Repentance is central to the message of Christianity. Yet, repentance has received little analysis in recent scholarship despite being emphasized by the church fathers. In particular, there has been minimal effort to understand the necessity of repentance in light of Christ’s atoning work. With this as the background, I explore fundamental questions such as repentance’s definition, scope, and role in salvation history. Furthermore, I attempt to more precisely outline repentance’s role in Christ’s salvific work. Underpinning the project is my view (...) that repentance should be understood as metanoia or transformation. This transformation of repentance is ordered toward divine metanoia – participation in Christ. In developing repentance, I put forward a synthesis of Thomas Aquinas’s framework of penance and John McLeod Campbell’s account of Christ’s vicarious repentance. Through this synthesis, I attempt to make sense of the relationship between repentance and atonement. I finish by suggesting that it would be appropriate to conclude that Thomas would endorse a vicarious repentance account of the atonement and hint at how it might fit into broader soteriologies. (shrink)

The Report presents insights which illuminates the intertwinements of European regulatory policies and global governance arrangements. By pinning down the exact nature of the interaction between these two levels, the EU’s dilemma becomes obvious: On the one hand, stronger global governance can be a chance, through which the EU can clarify its own raison d’être of increased integration to the wider world. On the other hand, the design of the European project is being challenged by more assertive global structures. This (...) is especially the case in relation to the WTO regime, which is constraining the decisional autonomy of the EU, regarding the appropriateness of its content and its external effects. Thus, the regulation of services in the EU and the WTO are discussed in the first section of this report. Section two focuses on labour standards, which are analysed from different angles in order to clarify the functions of the WTO and the ILO, multinational companies as well as other private actors within this specific field. The final section deals with the legitimacy problematic of transnational governance. Table of contents: Introduction Christian Joerges and Poul F. Kjaer Section One: Freedom of Services Chapter 1 The Multiple Understandings of Conflict between Trade in Services and Labour Protection Alexia Herwig Chapter 2 Competing in Markets, not Rules: The Conflict over the Single Services Market Susanne K. Schmidt Chapter 3 Competitiveness and Labour Protection: A Comment Markus Krajewski Section Two: Labour Standards Chapter 4 WTO and ILO: Can Social Responsibility be maintained in International Trade? Josef Falke Chapter 5 Reframing RECON: Perspectives on Transnationalisation and Post-national Democracy from Labour Law Claire Methven O’Brien Chapter 6 Transnational Governance and Human Rights: The Obligations of Private Actors in the Global Context Regina Kreide Section Three: The Legitimacy of Transnational Governance Chapter 7 Legitimacy through Precaution in European Regulation of GMOs? From the Standpoint of Governance as Analytical Perspective Maria Weimer Chapter 8 The Justice Deficit of the EU and other International Organisations Jürgen Neyer Chapter 9 Towards Normative Legitimacy of the World Trade Order Alexia Herwig and Thorsten Hüller Chapter 10 From Utopia to Apology – The Return to Inter-state Justice in Normative IR Scholarship: Comments on Neyer and Herwig & Hüller Jens Steffek. (shrink)

Kants Musikästhetik wird weithin unterschätzt. Dabei bietet sie die entscheidenden Ansätze zur Befreiung der Musik aus den Fängen der Nachahmungsästhetik, wie sie vor allem E.T.A.Hoffman kongenial umgesetzt hat.

In this paper, we argue that solutions to normative challenges associated with autonomous driving, such as real-world trolley cases or distributions of risk in mundane driving situations, face the problem of reasonable pluralism: Reasonable pluralism refers to the fact that there exists a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive moral doctrines within liberal democracies. The corresponding problem is that a politically acceptable solution cannot refer to only one of these comprehensive doctrines. Yet a politically adequate solution to the normative challenges (...) of autonomous driving need not come at the expense of an ethical solution, if it is based on moral beliefs that are (1) shared in an overlapping consensus and (2) systematized through public reason. Therefore, we argue that a Rawlsian justificatory framework is able to adequately address the normative challenges of autonomous driving and elaborate on how such a framework might be employed for this purpose. (shrink)

COVID-19 vaccine refusal seems like a paradigm case of irrationality. Vaccines are supposed to be the best way to get us out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet many people believe that they should not be vaccinated even though they are dissatisfied with the current situation. In this paper, we analyze COVID-19 vaccine refusal with the tools of contemporary philosophical theories of responsibility and rationality. The main outcome of this analysis is that many vaccine-refusers are responsible for the belief that (...) they should not be vaccinated and epistemically rational in holding it. This is an important result because it provides insights into the legitimacy of certain public health policies. In particular, this result shows that a public health policy that would abandon the project of convincing certain vaccine-refusers with reasons – e.g., by simply making vaccination compulsory – is prima facie illegitimate. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing to explore the limits (...) of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing _per se_ does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts. (shrink)

Control interventions (often called “sham,” “placebo,” or “attention controls”) are essential for studying the efficacy or mechanism of physical, psychological, and self-management interventions in clinical trials. This article presents core recommendations for designing, conducting, and reporting control interventions to establish a quality standard in nonpharmacological intervention research. A framework of additional considerations supports researchers’ decision making in this context. We also provide a reporting checklist for control interventions to enhance research transparency, usefulness, and rigour.

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

This book examines the epistemic function of perception and the relation between language and conceptual thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness: namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence.

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in the (...) respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on one controversial element of the method of reflective equilibrium, namely Rawls’s idea that the commitments that enter the justificatory procedure should be pre-selected or filtered: According to him, only considered judgements should be taken into account in moral philosophy. There are two camps of critics of this filtering process: 1) Critics of reflective equilibrium: They reject the Rawlsian filtering process as too weak and seek a more reliable one, which would actually constitute a distinct (...) epistemic method. 2) Proponents of reflective equilibrium: They reject the Rawlsian filtering process as too exclusionary. We defend RE against its critics, arguing that the method can secure reasonable commitments without depending on a strong external filtering process. However, we side with the critical proponents of reflective equilibrium and argue that without the Rawlsian weak filtering process, RE is more plausible both as a general method as well as in the context of moral philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We have previously argued that there are forms of greenhouse gas offsetting for which, when one emits and offsets, one imposes no risk. Orri Stefansson objects that our argument fails to distinguish properly between the people who stand to be harmed by one’s emissions and the people who stand to be benefited by one’s offsetting. We reply by emphasizing the difference between acting with a probability of making a difference to the distribution of harm and acting in a way (...) that worsen’s someone’s prospect. (shrink)

In this essay, we explore an issue of moral uncertainty: what we are permitted to do when we are unsure about which moral principles are correct. We develop a novel approach to this issue that incorporates important insights from previous work on moral uncertainty, while avoiding some of the difficulties that beset existing alternative approaches. Our approach is based on evaluating and choosing between option sets rather than particular conduct options. We show how our approach is particularly well-suited to address (...) this issue of moral uncertainty with respect to agents that have credence in moral theories that are not fully consequentialist. (shrink)

Despite the prevalence of human rights discourse, the very idea or concept of a human right remains obscure. In particular, it is unclear what is supposed to be special or distinctive about human rights. In this paper, we consider two recent attempts to answer this challenge, James Griffin’s “personhood account” and Charles Beitz’s “practice-based account”, and argue that neither is entirely satisfactory. We then conclude with a suggestion for what a more adequate account might look like – what we call (...) the “structural pluralist account” of human rights. (shrink)

This chapter explores two questions in detail: How should we determine the threshold for costs that individuals are asked to bear through insurance premiums or care-related out-of-pocket costs, including user fees and copayments? and What is an adequate relationship between costs and benefits? This chapter argues that preventing impoverishment is a morally more urgent priority than protecting households against income fluctuations, and that many health insurance plans may not adequately protect individuals from health care costs that threaten to drop their (...) financial status below a decent minimum. A design that places greater emphasis on preventing impoverishment and finances the achievement of that goal by reducing unnecessary subsidies to better-off households would better accord with a sufficientarian approach to health care. -/- . (shrink)

Many political theorists defend the view that egalitarian justice should extend from the domestic to the global arena. Despite its intuitive appeal, this ‘global egalitarianism’ has come under attack from different quarters. In this article, we focus on one particular set of challenges to this view: those advanced by domestic egalitarians. We consider seven types of challenges, each pointing to a specific disanalogy between domestic and global arenas which is said to justify the restriction of egalitarian justice to the former, (...) and argue that none of them – both individually and jointly – offers a conclusive refutation of global egalitarianism. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary debate about the nature of expertise often conflates having expertise with either the individual possession of competences or a certain role ascription. In contrast to this, the paper attempts to demonstrate how different dimensions of expertise ascription are inextricably interwoven. As a result, a balanced account of expertise will be proposed that more accurately determines the closer relationship between the expert’s dispositions, their manifestations and the expert’s function. This finally results in an advanced understanding of expertise that views (...) someone as an expert only if she is undefeatedly disposed to fulfill a contextually salient service function adequately at the moment of assessment. (shrink)

This book explores the nature of moral responsibilities of affluent individuals in the developed world, addressing global poverty and arguments that philosophers have offered for having these responsibilities. The first type of argument grounds responsibilities in the ability to avert serious suffering by taking on some cost. The second argument seeks to ground responsibilities in the fact that the affluent are contributing to such poverty. The authors criticise many of the claims advanced by those who seek to ground stringent responsibilities (...) to the poor by invoking these two types of arguments. It does not follow from this that the affluent are meeting responsibilities to the poor. The book argues that while people are not ordinarily required to make large sacrifices in assisting others in severe need, they are required to incur moderate costs to do so. If the affluent fail consistently to meet standards, this fact can substantially increase the costs they are required to bear in order to address it. (shrink)

Technology offers unique sets of opportunities, from human flourishing to civilization survival, but also challenges, from partial misuse to global apocalypse. Yet technology is shaped by the social environment in which it is developed and used, prompting questions about its desirable governance format. In this context, we look at governance challenges of large technical systems, specifically the peaceful use of high-power lasers in space, in order to propose a conceptual framework for legitimate global governance. Specifically, we adopt a context-based approach (...) to legitimacy to address the trade-offs between effectiveness (output legitimacy) and inclusivity (input legitimacy) in the governance of large technical systems. We show that distinguishing two basic phases of space laser policy which call for different legitimacy criteria helps balance out the trade-offs without sacrificing either effectiveness or inclusivity. Finally, we construe LTSs’ governance as a tool for creating globally networked spaces which may enable coordinated global democratic governance. (shrink)

Our aim in this brief essay is not to defend a particular policy or attitude toward lockdown measures in the United States or elsewhere, but to consider the scope and limits of different types of arguments that can be offered for them. Understanding the complexity of these issues will, we hope, go some way to helping us understand each other and our attitudes toward state responses to the pandemic.

Climate change and other harmful large-scale processes challenge our understandings of individual responsibility. People throughout the world suffer harms—severe shortfalls in health, civic status, or standard of living relative to the vital needs of human beings—as a result of physical processes to which many people appear to contribute. Climate change, polluted air and water, and the erosion of grasslands, for example, occur because a great many people emit carbon and pollutants, build excessively, enable their flocks to overgraze, or otherwise stress (...) the environment. If a much smaller number of people engaged in these types of conduct, the harms in question would not occur, or would be substantially lessened. However, the conduct of any particular person (and, in the case of climate change, of even quite large numbers of people) could make no apparent difference to their occurrence. My carbon emissions (and quite possibly the carbon emissions of much larger groups of people dispersed throughout the world) may not make a difference to what happens to anyone. When the conduct of some agent does not make any apparent difference to the occurrence of harm, but this conduct is of a type that brings about harm because many people engage in it, we can call this agent an overdeterminer of that harm, and their conduct overdetermining conduct. In this essay we explore the moral status of overdetermining harm. (shrink)

Mark Siderits’ confluence approach to philosophy, first sketched in his landmark monograph, Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy (2003), is emblematic of what has arguably become the most influential way of engaging historically and culturally distant Buddhist thinkers and texts systematically and constructively. For nearly half a century, and rather fittingly for someone enthralled by Madhyamaka, Siderits has successfully charted a middle ground between the text-based, exegetical approach to Buddhist philosophy still dominant in many parts of Europe and East Asia and (...) the methods of contemporary Anglophone analytic philosophy. Indebted to both, yet unconstrained by either, the confluence approach represents Siderits’ unique brand of historically-informed systematic reflection, delivered in the characteristically forceful and tightly argued prose that defines his inimitable style. (shrink)

I argue that free will and determinism are compatible, even when we take free will to require the ability to do otherwise and even when we interpret that ability modally, as the possibility of doing otherwise, and not just conditionally or dispositionally. My argument draws on a distinction between physical and agential possibility. Although in a deterministic world only one future sequence of events is physically possible for each state of the world, the more coarsely defined state of an agent (...) and his or her environment can be consistent with more than one such sequence, and thus different actions can be “agentially possible”. The agential perspective is supported by our best theories of human behaviour, and so we should take it at face value when we refer to what an agent can and cannot do. On the picture I defend, free will is not a physical phenomenon, but a higher-level one on a par with other higher-level phenomena such as agency and intentionality. (shrink)

What are some of the distinctive virtues of the confluence approach that sets it apart from other attempts to do philosophy across cultural boundaries? First, unlike comparing and contrasting, the confluence approach remains faithful to the dominant conception of philosophy as an intellectual enterprise centered on dialogue and argumentation, in which philosophers pursue unresolved problems by building on the achievements of their acknowledged forbears. Second, confluence philosophy implements a syncretic and creative approach to doing philosophy by drawing on non-Western philosophical (...) sources while using the tools and conceptual resources of analytic philosophy. Third and last, the confluence approach highlights possible tensions when the traditions of thought brought into dialogue are on a diverging path on certain matters. Contemporary philosophy, at least in the Anglophone world and its satellites, is an avowedly secular enterprise, deferring to the sciences for its account of what can be said to exist at the most fundamental level and for its understanding of the processes that realize cognition. Buddhism at its core is often understood as a soteriological project manly concerned with overcoming suffering, which sometimes is taken to entail an insight into the emptiness of all the constitutive elements of existence and/or experience. Confluence philosophy thus makes it possible to ask whether defending a theoretical framework which affirms this truth of emptiness means that one must engage in the very sort of activity, namely, rational self-assertion, that hinders enlightenment. (shrink)

This paper pursues two lines of inquiry. First, drawing on evidence from clinical literature on borderline states of consciousness, I propose a new categorical framework for liminal states of consciousness associated with certain forms of meditative attainment; second, I argue for dissociating phenomenal character from phenomenal content in accounting for the etiology of nonconceptual states of awareness. My central argument is that while the idea of nonconceptual awareness remains problematic for Buddhist philosophy of mind, our linguistic and categorizing practices cannot (...) be adequately explained without considering the ways in which the first-person phenomenology grounds a more basic level of cognitive and affective sensing. (shrink)

If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for metacognition? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing (...) the problem of self-knowledge in terms of the relation between phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge. Concepts of consciousness such as “introspective awareness” and “reflexive self-awareness” are grounded in phenomenal experiences rather than physical events and processes. As such they yield a different kind of self-knowledge than what can be gained by applying externalist conceptual schemas to understanding the mind. I argue that Dharmakīrti’s theory of content can be seen as endorsing the efficacy of phenomenal experience as a vehicle for self-knowledge. (shrink)

Traditionally, moral philosophers have distinguished between doing and allowing harm, and have normally proceeded as if this bipartite distinction can exhaustively characterize all cases of human conduct involving harm. By contrast, cognitive scientists and psychologists studying causal judgment have investigated the concept ‘enable’ as distinct from the concept ‘cause’ and other causal terms. Empirical work on ‘enable’ and its employment has generally not focused on cases where human agents enable harm. In this paper, we present new empirical evidence to support (...) the claim that some important cases in the moral philosophical literature are best viewed as instances of enabling harm rather than doing or allowing harm. We also present evidence that enabling harm is regarded as normatively distinct from doing and allowing harm when it comes to assigning compensatory responsibility. Moral philosophers should be exploring the tripartite distinction between doing harm, allowing harm, and enabling harm, rather than simply the traditional bipartite distinction. Cognitive scientists and psychologists studying moral judgment, who have so far largely adopted the bipartite distinction in this area of research, should likewise investigate the tripartite distinction. (shrink)

Suppose that the members of a group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions, and imagine that the group itself has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a general impossibility theorem that that (...) difficulty illustrates. Our paper describes this impossibility result and provides an exploration of its significance. The result naturally invites comparison with Kenneth Arrow's famous theorem (Arrow, 1963 and 1984; Sen, 1970) and we elaborate that comparison in a companion paper (List and Pettit, 2002). The paper is in four sections. The first section documents the need for various groups to aggregate its members' judgments; the second presents the discursive paradox; the third gives an informal statement of the more general impossibility result; the formal proof is presented in an appendix. The fourth section, finally, discusses some escape routes from that impossibility. (shrink)

The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights and (...) a moral status? I will tentatively defend the (increasingly widely held) view that, under certain conditions, artificial intelligent systems, like corporate entities, might qualify as responsible moral agents and as holders of limited rights and legal personhood. I will further suggest that regulators should permit the use of autonomous artificial systems in high-stakes settings only if they are engineered to function as moral (not just intentional) agents and/or there is some liability-transfer arrangement in place. I will finally raise the possibility that if artificial systems ever became phenomenally conscious, there might be a case for extending a stronger moral status to them, but argue that, as of now, this remains very hypothetical. (shrink)

In this essay we argue that an agent’s failure to assist someone in need at one time can change the cost she can be morally required to take on to assist that same person at a later time. In particular, we show that the cost the agent can subsequently be required to take on to help the person in need can increase quite significantly, and can be enforced through the proportionate use of force. We explore the implications of this argument (...) for the duties of the affluent to address global poverty. (shrink)

In this discussion paper, I argue that no theory of consciousness can simultaneously respect four initially plausible metaphysical claims – namely, “first-person realism”, “non-solipsism”, “non-fragmentation”, and “one world” – but that any three of the four claims are mutually consistent. So, theories of consciousness face a “quadrilemma”. Since it will be hard to achieve a consensus on which of the four claims to retain and which to give up, we arrive at a landscape of competing theories, all of which have (...) pros and cons. I will briefly indicate which kinds of theories correspond to the four horns of the quadrilemma. (shrink)

What justifies holding the person that we are today morally responsible for something we did a year ago? And why are we justified in showing prudential concern for the future welfare of the person we will be a year from now? These questions cannot be systematically pursued without addressing the problem of personal identity. This essay considers whether Buddhist Reductionism, a philosophical project grounded on the idea that persons reduce to a set of bodily, sensory, perceptual, dispositional, and conscious elements, (...) provides support for Parfit’s psychological criterion for personal identity. It examines the role that self-consciousness plays in mediating both self-concern and concern for others, and offers an argument for how reductionism about substantive or enduring selves may be reconciled with the seemingly irreducible character of self-consciousness. (shrink)

Humean reductionism about laws of nature appears to leave a central aspect of scientific practice unmotivated: If the world’s fundamental structure is exhausted by the actual distribution of non-modal properties and the laws of nature are merely efficient summaries of this distribution, then why does science posit laws that cover a wide range of non-actual circumstances? In this paper, we develop a new version of the Humean best systems account of laws based on the idea that laws need to organize (...) information in a way that maximizes their cognitive usefulness for creature like us. We argue that this account motivates scientific practice because the laws’ applicability to non-actual circumstances falls right out of their cognitive usefulness. (shrink)

This paper generalises the classical Condorcet jury theorem from majority voting over two options to plurality voting over multiple options. The paper further discusses the debate between epistemic and procedural democracy and situates its formal results in that debate. The paper finally compares a number of different social choice procedures for many-option choices in terms of their epistemic merits. An appendix explores the implications of some of the present mathematical results for the question of how probable majority cycles (as in (...) Condorcet's paradox) are in large electorates. (shrink)

The existence of group agents is relatively widely accepted. Examples are corporations, courts, NGOs, and even entire states. But should we also accept that there is such a thing as group consciousness? I give an overview of some of the key issues in this debate and sketch a tentative argument for the view that group agents lack phenomenal consciousness. In developing my argument, I draw on integrated information theory, a much-discussed theory of consciousness. I conclude by pointing out an implication (...) of my argument for the normative status of group agents. (shrink)

This paper sketches a new and somewhat heterodox metaphysical theory of consciousness: the “many-worlds theory”. It drops the assumption that all conscious subjects’ experiences are features of one and the same world and instead associates different subjects with different “first-personally centred worlds”. We can think of these as distinct “first-personal realizers” of a shared “third-personal world”, where the latter is supervenient, in a sense to be explained. This is combined with a form of modal realism, according to which different subjects’ (...) first-personally centred worlds are all real, though only one of them is present for each subject. The theory offers a novel way of capturing the irreducibly subjective nature of conscious experience without lapsing into solipsism. The paper also looks at some scientific theories of consciousness, such as integrated information theory, through the proposed lens and reconsiders the hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? And (...) what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? (2) Are there emergent properties? (3) Are higher-level descriptions reducible to lower-level ones? (4) Can the relationship between normative and non-normative domains be viewed as one involving levels? Although I use the terminology of “levels”, the proposed framework can also represent “scales”, “domains”, or “subject matters”, where these are not linearly but only partially ordered by relations of supervenience or inclusion. (shrink)

Alors que les phénoménologues prétendent avoir dépassé le solipsisme, la plupart n’ont en fait que repousser les frontières de l’intersubjectivité des individus humains aux individus des autres espèces. Pourtant, Husserl reconnaît l’existence d’une intersubjectivité interspécifique, c’est-à-dire d’une intersubjectivité dépassant les limites de l’espèce. Il va même jusqu’à affirmer qu’on comprend parfois mieux un animal familier qu’un humain étranger. Toutefois, même s’il admet que plusieurs animaux sont capables d’une vie de conscience subjective et qu’ils vivent dans un monde de sens partagé, (...) il ne les considère pas comme des « personnes » selon sa conception exigeante de la « personne » associée à la rationalité, à la maturité, la normalité et l’historicité. Reste qu’être une « personne », en son sens le plus primordial – et plus décisif puisque c’est celui sur lequel s’édifient des conceptions politiques,juridiques et éthiques – signifie simplement être le sujet d’un monde environnant, d’un monde commun et d’une existence biographique. Distinguer deux sens du concept de personne permet de reconnaître que les animaux ont part à la transcendantalité, qu’ils ne sont pas simplement en vie mais ont une vie à la fois biographique et communautaire, même s’ils ne sont pas en mesure de réfléchir à cette vie de conscience qui est la leur pour considérer leur place dans l’enchaînement des générations et pour adopter ce que Husserl appelle une « vocation ». La phénoménologie husserlienne des anomalies permet ainsi de reconnaître que les animaux ressortissent bien de la figure d’autrui, qu’ils sont des alter ego sujets d’une vie de conscience, et qu’à ce titre ils participent pleinement, comme les enfants, les fous et les étrangers, à la co-constitution du monde de l’esprit. (shrink)

It is often argued that higher-level special-science properties cannot be causally efficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This claim is usually derived from an exclusion principle stating that if a higher-level property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F cannot cause G. We employ an account of causation as difference-making to show that the truth or falsity of this principle is (...) a contingent matter and derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a version of it holds. We argue that one important instance of the principle, far from undermining non-reductive physicalism, actually supports the causal autonomy of certain higher-level properties. (shrink)

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...) individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

We offer a new argument for the claim that there can be non-degenerate objective chance (“true randomness”) in a deterministic world. Using a formal model of the relationship between different levels of description of a system, we show how objective chance at a higher level can coexist with its absence at a lower level. Unlike previous arguments for the level-specificity of chance, our argument shows, in a precise sense, that higher-level chance does not collapse into epistemic probability, despite higher-level properties (...) supervening on lower-level ones. We show that the distinction between objective chance and epistemic probability can be drawn, and operationalized, at every level of description. There is, therefore, not a single distinction between objective and epistemic probability, but a family of such distinctions. (shrink)

Previous research in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) suggests that a main aim of explainability approaches is to satisfy specific interests, goals, expectations, needs, and demands regarding artificial systems (we call these “stakeholders' desiderata”) in a variety of contexts. However, the literature on XAI is vast, spreads out across multiple largely disconnected disciplines, and it often remains unclear how explainability approaches are supposed to achieve the goal of satisfying stakeholders' desiderata. This paper discusses the main classes of stakeholders calling for explainability (...) of artificial systems and reviews their desiderata. We provide a model that explicitly spells out the main concepts and relations necessary to consider and investigate when evaluating, adjusting, choosing, and developing explainability approaches that aim to satisfy stakeholders' desiderata. This model can serve researchers from the variety of different disciplines involved in XAI as a common ground. It emphasizes where there is interdisciplinary potential in the evaluation and the development of explainability approaches. (shrink)

This chapter pursues the question of naturalism in the context of non-Western philosophical contributions to ethics and philosophy of mind: First, what conception of naturalism, if any, is best suited to capture the scope of Buddhist Reductionism? Second, can such a conception still accommodate the distinctive features of phenomenal consciousness (e.g., subjectivity, intentionality, first-person givenness, etc.). The first section reviews dominant conceptions of naturalism, and their applicability to the Buddhist project. In the second section, the author provides an example of (...) problematic issues more stringent conceptions of naturalism under the guise of neurophysicalism confront, and evaluate Flanagan’s response to these issues. The third section considers briefly the reflexivity thesis (the thesis that consciousness consists in conscious mental states being implicitly self-aware), specifically as articulated by Dignaga, Dharmakirti and their followers, and uses this thesis to articulate a conception of minimal agency as mineness that, the author argues, further challenges Flanagan’s neurophysicalism stance and his compatibilist account of moral agency. The paper concludes, in the fourth section, by suggesting a way in which no-ownership conceptions of reflexive self-consciousness can help us both to get the structure of phenomenal consciousness right and to ground our conceptions of agency, intentionality, and moral responsibility. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss a seemingly straightforward argument against physicalism which, despite being implicit in much of the philosophical debate about consciousness, has not received the attention it deserves (compared to other, better-known “epistemic”, “modal”, and “conceivability” arguments). This is the argument from the non-supervenience of the first-personal (and indexical) facts on the third-personal (and non-indexical) ones. This non-supervenience, together with the assumption that the physical facts (as conventionally understood) are third-personal, entails that some facts – (...) namely, first-personal, phenomenal ones – do not supervene on the physical facts. Unlike other arguments against physicalism, the first-personal argument, if successful, refutes not only physicalism but also other third-personal metaphysical pictures, including standard versions of dualism. (shrink)

Much recent philosophical work on social freedom focuses on whether freedom should be understood as non-interference, in the liberal tradition associated with Isaiah Berlin, or as non-domination, in the republican tradition revived by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. We defend a conception of freedom that lies between these two alternatives: freedom as independence. Like republican freedom, it demands the robust absence of relevant constraints on action. Unlike republican, and like liberal freedom, it is not moralized. We show that freedom as (...) independence retains the virtues of its liberal and republican counterparts while shedding their vices. Our aim is to put this conception of freedom more firmly on the map and to offer a novel perspective on the logical space in which different conceptions of freedom are located. (shrink)

This introduction concerns the place that Indian philosophical literature should occupy in the history of philosophy, and the challenge of championing pre-modern modes of inquiry in an era when philosophy, at least in the anglophone world and its satellites, has in large measure become a highly specialized and technical discipline conceived on the model of the sciences. This challenge is particularly acute when philosophical figures and texts that are historically and culturally distant from us are engaged not only exegetically but (...) also with a view to recruiting their topics and arguments for contemporary philosophical debates. (shrink)

The ``doctrinal paradox'' or ``discursive dilemma'' shows that propositionwise majority voting over the judgments held by multiple individuals on some interconnected propositions can lead to inconsistent collective judgments on these propositions. List and Pettit (2002) have proved that this paradox illustrates a more general impossibility theorem showing that there exists no aggregation procedure that generally produces consistent collective judgments and satisfies certain minimal conditions. Although the paradox and the theorem concern the aggregation of judgments rather than preferences, they invite comparison (...) with two established results on the aggregation of preferences: the Condorcet paradox and Arrow's impossibility theorem. We may ask whether the new impossibility theorem is a special case of Arrow's theorem, or whether there are interesting disanalogies between the two results. In this paper, we compare the two theorems, and show that they are not straightforward corollaries of each other. We further suggest that, while the framework of preference aggregation can be mapped into the framework of judgment aggregation, there exists no obvious reverse mapping. Finally, we address one particular minimal condition that is used in both theorems – an independence condition – and suggest that this condition points towards a unifying property underlying both impossibility results. (shrink)