For Humean atomists, cosmic contents supervene on a spatiotemporal mosaic of modally insulated, freely recombinable local qualities. One piecemeal subspecies of Humean atomism promises more than global supervenience—somehow or other—on a separable base; it constrains how exactly elemental inputs yield everything else. Roughly, the distribution of basic local qualities across elements in one part of our cosmos metaphysically suffices for the complete local physical state of that part: anything sharing this part’s basic elemental decoration should share its (...) more complete contents, regardless of what may be happening elsewhere. On a non-piecemeal alternative, derivative contents can be recognizably local to, or manifest within, one part of our cosmos while reflecting some more global elemental base. To develop this alternative, non-piecemeal Humeans can borrow inspiration from some critics of Humean supervenience, who already distinguish a broader notion of locality from strict Humean intrinsicality. (shrink)

Local miracle compatibilists claim that we are sometimes able to do otherwise than we actually do, even if causal determinism obtains. When we can do otherwise, it will often be true that if we were to do otherwise, then an actual law of nature would not have been a law of nature. Nevertheless, it is a compatibilist principle that we cannot do anything that would be or cause an event that violates the laws of nature. Carl Ginet challenges (...) this nomological principle, arguing that it is not always capable of explaining our inability to do otherwise. In response to this challenge, I point out that this principle is part of a defense against the charge that local miracle compatibilists are committed to outlandish claims. Thus it is not surprising that the principle, by itself, will often fail to explain our inability to do otherwise. I then suggest that in many situations in which we are unable to do otherwise, this can be explained by the compatibilist’s analysis of ability, or his criteria for the truth of ability claims. Thus, the failure of his nomological principle to explain the falsity of certain ability claims is no strike against local miracle compatibilism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 31, Number 1, April 2005, pp. 123-144 Laws Not Men: Hume's Distinction between Barbarous and Civilized Government NEIL McARTHUR 1. Introduction Hume uses the adjectives "civilized" and "barbarous" in a variety of ways, and in a variety of contexts. He employs them to describe individuals, societies, historical eras, and forms of government. These various uses are closely related. Hume thinks that cultural and political development (...) are intimately connected, and are mutually dependent. Civilized government goes together with civilized society. A wise ruler cannot emerge before "refinements have taken place" in the society at large and "science [becomes] known in the world." At the same time, the policy of a monarch who is "ignorant and uninstructed... for ever prevents all improvements."1 This intimate connection, however, is not an identification. A civilized government is not simply that which produces, or results from, a civilized society. When discussing forms of government, Hume uses the terms "barbarous" and "civilized" consistently and somewhat narrowly, to describe governments that possess certain specific characteristics. It is striking that these characteristics are explicitly divorced from the abilities or characters of the rulers. While a nation requires wise and refined leadership to achieve its civilized status, Hume thinks it is a crucial feature of civilized government that, once established, it depends Neil McArthur is at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2M8, Canada, e-mail: [email protected] 124 Neil McArthur entirely on its institutional structure, and not on the talents or intentions of any individual or group. To understand Hume's distinction between these two kinds of government, it is useful to abstract away from his discussion of more general issues of cultural development, and to lay temporarily aside the causal question of what social and economic conditions are necessary to produce a civilized government. I propose to explain Hume's concepts of barbarous and civilized government just in terms of the institutional characteristics possessed by each. Hume's choice of adjectives is not, of course, accidental. The complex causal questions of how a civilized government comes about, and what is its relation to civilized society, are large and important ones. However, 1 do not propose to take them up here.2 The crucial feature dividing civilized and barbarous government is their relation to law. In his essay "Of Civil Liberty" Hume says: "It may now be affirmed of civilized monarchies, what was formerly said in praise of republics alone, that they are a government of Laws, not of Men."3 "Barbarous government" are thus "governments of men"—he also calls them governments "of will."4 Scholars of Hume's political theory have noted the importance of the rule of law in defining "civilized government. "5 However, they have not made clear precisely what Hume thinks precisely defines a "government of laws. " I submit that such a government must (for Hume) possess three characteristics. It must have: 1. A clear separation between the legislative and magisterial "powers" of the state; 2. A rigid subordination of the magisterial to the legislative power, such that the "discretion" of magistrates is restricted by "general laws"; 3. Self-sufficient laws and institutions, such that they are able to operate regardless of the intentions or abilities of individual rulers or officeholders. To this end, a government of laws must possess fixed rules governing the succession of officers, including (in a civilized monarchy) succession to the throne. Hume thinks specific governments may meet these criteria to varying degrees through time (with regression also possible). His use of the term "civilized government" nevertheless implies that it exists as a distinct, and achievable, ideal. An examination of Hume's theory of civilized government shows his understanding of the rule of law to be more subtle and complex than has previously been acknowledged. Hume moves beyond traditional Whig panegyrics on the rule of show to show how the law must operate if it is to protect people from oppression in the local theatres in which it is most acute. He articulates a theory of "civilized monarchy" that provides a middle path between republican and absolutist theories of government, and that is consistent his philosophy as a whole. Hume Studies Laws... (shrink)

Edmund Burke grounds politics and the state over the pre-political network of moral relations, starting from the family, evolving, through the village, the parish and the town, up to the class and corporation, finally arriving to the nation. These subordinate affections can be geometrically imagined as expanding circles of belonging and, though strictly linked to the state, they are not reducible to it, nor can the state replace them. In Burke’s vision, the state of civil society is humankind’s state of (...) nature, for the reason that man is always, and since ever, a member of a community: we are from somewhere, Burke seems to suggest. Thus, politics is grounded in morality, and morality, in turn, is based on God’s will, which within history takes the form of natural law. The French Revolution, on the contrary, has broken the spontaneity of interactions between individuals and intermediate groups, eventually establishing the Terror. (shrink)

Edmund Burke grounds politics and the state over the pre-political network of moral relations, starting from the family, evolving, through the village, the parish and the town, up to the class and corporation, finally arriving to the nation. These subordinate affections can be geometrically imagined as expanding circles of belonging and, though strictly linked to the state, they are not reducible to it, nor can the state replace them. In Burke’s vision, the state of civil society is humankind’s state of (...) nature, for the reason that man is always, and since ever, a member of a community: we are from somewhere, Burke seems to suggest. Thus, politics is grounded in morality, and morality, in turn, is based on God’s will, which within history takes the form of natural law. The French Revolution, on the contrary, has broken the spontaneity of interactions between individuals and intermediate groups, eventually establishing the Terror. (shrink)

There are various supernatural phenomena which hardly can be explained by the existing electromagnetic science, for instance non-locality interactions (may be associated with ESP etc), and also precognitive interdictions. And there are other problems such as how to include the Spirit in our consciousness. For example, it has been known for long time that intuition plays significant role in many professions and human life, including in entrepreneurship, government, and also in detective or law enforcement activities. Despite these examples, such a (...) precognitive interdiction is hardly accepted in established science. In this paper, we discuss non-locality interactions and also advanced solutions of Maxwell equations, and argue in favor of precognitive interdiction from classical perspective. We also discuss shortly on how “spirit” may be included in medicine, although we also make cautious remarks on the danger of “spiritism.” However, we admit that what we discuss here is quite rough, and more researches are needed to verify what we describe here. (shrink)

The paper compares dispositionalism about laws of nature with primitivism. It argues that while the distinction between these two positions can be drawn in a clear-cut manner in classical mechanics, it is less clear in quantum mechanics, due to quantum non-locality. Nonetheless, the paper points out advantages for dispositionalism in comparison to primitivism also in the area of quantum mechanics, and of contemporary physics in general.

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)

One of the best-known members of the United Nations Commission which drafted the 1948 "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Jacques Maritain, famously held that the "natural rights" or "human rights" possessed by every human being are grounded and justified by reference to the natural law.' In many quarters today, the notion of the natural law, and arguments for a set of natural rights grounded in the natural law, have come under fierce attack. One common line of attack is illustrated by (...) the arguments of some utilitarians, for whom "natural law thinking" is mistaken insofar as it implies that there is an absolute moral prohibition against violating any human being's "natural rights." Even if there is such a thing as "natural rights," these utilitarians argue, such rights - including even the natural "right to life" - are necessarily relational, and thus have meaning only within the context of a larger social whole. As a result, the argument goes, the supposed "natural rights" possessed by individual human beings are never inviolable or unconditional, but instead always negotiable and subject to being "traded away" for the sake of greater social utility. Consider just one alleged counter-example to the notion that there are inviolable or unconditional "natural rights": it is well-known that approximately 36,000 people in the United States die every year as a result of influenza infections or influenza-related complications.' There is little doubt that hundreds, and probably even thousands, of human lives would be saved every year if local governments were to pass laws requiring flu vaccinations for all members of at-risk populations (e.g., the very young and the very elderly). It would seem that there would be broad support for mandated flu vaccinations- no matter what the expense - if human lives would be saved and if the natural "right to life" is inviolable or unconditional.' And yet no such life-saving laws exist, apparently because citizens and legislators believe that the social costs and inconveniences would be too great. According to the utilitarian position, this demonstrates - contrary to what Ronald Dworkin and others say about rights' - that rights do not trump utility, but in fact are quite regularly and reasonably trumped by utility. In light of such contemporary understandings and policies, can natural law thinking about natural rights be made credible? In what follows, I shall argue that utilitarian thinkers are correct to hold that rights are intrinsically relational; but they are wrong to conclude that the relational character of rights entails that "natural rights" are not inviolable or not unconditional. (shrink)

Under a policy first enacted in 1988 and expanded in 1996, federally funded public housing authorities (“PHAs”) and private landlords renting their properties to tenants receiving federal housing assistance have been required to include a provision in all leases under which drug-related criminal activity as well as criminal activity that in any way poses a threat to other tenants or nearby residents constitutes ground for initiating eviction proceedings. This strict liability eviction policy, which has become known as the “One-Strike Rule,” (...) was part of a broader congressional effort to combat the “reign of terror” that Congress believed drug dealers were imposing on public housing and assisted housing tenants. Like many of the crime-related policies enacted in the 1980s and 1990s, the One-Strike Rule has done little to reduce crime rates, but has been wildly successful in ensuring that the situation of poor households receiving federal assistance remains highly precarious. Calls for reform of the One-Strike Rule are almost as old as the policy itself, but given the political outlook of the current administration, the prospects for reform at the federal level are dim. While federal law and a combination of gridlock and unwillingness in the congressional and executive branches foreclose a range of possible strategies for reform, there is nonetheless room to mitigate the socially corrosive effects of the One-Strike Rule through legislative efforts at the state and local level. Courts in various jurisdictions have upheld state laws that protect vulnerable tenants despite the federal strict liability policy, and these holdings help to provide a framework for how state and local governments seeking to protect tenants can do so without their efforts necessarily falling prey to the Supremacy Clause. This article describes that framework and proposes three concrete measures that fit it. The article is structured as follows: after explaining the One-Strike Rule and the threat it poses to vulnerable tenants (Section II), the article discusses the burden the Rule imposes on tenants and the benefits it is supposed to bring to other parties, and argues that the resulting distribution of burdens and benefits is unjust (Section III). The article then lays out three concrete measures that state and local governments can enact to protect tenants who face eviction for criminal activity under the Rule without falling prey to a federal preemption challenge: requiring “good cause” for eviction, giving tenants the right to cure a breach of their lease, and providing tenants with free counsel in landlord-tenant court (Section IV). (shrink)

Scholars in Central Asia have long started exploring the nexus between law and technology. Contemporary Central Asian legal academia is producing research which stands at the junction of law, philosophy, and technology. Central Asia is comparatively not advanced in technology production and imports most the technologies from neighboring tech giants. These technologies are imported as a package along with the laws and regulations proposed by the technology manufacturing country. It has been observed that these regulations don‘t correlate with the (...) existing local and regional legal systems. To meet these demands, this article proposes a new discipline / branch of legal sciences named as ―Central Asia Tech Law to accommodate the technological progression of the 4th industrial revolution. This branch of law strives to promote globalized legal mechanisms to treat technology as per the demands of the Central Asian region and in line with the international norms and standardization. Another purpose of Central Asia Tech Law is to increase the interaction with regional social and applied scientists to set regional technological standards and preferences for Central Asia. (shrink)

This article offers a normative analysis of some of the most controversial incidents involving police—what I call police-generated killings. In these cases, bad police tactics create a situation where deadly force becomes necessary, becomes perceived as necessary, or occurs unintentionally. Police deserve blame for such killings because they choose tactics that unnecessarily raise the risk of deadly force, thus violating their obligation to prioritize the protection of life. Since current law in the United States fails to ban many bad tactics, (...) police- generated killings often are treated as “lawful but awful.” To address these killings, some call on changes to departmental policies or voluntary reparations by local governments, yet such measures leave in place a troubling gap between ethics and law. I argue that police-generated killings merit legal sanctions by appealing to a relevant analogy: self-generated self-defense, where the person who engages in self-defense started the trouble. The persistent lack of accountability for police-generated killings threatens life, police legitimacy, and trust in democratic institutions. The article closes by identifying tools in law and policy to address this challenge. (shrink)

The principle of Information Conservation or Determinism is a governing assumption of physical theory. Determinism has counterfactual consequences. It entails that if the present were different, then the future would be different. But determinism is temporally symmetric: it entails that if the present were different, the past would also have to be different. This runs contrary to our commonsense intuition that what has happened in the future depends on the past in a way the past does not depend on the (...) future. To understand how this can be so we observe that while the truth of some counterfactuals is guaranteed by the laws of logic or the laws of nature, some are not. It is among the latter contingent, counterfactuals that we find temporal asymmetry. It is this asymmetry that gives causation a temporal direction. The temporal asymmetry of these counterfactuals is explained by the fact that the dynamical laws of nature are logically irreversible functions from partial states of the world onto other partial states. (Logical reversibility is not to be confused, though it too often is, with time-reversal invariance). Though these irreversible laws are locally indeterministic, they can sum to give a globally deterministic description of the world. This combination of global determinism and local indeterminism gives rise to contingent counterfactual dependence and gives that dependence a direction. That direction is independent of the direction of entropy. The direction of contingent counterfactual dependence is time's arrow. (shrink)

According to Warriner (1969) a simple way of defining land reforms is to name it “the redistribution of property or rights in land for the benefit of the landless, tenants and farm labourers”. Land reforms are mainly characterised by the government’s change of laws, regulations or customs regarding land ownership. Land reforms deal with the government in power distributing property which is in most times agricultural land. In some instances it also involves the distribution of land from the more (...) powerful or wealthy group of people such as nobles and bourgeoisie and giving potions of the land to the less powerful in society especially during the start of the post-colonial error in most countries in Southern Africa. During the pre-colonial period, land or pieces of land belonged to different ethnic groups, clans and lineages but now in the post-colonial land reform programs were to introduce individual ownership of land. There are many reasons why the government (both colonial and post-colonial) embark on land reforms and some of the factors influencing them include political reasons such promoting communism or socialism, social reasons such as separating the blacks from the whites and creating social stratification and economic reasons such as facilitating private investments and raising the country’s economic growth of the agricultural sector just but to mention a few reasons. Though some of the government’s reasons to embark on land reforms appear to be noble, local communities refuse these land reforms since they create social stratifications, at times increase poverty, destroy the matrilineal societies and are more political in nature rather than a means to better the people’s lives especially during the colonial error. The essay below will vividly portray why the government embarks on land reform programs and why local people resist these reforms using examples from both colonial and post-colonial Southern African countries. (shrink)

The social media industry lacks developed principles of professional ethics that it would need in order to better navigate the ethics of conforming to local media laws in authoritarian countries that lack meaningful protections for privacy, personal and political expression, and intellectual property. This chapter analyzes this question through three frameworks of professional ethics—journalism ethics, technology ethics, and business ethics—and the ways that social media resembles and crucially differs from these three industries.

It is difficult to extract reliable criteria for causal locality from the limited ingredients found in textbook quantum theory. In the end, Bell humbly warned that his eponymous theorem was based on criteria that “should be viewed with the utmost suspicion.” Remarkably, by stepping outside the wave-function paradigm, one can reformulate quantum theory in terms of old-fashioned configuration spaces together with ‘unistochastic’ laws. These unistochastic laws take the form of directed conditional probabilities, which turn out to provide a (...) hospitable foundation for encoding microphysical causal relationships. This unistochastic reformulation provides quantum theory with a simpler and more transparent axiomatic foundation, plausibly resolves the measurement problem, and deflates various exotic claims about superposition, interference, and entanglement. Making use of this reformulation, this paper introduces a new principle of causal locality that is intended to improve on Bell's criteria, and shows directly that systems that remain at spacelike separation cannot exert causal influences on each other, according to that new principle. These results therefore lead to a general hidden-variables interpretation of quantum theory that is arguably compatible with causal locality. (shrink)

This paper examines the extent to which dispute resolvers in customary law systems provide widely understandable justifications for their decisions. The paper first examines the liberal-democratic reasons for the importance of publicity, understood to be wide accessibility of legal justification, by reviewing the uses of publicity in Habermas’ and Rawls’ accounts of the rule of law. Taking examples from Sierra Leone, the paper then argues that customary law systems would benefit from making local dispute resolution practices, such as “begging” (...) from elders, witchcraft, and customary law judgments, more widely accessible. The paper concludes that while legal pluralism is usually taken to be an analytical concept, it may have a normative thrust as well, and that publicity standards would also apply to formal courts in developing countries, which are also typically “defective” along this dimension. (shrink)

In this work, touched on some social issues whatever the result, and a raising awareness was aimed by some new technological upgrades for the vital infrastructures of states, social order and economic plans. The main aim is one world order which has no king and accepts nations as local governance as a requirement of hierarchical order. It is completely based on economic benefits of all nations as there is no alternative to establish a healthy economic order as economic management (...) is directly related with laws. As the important is a law exists or not, or is just or not for justice, also it encourages to develop organic laws in state institutions as it recognizes any state institution as autonomous. No state has this constitution. This work is only an offer. (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)

Leibniz proposed the ‘Most Determined Path Principle’ in seventeenth century. According to it, ‘ease’ of travel is the end purpose of motion. Using this principle and his calculus method he demonstrated Snell’s Laws of reflection and refraction. This method shows that light follows extremal (local minimum or maximum) time path in going from one point to another, either directly along a straight line path or along a broken line path when it undergoes reflection or refraction at plane or (...) spherical (concave or convex) surfaces. The extremal time path avoided the criticism that Fermat’s least time path was subjected to, by Cartesians who cited examples of reflections at spherical surfaces where light took the path of longest time. Thereby it became the standard method of demonstration of Snell’s Laws. Ptolemy’s theorem is a fundamental theorem in geometry. A special case of it offers a method of finding the minimum sum of the two distances of a point from two given fixed points. We show in this paper that Leibniz’s calculus proof of Snell’s Laws violates Ptolemy’s theorem, whereby Leibniz’s proof becomes invalid. (shrink)

Any foreign manufacturer desiring to market its products in Jordan has several courses open to it. The foreign manufacturer could establish a branch or wholly-owned subsidiary in Jordan or enter into a licensing or joint venture agreement with a company doing business in Jordan. If it wants a less significant presence, however, it is left with the alternative of having a local commercial agent market and sells its products. -/- The purpose of this article is to study certain aspects-exclusivity (...) and termination- of commercial agency according to the Jordanian law. The article is divided into four sections. Section two explains the general rules governing commercial agency in Jordan. Section three analyzes exclusivity of commercial agents. This section introduces the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the basic instrument covering trade in services, and analyses the current commercial agencies regulation in Jordan and its relation to articles VIII and IX of GATS. Also, section two explores Jordan schedule of specific commitments under the GATS in order to shed light on the extent and limit of its obligations with regard to commercial agents. Section four discusses agency termination. Finally, the article concludes by summarizing the main. (shrink)

This paper aims both to tackle the technical issue of deciphering Hobbes’s derivation of the sine law of refraction and to throw some light to the broader issue of Hobbes’s mechanical philosophy. I start by recapitulating the polemics between Hobbes and Descartes concerning Descartes’ optics. I argue that, first, Hobbes’s criticisms do expose certain shortcomings of Descartes’ optics which presupposes a twofold distinction between real motion and inclination to motion, and between motion itself and determination of motion; second, Hobbes’s optical (...) theory presented in Tractatus Opticus I constitutes a more economical alternative, which eliminates the twofold distinction and only admits actual local motion, and Hobbes’s derivation of the sine law presented therein, which I call “the early model” and which was retained in Tractatus Opticus II and First Draught, is mathematically consistent and physically meaningful. These two points give Hobbes’s early optics some theoretical advantage over that of Descartes. However, an issue that has baffled commentators is that, in De Corpore Hobbes’s derivation of the sine law seems to be completely different from that presented in his earlier works, furthermore, it does not make any intuitive sense. I argue that the derivation of the sine law in De Corpore does make sense mathematically if we read it as a simplification of the early model, and Hobbes has already hinted toward it in the last proposition of Tractatus Opticus I. But now the question becomes, why does Hobbes take himself to be entitled to present this simplified, seemingly question-begging form without having presented all the previous results? My conjecture is that the switch from the early model to the late model is symptomatic of Hobbes’s changing views on the relation between physics and mathematics. (shrink)

For more than two decades, police in the United States have used facial recognition to surveil civilians. Local police departments deploy facial recognition technology to identify protestors’ faces while federal law enforcement agencies quietly amass driver’s license and social media photos to build databases containing billions of faces. Yet, despite the widespread use of facial recognition in law enforcement, there are neither federal laws governing the deployment of this technology nor regulations settings standards with respect to its development. (...) To make matters worse, the Fourth Amendment—intended to limit police power and enacted to protect against unreasonable searches—has struggled to rein in new surveillance technologies since its inception. -/- This Article examines the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence leading up to Carpenter v. United States and suggests that the Court is reinterpreting the amendment for the digital age. Still, the too-slow expansion of privacy protections raises challenging questions about racial bias, the legitimacy of police power, and ethical issues in artificial intelligence design. This Article proposes the development of an algorithmic auditing and accountability market that not only sets standards for AI development and limitations on governmental use of facial recognition but encourages collaboration between public interest technologists and regulators. Beyond the necessary changes to the technological and legal landscape, the current system of policing must also be reevaluated if hard-won civil liberties are to endure. (shrink)

There is an old and powerful argument for the claim that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A recent response to this argument, sometimes called the “dependence response,” centers around the claim that God’s relevant past beliefs depend on the relevant agent’s current or future behavior in a certain way. This paper offers a new argument for the dependence response, one that revolves around different cases of time travel. Somewhat serendipitously, the argument also paves the way (...) for a new reply to a compelling objection to the dependence response, the challenge from prepunishment. But perhaps not so serendipitously, the argument also renders the dependence response incompatible with certain views of providence. (shrink)

Suppose Molinism is true and God placed Adam in the garden because God knew Adam would freely eat of the fruit. Suppose further that, had it not been true that Adam would freely eat of the fruit, were he placed in the garden, God would have placed someone else there instead. When Adam freely eats of the fruit, is he free to do otherwise? This paper argues that there is a strong case for both a positive and a negative answer. (...) Assuming such cases are possible under Molinism, we are left with a puzzling question: if Molinism is true, what can you do? (shrink)

Let (leeway) incompatibilism be the thesis that causal determinism is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. Several prominent authors have claimed that incompatibilism alone can capture, or at least best captures, the intuitive appeal behind Jorge Luis Borges's famous “Garden of Forking Paths” metaphor. The thought, briefly, is this: the “single path” leading up to one's present decision represents the past; the forking paths that one must decide between represent those possible futures consistent with the past and the (...) class='Hi'>laws of nature. But if determinism is true, there is only one possible future consistent with the past and the laws and, hence, only one path to choose from. That is, if determinism is true, then we are not free to do otherwise. In this paper, I argue that this understanding of the Garden of Forking Paths faces a number of problems and ought to be rejected even by incompatibilists. I then present an alternative understanding that not only avoids these problems but still supports incompatibilism. Finally, I consider how various versions of (leeway) compatibilism fit with the Garden of Forking Paths as well as the broader question of whether metaphors, however intuitive, have any dialectical force in the debates over freedom. (shrink)

Is the virtue of the good citizen the same as the virtue of the good man? Aristotle addresses this in Politics 3.4. His answer is twofold. On the one hand, (the account for Difference) they are not the same both because what the citizen’s virtue is depends on the constitution, on what preserves it, and on the role the citizen plays in it, and because the good citizens in the best constitution cannot all be good men, whereas the good man’s (...) virtue is uniform. On the other hand, (the account for Identity) the two virtues are identical in the good men in the best constitution, in which all are good citizens, each possessing the ability for ruling and for being ruled. This nuanced answer can be seen as Aristotle’s synthesis of a Periclean view (contribution to state blots out personal wrongs) and a Socratic view (no good citizen is without justice). Its nuances reflect the extent to which Aristotle’s conceptions of good citizenship and the best constitution accommodate deviations of what is probable from the human ideal set out in his ethical writings. In the present chapter, I will first address three puzzles regarding the nuances of Aristotle’s answer. Second, I will consider one question about its implication: Does Aristotle’s account for Difference turn out to entail something ultra-Periclean: that no one can simultaneously be a good man and a good citizen in any constitution other than the best? I shall argue the negative. (shrink)

Libertarian views of freedom claim that, although determinism would rule out our freedom, we are nevertheless free on some occasions. An odd implication of such views (to put it mildly) seems to be that indeterminism somehow enhances or contributes to our agency. But how could that be? What does indeterminism have to offer agency? This paper develops a novel answer, one that is centred around the notion of explanation. In short, it is argued that, if indeterminism holds in the right (...) places, then the best explanation of the history of the world necessarily cites facts about our agency. Along the way, alternative proposals regarding the significance of indeterminism are considered and, ultimately, rejected in favour of the one developed in this paper. (shrink)

The paper shows how the Bohmian approach to quantum physics can be applied to develop a clear and coherent ontology of non-perturbative quantum gravity. We suggest retaining discrete objects as the primitive ontology also when it comes to a quantum theory of space-time and therefore focus on loop quantum gravity. We conceive atoms of space, represented in terms of nodes linked by edges in a graph, as the primitive ontology of the theory and show how a non-local law in (...) which a universal and stationary wave-function figures can provide an order of configurations of such atoms of space such that the classical space-time of general relativity is approximated. Although there is as yet no fully worked out physical theory of quantum gravity, we regard the Bohmian approach as setting up a standard that proposals for a serious ontology in this field should meet and as opening up a route for fruitful physical and mathematical investigations. (shrink)

Recently, several authors have utilized the notion of dependence to respond to the traditional argument for the incompatibility of freedom and divine foreknowledge. However, proponents of this response have not always been so clear in specifying where the incompatibility argument goes wrong, which has led to some unfounded objections to the response. We remedy this dialectical confusion by clarifying both the dependence response itself and its interaction with the standard incompatibility argument. Once these clarifications are made, it becomes clear both (...) (1.) that the dependence response does not beg the question against the proponent of the incompatibility argument and (2.) that the dependence response advances the dialectic whether it is developed as a version of Ockhamism or as a version of multiple-pasts compatibilism. (shrink)

In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called commonsense metaphysics. This includes a number of areas that figure in virtually every domain of discourse, such as granularity, (...) scales, time, space, material, physical objects, shape, causality, functionality, and force. Our effort has been to construct core theories of each of these areas, and then to define, or at least characterize, a large number of lexical items in terms provided by the core theories. In this paper we discuss our methodological principles and describe the key ideas in the various domains we are investigating. (shrink)

Review of Causation and Free Will by Carolina Sartorio, Oxford University Press, 2016. viii + 188 pp. £35.00.

An increasing number of regulations propose the notion of ‘AI audits’ as an enforcement mechanism for achieving transparency and accountability for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Despite some converging norms around various forms of AI auditing, auditing for the purpose of compliance and assurance currently have little to no agreed upon practices, procedures, taxonomies, and standards. We propose the ‘criterion audit’ as an operationalizable compliance and assurance external audit framework. We model elements of this approach after financial auditing practices, and argue (...) that AI audits should similarly provide assurance to their stakeholders about AI organizations’ ability to govern their algorithms in ways that mitigate harms and uphold human values. We discuss the necessary conditions for the criterion audit, and provide a procedural blueprint for performing an audit engagement in practice. We illustrate how this framework can be adapted to current regulations by deriving the criteria on which ‘bias audits’ for hiring algorithms can be performed, as required by the recently effective New York City Local Law 144 of 2021. We conclude by offering critical discussion on the benefits, inherent limitations, and implementation challenges of applying practices of the more mature financial auditing industry to AI auditing where robust guardrails against quality assurance issues are only starting to emerge. Our discussion as informed by experiences in performing these audits in practice highlights the critical role that an audit ecosystem plays in ensuring the effectiveness of such methodology. (shrink)

The violation of Bell inequalities seems to establish an important fact about the world: that it is non-local. However, this result relies on the assumption of the statistical independence of the measurement settings with respect to potential past events that might have determined them. Superdeterminism refers to the view that a local, and determinist, account of Bell inequalities violations is possible, by rejecting this assumption of statistical independence. We examine and clarify various problems with superdeterminism, looking in particular (...) at its consequences on the nature of scientific laws and scientific reasoning. We argue that the view requires a neo-Humean account of at least some laws, and creates a significant problem for the use of statistical independence in other parts of physics and science more generally. (shrink)

In this short survey article, I discuss Bell’s theorem and some strategies that attempt to avoid the conclusion of non-locality. I focus on two that intersect with the philosophy of probability: (1) quantum probabilities and (2) superdeterminism. The issues they raised not only apply to a wide class of no-go theorems about quantum mechanics but are also of general philosophical interest.

The policy makers or lawyers may face the need of legal research for reasons. The congressmen may plan to make new laws to address the challenges of their constituent or to the interest of nation. The lawyers may need to serve their clients who like to know the legal issues involved, the strategies to deal with their loss and recovery, and prospect for winning the case if the dispute has gotten worse. The lawyers may practice in a solo business (...) or might work as an associate lawyer in the law firms. A senior lawyer or partner in some cases may like to exploit the junior work force about the problems or grievances from the potential clients. Since he needs to focus their attention on other matters, such as the business expansion of his law firm or more lucrative cases in need of career hands, he may tap the junior lawyer for the legal research, who could assist with the basis of his final legal opinion. The memorandum, opinion letter and brief would be such forms of professional communication for the lawyers and legal researchers. The congressman also can be supplemented with the aid of staffs in terms of his legal expertise and grasp of the issues standing for carrying their responsibility more effectively. For the lawyers and legal researchers, the structure of state and federal legal system is the kind of important variants to orient their work direction and basic frame for the most efficient and adequate scope of search and analysis. The paradigm change also is revolutionary to impact the general base of people. Decades ago, the research or researcher only related with the class of professionals, such as professors, lawyers, career officers and cadres of enterprises. They would enjoy insulation and exploit their research work as an entrance barrier from lay people. Their large shelves at home study or in the room or corner of office thrust an impression that he or she is learned and knowledgeable. This impliedly communicates his or her prestige of social or professional success. The books and articles seem to symbolize a kind of monopoly which bears to exclude unclassified or non-professional workers. The change is remarkable that every citizen could benefit from the on-line sources of information, which, of course, is generally true of professional knowledge. Now professors fear of plagiarism that students often are the kind of suspect. The legal research would turn on the help of digitization which revolutionizes to incur a new mode of research operation. About the query, the citizens and people can readily verify its truth or falsity with one clique within the personal computer. An enormous amount of information is currently flowing on the internet and on-line sources of reference, which shapes an informative and knowledgeable society. As the medical doctors warned decades ago, the precept is any most effective, “forbear from your intelligence or knowledge work for your health.” Many of them now spend long hours a day to satisfy their curiosity and intelligent search. He or she may be well awarded an academic degree if to recognize their hard work on his PC. Nevertheless, this information age does not always bring a positive progress, which arouses the kind of issues, say, right of privacy, on-line fraud. In some cases, this transformation may lead to an inferior attitude of researcher. My today’s experience is one of exotic case. I have received an e-mail from Google CEO stating that I have been selected as one of twelve winners from the pool of Google users. The award money is enormous which stalls me for some time. The authenticity and reliability have hit my head, and I utilized a verification service website managed by the team of lawyers. It costs five dollars and remaining 24 dollars would be processed upon the progress of interaction. I am waiting for an answer from the team. Then the research nowadays is not limited to the basic context of our subsistence, but influences in any depth into the professional lives. (shrink)

On the standard analysis, a counterfactual conditional such as “If P had been the case, then Q would have been the case” is true in the actual world if, in all nearest possible worlds in which its antecedent (P) is true, its consequent (Q) is also true. Despite its elegance, this analysis faces a difficulty if the laws of nature are deterministic. Then the antecedent could not have been true, given prior conditions. So, it is unclear what the relevant (...) “nearest possible worlds” are. David Lewis suggested that they are ones in which a local breach of the laws occurred: a “small miracle”. Others have suggested that they are ones in which the initial conditions were different (“backtracking”). I propose another response. It builds on the idea that the special sciences, where counterfactual reasoning is most common, operate at a higher level of description from fundamental physics, and that the world may behave indeterministically at higher levels even if it behaves deterministically at the fundamental physical one. The challenge from determinism can then be bypassed for many special-science counterfactuals. (shrink)

The principle of energy conservation is widely taken to be a se- rious difficulty for interactionist dualism (whether property or sub- stance). Interactionists often have therefore tried to make it satisfy energy conservation. This paper examines several such attempts, especially including E. J. Lowe’s varying constants proposal, show- ing how they all miss their goal due to lack of engagement with the physico-mathematical roots of energy conservation physics: the first Noether theorem (that symmetries imply conservation laws), its converse (that (...) conservation laws imply symmetries), and the locality of continuum/field physics. Thus the “conditionality re- sponse”, which sees conservation as (bi)conditional upon symme- tries and simply accepts energy non-conservation as an aspect of interactionist dualism, is seen to be, perhaps surprisingly, the one most in accord with contemporary physics (apart from quantum mechanics) by not conflicting with mathematical theorems basic to physics. A decent objection to interactionism should be a posteri- ori, based on empirically studying the brain. (shrink)

The paper discusses Hilbert mathematics, a kind of Pythagorean mathematics, to which the physical world is a particular case. The parameter of the “distance between finiteness and infinity” is crucial. Any nonzero finite value of it features the particular case in the frameworks of Hilbert mathematics where the physical world appears “ex nihilo” by virtue of an only mathematical necessity or quantum information conservation physically. One does not need the mythical Big Bang which serves to concentrate all the violations of (...) energy conservation in a “safe”, maximally remote point in the alleged “beginning of the universe”. On the contrary, an omnipresent and omnitemporal medium obeying quantum information conservation rather than energy conservation permanently generates action and thus the physical world. The utilization of that creation “ex nihilo” is accessible to humankind, at least theoretically, as long as one observes the physical laws, which admit it in their new and wider generalization. One can oppose Hilbert mathematics to Gödel mathematics, which can be identified as all the standard mathematics until now featureable by the Gödel dichotomy of arithmetic to set theory: and then, “dialectic”, “intuitionistic”, and “Gödelian” mathematics within the former, according to a negative, positive, or zero value of the distance between finiteness and infinity. A mapping of Hilbert mathematics into pseudo-Riemannian space corresponds, therefore allowing for gravitation to be interpreted purely mathematically and ontologically in a Pythagorean sense. Information and quantum information can be involved in the foundations of mathematics and linked to the axiom of choice or alternatively, to the field of all rational numbers, from which the pair of both dual and anti-isometric Peano arithmetics featuring Hilbert arithmetic are immediately inferable. Noether’s theorems (1918) imply quantum information conservation as the maximally possible generalization of the pair of the conservation of a physical quantity and the corresponding Lie group of its conjugate. Hilbert mathematics can be interpreted from their viewpoint also after an algebraic generalization of them. Following the ideas of Noether’s theorem (1918), locality and nonlocality can be realized both physically and mathematically. The “light phase of the universe” can be linked to the gap of mathematics and physics in the Cartesian organization of cognition in Modernity and then opposed to its “dark phase”, in which physics and mathematics are merged. All physical quantities can be deduced from only mathematical premises by the mediation of the most fundamental physical constants such as the speed of light in a vacuum, the Planck and gravitational constants once they have been interpreted by the relation of locality and nonlocality. (shrink)

For Humeans, many facts—even ones intuitively “about” particular, localized macroscopic parts of the world—turn out to depend on surprisingly global fundamental bases. We investigate some counterintuitive consequences of this picture. Many counterfactuals whose antecedents describe intuitively localized, non-actual states of affairs nevertheless end up involving wide-ranging implications for the global, embedding Humean mosaic. The case of self-undermining chances is a familiar example of this. We examine that example in detail and argue that popular existing strategies such as “holding the (...) class='Hi'>laws fixed as laws” or “holding the laws fixed as true” are of no help. Interestingly, we show how a new proposal that draws on the resources of the Mentaculus can yield the right results—but only on the assumption that the Humean can make cross-world identifications. We go on to argue that the Humean cannot make such identifications. We conclude that the root of this trouble is deeper, and its reach broader, than the familiar cases suggest. We think it is very much an open question whether the Humean has sufficient resources to properly conceptualize macroscopic objects or to analyze these “local” counterfactuals. (shrink)

We address a long-standing debate over whether classical magnetic forces can do work, ultimately answering the question in the affirmative. In detail, we couple a classical particle with intrinsic spin and elementary dipole moments to the electromagnetic field, derive the appropriate generalization of the Lorentz force law, show that the particle's dipole moments must be collinear with its spin axis, and argue that the magnetic field does mechanical work on the particle's elementary magnetic dipole moment. As consistency checks, we calculate (...) the overall system's energy-momentum and angular momentum, and show that their local conservation equations lead to the same force law and therefore the same conclusions about magnetic forces and work. We also compute the system's Belinfante-Rosenfeld energy-momentum tensor. (shrink)

Over recent decades, several global tech giants have gained enormous power while at the same time generating various disputes with their end-users, local governments, and regulators. We propose that the Jewish concept of covenant can help the above parties, legal scholars, and wider society, in addressing this complex legal reality. We present the challenge of disequilibrium between the above four parties against the main points of conflict: the requirement of customer consent; clear contractual provisions upon entry; options for reasonable (...) customer exit; limitations on the platform’s ability to exercise unilateral termination; profile-based discrimination; and liability for mere intermediation. We introduce the biblical concept of covenant, and we review its unfolding in Jewish tradition. Further, we conceptualize three main covenantal principles: (1) responsibility—God and humans are both conceived as moral agents; (2) reciprocity—God as a caring law giver, open to human appeals; and (3) reasonability—divine instruction as initially intelligible. We demonstrate how the latter principle of explainability is exercised in the biblical law narratives and how the story of Balaam stresses the significance of moral agency that cannot hide behind “mere intermediary” claims. In light of this analysis, we revisit the relationship between tech giants and tech users to demonstrate how covenantality offers novel ways to conceptualize the noted conflicts between the parties. (shrink)

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for (...) its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being “meta-dynamism” (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time. (shrink)

Although symmetry has been discussed in terms of a major law of perceptual organization since the early conceptual efforts of the Gestalt school (Wertheimer, Metzger, Koffka and others), the first quantitative measurements testing for effects of symmetry on processes of Gestalt formation have seen the day only recently. In this study, a psychophysical rating study and a “foreground”-“background” choice response time experiment were run with human observers to test for effects of bilateral symmetry on the perceived strength of figure-ground in (...) triangular Kanizsa configurations. Displays with and without bilateral symmetry, identical physically-specified-to-total contour ratio, and constant local contrast intensity within and across conditions, but variable local contrast polarity and variable orientation in the plane, were presented in a random order to human observers. Configurations with bilateral symmetry produced significantly stronger figure-ground percepts reflected by greater subjective magnitudes and consistently higher percentages of “foreground” judgments accompanied by significantly shorter response times. These effects of symmetry depend neither on the orientation of the axis of symmetry, nor on the contrast polarity of the physical inducers. It is concluded that bilateral symmetry, irrespective of orientation, significantly contributes to the, largely sign-invariant, visual mechanisms of figure-ground segregation that determine the salience of figure-ground in perceptually ambiguous configurations. (shrink)

‘Crime is a prohibited act from which results in more evil than good’ is how Jeremy Bentham described crime. ‘Crime is a serious anti-social action to which the State reacts consciously by inflicting pain’, is how W.A.Bonger describes crime. Morality and its lack thereof are related to crime. Morality is so closely interwoven with social conduct and immorality interwoven with criminal conduct that it is desirable to investigate this matter further and so this shorter version of a paper by Sally (...) Ramage is the vehicle by which to look further into this issue of moral crime which notion is based on accepted moral code and common sense. We need to urgently study moral crime if we are to arrest the current moral decline in society and restore integrity and trust to the human race. In this example we see that maturity does not mellow the human psyche as modern criminal law states. It was Sir Norwood East who stated that ‘acquisitiveness, aggressiveness and sexuality are often closely associated but the maturity which changes criminality is never going to be present until one is conscious of one’s own maturity by beginning to live in that consciousness’. Social conduct must be cultivated. Crucially, sociologists argue that social conduct may vary with time and place. However, the case of maturity is different when considering those in formative early life and also in declining periods of life. It must be cultivated. It does not happen automatically with age and some people can never change since their greed, selfishness and criminal inclinations remain steadfast. To these types, there is no resilience learnt because resilience is characteristic of the formative period of life when the disappointments of today are counterbalanced by the anticipations of tomorrow. (shrink)

Mental causation, idea that it is us – via our minds – who cause bodily actions is as commonsensical as it is indispensable for our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. Somewhat less uncontroversial, but nonetheless widespread (at least among ordinary people) is the idea that the mind is non-physical, following the intuition that what is physical can neither act nor think nor judge morally. Taken together, and cast into a metaphysical thesis, the two intuitions yield interactive dualism: the view (...) that human persons and their minds are non-physical but can nonetheless interact with their bodies, most notably through their brains. This thesis has two main objectives: first, to defend interactive dualism against objections, and second, to show how it can blend in with a physical world in which laws of nature hold. The first part (chapter 1) consists in a brief motivation of interactive dualism as opposed to non-interactive dualism. I argue that non-interactive, epiphenomenalist dualism sacrifices so many crucial aspects of our human existence that interactive dualism is highly to be preferred to it, barring even stronger counterarguments against the latter. It is those putative counterarguments I address in parts II and III. Part II takes on the philosophical objections from the causal closure of the physical and from causal heterogeneity. The former takes the success of physics and physiology as basis for the doctrine of the causal closure of the physical (CCP). I argue against this that there is not only no convincing argument for CCP, but also that any science-based belief in CCP cannot be epistemically justified. As regards the causal heterogeneity objection, it is ‘weighed and found wanting’, because it relies on unwarranted assumptions about causation. In part III, I examine the objection from energy conservation. It roughly says that if interactive dualism were true, then energy would not be conserved, which physics taught us cannot be the case. My reply is that the underlying conception of energy (and momentum) conservation is wrong-headed and not the one that actual physicists use. Instead of being categorical and global, conservation laws are conditional and local, thereby making natural room for mental interaction. Some dualists, however, have sought to make interactive dualism conservation-friendly, notably by invoking quantum physics; I show that these attempts are unnecessary and create more problems than they solve. Finally, in chapter 9, I turn the tables on non-interactionists by investigating current neurophysiological literature on volitional actions, which, though not addressing the question directly, still encourages the interactive dualist picture more than a non-interactionist one. Part IV is about the interplay between interactive dualism and the laws of nature. The ultimate goal is, if possible, to come up with a theory of the laws of nature that explains the lawlike behavior of nature and at the same time makes room for interaction. I begin by pointing out that the laws of nature are or at least should be what physicalists worry about (chapter 10). I then proceed with a historical survey on the development of the notion of laws of nature (chapter 11) that sheds light on its theistic origin. This is followed by an inquiry into the question how a law of nature could possibly be broken (chapter 12) and a survey of the extant metaphysical theories of the laws of nature with special regard to their receptivity to interaction (chapter 13). Finally, in chapter 14 I develop a theory of the laws of nature both faithful to their divine origin and the possibility of mental interaction: dispositionalist divine decretalism, a synthesis of dispositionalism and Jeffrey Koperski’s divine decretalism. (shrink)

Biology seems to present local and transitory regularities rather than immutable laws. To account for these historically constituted regularities and to distinguish them from mathematical invariants, Montévil and Mossio (Journal of Theoretical Biology 372:179–191, 2015) have proposed to speak of constraints. In this article we analyse the causal power of these constraints in the evolution of biodiversity, i.e., their positivity, but also the modality of their action on the directions taken by evolution. We argue that to fully account (...) for the causal power of these constraints on evolution, they must be thought of in terms of normativity. In this way, we want to highlight two characteristics of the evolutionary constraints. The first, already emphasised as reported by Gould (The structure of evolutionary theory, Harvard University Press, 2002), is that these constraints are both produced by and producing biological evolution and that this circular causation creates true novelties. The second is that this specific causality, which generates unpredictability in evolution, stems not only from the historicity of biological constraints, but also from their internalisation through the practices of living beings. (shrink)

The article sets out a primitive ontology of the natural world in terms of primitive stuff—that is, stuff that has as such no physical properties at all—but that is not a bare substratum either, being individuated by metrical relations. We focus on quantum physics and employ identity-based Bohmian mechanics to illustrate this view, but point out that it applies all over physics. Properties then enter into the picture exclusively through the role that they play for the dynamics of the primitive (...) stuff. We show that such properties can be local, as well as holistic, and discuss two metaphysical options to conceive them, namely, Humeanism and modal realism in the guise of dispositionalism. 1 Introduction2 Primitive Ontology: Primitive Stuff3 The Physics of Matter as Primitive Stuff4 The Humean Best System Analysis of the Dynamical Variables5 Modal Realism about the Dynamical Variables6 Conclusion. (shrink)

Macroscopic irreversible processes emerge from fundamental physical laws of reversible character. The source of the local irreversibility seems to be not in the laws themselves but in the initial and boundary conditions of the equations that represent the laws. In this work we propose that the screening of currents by black hole event horizons determines, locally, a preferred direction for the flux of electromagnetic energy. We study the growth of black hole event horizons due to the (...) cosmological expansion and accretion of cosmic microwave background radiation, for different cosmological models. We propose generalized McVittie co-moving metrics and integrate the rate of accretion of cosmic microwave background radiation onto a supermassive black hole over cosmic time. We find that for flat, open, and closed Friedmann cosmological models, the ratio of the total area of the black hole event horizons with respect to the area of a radial co-moving space-like hypersurface always increases. Since accretion of cosmic radiation sets an absolute lower limit to the total matter accreted by black holes, this implies that the causal past and future are not mirror symmetric for any spacetime event. The asymmetry causes a net Poynting flux in the global future direction; the latter is in turn related to the ever increasing thermodynamic entropy. Thus, we expose a connection between four different “time arrows”: cosmological, electromagnetic, gravitational, and thermodynamic. (shrink)