Recent archaeological discoveries show ancient, and particularly Near Eastern society to have been supremely contractual, while Mediterranean society was historically characterized by strong family structures, challenging the 19th century evolutionary Status-to-Contract canon.

The recent trend toward privately owned and operated prisons calls attention to a variety of issues involving human rights. The growing number of corporatized correctional institutions is especially notable in the United States, but it is also a global phenomenon in many countries. The reasons cited for privatizing prisons are usually economic; the opportunity to outsource prison services enables local political leaders to save tax revenue, and local communities are promised a chance to create new jobs and bring in a (...) new industry. This article will address the history of prisons and the recent trend toward privatizing prisons and the perception of prisons as a for-profit enterprise. This new economic order brings with it a set of human rights concerns, including the relationship of for-profit prisons to increased numbers of incarcerated persons and increased sentences, racism and classism. The contractual relationship between political leaders and prison corporations will be addressed, noting that conditions of liability frequently mean that prison administrations lack motivation to safeguard the human rights of prisoners. The human rights issues often extend outside of the private prison itself, having a negative effect on the local community. (shrink)

This article sheds light on managing and utilizing scientific and technological funds (Sci-Tech funds) in Vietnam.

Scientific journal presented by Bogdan Khmelnitsky Melitopol State Pedagogical University, Ukraine, Melitopol. Main points: 1. Actual Problems of Modern Philosophy 2. Researches in Philosophy connected with natural components, sociological aspects and self - identity development.

Political theorists have recently sought to replace the liberal, contractual theory of the firm with a political view that models the authority relation of employee to firm, and its appropriate regulation, on that of subject to state. This view is liable to serious difficulties, however, given existing discontinuities between corporate and civil authority as to their coerciveness, entry and exit conditions, scope, legal standing, and efficiency constraints. I here inspect these, and argue that, albeit in some cases significant, (...) such discontinuities fail to undermine the firm/state analogy, either because they are not significant enough to do so or because the particular trait on which they hinge is not decisive for how authority, in the state and in the firm, should be regulated to be legitimate. A pro tanto requirement exists, I thus argue, that corporate authority be held to regulatory norms comparable to those legitimate states abide by, including civil liberties, rule-of-law constraints, and accountability to subjects. (shrink)

Honors Research: PPE @ UPenn | This thesis seeks to address some of the most central questions to the fields of political philosophy and political economy. How can social order and government develop from anarchy under standard economic assumptions of rationality, where all agents act strictly in their own interests? What are the deontological limits to the State’s use of force such that political legitimacy is maintained, and how do these ethical boundaries of government relate to moral obligations conferred (...) upon individuals? Finally, what sets of policies and social institutions ought the State implement to achieve the best welfare outcomes for a society, and is there a necessary conflict between policy consequentialism and deontological ethics? This thesis will first show that a laissez-faire capitalist social order spontaneously emerges from the State of Nature as a result of mutual self-interest between rational agents, with the institution of government being a mere product of market forces that is best modeled as a locally-monopolized, excludable, collective entity with global competition. Then, this thesis will defend a theory of natural rights on the basis that persons are normatively separate, before establishing that laissez-faire capitalism and its contractual form of government are uniquely in compliance with these universal moral standards of conduct that predate the institution of any state. Finally, it will be argued in this thesis that the key tenets of laissez-faire capitalism - strong individual rights to life, liberty, and property - produce maximal human welfare from both individualist and collectivist aggregations, before such conclusions are translated into a foundation for limited government. These arguments serve to solidify libertarianism as both the dominant political philosophy and the globally convergent equilibrium of political organization, while also demonstrating that laissez-faire capitalism is the optimal form of social order. (shrink)

According to the brain drain argument, there are good reasons for states to limit the exit of their skilled workers (more specifically, healthcare workers), because of the negative impacts this type of migration has for other members of the community from which they migrate. Some theorists criticise this argument as illiberal, while others support it and ground a duty to stay of the skilled workers on rather vague concepts like patriotic virtue, or the legitimate expectations of their state and (...) co-citizens. In this article, on the contrary, we suggest that the liberal conception of states’ legitimate political authority demands, and not just permits, that developing states from which migration of skilled workers occurs set up contractual mechanisms. These mechanisms will ensure that state-funded training in the health sector is provided against a commitment on the part of future professionals to reciprocate with their services for the benefits obtained. If one of the conditions for the state to maintain legitimate political authority is to provide basic services such as healthcare to its subjects (while respecting at the same time their autonomy and freedom), then this is what developing states affected by the brain drain ought to do. What we call the authority-based approach to the brain drain also helps to clarify the obligations that other states have not to interfere with these contractual mechanisms when they exist, and not to profit from their absence. Inspired by FIFA’s legal instruments of training compensation and solidarity mechanism for the transfer of players, we conclude by suggesting a plausible global policy to complement this authority-based approach. (shrink)

This study seeks to critically explore the link between sovereignty, violence and war in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. From a brief rereading of Leviathan’s main arguments that explicitly revolves around the Aristotelian distinction between actuality/ potentiality, it will conclude that Hobbesian pre-contractual violence is primarily based on what Hobbes terms “anticipatory reason” and the problem of future contingency. Relying on Foucauldian insights, it will be emphasized that the assumption of certain potentialities suffices in leading (...) to Hobbes’s well-known conclusion that the state of nature is a “condition of Warre.” In a second step, this study considers some of Agamben’s arguments to account for how pre-contractual violence as envisioned by Hobbes cannot be rendered impotent through the integration of a sovereign. In specific, Agamben’s claims shed light on an irreducible, inextricable entwining between the state of nature and the state of law as “Siamese twins” (Virno). On a meta-level, Agamben thus implicitly shows how the “Hobbesian problem” cannot be merely reduced to a “problem of order” (Parsons). With regard to the current functioning of the stratagems of financial markets and the mechanisms of future-colonization underpinning global politics, this study finally argues that Hobbes ought to be reevaluated in particular regarding the problem of the future in his account. Partly responding to Agamben’s critical investigations, I suggest that a careful exploration of what will be coined “the prospects of an actualization of the potentiality not-to-be” might serve as a first theoretical step towards a productive form of criticism. (shrink)

Many theorists have recently observed that the response to the same-sex marriage controversy most congruent with basic liberal principles is neither the retention of the institution of marriage in its present form, nor its extension so as to include same-sex unions along with heterosexual ones, but rather the ‘dis-establishment’ of marriage. Less commonly observed, however, is the fact that there are two competing models for how the state might effect a regime of disestablished marriage. On the one hand, there (...) is a ‘deflationary’ approach, on which the state ceases to confer marital status, but does remain in the status-conferring business. On this approach, the state would still bestow a certain ‘thinner’, more ‘neutral’ legal status – as it does when it creates civil unions, for instance. Call this the ‘Status Model’ of disestablished marriage. On the other hand, there is an ‘eliminativist’ approach, on which the state ceases to confer any sort of status at all – not even the thin or neutral status of ‘civilly-unioned’. There simply are no registered domestic partnerships. What there is, is contract law, and individuals entering into contracts for life-partnership – contractual arrangements which might assume any of a wide variety of forms. Call this the ‘Contract Model’ of disestablished marriage. In this paper, I explore the merits of these competing models. After briefly discussing what it means to speak of ‘disestablishing marriage’, and examining the case for disestablishment, I proceed to consider the advantages and disadvantages of each model. My tentative conclusion is that the Contract Model is the one that best instantiates cardinal liberal virtues. (shrink)

Access to surrogacy is often cast in the language of rights. Here, I examine what form such a right could take. I distinguish between surrogacy as a right to assisted procreation, and surrogacy as a contractual right. I find the first interpretation implausible: it would give rise to claims against the state that no state can fulfil, namely the provision of sufficient surrogates to satisfy the need. Instead, I argue that the right to surrogacy can only be (...) plausibly understood as a contractual right. I then investigate two different sets of harms that are often employed to argue against such a contractual interpretation of the right to surrogacy: harm to women's interests in a gendered society, and harm to the sense of self of the surrogate. I assess both of these through the analytical lens of vulnerability. I find neither of them to be convincing arguments against surrogacy contracts. In conclusion, I agree that surrogacy contracts should be carefully regulated, but I disagree with those who call for prohibition of the right to surrogacy as a contractual right. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the most controversial philosophers and political theorists of the Enlightenment. He has often been accused of laying the ideological foundation for many repressive and radical movements and regimes, from the reign of terror of the French Revolution to the right-wing and left-wing totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Especially his idea of the general will has been criticised by scholars as an abstract Platonism that establishes the dictatorship of the state and rejects basic human (...) rights. Some authors even believe that all of Rousseau’s authoritarian passages are merely a paraphrase of arguments found in French absolutist thought. Nevertheless, Rousseau’s novelty lay in his denial of identifying authority with only one person. Instead, sovereignty was based on the will of all those people who made up the political body. Accordingly, the theory of absolute monarchy was transformed into an alternative democratic version of absolute popular sovereignty. Rousseau is also considered one of the classics of the contractual tradition. He argued that mankind without a govern- ment would live in what he called a “state of nature” where there would be no law and order. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to compare Rousseau’s ideas about the principles of political authority in two of his works: “The Social Contract” and “Considerations on the Government of Poland”. In the first part of the paper we will briefly review the main concepts developed in The Social Contract, such as the general will, the social contract, sovereignty and direct democracy. In the second part, we will focus on the main ideas put forward in Considerations on the Government of Poland. Then, at the end, we will try to identify the reasons for the conceptual changes in some of Rousseau’s views. (shrink)

Society, based on contract and voluntary exchange, is evolving, but remains only partly developed. Goods and services that meet the needs of individuals, such as food, clothing, and shelter, are amply produced and distributed through the market process. However, those that meet common or community needs, while distributed through the market, are produced politically through taxation and violence. These goods attach not to individuals but to a place; to enjoy them, individuals must go to the place where they are. Land (...) owners, all unknowingly, distribute such services contractually as they rent or sell sites. Rent or price is the market value of such services, net after disservices, as they affect each site. By distributing occupancies to those who can pay the highest price, land owners’ interests align with those of society. Without this, tenure would be precarious—by force or favor of politicians. The 18th-century separation of land from state, so little studied by historians, permitted the development of modern property in land. This change is perhaps “the greatest single step in the evolution of Society the world has ever seen.” When land owners realize that they market community services, they will organize to produce and administer them as well, and society will be made whole. (shrink)

This article offers a critical analysis of David Miller’s proposal that liberal immigration policies should be conceptualized in terms of a quasi-contract between receiving nations and immigrant groups, designed to ensure both that cultural diversity does not undermine trust among citizens and that immigrants are treated fairly. This proposal fails to address sufficiently two related concerns. Firstly, an open-ended, quasi-contractual requirement for cultural integration leaves immigrant groups exposed to arbitrary critique as insufficiently integrated and unworthy of trust as citizens. (...) Secondly, the focus on national culture instead of citizenship obfuscates the close link between political membership and political trustworthiness. An examination of two models of interpersonal trust, affective and cognitive,shows that there is no room for the mid-way position associated with a quasi-contract. The effect of grounding political trust in a shared national culture instead of democratic institutions is to normalize the domination of immigrants and citizens alike. (shrink)

Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains, raised questions about James M. Buchanan’s commitment to democracy. This paper investigates the relationship of classical liberalism in general and of Buchanan in particular to democratic theory. Contrary to the simplistic classical liberal juxtaposition of “coercion vs. consent,” there have been from Antiquity onwards voluntary contractarian defenses of non-democratic government and even slavery—all little noticed by classical liberal scholars who prefer to think of democracy as just “government by the consent of the governed” and (...) slavery as being inherently coercive. Historically, democratic theory had to go beyond that simplistic notion of democracy to develop a critique of consent-based non-democratic government, e.g., the Hobbesian pactum subjectionis. That critique was based firstly on the distinction between contracts or constitutions of alienation (translatio) versus delegation (concessio). Then the contracts of alienation were ruled out based on the theory of inalienable rights that descends from the Reformation doctrine of inalienability of conscience down through the Enlightenment to modern times in the abolitionist and democratic movements. While he developed no theory of inalienability, the mature Buchanan explicitly allowed only a constitution of delegation, contrary to many modern classical liberals or libertarians who consider the choice between consent-based democratic or non-democratic governments (e.g., private cities or shareholder states) to be a pragmatic one. But Buchanan seems to not even realize that his at-most-delegation dictum would also rule out the employer-employee or human rental contract which is a contract of alienation “within the scope of the employment.”. (shrink)

This paper argues that throughout his intellectual career, Hobbes remains unsatisfied with his own attempts at proving the invariant advisability of contract-keeping. Not only does he see himself forced to abandon his early idea that contractual obligation is a matter of physical laws. He also develops and retains doubts concerning its theoretical successor, the doctrine that the obligatoriness characteristic of contracts is the interest in self-preservation in alliance with instrumental reason - i.e. prudence. In fact, it is during his (...) work on Leviathan that Hobbes notes the doctrine's main shortcoming, namely the limitation of its dialectical potential to cases in which contract-breakers are publicly identifiable. This essay shows Hobbes's doubts about his Leviathan's treatment of contractual obligation by way of a close reading of its central 15 th chapter and an analysis of some revealing shifts between the English Leviathan and the Latin edition. The paper ends by suggesting that Hobbes's awareness of the flaws at the heart of his political philosophy helps account for some striking changes in his latest writings. (shrink)

What is the quantum state of the universe? Although there have been several interesting suggestions, the question remains open. In this paper, I consider a natural choice for the universal quantum state arising from the Past Hypothesis, a boundary condition that accounts for the time-asymmetry of the universe. The natural choice is given not by a wave function but by a density matrix. I begin by classifying quantum theories into two types: theories with a fundamental wave function and (...) theories with a fundamental density matrix. The Past Hypothesis is compatible with infinitely many initial wave functions, none of which seems to be particularly natural. However, once we turn to density matrices, the Past Hypothesis provides a natural choice---the normalized projection onto the Past Hypothesis subspace in the Hilbert space. Nevertheless, the two types of theories can be empirically equivalent. To provide a concrete understanding of the empirical equivalence, I provide a novel subsystem analysis in the context of Bohmian theories. Given the empirical equivalence, it seems empirically underdetermined whether the universe is in a pure state or a mixed state. Finally, I discuss some theoretical payoffs of the density-matrix theories and present some open problems for future research. (Bibliographic note: the thesis was submitted for the Master of Science in mathematics at Rutgers University.). (shrink)

Explanation does not exist in a metaphysical vacuum. Conceptions of the structure of a phenomenon play an important role in guiding attempts to explain it, and erroneous conceptions of a phenomenon may direct investigation in misleading directions. I believe that there is a case to be made for thinking that much work on the neural underpinnings of consciousness—what is often called the neural correlates of consciousness—is driven by an erroneous conception of the structure of consciousness. The aim of this paper (...) is lay bare some connections between the explanation of consciousness and the structure of consciousness, and to argue for a conception of the structure of consciousness that is more adequate than that which currently drives much research into the neural correlates of consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper we put forward a realist account of the problem of the accommodation of conflicting claims over sacred places. Our argument takes its cue from the empirical finding that modern, Western-style states necessarily mould religion into shapes that are compatible with state rule. So, at least in the context of modern states there is no pre-political morality of religious freedom that states ought to follow when adjudicating claims over sacred spaces. In which case most liberal normative theory (...) on religious accommodation turns out to be wrong headed. As an alternative, we suggest the question of contested sacred places should be settled with reference to the state’s purposes—at least as long as one is committed to the existence of modern states. If one finds the state’s treatment of religion unsatisfactory, then our argument provides a pro tanto reason for seeking alternative forms of political organisation. (shrink)

Under so-called primitive ontology approaches, in fully describing the history of a quantum system, one thereby attributes interesting properties to regions of spacetime. Primitive ontology approaches, which include some varieties of Bohmian mechanics and spontaneous collapse theories, are interesting in part because they hold out the hope that it should not be too difficult to make a connection between models of quantum mechanics and descriptions of histories of ordinary macroscopic bodies. But such approaches are dualistic, positing a quantum state (...) as well as ordinary material degrees of freedom. This paper lays out and compares some options that primitive ontologists have for making sense of the quantum state. (shrink)

In order for states to fulfil (many of) their moral obligations, costs must be passed to individuals. This paper asks how these costs should be distributed. I advocate the common-sense answer: the distribution of costs should, insofar as possible, track the reasons behind the state’s duty. This answer faces a number of problems, which I attempt to solve.

While Quine’s linguistic behaviorism is well-known, his Kant Lectures contain one of his most detailed discussions of behaviorism in psychology and the philosophy of mind. Quine clarifies the nature of his psychological commitments by arguing for a modest view that is against ‘excessively restrictive’ variants of behaviorism while maintaining ‘a good measure of behaviorist discipline…to keep [our mental] terms under control’. In this paper, I use Quine’s Kant Lectures to reconstruct his position. I distinguish three types of behaviorism in psychology (...) and the philosophy of mind: ontological behaviorism, logical behaviorism, and epistemological behaviorism. I then consider Quine’s perspective on each of these views and argue that he does not fully accept any of them. By combining these perspectives we arrive at Quine’s surprisingly subtle view about behaviorism in psychology. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide a philosophical conceptual framework to understand the theoretical roots and political implications of the interpretations of Plato’s work in Jaeger’s Third Humanism and Krieck’s völkisch-racist pedagogy and anthropology. This article will seek to characterize, as figures of localitas, their conceptions of the individual, community, corporeality, identity, and the State that both authors developed departing from Platonic political philosophy. My main hypothesis is that Jaeger’s and Krieck’s interpretations of Platonic paideía shared several (...) core-elements based on a modern conception of State sovereignty and human will, whose fundamental ground is the subjectivist-technical metaphysics. The “production” of a human type (spiritual and/or racial) and a unitary State political community appears in both authors mediated by a theory of political education, that I define as «State typohumanism», that sought its sustenance in Plato’s political philosophy, mainly by means of a distorted understanding of the notions of týpos and ē̂thos, and that, I argue, played a key role in the intellectual legitimization of völkisch-racism. This would be broadly translated into a programmatic and literal understanding of the Platonic Republic which assumes that the inherent function of any State is to produce subjectivities based on national identities grounded on homogeneous characteristics. In these varied characterizations similar appropriations of humanitas have been expressed both in Jaeger and in Krieck. (shrink)

This monograph investigates the temporal interpretation of narrative discourse in two parts. The theme of the first part is narrative progression. It begins with a case study of the adverb ‘now’ and its interaction with the meaning of tense. The case study motivates an ontological distinction between events, states and times and proposes that ‘now’ seeks a prominent state that holds throughout the time described by the tense. Building on prior research, prominence is shown to be influenced by principles (...) of discourse coherence and two coherence principles, NARRATION and RESULT, are given a formally explicit characterization. The key innovation is a new method for testing the definitional adequacy of NARRATION and RESULT, namely by an abductive argument. This contribution opens a new way of thinking about how eventive and stative descriptions contribute to the perceived narrative progression in a discourse. -/- The theme of the second part of the monograph is the semantics and pragmatics of tense. A key innovation is that the present and past tenses are treated as scalar alternatives, a view that is motivated by adopting a particular hypothesis concerning stative predication. The proposed analysis accounts for tense in both matrix clauses and in complements of propositional attitudes, where the notorious double access reading arises. This reading is explored as part of a corpus study that provides a glimpse of how tense semantics interacts with Gricean principles and at-issueness. Several cross-linguistic predictions of the analysis are considered, including their consequences for the Sequence of Tense phenomenon and the Upper Limit Constraint. Finally, a hypothesis is provided about how tense meanings compose with temporal adverbs and verb phrases. Two influential analysis of viewpoint aspect are then compared in light of the hypothesis. (shrink)

The paper discusses the structure, applications, and plausibility of the much-used parallel-case argument for workplace democracy. The argument rests on an analogy between firms and states according to which the justification of democracy in the state implies its justification in the workplace. The contribution of the paper is threefold. First, the argument is illustrated by applying it to two usual objections to workplace democracy, namely, that employees lack the expertise required to run a firm and that only capital suppliers (...) should have a say over the governance of the firm. Second, the structure of the argument is unfolded. Third, two salient similarities between firms and states regarding their internal and external effects and the standing of their members are addressed in order to asses the potential and limits of the argument, as well as three relevant differences regarding the voluntariness of their membership, the narrowness of their goals, and the stiffness of the competition they face. After considering these similarities and differences, the paper contends that the the parallel-case argument provides a sound reason in favor of democracy in the workplace—a reason, however, that needs to be importantly qualified and that is only pro tanto. (shrink)

What makes #BlackLivesMatter unique is the implication that it isn’t only some black lives that matter, that is, not only the most commonly referenced male lives. Rather, the hashtag suggests that all black lives matter, including queer, trans, disabled, and female. This movement includes all those black lives who have been marginalized within the black liberation tradition, as well as in greater society. The movement highlights the ways in which black people have been traditionally deprived of dignity and human rights. (...) State racism and state violence are sustained together. The law creates a “subrace” out of those whom white society fears and holds in contempt. This leaves not only black Americans but all citizens vulnerable. A way to fight this form of racism is not only to create a solidarity among the oppressed members of the subrace but to create a solidarity with all members, in “vulnerable solidarity.”. (shrink)

Although Robert Nozick has argued that libertarianism is compatible with the justice of a minimal state—even if does not arise from mutual consent—few have been persuaded. I will outline a different way of establishing that a non-consensual libertarian state can be just. I will show that a state can—with a few important qualifications—justly enforce the rights of citizens, extract payments to cover the costs of such enforcement, redistribute resources to the poor, and invest in infrastructure to overcome (...) market failures. Footnotesa For very helpful comments, I am indebted to Dani Attas, Ellen Frankel Paul, Robert Johnson, Brian Kierland, Mike Otsuka, Eric Roark, and the other contributors to this volume. (shrink)

Recent studies have demonstrated neural overlap between resting state activity and self-referential processing. This “rest-self” overlap occurs especially in anterior cortical midline structures like the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (PACC). However, the exact neurotemporal and biochemical mechanisms remain to be identified. Therefore, we conducted a combined electroencephalography (EEG)-magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) study. EEG focused on pre-stimulus (e.g., prior to stimulus presentation or perception) power changes to assess the degree to which those changes can predict subjects’ perception (and judgment) of (...) subsequent stimuli as high or low self-related. MRS measured resting state concentration of glutamate, focusing on PACC. High pre-stimulus (e.g., prior to stimulus presentation or perception) alpha power significantly correlated with both perception of stimuli judged to be highly self-related and with resting state glutamate concentrations in the PACC. In sum, our results show (i) pre-stimulus (e.g., prior to stimulus presentation or perception) alpha power and resting state glutamate concentration to mediate rest-self overlap that (ii) dispose or incline subjects to assign high degrees of self-relatedness to perceptual stimuli. (shrink)

I discuss here the nature of nonconscious mental states and the ways in which they may differ from their conscious counterparts. I first survey reasons to think that mental states can and often do occur without being conscious. Then, insofar as the nature of nonconscious mentality depends on how we understand the nature of consciousness, I review some of the major theories of consciousness and explore what restrictions they may place on the kinds of states that can occur nonconsciously. I (...) close with a discussion of what makes a state mental, if consciousness is not the mark of the mental. (shrink)

Most theories of promising are insufficiently broad, for they ground promissory obligation in some external or contingent feature of the promise. In this paper, I introduce a new kind of theory. The Mental States First (MSF) theory grounds promissory obligation in something internal and essential: the mental state expressed by promising, or the state that promisors purport to be in. My defense of MSF relies on three claims. First, promising to Φ expresses that you have resolved to Φ. (...) Second, resolving to Φ commits you to Φing, all else being equal. Third, the norms on speech acts are determined by the norms on the mental states they express, such that publicly expressing that you are in a state subjects you to whatever commitments are normally incurred by being in that state, regardless of whether you really are in it. I suggest that this general approach might also explain how the norms on other sorts of speech acts work. (shrink)

This paper sketches a framework for the separation of church and state and, with the framework in view, indicates why a government’s maintaining such separation poses challenges for balancing two major democratic ideals: preserving equality before the law and protecting liberty, including religious liberty. The challenge is particularly complex where healthcare is either provided or regulated by government. The contemporary problem in question here is the contraception coverage requirement in the Obama Administration’s healthcare mandate. Many institutions have mounted legal (...) challenges to the mandate on grounds of religious freedom. The paper proposes a number of interconnected principles toward a resolution of the problem: for the institutional realm, specific principles for church-state separation and a principle concerning the protection of citizens’sense of identity; and for the ethics of citizenship in the conduct individuals, principles that provide an adequate place for natural (thus secular) reason in lawmaking and political decisions. (shrink)

Like American politics, the academic debate over justice is polarized, with almost all theories of justice falling within one of two traditions: egalitarianism and libertarianism. This book provides an alternative to the partisan standoff by focusing not on equality or liberty, but on the idea that we should give people the things that they deserve. Mulligan argues that a just society is a meritocracy, in which equal opportunity prevails and social goods are distributed strictly on the basis of merit. That (...) gives citizens their just deserts. In addition to its novel conceptual approach, meritocracy is distinctive from existing work in two ways. First, it is grounded in research on how people actually think about justice. Empirical research reveals that people don't think that social goods should be distributed equally. Nor do they dismiss the idea of social justice. Across ideological and cultural lines, people want rewards to reflect merit. Second, the book discusses hot-button political issues and makes concrete policy recommendations. These issues include anti-meritocratic bias against women and racial minorities and the United States’ widening economic inequality. Justice and the Meritocratic State offers a new theory of justice and provides solutions to our most vexing social and economic problems. It will be of keen interest to philosophers, economists, and political theorists. (shrink)

In this paper I outline a theory of legitimacy that grounds the state’s right to rule on a natural duty not to harm others. I argue that by refusing to enter the state, anarchists expose those living next to them to the dangers of the state of nature, thereby posing an unjust threat. Since we have a duty not to pose unjust threats to others, anarchists have a duty to leave the state of nature and enter (...) the state. This duty correlates to a claim-right possessed by those living next to them, who also have a right to act in self-defence to enforce this obligation. This argument, if successful, would be particularly attractive, as it provides an account of state legitimacy without importing any normative premises that libertarians would reject. (shrink)

It is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred (...) to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one’s activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters. Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as they can have a large range of sensing, do not require physical presence at a particular location and are physically intangible. Moreover, relevant information about individuals’ activities and health status can derive from processing audio signals. Nevertheless, as the other side of the coin, cameras and microphones are often perceived as the most intrusive technologies from the viewpoint of the privacy of the monitored individuals. This is due to the richness of the information these technologies convey and the intimate setting where they may be deployed. Solutions able to ensure privacy preservation by context and by design, as well as to ensure high legal and ethical standards are in high demand. After the review of the current state of play and the discussion in GoodBrother, we may claim that the first solutions in this direction are starting to appear in the literature. A multidisciplinary debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach. This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio- and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users. The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely lifelogging and self-monitoring, remote monitoring of vital signs, emotional state recognition, food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, activity and personal assistance, gesture recognition, fall detection and prevention, mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted. The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed. (shrink)

This is a chapter from my book Perception (Routledge). I explain the physical state view of sensory experience (Papineau, McLaughlin, others). I criticize an argument against it based on the "transparency observation". Then I develop two alternative arguments against it. The first is a Leibniz's Law argument based on the essentially externally directed character of some experiences. The second concerns "brains in vats". Finally I consider a recent response due to David Papineau, which involves rejecting essential external directedness.

In Chapter 5 of Liberalism’s Religion, Cécile Laborde considers the freedom and autonomy of religious associations within liberal democratic societies. This paper evaluates her central arguments in that chapter. First, I argue that Laborde makes things too easy for herself in dismissing controversies over the state’s legitimate jurisdictional authority. Second, I argue that Laborde’s view of when associations’ ‘coherence interests’ justify exemptions is too narrow. Third, I consider how we might develop an account of judicial deference to associations’ ‘competence (...) interests’. (shrink)

With the development of sharing economy, a consensus to study this area from the perspective of morality and ethics has been recently reached. The key point of this study is the ethical basis of sharing economy. It should be noticed that the conceptual framework of sharing economy must be grounded within the market economy, technological innovation, and the spirit of "rational cooperation". It is, therefore, necessary to realize that the sharing economy is based on the Contractual Ethics internally rooted (...) in the market economy, the Technical Ethics which is coordinated with technological innovation, and the Universal Ethics produced by the cooperative reason. The three concept of ethics lay the ethical foundation of sharing economy together. (shrink)

The paper considers the nature of the state understood as the political unity articulated on the basis of a collective identity which provides the state with its capacity to make decisions. The foremost decision of the state to protect and defend this identity is the source of its authority to enforce laws. Collective identity thus represents an object of special interest, unlike both “political” interests (Millian other-regarding acts) and private interests (Millian self-regarding acts). The validation of laws (...) through this special interest is a necessary condition for both of these latter kinds of interests to materialize. Hence, unlike the Millian thesis of two different kinds of interests (self- and other-regarding), here we take that there are three types or spheres of interests. Any conception of rights, then, will cover a subset of interests found in the domains of all of those three types of interests: in the domain of political interest the issue concerns selection among competing sets of legitimate interests, within the domain of private interests the point is to discern those that will be protected by law, while the third type of interests, the object of which is a unique collective identity and its defining specificity, represents an overarching interest that is embedded in any legitimate collective concern. In this scheme, well-suited for democratic theory, the majority/minority discourse is a matter of distinguishing which particular set of legitimate interests is chosen to be dominant (e.g., which political party is in power) and which ones are waiting for the opportunity to achieve their transformation from minority (opposition) to majority (i. e. government). If, however, there is no well-defined collective identity, minorities acquire a new meaning. Rather than being possible future majorities, they form a nucleus of competing collective identities with, sometimes hopeless but still alive, aspirations to sovereignty. Thus they become sources of likely conflicts that may go well beyond political controversies. (shrink)

Robust technological enhancement of core cognitive capacities is now a realistic possibility. From the perspective of neutralism, the view that justifications for public policy should be neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good, only members of a subset of the ethical concerns serve as legitimate justifications for public policy regarding robust technological enhancement. This paper provides a framework for the legitimate use of ethical concerns in justifying public policy decisions regarding these enhancement technologies by evaluating the ethical concerns that arise (...) in the context of testing such technologies on nonhuman animals. Traditional issues in bioethics, as well as novel concerns such as the possibility of moral status enhancement, are evaluated from the perspective of neutralism. (shrink)

This paper elaborates a new solution to the lottery paradox, according to which the paradox arises only when we lump together two distinct states of being confident that p under one general label of ‘belief that p’. The two-state conjecture is defended on the basis of some recent work on gradable adjectives. The conjecture is supported by independent considerations from the impossibility of constructing the lottery paradox both for risk-tolerating states such as being afraid, hoping or hypothesizing, and for (...) risk-averse, certainty-like states. The new proposal is compared to views within the increasingly popular debate opposing dualists to reductionists with respect to the relation between belief and degrees of belief. (shrink)

The side-effect effect, in which an agent who does not speci␣cally intend an outcome is seen as having brought it about intentionally, is thought to show that moral factors inappropriately bias judgments of intentionality, and to challenge standard mental state models of intentionality judgments. This study used matched vignettes to dissociate a number of moral factors and mental states. Results support the view that mental states, and not moral factors, explain the side-effect effect. However, the critical mental states appear (...) not to be desires as proposed in standard models, but rather ‘deeper’ evaluative states including values and core evaluative attitudes. (shrink)

I propose that Mandarin ｡-sentences (units marked by ｡) are aspectual topic-comment sequences, where an initial update (terminating in a pause) introduces a topic state for comment by one or more clauses. Each comment anaphorically refers to the topic state via the aspect feature of the verbal predicate. This proposal explains why Mandarin ｡-sentences have controversial boundaries, since speakers may disagree where one topic state ends and the next one begins. It also explains various manifestations of aspect-prominence (...) and topic-prominence in Mandarin discourse. In Bittner (2014), this proposal is formally implemented in Categorial Grammar and a new dynamic logic called Update with Centering. (shrink)

If one takes seriously the idea that a scientific language must be extensional, and accepts Quine’s notion of truth-value-related extensionality, and also recognizes that a scientific language must allow for singular terms that do not refer to existing objects, then there is a problem, since this combination of assumptions must be inconsistent. I will argue for a particular solution to the problem, namely, changing what is meant by the word ‘extensionality’, so that it would not be the truth-value that had (...) to be preserved under the substitution of co-extensional expressions, but the state of affairs that the sentence described. The question is whether or not elementary sentences containing empty singular terms, such as ‘Vulcan rotates’, are extensional in the substitutivity sense. Five conditions are specified under which extensionality in the substitutivity sense of such sentences can be secured. It is demonstrated that such sentences are state-of-affairs-as-extension-related extensional. This implies that such sentences are also truth-value-related extensional in Quine’s sense, but not truth-value-as-extension-related extensional. (shrink)

Important conceptual and metaphysical issues arise when we try to understand the mental lives of “split-brain” subjects. How many distinct streams of consciousness do they have? According to Elizabeth Schechter’s partial unity model, the answer is one. A related question is whether co-consciouness, in general, is transitive. That is, if α and β are co-conscious experiences, and β and γ are co-conscious experiences, must α and γ be co-conscious? According to Schechter, the answer is no. The partial unity model faces (...) some serious objections. Its underpinnings are suspect, and ways of working out the model fall into trouble of various sorts: incoherence, emptiness, or unacceptable indeterminacy about the identity of (token) conscious states. One apparent lesson is that a subject can host two distinct conscious experiences of the same sort. Another is that the co-consciousness relation is transitive after all. (shrink)

In their paper ‘Degrees as Kinds’, Anderson and Morzycki, demonstrate how certain constructions in a range of languages treat kinds, manners, and degrees alike. Their proposal is to identify degrees with kinds of states and they consider states to be interchangeable with tropes. In these comments, I will raise some issues about the interchangeability of (concrete) states and tropes as well as the category of concrete states as well as Anderson and Morzycki's analysis of the comparative.

This paper explores how individuals experiencing hostile affective states such as envy, jealousy, hate, contempt, and Ressentiment tend to deceive themselves about their own mental states. More precisely, it examines how the feeling of being diminished in worth experienced by the subject of these hostile affective states motivates a series of self-deceptive maneuvers that generate a fictitious upliftment of the subject’s sense of self. After introducing the topic (section 1), the paper explores the main arguments that explain why several hostile (...) affective states involve a feeling of diminution in the subject’s own value (section 2). Next, it offers an analysis of how the negative feeling of self-worth motivates self-deception. While in extrinsically motivated self-deception, the subject feels diminished in worth after negatively evaluating her own hostile affective states, in intrinsically motivated self-deception, the negative feelings of self-worth are constituent elements of the hostile affective state in question (section 3). Cases of intrinsically motivated self-deception are particularly intriguing because in them the motivation for self-deception is inherent to the hostile affective state, independently of external reasons. I coin the expression “self-deceptive style” to capture the distinctive form in which each hostile affective state intrinsically motivates changes in the architecture of the mind (e.g., perception, imagining, memory, judgment, attention, etc.) in order to generate an upliftment of the self (section 4). To show the descriptive and explanatory function of this concept, a comparative analysis of the self-deceptive styles of envy and hate is provided (section 5). The conclusion summarizes the main findings and explores directions for further research (section 6). (shrink)

Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".

Non-state peoples cannot be subjects of Kant’s international law, which accordingly affords them no protection against external interference. They might also lack the dynamic of private law at the basis of the duty of state entrance. Prima facie, this compels Kant to allow that their lands be appropriated and that they be forced out of the state of nature. But this conclusion is at odds with his cosmopolitanism, particularly its anti-imperialistic commitments: non-state peoples are protected against (...) annexation, under Kant’s cosmopolitan law. The paper makes three contributions to the debate on this tension. Firstly, it disambiguates scope, ground, and relata of the duty to exit the state of nature. Secondly, it argues that non-state peoples have an inter-group duty to exit the state of nature; and that this holds for a non-state people regardless of whether it also has an intra-group duty of state entrance, which remains unenforceable by outside parties. Finally, it offers a construal of the former duty as a cosmopolitan duty to interact peacefully even in the absence of a shared culture. (shrink)

I discuss the foundations of predicate ontologies based on two model notions – elementary states of affairs and eventualities, i.e. ordered pairs of initial and end states of affairs. Vendlerian classifications are oriented towards elementary states and tense logic, while Davidsonian classifications deal with eventualities and event logic. There are two kinds of atemporal predicates - fact and properties. Facts are propositional arguments of second-order predicates which add a special meaning that the embedded proposition was verified. Properties are atemporal first-order (...) predicates that lack eventive interpretation and are not associated with factive frames. Davidsonian states are homogeneous durable spatiotemporal things distinct both from atemporal properties and spatiotemporal dynamic predicates. Davidsonian states are causally independent, while resultatives are causally determined as they reconstruct a preceding event that has caused the end state p. I discuss the contrast between external and internal Davidsonian states. The former lack a priority argument and can be quantified extensionally. The latter have a priority experiential argument and can only be quantified intensionally. External states can be observed, while internal states cannot. (shrink)