This chapter begins with an empirical analysis of attitudes towards the law, which, in turn, inspires a philosophical re-examination of the moral status of the rule of law. In Section 2, we empirically analyse relevant survey data from the US. Although the survey, and the completion of our study, preceded the recent anti-police brutality protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, the relevance of our observations extends to this recent development and its likely reverberations. Consistently with prior studies, (...) we find that people’s ascriptions of legitimacy to the legal system are predicted strongly by their perceptions of the procedural justice and lawfulness of police and court officials’ action. Two factors emerge as significant predictors of people’s compliance with the law: (i) their belief that they have a (content-independent, moral) duty to obey the law (which is one element of legitimacy, as defined here); and (ii) their moral assessment of the content of specific legal requirements (‘perceived moral content of laws’). We also observe an interactive relationship between these two factors. At higher levels of perceived moral content of laws, felt duty to obey is a better predictor of compliance. And, similarly, perceived moral content of laws is a better predictor of compliance at higher levels of felt duty to obey. This suggests that the moral content incorporated in specific laws interacts with the normative force people ascribe to legal authorities by virtue of other qualities, specifically here procedural justice and lawfulness. In Section 3, the focus shifts to a philosophical analysis, whereby we identify a parallel (similarly interactive) modality in the way that form and content mutually affect the value of the rule of law. We advocate a distinctive alternative to two rival approaches in jurisprudential discourse, the first of which claims that Lon Fuller’s eight precepts of legality embody moral qualities not contingent on the law’s content, while the second denies any independent moral value in these eight precepts, viewing them as entirely subservient to the law’s substantive goals. In contrast, on the view put forward here, Fuller’s principles possess (inter alia) an expressive moral quality, but their expressive effect does not materialise in isolation from other, contextual factors. In particular, the extent to which it materialises is partly sensitive to the moral quality of the law’s content. (shrink)

According to relationism, for Alice to believe that some rabbits can speak is for Alice to stand in a relation to a further entity, some rabbits can speak. But what could this further entity possibly be? Higher-order metaphysics seems to offer a simple, natural answer. On this view (roughly put), expressions in different syntactic categories (for instance: names, predicates, sentences) in general denote entities in correspondingly different ontological categories. Alice's belief can thus be understood to relate her to a sui (...) generis entity denoted by "some rabbits can speak", belonging to a different ontological category than Alice herself. This straightforward account of the attitudes has historically been deemed so attractive that it was seen as providing an important motivation for higher-order metaphysics itself (Prior [1971]). But I argue that it is not as straightforward as it might seem, and in fact that propositional attitudes present a foundational challenge for higher-order metaphysics. (shrink)

Professor Nicholas Ryder (see Appendix A for a list of his published works) and Dr Karen Harrison (see Appendix B for a list of her published works) have produced this second edition of The Law relating to financial crime in the United Kingdom (published by Routledge of Taylor & Francis Group) in order to bring the work up-to-date; to include recent legislation and government policy developments; and also to add the financial crime topics of tax evasion, market manipulation (including insider (...) trading) and cybercrime, making this work a complete and well-rounded university-level introduction to the criminal laws relating to financial crimes as they affect the United Kingdom. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of the Relational Analysis of attitude reports. The problem I raise involves counterfactual attitude verbs. such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘ S wishes that P ’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P ’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately related to the content of their beliefs. I capture this (...) fact by moving to a framework in which ‘wish’ relates subjects to sets of pairs of worlds, or paired propositions, rather than—as is standardly assumed—sets of worlds. Although other types of counterfactual attitude reports, for example those involving ‘imagine’, may be similarly problematic, at this stage it is unclear whether they can be handled the same way. (shrink)

One of the challenges in secondary schools today is infringements on students’ rights, in a tortious way that may also constitute breach of the Child’s Right Act of 2003 in Nigeria. These breach on rights usually come through the administration of corporal punishments on students, and mainly because the school heads see themselves as loco parentis of the students who can, therefore, enforce any form of punishment on them in the school. This study investigated knowledge, attitude, and infringement of tort (...) law among public secondary school heads on students in Osun State. All the students in Osun State public secondary schools and 723 heads constituted the population. A sample of 54 school heads and 180 students were selected using multi-stage sampling procedure. Two instruments were designed to elicit responses from the respondents. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to answer the research questions raised for the study. The results showed that school heads do not have adequate knowledge of tort law and that both the school heads and students have poor attitude toward it tort law. The study recommends that short term training on student’s right, how they can be legally protected and tort law be organised for school heads. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Our mental lives are entwined with the world. There are worldly things that we have beliefs about and things in the world we desire to have happen. We find some things fearsome and others likable. The puzzle of intentionality — how it is that our minds make contact with the world — is one of the oldest and most vexed issues facing philosophers. Many contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists have been attracted to the idea that our minds represent (...) the world. This book explores an important assumption about representation, namely, that when we represent things in the world, we represent them as having properties, and in this way our representations have "propositional" structure. The contributors examine what the commitment to propositionalism amounts to; illuminate why one might find the thesis attractive ; and consider ways in which one might depart from propositionalism. The hope is that this will lead towards a more complete understanding of how the mind and world are connected. (shrink)

Though legal positivism remains popular, HLA Hart’s version has fallen somewhat by the wayside. This is because, according to many, the central task of a theory of law is to explain the so-called ‘normativity of law’. Hart’s theory, it is thought, is not up to the task. Some have suggested modifying the theory accordingly. This paper argues that both Hart’s theory and the normativity of law have been misunderstood. First, a popular modification of Hart’s theory is considered and rejected. It (...) stems from a misunderstanding of Hart and his project. Second, a new understanding of the mysterious but often-mentioned ‘normativity of law’ is presented. Once we have dispelled some misunderstandings of Hart’s view and clarified the sense in which law is supposed to be normative, we see that Hart’s view, unmodified, is well suited to the task of explaining law’s normativity. (shrink)

Software piracy is older than the PC and has been the subject of several studies, which have found it to be a widespread phenomenon in general, and among university students in particular. An earlier study by Cohen and Cornwell from a decade ago is replicated, adding questions about downloading music from the Internet. The survey includes responses from 224 students in entry-level courses at two schools, a nondenominational suburban university and a Catholic urban college with similar student profiles. The study (...) found that there has been few if any changes in student opinions regarding the unauthorized duplication of copy- righted materials. Students generally felt that copying commercial software and downloading music from the Internet was acceptable and found that there was no significant correlation between student attitudes and their school’s religious affiliation or lack thereof. Additionally, the study found that a small but significant percentage of respondents considered the other questionable behaviors as ethically acceptable. Finally, the reasons for these attitudes are discussed as well as what colleges can do to correct the situation. (shrink)

This paper examines the debate as to whether something can have final value in virtue of its relational (i.e., non-intrinsic) properties, or, more briefly put, whether final value must be intrinsic. The paper adopts the perspective of the fitting-attitude analysis (FA analysis) of value, and argues that from this perspective, there is no ground for the requirement that things may have final value only in virtue of their intrinsic properties, but that there might be some grounds for the alternate requirement (...) that final value be grounded only in the essential properties of their bearers. First, the paper introduces the key elements of the FA analysis, and sets aside an obvious but unimportant way in which this analysis makes all final values relational. Second, it discusses some classical counterexamples to the view that final value must be intrinsic. Third, it discusses the relation between final, contributive, and signatory value. Fourth, it examines Zimmerman’s defense of the requirement that final value must be intrinsic on the grounds that final value cannot be derivative. And finally, it explores the alternative requirement that something may have final value in virtue of its essential properties. (shrink)

This paper argues that Twin Earth twins belong to the same psychological natural kind, but that the reason for this is not that the causal powers of mental states supervene on local neural structure. Fodor’s argument for this latter thesis is criticized and found to rest on a confusion between it and the claim that Putnamian and Burgean type relational psychological properties do not affect the causal powers of the mental states that have them. While it is true that Putnamian (...) and Burgean type relational psychological properties do not affect causal powers, it is false that no relational psychological properties do. Examples of relational psychological properties that do affect causal powers are given and psychological laws are sketched that subsume twins in virtue of them instantiating these relational properties rather than them sharing the narrow contents of their thoughts. (shrink)

The Covid-19 virus has affected everyone, and some are still getting better. The changes the pandemic brought about pushed us to use conventional survival methods. It is necessary for both teachers and students to quickly switch to an entirely new method to carry on with their school program This study aims to ascertain the elementary teachers' attitude toward changes and how it mediates the job-related issues that the pandemic brought about, particularly in the mode of delivery of learning during (...) these times, as well as its impact on the coping response that the teachers use to cope up with these changes. To assess the current state of the variable, the research employs a descriptive survey methodology. The study revealed that teacher respondents’ profiles were significantly influenced by the coping response; the data presented that age is the only variable with a significant relationship with the coping response, while between job-related issues and coping strategies, the data show that the distribution/retrieval of modules influences all facets of coping strategy. It is also found that the respondent’s job-related issues significantly correlate with all the attitudes toward change. Most evidently the effect of the authentic assessment and students’ engagement with the teacher’s resistance to these changes in distance learning. This study recommends that school conduct seminars promoting work-life balance as well as administrators assisting teachers when it comes to the use of technology. (shrink)

According to the fitting attitude (FA) analysis of value concepts, to conceive of an object as having a given value is to conceive of it as being such that a certain evaluative attitude taken towards it would be fitting. Among the challenges that this analysis has to face, two are especially pressing. The first is a psychological challenge: the FA analysis must call upon attitudes that shed light on our value concepts while not presupposing the mastery of these concepts. (...) The second challenge is normative: the FA analysis must account for the fittingness of the relevant attitudes in terms of a kind of normativity intimately related to these attitudes, but again without presupposing the mastery of the relevant value concepts. In this paper, we show that real progress is possible if we pay close attention to the nature of the attitudes recruited by the analysis. More specifically, we claim that an FA analysis that appeals to emotions conceived as evaluative attitudes — as opposed to, for instance, evaluative judgements or evaluative perceptions — has the best prospects of meeting the two challenges and of putting the FA analysis on a strong footing. (shrink)

Purpose: Illicit financial flows are targeted by the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, these illicit flows are not entirely understood. Furthermore, they can benefit from economic norms, laws, and regulations that lack mechanisms to detect and penalize them. This paper investigates whether a recent test, the embezzler test, can be used to identify regulatory architectures that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes. -/- Design/methodology/approach: To develop a more advanced version of the embezzler test in (...) terms of definitions and practical implementation methodology. -/- Findings: In this test, the definition of embezzlement can be understood to be the occurrence of illicit financial flows crossing the boundaries of organizations and/or countries. This is a multi-stage test, which intentionally simulates illicit financial flows to observe how well equipped is the regulatory architecture to deal with other financial offences that are related with these flows, such as theft, money laundering, fraud, corruption, market manipulation, and tax evasion. -/- Originality: This is the first explicit test that has been presented to identify norms, laws, and regulations that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes. -/- Research implications: Future research can employ the version of this test to stress test a large range of economic norms, laws, and regulations. -/- Practical/Social implications: This test’s new version can assist achieve the UN SDGs’ illicit financial flow reduction target. Furthermore, it can be used to study both existing and proposed norms, laws, and regulation. (shrink)

I start by explaining what attitude-related reasons are and why it is plausible to assume that, at least in the domain of practical reason, there are such reasons. Then I turn to Raz’s idea that the practice of practical reasoning commits us to what he calls exclusionary reasons. Being excluded would be a third way, additional to being outweighed and being undermined, in which a reason can be defeated. I try to show that attitude-related reasons can explain the (...) phenomena Raz appeals to equally well. Attitude-related reasons, however, are weighted against other reasons and, thus, don’t determine a third relation of defeat. On this basis, I voice some doubts about Raz’s conception of exclusionary reasons. (shrink)

I explore the possibility that propositional attitudes are not basic in folk psychology, and that what we really ascribe to people are relations to individuals, those that the apparently propositional contents of beliefs, desires, and other states concern. In particular, the relation between a state and the individuals that it tracks shows how ascription of propositional attitudes could grow out of ascription of relations between people and objects.

The regularity in social relations is deduced on the base of natural human reactions. The regularity is similar to the Newton’s Third Law. The new approach to phenomenon and definition of violence is offered as a consequence of the discovered regularity. Violence is considered as an action with an object without consent of the owner. It is shown that a person herself is responsible for significant part of violence against her, namely for the violence which is just reaction for her (...) own violence. The regularity of deliberate rejection of violence in society in historical perspective is proved. (shrink)

The conventional wisdom has it that between 1905 and 1919 Russell was critical to pragmatism. In particular, in two essays written in 1908–9, he sharply attacked the pragmatist theory of truth, emphasizing that truth is not relative to human practice. In fact, however, Russell was much more indebted to the pragmatists, in particular to William James, as usually believed. For example, he borrowed from James two key concepts of his new epistemology: sense-data, and the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and (...) knowledge by description. Reasonable explanation of this is that, historically, Russell’s logical realism and James’s pragmatism have the same roots—the German philosopher Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–1881). In this paper we are going to explore the fact that in 1905, under Lotze’s influence, Russell married propositions with beliefs. A few years later this step also made Russell prone to embrace the theory of truth-making that has its roots in James. In contrast to the concept of sense-data and to the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, however, the understanding that we believe propositions—and not, for example, simply grasp them—was in tension with Russell’s Principle of Extensionality, according to which propositions can be logically connected with other propositions only as truth-functions. The point is that when we judge a mind-relation (for example, a relation of belief) to a proposition, the latter cannot be determined as true or false. The two most talented pupils of Russell, Wittgenstein and Ramsey, severely criticized the central place propositional attitudes play in Russell’s logic. Wittgenstein analyzed “A believes that p” to “ ‘p’ says p” (5.542). Ramsey criticized Russell’s beliefs in propositions the other way round: He stressed that belief is an ambiguous term that can be interpreted for the better in the sense of pragmatism. Prima facie surprisingly, he maintained that his “pragmatism is derived from Mr Russell.” (1927: 51). (shrink)

In The Context of Laws of Nature Structural Humeanism vs. Classical Humeanism -/- In the context of the laws of nature, philosophers of science have developed some views in order to adopt an attitude towards recurring events in nature. In this respect, it has been discussed whether there is any driving force underlying the regular behaviours and movements we encounter in nature, and two approaches have emerged as a result of the discussion: A view that there are certain driving forces (...) or causal relations in the ground, and an opposing view that claims that there are no causal relations in the ground, but there are regularities in nature. Views such as the latter are generally described as the Humean view. Such views are also called regularity theories. Throughout this article, the statements referred to as regularity are characterised as the Humean view. Since the article will be centred on the Humean view, views such as the first view, such as dispositional essentialism or structural realism, are not the concern of this article. The article favours the Structural Humean approach over the classical Humean approach. The classical Humean approach is centred on the views of David Lewis and is concerned with distinguishing between laws of nature seen as accidental generalisations and regularities. While it tries to make such a distinction by constructing nature through a mosaic, the Structural Humean approach is an approach that develops Lewis’s claims and tries to shape nature with the concept of structure rather than mosaic. Thus, it is seen as an approach that provides more information than the Classical Humean approach in terms of creating a philosophical infrastructure for explaining nature in terms of modern physics. Through Psillos, Structural Humeanism tried to place the concept of natural pattern into the structure in order to gain metaphysical solidity and tried to bring the Structural Humean approach closer to the Structural Realism camp. Thus, the classically epistemologically important Humean approach has made a significant progress in positioning it on the realist wing. As a result of all these studies, the Structural Humean approach has been defended as a philosophical approach that offers useful arguments for modern physics compared to the Classical Humean approach. -/- Keywords: Humeanism, Regularity, Laws of Nature, Best System Account, Structural Humeanism, Natural Patterns. (shrink)

The attitudes P. F. Strawson dubs reactive are felt toward another (or oneself). They are thus at least in part affective reactions to what Strawson describes as qualities of will that people manifest toward others and themselves. The reactive attitudes are also interpersonal, relating persons to persons. But how do they relate persons? On the deontic, imperative view, they relate persons in second-personal authority and accountability relations. After addressing how best to understand the reactive attitudes as sentiments, (...) I evaluate the deontic imperative view. I argue that the modality of reactive attitudes is not invariably deontic nor is their mood invariably imperative. Certain reactive attitudes are aretaic, appellative sentiments that prescribe non-jural ideals of conduct or character. Although expansive, my resulting conception of the reactive attitudes escapes the charge of failing to distinguish reactive sentiments from “disengaged aesthetic reactions” to the beautiful and ugly in human action and character. (shrink)

Traditionally, ‘that’-clauses occurring in attitude attributions are taken to denote the objects of the attitudes. Prior raised a famous problem: even if Frege fears that the Begriffsschrift leads to a paradox, it is unlikely that he fears a proposition, a sentence or what have you as the alleged object denoted by the ‘that’-clause. The usual way out is to say that ‘that’-clauses do not contribute the objects of the attitudes but their contents. I will show that, if we (...) accept this answer, either we’d better stop working on attitude attributions or we’d better work harder on them. (shrink)

There are many types of political culture as well as many elements to be found in each type of political culture. The present study will be limited in two ways. Firstly, we shall not deal with all the elements of political culture. We shall focus on what has been called the "Affective Attitudes" element, which we take to include feelings and emotional proclivities, which to us, are inseparable from values and evaluations. Secondly, we shall not focus on all types (...) of political cultures, but rather on democratic political culture. We plan to study one particular conceptual relation between (democratic) political culture and (democratic) political system. This is the relation of congruence. This relation is less controversial than causal relation which some theorists propose as holding between political culture and political system. However, it does suggest concepts that can be used in formulating causal hypotheses that can be empirically tested. مناقشة لطبيعة الثقافة السياسية التي تتوائم مع تتوائم مع النظام السياسي الديمقراطي. سوف يجري التركيز على التوجهات الانفعالية (المشاعر العواطف والقيم) التي تشكل جزءا هاما من الثقافة السياسية -/- . (shrink)

I investigate when we can (rationally) have attitudes, and when we cannot. I argue that a comprehensive theory must explain three phenomena. First, being related by descriptions or names to a proposition one has strong reason to believe is true does not guarantee that one can rationally believe that proposition. Second, such descriptions, etc. do enable individuals to rationally have various non-doxastic attitudes, such as hope and admiration. And third, even for non-doxastic attitudes like that, not (...) just any description will allow it. I argue that we should think of attitude formation like we do (practical) choices among options. I motivate this view linguistically, extending "relevant alternatives'' theories of the attitudes to both belief and to the other, non-doxastic attitudes. Given a natural principle governing choice, and some important differences between doxastic and non-doxastic "choices'', we can explain these puzzling phenomena. (shrink)

In the discipline of international relations there are contending general theories or theoretical perspectives. Realism, also known as political realism, is a view of international politics that stresses its competitive and conflictual side. It is usually contrasted with idealism or liberalism, which tends to emphasize cooperation. Realists consider the principal actors in the international arena to be states, which are concerned with their own security, act in pursuit of their own national interests, and struggle for power. The negative side of (...) the realists’ emphasis on power and selfinterest is often their skepticism regarding the relevance of ethical norms to relations among states. National politics is the realm of authority and law, whereas international politics, they sometimes claim, is a sphere without justice, characterized by active or potential conflict among states. Not all realists, however, deny the presence of ethics in international relations. The article presents a comprehensive picture of political realism. -/- Korab-Karpowicz, W. Julian, "Political Realism in International Relations", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). (shrink)

Should we understand implicit attitudes on the model of belief? I argue that implicit attitudes are (probably) members of a different psychological kind altogether, because they seem to be insensitive to the logical form of an agent’s thoughts and perceptions. A state is sensitive to logical form only if it is sensitive to the logical constituents of the content of other states (e.g., operators like negation and conditional). I explain sensitivity to logical form and argue that it is (...) a necessary condition for belief. I appeal to two areas of research that seem to show that implicit attitudes fail spectacularly to satisfy this condition—although persistent gaps in the empirical literature leave matters inconclusive. I sketch an alternative account, according to which implicit attitudes are sensitive merely to spatiotemporal relations in thought and perception, i.e., the spatial and temporal orders in which people think, see, or hear things. (shrink)

We use probability-matching variations on Ellsberg’s single-urn experiment to assess three questions: (1) How sensitive are ambiguity attitudes to changes from a gain to a loss frame? (2) How sensitive are ambiguity attitudes to making ambiguity easier to recognize? (3) What is the relation between subjects’ consistency of choice and the ambiguity attitudes their choices display? Contrary to most other studies, we find that a switch from a gain to a loss frame does not lead to a (...) switch from ambiguity aversion to ambiguity neutrality and/or ambiguity seeking. We also find that making ambiguity easier to recognize has little effect. Finally, we find that while ambiguity aversion does not depend on consistency, other attitudes do: consistent choosers are much more likely to be ambiguity neutral, while ambiguity seeking is much more frequent among highly inconsistent choosers. (shrink)

In ‘What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?’, Bernard Williams reaffirms J. L. Austin’s suggestion that philosophy might learn from tort law ‘the difference between practical reality and philosophical frivolity’. Yet while Austin regarded tort law as just another repository of time-tested concepts, on a par with common sense as represented by a dictionary, Williams argues that ‘the use of certain ideas in the law does more to show that those ideas have strength than is done by the mere (...) fact that they are part of the currency of common sense’. But what does it mean to show that ideas or concepts ‘have strength’? How does conceptual strength relate to the distinction between practical reality and philosophical frivolity? And what special features of the law are supposed to make it a better test of conceptual strength than common sense? In this chapter, I reconstruct and develop Williams’s answers to these questions. I show why Williams believes that we need to test the concepts forming the currency of common sense against practical reality as embodied by legal practice; I identify seven features of tort law that make it particularly suitable to act as such a test; I distinguish three respects in which concepts can show strength, and unpack Williams’s metaphor of microwave-resistant concepts: concepts capable of holding and presenting material for intense critical scrutiny without succumbing to it themselves; lastly, I show how philosophy can learn to identify systematically weak concepts, and the limits of otherwise valuable concepts, by considering which concepts fail the test. (shrink)

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)

Causal Determinism (CD) entails that all of a person’s choices and actions are nomically related to events in the distant past, the approximate, but lawful, consequences of those occurrences. Assuming that history cannot be undone nor those (natural) relations altered, that whatever results from what is inescapable is itself inescapable, and the contrariety of inevitability and freedom, it follows that we are completely devoid of liberty: our choices are not freely made; our actions are not freely performed. Instead of (...) disputing the soundness of this reasoning, some philosophers prefer to maintain that we could yet have a small measure of freedom were CD true of our world: although being unable to choose or act differently, one could at least under normal circumstances truly claim to be acting ‘on one’s own’, beyond the control of ‘outside forces’, in a word, autonomous. They further argue that being free in this sense suffices for moral responsibility. Call their philosophy ‘Autonomy Compatibilism’ (AC). -/- In adopting here reactive attitudes towards an agent, one is choosing to highlight the fact that the individual in question is of sound mind, reasoning and acting free from the interference of others. These facts alone, the adherent of AC claims, justify his stance, despite the necessity of the agent’s choices. Why would we not regard a sane individual who is not being coerced, intimidated, deceived or unduly put upon as in charge of his life so as to be responsible for his activities? -/- The Manipulation Argument (MA) is supposed to cut off this line of retreat. Its authors hold that, were CD true of our world, we would be no more autonomous than a victim of “covert, non-constraining control” (CNC): manipulation whereby one person causes another, through the use of methods such as brainwashing or circumspect operant conditioning, to ‘do his bidding’ without the latter being aware of his subjugation or feeling in any way coerced. Since a CNC victim obviously lacks autonomy, then so must “persons” living in a deterministic universe. Defenders of AC have, then, the following argument with which to contend: -/- 1. Victims of CNC (obviously) lack autonomy. 2. Thus, AC would be true only if some definition of autonomy succeeds in specifying a freedom relevant difference between victims of CNC and agents whose choices/actions are necessary consequences of prior events. 3. There could be no such definition. 4. Therefore, AC must be false. -/- The challenge issued here is clear: find a way to refute the claim that being subject to natural laws would be tantamount to being a victim of CNC, to show that Nature is no manipulator. Moreover, this challenge cannot be met by responding with a Frankfurt case: a situation in which things have been surreptitiously arranged so that an agent is unable to avoid doing something that he manages to do ‘on his own’, thus, being autonomous despite his inability to act otherwise. For, even if CD is not inconsistent with autonomy because it eliminates the ability to do otherwise per se, it may yet entail that no human agent ever does act of his own accord, an implication of which would be a lack of alternatives on anyone’s part. In other words, the fact that causally determined beings could never act differently than they do does is perhaps only symptomatic of the reason why such beings would lack autonomy: forces beyond their control would have dominion over their psychological development. Thus, AC advocates must show that the way that an agent’s character would be shaped, were she (merely) subject to natural laws, would leave unimpaired an ability that CNC would destroy. What follows is a definition of this ability, which I also use to solve the Problem of Freedom and Foreknowledge. (shrink)

A number of writers have drawn on Hayek’s epistemic defence of market institutions to argue that free-markets and tort law are best placed to overcome the knowledge problems associated with the environmental sphere. This paper argues to the contrary, that this Austrian School approach itself suffers from significant knowledge problems. The first of these relates to the ability of Austrian economics to assign victim compensation and the second to the difficulty of establishing causation in complex environmental problems. The paper will (...) also show how alternative approaches may not suffer from these epistemic challenges and are better placed to overcome them. (shrink)

The paper reports results of the very first survey-based study on the prevalence, frequency and nature of ethical or other non-medical difficulties faced by Polish physicians in their everyday clinical practice. The study involved 521 physicians of various medical specialties, practicing mainly in inpatient healthcare. The study showed that the majority of Polish physicians encounter ethical and other non-medical difficulties in making clinical decisions. However, they confront such difficulties less frequently than their foreign peers. Moreover, Polish doctors indicate different circumstances (...) as a source of the experienced problems. The difficulties most often reported relate to (i) patients (or their proxies) requests for medically non-indicated interventions; (ii) problems with communication with patients (or their proxies) due to the patients’ negative attitude, unwillingness to cooperate, or aggression; and (iii) various difficulties with obtaining informed consent. Polish physicians report difficulties associated with disagreements among care givers or scarcity of resources less frequently than doctors from other countries. The study’s findings provide support for the thesis that a significant portion of Polish physicians still follow a traditional, paternalistic, and hierarchical model of healthcare practice. Instead of promoting patient’s empowerment, engagement, and rights, they often consider these ideas as a threat to physicians’ professional authority and autonomy. The study leads to the conclusion that due to insufficient training in medical ethics, communication skills, and medical law, many Polish physicians lack the knowledge and competence necessary to adequately respond to challenges posed by modern healthcare practice. (shrink)

D. M. Armstrong famously claims that deterministic laws of nature are contingent relations between universals and that his account can also be straightforwardly extended to irreducibly probabilistic laws of nature. For the most part, philosophers have neglected to scrutinize Armstrong’s account of probabilistic laws. This is surprising precisely because his own claims about probabilistic laws make it unclear just what he takes them to be. We offer three interpretations of what Armstrong-style probabilistic laws are, and argue that all three interpretations (...) are incompatible either with some feature of Armstrong’s broader metaphysics or with essential features of his account of laws (or both). (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophical discussions of intentionality start and end with a treatment of the propositional attitudes. In fact, many theorists hold that all attitudes are propositional attitudes. Our folk-psychological ascriptions suggest, however, that there are non-propositional attitudes: I like Sally, my brother fears snakes, everyone loves my grandmother, and Rush Limbaugh hates Obama. I argue that things are as they appear: there are non-propositional attitudes. More specifically, I argue that there are attitudes that relate (...) individuals to non-propositional objects and do so not in virtue of relating them to propositions. I reach this conclusion by not only showing that attempted analyses of apparently non-propositional attitudes in terms of the propositional fail, but that some non-propositional attitudes don’t even supervene on propositional attitudes. If this is correct, then the common discussions of intentionality that address only propositional attitudes are incomplete and those who hold that all intentional states are propositional are mistaken. (shrink)

This dissertation shows how initial conditions play a special role in the explanation of contingent and irregular outcomes, including, in the form of geographic context, the special case of uneven development in the social sciences. The dissertation develops a general theory of this role, recognizes its empirical limitations in the social sciences, and considers how it might be applied to the question of uneven development. The primary purpose of the dissertation is to identify and correct theoretical problems in the study (...) of uneven development; it is not intended to be an empirical study. Chapter 1 introduces the basic problem, and discusses why it has become especially salient in debates concerning uneven development. Chapter 2 develops an argument for the importance of initial conditions in the philosophy of science, developed specifically in the context of the Bhaskar/Cartwright ‘open systems’ (and by extension, ‘exogenous factor’) emphasis on the ubiquity of contingency in the universe and rejection of explanation based on laws of nature (regularity accounts) of causation. Chapter 3 makes three claims concerning the concept of contingency, especially as related to the study of society: 1) that there are eight distinct uses of the word contingency, and its many meanings are detrimental to clarity of discussion and thought in history and the social sciences; 2) that it is possible to impose some order on these different uses through developing a classification of contingency into three types based on assumptions concerning possible worlds and determinism; 3) that one of the classes is a special use of the word without relevance to the social sciences, while the two remaining classes are nothing more than a variety of the ‘no hidden factors’ argument in the debate on indeterminism and determinism (and thus related to the concept of spacetime trajectories caused by initial conditions and the interference of these in the form of ‘exogenous factors’ with ‘open systems’). Chapter 4 The concept of explanation based on initial conditions together with laws of nature is widely associated with determinism. In the social sciences determinism has frequently been rejected due to the moral dilemmas it is perceived as presenting. Chapter 4 considers problems with this view. Chapter 5 considers attitudes among geographers, economists, and historians towards using geographic factors as initial conditions in explanation and how they might acceptably be used, in particular their role in ‘anchoring’ aspatial theories of social processes to real-world distributions. Chapter 6 considers the relationship of the statistical methods common in development studies with the trend towards integrating geographical factors into econometric development studies. It introduces the statistical argument on ‘apparent populations’ that arrives at conclusions concerning determinism consistent with Chapters 2 and 3 of the dissertation. The need for the visual interpretation of data with descriptive statistics and maps and their utility in the study of uneven development is discussed with a number of examples. Chapter 7 applies these concepts to the ‘institutions versus geography’ debate in development studies, using Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson’s 2002 ‘reversal of fortune’ argument as a primary example. Chapter 8 considers possible directions for future work, both theoretical and empirical. Chapter 9 concludes with a discussion of additional possible objections to the use of initial conditions as exogenous factors in explanation. (shrink)

Propositions are the things we believe, intend, desire, and so on, but discussions are often less precise than they could be and an important driver of this deficiency has been a focus on the objects but a neglect of the attitudinal relations we bear to them. In what follows, we will offer some thoughts on what it means for a proposition to be the object of an attitude and we will argue that an important part of the story lies with (...) the attitude relations rather than the propositions. As we will see there are infinitely many relations we might bear to a proposition, but the propositional attitude relations are special amongst them. Accounting for what makes them special will be an important component in the discussion that follows. We will argue that once one appreciates certain facts about propositional attitude relations, various claims that metaphysicians often make regarding propositions themselves begin to look undermotivated. In fact, many views on the metaphysical nature of propositions come to look like plausible candidates for being that to which our propositional attitudes relate us. As will emerge, we will see that the principle role of propositions in the theory of mind is simply to keep track of how our attitudinal states represent things as being. But, we argue, in order to do this work, very few constraints must be placed on the nature of propositions themselves. In particular, contra much of the recent work on the metaphysics of propositions, they need not represent nor must they be structured. In light of these observations, we conclude by sketching our own favored minimalist view of propositions. (shrink)

We sought to compare the implicit and explicit views of a group of Muslim graduates on the fairness of Islamic law. In this preliminary investigation, we used the Electroencephalographic N400 Event Related Potential to detect the participant’s implicit beliefs. It was found that the majority of participants, eight out of ten, implicitly held that Islamic Law was unfair despite explicitly stating the opposite. In seeking to understand what separated these eight participants from the remaining two – the two who (...) both implicitly and explicitly held that Islamic Law was fair – only two distinguishing characteristics could be identified. Both participants had undertaken an in-depth study of a branch of Islamic law that places the spirit of the law above that of a literal interpretation. They had also attended the same seminary, exclusive to the other participants. Of the eight participants, it was discovered that, while they implicitly held Islamic law to be unfair, they also held it to be rational – in the same way they found that it was rational to push a person of a ship in order to save the remaining from drowning, yet unfair. We discuss these preliminary findings and consider theories on how an innate sense of fairness, an aspect of nativism, may come into play when it is not congruent with a participant’s own beliefs. Further, we ask, where such an inconsistency occurs, how does the mind attempt to rectify it – if at all? As a possible contribution to the discussion on theories of nativism vs. empiricism we put forward a hypothesis and methodology for investigation that may produce previously unconsidered data on human nature. (shrink)

David Armstrong accepted the following three theses: universals are immanent, laws are relations between universals, and laws govern. Taken together, they form an attractive position, for they promise to explain regularities in nature—one of the most important desiderata for a theory of laws and properties—while remaining compatible with naturalism. However, I argue that the three theses are incompatible. The basic idea is that each thesis makes an explanatory claim, but the three claims can be shown to run in a problematic (...) circle. I then consider which thesis we ought to reject and suggest some general lessons for the metaphysics of laws. (shrink)

Aquinas's account of law as an ordering of reason for the common good of a community depends on the mereology that covered his theory of parthood relations, including the relations of parts to parts and parts to wholes. Aquinas argued that 'all who are included in a community stand in relation to that community as parts to a whole', and 'every individual person is compared to the whole community as part to whole'. Aquinas held that the perfection of wholes through (...) the proper ordering of their parts does not entail the elimination of diversity, but in many cases requires diversity. Aquinas argued that there are two ways of ordering parts within a whole. Firstly, the parts are ordered with respect to one another, and secondly, the parts are ordered toward an end. The ordering of a whole's parts to one another is always for the sake of the ordering of the whole to its extrinsic end. Aquinas argued that the good toward which the law directs a community is called the 'common good' of that community. The common good or common end toward which members of a community are ordered can be the sort of end that the agents bring into existence through their own actions such as justice within a community, or the sort of end that can exist apart from the actions of the agents. (shrink)

One of the most intuitive views about the metaphysics of laws of nature is Tim Maudlin's idea of a Fundamental Law of Temporal Evolution. So-called FLOTEs are primitive elements of the universe that produce later states from earlier states. While FLOTEs are at home in traditional Newtonian and non-relativistic quantum mechanical theories (not to mention our pre-theoretic conception of the world), I consider here whether they can be made to work with relativity. In particular, shifting to relativistic spacetimes poses two (...) threats to FLOTEs. First, the lack of a privileged spacelike hypersurface in relativistic spacetime makes it unclear how to understand what produces what. A survey of several conceptions of the nomic production relation compatible with relativity reveals all of them to be lacking. Second, relativity motivates a four-dimensional block universe conception of time, according to which all events that will ever occur already exist. On such a view, it's unclear what work there is to be done by FLOTEs. I consider how a proponent of FLOTEs might respond, but conclude that these combined threats seriously undermine the prospects of a productive conception of laws. In short, if spacetime is relativistic, laws are not productive. (shrink)

This paper offers a comparison of three different kinds of collective attitudes: aggregate, common, and corporate attitudes. They differ not only in their relationship to individual attitudes—e.g., whether they are “reducible” to individual attitudes—but also in the roles they play in relation to the collectives to which they are ascribed. The failure to distinguish them can lead to confusion, in informal talk as well as in the social sciences. So, the paper’s message is an appeal for (...) disambiguation. (shrink)

Much of the debate about post-secularism has presumed a background of Western countries and the sort of statutory law that legislatures should make, and how they should make it, in the light of residents’ religious attitudes and practices. In this chapter I address a fresh context, namely, that of South Africa and the way that courts have interpreted, and should interpret, law in the face of African traditional religions. Specifically, I explicate the fact that, by South Africa's famously progressive (...) Constitution, religious customs already count as law, and I illustrate how such customary law could work with three court cases related to indigenous African spirituality. Then, I lay out and evaluate the two central arguments that jurists have made in favour of South Africa's Constitutional practice of deeming long-standing religious ways of life to be sources of law. I contend that these influential arguments for customary law, which are substantially individualist, are weak, and also sketch more promising rationales, which invoke more communitarian considerations. My aim is not so much to convince the reader that South Africa’s approach to post-secularism is justified as to identify some argumentative strategies that particularly promise to justify it. (shrink)

Leuridan (2010) argued that mechanisms cannot provide a genuine alternative to laws of nature as a model of explanation in the sciences, and advocates Mitchell’s (1997) pragmatic account of laws. I first demonstrate that Leuridan gets the order of priority wrong between mechanisms, regularity, and laws, and then make some clarifying remarks about how laws and mechanisms relate to regularities. Mechanisms are not an explanatory alternative to regularities; they are an alternative to laws. The existence of stable regularities in nature (...) is necessary for either model of explanation: regularities are what laws describe and what mechanisms explain. (shrink)

Does the moral status of an action provide in itself a non-instrumental, pro-tanto reason for a corresponding legal status – a reason that applies regardless of whether the law promotes a value that is independent of the law, such as preventing wrongdoing or promoting distributive or retributive justice? While the relation between morality and law is a familiar topic, this specific question is typically not considered explicitly. Yet it seems to be controversial and each of the contrasting answers to this (...) question has some appeal. The article highlights and considers this question. it concludes that the answer is negative: there is no necessary relation between morality and law in this respect. Rather, there is a reason in favor of incorporating morality into the law only when this incorporation promotes a moral value that is independent of the law. (shrink)

Many of the most important social institutions—e.g., law and language—are thought to be normative in some sense. And philosophers have been puzzled by how this normativity can be explained in terms of the social, descriptive states of affairs that presumably constitute them. This paper attempts to solve this sort of puzzle by considering a simpler and less contentious normative social practice: table manners. Once we are clear on the exact sense in which a practice is normative, we see that some (...) practices can be normative in an interesting and non-trivial sense, but also explicable with merely descriptive resources. In addition to arguing that it is possible to explain normative practices with descriptive resources, this paper presents and defends just such an explanation—an account of the nature of table manners that appeals only to descriptive states of affairs. (shrink)

Russell prétend qu’un examen des croyances est indispensable pour définir nos raisonnements quotidiens et comprendre ce que les philosophes entendent par la notion de vérité. Cela étant, l’auteur considère qu’une étude de ces croyances n’a aucun rapport avec la logique, laquelle concerne uniquement le vrai et le faux. En d’autres termes, Russell associe croyance et psychologie tout en réservant le domaine de la logique au thème de la proposition, vraie ou fausse par définition. Une certaine théorie de la vérité sous-tend (...) son rejet primordial d’une logique épistémique ; si la croyance a un intérêt philosophique, c’est parce que Russell se sert de son examen pour discerner la théorie de la vérité que défendent plusieurs philosophes : la théorie de la vérité-cohérence est une cible principale du Britannique, qui défend pour sa part une théorie de la vérité-correspondance en caractérisant la proposition par sa relation de correspondance ou de non-correspondance avec un fait. (shrink)

A pressing problem for many non-realist1 theories concerning various specific subject matters is the challenge of making sense of our ordinary propositional attitude claims related to the subject in question. Famously in the case of ethics, to take one example, we have in ordinary language prima facie ascriptions of beliefs and desires involving moral properties and relationships. In the case, for instance, of “Jason believes that Kylie is virtuous”, we appear to have a belief which takes Kylie to be (...) a certain way. If Jason desires that Kylie acts as she ought, he appears to have a desire which has as its content that Kylie perform actions of a certain sort (i.e. the actions that she ought to perform). However, for non-cognitivists in ethics who reject the idea that sentences such as “Kylie is virtuous” or “Kylie acts as she ought” are in the business of making truth-apt claims, or representing that certain moral features are possessed by objects or events, or even, in extreme cases, that such claims express propositions at all, the semantic analysis of the example propositional attitude claims made about Jason will have to be non-standard. (This is merely an application of the well-known “Frege-Geach problem” (see Geach 1965) to the case of embedding moral vocabulary in propositional-attitude ascriptions.). (shrink)

How can the law be characterized in a theory of collective intentionality that treats collective intentionality as essentially layered and tries to understand these layers in terms of the structure and the format of the representations involved? And can such a theory of collective intentionality open up new perspectives on the law and shed new light on traditional questions of legal philosophy? As a philosopher of collective intentionality who is new to legal philosophy, I want to begin exploring these questions (...) in this paper. I will try to characterize the law in terms of the layered account of collective intentionality that I have introduced in some earlier writings (Schmitz 2013; 2018). In the light of this account I will then discuss a traditional question in the philosophy of law: the relation between law and morality. I begin by giving a brief sketch of the layered account in the next section. Collective intentionality should be understood in terms of experiencing and representing others as co-subjects, rather than as objects, of intentional states and acts on different layers or levels. I distinguish the nonconceptual layer of the joint sensory-motor-emotional intentionality of joint attention and joint bodily action, the conceptual level of shared we-mode beliefs, intentions, obligations, values, and so on, and the institutional level characterized through role differentiation, positions taken in role-mode, e.g. as a judge or attorney, and writing and other forms of documentation. In the third section I introduce a set of parameters for representations such as their degree of richness, of context-dependence, of density and differentiation of representational role and of durability and stability, which can be used to more precisely distinguish different layers. I also put forward the hypothesis that these properties are connected and tend to cluster, and that higher levels can only function and determine conditions of satisfaction against lower level ones. In the fourth and final section I critically discuss the sharp positivistic separation of morality and the law according to which whether something is a law is completely independent of its moral merits. I argue that this only seems plausible if we take an observational stance towards the law, but not towards morality. When we treat them the same way, it rather appears that the moral attitudes of the co-subjects of a society will determine whether and to what extent they will accept its legal order. I conclude by proposing to think of the law as being itself an institutionalized form of morality. (shrink)

Rawls saw need for non-ideal theory also within society but never developed that project. In this chapter, Card suggests that the non-ideal part of Rawls’ Law of Peoples can be a resource for thinking about responding to evils when the subject is not state-centered. It is plausible that defense against great evils other than those of aggressive states should be governed by analogues of scruples that Rawlsian well-ordered societies observe in defending themselves against outlaw states. This essay explores those hypotheses (...) in relation to women’s self-defense and mutual defense against evils of misogyny, the term feminists apply to the most deeply hostile environments of and attitudes toward women and girls and to the cruelest wrongs to them/us, regardless whether perpetrators harbor feelings of hatred. It extrapolates and adapts to this case values, concepts, and methods from Rawls’s life’s work, especially his writing on war. (shrink)

In this chapter we focus on the structure of close personal relations and diagnose how these relationships are disrupted by addiction. We draw upon Peter Strawson’s landmark paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (2008, first published 1962) to argue that loved ones of those with addiction veer between, (1) reactive attitudes of blame and resentment generated by disappointed expectations of goodwill and reciprocity, and (2) the detached objective stance from which the addicted person is seen as less blameworthy but also as (...) less fit for ordinary interpersonal relationships. We examine how these responses, in turn, shape the addicted person’s view of themselves, their character and their capacities, and provide a negative narrative trajectory that impedes recovery. We close with a consideration of how these effects might be mitigated by adopting less demanding variations of the participant stance. (shrink)

Public attitudes towards cognitive enhancement––e.g., using stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin to improve mental functioning––are mixed. Attitudes vary by context and prompt ethical concerns about fairness, obligation, and authenticity/character. While people may have strong views about the morality of cognitive enhancement, how these views are affected by the physical characteristics of enhancers is unknown. Visible facial anomalies (e.g., scars) bear negatively on perceptions of moral character. This pre-registered study (osf[dot]io/uaw6c/) tested the hypothesis that such negative biases against people (...) with facial anomalies extend to moral beliefs surrounding their use of cognitive enhancement. In an online survey, 941 participants made moral judgments in response to a vignette about a person who had to decide whether or not to enhance. The vignette was accompanied by a face photograph that ostensibly depicted the potential enhancer and either did or did not have visible anomalies. Participants then learned whether the person ultimately decided to enhance. Next, participants played a modified Trust Game with, they were told, the person from the photograph/vignette. Participants judged enhancement to be less fair and enhancers less authentic if they had facial anomalies, while effects on judgments of moral obligation and on behavior were not detected. These findings extend previous work showing that people with visible differences are subject to an “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype that has negative consequences for perceptions of their moral character. While anomalous faces were judged more harshly, these judgments did not appear to affect behavior. These results are discussed in relation to discrimination and policy. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, I argue against the view that laws of nature are contingent, by attacking a necessary condition for its truth within the framework of a conception of laws as relations between universals. I try to show that there is no independent reason to think that universals have an essence independent of their nomological properties. However, such a non-qualitative essence is required to make sense of the idea that different laws link the same universals in (...) different possible worlds. In the second part, I give a positive argument for the necessity of at least some laws of nature, by showing with the example of a paradigmatic law of association that it consists in an internal relation between two universals which are determinables of the same class of determinates, where this relation is essential to both. Furthermore, I show that the necessity of laws of association could be accommodated within David Lewis' Humean metaphysics, but that it is incompatible with David Armstrong's combinatorialism. (shrink)