Beauty has captured human interest since before Plato, but how, why, and to whom does beauty matter in today's world? Whose standard of beauty motivates African Americans to straighten their hair? What inspires beauty queens to measure up as flawless objects for the male gaze? Why does a French performance artist use cosmetic surgery to remake her face into a composite of the master painters' version of beauty? How does beauty culture perceive the disabled body? Is the constant effort to (...) remain young and thin, often at considerable economic and emotional expense, ethically justifiable? Provocative essays by an international group of scholars discuss beauty in aesthetics, the arts, the tools of fashion, the materials of decoration, and the big business of beautification—beauty matters—to reveal the ways gender, race, and sexual orientation have informed the concept of beauty and driven us to become more beautiful. Here, Kant rubs shoulders with Calvin Klein. Beauty Matters draws from visual art, dance, cultural history, and literary and feminist theory to explore the values and politics of beauty. Various philosophical perspectives on ethics and aesthetics emerge from this penetrating book to determine and reveal that beauty is never disinterested. Foreward by Eleanor Heartney; "Introduction" by Peg Brand [Weiser] included here. Authors include Marcia M. Eaton, Noel Carroll, Paul C. Taylor, Arthur C. Danto, Kathleen M. Higgins, Susan Bordo, Dawn Perlmutter, Eva Kit Wah Man, Anita Silvers, Hilary Robinson, Kaori Chino, Sally Banes, and Peg Brand's essay "Bound to Beauty: An Interview with Orlan." (available on PhilPapers). (shrink)

Groups behave in a variety of ways. To show that this behavior amounts to action, it would be best to fit it into a general account of action. However, nearly every account from the philosophy of action requires the agent to have mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Unfortunately, theorists are divided over whether groups can instantiate these states—typically depending on whether or not they are willing to accept functionalism about the mind. But we can avoid this debate. (...) I show how a more general view of action captures what is central to action without mentioning mental states, and I argue that a group’s members can fulfill the role in group action that mental states play in our actions. Group behavior is explicable in terms of reasons, regardless of whether the group itself cognizes those reasons. After discussing the kind of reasons at issue and arguing that groups can act in light of them without minds, I assess how this account bears on the question of group responsibility. (shrink)

This article is a critical survey of the debate over the value of the social discount rate, with a particular focus on climate change. The ma- jority of the material surveyed is from the economics rather than from the philosophy literature, but the emphasis of the survey itself is on founda- tions in ethical and other normative theory rather than highly technical details. I begin by locating the standard approach to discounting within the overall landscape of ethical theory, and explaining (...) the assumptions and simplifications that are needed in order to arrive at the model that is standard in the discounting literature. The article then covers the general theory of the Ramsey equation and its relationship to observed interest rates, arguments for and against a positive rate of pure time preference, the consumption elasticity of utility, and the effect of various sorts of uncertainty on the discount rate. Finally, it turns specifically to the ap- plication of this debate to the case of climate change, focussing on the recent controversy over the low discount rate used in the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change. (shrink)

Emergence is typically discussed in the context of mental properties or the properties of the natural sciences, and accounts of emergence within these contexts tend to look a certain way. The emergent property is taken to emerge instantaneously out of, or to be proximately caused by, complex interaction of colocated entities. Here, however, I focus on the properties instantiated by the elements of certain systems discussed in social ontology, such as being a five-dollar bill or a pawn-movement, and I suggest (...) that these properties emerge in a distinctive way. They emerge in part because of a system that is far beyond and typically before the object that instantiates them. I characterize how emergence occurs in these cases, juxtaposing it with how emergence is typically discussed. I then consider whether their emergence is best framed as weak or strong as these notions are characterized in the literature, and I reveal what debates are central to answering this question. Though I will not resolve these debates, I do show a collection of views that would vindicate these properties as strongly emergent and downwardly causing. (shrink)

This chapter makes the case for strong longtermism: the claim that, in many situations, impact on the long-run future is the most important feature of our actions. Our case begins with the observation that an astronomical number of people could exist in the aeons to come. Even on conservative estimates, the expected future population is enormous. We then add a moral claim: all the consequences of our actions matter. In particular, the moral importance of what happens does not depend on (...) when it happens. That pushes us toward strong longtermism. We then address a few potential concerns, the first of which is that it is impossible to have any sufficiently predictable influence on the course of the long-run future. We argue that this is not true. Some actions can reasonably be expected to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. These include reducing the risk of human extinction, preventing climate change, guiding the development of artificial intelligence, and investing funds for later use. We end by arguing that these actions are more than just extremely effective ways to do good. Since the benefits of longtermist efforts are large and the personal costs are comparatively small, we are morally required to take up these efforts. (shrink)

The ‘limits of markets’ debate broadly concerns the question of when it is (im)permissible to have a market in some good. Markets can be of tremendous benefit to society, but many have felt that certain goods should not be for sale (e.g., sex, kidneys, bombs). Their sale is argued to be corrupting, exploitative, or to express a form of disrespect. InMarkets without Limits, Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski have recently argued to the contrary: For any good, as long as it (...) is permissible to give it for free, then it is permissible to give it for money. Their thesis has led to a number of engaging objections, and I leverage recent work on the nature of feasibility within political philosophy to offer a new challenge.I argue that feasibility offers a constraint on which markets can be permissibly implemented. Though it may be possible to create a morally acceptable version of an otherwise repugnant market, some of these markets may be infeasible, and so we are not permitted to implement them. After laying out this challenge, I consider several replies. They concern the relevance of feasibility, and whether any markets really are infeasible. This provides an opportunity to explore the dangers of pursuing the infeasible and with markets generally. I conclude by considering what might lead us to pursue these markets despite their infeasibility, or how knowledge of infeasibility may prove useful regardless. (shrink)

Most business ethicists maintain that corporate actors are subject to a variety of moral obligations. However, there is a persistent and underappreciated concern that the competitive pressures of the market somehow provide corporate actors with a far-reaching excuse from meeting these obligations. Here, we assess this concern. Blending resources from the history of philosophy and strategic management, we demonstrate the assumptions required for and limits of this excuse. Applying the idea of ‘the state of nature’ from Thomas Hobbes, we suggest (...) that corporate actors would be excused from duties if complying with them threatened their vital interests. We show how this excuse is not available for most individuals within firms; instead, it is an excuse perhaps available to firms themselves, but only given substantive assumptions about corporate personhood. For those willing to make these assumptions, we apply the competitive advantage construct to delimit the scope of this excuse. We suggest that firms are excused from fulfilling an obligation when complying leads to a competitive disadvantage, as this imperils the firm’s vital interests. After revealing why this excuse does not generalize, we conclude by considering when we should reform the market to avoid the legitimacy of this excuse. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1983, given by Hilary Putnam, an American philosopher.

The Causal Exclusion Problem is raised in many domains, including in the metaphysics of macroscopic objects. If there is a complete explanation of macroscopic effects in terms of the microscopic entities that compose macroscopic objects, then the efficacy of the macroscopic will be threatened with exclusion. I argue that we can avoid the problem if we accept that macroscopic objects are ontically vague. Then, it is indeterminate which collection of microscopic entities compose them, and so information about microscopic entities is (...) insufficient to provide a complete explanation of certain properties of macroscopic objects. After outlining this solution, I consider several objections. (shrink)

As George Boole saw it, the laws of logic are the laws of thought, and by this he meant, not that human thought is actually governed by the laws of logic, but, rather, that it should be. Boole’s view that the laws of logic have normative implications for how we ought to think is anything but an outlier. The idea that violating the laws of logic involves epistemic impropriety has seemed to many to be just obvious. It has seemed especially (...) obvious to those who see propositional justification as more fundamental than doxastic justification. Whatever other principles are required for defining propositional justification, the laws of logic seem indispensable. The idea that violation of the laws of logic involves some sort of epistemic impropriety—whatever the peculiarities of our psychology may be—has served as a fixed point around which defenders of the fundamentality of propositional justification are united, whatever their other differences. This paper challenges that common thread in defenses of the fundamentality of propositional justification. It is argued that the laws of logic have no bearing whatever on epistemic justification. Once we see why this should be so, the way is paved for seeing why it is that doxastic justification is more fundamental than propositional justification. (shrink)

In the last decades, the development of advanced imagery techniques made possible a better understanding of the functioning of the brain as well as the formulation of cognitive theories on how conscious experience may rise from its activity. However, it is sometimes challenging to distin- guish which of these theories are actually about consciousness (addressing ‘easy’ problems instead of the hard problem). In this text, I put into evidence that, for two prominent of these theories, what makes them the- ories (...) about consciousness are tacit relations between parts of the brain and part of the mind, and that these relations rely on mapping struc- tures of these parts. While conceptualising this approach, I address some shortcomings of its implementation by the mentioned cognitive theories. It appears that the most important difficulty in implementing it is the lack of a method for discovering more structure in the mind which may be related to physical activity through structure mapping. I propose that this could be done by an axiomatisation of the structure of judgements about the experiencing subject which irreducibly involve a point of view. (shrink)

Population axiology is the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, when the states of affairs in ques- tion may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live. Extant theories include totalism, averagism, variable value theories, critical level theories, and “person-affecting” theories. Each of these the- ories is open to objections that are at least prima facie serious. A series of impossibility theorems shows that this is no coincidence: (...) it can be proved, for various sets of prima facie intuitively compelling desiderata, that no axiology can simultaneously satisfy all the desiderata on the list. One’s choice of population axiology appears to be a choice of which intuition one is least unwilling to give up. (shrink)

Decisions, whether moral or prudential, should be guided at least in part by considerations of the consequences that would result from the various available actions. For any given action, however, the majority of its consequences are unpredictable at the time of decision. Many have worried that this leaves us, in some important sense, clueless. In this paper, I distinguish between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ possible sources of cluelessness. In terms of this taxonomy, the majority of the existing literature on cluelessness focusses (...) on the simple sources. I argue, contra James Lenman in particular, that these would-be sources of cluelessness are unproblematic, on the grounds that indifference-based reasoning is far less problematic than Lenman (along with many others) supposes. However, there does seem to be a genuine phenomenon of cluelessness associated with the ‘complex’ sources; here, indifference-based reasoning is inapplicable by anyone’s lights. This ‘complex problem of cluelessness’ is vivid and pressing, in particular, in the context of Effective Altruism. This motivates a more thorough examination of the precise nature of cluelessness, and the precise source of the associated phenomenology of discomfort in forced-choice situations. The latter parts of the paper make some initial explorations in those directions. (shrink)

Strategies are mentioned across a variety of domains, from business ethics, to the philosophy of war, philosophy of sport, game theory, and others. However, despite their wide use, very little has been said about how to think about what strategies are or how they relate to other prominently discussed concepts. In this article, I probe the close connection between strategies and plans, which have been much more thoroughly characterized in the philosophy of action. After highlighting the challenges of analyzing strategies (...) in terms of plans, I show how the work done on the connection between plans and intentions can inspire further questions about the nature of strategy. I conclude by showing how one particular innovation in the understanding of plans—how they can be more or less partial—can be used to help us to mark what makes for a good strategy. (shrink)

Much public policy analysis requires us to place a monetary value on the bad- ness of a premature human death. Currently dominant approaches to determining this ‘value of a life’ focus exclusively on the ‘self-regarding’ value of life — that is, the value of a person’s life to the person whose death is in question — and altogether ignore effects on other people. This procedure would be justified if, as seems intuitively plausible, other-regarding effects were negligible in comparison with self-regarding (...) ones. I argue that in the light of the issue of overpopulation, that intuitively plausible condition is at best highly questionable. Unless the world is in fact underpopulated, the social disvalue of a premature death is likely to be significantly lower than the current estimates. (shrink)

This paper (i) offers an interpretation of some central aspects of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of language, (ii) challenges the received view of its relation to analytic philosophy, and (iii) seeks to show that this investigation into the prehistory of analytic philosophy sheds light on its history proper. It has been often maintained, most notably by Quine, that Bentham anticipated Frege’s context principle and the use of contextual definition. On these bases, Bentham has been presented as one of the initiators of (...) a tradition that shares a common commitment to the “semantic priority of sentences” and that includes authors as otherwise diverse as Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. In opposition to this narrative, I argue that Bentham did indeed anticipate the use of contextual definition, but was not a forerunner of Frege’s context principle. The two issues should be sharply distinguished. I show that Bentham’s philosophy of language is informed by a set of empiricist assumptions that Frege’s contextualism was centrally meant to oppose. I conclude that with respect to the question of the relation between propositional and sub-propositional meaning, we should distinguish two opposed strands in the history of analytic philosophy: an empiricist strand anticipated by Bentham, represented most notably by Russell, and an anti-empiricist strand, represented most notably by Frege and Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Einleitung 1 -/- Kritik des Positivismus: Realismus «Was kann ich wissen?» 1 Erklärung und Referenz (1973) 1 2 Sprache und Wirklichkeit (1975) 38 3 Was ist ‹Realismus›? (1975) 77 -/- Der dritte Weg: Interer Realismus statt metaphysischem Realismus oder Positivismus 4 Modelle und Wirklichkeit (1980) 112 5 Referenz und Wahrheit (1980) 159 6 Wie man zugleich interner Realist und transzendentaler Idealist sein kann (1980) 191 7 Warum es keine Fertigwelt gibt (1982) 218 -/- Auf des Messers Schneide: Interner Realismus und (...) Relativismus 8 Wozu die Philosophen? (1986) 259 9 Realismus mit menschlichem Antlitz (1988/90) 284 10 Irrealismus und Dekonstruktion (1992) 330 -/- Bibliographie der Schriften von Hilary Putnam 363 I Bücher 363 II Aufsätze, Vorträge und Vorlesungen 365 III Übersetzungen ins Deutsche 385 -/- Literaturverzeichnis 387 Register 413. (shrink)

An exploration of the nexus between ecology, evolutionary biology and molecular biology, via the concept of phenotypic plasticity.

Being a widely translated piece of work, the Daodejing becomes vulnerable to 'translation errors', which fail to bring across the nuances in certain parts of the text. This thus leads to the existing argument that the Daodejing seems to portray some form of linguistic skepticism, through the presence of differing interpretations of the Dao and the moral truth of wuwei (无为) (non-action). Furthermore, given that the text is widely used as a moral guide, there is a problem. It now seems (...) that the text perpetuates moral skepticism as well. In this paper, I analyse the question of whether linguistic skepticism in the Daodejing does bring about moral skepticism, and argue that it is the case; that moral skepticism does indeed follow from linguistic skepticism. The hope through this discussion is to call for a universal address of the presence of linguistic skepticism in the Daodejing and how it perpetuates moral skepticism, for this topic is still rather novel in the community, and open up further discussion. (shrink)

Harsanyi claimed that his Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems provide a justification for utilitarianism. This claim has been strongly resisted, notably by Sen and Weymark, who argue that while Harsanyi has perhaps shown that overall good is a linear sum of individuals’ von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities, he has done nothing to establish any con- nection between the notion of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility and that of well-being, and hence that utilitarianism does not follow. The present article defends Harsanyi against the Sen-Weymark cri- (...) tique. I argue that, far from being a term with precise and independent quantitative content whose relationship to von Neumann-Morgenstern utility is then a substantive question, terms such as ‘well-being’ suffer (or suffered) from indeterminacy regarding precisely which quantity they refer to. If so, then (on the issue that this article focuses on) Harsanyi has gone as far towards defending ‘utilitarianism in the original sense’ as could coherently be asked. (shrink)

An important objection to preference-satisfaction theories of well-being is that these theories cannot make sense of interpersonal comparisons of well-being. A tradition dating back to Harsanyi () attempts to respond to this objection by appeal to so-called extended preferences: very roughly, preferences over situations whose description includes agents’ preferences. This paper examines the prospects for defending the preference-satisfaction theory via this extended preferences program. We argue that making conceptual sense of extended preferences is less problematic than others have supposed, but (...) that even so extended preferences do not provide a promising way for the preference satisfaction theorist to make interpersonal well-being comparisons. Our main objection takes the form of a trilemma: depending on how the theory based on extended preferences is developed, either the result will be inconsistent with ordinary preference-satisfaction theory, or it will fail to recover sufficiently rich interpersonal well-being comparisons, or it will take on a number of other arguably odd and undesirable commitments. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have found inspiration for a distinctive approach to a wide range of epistemological issues in P. F. Strawson’s classic essay, “Freedom and Resentment.” These Strawsonian epistemologists, as I call them, argue that the epistemology of testimony, self-knowledge, promising, and resolving is fundamentally different in kind from the epistemology of perception or inference. We should not see properly formed belief on these topics as evidence-based, for such an objective perspective, in such cases, results in a kind of (...) alienation. This paper explores these Strawsonian themes in recent epistemology, and argues that the Strawsonian approach should be resisted. (shrink)

An important objection to preference-satisfaction theories of well-being is that they cannot make sense of interpersonal comparisons. A tradition dating back to Harsanyi :434, 1953) attempts to solve this problem by appeal to people’s so-called extended preferences. This paper presents a new problem for the extended preferences program, related to Arrow’s celebrated impossibility theorem. We consider three ways in which the extended-preference theorist might avoid this problem, and recommend that she pursue one: developing aggregation rules that violate Arrow’s Independence of (...) Irrelevant Alternatives condition. (shrink)

I argue that excessive reliance on the notion of “the badness of death” tends to lead theorists astray when thinking about healthcare prioritisation. I survey two examples: the confusion surrounding the “time-relative interests account” of the badness of death, and a confusion in the recent literature on cost-benefit analyses for family planning interventions. In both cases, the confusions in question would have been avoided if (instead of attempting to theorise in terms of the badness of death) theorists had forced themselves (...) first to write down an appropriate value function, and then focused on the question of how to maximize value. (shrink)

Given the deep disagreement surrounding population axiology, one should remain uncertain about which theory is best. However, this uncertainty need not leave one neutral about which acts are better or worse. We show that as the number of lives at stake grows, the Expected Moral Value approach to axiological uncertainty systematically pushes one towards choosing the option preferred by the Total and Critical Level views, even if one’s credence in those theories is low.

In this text, I am considering the question `what I am ultimately searching for ?', attempt of systematising metaphysical reflection using in particular the singular and imagined experience of the ocean in order to distinguish between to types of relations of the subject to its world which allows to understand the transition from nihilism to faith.

In this text I consider the question of why to write ? retracting back this question to the point of view of the individual that I am from the one of the society as a whole. I believe that this change of point of view may serve even the construction of a collective discourse, in particular because a solution to this problem would guarantee the preservation of meaning even at the collective level. Taking this point of view has consequences on (...) how to write and to organize its script into units of meaning and these units around a structure, and they in return have an impact on the question of the why. This text contains reflections on these many questions. (shrink)

There is a worry about the intellectual legitimacy of philosophy. Although the sciences have a progressive history, with later theories largely building on earlier ones, and a tremendous amount of agreement within the scientific community about the approximate truth of current theory, philosophy is different. We do not see a progressive history of philosophical theorizing, and there is little agreement within the philosophical community about which theories are even roughly correct. This not only encourages a certain skepticism about the possibility (...) of philosophical knowledge, but a real question about whether the activity of philosophical theorizing is intellectually legitimate. It is argued here that there are features of a naturalistic methodology in philosophy which have the resources to respond to these concerns. (shrink)

Respondeat superior is a legal doctrine conferring liability from one party onto another because the latter stands in some relationship of authority over the former. Though originally a doctrine of tort law, for the past century it has been used within the criminal law, especially to the end of securing criminal liability for corporations. Here, I argue that on at least one prominent conception of criminal responsibility, we are not justified in using this doctrine in this way. Firms are not (...) answerable for the crimes committed by their employees, because firms cannot answer as to why the crime was committed; they lack the authority to offer the employee’s reasons for action. Though this rules out respondeat superior as a general principle, I show contexts in which vicarious liability is still appropriate in the criminal law, and I respond to a number of other concerns raised by this picture. (shrink)

In this text, I define an introspective method for understanding consciousness via the general structure of the experiencing subject, meaning how the elementary operations involved in the relation between a subject of experience and its world (a set of possible experiences) are combined and in what 'space' we should think they are so. This comes with a redefinition of introspection, keeping it away from what I shall call straightforward introspection, that is introspection under the belief that the immediate grasp on (...) experience may serve as an accurate description of what there is to experience. (shrink)

J.K.Rowling's celebrated tale has been the object of many comments, including scholarly ones, since it was first published. These comments have made clear the depth of the philosophical and spiritual reflection of J.K.Rowling underlying her story, however to my taste they still miss important points. In this text I offer my own philosophical point of view on the tale, which is the result of a long-lasting reflection about it.

Whereas many philosophers take backwards causation to be impossible, the few who maintain its possibility either take it to be absent from the actual world or else confined to theoretical physics. Here, however, I argue that backwards causation is not only actual, but common, though occurring in the context of our social institutions. After juxtaposing my cases with a few others in the literature and arguing that we should take seriously the reality of causal cases in these contexts, I consider (...) several objections. These objections involve whether the cases should be reinterpreted, whether they are properly within the institution, whether they involve necessitation or else Cambridge changes, whether and how they involve changing the past, and whether this should call us to question institutional reality. I end by suggesting that it is a virtue of our institutions that they allow backwards causation, that this is a kind of technology that they are often built to incorporate. (shrink)

For the full text of this article see "Download Options PhiPapers Archive and click Download from Archive" at the bottom of this page. First 500 words of article: To my surprise last spring, an article titled “Gut Almighty”, which briefly explained the latest emotion theories on how intuition comes from the gut, was featured in Psychology Today (Flora, 2007) at the same time that my article on gut instinctual somatic responses and healthy life choices was published in Somatics Spring 07 (...) issue (Love, 2007). I wondered if two articles published on the gut in one month might surely be a record, as the gut has not seemed to have so much attention in the media since Gershon’s (1998) book acclaiming it through his neurological research to have a mind of its own. -/- In the months I awaited the publication of my article, I reread Gershon’s (1998) book and it was again delightful to me to read that a scientific investigation actually uncovered evidence that the gut has a separate capacity to generate and record vital responses and functions as what he calls our second brain. Gershon outlines the biological functions of the gut as being its own intelligent brain and having its own vitality that is in communication with, but not dependent upon, the head brain. As I combed through his book and shared emails with my colleague, Robert Sterling, it became quite clear to us that Gershon’s work was supportive of the clinical findings in the work we did as guidance counselors in the 70s. Our work centered around assisting people to assess the meaning of their experiences through an awareness on the empty-full instinctual feeling responses that they identified in the gut region of the body. We found with the people that we counseled that these gut responses were linked to the dynamic struggles of balancing the two needs of the person for acceptance and for feeling in control of one’s own responses (the freedom to respond naturally), and that these two needs were instinctual and necessary to fulfill on a moment to moment basis for continued vitality of the person. Similar to Gershon’s findings, it was also our conclusion that the gut area of the body contains a feeling response center that holds a relationship to the thinking processes of the person, but is a separate response center from the thinking head responses and certainly not dependent upon it. -/- Feeling inspired by Gershon’s (1998) work and the attention recently given to the gut in the literature and media, I decided to write a second article for Somatics that further explains the specific technique of the Somatic Reflection Process (SRP). The intention of this article is to answer the questions about the process that I have been asked in the past year by many friends and colleagues who read my first article last Spring on the findings of Robert Sterling’s and my somatic work as guidance counselors. I am including both the method and a protocol for facilitating the SRP, as well as a brief summary of a recent research study using the SRP protocol presented (Love, 2005). (shrink)

In this text I propose a formal framework for the study of phenomenal objectness - the distinction in an a priori undifferenciated experience of the phenomenal field of certain 'objects'. The purpose of this framework is to represent (even partially) the reality of phenomenal experience in its structure (which participates conceptually to consciousness as such) and at the same time to allow the production of a tractable formalism in order to search for a mathematical explanation for the fundamental phenomenon of (...) objectness. The constitution of this framework is based on intuitions from consciousness literature as well as the recent integrated information theory. Before coming to the framework's definition, I analyse this theory from the point of view of the discourse, through concepts that I introduce here (statical and dynamical phases of the discourse), and explain some severe epistemic difficulties it encounters. The definition of a general combination criterion for the inter-discourse between philosophy and mathematics (which is necessary for the project of explaining consciousness scientifically) in these terms leads in this text to disentangle this theory into the proposed framework. (shrink)

Essay “Meaning and Mentalism” is translated from Hilary Putnam’s book: Represen tation and Reality. Chapter 1. Meaning and Mentalism. The MIT Press, 1998. pp.1-18.

In carrying out cost-benefit or cost-effective analysis, a discount rate should be applied to some kinds of future benefits and costs. It is controversial, though, whether future health is in this class. I argue that one of the standard arguments for discounting (from diminishing marginal returns) is inapplicable to the case of health, while another (favouring a pure rate of time preference) is unsound in any case. However, there are two other reasons that might support a positive discount rate for (...) future health: one relating to uncertainty, and the other relating to the instrumental benefits of improved health. While the latter considerations could be modelled via a discount rate, they could alternatively be modelled more explicitly, in other ways; I briefly discuss which modelling method is preferable. Finally, I argue against the common claims that failing to discount future health would lead to paradox, and/or to inconsistency with the way future cash flows are treated. (shrink)

Proponents of corporate moral responsibility take certain corporations to be capable of being responsible in ways that do not reduce to the responsibility of their members. If correct, one follow-up question concerns what leads corporations to fail to meet their obligations. We often fail morally when we know what we should do and yet fail to do it, perhaps out of incontinence, akrasia, or weakness of will. However, this kind of failure is much less discussed in the corporate case. And, (...) where it is discussed, the view is that corporations are less prone to weakness. Here, I argue that proponents of corporate responsibility should say that corporations can and often do instantiate weakness of the will, and that this is important to recognize. Weakness of the will requires certain capacities that these proponents typically take corporations to have. And once this is appreciated, we can assess how corporate weakness might proceed differently than how it does for individuals. We can also begin a conversation about how best to meet the distinctive challenges for recognizing and correcting corporate weakness, using a number of resources from management scholarship. (shrink)

Upon doing something generous for someone with whom you are close, some kind of reciprocity may be appropriate. But it often seems wrong to actually request reciprocity. This chapter explores the wrongness in making these requests, and why they can nevertheless appear appropriate. After considering several explanations for the wrongness at issue (involving, e.g. distinguishing oughts from obligation, the suberogatory, imperfect duties, and gift-giving norms), a novel proposal is advanced. The requests are disrespectful; they express that their agent insufficiently trusts (...) the hearer to recognize their own reasons to reciprocate, and the close relationship between them morally requires this kind of trust. This proposal is articulated and situated in the recent discussion of the normativity of requests. The chapter concludes by explaining how these requests may appear appropriate. Agents in these relationships often have standing to make requests, though the standing is lacking in these particular cases. (shrink)

Rights-based approaches and consequentialist approaches to ethics are often seen as being diametrically opposed to one another. In one sense, they are. In another sense, however, they can be reconciled: a ‘global’ form of consequentialism might supply consequentialist foundations for a derivative morality that is non-consequentialist, and perhaps rights-based, in content. By way of case study to illustrate how this might work, I survey what a global consequentialist should think about a recent dispute between Jeff McMahan and Henry Shue on (...) the morality and laws of war. (shrink)

Love, S. (2007). Using somatic awareness as a guide for making healthy life choices. Somatics Magazine- Journal Of The Mind/Body Arts and Sciences, Volume XV, Number 2, pages 40-43. (Silver Love is same person as author Martha C. Love).

Smithies presents an account of justification that ties it to an idealized view of reflection. I argue that no such account can work. More than this, I argue that the kind of idealization which Smithies offers loses contact with the very phenomenon of reflection which he intends to illuminate. I also discuss how Smithies's view bears on the internalism/externalism controversy.

There are many historical concerns about freedom that have come to be deemphasized in the free will literature itself—for instance, worries around the tyranny of government or the alienation of capitalism. It is hard to see how the current free will literature respects these, or indeed how they could even find expression. This paper seeks to show how these and other concerns can be reintegrated into the debate by appealing to a levels ontology. Recently, Christian List and others have considered (...) how the notion of levels could be relevant to the free will debate. Invariably, however, the focus is on the significance of facts at lower levels. The threats come from below, from fundamental physics or neuroscience. Here, I aim to show how we can frame many interesting concerns about free will in terms of threats from above. After arguing that determination from above is no less threatening, I catalogue such concerns that might constitute threats to our freedom. Doing this not only allows us to show how these concerns relate to those standardly discussed, but it pushes us to expand our conception of freedom. (shrink)

“But when you meet her again,” he observed, “in Heaven, you, too, will be changed. You will see her spiritualized, with spiritual eyes.”1Dante is not a philosopher, although George Santayana sees him as one among a very few philosophical poets.2 The Divine Comedy deals in terza rima with issues that are philosophically urgent, including the relation between reasoning well and happiness.3And as one of the few great epics in Western literature, the Comedy offers its readers the pleasures of world-class poetry, (...) fabulous beasts from classical literature, good people and sinners from Dante’s Italy, and the prolongation in verse of Thomas Aquinas’s summa Theologiae and Summa contra Gentiles. In some ways, Dante’s epic .. (shrink)