In this dissertation, I argue for a new conception of the epistemic condition on moral responsibility.

This paper looks at Timothy Williamson’s formulation of the thesis of Evidence Neutrality (EN). I motivate and argue for an upgraded version of EN by showing that changing one’s assumption about the nature of evidence (i.e. fallibility vs. factivity) generates a different verdict on EN. Then, I show how Williamson’s interpretation of EN is incomplete in light of a principle that guides his complete understanding of the nature of evidence. I reformulate EN to overcome deficiencies in Williamson’s interpretation of EN, (...) and, lastly, I use cases from philosophy and science to show that reformulated‐EN promotes better practices in both domains while, at the same time, it avoids psychologizing evidence. (shrink)

As autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) begin living in the home, performing service tasks and assisting with daily activities, their actions will have profound ethical implications. Consequently, AMRs need to be outfitted with the ability to act morally with regard to human life and safety. Yet, in the area of robotics where morality is a relevant field of endeavor (i.e. human-robot interaction) the sub-discipline of morality does not exist. In response, the Utilibot project seeks to provide a point of initiation for (...) the implementation of ethics in an AMR. The Utilibot is a decision-theoretic AMR guided by the utilitarian notion of the maximization of human well-being. The core ethical decision-making capacity of the Utilibot consists of two dynamic Bayesian networks that model human and environmental health, a dynamic decision network that accounts for decisions and utilities, and a Markov decision process (MDP) that decomposes the planning problem to solve for the optimal course of action to maximize human safety and well-being. (shrink)

How are reasons and evidence interrelated? According to one prevalent view, reasons and evidence are equivalent: evidence is a reason, and a reason is evidence. On another view reasons and evidence are conditionally related: if there is evidence, then there is a reason. On a different view reasons and evidence are disjunctively related: reasons or evidence can be substituted for each other. In this paper, I argue against these common views, and I defend the view that reasons and evidence are (...) conjunctively related: evidence and reasons are distinguishable yet inseparable. I argue reasons and evidence are distinct because they come apart in certain cases, and I argue reasons and evidence are inseparable because only when properly conjoined are they capable of yielding correct verdicts on important cases in epistemology. (shrink)

This volume collects selected papers delivered at the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, which was held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in July 2018. It includes papers dealing with the past, present, and future of utilitarianism – the theory that human happiness is the fundamental moral value – as well as on its applications to animal ethics, population ethics, and the future of humanity, among other topics.

Background: While the solid organ transplant evaluation process is designed to function equitably, discriminatory practices remain, resulting in disparities in access for persons with disabilities. Physical function and frailty status are often-cited factors in establishing transplant, despite limited consensus on their assessment and impact. Objective: The purpose of this study was to describe how transplant healthcare professionals conceptualize the relationship between physical disability and transplant candidacy. Methods: A convenience sample of multidisciplinary transplant was solicited to respond to an electronic survey (...) between February and March 2024. Results: Of the 126 professionals contacted, 43 participants responded, yielding a response rate of 34 %. The majority of participants (88 %) held contradictory views of physical disability as it relates to transplant candidacy (p = 0.049). Men were more likely to endorse awareness of bias when evaluating transplant candidates (p = 0.008). Professional discipline was significantly associated with perception of transplant process fairness, impact of bias, and interpretation of quality of life. Iterative thematic analysis revealed a propensity to conflate frailty with physical disability. Conclusions: Multidisciplinary transplant professionals rarely endorsed overtly ableist sentiments. However, responses highlighted inconsistent, unclear, and at times contradictory conceptions of physical function and physical disability, which may contribute to disparate access to solid organ transplant for individuals with physical disability. (shrink)

This study examines the relation of language use to a person’s ability to perform categorization tasks and to assess their own abilities in those categorization tasks. A silent rhyming task was used to confirm that a group of people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) had corresponding covert language production (or “inner speech”) impairments. The performance of the PWA was then compared to that of age- and education-matched healthy controls on three kinds of categorization tasks and on metacognitive self-assessments of their performance (...) on those tasks. The PWA showed no deficits in their ability to categorize objects for any of the three trial types (visual, thematic, and categorial). However, on the categorial trials, their metacognitive assessments of whether they had categorized correctly were less reliable than those of the control group. The categorial trials were distinguished from the others by the fact that the categorization could not be based on some immediately perceptible feature or on the objects’ being found together in a type of scenario or setting. This result offers preliminary evidence for a link between covert language use and a specific form of metacognition. (shrink)

Indem dieser Band sich auf das Verhältnis von Naturerkennen und Natursein konzentriert, thematisiert er einen wesentlichen Ausschnitt aus dem weiten Spektrum von Böhmes philosophischer Arbeit. Um die Naturthematik möglichst breit zu entfalten und für Querverbindungen offenzuhalten, ist der vorliegende Band in drei Abschnitte gegliedert. Im ersten Abschnitt stehen Charakter und Reichweite der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis von Natur im Mittelpunkt. Der zweite Teil des Bandes stellt alternative Perspektiven auf Natur vor. Im dritten Teil schließlich stehen der Mensch und sein Verhältnis zu sich (...) selbst im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchungen. Inhaltsverzeichnis Krohn, Wolfgang: Wissenschaftsentwicklung zwischen Dezentrierung und Dekonstruktion. Stehr, Nico: Von den Grenzen der Macht wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis. Schäfer, Wolf: Zweifel am Ende des Baconschen Zeitalters. Kamper, Dietmar: Wissen ist Ohnmacht. Macht ist Unwissen. Gamm, der Technik. Janich, Peter: Zeit und Natur. Kimmerle, Heinz: »Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird«. Wie kann Zeit Zeit werden? Schiemann, Gregor: Natur auf dem Rückzug. Zur Relevanz der aristotelischen Unterscheidung von Natur und Technik. Hauskeller, Michael: Ist Schönheit eine Atmosphäre?. Zur Bestimmung des landschaftlich Schönen. Schmitz, Hermann: Situationen und Atmosphären. Zur Ästhetik und Onthologie bei Gernot Böhme. Rehmann-Sutter, Christoph: Über Relationalität. Was ist das »Ökologische« in der Naturästhetik? Meyer-Abich, Klaus Michael: Erinnerung an die natürliche Mitwelt. Andreas-Griesebach, Manon: Idee plus Erfahrung. Goethes Begründung eines neuen Typs von Naturwissenschaft. Engelhardt, Dietrich von: Madame de Stael über Naturphilosophie, Naturwissenschaft und Medizin in De l'Allemagne. Deneke, Michael: Schramm, Engelbert: »Soziale Naturwissenschaft«. Zwischen Sozialwissenschaften und Naturwissenschaften. Böhme, Hartmut: Enthüllen und Verhüllen des Körpers. Biblische, mythische und künstlerische Deutungen des Nackten. Lippe, Rudolf zur: Eine Logik des gestischen Wissens. Müller, Rudolf Wolfgang: Gernot Böhme - Anima naturaliter japonica. Hoffmann, Gisbert: Das menschliche Sein als mediales. Martens, Ekkehard: »Natürlich« denken?. Heideggers Pseudosokratismus als Irrationalismus. Fleischer, Helmut: Naturalität ohne Naturalismus. Zum lebensweltlichen Fundus jeder höheren Erkenntnis-Artistik. Gerhard: Technik als Medium. Grundlinien einer Philosophie. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

Two controversies exist regarding the appropriate characterization of hierarchical and adaptive evolution in natural populations. In biology, there is the Wright-Fisher controversy over the relative roles of random genetic drift, natural selection, population structure, and interdemic selection in adaptive evolution begun by Sewall Wright and Ronald Aylmer Fisher. There is also the Units of Selection debate, spanning both the biological and the philosophical literature and including the impassioned group-selection debate. Why do these two discourses exist separately, and interact relatively little? (...) We postulate that the reason for this schism can be found in the differing focus of each controversy, a deep difference itself determined by distinct general styles of scientific research guiding each discourse. That is, the Wright-Fisher debate focuses on adaptive process, and tends to be instructed by the mathematical modeling style, while the focus of the Units of Selection controversy is adaptive product, and is typically guided by the function style. The differences between the two discourses can be usefully tracked by examining their interpretations of two contested strategies for theorizing hierarchical selection: horizontal and vertical averaging. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)

Das Wiskott-Aldrich-Syndrom (WAS), ein genetisch bedingter Immundefekt mit klinischer Manifestation im Kleinkindalter, wird voraussichtlich in näherer Zukunft erstmals versuchsweise durch eine somatische Gentherapie behandelt werden. Im vor- liegenden Beitrag werden die wichtigsten medizinisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Fakten dieses Krankheitsbildes sowie die bisherigen Erfahrungen mit somatischen Gentherapien bei anderen Immunmangelsyndromen ausführlich dargestellt. Sodann erfolgt eine ethische Analyse eines möglichen gentherapeutischen Eingriffs bei WAS-Patienten, bei der die spezifischen Aspekte des Wiskott-Aldrich-Syndroms – insbesondere die fast ausschließliche Betroffenheit von Kindern sowie die unterschiedlich aussichtsreiche Alter- nativoption einer (...) allogenen Knochenmarktransplantation–wesentliche Aspekte der Beurteilung sind. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich, dass ein gentherapeutischer Eingriff im vorliegenden Fall nicht im Rahmen einer Forschungsstudie, d.h. als Humanexperiment, gerechtfertigt werden kann, sondern allein als individueller Heilversuch. Gleichwohl las- sen die besonderen Risiken und die Innovativität eines solchen Eingriffs es notwendig erscheinen, diesen Heilversuch – anders als andere Heilbehandlungen mit bislang unerprobten Mitteln – in streng kontrollierter Form durchzuführen. Der neuartige Gedanke eines kontrollierten individuellen Heilversuchs zeichnet sich daher für den vorliegenden Fall, und womöglich auch für vergleichbare risikoreiche Behandlungsansätze namentlich im Bereich der Gentherapie, als geeignetes Instrument der Konzeption und Beurteilung ab. (shrink)

It often seems incorrect to say that psychiatric conditions are diseases, and equally incorrect to say that they are not. This results in what would seem to be an unsatisfactory stalemate. The present essay examines the considerations that have brought us to such a stalemate in our discussions of autism. It argues that the stalemate in this particular case is a reflection of the fact that we need to find the logical space for a position that rejects both positive and (...) negative answers. It then suggests one way in which we might find such space, by applying Michael Dummett’s notion of semantic disharmony. (shrink)

Rather than approaching the question of the constructive or therapeutic character of Hegel’s Logic through a global consideration of its argument and its relation to the rest of Hegel’s system, I want to come at the question by considering a specific thread that runs through the argument of the Logic, namely the question of the proper understanding of power or control. What I want to try to show is that there is a close connection between therapeutic and constructive elements in (...) Hegel’s treatment of power. To do so I will make use of two deep criticisms of Hegel’s treatment from Michael Theunissen. First comes Theunissen’s claim that in Hegel’s logical scheme, reality is necessarily dominated by the concept rather than truly reciprocally related to it. Then I will consider Theunissen’s structurally analogous claim that for Hegel, the power of the concept is the management of the suppression of the other. Both of these claims are essentially claims about the way in which elements of the logic of reflection are modified and yet continue to play a role in the logic of the concept. (shrink)

Relatively few authors attempt to assess individuals’ moral responsibility for collective action within organizations. I draw on fairly technical recent work by Seamus Miller, Christopher Kutz, and Tracy Isaacs in the field of collective responsibility to see what normative lessons can be prepared for people considering entry into large hierarchical, compartmentalized organizations like businesses or the military. I will defend a view shared by Isaacs that group members’ responsibility for collective action depends on intentions to contribute to particular collective (...) actions, against Miller and Kutz’s more inculpating standards. Miller and Kutz fail to achieve their goal of articulating a variable standard for measuring individual responsibility within organizations, for reasons suggesting we might not be able to do better with their theoretical commitments than a threshold warning for all potential entrants to be wary of the groups they enter. Isaacs sketches an approach that is more successful at creating a variable standard for assessing high echelon actors; I build on and refine her theory to argue that organization members can be held responsible for their unique interpretations of the organization mission and unique contributions to their role duties. High echelon actors may share personal responsibility for their subordinates’ behavior when they have created the conditions for those actions through their unique orders. (shrink)

I discuss two accounts of rational religious faith that have recently been proposed by Peter Rohs and Volker Gerhardt, respectively, and critically explore the relations between (i) faith and knowledge and (ii) faith and hope. I argue that, if faith essentially involves some form of eschatological hope, then a theory of rational faith will have to include an analysis of rational hope.

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

The philosophical interest in the nature, value, and varieties of human understanding has swelled in recent years. This article will provide an overview of new research in the epistemology of understanding, with a particular focus on the following questions: What is understanding and why should we care about it? Is understanding reducible to knowledge? Does it require truth, belief, or justification? Can there be lucky understanding? Does it require ‘grasping’ or some kind of ‘know-how’? This cluster of questions has largely (...) set the research agenda for the study of understanding in epistemology. This article will conclude by discussing some varieties of understanding and highlight directions for future research. (shrink)

What is the status of research on implicit bias? In light of meta‐analyses revealing ostensibly low average correlations between implicit measures and behavior, as well as various other psychometric concerns, criticism has become ubiquitous. We argue that while there are significant challenges and ample room for improvement, research on the causes, psychological properties, and behavioral effects of implicit bias continues to deserve a role in the sciences of the mind as well as in efforts to understand, and ultimately combat, discrimination (...) and inequality. (shrink)

According to a historically popular view, emotions are normative experiences that ground moral knowledge much as perceptual experiences ground empirical knowledge. Given the analogy it draws between emotion and perception, sentimental perceptualism constitutes a promising, naturalist-friendly alternative to classical rationalist accounts of moral knowledge. In this paper, we consider an important but underappreciated objection to the view, namely that in contrast with perception, emotions depend for their occurrence on prior representational states, with the result that emotions cannot give perceptual-like access (...) to normative properties. We argue that underlying this objection are several specific problems, rooted in the different types of mental states to which emotions may respond, that the sentimental perceptualist must tackle for her view to be successful. We argue, moreover, that the problems can be answered by filling out the theory with several independently motivated yet highly controversial commitments, which we carefully catalogue. The plausibility of sentimental perceptualism, as a result, hinges on further claims sentimental perceptualists should not ignore. (shrink)

A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...) such norms are false because they are insensitive to the potentially ambitious epistemic goals that agents may permissibly bring to bear on an inquiry. Focusing particularly on knowledge-oriented versions of the norm, I argue that ignorance has a positive role to play in epistemic life by licensing prolonged inquiry into questions that we especially care about. (shrink)

I am grateful to Donald Ainslie, Lisa Austin, Michael Blake, Abraham Drassinower, David Dyzenhaus, George Fletcher, Robert Gibbs, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Sari Kisilevsky, Dennis Klimchuk, Christopher Morris, Scott Shapiro, Horacio Spector, Sergio Tenenbaum, Malcolm Thorburn, Ernest Weinrib, Karen Weisman, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments, and audiences in the UCLA Philosophy Department and Columbia Law School for their questions.

nated discussion of the semantics of such verbs. I will call this view.

Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily p iff, and because, there is some x whose essence ensures that p. Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there are basic necessities that cannot be explained. Thus, Hale style essentialism falls short of what Wilsch (...) calls the explanation-challenge (EC) for the metaphysics of necessity. Without endorsing the EC, I argue that Hale’s argument for basic, unexplained necessities fails due to a misunderstanding of the structure of essentialist explanations. Getting clear about the structure of essentialist explanations of necessity leads to a re-evaluation of crucial circularity- and regress-arguments that have been discussed in the debate about essentialism. (shrink)

More and more researchers argue that online technologies manipulate human users and, therefore, undermine their autonomy. We call this the MAL view on online technology because it argues from Manipulation to Autonomy-Loss. MAL enjoys public visibility and will shape the academic discussion to come. This view of online technology, however, fails conceptually. MAL presupposes that manipulation equals autonomy loss, and that autonomy is the absence of manipulation. That is mistaken. In short, an individual can be manipulated while being fully personally (...) autonomous. Internet policy researchers should be aware of this point to avoid looking in the wrong place in future research on manipulative and harmful online technology. (shrink)

Social media use is soaring globally. Existing research of its ethical implications predominantly focuses on the relationships amongst human users online, and their effects. The nature of the software-to-human relationship and its impact on digital well-being, however, has not been sufficiently addressed yet. This paper aims to close the gap. I argue that some intelligent software agents, such as newsfeed curator algorithms in social media, manipulate human users because they do not intend their means of influence to reveal the user’s (...) reasons. I support this claim by defending a novel account of manipulation and by showing that some intelligent software agents are manipulative in this sense. Apart from revealing a priori reason for thinking that some intelligent software agents are manipulative, the paper offers a framework for further empirical investigation of manipulation online. (shrink)

Imagination is necessary for scientific practice, yet there are no in vivo sociological studies on the ways that imagination is taught, thought of, or evaluated by scientists. This article begins to remedy this by presenting the results of a qualitative study performed on two systems biology laboratories. I found that the more advanced a participant was in their scientific career, the more they valued imagination. Further, positive attitudes toward imagination were primarily due to the perceived role of imagination in problem-solving. (...) But not all problem-solving episodes involved clear appeals to imagination, only maximally specific problems did. This pattern is explained by the presence of an implicit norm governing imagination use in the two labs: only use imagination on maximally specific problems, and only when all other available methods have failed. This norm was confirmed by the participants, and I argue that it has epistemological reasons in its favour. I also found that its strength varies inversely with career stage, such that more advanced scientists do (and should) occasionally bring their imaginations to bear on more general problems. A story about scientific pedagogy explains the trend away from (and back to) imagination over the course of a scientific career. Finally, some positive recommendations are given for a more imagination-friendly scientific pedagogy. (shrink)

Solidarity is a widespread but under-explored phenomenon. In this paper, I give a philosophical account of solidarity, answering three salient questions: What motivates acts of solidarity? What unifies different acts into tokens of a single type of act, one of solidarity? And what values do acts of solidarity exhibit? The answer to all three, I argue, involves a certain way of relating to others: identifying with them on the basis of shared features, and identifying with the larger group that one (...) and the others both belong to. (shrink)

This article asks whether states have a right to close their borders because of their right to self-determination, as proposed recently by Christopher Wellman, Michael Walzer, and others. It asks the fundamental question whether self-determination can, in even its most unrestricted form, support the exclusion of immigrants. I argue that the answer is no. To show this, I construct three different ways in which one might use the idea of self-determination to justify immigration restrictions and show that each (...) of these arguments fails. My conclusion is that the nature and value of self-determination have to do with the conditions of genuine self-government, not membership of political society. Consequently, the demand for open borders is fully consistent with respect to self-determination. (shrink)

There is a loud and persistent drum beat of support for schools, for citizenship, for diversity and inclusion, and increasingly for labor market readiness with very little critical attention to the assumptions underlying these agendas, let alone to their many internal contradictions. Accordingly, in this book I examine the philosophical, motivational, and practical challenges of education theory, policy, and practice in the twenty-first century. As I proceed, I do not neglect the historical, comparative international context so essential to better understanding (...) where we are, as well as what is attainable in terms of educational justice. I argue that we must constructively critique some of our most cherished beliefs about education if we are to save the hope of real justice from the rhetoric of imagined justice. (shrink)

Unlike first-person Moorean sentences, it’s not always awkward to assert, “p, but you don’t know that p.” This can seem puzzling: after all, one can never get one’s audience to know the asserted content by speaking thus. Nevertheless, such assertions can be conversationally useful, for instance, by helping speaker and addressee agree on where to disagree. I will argue that such assertions also make trouble for the growing family of views about the norm of assertion that what licenses proper assertion (...) is not the initiating epistemic position of the speaker but the resulting epistemic position of the audience. (shrink)

Moral philosophy continues to be enriched by an ongoing empirical turn,mainly through contributions from neuroscience, biology, and psychology. Thusfar, cultural anthropology has largely been missing. A recent and rapidly growing‘ethical turn’ within cultural anthropologynow explicitly and systematically studiesmorality. This research report aims to introduce to an audience in moral philosophyseveral notable works within the ethical turn. It does so by critically discussing theethical turn’s contributions to four topics: the definition of morality, the nature ofmoral change and progress, the truth of (...) moral relativism, and attempts to debunkmorality. The ethical turn uncovers a richer picture of moral phenomena on theintersubjective level, one akin to a virtue theoretic focus on moral character, withstriking similarities of moral phenomena across cultures. Perennial debates are notsettled but the ethical turn strengthens moral philosophy’s empirical turn and itrewards serious attention from philosophers. (shrink)

Evaluative claims and assumptions are ubiquitous in positive psychology. Some will deny this. But such disavowals are belied by the literature. Some will consider the presence of evaluative claims a problem and hope to root them out. But this is a mistake. If positive psychology is to live up to its raison d’être – to be the scientific study of the psychological components of human flourishing or well-being – it must make evaluative claims. Well-being consists in those things that are (...) good for us, that make life go well. Thus, one cannot investigate this topic without making claims about what is good for people and what they have reason to do. It’s time, therefore, to embrace the fact that positive psychology is value-laden. Doing so would benefit the field by allowing for more rigorous theorizing, and – perhaps counterintuitively – increasing the field’s objectivity. (shrink)

This paper defends a new norm of assertion: Assert that p only if you are in a position to know that p. We test the norm by judging its performance in explaining three phenomena that appear jointly inexplicable at first: Moorean paradoxes, lottery propositions, and selfless assertions. The norm succeeds by tethering unassertability to unknowability while untethering belief from assertion. The PtK‐norm foregrounds the public nature of assertion as a practice that can be other‐regarding, allowing asserters to act in the (...) best interests of their audience when psychological pressures would otherwise prevent them from communicating the knowable truth. (shrink)

If there is something (P) that every possible agent is committed to value, and certain actions or attitudes either enhance or diminish P, then normative claims about a range of intentional actions can be objectively and non-trivially evaluated. I argue that the degree of existence as an agent depends on the consistency of reflexive-relating with other individuals of the agent-kind: the ontological thesis. I then show that in intending to act on a reason, every agent is rationally committed to value (...) ‘above all else’ being an agent, what consists in exercising the capacity to act and having the freedom to discriminate between more or less valuable actions: the transcendental thesis. Since the degree of possession of this personal but non-contingent good depends on relating to other agents in a special way, certain actions and attitudes may be objectively right or wrong for all agents. (shrink)

In his article “Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality,” Joshua Greene argues that the empirical findings of cognitive neuroscience have implications for ethics. Specifically, he contends that we ought to trust our manual, conscious reasoning system more than our automatic, emotional system when confronting unfamiliar problems; and because cognitive neuroscience has shown that consequentialist judgments are generated by the manual system and deontological judgments are generated by the automatic system, we ought to trust the former more than the latter when facing unfamiliar moral (...) problems. In the present article, I analyze one of the premises of Greene’s argument. In particular, I ask what exactly an unfamiliar problem is and whether moral problems can be classified as unfamiliar. After exploring several different possible interpretations of familiarity and unfamiliarity, I conclude that the concepts are too problematic to be philosophically compelling, and thus should be abandoned. (shrink)

Whatever the merits idealized liberal accounts of citizenship education may have in the seminar room, in this essay I argue that they are both unpersuasive and ineffectual. This is the case, because they are insufficiently attentive to the empirical realities, first (a) with respect to how real – versus imaginary – school systems function; and second, (b) with respect to the broader political context in which citizenship education policies are implemented. Because so much is already known about the former, I (...) devote more attention in this essay to the latter. (shrink)

This paper explores the level of obligation called for by Milton Friedman’s classic essay “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits.” Several scholars have argued that Friedman asserts that businesses have no or minimal social duties beyond compliance with the law. This paper argues that this reading of Friedman does not give adequate weight to some claims that he makes and to their logical extensions. Throughout his article, Friedman emphasizes the values of freedom, respect for law, and duty. (...) The principle that a business professional should not infringe upon the liberty of other members of society can be used by business ethicists to ground a vigorous line of ethical analysis. Any practice, which has a negative externality that requires another party to take a significant loss without consent or compensation, can be seen as unethical. With Friedman’s framework, we can see how ethics can be seen as arising from the nature of business practice itself. Business involves an ethics in which we consider, work with, and respect strangers who are outside of traditional in-groups. (shrink)

According to many philosophers, "the meaning of life" refers to our cosmic purpose, the activity that we were created by God or a purposive universe to perform. If there is no God or teleology, there is no such thing as the meaning of life. But this need not be the last word on the matter. In this paper, I ask what the benefits provided by a cosmic purpose are, and go on to argue that thinking of our lives in a (...) particular way—in terms of a unified life narrative—can supply us with many of those benefits. We might lose little if there is no such thing as the meaning of life, since there is still something that can provide much of what is valuable about it. (shrink)

In my 1991 paper, AAnti-Individualism and Privileged Access,@ I argued that externalism in the philosophy of mind is incompatible with the thesis that we have privileged , nonempirical access to the contents of our own thoughts.¹ One of the most interesting responses to my argument has been that of Martin Davies (1998, 2000, and Chapter _ above) and Crispin Wright (2000 and Chapter _ above), who describe several types of cases to show that warrant for a premise does not always (...) transmit to a known deductive consequence of that premise, and who contend that this fact under-mines my argument for incompatibilism. I will try to show here that the Davies/Wright point about transmission of warrant does not adversely affect my argument. (shrink)

Grief research in philosophy agrees that one who grieves grieves over the irreversible loss of someone whom the griever loved deeply, and that someone thus factored centrally into the griever’s sense of purpose and meaning in the world. The analytic literature in general tends to focus its treatments on the paradigm case of grief as the death of a loved one. I want to restrict my account to the paradigm case because the paradigm case most persuades the mind that grief (...) is a past-directed emotion. The phenomenological move I propose will enable us to (1) respect the paradigm case of grief and a broader but still legitimate set of grief-generating states of affairs, (2) liberate grief from the view that grief is past directed or about the past, and thus (3) account for grief in a way that separates it from its closest emotion-neighbor, sorrow, without having to rely on the affective quality of those two emotions.If the passing of the beloved causes the grief but is not what the grief is about, then we can get at the nature of grief by saying its temporal orientation is in the past (the event of the passing), but its temporal meaning is the present and future—the new significance of a world with the pervasive absence that is the world without the beloved. The no-longer of grief is a no-longer oriented by a past (that which is no longer) that is referred a present and future (that which is a no-longer understood as not now as it once was). Looking at the griever’s relation to time can tell us much about the pain and the object of grief, then. As the griever puts the past before himself with a certainty about this world “henceforth,” a look at the griever’s lived sense of the fi nality of the irreversibly lost (1) liberates grief from the tendency in the literature to be reduced to a past-directed emotion, (2) accounts for grief ’s intensity, its affective force or poignancy, and thus (3) enables us to separate grief from sorrow according to its intentionalobject in light of the temporal meaning of these emotions. (shrink)