This paper describes an Intelligent Tutoring System for helping users with ADO.NET called ADO-Tutor. The Intelligent Tutoring System was designed and developed using (ITSB) authoring tool for building intelligent educational systems. The user learns through the intelligent tutoring system ADO.NET, the technology used by Microsoft.NET to connect to databases. The material includes lessons, examples, and questions. Through the feedback provided by the intelligent tutoring system, the user's understanding of the material is assessed, and accordingly can be guided to different difficulty (...) level of exercises and/or the lessons. The Intelligent Tutoring System was evaluated by a group of users and the results were more than satisfactory in terms of the quality of the material and the design of the system. (shrink)

This study employs machine learning to predict diabetes using a Kaggle dataset with 13 features. Our three-layer model achieves an accuracy of 98.73% and an average error of 0.01%. Feature analysis identifies Age, Gender, Polyuria, Polydipsia, Visual blurring, sudden weight loss, partial paresis, delayed healing, irritability, Muscle stiffness, Alopecia, Genital thrush, Weakness, and Obesity as influential predictors. These findings have clinical significance for early diabetes risk assessment. While our research addresses gaps in the field, further work is needed to enhance (...) model generalizability. (shrink)

The role of reciprocal causation in Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is controversial. Proponents of EES argue that reciprocal causation is a key innovation, underpinning the necessity of EES. Conversely, critics of the EES maintain that Standard Evolutionary Theory (SET) adequately encompasses the concept of reciprocal causation, challenging the need for EES. This skepticism is rooted in two primary critiques. First, the mischaracterization of causal dynamics within SET by EES advocates leads to a misrepresentation of SET. Second, the oversight of how (...) SET incorporates and acknowledges instances of reciprocal causation leads to claims about the empirical inaptness of SET. As a result, the debate has reached an impasse, with limited progress towards a constructive examination of reciprocal causation’s significance to evolutionary explanations. This paper introduces the scope argument, which examines reciprocal causation through timescales and grain of explanations. This approach revitalizes the debate in two ways. First, reframing the debate in terms of scope clarifies the role of reciprocal causation by allowing research programs to specify targets of explanation. Second, the elements of scope (timescales and grain) elucidate the epistemic advantage of reciprocal causation in the respective research programs in question. (shrink)

This paper describes an Intelligent Tutoring System for helping users with ADO NET called ADO-Tutor. The IntellTutoring System was designed and developed using (ITSB) authoring tool for building intelligent educational systems. The user learns through the intelligent tutoring system ADO NET, the technology used by Microsoft NET to connect to databases. The material includes lessons, examples, and questions. Through the feedback provided by the intelligent tutoring system, the user's understanding of the material is assessed, and accordingly can be guided to (...) different difficulty level of exercises and/or the lessons. The Intelligent Tutoring System was evaluated by a group of users and the results were more than satisfactory in terms of the quality of the material and the design of the system. (shrink)

In this essay I try to determine the extent to which it is possible to conceive robots and organisms as analogous entities. After a cursory preamble on the long history of epistemological connections between machines and organisms I focus on Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, where the analogy between modern machines and organisms is introduced most explicitly. The analysis of issues pertaining to the cybernetic interpretation of the analogy serves then as a basis for a critical assessment of its reprise in contemporary (...) robotics and AI, where the line between organisms and technologies gets even more blurred. In brief, I argue for the necessity of defining the extent to which the analogy between robots and organisms applies in order not only to harness its heuristic potential, but also to keep track of the pivotal differences that distinguish the two classes of entities. Finally, I discuss how the ordinary use of language and the peculiar status of the idea of robot obstruct awareness of the differences between robots and organisms. (shrink)

This is a sequel to my paper "Il denaro è un’opera d’arte", focusing on the metaphysics of those peculiar social objects that play an increasingly central role in the financial world—derivatives. On the analysis I offer, they appear to run afoul of Searle’s theory of social objects (or of the theory outlined in my earlier paper), and I put forward some suggestions on where to look for the necessary adjustments.

I critically examine the view that Descartes’s independence conception (IC) of substance plays a crucial role in his “separability argument” for substance dualism. I argue that IC is a poisoned chalice. I do so by considering how an IC-based separability argument fares on two different ways of thinking about principal attributes. On the one hand, if we take principal attributes to be universals, then a separability argument that deploys IC establishes a version of dualism that is unacceptably strong. On (...) the other hand, if we take principal attributes to be tropes, then IC introduces challenges which undermine the argument. This is partly because the assumption of tropes makes it possible to distinguish several versions of substance dualism, versions which differ with respect to their degree of generality. I argue that taking principal attributes to be tropes makes it challenging to establish any of these versions by way of an IC-based separability argument. I conclude the paper by suggesting a way forward for the proponent of the separability argument. (shrink)

Avicenna, in his treatise called "Al-Siyasāt al-Ahliyyah", has discussed various topics about household management, among which are discussion about family formation and discussion about wife and children. The discussions about wife and child in this treatise are not only about family management, how to deal with wife and child. However, the issues related to women's rights and children's rights are also seen in it. The two fundamental questions of this paper are whether women's rights and children's rights, which are found (...) in Avicenna's views in this treatise, are comparable to the provisions of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (first question), and if they can be compared, do they confirm or deny each other? Hence, the topics that will be examined in this paper will be in line with the answers to these two questions in a descriptive-analytical method. (shrink)

In English, in order to speak about Arthur’s attitudes, we use sentences like “Arthur believes that natural language is messy”. For sentences of this kind we have a standard theory, according to which the ‘that’-clause ‘that natural language is messy’ denotes a proposition. As Prior showed for the first time, the standard theory appears to be at odds with some linguistic data. Geach and Prior both assumed that linguistic data are to be taken as reliable guides to a correct semantic (...) account and I will start by raising some worries concerning their methodology. Because of these data, Prior and Geach suggested some non-standard accounts. I will then show that if we take linguistic data seriously, their non-standard accounts do not fare any better than the standard theory. My general conclusion will thus not only be that Prior’s and Geach’s methodology is disputable, but also that their conclusions do not seem to follow even if we grant the reliability of their methodology. (shrink)

Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (OY-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner’s dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tournaments and in “evolutionary” tournaments, where the scores in a given “generation” directly determine contribution (...) to the population in the next generation. Oyun is freely available, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, and the process of creating new prisoner’s dilemma strategies is both easy to teach and easy for students to grasp. We illustrate with two interesting examples taken from actual use of Oyun in the classroom. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze Charles Crittenden’s account of fictional objects in his Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects (1991). I argue that Crittenden’s sketchy ontology of fictional objects does not support his weak eliminativism. Going along the lines of Amie Thomasson (1999), I stress that the problem of fictional objects is a strictly ontological problem, which requires an ontological solution. A solution to the problem of fictional objects (or ficta) that accommodates “practice” (ordinary language and literary practices) is of (...) course to be praised, but not when it is foregrounded at the expense of “ontology.” I argue for Roman Ingarden as a champion of ontology and practice, whose way of dealing with ficta fares better than Crittenden’s on both the ontological and practical sides. In short, ficta should be approached as something over and above mere grammaticalia (grammatical objects) namely as “purely intentional” objects that are formally incomplete, and which readers complete by resorting to practices of language and literary criticism. (shrink)

This paper challenges Francis Hutcheson's and John Clarke of Hull's alleged demonstrations that William Wollaston's moral theory is inconsistent. It also present a form of the inconsistency objection that fares better than theirs, namely, that of Thomas Bott (1688-1754). Ultimately, the paper shows that Wollaston's moral standard is not what some have thought it to be; that consequently, his philosophy withstands the best-known efforts to expose it as inconsistent; and further, that one of the least-known British moralists is more (...) important than hitherto thought, in that he uncovers the inconsistency Clarke and Hutcheson try in vain to elicit. (shrink)

Thanks to mounting discussion about projected technologies’ possibly altering the species mentally and physically, philosophical investigation of what human beings are proceeds robustly. Many thinkers contend that whatever we are has little to do with how we should behave. Yet, tampering with what the human being is may tread upon human rights to be whatever one is. Rights given in widely recognized documents such as the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples assume what humans are and need depends (...) upon ontological assumptions about human existence. Godman turns to human ontology—just what kind of beings humans are (from an angle distinct from the other two books) and how these play into rights. She is concerned with how well the social sciences accord with what we are. Gunkel homes in on a more specific moral topic than Godman's general concern with identity’s role in rights: automata moral status and rights. He enjoins us to inquire into what human rights are before we take on the new technologies’ challenge to it. Schneider’s Artificial You, while not explicitly about rights, poses a rights quandary. Certain individuals with reputable resources and practical backing explicitly seek to evolve the species as they see fit. The urgency among these works concerns how we need a sharper idea of what we are, how we should act and be treated, and how our rights fare among potential human improvements. (shrink)

Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds has been subject to numerous criticisms, both from his contemporaries and ours. In this paper I investigate a cluster of such criticisms based on the existence, abundance or character of worldly evil. As several Leibniz-inspired versions of optimism have been advanced in recent years, the aim of my investigation is to assess not just how Leibniz’s brand of optimism fares against these criticisms, but also whether optimism as a (...) philosophy has the resources to meet these challenges. I show that none of the criticisms considered has sufficient force to pose a threat to Leibniz’s version of optimism or to one modelled on it. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the conflict between thought and speech that is inherent in lying. This is the conflict of saying what you think is false. The chapter shows how stubbornly saying what you think is false resists analysis. In traditional analyses of lying, saying what you think is false is analyzed in terms of saying something and believing that it is false. But standard cases of unconscious or divided belief challenge these analyses. Classic puzzles about belief from Gottlob Frege and (...) Saul Kripke show that suggested amendments involving assent instead of belief do not fare better. I argue that attempts to save these analyses by appeal to guises or Fregean modes of presentation will also run into trouble. I then consider alternative approaches to untruthfulness that focus on (a) expectations for one’s act of saying/asserting and (b) the intentions involved in one’s act of saying/asserting. Here I introduce two new kinds of case, which I call “truth serum” and “liar serum” cases. Consideration of these cases reveals structural problems with intention- and expectation-based approaches as well. Taken together, the string of cases presented suggests that saying what you think is false, or being untruthful, is no less difficult and interesting a subject for analysis than lying itself. Tackling the question of what it is to say what you think is false illuminates ways in which the study of lying is intertwined with fundamental issues in the nature of intentional action. (shrink)

We examine how Frege’s contrast between identity judgments of the forms “a=a” vs. “a=b” would fare in the special case where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are complex mental representations, and ‘a’ stands for an introspected ‘I’-thought. We first argue that the Fregean treatment of I-thoughts entails that they are what we call “one-shot thoughts”: they can only be thought once. This has the surprising consequence that no instance of the “a=a” form of judgment in this specific case comes out true, let (...) alone a priori true. This further reinforces Glezakos’s objections against the set-up of Frege’s puzzle, while also raising what we think is an acute problem for Fregeans, insofar as I-thought (and indexical thinking more generally), understood in their way, turns out to be incompatible with some basic features of rationality. (shrink)

The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes to solve the measurement problem and reconcile completeness and locality of quantum mechanics by postulating relativity to the observer for events and facts, instead of an absolute “view from nowhere”. The aim of this paper is to clarify this interpretation, and in particular, one of its central claims concerning the possibility for an observer to have knowledge about other observer’s events. I consider three possible readings of this claim, and develop the most promising (...) one, relativism, to show how it fares when confronted with the traditional interpretative problems of quantum mechanics. Although it provides answers to some problems, I claim that there is currently no adapted locality criterion to evaluate whether the resulting interpretation is local or not. (shrink)

Here I respond to Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer’s “The Evil of Death: A Reply to Yi.” They developed an influential strategy in defense of the deprivation account of death’s badness against the Lucretian symmetry problem. The core of their argument consists in the claim that it is rational for us to welcome future intrinsic goods while being indifferent to past intrinsic goods. Previously, I argued that their approach is compatible with the evil of late birth insofar as an (...) earlier birth would have generated more goods in the future. In reply, Brueckner and Fischer argue that my critique fails to appreciate an important aspect of their thought experiment, which aims only to show that the deprivation of past goods per se is not bad for us. Thus, purportedly, my critique poses no threat to their view. Here I argue that since the deprivation account explains the evil of death with recourse to how one’s life would have fared had one lived longer, it ought to respond to the symmetry problem with reference to how one’s life would have fared had one been born earlier. However, it is not generally true that the life one would have had with an earlier birth is not preferable to one’s actual life, because in many cases such a life would contain more future goods. (shrink)

How does Quine fare in the first decades of the twenty-first century? In this paper I examine a cluster of Quinean theses that, I believe, are especially fruitful in meeting some of the current challenges of epistemology and ontology. These theses offer an alternative to the traditional bifurcations of truth and knowledge into factual and conceptual-pragmatic-conventional, the traditional conception of a foundation for knowledge, and traditional realism. To make the most of Quine’s ideas, however, we have to take an active (...) stance: accept some of his ideas and reject others, sort different versions of the relevant ideas, sharpen or revise some of the ideas, connect them with new, non-Quinean ideas, and so on. As a result the paper pits Quine against Quine, in an attempt to identify those Quinean ideas that have a lasting value and sketch potential developments. (shrink)

The philosophical study of well-being concerns what makes lives good for their subjects. It is now standard among philosophers to distinguish between two kinds of well-being: - lifetime well-being, i.e., how good a person's life was for him or her considered as a whole, and - temporal well-being, i.e., how well off someone was, or how they fared, at a particular moment in time or over a period of time longer than a moment but shorter than a whole life, say, (...) a day, month, year, or chapter of a life. Many theories have been offered of each of these kinds of well-being. A common view is that lifetime well-being is in some way constructed out of temporal well-being. This book argues that much of this literature is premised on a mistake. Lifetime well-being cannot be constructed out of temporal well-being, because there is no such thing as temporal well-being. The only genuine kind of well-being is lifetime well-being. The Passing of Temporal Well-Being will prove essential reading for professional philosophers, especially in moral and political philosophy. It will also be of interest to welfare economists and policy-makers who appeal to well-being. (shrink)

Philosophers generally agree that gratitude, the called-for response to benevolence, includes positive feelings. In this paper, I argue against this view. The grateful beneficiary will have certain feelings, but in some contexts, those feelings will be profoundly negative. Philosophers overlook this fact because they tend to consider only cases of gratitude in which the benefactor’s sacrifice is minimal, and in which the benefactor fares well after performing an act of benevolence. When we consider cases in which a benefactor suffers (...) severely, we see the feelings associated with gratitude can be negative, and even quite painful. I conclude with a discussion of the implications negative feelings of gratitude have for the normative question of when gratitude is owed, and for the descriptive claim in positive psychology that gratitude enhances wellbeing. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, feminist philosophy has become recognised as a philosophical sub-discipline in its own right. Among the ‘core’ areas of philosophy, metaphysics has nonetheless until relatively recently remained largely dismissive of it. Metaphysics typically investigates the basic structure of reality and its nature. It examines reality's putative building blocks and inherent structure supposedly ‘out there’ with the view to uncovering and elucidating that structure. For this task, feminist insights appear simply irrelevant. Moreover, the value-neutrality of metaphysics seems (...) prima facie incompatible with feminism's explicitly normative stance in that feminist philosophy involves advocacy: speaking on behalf of some group on political grounds. The prospects of feminist metaphysics thus look grim. Nonetheless, feminist philosophers have in recent years increasingly taken up explicitly metaphysical investigations. The basic ideas behind such investigations can be summed up as follows: feminist metaphysics is about negotiating the natural and going beyond the fundamental. In so doing, feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics. Further, feminist philosophers typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy. With this in mind, the article considers the following questions: when thinking about philosophical methodology, how does feminist metaphysics fare relative to ‘mainstream’ metaphysics? More specifically, is feminism's political advocacy inconsistent with apparent objectivity that some prominent contemporary versions of metaphysics are committed to? (shrink)

One guide to an argument's significance is the number and variety of refutations it attracts. By this measure, the Dutch book argument has considerable importance.2 Of course this measure alone is not a sure guide to locating arguments deserving of our attention—if a decisive refutation has really been given, we are better off pursuing other topics. But the presence of many and varied counterarguments at least suggests that either the refutations are controversial, or that their target admits of more than (...) one interpretation, or both. The main point of this paper is to focus on a way of understanding the Dutch Book argument (DBA) that avoids many of the well-known criticisms, and to consider how it fares against an important criticism that still remains: the objection that the DBA presupposes value-independence of bets. (shrink)

Presented at Philosophy Across Disciplines Conference 2021, Newcastle University. -/- As noted by philosopher Robert Pasnau, “our standard view of sound is incoherent” at best. A quick perusal of how we discuss and represent sound in our day-to-day language readily highlights a number of inconsistencies. Sound might be described roughly as emanating from the location of its material source (the ‘crack of the snare drum over there’ distal theory), as a disruption somewhere in the space in-between the sounding object and (...) the listener (the ‘longitudinal compression waves in the air’ medial theory), located with the hearer (the ‘inner sensations’ proximal theory), or perhaps as devoid of spatial characteristics at all (aspatial theory). Beyond these topographic ruminations on the location of sounds, even deeper disagreements arise around just what sorts of things sounds are. A broad array of theories treat sounds as events, as object-like particulars that travel through space, as properties of their sounding objects, etc.—with many subtle ontological variations springing up along the way. The philosophical plot further thickens as we expand from defining the ontology and spatial position of simple primary sounds through to the phenomenon of echoes, with certain theories arguably faring better than others. We’ll focus here on Casey O’Callaghan’s formulation of sounds as disturbance events which bind primary sounds and their echoes together as one. In short, the claim that echoes are identical to their associated primary sound and are not distinct sounds in their own right. Described as the ‘Primary Sound Account of Echoes’ (‘PSAE’) in Gregory Fowler’s “Against the Primary Sound Account of Echoes,” the intricacies of this particular aspect of O’Callaghan’s theory of a primary sound’s connection to its echo bears greatly upon the workability of distal theories of sound in general. What I seek to achieve in this presentation is to illustrate how O’Callaghan’s PSAE fails when subjected to increased scrutiny across a broader range of echo scenarios, which in turn presents a significant issue for proponents of distal theories of sound. (shrink)

The notion of “representation” is central to Kant’s transcendental philosophy. But naturalism and mind-body reductionism tend to reduce talk of (first-person) representation to stories of (third-person) causality and evolution. How does Kant fare in this context?

This paper investigates propositional hyperintensionality in counterfactuals. It starts with a scenario describing two children playing on a seesaw and studies the truth-value predictions for counterfactuals by four different semantic theories. The theories in question are Kit Fine’s truthmaker semantics, Luis Alonso-Ovalle’s alternative semantics, inquisitive semantics and Paolo Santorio’s syntactic truthmaker semantics. These predictions suggest that the theories that distinguish more of a given set of intensionally equivalent sentences (Fine and Alonso-Ovalle’s) fare better than those that do not (inquisitive semantics (...) and Santorio’s). Then we investigate how inquisitive semantics and Santorio can respond to these results. They can respond to them by helping themselves to considerations from Hurford disjunctions, disjunctions whose disjuncts stand in an entailment relation to one another. I argue that considerations from Hurford disjunctions are ad hoc modifications merely to predict the expected results. I conclude that the scenarios suggest a need for more fine-grained theories of sentential meaning in general. (shrink)

In Knowledge and its Limits (KAIL), Timothy Williamson argues for the view that “only knowledge warrants assertion” (2000, 243). Call this the knowledge norm of assertion. Several philosophers including DeRose, Hawthorne, and Stanley, agree that if the knowledge norm is true, then knowledge itself depends on stakes, since warranted assertability seems to change with what is at stake if the proposition in question is true (1992; 2003; 2005). This brings us to the question: stakes for whom? DeRose maintains that knowledge (...) depends on the stakes for the speaker of the knowledge attribution, arguing for Epistemic Contextualism (2002, 187). However, Hawthorne and Stanley disagree, contending that it is the stakes for the subject of the knowledge attribution which is relevant, arguing for Subject Sensitive Invariantism (2003, 157; 2005, 85). While the Contextualist and the Invariantist are armed with responses against each other’s view, I suspect that Russell’s and Doris’ indifference cases might break the impasse in favor of the Contextualist (2008, 432). This paper will thus attempt to show that the knowledge norm of assertion leads us to Contextualism rather than Subject Sensitive Invariantism, by comparing how Contextualism and Subject Sensitive Invariantism fare against Russell’s and Doris’ Indifference Cases. (shrink)

I review Shlomi Segall's book 'Why Inequality Matters'. I argue that it conclusively establishes that alongside egalitarians, prioritarians and sufficientarians must sometimes regard a prospect as better (in at least one respect) when it is not better (in terms of well-being) for anyone. Sufficientarians and prioritarians must therefore relinquish a treasured anti-egalitarian argument. It also makes a powerful case that among these three views, egalitarians are in the best position to explain such departures from what is in each person’s prudential (...) interest. For egalitarians can point to the natural idea that it is unfair when, due to pure chance, some fare much better than others. By contrast, it remains unclear what value, if any, sufficientarians or prioritarians can appeal to in order to justify their departures from what best promotes people’s well-being. (shrink)

Mengzi 孟子 6A2 contains the famous water analogy for the innate goodness of human nature. Some evaluate Mengzi’s reasoning as strong and sophisticated; others, as weak or sophistical. I urge for more nuance in our evaluation. Mengzi’s reasoning fares poorly when judged by contemporary standards of analogical strength. However, if we evaluate the analogy as an instance of correlative thinking within a yin-yang 陰陽 cosmology, his reasoning fares well. That cosmology provides good reason to assert that water tends (...) to flow downward, not because of available empirical evidence, but because water correlates to yin and yin correlates to naturally downward motion. Substantiating these contentions also gives occasion to better understand the nature of correlative reasoning in classical Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

Vice epistemology, as Quassim Cassam understands it, is the study of the nature, identity, and significance of the epistemic vices. But what makes an intellectual vice a vice? Cassam calls his own view “Obstructivism” – intellectual vices are those traits, thinking styles, or attitudes that systematically obstruct the acquisition, retention, and transmission of knowledge. -/- I shall argue that Cassam’s account is an improvement upon virtue-reliabilism, and that it fares better against what I call Montmarquet’s objection than its immediate (...) rivals. Nevertheless, I contend that it does not go far enough — Montmarquet’s objection stands. -/- I conclude that either the objection needs to be answered in some other way, or else proponents of Obstructivism need to explain why their account of the nature of the intellectual vices does not have the counterintuitive consequences it appears to have. Alternatively, another account of the nature of the intellectual vices needs to be sought. (shrink)

Wars are large-scale conflicts between organized groups of belligerents, which involve suffering, devastation, and brutality unlike almost anything else in human experience. Whatever one’s other beliefs about morality, all should agree that the horrors of war are all but unconscionable, and that warfare can be justified only if we have some compel- ling account of what is worth fighting for, which can justify contributing, as individu- als and as groups, to this calamitous endeavour. Although this question should obviously be central (...) to both philosophical and politi- cal discussion about war, it is at the forefront of neither. In recent years, philosophical discussion of warfare has bloomed, but the debate has focused on whom we may kill, on the assumption that our aims are justified.1 Political debate, meanwhile, is more concerned with matters of prudence, international law, and public justification, than with reassessing what is worth fighting for. For wars of intervention to halt or prevent massive humanitarian crises, this gap is not so troubling. When warfare is the only means to prevent the mass killing or enslavement of the innocent, the purposes of military force are clear enough (though undoubtedly many other problems remain). The problem is more pressing, how- ever, for the justification of national defence.3 Although common-sense morality and international law view national defence as the paradigm case of justified warfare, grounding this consensus is surprisingly difficult.4 We typically believe that any state is justified in using lethal force to protect its territory against any form of uninvited military incursion by any other state. And yet we lack a good argument to explain why this should be so. In this chapter, I explain why one familiar and otherwise plausible approach to the justification of killing in war cannot adequately ground common-sense views of permissible national defence.5 Reductionists believe that justified warfare reduces to an aggregation of acts that are justified under ordinary principles of interpersonal morality.6 The standard form of reductionism focuses on the principles governing killing in ordinary life, specifically those that justify intentional killing in self- and other-defence, and unintended but foreseen (for short, collateral) killing as a lesser evil. Justified warfare, on this view, is no more than the coextension of multiple acts justified under these two principles. Reductionism is the default philosophical approach to thinking through the ethics of killing in war. It makes perfect sense to ask what principles govern permissible kill- ing in general, before applying them to the particular context of war. If it cannot deliver a plausible set of conclusions about when national defence is permitted, then we must either revise our beliefs about which conclusions count as plausible, or else face the significant challenge of developing a different theoretical model for justifying war- fare—an exceptionalist model, which views war as an exception to the regular moral landscape, to which principles apply which apply to nothing else but war.7 We must show, in other words, that there is something worth fighting for in wars of national defence, which is not engaged when we use force in any other context. The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2.2 sets out the argument against reduc- tionism.8 Section 2.3 considers and rebuts one common response to the argument, which has often been thought sufficient grounds to disregard its conclusion. Section 2.4 then asks whether a modified reductionism would survive unscathed by the argu- ment. Finally, section 2.5 sets out some desiderata on a plausible exceptionalist alterna- tive. Section 2.6 concludes. (shrink)

The project of this paper is to deliver a semantics for a broad subset of bare plural generics about racial kinds, a class which I will dub 'Type C generics.' Examples include 'Blacks are criminal' and 'Muslims are terrorists.' Type C generics have two interesting features. First, they link racial kinds with ​ socially perspectival predicates ​ (SPPs). SPPs lead interpreters to treat the relationship between kinds and predicates in generic constructions as nomic or non-accidental. Moreover, in computing their content, (...) interpreters must make implicit reference to socially privileged​ ​ perspectives which are treated as authoritative about whether a given object fits into the extension of the predicate. Such deference grants these authorities influence over both the conventional meaning of these terms and over the nature of the ​ objects ​ in the social ontology that these terms purport to describe, much the way a baseball umpire is authoritative over the meaning and metaphysics of 'strike'/​ strike ​. Second, terms like 'criminal' and 'terrorist' receive default ​ racialized ​ interpretations in which these terms conventionally token racial or ethnic identities. I show that neither of these features can be explained by Sarah-Jane Leslie's influential 'weak semantics' for generics, and show how my own 'socially perspectival semantics' fares better on both counts. Finally, I give an analysis of 'Blacks are criminal' which explores the semantic mechanisms that underlie default racialized interpretations. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating how social networking platforms fare as epistemic environments for human users. I begin by proposing a situated concept of epistemic agency as fundamental for evaluating epistemic environments. Next, I show that algorithmic personalisation of information makes social networking platforms problematic for users’ epistemic agency because these platforms do not allow users to adapt their behaviour sufficiently. Using the tracing principle inspired by the ethics of self-driving cars, I operationalise it here and identify (...) three requirements that automated epistemic environments need to fulfil: (a) the users need to be afforded a range of skilled actions; (b) users need to be sensitive to the possibility to use their skills; (c) the habits built when adapting to the platform should not undermine the user’s pre-existing skills. I then argue that these requirements are almost impossible to fulfil all at the same time on current SN platforms; yet nevertheless, we need to pay attention to these whenever we evaluate an epistemic environment with automatic features. Finally, as an illustration, I show how Twitter, a popular social networking platform, will fare regarding these requirements. (shrink)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) is often thought of as a “philosopher’s philosopher,” with a specialist rather than generalist appeal. One reason for Schelling’s lack of popularity is that he is something of a problem case for traditional narratives about the history of philosophy. Although he is often slotted in as a stepping stone on the intellectual journey from Kant to Hegel, any attention to his ideas will show that he does not fit this role very well. His later (...) philosophy suggests a materialism and empiricism that puts him outside of idealism proper; his connection with the romantic movement suggests an aestheticism that challenges traditional philosophy as such; and his mysticism allies him with medieval, pre-critical philosophies considered antiquated by the 19th century. And if Schelling was not entirely at home with his contemporaries, he seems, on the face of it, to have fared little better with his future: there has been no Schelling school, he has had no followers. No historical trajectory announces Schelling as its point of departure. -/- And yet Schelling’s influence has been an extraordinary one. He has inspired physicists, physicians, theologians, historians and poets. A wildly diverse set of philosophers have claimed that their ideas have resonance with his. Perhaps the question of Schelling’s influence can be approached by looking at what Kant says about works of genius -- that they should give rise to inspiration, not imitation. Paradoxically, to imitate genius is not to produce an imitation but a new creative work. Whether or not Schelling should be strictly viewed as a genius, Kant’s notion suggests a sense in which Schelling should be understood as a “philosopher’s philosopher”; he inspired creativity, not repetition. In this perspective, the lack of a “Schelling school” is a sign of strength; Schelling is continually being rediscovered, and his works have retained a fresh and untimely character. If Schelling does not have any obvious historical successors, it is because his influence cannot be charted by the usual methods. New philosophical tools are needed in order to understand his philosophical significance, his impact on contemporary thought and relevance for contemporary concerns. (shrink)

What is artistic style? In the literature one answer to this question has proved influential: the view that artistic style is the expression of personality. In what follows we elaborate upon and evaluatively compare the two most plausible versions of this view with a new proposal—that style is the expression of the artist’s ideals for her art. We proceed by comparing the views’ answers to certain questions we think a theory of individual artistic style should address: Are there limits on (...) what range of features can figure in a style? Can flaws be stylistic? Are there limits on the range of art forms across which a given style can be exhibited? To what extent is a style a kind of unity, and why? What makes style an artistic achievement? Why do we care about style? By considering the different views' answers to these questions we argue that our proposal is a workable theory of individual style and suggest that it fares better on the whole than both versions of the influential and widely accepted view. (shrink)

There are two intuitions about time. The first is that there's something special about the present that objectively differentiates it from the past and the future. Call this intuition Specialness. The second is that the time at which we happen to live is just one among many other times, all of which are ‘on a par’ when it comes to their forming part of reality. Call this other intuition Egalitarianism. Tradition has it that the so-called ‘A-theories of time’ fare well (...) at addressing the first intuition, but rather badly when it comes to the second. The goal of this article is to offer advice to A-theorists about how to reconcile their view with Egalitarianism. (shrink)

Is knowledge consistent with literally any credence in the relevant proposition, including credence 0? Of course not. But is credence 0 the only credence in p that entails that you don’t know that p? Knowledge entails belief (most epistemologists think), and it’s impossible to believe that p while having credence 0 in p. Is it true that, for every value of ‘x,’ if it’s impossible to know that p while having credence x in p, this is simply because it’s impossible (...) to believe that p while having credence x in p? If so, is it possible to believe that p while having (say) credence 0.4 in p? These questions aren’t standard epistemological fare, at least in part because many epistemologists think their answers are obvious, but they have unanticipated consequences for epistemology. Let ‘improbabilism’ name the thesis that it’s possible to know that p while having a credence in p below 0.5. Improbabilism will strike many epistemologists as absurd, but careful reflection on these questions reveals that, if improbabilism is false, then all of the most plausible theories of knowledge are also false. Or so I argue in this paper. Since improbabilism is widely rejected by epistemologists (at least implicitly), this paper reveals a tension between all of the most plausible theories of knowledge and a widespread assumption in epistemology. (shrink)

Recent studies have shown that recidivism scoring algorithms like COMPAS have significant racial bias: Black defendants are roughly twice as likely as white defendants to be mistakenly classified as medium- or high-risk. This has led some to call for abolishing COMPAS. But many others have argued that algorithms should instead be given access to a defendant's race, which, perhaps counterintuitively, is likely to improve outcomes. This approach can involve either establishing race-sensitive risk thresholds, or distinct racial ‘tracks’. Is there a (...) moral difference between these two approaches? We first consider Deborah Hellman's view that the use of distinct racial tracks (but not distinct thresholds) does not constitute disparate treatment since the effects on individuals are indirect and does not rely on a racial generalization. We argue that this is mistaken: the use of different racial tracks seems both to have direct effects on and to rely on a racial generalization. We then offer an alternative understanding of the distinction between these two approaches—namely, that the use of different cut points is to the counterfactual comparative disadvantage, ex ante, of all white defendants, while the use of different racial tracks can in principle be to the advantage of all groups, though some defendants in both groups will fare worse. Does this mean that the use of cut points is impermissible? Ultimately, we argue, while there are reasons to be skeptical of the use of distinct cut points, it is an open question whether these reasons suffice to make a difference to their moral permissibility. (shrink)

In recent years, an active research program has emerged that aims to develop a Humean best-system account (BSA) of laws of nature that improves on Lewis’s canonical articulation of the view. Its guiding idea is that the laws are cognitive tools tailored to the specific needs and limitations of creatures like us. While current versions of this “pragmatic Humean” research program fare much better than Lewis’s account along many dimensions, I will argue that they have trouble making sense of certain (...) key features of the practice of fundamental physics. Indeed, these features seem to go against the very idea that laws are useful for agents like us. In my view, Humeans can address these issues by paying more attention to the explanatory role of laws. Following this idea, I will propose an account on which what makes a systematization the best is a kind of explanatory power, understood along the lines of the unificationist theory of explanation. The resulting view, I will argue, can make sense of those features of laws that other pragmatic accounts of laws have trouble explaining. (shrink)

The most prominent theories of rights, the Will Theory and the Interest Theory, notoriously fail to accommodate all and only rights-attributions that make sense to ordinary speakers. The Kind-Desire Theory, Leif Wenar’s recent contribution to the field, appears to fare better in this respect than any of its predecessors. The theory states that we attribute a right to an individual if she has a kind-based desire that a certain enforceable duty be fulfilled. A kind-based desire is a reason to want (...) something which one has simply in virtue of being a member of a certain kind. Rowan Cruft objects that this theory creates a puzzle about the relation between rights and respect. In particular, if rights are not grounded in aspects of the particular individuals whose rights they are, how can we sustain the intuitive notion that to violate a right is to disrespect the right-holder? I present a contractualist account of respect which reconciles the Kind-Desire Theory with the intuition that rights-violations are disrespectful. On this account, respect for a person is a matter of acknowledging her legitimate authority to make demands on the will and conduct of others. And I argue that kind-based desires authorize a person to make demands even if they do not correspond to that person’s well-being or other non-relational features. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how a solution to Lewis’ problem of temporary intrinsics is also a response to McTaggart’s argument that the A-series is incoherent. There are three strategies Lewis considers for solving the problem of temporary intrinsics: perdurantism, presentism, and property-indexing. William Lane Craig (Analysis 58(2):122–127, 1998) has examined how the three strategies fare with respect to McTaggart’s argument. The only viable solution Lewis considers to the problem of temporary intrinsics that also succeeds against McTaggart, Craig claims, is (...) presentism. This gives us prima facie reason to be presentists. But there is a strategy Craig does not consider-indexing, or relativizing, the copula. In this paper, I show that to the degree that indexing the copula solves the problem of temporary intrinsics, it also shows the invalidity of McTaggart’s argument. The upshot: the copula-indexer needn’t affirm the unreality of time, nor need she embrace presentism. (shrink)

How may nations protect their interests in space if its fragility makes military operations there self-defeating? This essay claims nations are in Prisoners Dilemmas on the matter, and applies David Gauthier’s theories about how it is rational to behave morally—cooperatively—in such dilemmas. Currently space-faring nations should i) enter into co-operative space sharing arrangements with other rational nations, ii) exclude—militarily, but with only terrestrial force—nations irrational or existentially opposed to other nations being in space, and iii) incentivize all nations into co-operation (...) by redistributing some space-generated wealth to nations that might otherwise ruin space. Further, since all nations are rationally incentivized to ever greater dependence on space, and since each, by threatening space, can hold hostage its benefits to all, each can demand resolution of terrestrial discontents with other nations. So each has a rational interest in treating others morally both in space and on terrestrial issues. (shrink)

Recently several prominent biologists and philosophers, including Feinberg and Mallatt, and Godfrey-Smith, have proposed evolutionary accounts of consciousness. Despite disagreements regarding the specifics, they all focused on the “primitive” form of consciousness and argued that its origin is much more ancient than previously believed. In this study, we examine these accounts based on their methodological grounds. Specifically, we examine whether one methodological criticism leveled against evolutionary psychology on the completeness of its explanations can be applied to Feinberg and Mallatt’s adaptation (...) explanations. We conclude that their explanations fall short of being complete, but fare better than those advanced by evolutionary psychologists. (shrink)

Brentano is often considered the originator of the fitting-attitudes analysis of value, on which to be valuable is to be that which it’s fitting to value. But there has been comparatively little attention paid to Brentano’s argument for this analysis. That argument advances the stronger claim that fittingness is part of the analysis of normativity. Since the argument rests on an analogy between truth and fittingness, its impact may seem limited by the idiosyncratic features of Brentano’s later notion of truth. (...) I argue, however, that the Brentanian argument is defensible even if fittingness is analogized to a more typical realist account of truth. The result is what I call the worldly Brentanian account of normativity. I defend this account as a form of naturalistic realism. I then show how the account can fare better than prominent alternatives against two kinds of error-theoretic arguments. (shrink)

Rawlsian justice as fairness is neither fundamentally luck egalitarian nor relational egalitarian. Rather, the most fundamental idea is that of society as a fair system of cooperation. Collective pensions provide a case study which illustrates the fruitfulness of conceiving justice in these latter terms. Those who have recently reached the age of majority do not now know how long they will live in retirement or how well any investments they try to save up for their retirement would fare. From the (...) perspective of the beginning of their working lives, it is therefore rational for each to enter into an agreement with others, who also do not yet know their fates, that, if one turns out to be among the unfortunate whose private pension pots would not have yielded enough for one’s retirement, one will receive much more in retirement, whereas those whose pension pots would have overflowed their retirements will receive somewhat less. These terms are to each person’s expected advantage, which is made possible by a fair sharing of the fruits of social cooperation which arise through the efficiencies reaped by the pooling of the risk of outliving what one could save for one’s retirement on one’s own. It is rational for each to agree to share one another’s fates by pooling risks across both space and time, on fair terms of social cooperation for mutual advantage. Even when collective pensions arise from, and are proportional to, a baseline of unequal income, they can be defended on grounds of reciprocity involving regard for one another as equals. (shrink)

As in many other fields of practical ethics, virtue ethics is increasingly of interest within nursing ethics. Nevertheless, the virtue ethics literature in nursing ethics remains relatively small and underdeveloped. This article aims to categorize which broad theoretical approaches to virtue have been taken, to undertake some initial comparative assessment of their relative merits given the peculiar ethical dilemmas facing nurse practitioners, and to highlight the prob- lem areas for virtue ethics in the nursing context. We find the most common (...) approaches fall into care approaches grounded in sentimentalist or feminist ethics, eudaimonist approaches grounded in neo-Aristotelianism, and those grounded in MacIntyre’s practice theory. Our initial assessment is that the eudaimonist approach fares best in terms of merit and relative to criticisms of virtue ethics. But an outstanding issue concerns the motivational psychology of virtuous nursing and whether virtue ethical accounts of right action are self-effacing, i.e. justify an act on grounds that cannot function as the agent’s reason for doing it if she is to act well. One of us, Newham, believes that a virtue consequentialist approach is the best response to these issues. Some form of pluralistic theory, such as Christine Swanton’s, may be needed to explain the many competing values and goods involved in ethical nursing. (shrink)

Julius Kovesi was a moral philosopher whose work rested on a theory of concepts and concept-formation, which he outlined in his 1967 book Moral Notions. But his contribution goes further than this. In sketching a theory of concepts and concept-formation, he was entering the philosophy of language. To make his account of moral concepts credible, he needs a broader story about how moral concepts compare with other sorts of concepts. Yet philosophy of language, once dominated by Wittgenstein and Austin, came (...) rather suddenly in the 1960s to be dominated by metaphysicians and philosophers of science trying to give an account of natural science concepts. How then does Kovesi’s theory of concepts fare when viewed in the light of this shift of interests? Does he have a theory of natural world concepts that can stand scrutiny? I will try to show that he does. To show this, I will focus on the concept of water. However, before doing this we need an outline of Kovesi’s account of what he called ‘notions formed about the inanimate world’. (shrink)

This article asks how the costs and benefits of operating a monetary union should be distributed amongst its more and less competitive members, taking as an example the operation of the European Monetary Union (EMU or Eurozone). Drawing on existing domestic and transnational justice debates, I resist both a purely procedural and a purely distributive view. The former assumes treaties against a fair background can make any distribution fair and disregards how individual citizens are likely to fare depending on how (...) a monetary union is organized. The latter requires justice amongst Eurozone co-citizens, and it neglects the value of member state’s choices and attitudes towards risk. Instead, I defend a view of the EMU as an association of free self-determining states. I also argue that a variety of factors are relevant to this problem, including the need to protect less competitive states from ‘domination’, or inappropriate forms of control by their co-members, and to protect citizens from various forms of deprivation even if their own governments are willing to expose them to the relevant risks. This article asks how the costs and benefits of operating a monetary union should be distributed amongst its more and less competitive members, taking as an example the operation of the European Monetary Union (EMU or Eurozone). Drawing on existing domestic and transnational justice debates, I resist both a purely procedural and a purely distributive view. The former assumes treaties against a fair background can make any distribution fair and disregards how individual citizens are likely to fare depending on how a monetary union is organized. The latter requires justice amongst Eurozone co-citizens, and it neglects the value of member state’s choices and attitudes towards risk. Instead, I defend a view of the EMU as an association of free self-determining states. I also argue that a variety of factors are relevant to this problem, including the need to protect less competitive states from ‘domination’, or inappropriate forms of control by their co-members, and to protect citizens from various forms of deprivation even if their own governments are willing to expose them to the relevant risks. (shrink)