Machine intelligence already helps medical staff with a number of tasks. Ethical decision-making, however, has not been handed over to computers. In this proof-of-concept study, we show how an algorithm based on Beauchamp and Childress’ prima-facie principles could be employed to advise on a range of moral dilemma situations that occur in medical institutions. We explain why we chose fuzzy cognitive maps to set up the advisory system and how we utilized machine learning to train it. We report on the (...) difficult task of operationalizing the principles of beneficence, non-maleficence and patient autonomy, and describe how we selected suitable input parameters that we extracted from a training dataset of clinical cases. The first performance results are promising, but an algorithmic approach to ethics also comes with several weaknesses and limitations. Should one really entrust the sensitive domain of clinical ethics to machine intelligence? (shrink)

This paper examines the debate between permissive and impermissive forms of Bayesianism. It briefly discusses some considerations that might be offered by both sides of the debate, and then replies to some new arguments in favor of impermissivism offered by Roger White. First, it argues that White’s (Oxford studies in epistemology, vol 3. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 161–186, 2010) defense of Indifference Principles is unsuccessful. Second, it contends that White’s (Philos Perspect 19:445–459, 2005) arguments against permissive views do not (...) succeed. (shrink)

Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists, such as semaglutide, and dual GLP-1 and glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) receptor agonists, such as tirzepatide, have been found to be effective for treating obesity and diabetes, significantly reducing weight and the risk or predicted risk of adverse cardiovascular events. There is a global shortage of these medications that could last several years and raises questions about how limited supplies should be allocated. We propose a fair-allocation framework that enables evaluation of the ethics of current (...) practices and could guide governments, professional societies, and physicians in allocation decisions. (shrink)

Empirical evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias; another is future-bias. Philosophical theorising about these biases often proceeds on two assumptions. First, that the two biases are _independent_: that they are explained by different factors (the independence assumption). Second, that there is a normative asymmetry between the two biases: one is rationally impermissible (near-bias) and the other rationally permissible (future-bias). The former assumption at least partly feeds into the latter: if the two biases were not explained by (...) different factors, then it would be less plausible that their normative statuses differ. This paper investigates the independence assumption and finds it unwarranted. In light of this, we argue, there is reason to question the normative asymmetry assumption. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that people naïvely represent time as dynamical (i.e. as containing robust temporal passage). Yet many contemporary B-theorists deny that it seems to us, in perceptual experience, as though time robustly passes. The question then arises as to why we represent time as dynamical if we do not have perceptual experiences which represent time as dynamical. We consider two hypotheses about why this might be: the temporally aperspectival replacement hypothesis and the moving open future hypothesis. We then empirically (...) test the moving open future hypothesis. According to that hypothesis, we represent the past as objectively fixed and the future open. And we represent that this objective openness moves as events that were open become fixed, such that in doing so, we represent a privileged moving present. We found no evidence for the moving open future hypothesis, which suggests that further investigation of the temporally aperspectival replacement hypothesis is called for. Our results also shed further light on our understanding of the respects in which we represent the future to be open, which, in turn, has implications for our theorising about the open future. (shrink)

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their (...) groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents. (shrink)

This paper offers both a theoretical and an experimental perspective on the relationship between connectionist and Classical (symbol-processing) models. Firstly, a serious flaw in Fodor and Pylyshyn’s argument against connectionism is pointed out: if, in fact, a part of their argument is valid, then it establishes a conclusion quite different from that which they intend, a conclusion which is demonstrably false. The source of this flaw is traced to an underestimation of the differences between localist and distributed representation. It has (...) been claimed that distributed representations cannot support systematic operations, or that if they can, then they will be mere implementations of traditional ideas. This paper presents experimental evidence against this conclusion: distributed representations can be used to support direct structure-sensitive operations, in a man- ner quite unlike the Classical approach. Finally, it is argued that even if Fodor and Pylyshyn’s argument that connectionist models of compositionality must be mere implementations were correct, then this would still not be a serious argument against connectionism as a theory of mind. (shrink)

ASP.net is one of the most widely used languages in web developing of its many advantages, so there are many lessons that explain its basics, so it should be an intelligent tutoring system that offers lessons and exercises for this language.why tutoring system? Simply because it is one-one teacher, adapts with all the individual differences of students, begins gradually with students from easier to harder level, save time for teacher and student, the student is not ashamed to make mistakes, and (...) more. Therefore, in this paper, we describe the design of an Intelligent Tutoring System for teaching ASP.net to help students learn ASP.net easily and smoothly. Tutor provides beginner level in ASP.net. Finally, we evaluated our tutor and the results were excellent by students and teacher. (shrink)

The New Evil Demon problem has been hotly debated since the case was introduced in the early 1980’s (e.g. Lehrer and Cohen 1983; Cohen 1984), and there seems to be recent increased interest in the topic. In a forthcoming collection of papers on the New Evil Demon problem (Dutant and Dorsch, forthcoming), at least two of the papers, both by prominent epistemologists, attempt to resist the problem by appealing to the distinction between justification and excuses. My primary aim here is (...) to critically evaluate this new excuse maneuver as a response to the New Evil Demon problem. -/- Their response attempts to give us reason to reject the idea that victims of the New Evil Demon have justification for believing as they do. I shall argue that this approach is ultimately unsuccessful, however much of value can be learned from these attempts. In particular, progress in the debate can be made by following those who advance the excuse maneuver and make explicit the connection between epistemic justification and epistemic norms. By doing so, the questions being debated are clarified, as is the methodology being used to attempt to answer them. (shrink)

In their Why Machines Will Never Rule the World, Landgrebe and Smith (2023) argue that it is impossible for artificial general intelligence (AGI) to succeed, on the grounds that it is impossible to perfectly model or emulate the “complex” “human neurocognitive system”. However, they do not show that it is logically impossible; they only show that it is practically impossible using current mathematical techniques. Nor do they prove that there could not be any other kinds of theories than those in (...) current use. Even if perfect theories were impossible or unlikely, perfection may not be needed and may even be unhelpful. (shrink)

All else being equal, most of us typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future rather than the past and negative experiences in the past rather than the future. Recent empirical evidence tends not only to support the idea that people have these preferences, but further, that people tend to prefer more painful experiences in their past rather than fewer in their future (and mutatis mutandis for pleasant experiences). Are such preferences rationally permissible, or are they, as time-neutralists contend, (...) rationally impermissible? And what is it that grounds their having the normative status that they do have? We consider two sorts of arguments regarding the normative status of future-biased preferences. The first appeals to the supposed arbitrariness of these preferences, and the second appeals to their upshot. We evaluate these arguments in light of the recent empirical research on future-bias. (shrink)

The revival of republicanism was meant to challenge the hegemony of liberalism in contemporary political theory on the grounds that liberals show insufficient concern with institutional protection against political misrule. This article challenges this view by showing how neorepublicanism, particularly on Philip Pettit’s formulation, demands no greater institutional protection than does political liberalism. By identifying neutrality between conceptions of the good as the constraint on institutional requirements that forces neorepublicanism into the liberal framework, the article shows that neutrality is what (...) neorepublicans must jettison to offer a tenable critique of liberalism. Only then can neorepublicans ensure greater protection against misrule by demanding that citizens participate more actively in politics. They can then also criticize liberalism for failing to appreciate the importance of such protection. (shrink)

How does trust relate to faith? We do not know of a theory-neutral way to answer our question. So, we begin with what we regard as a plausible theory of faith according to which, in slogan form, faith is resilient reliance. Next, we turn to contemporary theories of trust. They are not of one voice. Still, we can use them to indicate ways in which trust and faith might both differ from and resemble each other. This is what we do. (...) Along the way, we evaluate substantive issues related to these possible differences and similarities. (shrink)

Standard decision theory has trouble handling cases involving acts without finite expected values. This paper has two aims. First, building on earlier work by Colyvan (2008), Easwaran (2014), and Lauwers and Vallentyne (2016), it develops a proposal for dealing with such cases, Difference Minimizing Theory. Difference Minimizing Theory provides satisfactory verdicts in a broader range of cases than its predecessors. And it vindicates two highly plausible principles of standard decision theory, Stochastic Equivalence and Stochastic Dominance. The second aim is to (...) assess some recent arguments against Stochastic Equivalence and Stochastic Dominance. If successful, these arguments refute Difference Minimizing Theory. This paper contends that these arguments are not successful. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been overwhelming public health-care systems around the world. With demand exceeding the availability of medical resources in several regions, hospitals have been forced to invoke triage. To ensure that this difficult task proceeds in a fair and organised manner, governments scrambled experts to draft triage guidelines under enormous time pressure. Although there are similarities between the documents, they vary considerably in how much weight their respective authors place on the different criteria that they propose. Since most (...) of the recommendations do not come with ethical justifications, analysing them requires that one traces back these criteria to their underlying theories of distributive justice. In the literature, COVID-19 triage has been portrayed as a value conflict solely between utilitarian and egalitarian elements. While these two accounts are indeed the main antipodes, I shall show that in fact all four classic theories of distributive justice are involved: utilitarianism, egalitarianism, libertarianism, and communitarianism. Detecting these in the documents and classifying the suggested criteria accordingly enables one to understand the balancing between the different approaches to distributive justice—which is crucial for both managing the current pandemic and in preparation for the next global health crisis. (shrink)

Good physical experiments conform to the basic methodological standards of experimental design: they are objective, reliable, and valid. But is this also true of thought experiments? Especially problems of personal identity have engendered hypothetical scenarios that are very distant from the actual world. These imagined situations have been conspicuously ineffective at resolving conflicting intuitions and deciding between the different accounts of personal identity. Using prominent examples from the literature, I argue that this is due to many of these thought experiments (...) not adhering to the methodological standards that guide experimental design in nearly all other disciplines. I also show how empirically unwarranted background assumptions about human physiology render some of the hypothetical scenarios that are employed in the debate about personal identity highly misleading. (shrink)

This paper proposes to reorient the philosophical debate about peer disagreement. The problem of peer disagreement is normally seen as a problem about the extent to which disagreement provides one with evidence against one's own conclusions. It is thus regarded as a problem for individual inquiry. But things look different in more collaborative contexts. Ethical norms relevant to those contexts make a difference to the epistemology. In particular, we argue that a norm of mutual answerability applies to us when we (...) engage in shared inquiry with others, and precludes us from treating one another's conflicting judgments as evidence relevant to the dispute. From this it follows that standard philosophical accounts of peer disagreement—e.g., the Equal Weight View and the Total Evidence View—presuppose that the disagreeing parties are in a sense alienated from one another. It's doubtful that such forms of alienated disagreement should be treated as the central case. (shrink)

Structural analogies connect Williamson’s epistemology and action theory: for example, action is the direction-of-fit mirror image of knowledge, and knowledge stands to belief as action stands to intention. These structural analogies, for Williamson, are meant to illuminate more generally how ‘mirrors’ reversing direction of fit should be understood as connecting the spectrum of our cognitive and practically oriented mental states. This paper has two central aims, one negative and the other positive. The negative aim is to highlight some intractable problems (...) with Williamson’s preferred analogical picture, which links the cognitive and the practical through the nexus of direction-of-fit mirroring. The positive aim of the paper is to propose a better alternative. In particular, we show that an achievement-theoretic proposal captures what is in common across the range of attitudes that exhibit the kind of structure that knowledge-belief, action-desire/intention do, while at the same time avoiding the problems shown to face Williamson’s proposed picture. Moreover, we draw attention to several key theoretical benefits of embracing our proposed achievement-theoretic picture, including some of the key benefits of the knowledge-first programme that Williamson’s own analogies were designed to secure. (shrink)

Theorists attending to the epistemic condition on responsibility are divided over whether moral ignorance is ever exculpatory. While those who argue that reasonable expectation is required for blameworthiness often maintain that moral ignorance can excuse, theorists who embrace a quality of will approach to blameworthiness are not sanguine about the prospect of excuses among morally ignorant wrongdoers. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that moral ignorance always reflects insufficient care for what matters morally, and therefore that moral ignorance never excuses. Furthermore, (...) quality of will theorists treat their skepticism about excuses for the morally ignorant as a natural implication of their approach. It is therefore unsurprising that, while many have argued for the blamelessness of certain morally ignorant agents on grounds concerning reasonable expectation, the possibility that morally ignorant agents might be blameless even according to quality of will views has not been adequately addressed. I illustrate and explain how it is possible for morally ignorant agents to display sufficient care for the morally relevant features of their wrong behavior. Thus, even if quality of will views are correct, moral ignorance sometimes excuses. (shrink)

John Rawls thinks republicanism is compatible with his political liberalism. Philip Pettit insists that the two conflict in important ways. In this paper, I make sense of this dispute by employing David Chalmers’s method of elimination to reveal the meaning underlying key terms in Rawls’s political liberalism and Pettit’s republicanism. This procedure of disambiguating terms will show how the two theories defend the same institutional arrangement on the same grounds. The procedure thus vindicates Rawls’s view of the two theories being (...) compatible. The reason for this compatibility is that both theories are politicized—that is, they are constructed to attract the compliance of all reasonable members of a modern, pluralistic society. (shrink)

Evidential Uniqueness is the thesis that, for any batch of evidence, there’s a unique doxastic state that a subject with that evidence should have. One of the most common kinds of objections to views that violate Evidential Uniqueness are arbitrariness objections – objections to the effect that views that don’t satisfy Evidential Uniqueness lead to unacceptable arbitrariness. The goal of this paper is to examine a variety of arbitrariness objections that have appeared in the literature, and to assess the extent (...) to which these objections bolster the case for Evidential Uniqueness. After examining a number of different arbitrariness objections, I’ll conclude that, by and large, these objections do little to bolster the case for Evidential Uniqueness. (shrink)

Perception involves the processing of content or information about the world. In what form is this content represented? I argue that perception is widely compositional. The perceptual system represents many stimulus features (including shape, orientation, and motion) in terms of combinations of other features (such as shape parts, slant and tilt, common and residual motion vectors). But compositionality can take a variety of forms. The ways in which perceptual representations compose are markedly different from the ways in which sentences or (...) thoughts are thought to be composed. I suggest that the thesis that perception is compositional is not itself a concrete hypothesis with specific predictions; rather it affords a productive framework for developing and evaluating specific empirical hypotheses about the form and content of perceptual representations. The question is not just whether perception is compositional, but how. Answering this latter question can provide fundamental insights into perception. (shrink)

Influential cases have been provided that seem to suggest that one can fail to have knowledge because of the social environment. If not a distinct kind of social defeater, is there a uniquely social phenomenon that defeats knowledge? My aim in this paper is to explore these questions. I shall argue that despite initial appearances to the contrary, we have no reason to accept a special class of social defeater, nor any essentially social defeat phenomenon. We can explain putative cases (...) of social defeat with our existing epistemological apparatus. (shrink)

The mental health crisis and loneliness epidemic have sparked a growing interest in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots as a potential solution. This report examines the benefits and risks of incorporating chatbots in mental health treatment. AI is used for mental health diagnosis and treatment decision-making and to train therapists on virtual patients. Chatbots are employed as always-available intermediaries with therapists, flagging symptoms for human intervention. But chatbots are also sold as stand-alone virtual therapists or as friends and lovers. (...) There is evidence that these uses of AI and chatbots can provide better quality service, improve accessibility, and lower costs. The systems can reduce the stigma and shame of sharing their problems and leverage a mass of biometric and behavioral data to supplement self-reports. As the systems' intelligence rapidly improves, they will need to be rigorously tested for the accuracy and precision of their diagnoses and the quality of their interactions with patients. As chatbots become indistinguishable from humans and leverage their superhuman capacity to detect affect and draw on knowledge of a patient’s life, patients will be drawn to attribute personality to and relationship with the chatbot. Consequently, it will be essential to study what the “therapeutic alliance” with an actual human counselor provides and the risks of patients attributing such a relationship to a one-sided or “parasocial” relationship. (shrink)

The full compliance assumption has been the focus of much recent criticism of ideal theory. Making this assumption, critics argue, is to ignore the important issue of how to actually make individuals compliant. In this article, I show why this criticism is misguided by identifying the key role full compliance plays in modelling fairness. But I then redirect the criticism by showing how it becomes appropriate when Rawls and other ideal theorists expect their model of fairness to guide real-world political (...) practice. Attempts to establish institutions conforming to this ideal could have undesirable consequences and might even undermine fairness itself. (shrink)

The physicalist credo is that the world is physical. But some phenomena, such as minds, morals, and mathematics, appear to be nonphysical. While an uncompromising physicalism would reject these, a conciliatory physicalism needn’t if it can account for them in terms of an underlying physical basis. Any such account must refer to the nonphysical. But won’t this unavoidable reference to the nonphysical conflict with the physicalist credo? This essay aims to clarify this problem and introduce a novel solution that relies (...) on a distinction between “circumstantial” facts that are based in the circumstances and “acircumstantial” facts that are not. This is used in two ways. First, physicalism is restricted to circumstantial facts: only they must have a physical basis that does not refer to the nonphysical. Second, facts accounting for the nonphysical are not restricted to the circumstantial: they may refer to the nonphysical if they are acircumstantial. Facts about how the physical accounts for the nonphysical therefore do not conflict with the physicalist’s credo. This provides a credible answer to what physicalism could be. (shrink)

Principles of justice, David Estlund argues, cannot be falsified by people’s unwillingness to satisfy them. In his Utopophobia, Estlund rejects the view that justice must bend to human motivation to deliver practical implications for how institutions ought to function. In this paper, I argue that a substantive argument against such bending of justice principles must challenge the reasons for making these principles sensitive to motivational limitations. Estlund, however, provides no such challenge. His dispute with benders of justice is therefore a (...) verbal one over the true meaning of justice, which need not worry those with the intuition that justice should perform a function that requires bending. By focusing on John Rawls’s reasons for bending his justice principles, I point towards a substantive critique of bent justice. (shrink)

It is intuitive that circumstantial ignorance, even when culpable, can mitigate blameworthiness for morally wrong behavior. In this paper I suggest an explanation of why this is so. The explanation offered is that an agent’s degree of blameworthiness for some action depends at least in part upon the quality of will expressed in that action, and that an agent’s level of awareness when performing a morally wrong action can make a difference to the quality of will that is expressed in (...) it. This explanation makes use of Holly Smith’s distinction between benighting and benighted actions as well as a notion developed here called “capture.”. (shrink)

‘Gender disappointment’ is regularly reported by those whose child’s sex does not match the sex that they, the parent, desired. With symptoms ranging from mere fleeting sadness to documented cases of serious depression, alienation from one’s child, and emotional suffering, it is clear that so-called ‘gender disappointment’ is a serious issue, that has, as yet, seen little philosophical attention (though see Hendl and Browne 2020). In this chapter I explore gender disappointment, not from the perspective of a parent who ended (...) up with the child of the wrong sex at birth, but rather, from the perspective of a different kind of gender disappointment: the transgender person who grew up and only then disappointed their parents by turning out to be the ‘wrong’ gender. This perspective, I argue, reveals a great deal about the shared gender essentialism at the heart of patriarchal and cissexist ideology. Moreover, I will argue that it reveals the underlying propertarian relationship of parents to their children under contemporary capitalism – a troubling relationship that legitimates the treatment of children as objects to be designed and controlled as commodities at the whims of parents. In this way I disagree with Whyman when he writes that “a preference for having a child of one sex over the other should be considered one of those irrational things of which some sense can nevertheless be made – like aesthetic taste” (Whyman 2021, 113-114). I argue, to the contrary, that the desire for a child of one particular gender is not akin to a mere unproblematic aesthetic preference. Instead, and following the rich feminist tradition of thinking about the patriarchal origins of sexual desire, I argue that we must see these desires as troubling reflections of dominant patriarchal and cissexist ideology, underwritten by a particular neoliberal capitalist mode of production. Moreover, we can seek to change those desires. (shrink)

This chapter will discuss the relation of physicalism to social ontology, and explores problems that social ontology raises for physicalism. Physicalism is often understood to be the view that all facts—the social ones included—are physical facts, or at least are exhaustively determined by physical facts. While this view is widely endorsed, social phenomena challenge physicalism in several ways, both challenging the coherence of claims of physicalism and raising potential counterexamples.

While philosophical questions about health and disease have attracted much attention in recent decades, and while opinions are divided on most issues, influential accounts seem to embrace negativism about health, according to which health is the absence of disease. Some subscribe to unrestricted negativism, which claims that negativism applies not only to the concepts of health and disease as used by healthcare professionals but also to the lay concept that underpins everyday thinking. Whether people conceptualize health in this manner has (...) implications for medical care and public health, and so we set out to examine this claim in two studies. Participants were asked to assess and compare the health states of two people presented in two vignettes. We found that both lay people and medical students conceptualize health as something more than the absence of disease. We argue that our findings highlight a need to rethink unrestricted negativism and indicate a need to rethink the way the debate has traditionally focused on disease. (shrink)

The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI) states that the world we live in is just one among many parallel worlds. It is widely believed that because of this commitment to parallel worlds, the MWI violates common sense. Some go so far as to reject the MWI on this basis. This is despite its myriad of advantages to physics (e.g. consistency with relativity theory, mathematical simplicity, realism, determinism, etc.). Here, we make the case that common sense in fact favors (...) the MWI. We argue that causal explanations are commonsensical only when they are local causal explanations. We present several quantum mechanical experiments that seem to exhibit nonlocal “action at a distance”. Under the assumption that only one world exists, these experiments seem immune to local causal explanation. However, we show that the MWI, by taking all worlds together, can provide local causal explanations of the experiments. The MWI therefore restores common sense to physical explanation. (shrink)

According to group-agent realism, treating groups as agents with their own intentional states, irreducible to those of the group members, helps us explain and predict the groups’ behavior. This paper challenges this view. When groups judge logically interconnected propositions, group members often have incentives to misrepresent their beliefs of propositions they care less about in order to increase the probability of their groups adopting their view of propositions they consider more important. Aggregating such untruthful judgments may lead to the group (...) forming false beliefs. Treating groups as agents will then not help us explain or predict their behavior. (shrink)

Automated influence is one of the most pervasive applications of artificial intelligence in our day-to-day lives, yet a thoroughgoing account of its associated individual and societal harms is lacking. By far the most widespread, compelling, and intuitive account of the harms associated with automated influence follows what I call the control argument. This argument suggests that users are persuaded, manipulated, and influenced by automated influence in a way that they have little or no control over. Based on evidence about the (...) effectiveness of targeted advertising as well as empirical results about the nature of attentional control, I provide reasons to reject this argument. In turn, I use C. Thi Nguyen’s theory of value collapse to develop a new account of the harmfulness of automated influence. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that images, whether in the world or in the head, do not have a privileged analysis into constituent parts. They are thought to lack the sort of syntactic structure necessary for representing complex contents and entering into sophisticated patterns of inference. I reject this assumption. “Image grammars” are models in computer vision that articulate systematic principles governing the form and content of images. These models are empirically credible and can be construed as literal grammars for images. (...) Images can have rich syntactic structure, though of a markedly different form than sentences in language. (shrink)

An increasingly popular theory of moral responsibility, Attributionism, identifies attitudes as the locus of direct responsibility. And yet, two agents with qualitatively identical attitudes may differ in their responsibility due to a difference in whether they act on those attitudes. On the most plausible interpretation of Attributionism, attitude duplicates differ in their responsibility only with respect to the scope of what they’re responsible for: one agent is responsible for only their attitudes, while the other is responsible for their attitudes and (...) for acting in a way that reflects those attitudes. Against this, I argue that attitude duplicates may also differ with respect to their degrees of praiseworthiness, and that this is best explained by either the effort or sacrifice instantiated in one’s actions—explanations unavailable to Attributionism. If this is correct, then Attributionism fails to provide an adequate account of praiseworthiness, and therefore fails as a theory of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Many take Kantian ethics to founder when it comes to our duties to animals. In this paper, I advocate a novel approach to this problem. The paper is divided into three sections. In the first, I canvass various passages from Kant in order to set up the problem. In the second, I introduce a novel approach to this problem. In the third, I defend my approach from various objections. By way of preview: I advocate rejecting the premise that nonhuman animals (...) are nonrational. (shrink)

Default logic has been a very active research topic in artificial intelligence since the early 1980s, but has not received as much attention in the philosophical literature thus far. This paper shows one way in which the technical tools of artificial intelligence can be applied in contemporary epistemology by modeling a paradigmatic case of deep disagreement using default logic. In §1 model-building viewed as a kind of philosophical progress is briefly motivated, while §2 introduces the case of deep disagreement we (...) aim to model. On the heels of this, §3 defines our formal framework, viz., a refined Horty-style default logic. §4 then uses the framework to model deep disagreement, and finally §5 provides a critical discussion of the result. (shrink)

Biodiversity loss is an immense ecological crisis of our time. But while “biodiversity” has become a buzzword in media and policy, conservationists have found it difficult to build a common understanding on the nature and severity of biodiversity loss and the means to tackle it. Perhaps surprisingly, many biologists and philosophers have proposed that biodiversity might be best defended with reference to its aesthetic value. This article explores whether aesthetic values could provide strong support for biodiversity conservation. By exploring the (...) question from the viewpoints of species diversity, ecosystem diversity, and genetic diversity, we argue that there is a mismatch between apparent and real biodiversity and that aesthetics can, at best, give only limited support for biodiversity conservation. (shrink)

In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been fighting their own (...) battle against the abstraction of theory from the realities of trans lives and oppression. Vivian Namaste (2000) and Jay Prosser (1998) argued that contemporary gender theory failed to justice to the actuality of trans life, retreating instead to understanding trans life through literary archetypes and idealized radical figures. In this chapter I’ll compare Mills’ critique of ideal theory with the transfeminist critique of 1990s gender theory, arguing that they share much in common. Centrally, both critiques share an underlying commitment to theory needing to be grounded in the actuality of oppression and power relations. This common thread, I suggest, must continue to guide transfeminist thought and action: contra Marquis Bey (2022) transfeminist thought and praxis must continue to be about trans lives, about the oppression of trans women, and about ways of actually achieving liberation from our current dire position. (shrink)

abstract: Richard T. Greener was the first Black graduate of Harvard College in 1870, and he served briefly as a professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina from 1873 to 1877. Historians and biographers have uncovered many of the facts of his unusual life, but to date his philosophy has remained unappreciated. This essay reconstructs his philosophy from published and archival sources, evaluating it in relationship to the work of his better-known mentor, Frederick Douglass. I argue that Greener’s (...) account of Reconstruction politics, especially his arguments on land redistribution, race, and Black intellectual history, possess notable advantages over Douglass’s views. Of particular importance is that he defended a more robust republican state than did his hero, while rejecting the originalism and constitutionalism that characterize Douglass’s liberalism. (shrink)

In this chapter, we introduce the perennial and sometimes sprawling topic of properties, with a brief historical sketch from Ancient to Modern philosophy throughout various cultures and traditions. We argue that the importance of properties can be shown by explaining what explanatory work they can do in philosophical theorising across many areas of philosophy. The chapters in this volume do just that in their specific ways. We also outline the structure of the volume and summarise each Part, first describing the (...) larger context of each Part and then the upshot of each chapter. (shrink)

We start this Volume 13 with the usual Editorial Note reviewing the main features of Economics and Business Letters. EBL is an online letter-type journal, free both for authors and readers, covering all areas of economics and business and with theoretical and empirical letters.

The debate on ideal theory focuses mainly on whether it can provide a long-term target and a metric for assessing the justice of different institutional arrangements in non-ideal theory. Both critics and defenders of ideal theory typically overlook the role it plays in a model of fairness that can restrict the range of permissible arrangements under non-ideal conditions. In this paper, I explain ideal theory’s fairness role and its part in ensuring an institutional structure that benefits everyone in a society. (...) Critics of ideal theory therefore cannot reject it as simply useless. But I consider how they can question the attractiveness of an ideal-theory-based fairness constraint on non-ideal theory. (shrink)

A topic of special importance when it comes to responsibility and implicit bias is responsibility for knowledge. Are there strategies for becoming more responsible and respectful knowers? How might we work together, not just as individuals but members of collectives, to reduce the negative effects of bias on what we see and believe, as well as the wrongs associated with epistemic injustice? To explore these questions, Chapter 9 introduces the concept of epistemic responsibility, a set of practices developed through the (...) cultivation of basic epistemic virtues, such as open-mindedness, epistemic humility, and diligence that help knowers seek information about themselves, others, and the world. (shrink)