Collected and edited by Noah Levin -/- Table of Contents: -/- UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The (...) Ethics of our Digital Selves (Noah Levin) -/- UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE “GREATER GOOD” 7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas) 8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge) 9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis) 10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin) 11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) 12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) -/- UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS 13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar) 14 John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (Ben Davies) 15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman) 16 Rape, Date Rape, and the “Affirmative Consent” Law in California (Noah Levin) 17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar) 18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes) -/- UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS 19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the “Experience Machine” (Prabhpal Singh) 20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill) 21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge) 22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin) 23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton) 24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill) -/- UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY 25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato) 26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley) 27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant) 28 The Virtues (Aristotle) 29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko). (shrink)

I examine issues in the philosophy of religion at the intersection of what possibilities there are and what a God, as classically conceived in the theistic philosophical tradition, would be able to do. The discussion is centered around arguing for an incompatibility between theism and two principles about possibility and ability, and exploring what theists should say about these incompatibilities. -/- I argue that theism entails that certain kinds and amounts of evil are impossible. This puts theism in conflict with (...) popular principles of modal recombination. However, theists have plausible explanations for the violations of recombination that they posit, and can suitably amend these principles without giving up their usefulness in accounting for what possibilities there are. -/- I also argue that despite the impossibility of these evils, God is able to bring these evils about. This puts theism in conflict with the principle that no one is able to do the impossible. However, theists can give a plausible account of why God is unique in being able to do the impossible, and have distinctive resources to address the arguments in favor of the idea that no one is able to do the impossible. And by denying this principle, theists are able to resolve several otherwise difficult puzzles, including reconciling conflicts between the divine attributes. (shrink)

I argue for the viability of one neglected way of developing supervenience-based objections to metaethical non-naturalism. This way goes through a principle known as ‘Hume’s Dictum’, according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. I challenge several objections to the Hume’s Dictum-based argument. In the course of doing so, I formulate and motivate modest and precise versions of Hume’s Dictum, illustrate how arguments employing these principles might proceed, and argue that the Hume’s Dictum argument enjoys some advantages (...) relative to other supervenience-based objections to non-naturalism. (shrink)

Can groups really be agents or is group agency just a fiction? Christian List and Philip Pettit argue influentially for group-agent realism by showing how certain groups form and act on attitudes in ways they take to be unexplainable at the level of the individual agents constituting them. Group agency is therefore considered not a fiction or a metaphor but a reality we must account for in explanations of certain social phenomena. In this paper, I challenge this defence of group-agent (...) realism by showing how it is undermined by individual-level analysis of how individuals interact within groups. While group agency can be a useful fiction, real agents are at the individual level, not the collective level. (shrink)

To meet the luck objection to incompatibilism, philosophers such as Timothy O’Connor, Randolph Clark, and William Rowe resurrected the Reidian notion of agent causation, which implies the “Substance-Causal Thesis” (SCT): some causes are fundamentally substances, not events. I examine an objection to SCT by C. D. Broad, developed by Carl Ginet, that substances cannot cause events because substances cannot explain why events happen when they do. The objection fails as it rests on a demand for contrastive explanations of free actions. (...) However, I show that a slightly different objection succeeds in showing SCT false. (shrink)

There is a very plausible principle linking abilities and possibilities: If S is able to Φ, then it is metaphysically possible that S Φ’s. Jack Spencer recently proposed a class of counterexamples to this principle involving the ability to know certain propositions. I renew an argument against these counterexamples based on the unknowability of Fitch propositions. In doing so, I provide a new argument for the unknowability of Fitch propositions and show that Spencer’s counterexamples are in tension with a principle (...) weaker than the one linking abilities and possibilities. (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)

I argue that classical theism is in tension with a kind of modal recombination principle known as ‘cut-and-paste’. I develop this tension at length, giving two arguments against theism based on cut-and-paste. I then both lay out and respond to various original proposals for reconciling theism with cut-and-paste. I conclude by measuring the cost of having to deny cut-and-paste. I argue that while there is an intuitive cost to this consequence of theism, theists also have plausible ways of addressing various (...) motivations for cut-and-paste. (shrink)

Logic and humour tend to be mutually exclusive topics. Humour plays off ambiguity, while classical logic falters over it. Formalizing puns is therefore impossible, since puns have ambiguous meanings for their components. However, I will use Independence-Friendly logic to formally encode the multiple meanings within a pun. This will show a general strategy of how to logically represent ambiguity and reveals humour as an untapped source of novel logical structure.

Every day, thousands of polls, surveys, and rating scales are employed to elicit the attitudes of humankind. Given the ubiquitous use of these instruments, it seems we ought to have firm answers to what is measured by them, but unfortunately we do not. To help remedy this situation, we present a novel approach to investigate the nature of attitudes. We created a self-transforming paper survey of moral opinions, covering both foundational principles, and current dilemmas hotly debated in the media. This (...) survey used a magic trick to expose participants to a reversal of their previously stated attitudes, allowing us to record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite view of what they had stated only moments ago. The result showed that the majority of the reversals remained undetected, and a full 69% of the participants failed to detect at least one of two changes. In addition, participants often constructed coherent and unequivocal arguments supporting the opposite of their original position. These results suggest a dramatic potential for flexibility in our moral attitudes, and indicates a clear role for self-attribution and post-hoc rationalization in attitude formation and change. (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)

Brock and Glasgow recently introduced a new definition of paradox and argue that this conception of paradox itself leads to paradox, the so-called Paradox Paradox. I show that they beg the questions during the course of their argument, but, more importantly, do so in a philosophically interesting way: it reveals a counterexample to the equivalence between being a logical truth and having a probability of one. This has consequences regarding norms of rationality, undermining the grounds for the Conjunction Fallacy.

I outline and defend a version of the aesthetic argument for the existence of God, according to which theism explains our capacity for subjective aesthetic experience better than its major competitor, naturalism. I argue that naturalism fails to adequately explain the nature and range of our aesthetic experiences, since these are amenable neither to standard Darwinian explanation nor to explanation in terms of more complex sociobiological mechanisms such as sexual selection or between-group selection. I concede that aesthetic experience may be (...) an evolutionary spandrel but argue that the conjunction of this thesis with naturalism is highly improbable given the prevalence of beauty in the natural world. Theism, on the other hand, furnishes a robust personal explanation of aesthetic experience, since on theism God has both good reasons to bring such experiences about and the power to do so. I address an objection to the theistic explanation from broadly negative aesthetic experiences, arguing that God plausibly has many reasons to allow these. I contend that this formulation of the argument is superior to other extant versions, since it does not depend on controversial probability judgments, dubious analogies between natural phenomena and human artefacts, or objectivism about aesthetic values. (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)

I examine two related arguments for the claim that if God is omnipotent, God cannot lack abilities such as the ability to do evil or to act irrationally. Both arguments concern the idea that omnipotence is inconsistent with being dominated with respect to abilities. I raise new issues in the formulation of such dominance principles about ability, and attempt to solve them. I also discuss and reject existing objections to these arguments. I conclude that these arguments are promising but not (...) conclusive, and that important work remains to be done in formulating the relevant dominance principles. (shrink)

Institutions promoting republican freedom as non-domination are commonly believed to differ significantly from institutions promoting negative freedom as non-interference. Philip Pettit, the most prominent contemporary defender of this view, also maintains that these republican institutions are neutral between the different conceptions of the good that characterise a modern society. This paper shows why these two views are incompatible. By analysing the institutional requirements Pettit takes as constitutive of republican freedom, I show how they also promote negative freedom by reducing overall (...) interference. To avoid this result, republican institutions must be more restrictive and require that citizens conform to a life of political engagement. But then republican freedom will not be a neutral ideal. Rejecting negative freedom therefore means sacrificing neutrality. (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)

In the debate on how we ought to define political freedom, some definitions are criticized for implying that no one can ever be free to perform any action. In this paper, I show how the possibility of freedom depends on a definition that finds an appropriate balance between absence of interference and protection against interference. To assess the possibility of different conceptions of freedom, I consider the trade-offs they make between these two dimensions. I find that pure negative freedom is (...) clearly possible. Republican freedom might also be possible, though its protection requirement is too vague for a definitive verdict. Finally, the recently proposed ‘freedom as independence’ is impossible since it is an attempt to avoid the unavoidable trade-off. (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)

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We asked our (...) participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (69.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift. This can be contrasted with the established polls tracking the Swedish election, which registered maximally 10% voters open for a swing. Our results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to change. (shrink)

In this essay, I defend a mind-body dualism, according to which human minds are immaterial substances that exercise non-redundant causal powers over bodies, against the notorious problem of psychophysical causation. I explicate and reply to three formulations of the problem: (i) the claim that, on dualism, psychophysical causation is inconsistent with physical causal closure, (ii) the claim that psychophysical causation on the dualist view is intolerably mysterious, and (iii) Jaegwon Kim’s claim that dualism fails to account for causal pairings. Ultimately, (...) I conclude that these objections fail and that dualist interactionism is no more problematic or mysterious than physical causation. (shrink)

In some recent work, John N.Williams defends a new objection to the defeasibility theory of knowledge. But the objection is of wider interest, since Williams also suggests that this style of objection may undermine other theories of knowledge. I distinguish two versions of Williams’ objection. I then show that the first version relies on false conceptual principles, and the second relies on a specific and dubious conception of the goal of the analysis of knowledge.

Recognition of the plasticity of development — from gene expression to neuroplasticity — is increasingly undermining the traditional distinction between structure and function, or anatomy and behavior. At the same time, dynamic systems theory — a set of tools and concepts drawn from the physical sciences — has emerged as a way of describing what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “dynamic anatomy” of the living organism. This article surveys and synthesizes dynamic systems models of development from biology, neuroscience, and psychology in (...) order to propose an integrated account of growth, learning, and behavior. Key to this account is the concept of self-differentiation or symmetry-breaking. I argue that development can be understood as a cascade of symmetry-breaking events brought about by the ongoing interactions of multiple, nested, nonlinear dynamic systems whose self-organizing behaviors gradually alter their own anatomical conditions. I begin by introducing the concept of symmetry-breaking as a way of understanding anatomical development. I then extend this approach to motor development by arguing that the organism’s behavior grows along with its body, like a new organ. Finally, I argue that the organism’s behavior and its world grow together dialectically, each driving the other to become more complex and asymmetrical through its own increasing asymmetry. Thus development turns out to be a form of cognition or sense-making, and cognition a form of development. (shrink)

Public reason liberals expect individuals to have justificatory reasons for their views of certain political issues. This paper considers how groups can, and whether they should, give collective public reasons for their political decisions. A problem is that aggregating individuals’ consistent judgments on reasons and a decision can produce inconsistent collective judgments. The group will then fail to give a reason for its decision. The paper considers various solutions to this problem and defends a deliberative procedure by showing how it (...) incentivizes information sharing and leads to outcomes most acceptable to the group members. (shrink)

Rawlsian ideal theory is meant to perform various roles in non-ideal theory. In this paper, I distinguish between three roles, and I consider the extent to which we can expect ideal theory to perform them. It is meant to serve as a target to guide non-ideal theorising in the long-term. It is also supposed to provide a way of comparing different injustices to tell us which is worst and therefore in most urgent need of a remedy. Finally, ideal theory is (...) the basis for a model of fairness that restricts the set of morally permissible measures in non-ideal theory. I show how the first two roles—the target and urgency roles—are less plausible than the fairness role. (shrink)

What are the justifications for and constraints on the use of force in self-defense? In his book The Morality of Defensive Force, Jonathan Quong presents the moral status account to address this and other fundamental questions. According to the moral status account, moral liability to defensive harm is triggered by treating others with less respect than they are due. At the same time, Quong rejects the relevance of culpability to the morality of defensive harming. In this article I argue that (...) this rejection of culpability is unfounded and that Quong fails to establish his account as superior to the culpability account of liability to defensive harm. (shrink)

Knowledge is analyzed in terms of the cost incurred when mistakes are made — things we should have known better, but didn’t. Following Wittgenstein at the end of On Certainty, an Epistemic Wager, similar to Pascal’s Wager, is set up to represent the cost differences not in belief vs. disbelief, but in knowledge vs. skepticism. This leads to a core class of absolutely certain knowledge, related to Moorean Facts, that is integrated into our everyday lives. This core knowledge is resistant (...) to both radical skepticism, such as a Cartesian Demon, and Gettier style objections, while providing a small, but sufficient base for future epistemological research. (shrink)

Positive political theorists typically deny the possibility of collective agents by understanding aggregation problems to imply that groups are not rational decision-makers. This view contrasts with List and Pettit’s view that such problems actually imply the necessity of accounting for collective agents in explanations of group behaviour. In this paper, I explore these conflicting views and ask whether positive political theorists should alter their individualist analyses of groups like legislatures, political parties, and constituent assemblies. I show how we fail to (...) appreciate the significance of strategic voting and agenda control by treating groups as agents. I, therefore, conclude that positive political theorists should cling to their individualist approach and maintain that groups are not agents. (shrink)

Indicative conditionals and tendency causal claims are closely related (e.g., Frosch and Byrne, 2012), but despite these connections, they are usually studied separately. A unifying framework could consist in their dependence on probabilistic factors such as high conditional probability and statistical relevance (e.g., Adams, 1975; Eells, 1991; Douven, 2008, 2015). This paper presents a comparative empirical study on differences between judgments on tendency causal claims and indicative conditionals, how these judgments are driven by probabilistic factors, and how these factors differ (...) in their predictive power for both causal and conditional claims. (shrink)

Abstract Criteria of scientific value are of different kinds. This paper concerns ultimate criteria, i.e. the axiology of science. Most ultimate criteria are multi?dimensional. This gives rise to an aggregation problem, which cannot be adequately solved with reference to attitudes and behaviour within the scientific community. Therefore, in many cases, there is no fact of the matter as to whether one theory is better than another. This, in turn, creates problems for methodology.

This article argues that Kant’s attack on the ars oratoria in §53 of the Critique of the Power of Judgement is directed against eighteenth-century school rhetoric, in particular against the ‘art of speech’ (Redekunst) of Johann Christoph Gottsched. It is pointed out that Kant suggests a revision of Gottsched’s conception of ‘true eloquence’, which was the predominant rhetorical ideal at the time. On this basis, and in response to recent discussions on ‘Kantian rhetoric’, Kant’s own ideal of speech is adressed. (...) It emerges that he favours a culture of speech embedded in moral cultivation, which excludes any disciplinary form of rhetoric. (shrink)

In Reason, Truth and History and certain related writings, Hilary Putnam attacked the fact-value distinction. This paper criticizes his arguments and defends the distinction. Putnam claims that factual statements presuppose values, that “the empirical world depends upon our criteria of rational acceptability,” and that “we must have criteria of rational acceptability to even have an empirical world.” The present paper argues that these claims are mistaken.

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)

Aslına bakılırsa gündelik yaşam mücadelesi içinde hemen herkes anbean gündelik dilin mantıksızlığıyla da mücadele halindedir. Bu halin göstergesi olan tavır ve tutumlara odaklandığımızda ortak değerler üzerinden bir mücadele için, kendimize ve başkalarına yapabilirlikler yaratan alıştırmalar önerebiliyor muyuz? Başkalarının önerdiği yaratıcı ve yapabilirlikler belirleyen alıştırmaların farkına varabiliyor muyuz?

In his late ‘A Plea for Excuses’, John L. Austin suggests labelling his philosophy ‘linguistic phenomenology’. This article examines which idea of phenomenology Austin had in mind when he coined this term and what light this sheds on his method. It is argued that the key to answering this question can be found in Merleau-Ponty’s 'Phenomenology of Perception', which Austin must have been familiar with. Merleau-Ponty presents phenomenology in a way Austin could embrace: it is a method, it aims at (...) description and uses reduction, it is a non-idealistic study of essence, and interprets intentionality as ‘operative’. In this light, Austin’s method can be appreciated more fully. (shrink)

A moralised conception of freedom is based on a normative theory. Understanding it therefore requires an analysis of this theory. In this paper, I show how republican freedom as non-domination is moralised, and why analysing this concept therefore involves identifying the basic components of the republican theory of justice. One of these components is the non-moralised pure negative conception of freedom as non-interference. Republicans therefore cannot keep insisting that their freedom concept conflicts with, and is superior to, this more basic (...) concept. I demonstrate how we can use pure negative freedom to formulate the republican theory more precisely. This exercise is more fruitful than the common focus on the alleged conflict between the two freedom concepts. (shrink)

It is often assumed that the concept of 'alētheia', or ‘truth’, in Gorgias of Leontini belongs to the art of rhetoric. Along these lines, it is usually understood as an aesthetic concept or even a mere ‘adornment’ of speech. In this paper, it is argued, by contrast, that Gorgianic alētheia is a definable criterion of speech figuring in the practice of moral educa­tion. While the ‘truth’ of a logos indeed has to be assessed on aesthetic grounds, the underlying concept of (...) alētheia is predominantly ethical. For Gorgias, speech is ‘true’ when it promotes virtue (aretē) by being expressive of virtue. The principle stated in the opening passage of the Encomium of Helen, that a speaker has ‘to praise what is praiseworthy and to blame what is blameworthy’, explains precisely this understand­ing of alētheia. (shrink)

Armed military interventions often inflict large amounts of collateral harm on innocent civilians. Ought intervening soldiers, when possible, to direct collateral harm to one innocent population group rather than the other? Recently several authors have proposed that expected beneficiaries of a military intervention ought to carry greater risk of collateral harm than neutral bystanders who are not subject to the threat the military forces are intervening to avert. According to this view, intervening soldiers ought to reduce the risk of collateral (...) harm to neutral bystanders, even if this means foreseeably imposing a somewhat higher overall number of collateral casualties among those for whom the intervention is conducted. This chapter raises a number of challenges to this view. Even if the beneficiary thesis is accepted with respect to discrete risk-imposing acts, it should not be with respect to risk-imposing strategies individuated on a war-by-war basis. (shrink)

An influential view in the ethics of self-defence is that causal responsibility for an unjust threat is a necessary requirement for liability to defensive harm. In this article, I argue against this view by providing intuitive counterexamples and by revealing weaknesses in the arguments offered in its favour. In response, adherents of the causal view have advanced the idea that although causally inefficacious agents are not liable to defensive harm, the fact that they may deserve harm can justify harming them (...) in the course of defending oneself. I argue that this strategy is ad hoc and leads to more problems than it solves. Once we allow normative facts outside our account of liability to affect a person's moral protection against harm, the lieability verdicts cannot tell us whether there is a relevant moral asymmetry between the victim and the target of defence. In conclusion, the causal view is wrong and causal responsibility for an unjust threat is not a necessary requirement for liability to defensive harm. (shrink)

İletişimsel eylem kuramı stratejik eylemi dışlamakla bizi gerçekçi bir doğruluk kavramı geliştirmekten alıkoyar. Halbuki, gerçekçi bir doğruluk kavramı, kuramın öndayanaklarından biridir. O halde, yeni bir mantık aracılığıyla, stratejik eylemi de bünyesine alan, yeni bir iletişimsel eylem anlayışının olanaklılığı sorgulanabilir. Bu bildiride böyle bir anlayışın nasıl geliştirilebileceği üzerinde duracağım.

Assessment of those with whom one finds oneself in dispute is indispensable in the epistemology of disagreement. The assessment of one’s opponents is necessary in order to determine whether a particular disagreement constitutes evidence of a likely error in one’s own understanding. However, assessment of an opponent’s capacity to know the matter in dispute is only possible when the conditions for knowledge are not themselves open to debate. Consequently, epistemic significance can only be recognised in disagreements among those who are (...) in tacit or explicit agreement about what constitutes justification in a given case. The result is that the epistemic significance that disagreement possesses is always strictly conditional upon prior assumptions. The difference between a peer disagreement and a non-peer disagreement cannot indicate whether one is or is not more likely to be right than one’s opponent in an absolute sense, only whether one is or is not more likely to be right given the presupposed conditions. (shrink)

In this article I argue for an empiricist view on laws. Some laws are fundamental in the sense that they are the result of inductive generalisations of observed regularities and at the same time in their formulation contain a new theoretical predicate. The inductive generalisations simul- taneously function as implicit definitions of these new predicates. Other laws are either explicit definitions or consequences of other previously established laws. I discuss the laws of classical mechanics, relativity theory and electromagnetism in detail. (...) Laws are necessary, whereas acciden- tal generalisations are not. But necessity here is not a modal concept, but rather interpreted as short for the semantic predicate “... is necessarily true”. Thus no modal logic is needed. The neces- sity attributed to law sentences is in turn interpreted as “necessary condition for the rest of the the- ory”, which is true since fundamental laws are implicit definitions of theoretical predicates use in the theory. (shrink)

Over the past decade, attention to epistemically significant disagreement has centered on the question of whose disagreement qualifies as significant, but ignored another fundamental question: what is the epistemic significance of disagreement? While epistemologists have assumed that disagreement is only significant when it indicates a determinate likelihood that one’s own belief is false, and therefore that only disagreements with epistemic peers are significant at all, they have ignored a more subtle and more basic significance that belongs to all disagreements, regardless (...) of who they are with—that the opposing party is wrong. It is important to recognize the basic significance of disagreement since it is what explains all manners of rational responses to disagreement, including assessing possible epistemic peers and arguing against opponents regardless of their epistemic fitness. (shrink)

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)

Keywords: W.V.Quine claimed that relativism is paradoxical and unacceptable; nevertheless, his own views concerning truth and the underdetermination of theories by data amount to an interesting and plausible form of relativism.

This literature review describes the current state of research on the Greek sophists. It draws on recent work on the beginnings of rhetoric, overviews of sophistic thought and case studies on Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon and Prodicus. It is shown that the traditional notion of a sophistic antithesis to philosophy has lost further ground: While earlier »rehabilitations« of sophistic thought still use the dichotomous distinction of philosophy und sophistic, now any generic talk of »the sophist« should better be regarded as misleading.

Can a group be morally responsible instead of, or in addition to, its members? An influential defense of corporate responsibility is based on results in social choice theory suggesting that a group can form and act on attitudes held by few, or even none, of its members. The members therefore cannot be (fully) responsible for the group’s behavior; the group itself, as a corporate agent, must be responsible. In this paper, I reject this view of corporate responsibility by showing how (...) it pays insufficient attention to individual agency. By accounting for group members’ strategic behavior, we shall see how they control collective attitude formation and are therefore responsible for their group’s behavior. (shrink)