Philosophers have used the terms 'impersonal' and 'personal value' to refer to, among others things, whether something's value is universal or particular to an individual. In this paper, I propose an account of impersonal value that, I argue, better captures the intuitive distinction than potential alternatives, while providing conceptual resources for moving beyond the traditional stark dichotomy. I illustrate the practical importance of my theoretical account with reference to debate over the evaluative scope of cultural heritage.

The young Edmund Husserl stressed that the success of his philosophy hinged upon his ability to determine the subject and the predicate of impersonal propositions and their expressions, such as ‘It is raining’. This essay accordingly investigates the tenability of Husserl’s early thought, by executing the first study of his analysis of impersonal propositions from the late 1890s. This examination reshapes our understanding of the inception of phenomenology in two ways. First, Husserl pinpoints the subject by outlining why (...) impersonal expressions are employed during communication. This contravenes interpretations of the early Husserl as uninterested in intersubjectivity. Second, by studying how Husserl determines the predicate by investigating existential propositions, I show that Husserl, in the late 1890s, came to his final view on the concept of being. (shrink)

A notable feature of our moral and legal practices is the recognition of privileges, powers, and entitlements belonging to a select group of individuals in virtue of their status as victims of wrongful conduct. A philosophical literature on relational normativity purports to account for this status in terms of such notions as interests, rights, and attitudes of disregard. This paper argues that such individualistic notions cannot account for prevailing and intuitive ways of demarcating the class of victims. The focus of (...) the discussion is the wrongful infliction of harm, and the mediating role played by impersonal “danger-making properties” in the determination of the class of victims. Beginning with a treatment of one of the most well-known discussions of negligently-inflicted harm — from the most famous case of the American common law tradition, Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. — the analysis is then extended to the morality of harm-doing more broadly, negligent and intentional alike. The paper’s chief targets are interest theories of rights — including contractualist theories of moral claim-rights of the kind defended by R. Jay Wallace — and neo-Strawsonian Quality of Will theories of “moral injury”. (shrink)

This essay examines Elizabeth Grosz's provocative claim that feminist and anti-racist theorists should reject a politics of recognition in favor of "a politics of imperceptibility." She criticizes any humanist politics centered upon a dialectic between self and other. I turn to Spinoza to develop and explore her alternative proposal. I claim that Spinoza offers resources for her promising politics of corporeality, proximity, power, and connection that includes all of nature, which feminists should explore.

The study investigated assessment of sex and age impersonation as academic dishonest behaviour among post graduate students’ of Federal Universities of South-South, Nigeria. The study which is a survey research, involved a multi-stage stratified random sampling technique of 440 males and 490 females from 3 universities and 3 faculties of the same universities in South-South, Nigeria. Sample was selected through stratified random sampling approach. The study adopted frequencies, percentages, factor analysis and multiple classification analysis statistical tools. A questionnaire developed and (...) validated by the researcher titled: “Academic Dishonest Behaviour Questionnaire’’ (ADBQ) with Cronbach coefficient alpha reliability of 0.83 was used for data collection. Two research questions and one hypothesis were formulated for the study. The findings indicated that the students used for this study were involved in Sex and Age impersonation aspect of academic dishonest behaviours. Female students were seen to be more involved than male in impersonation, Students ages 25-29years are more culpable in impersonation as academic dishonest behaviour. It is therefore recommended among others that there should be synergy among stakeholders in the educational process to fight this art of impersonation. (shrink)

Sentences such as 'Chocolate tastes good' have been widely discussed as sentences that give rise to faultless disagreement. As such, they actually belong to the more general class of impersonal perception reports, which include 'The violin sounds / looks strange' as well sentences that are about an agent-centered situation such as 'It feels / seems like it is going to rain'. I maintain the view that faultless disagreement is due to first person-based genericity, which, roughly, consists in attributing a (...) property to anyone the speaker (or described agent) identifies with (which generally requires a first-person experience) (Moltmann 2010). Unlike my previous analysis (and similar analyses), this paper no longer makes use of experiencers or judges as implicit arguments of taste predicates, but argues that impersonal perception verbs (taste, look, feel, seem), have a logophoric character. More precisely, such verbs describe perceptual occurrences whose experiencer is identical to the agent of the utterance situation, described attitudinal situation, or the situations a generic operator may range over. Perceptual occurrences are sharply distinguished ontologically from perceptual experiences as well as perceptual objects, entities we refer to as ‘the taste of chocolate’, ‘the sound of the violin’, ‘the look of the violin’. Sentences about perceptual objects ('the taste of chocolate is good', 'the sound of the violin is great', 'the look of the violin is beautiful') also give rise to faultless disagreement, but the source of that is a first-person-based attribution of an evaluative predicate to an (objective) perceptual object. (shrink)

David Benatar has argued both for anti-natalism and for a certain pessimism about life's meaning. In this paper, I propose that these positions are expressions of a deeply impersonal philosophical temperament. This is not a problem on its own; we all have our philosophical instincts. The problem is that this particular temperament, I argue, leads Benatar astray, since it prevents him from answering a question that any moral philosopher must answer. This is the question of rational authority, which requires (...) the moral philosopher to say why existing human agents have strong practical reasons to comply with the philosopher's dictates. A purely impersonal ethical system can never do this, and this is why Benatar has no answer to this question. (shrink)

The Impossibility of Poetry Adorno's aesthetic theory bears the profound scars of his personal experience of fascism. Even after Auschwitz, he feared that modern bourgeois society is a breeding ground for new forms of fascist terror. It was said that, after Auschwitz, one could no longer write poems. But Adorno insisted that postwar art is an indispensable means for telling the truth about how the social order was fundamentally changed by that catastrophe.1 Not to tell the truth is to be (...) guilty of complicitous silence; yet, the unbearable truth is that society is pervasively and radically evil. As long as…. (shrink)

The Buddha, unlike the Upaniṣadic or Brahmanical way, has avoided the concept of the self, and it seems to be left with limited conceptual possibilities for free will and moral responsibility. Now, the question is, if the self is crucial for free will, then how can free will be conceptualized in the Buddhist ‘no-self’ (anattā) doctrine. Nevertheless, the Buddha accepts a dynamic notion of cetanā (intention/volition), and it explicitly implies that he rejects the ultimate or absolute freedom of the will, (...) but not the minimal power of free will. It seems that the Buddha’s view shifts from agent causation (independent ownership) to a causal sequence of impersonal processes (psychophysical factors). This paper claims to shed clarity on ‘whether free will is viable in the context of the anattāvāda in Buddhism.’ It mainly studies the secondary sources (even though it has also discussed the primary sources) and their interpretations of freedom of the will and how it further does argue for a compatibility approach of free will in Buddhist thought. (shrink)

A classic objection to act-consequentialism is that it is overdemanding: it requires agents to bear too many costs for the sake of promoting the impersonal good. I develop the complementary objection that act-consequentialism is underdemanding: it fails to acknowledge that agents have moral reasons to bear certain costs themselves, even when it would be impersonally better for others to bear these costs.

The article explores the relationship between Baukunst and Zeitwille in the practice and pedagogy of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the significance of the notions of civilization and culture for his philosophy of education and design practice. Focusing on the negation of metropolitan life and mise en scene of architectural space as its starting point, it examines how Georg Simmel’s notion of objectivity could be related to Mies’s understanding of civilization. Its key insight is to recognize that Mie’s practice (...) and pedagogy was directed by the idea that architecture should capture the driving force of civilization. The paper also summarizes the foundational concepts of Mies’s curriculum in Chicago. It aims to highlight the importance of the notions of Zeitwille and impersonality in Mies van der Rohe’s thought and to tease apart the tension between the impersonality and the role of the autonomous individual during the modernist era. (shrink)

As all philosophical concepts, also the concept of person constitutes itself referring to a particular problem. The analysis drafted by Marcel Mauss regarding the genesis of the aforementioned category permits to analyse the problematic nucleus to which such concept refers to, disclosing that it responds to the necessity of solving the ancient problem of the link between mind and body in a specific perspective. In this respect, Bergsonian theory of images represents a solid attempt of passing not only the habitual (...) solution of the problem represented by the concept of person, but also the problem itself whereto refers. The deleuzian reading of Henri Bergson’s theory leads him to define the impersonal and pre-individual field sketched out by Bergson as a plane of immanence, and this last as “a life”. The ultimate aim of this paper is to analyse the nature of such plane and to suggest an interpretation of the latest Gilles Deleuze’s piece of writing, "L’immanence: une vie..." that unveils its profound Bergsonism. (shrink)

In large, impersonal moral orders many of us wish to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. The mutual maintaining of good will, then, requires that we somehow communicate our intentions to one another. But how do we actually do this? The current paper argues that when we engage in moral responsibility practices—that is, when we express our reactive attitudes by blaming, praising, and resenting—we communicate a (...) desire to maintain good will to those in the community we are imbedded in. Participating in such practices alone will not get the job done, though, for expressions of our reactive attitudes are often what economists call cheap talk. But when we praise and blame in cases of moral diversity, expressions of our reactive attitudes act as costly signals capable of solving our social dilemma. (shrink)

What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value when (...) it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest in it. So, the more the good is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the good, the better for you. The more the bad is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the bad, the worse for you. We’ll argue that this account is extensionally adequate: it explains the welfare value of achievements, friendships, knowledge, pleasures and virtues. Moreover, it has a number of explanatory virtues: it’s unified, elegant and explanatorily powerful. So, we’ll suggest, it’s an excellent account of welfare, and in many ways superior to its main competitors. (shrink)

Socialist republicans advocate public ownership and control of the means of production in order to achieve the republican goal of a society without endemic domination. While civic republicanism is often attacked for its conservatism, the relatively neglected radical history of the tradition shows how a republican form of socialism provides powerful conceptual resources to critique capitalism for leaving workers and citizens dominated. This analysis supports a programme of public ownership and economic democracy intended to reduce domination in the workplace and (...) wider society. I defend this socialist republicanism from both the Marxist objection that it overlooks the impersonal nature of domination under capitalism and the left-liberal objections that property-owning democracy or worker codetermination are sufficient to suppress dominating relationships. The resulting position identifies the need for more ambitious institutional grounds for republican liberty than is often supposed, while offering us a distinctive emancipatory justification for socialism. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Jenefer Robinson’s personalist account of pictorial expression. [1] According to personalism, a picture possesses the expressive properties we attribute to it because we take it that someone expresses E in the work. Robinson’s particular strategy exploits the concept of an implied persona who ‘unifies’ and ‘specifies’ what is expressed. [2] Dominic Lopes challenges this view by attacking what he takes to be a flawed assumption motivating the personalist account: the priority of figure expression. [3] Once (...) we acknowledge this flaw, he argues, there is no good reason to prefer personalism to an impersonalist theory. I will argue that Robinson qua personalist can pre-empt this strike by clarifying the relation between (a) what a picture expresses and (b) what is depicted as expressing in the picture. Rather than leading with the idea that personalism unifies or determines the meaning, I argue that impersonalism diminishes it and that, should it be accepted, we would be left with an impoverished view of what specific art pieces can mean. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophy of the nineteenth-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna and brings him into dialogue with Western philosophers of religion, primarily in the recent analytic tradition. Sri Ramakrishna’s expansive conception of God as the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality, Maharaj argues, opens up an entirely new paradigm for addressing central topics in the philosophy of religion, including divine infinitude, religious diversity, the nature and epistemology of mystical experience, and the problem of evil.

A classic and fraught question in the philosophy of film is this: when you watch a film, do you experience yourself in the world of the film, observing the scenes? In this paper, we argue that this subject of film experience is sometimes a mere impersonal viewpoint, sometimes a first-personal but unindexed subject, and sometimes a particular, indexed subject such as the viewer herself or a character in the film. We first argue for subject pluralism: there is no single (...) answer to the question of what kind of subjectivity, if any, is mandated across film sequences. Then, we defend unindexed subjectivity: at least sometimes, films mandate an experience that is first-personal but not tied to any particular person, not even to the viewer. Taken together, these two theses allow us to see film experience as more varied than previously appreciated and to bridge in a novel way the cognition of film with the exercise of other imaginative capacities, such as mindreading and episodic recollecting. (shrink)

Our pollution of the environment seems set to lead to widespread problems in the future, including disease, scarcity of resources, and bloody conflicts. It is natural to think that we are required to stop polluting because polluting harms the future individuals who will be faced with these problems. This natural thought faces Derek Parfit’s famous Non-Identity Problem ( 1984 , pp. 361–364). The people who live on the polluted earth would not have existed if we had not polluted. Our polluting (...) behaviour does not make these individuals worse off. It may therefore seem that we do not harm them by polluting. Parfit argues that we should replace person-affecting principles with an impersonal principle of beneficence, Principle Q ( 1984 , p. 360.). I argue that Principle Q cannot give an adequate account of our duties to refrain from polluting. I consider attempts to solve the Non-Identity Problem by denying that to harm someone an agent must make them worse off. I argue that such responses provide a partial solution to the Non-Identity Problem. They do show that we harm future individuals in a morally relevant sense by polluting. Nonetheless, this is only a partial solution. The Non-Identity Problem still suggests that our harm-based reasons not to pollute are less strong than we intuitively believe. Thus on its own an appeal to the claim that we harm future individuals is not able to give a fully satisfactory account of why we are required not to pollute. (shrink)

The non-identity problem is usually considered in the forward-looking direction but a version of it also applies to the past, due to the fact that even minor historical changes would have affected the whole subsequent sequence of births, dramatically changing who comes to exist next. This simple point is routinely overlooked by familiar attitudes and evaluative judgments about the past, even those of sophisticated historians. I shall argue, however, that it means that when we feel sadness about some historical tragedy, (...) or think of one possible course of history as better than another, these judgments and attitudes can be understood in terms of two opposing perspectives on the past: an impersonal standpoint concerned only with how much value each course of history contains, and a person-centred standpoint concerned with harms and benefits to the people who had actually existed. In this paper, I will set out these radically different visions of what matters in history and point out some of their surprising implications. (shrink)

This paper argues for a new understanding of Strawson’s distinction between personal, impersonal, and self-reactive attitudes. Many Strawsonians take these basic reactive attitude types to be distinguished by two factors. Is it the self or another who is treated with good- or ill-will? And is it the self or another who displays good- or ill-will? On this picture, when someone else wrongs me, my reactive attitude is personal; when someone else wrongs someone else, my reactive attitude is impersonal; (...) and when I wrong someone else, my attitude is self-reactive. Against this account, I argue that the basic reactive attitude types are better distinguished according to whether they express partial or impartial concern. This fits Strawson’s discussion in “Freedom and Resentment”, and it allows us to see an important point that the alternative approach obscures. Namely, while attitudes like resentment, gratitude, shame, and pride can arise as responses to our own treatment and behavior, they can also arise as third-party responses to the treatment and behavior of our family members, romantic partners, and close friends. Similarly, attitudes like moral indignation and disapprobation also have a wider scope than is often acknowledged; they can arise as responses to others’ treatment, but they can also arise as responses to our own treatment when we react impartially to circumstances involving ourselves. (shrink)

In our book The Inessential Indexical we argue that the various theses of essential indexicality all fail. Indexicals are not essential, we conclude. One essentiality thesis we target in the third chapter is the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action. Our strategy is to give examples of what we call impersonal action rationalizations , which explain actions without citing indexical attitudes. To defeat the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action, it suffices that there could be (...) even one successful impersonal action rationalization. In what follows we bolster our case against an essential connection between action and the de se (or indexicality), first by developing a range of new action models and secondly by responding to challenges from Dilip Ninan, Stephan Torre, and José Luis Bermúdez . (shrink)

The principle of assistance says that the global rich should help the global poor because they are able to do so, and at little cost. The principle of contribution says that the rich should help the poor because the rich are partly to blame for the plight of the poor. This paper explores the relationship between the two principles and offers support for one version of the principle of assistance. The principle of assistance is most plausible, the paper argues, when (...) formulated so as to identify obligations that arise from the needs of particular identifiable members of the global poor, not from impersonal rules or values. Under that formulation, the principle can explain why knowledge of the circumstances faced by individual members of the global poor can have such a marked effect upon the willingness of the global rich to provide help, and can offer a better grounded motivational basis for helping the global poor. These are real advantages, the paper argues, and ones that cannot be matched by stories that focus upon the ways in which the global rich contribute to global poverty. (shrink)

Can it be better or worse for a person to be than not to be, that is, can it be better or worse to exist than not to exist at all? This old 'existential question' has been raised anew in contemporary moral philosophy. There are roughly two reasons for this renewed interest. Firstly, traditional so-called “impersonal” ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, have counter-intuitive implications in regard to questions concerning procreation and our moral duties to future, not yet existing people. (...) Secondly, it has seemed evident to many that an outcome can only be better than another if it is better for someone, and that only moral theories that are in this sense “person affecting” can be correct. The implications of this Person Affecting Restriction will differ radically, however, depending on which answer one gives to the existential question. Melinda Roberts (2003) and Matthew Adler (2009) have defended an affirmative answer to the existential question using an assumption that one can asribe a zero level of wellbeing to a person in a world in which that person doesn't exist. Contrariwise, Derek Parfit (1984), John Broome (1999), and others have worried that if we take a person’s life to be better for her than non-existence, then we would have to conclude that it would have been worse for her if she did not exist, which is absurd: Nothing would have been worse or better for a person if she had not existed. The paper suggests that an affirmative answer to the existential question can avoid such absurdities: One can claim that, say, it is better for a person to exist than not to exist, without implying that it would have been worse for a person if she had not existed or that her level of wellbeing would then have been lower. (shrink)

A brief study of the logical, linguistic, psychological and ontological problem of ‘impersonalia’, which is to say of assertions such as ‘it’s raining’ or ‘es blitzt’ which seem to have no subject. Such assertions cause problems not only for defenders of traditional subject-predicate views of assertive sentences, but also for those, such as Frege, who defended a view in terms of functions and arguments.

Discovering laws of nature was a way to worship a law-giving God, during the Scientific Revolution. So why should we consider it worthwhile now, in our own more secularized science? For historical perspective, I examine two competing early modern theological traditions that related laws of nature to different divine attributes, and their secular legacy in views ranging from Kant and Nietzsche to Humean and ‘governing’ accounts in recent analytic metaphysics. Tracing these branching offshoots of ethically charged God-concepts sheds light on (...) how our ethical ideals and ideas of natural order can still be valuably integrated. Early modern intellectualists valued the law-governed order of nature as a sign of divine Reason. In turn, Reason traditionally ascribed to God has now been partly reclaimed for humans, reframing the value of natural order anthropocentrically, in terms of the value of our own intelligence. Alternatively, Reason may be reclaimed for nature itself, as in an ‘objective’ idealism or metaphysical rationalism. However, beyond divine Reason, an influential voluntarist tradition in theology stressed a connection between laws of nature and God’s Power or free Will. Tracking how divine Power has been reinvested in human beings provides a broader context for instrumentalism and related lineages of empiricism. But secularization can also transfer Power from God to the impersonal natural world. In this light, current scientific interest in lawlike order may also reflect the inherent value of brute necessity or inhuman causal power in nature: this is a deeper way to reject anthropocentrism and to show our respect for the environment. (shrink)

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that (...) a recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. (shrink)

A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective impersonal laws. Asma argued that our contemporary imaginative cognition is evolutionarily conserved-it has structural and functional similarities to premodern Homo sapiens’s cognition. This article will outline the essential features of mythopoetic cognition or adaptive imagination, delineate the adaptive sociocultural advantages of mythopoetic cognition, explain the phylogenetic and ontogenetic mechanisms that give rise to human mythopoetic mind, show (...) how mythopoetic cognition challeng­es contemporary trends in cognitive science and philosophy, and recognize and outline empirical approaches for a new cognitive science of the imagination. (shrink)

This study compares the neural substrate of moral decision making processes between Korean and American participants. By comparison with Americans, Korean participants showed increased activity in the right putamen associated with socio-intuitive processes and right superior frontal gyrus associated with cognitive control processes under a moral-personal condition, and in the right postcentral sulcus associated with mental calculation in familiar contexts under a moral-impersonal condition. On the other hand, American participants showed a significantly higher degree of activity in the bilateral (...) anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) associated with conflict resolution under the moral-personal condition, and in the right medial frontal gyrus (MFG) associated with simple cognitive branching in non-familiar contexts under the moral-impersonal condition when a more lenient threshold was applied, than Korean participants. These findings support the ideas of the interactions between the cultural background, education, and brain development, proposed in the field of cultural psychology and educational psychology. The study introduces educational implications relevant to moral psychologists and educators. (shrink)

Digital records, from chat transcripts to social media posts, are being used to create chatbots that recreate the conversational style of deceased individuals. Some maintain that this is merely a new form of digital memorial, while others argue that they pose a variety of moral hazards. To resolve this, I turn to classical Chinese philosophy to make use of a debate over the ethics of funerals and mourning. This ancient argument includes much of interest for the contemporary issue at hand, (...) including the use of impersonators of the dead to help the bereaved to deal well with their grief. I connect this historical discussion with a modern trend in clinical psychology that reframes therapeutic interventions with bereaved individuals. The trend directs practitioners away from facilitating detachment and toward affirming continuing bonds. I conclude that these chatbots can offer an important source of support to mourners, but also discuss parameters and features of social context that will be important to avoid the moral hazards identified by sceptics. (shrink)

In the Sociology of Emotion and Affect Studies, affects are usually regarded as an aspect of human beings alone, or of impersonal or collective atmospheres. However, feelings and emotions are only specific cases of affectivity that require subjective inner selves, while the concept of ‘atmospheres’ fails to explain the singularity of each individual case. This article develops a theory of social affect that does not reduce affect to either personal feelings or collective emotions. First, I use a Spinozist understanding (...) of the ‘body’ to conceptualize the receptivity and mutual constitution of bodies, to show how affects do not ‘belong’ to anybody; they are not solely attributable either to the human or to any kind of body alone, but emerge in situations of the encounter and interaction. Next I build upon Jean-Marie Guyau’s concept of transmissions to show how we can theorize affect as an emerging transmission between and among bodies. Finally, I demonstrate how we now have a complete conceptual frame for theorizing affect in relation to all bodies in any given social scene, the grand composition of which I call affectif. (shrink)

This paper considers whether universally—for all (known) rational beings—an argument scheme or pattern can go from being cogent (well-reasoned) to fallacious. This question has previously received little attention, despite the centrality of the concepts of cogency, scheme, and fallaciousness. I argue that cogency has vanished in this way for the following scheme, a common type of impersonal means-end reasoning: X is needed as a basic necessity or protection of human lives, therefore, X ought to be secured if possible. As (...) it stands (with no further elaboration), this scheme is committed to the assumption that the greater the number of human lives, the better. Although this assumption may have been indisputable previously, it is clearly disputable now. It is a fallacy or non sequitur to make a clearly disputable assumption without providing any justification. Although this topic raises critical issues for practically every discipline, my primary focus is on logical (as opposed to empirical or ethical) aspects of the case, and on implications for practical and theoretical logic. I conclude that the profile of vanishing cogency of the scheme may be unique and is determined by a peculiar combination of contingent universality and changing conditions. (shrink)

Given reductionism about people, personal persistence must fundamentally consist in some kind of impersonal continuity relation. Typically, these continuity relations can hold from one to many. And, if they can, the analysis of personal persistence must include a non-branching clause to avoid non-transitive identities or multiple occupancy. It is far from obvious, however, what form this clause should take. This paper argues that previous accounts are inadequate and develops a new proposal.

Most moral theories share certain features in common with other theories. They consist of a set of propositions that are universal, general, and hence impartial. The propositions that constitute a typical moral theory are (1) universal, in that they apply to all subjects designated as within their scope. They are (2) general, in that they include no proper names or definite descriptions. They are therefore (3) impartial, in that they accord no special privilege to any particular agent's situation which cannot (...) be justified under (2) and (3). These three features do not distinguish moral theories from other theories, nor indeed from most general categorical propositions we assert. Yet, in recent years, these features of moral theories have been the target of a certain concerted and sustained criticism, namely, that to be committed to such a moral theory, or to aspire to act in accordance with its requirements, results in what has come to be known as moral alienation. Moral alienation, according to this criticism, consists in (i) viewing one's ground projects from an impersonal, "moral point of view" engendered by one's acceptance of the theory; (ii) being prepared to sacrifice these projects to the requirements of moral principle; and (iii) making such a sacrifice specifically and self-consciously in order to conform to these requirements. Moral alienation is said to manifest itself in one (or both) of two ways, depending on the nature of the project thus susceptible to sacrifice. One may be alienated from oneself, if the project consists of tastes, convictions, or aspirations that are centrally definitive of one's self. In this case one's commitment to the project can be at best conditional on its congruence with one's moral theory. It is claimed that this must make for a rather tepid and unenthusiastic commitment indeed. Alternatively, one may be alienated from others, if the project is an interpersonal relationship such as a friendship, marriage, or collegial relationship. In this case one's responses to the other are motivated by one's awareness of what one's moral theory requires. It is claimed that this obstructs a genuine and unmediated emotional response to the other as such. My aim here will be to argue that this very compelling criticism - call it the moral-alienation criticism - is nevertheless misdirected. The real culprit is not any particular moral theory, but rather a certain familiar personality type that may or may not adopt it. (shrink)

Guided to the notion of the eternal return by the philosophical intuitions of the Greek antiquity, Nietzsche turned to the physical sciences of his day in order to further his inquiry. This extensive intellectual engagement represented a genuine attempt to investigate the possible continuity of meaning between the mythical tradition, on the one hand, and the rational-empirical (i.e. scientific), on the other. In particular, Nietzsche was intrigued by the manner in which the relationship between myth and science played out in (...) the wide-ranging debates on the eternal recurrence and entropy. Obscuring the view, however, lay the debris of metaphysical imports into the discourse of secular modern science. In the course of his ambitious undertaking to disentangle physics from metaphysics, Nietzsche discerned a possibility for synthesising the scientific explanation for his ‘fundamental conception’ (EH: Z, §1) with the mythical wisdom of the ages. His inferences proved nothing short of explosive. The doctrine of the eternal return of the same, instead of the docile cosmic torpor, urged the radical revaluation of all values. The measure of the eternal return’s power was to dissolve its impersonation – the Übermensch – into a form of well-being. Nietzsche was convinced that his ‘mightiest idea’ (NF-1881:11[148]) illuminated the path we must follow lest we wish to incur the full force of the ‘frightening wisdom of Silenus’ (BT: §4). (shrink)

Several philosophers have argued that if we examine our lives in context of the cosmos at large, sub specie aeternitatis, we cannot escape life's meaninglessness. To see our lives as meaningful, we have to shun the point of view of the cosmos and consider our lives only in the narrower context of the here and now. I argue that this view is incorrect: life can be seen as meaningful also sub specie aeternitatis. While criticizing arguments by, among others, Simon Blackburn, (...) Nicholas Rescher, and Thomas Nagel, I show that what determines assessments of the meaning of a life are the standards of meaningfulness one endorses rather than the size of the context in which that life is assessed. Employing non-demanding standards of meaningfulness to assess a life is compatible with examining it in the context of the cosmos at large. That is also the case if we accept Nagel's claim that to examine a life sub specie aeternitatis is to examine it externally, impersonally and objectively: life can be evaluated as meaningful also when under these perspectives if the standards of meaningfulness we adopt are not overly challenging. Nor does the contingency of our existence, realized sub specie aeternitatis, render our life meaningless. Contrary to a commonly accepted view, then, examining our lives sub specie aeternitatis does not necessitate that we see them as meaningless. (shrink)

The self can be understood in objective metaphysical terms as a bundle of properties, as a substance, or as some other kind of entity on our metaphysical list of what there is. Such an approach explores the metaphysical nature of the self when regarded from a suitably impersonal, ontological perspective. It explores the nature and structure of the self in objective reality, that is, the nature and structure of the self from without. This is the objective self. I am (...) taking a different approach. In addition to objective reality, which is usually understood and explored from an impersonal, quasi-observational and metaphysically realist perspective, we can also explore the nature and structure of subjective reality. The nature and structure of subjective reality is defined by the nature and structure of first-personal, conscious experience. Subjective reality is as real as objective reality, and a metaphysical realist such as myself can endorse the existence of both kinds of ontology. The mental states that, as experienced from the first-personal or subjective perspective, capture the nature and structure of subjective reality, are included in objective reality. The questions to explore in a subjective ontology of the self concern the nature and structure of the self from the first-personal or subjective perspective, that is, the nature and structure of the self from within. This is the subjective self. (shrink)

Special issue: "Henri Bergson. Creative Evolution and Philosophy of Life." -/- I read the genealogy of the concept of energy through Bergson's Creative Evolution to argue that, historically, energy and its proto-concepts are grounded in spatialized notions of time. Bergson's work not only demands that we rethink energy and its relation to time, it also allows us to see that the concept of energy as we know it depicts time and materiality as a numerical multiplicity, which effaces the differences in (...) kind which are characteristic of energy transformations and real duration. To make this case, I first provide an analysis of Bergson’s concept of the cinematographical mechanism of thought, which splits duration into a composition of distinct states strung together by the idea of an impersonal becoming. Bergson claimed that this is the epistemological model for both ancient philosophy and modern science, meaning that it is also the epistemological ground within which energy concepts in western philosophy and science have been theorized. I then show how Bergson offers a way to overcome this model of theorizing through his method of intuition, and how these conclusions might be extended to future energy concepts. Thus, I argue that 1) Bergson’s work on duration allow us to interpret the genealogy of energy as the history of attempts to provide an account of change in terms of spatialized notions of time; 2) that his work offers a way of incorporating historicity into our understanding of energy; and 3) that thinking energy in the context of duration offers the possibility of conceptualizing energy as change. (shrink)

Novels like Fight Club or American Psycho are said to be instances of unreliable narration: the first person narrator presents an evidently distorted picture of the fictional world. The film adaptations of these novels are likewise said to involve unreliable narration. I resist this extension of the term ‘unreliable narration’ to film. My argument for this rests on the observation that unreliable narration requires a personal narrator while film typically involves an impersonal narrator. The kind of ambiguous story-telling that (...) we find in literary fiction with unreliable narrators, where for certain descriptions it is unclear whether what we’re told is an accurate account of what’s happening in the story world or not, can instead be achieved by conventionalized filmmaking techniques for reporting the contents of mental states, like the point of view shot, but especially the more ambiguous blended perspective shot. (shrink)

Many philosophers recognize that, as a matter of psychological fact, one can believe something valuable without valuing it. I argue that it is also possible to value something without believing it valuable. Agents can genuinely value things that they neither believe disvaluable nor believe valuable along a scale of impersonal value.

The ethics of biological procreation has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Yet, as I show in this paper, much of what has come to be called procreative ethics is conducted in a strangely abstract, impersonal mode, one which stands little chance of speaking to the practical perspectives of any prospective parent. In short, the field appears to be flirting with a strange sort of practical irrelevance, wherein its verdicts are answers to questions that no-one is (...) asking. I go on to articulate a theory of what I call existential grounding, a notion which explains the role that prospective children play in the lives of many would-be parents. Procreative ethicists who want their work to have real practical relevance must, I claim, start to engage with this markedly first-personal kind of practical consideration. (shrink)

Psychopathic behavior is characteristically amoral, but to date research studies have largely failed to identify any systematic differences in moral judgment capability between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. In this study, we investigate whether significant differences in moral judgment emerge when taking into account the phenotypic heterogeneity of the disorder through a well-validated distinction between psychopathic subtypes. Three groups of incarcerated participants [low-anxious psychopaths (n 1⁄4 12), high-anxious psychopaths (n 1⁄4 12) and non-psychopaths (n 1⁄4 24)] completed a moral judgment test involving (...) hypothet- ical dilemmas. The moral dilemmas featured personal (i.e. involving direct physical harm) or impersonal (i.e. involving indirect or remote harm) actions. Compared to non-psychopaths, both groups of psychopaths were significantly more likely to endorse the impersonal actions. However, only the low-anxious psychopaths were significantly more likely to endorse the personal harms when commission of the harm would maximize aggregate welfare the utilitarian choice. High-anxious psychopaths and non-psychopaths did not significantly differ in their personal moral judgments. These results provide novel laboratory evidence of abnormal moral judgment in psychopaths, as well as additional support for the importance of considering psychopathic subtypes. (shrink)

The past two centuries have been an extraordinary era for criticism and reform of institutions and social practices. Unprecedented egalitarian and humanitarian movements have arisen to protest and improve the condition of victims of every variety of evil, personal and impersonal, natural and social. The beneficiaries of these movements belong to all manner of groups: racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, the poor, the insane, the orphaned, the handicapped, the homosexual, the young, the elderly, the female, the animal, the unborn, (...) and so on. Many of these movements had few followers and fewer victories until deep into this century, but most had precursors in the last century, which challenged the moral legitimacy of accepted practices. (shrink)

En este artículo se analiza la teoría para la toma de decisiones y se contrasta la valía de los dilemas morales para explicar los mecanismos deliberativos. Se sostiene que una estrategia de decisión exitosa es aquella que es capaz de realizar los movimientos racionales, adaptativos y necesarios para llegar a un fin programado. Una aspiración de las éticas normativas y descriptivas es elaborar una teoría de la decisión práctica, sin importar los análisis racionales del modo en que se llegue al (...) fin. El artículo plantea los procesos relacionados al cambio y a la retroalimentación sin encasillar la teoría de las decisiones en posturas deontológicas, utilitaristas o emocionales. Se examina la valía de los dilemas morales y algunas críticas recurrentes y se concluye que, personales o impersonales, los dilemas parecen no explicar la complejidad de los procesos deliberativos. This article analyzes the theory for decision making and contrasts the value of moral dilemmas to explain the deliberative mechanisms. It is argued that a successful decision strategy is one that is capable of performing the rational, adaptive and necessary movements to reach a programmed end. It suggests that the processes related to change and feedback can be useful but insufficient explanations if the theory of decisions is framed to deontological, utilitarian or emotional postures. The value of moral dilemmas and some recurrent criticisms are examined and it is concluded that, personal or impersonal, the dilemmas do not seem to explain the complexity of the deliberative processes. (shrink)

The practice of official apology has a fairly poor reputation. Dismissed as ‘crocodile tears’ or cheap grace, such apologies are often seen by the public as an easy alternative to more punitive or expensive ways of taking real responsibility. I focus on what I call the role-playing criticism: the argument that someone who offers an apology in public cannot be appropriately apologetic precisely because they are only playing a role. I offer a qualified defence of official apologies against this objection, (...) considering them through the lens of fiduciary duties. This focus draws our attention to formal or impersonal relationships that are nevertheless normatively rich, capable of sustaining trust, concern, and care. At the same time, I highlight several pitfalls for fiduciary apologisers, including the tension between apology as a mode of truth telling and the duty of confidentiality. I consider whether the fiduciary apologiser, in reflecting on her fiduciary obligations, has ‘one thought too many’ for genuine apology, and argue that the issue of mixed motives is not limited to fiduciary contexts, cautioning against excessive idealism in our conception of apology. I conclude with some reflections on possible conflicts between fiduciary obligations and the conscientious desire to apologise. (shrink)

Difference and Repetition might be said to have brought about a Deleuzian Revolution in philosophy comparable to Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Kant had denounced the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics – self, world and God – as transcendent illusions, and Deleuze pushes Kant’s revolution to its limit by positing a transcendental field that excludes the coherence of the self, world and God in favour of an immanent and differential plane of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities. In the process, (...) he introduces numerous conceptual innovations into philosophy: the becoming of concepts; a transformation of the form of the question; an insistence that philosophy must start in the middle; an attempt to think in terms of multiplicities; the development of a new logic and a new metaphysics based on a concept of difference; a new conception of space as intensive rather than extensive; a conception of time as a pure and empty form; and an understanding of philosophy as a system in heterogenesis – that is, a system that entails a perpetual genesis of the heterogeneous, an incessant production of the new. -/- Keywords: concepts, becoming, multiplicity, singularity, the middle [au milieu], difference, intensity, time, system, the new. (shrink)

Many atheists argue that because gratuitous evil exists, God (probably) doesn’t. But doesn’t this commit atheists to wishing that God did exist, and to the pro-theist view that the world would have been better had God existed? This doesn’t follow. I argue that if all that evil still remains but is just no longer gratuitous, then, from an atheist perspective, that wouldn’t have been better. And while a counterfactual from which that evil is literally absent would have been impersonally better, (...) it wouldn’t have been better for anyone, not even for those who suffered such evils. (shrink)

In her Nobel speech in 2019, Olga Tokarczuk presented the category of tenderness as a new way of narrating the contemporary world. This article is a proposal for the analysis and interpretation of tenderness in ethical and aesthetic terms. (1) From an ethical perspective, tenderness is interpreted as an extension and complement of feminist relational ethics, i.e., the ethics of care. In the proposed approach, tenderness is a broader and more universal quality than care in the feminist understanding. This article (...) opens with a brief discussion of feminist interventions in ethics, with particular emphasis on the ethics of care. Next, the differences between care and tenderness are enumerated and described, in order to show how tenderness can serve as an extension and complement of the feminist ethic of care. These considerations are guided by the question of why tenderness is a better—more appropriate and more responsive to contemporary challenges—moral guidepost than care. (2) From the aesthetic perspective, tenderness is the negation of a contemplative, distanced, impersonal, and rational view of reality. As an aesthetic imperative, tenderness implies engaged experience of the beauty of reality in all of its manifestations. Therefore, in the last part of the article, existential tender attunement is described in aesthetic terms, as a position serving to sensitize others to the beauty and complexity of the post-anthropocentric world. (shrink)

Man avoids solitude through _divertissement_ because he is afraid of what staying alone entails: thinking about himself (Pascal). Furthermore, man seeks isolation in order to gain ambition and reputation (Montaigne). However, solitude is really different from isolation and it is a fundamental emotional condition. Heidegger’s analysis of the forms of boredom adapts to and relates to the specific dynamic of solitude, showing that it is a part of human being’s structure despite his experience appearing controversial. Even if man lives in (...) modern apartments and one-room apartments, he is in a condition of co-isolation (Sloterdijk) that differs from solitude. There is a space solitude (Foucault) that involves – or can involve – human isolation, but we only experience essential solitude in sleep (Merleau-Ponty, Blanchot, Perec) where man detached himself from himself and he is really alone, from himself and the others. The forms of solitude lead the analysis towards impersonal activity. (shrink)