The Deaf culture in the United States is a unique culture that is not widely understood. To members of the Deaf community in the United States, deafness is not viewed as a disease or pathology to be treated or cured; instead it is seen as a difference in human experience. Members of this community do not hide their deafness; instead they take great pride in their Deaf identity. The Deaf culture in the United States is very communitarian not individualistic. Mary (...) Beth and Dominic are a married couple in their late 20s who are genetically deaf. They are active members in the Deaf community and work as advocates for individuals who are deaf, family members of Deaf people and sign language interpreters who identify with the Deaf culture. Mary Beth and Dominic approach the fertility clinic with a request that they only want a child with the genetic gene for deafness. They would want the embryos that do not have the gene to be destroyed. This would entail creating a child who would have the gene for deafness. Medically and ethically, should the fertility clinic agree to the couple’s request? The authors argue that the couple's request should be denied and provide reasons for it from the perspectives of foundational and clinical ethics. (shrink)

Finnis claims that his theory proceeds from seven basic principles of practical reason that are self-evidently true. While much has been written about the claim of self-evidence, this article considers it in relation to the rigorous claims of logic and mathematics. It argues that when considered in this light, Finnis equivocates in his use of the concept of self-evidence between the realist Thomistic conception and a purely formal, modern symbolic conception. Given his respect for the modern positivist separation of fact (...) and value, the realism of the Thomistic conception cannot be the foundation for the natural law as Finnis would reconstruct it. Nor can the purely formal modern conception of self-evidence provide a foundation for practical reason. This raises some doubt as to whether there can be self-evident principles of practical reason as Finnis suggests. The article contributes to the analysis of the Finnis reconstruction of the natural law by providing a rigorous analysis of his claim for self-evidence. It frames this analysis historically, suggesting the roles that certainty and mystery play in the apprehension of moral meaning. (shrink)

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and (...) Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women. (shrink)

This paper identifies, develops, and argues for an interpretation of Mary Astell’s understanding of self-government. On this interpretation, what is essential to self-government, according to Astell, is an agent’s responsiveness to her own reasoning. The paper identifies two aspects of her theory of self-government: an ‘authenticity’ criterion of what makes our motives our own and an account of the capacities required for responsiveness to our own reasoning. The authenticity criterion states that when our motives arise from some external source without (...) validation by our own understanding of the reasons supporting them, then they are not our own. The capacities requisite for responsiveness to our own reasoning are those of examining and evaluating our own motives and of resisting the social pressure to conform to others’ opinions. An upshot of this interpretation of Astell’s theory of self-government is that it reveals her insights into the ways ‘custom’ can undermine an individual’s ability to govern oneself. (shrink)

The debate over Hypothetical Syllogism is locked in stalemate. Although putative natural language counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism abound, many philosophers defend Hypothetical Syllogism, arguing that the alleged counterexamples involve an illicit shift in context. The proper lesson to draw from the putative counterexamples, they argue, is that natural language conditionals are context-sensitive conditionals which obey Hypothetical Syllogism. In order to make progress on the issue, I consider and improve upon Morreau’s proof of the invalidity of Hypothetical Syllogism. The improved proof (...) relies upon the semantic claim that conditionals with antecedents irrelevant to the obtaining of an already true consequent are themselves true. Moreover, this semantic insight allows us to provide compelling counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism that are resistant to the usual contextualist response. (shrink)

I assess a number of connected ideas about temporal experience that are introspectively plausible, but which I believe can be argued to be incorrect. These include the idea that temporal experiences are extended experiential processes, that they have an internal structure that in some way mirrors the structure of the apparent events they present, and the idea that time in experience is in some way represented by time itself. I explain how these ideas can be developed into more sharply defined (...) views, and then argue that these views are inconsistent with certain empirical facts about how time is represented in the brain. These facts instead support a kind of atomic view, on which temporal experiences are temporally unstructured atoms. (shrink)

I sketch here an intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types, which are individuated in part by historical paths (re)production. Although attractive, this view has been rejected by a number of authors on the basis of general claims about abstract objects. On consideration, however, these general claims are overgeneralizations, which whilst true of some abstracta, are not true of all abstract objects, and in particular, are not true of created types. The intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types (...) is, then, left in place. (shrink)

I defend Braun's gappy proposition view from two objections.

In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, (...) and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)

Are counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents automatically true? That is, is Conjunction Conditionalization: if (X & Y), then (X > Y) valid? Stalnaker and Lewis think so, but many others disagree. We note here that the extant arguments for Conjunction Conditionalization are unpersuasive, before presenting a family of more compelling arguments. These arguments rely on some standard theorems of the logic of counterfactuals as well as a plausible and popular semantic claim about certain semifactuals. Denying Conjunction Conditionalization, then, requires (...) rejecting other aspects of the standard logic of counterfactuals, or else our intuitive picture of semifactuals. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in which (...) a system can be more or less analog. We explain how our theory improves upon prior accounts of analog representation, provides plausible diagnoses for novel challenge cases, extends to hybrid systems that are partially analog and partially symbolic, and accounts for some of the advantages and disadvantages of representing analogically versus symbolically. (shrink)

I give an account of the difference between "Holistic" and "Atomistic" views of conscious experience. On the Holistic view, we enjoy a unified "field" of awareness, whose parts are mere modifications of the whole, and therefore owe their existence to the whole. There is some tendency to saddle those who reject the Holistic field model with a (perhaps) implausible "building block" view. I distinguish a number of different theses about the parts of an experience that are suggested by the "building (...) block" metaphor, but which can be rejected by those who also reject the holistic field view. (shrink)

"The enterprise initiative is probably the most significant political and cultural influence to have affected Western and Eastern Europe in the last decade. In this book, academics from a range of disciplines debate Mary Douglas's distinctive Grid Group cultural theory and examine how it allows us to analyse the complex relation between the culture of enterprise and its institutions. Mary Douglas, Britain's leading cultural anthropologist, contributes several chapters."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Psychologists and philosophers have not yet resolved what they take implicit attitudes to be; and, some, concerned about limitations in the psychometric evidence, have even challenged the predictive and theoretical value of positing implicit attitudes in explanations for social behavior. In the midst of this debate, prominent stakeholders in science have called for scientific communities to recognize and countenance implicit bias in STEM fields. In this paper, I stake out a stakeholder conception of implicit bias that responds to these challenges (...) in ways that are responsive to the psychometric evidence, while also being resilient to the sorts of disagreements and scientific progress that would not undermine the soundness of this call. Along the way, my account advocates for attributing collective (group-level) implicit attitudes rather than individual-level implicit attitudes. This position raises new puzzles for future research on the relationship (metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical) between collective implicit attitudes and individual-level attitudes. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to introduce an original and radical phenomenology of life into Heidegger’s earliest lectures at Freiburg University. The motivation behind this aim lies in the exclusion of life from the existential analytic despite Heidegger’s preoccupation with the question of life during this very early period. Principally, the essay demonstrates how Husserl’s phenomenological insight into the intentionality of life has the potential to be transformed into a living aporia. Although this demonstration is set within the general (...) context of obtaining knowledge in and of life, it is achieved via a reciprocal critique of the possibility of a philosophy of life and Husserlian phenomenology to reveal the congruence life philosophy has with the project of phenomenology. In contrast to fundamental ontology, the essay ends by exposing Heidegger’s latent and inexplicit formulation of phenomenology in terms of a radical correlation that holds aporetically between living and unliving experience. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea of "objective phenomenology," or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are (...) objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that life is worth living not merely because of the goods and the bads within it, but also because life itself is good. I explain how this idea can be formalized by associating each version of such of a view with a function from length of life to the value generated by life itself. Then I argue that every version of the view that life itself is good faces some version of the following dilemma: either (1) good (...) human lives are worse than very long lives wholly devoid of pleasure, desire-satisfaction, knowledge, or any other goods, or (2) very short lives containing nothing but suffering are worth living. Since neither result is plausible, we ought to reject the view that life itself is good. On the view I favor, any given life may be worth living because of the goods that it contains, but life itself is neutral. (shrink)

Conscious experiences are characterized by mental qualities, such as those involved in seeing red, feeling pain, or smelling cinnamon. The standard framework for modeling mental qualities represents them via points in geometrical spaces, where distances between points inversely correspond to degrees of phenomenal similarity. This paper argues that the standard framework is structurally inadequate and develops a new framework that is more powerful and flexible. The core problem for the standard framework is that it cannot capture precision structure: for example, (...) consider the phenomenal contrast between seeing an object as crimson in foveal vision versus merely as red in peripheral vision. The solution I favor is to model mental qualities using regions, rather than points. I explain how this seemingly simple formal innovation not only provides a natural way of modeling precision, but also yields a variety of further theoretical fruits: it enables us to formulate novel hypotheses about the space and structures of mental qualities, formally differentiate two dimensions of phenomenal similarity, generate a quantitative model of the phenomenal sorites, and define a measure of discriminatory grain. A noteworthy consequence is that the structure of the mental qualities of conscious experiences is fundamentally different from the structure of the perceptible qualities of external objects. (shrink)

We argue that relating to myself as me provides, as such, a reason to care about myself: grasping that an event involves me, instead of another, makes it matter in a special way. Further, this self-concern is not simply a matter of seeing in myself some instrumental value for other ends. We use as our foil a recent skeptical challenge to this view offered in Setiya 2015. We think the case against self-concern is powered by unwarrantedly narrow construals of three (...) key notions. One is the notion of a first-personal way of relating to oneself. A narrow account of the first person in terms of special epistemic relations to oneself makes it easy to overlook a source of non-instrumental reasons of self-concern, located in the special relation a subject has to herself as agent. Two is the notion of what it is to be a reason. And, three, is the notion of self-concern itself. We show that the skeptical case rests in part on a slide towards neighbouring but distinct notions of egoism and selfishness. We also argue that Setiya’s notion of self-love, offered to capture the pre-theoretical intuition of self-concern, cannot do it justice. (shrink)

Are a material object, such as a statue, and its constituting matter, the clay, parts of one another? One wouldn't have thought so, and yet a number of philosophers have argued that they are. I review the arguments for this surprising claim showing how they all fail. I then consider two arguments against the view concluding that there are both pre-theoretical and theoretical considerations for denying that the statue and the clay are mutual parts.

The question of authenticity centers in the lives of women of color to invite and restrict their representative roles. For this reason, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Uma Narayan advocate responding with strategic essentialism. This paper argues against such a strategy and proposes an epistemic understanding of the question of authentic- ity. The question stems from a kernel of truth—the connection between experience and knowledge. But a coherence theory of knowledge better captures the sociality and the holism of experience and knowledge.

In this chapter, Marie Collins Swabey critiques naturalism and defends a rationalistic conception of knowledge.

Is A & C sufficient for the truth of ‘if A were the case, C would be the case’? Jonathan Bennett thinks not, although the counterexample he gives is inconsistent with his own account of counterfactuals. In any case, I argue that anyone who accepts the case of Morgenbesser's coin, as Bennett does, should reject Bennett’s counterexample. Moreover, I show that the principle underlying his counterexample is unmotivated and indeed false. More generally, I argue that Morgenbesser’s coin commits us to (...) the sufficiency of A & C for the truth of the corresponding counterfactual. (shrink)

Exploring the intimate tie between body movement and space and time, Lee begins with the position that body movement generates space and time and explores the ethical implications of this responsibility for the situations one’s body movements generate. Whiteness theory has come to recognize the ethical responsibility for situations not of one’s own making and hence accountability for the results of more than one’s immediate personal conscious decisions. Because of our specific history, whites have developed a particular embodiment and body (...) movement that generates places that can only be characterized as more comfortable and more enabling to whites. (shrink)

It has recently been proposed that the framework of semantic relativism be put to use to describe mental content, as deployed in some of the fundamental operations of the mind. This programme has inspired in particular a novel strategy of accounting for the essential egocentricity of first-personal or de se thoughts in relativist terms, with the advantage of dispensing with a notion of self-representation. This paper is a critical discussion of this strategy. While it is based on a plausible appeal (...) to cognitive economy, the relativist theory does not fully account for the epistemic profile that distinguishes de se thinking, as some of its proponents hope to do. A deeper worry concerns the reliance of the theory on a primitive notion of “centre” that hasn’t yet received enough critical attention, and is ambiguous between a thin and a rich reading. I argue that while the rich reading is required if the relativist analysis of the de se is to achieve its most ambitious aims, it also deprives the theory of much of its explanatory power. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept both of the following claims: (1) consciousness matters morally, and (2) species membership doesn’t matter morally. In other words, many reject speciesism but accept what we might call 'sentientism'. But do the reasons against speciesism yield analogous reasons against sentientism, just as the reasons against racism and sexism are thought to yield analogous reasons against speciesism? This paper argues that speciesism is disanalogous to sentientism (as well as racism and sexism). I make a case for the following (...) asymmetry: (a) some non-humans clearly have interests, but (b) no non-conscious entities clearly have interests. This asymmetry, I argue, renders sentientism resistant to the standard argument against speciesism. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a new account of the philosophical motivations for Descartes’s theory of judgment. The theory needs explanation because the idea that judgment, or belief, is an operation of the will seems problematic at best, and Descartes does not make clear why he adopted what, at the time, was a novel view. I argue that attending to Descartes’s conception of the will as the active, free faculty of mind reveals that a general concern with responsibility motivates his (...) theory of judgment. My account avoids some unappealing features of the standard interpretation, renders the theory more plausible than many have suggested, and explains why his theory does not fall neatly into any current-day position on the issue of the control we have over belief. (shrink)

I develop and defend a sense-datum theory of perception. My theory follows the spirit of classic sense-datum theories: I argue that what it is to have a perceptual experience is to be acquainted with some sense-data, where sense-data are private particulars that have all the properties they appear to have, that are common to both perception and hallucination, that constitute the phenomenal characters of perceptual experiences, and that may be aptly described as pictures in-side one’s head. But my theory also (...) diverges from conventional sense-datum theories in some key respects: on my view, (1) sense-data are first-person presentations of neural states, (2) the sensational qualities of sense-data differ in kind from the sensible qualities of external objects, and (3) sense-data are the vehicles in virtue of which we perceive, rather than the objects that we perceive. I argue that this package of claims is appropriately labeled ‘sense-datum theory’, and that the resultant view ought to be a live contender in contemporary philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Oliva Sabuco's New Philosophy of Human nature (1587) is an early modern philosophy of medicine that challenged the views of the successors to Aristotle, especially Galen and Ibn Sina (Avicenna). It also challenged the paradigm of the male as the epitome of the human and instead offers a gender-neutral philosophy of human nature. Now largely forgotten, it was widely read and influential amongst philosophers of medicine including DeClave, LePois, Harvey,Southey and others, particularly for its account of the role of the (...) nervous system and cerebrospinal fluid in mind-body interaction. In this article I trace its early influence by tracing provenance of the editions produced during the lifetime of its author. (shrink)

Under the traditional system of peer-reviewed publication, the degree of prestige conferred to authors by successful publication is tied to the degree of the intellectual rigor of its peer review process: ambitious scientists do well professionally by doing well epistemically. As a result, we should expect journal editors, in their dual role as epistemic evaluators and prestige-allocators, to have the power to motivate improved author behavior through the tightening of publication requirements. Contrary to this expectation, I will argue that the (...) publication bias literature in academic medicine demonstrates that editor interventions have had limited effectiveness in improving the health of the publication and trial registration record, suggesting that much stronger interventions are needed. (shrink)

Epistemic injustices are wrongs that agents can suffer in their capacity as knowers. In this article, I offer a conceptualisation of a phenomenon I call anticipatory epistemic injustice, which I claim is a distinct and particularly pernicious type of epistemic injustice worthy of independent analysis. I take anticipatory epistemic injustice to consist in the wrongs that agents can suffer as a result of anticipated challenges in their process of taking up testimony-sharing opportunities. I distinguish my account from paradigmatic cases of (...) epistemic injustice, such as Miranda Fricker’s concepts of testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice; additionally, I differentiate my view from Kristie Dotson’s account of testimonial smothering. I argue, ultimately, that anticipatory epistemic injustice is a useful addition to our current taxonomy of epistemic injustices, as it has promising explanatory potential for a range of non-standard cases of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

I motivate and articulate a dispositional account of aversive racism. By conceptualizing and measuring attitudes in terms of their full distribution, rather than in terms of their mode or mean preference, my account of dispositional attitudes gives ambivalent attitudes (qua attitude) the ability to predict aggregate behavior. This account can be distinguished from other dispositional accounts of attitude by its ability to characterize ambivalent attitudes such as aversive racism at the attitudinal rather than the sub-attitudinal level and its deeper appreciation (...) of the analogy between traits and attitudes. (shrink)

I reply to Ahmed’s rejection (2011) of my argument (Walters 2009) that all counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents are themselves true.

A response to a declaration in 'Le Monde', 'Luttons efficacement contre les théories du complot' by Gérald Bronner, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez, Karen Douglas, Nicolas Gauvrit, Anthony Lantian, and Pascal Wagner-Egger, published on June the 6th, 2016.

This paper discusses Shoemaker's (1984) account of personal identity over time and the problems person essentialism raises for psychological continuity theories of personal identity at large, as detailed by Olson and Witt (2020).

A number of philosophers have recently proposed several alleged cases of “knowledge from falsehood,” i.e., cases of inferential knowledge epistemised by an inference with a false crucial premise. This paper examines such cases and argues against interpreting them as cases of knowledge from falsehood. Specifically, I argue that the inferences in play in such cases are in no position to epistemise their conclusions.

This introduction to the Journal of Business Research special issue on anti-consumption briefly defines and highlights the importance of anticonsumption research, provides an overview of the latest studies in the area, and suggests an agenda for future research on anti-consumption.

This paper begins to examine different interpretations of causa sui as the key notion used by Strawson to argue for the impossibility of ultimate moral responsibility. Descartes’ and Spinoza’s interpretations are representative in understanding the notion of causa sui. Strawson is, I think, on the side of Descartes. If causa sui can be interpreted differently from the way in which Strawson did, the idea of moral responsibility would change. I shall here examine Spinoza’s notion of causa sui, which is an (...) alternative approach to Strawson’s, for leading to the possibility of moral responsibility. The Chinese concept of the Supreme Polarity (taiji) can be interpreted as a foundation of self-determination when philosophically comparing it with Spinoza’s idea of causa sui, which means an immanent and efficient cause. In the Chinese context, the ontological account of an agent explains how and why persons actively participate in the ordering of the world in the Confucian way of life. Based upon this, I will attempt to examine the idea of moral responsibility with the notion of taking responsibility for oneself or, as I will call it, “selfassignment”, and consider how the role a person plays might contribute to understanding the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. In other words, the ontological claim that the unitary principle of Heaven-andEarth is innately immanent in each person seems to endorse the possibility of ultimate responsibility even though the teleological commitment to making the world better implies the absence of free will. This is one of the alternative ways that we can take moral responsibility without free will. (shrink)

Totalitarianism is perhaps unanimously regarded as one of the greatest political evils of the last century and has been the grounds for much of Anglo-American political theory since. Confucianism, meanwhile, has been gaining credibility in the past decades among sympathizers of democratic theory in spite of criticisms of it being anti-democratic or authoritarian. I consider how certain key concepts in the classical Confucian texts of the Mencius and the Xunzi might or might not be appropriated for ‘legitimising’ totalitarian regimes. Under (...) an Arendtian approach to understanding totalitarianism, it is precisely an unproblematised relation to a normative History and Nature that underlies the potential compatibility or incompatibility. I argue against a longstanding prejudice that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it would have to be Xunzian. Against this, I hope to show that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it might well be a naturalistic Mencian Confucianism instead of a constructivist Xunzian one. (shrink)

Utilizing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, I argue that the gestaltian framework’s co-determinacy of the theme and the horizon in seeing and experiencing the world serves as an encompassing epistemological framework with which to understand racism. Conclusions reached: as bias is unavoidably part of being in the world, defining racism as bias is superfluous; racism is sedimented into our very perceptions and experiences of the world and not solely a prejudice of thought; neutral perception of skin color is impossible. Phenomenology accounts for (...) the dynamic changes in expressions of racism and the interconnections of both race and sex for women of color. (shrink)

In the standard theory of deontic modals, ‘ought’ is understood as expressing a propositional operator. However, this view has been called into question by Almotahari and Rabern’s puzzle about deontic ‘ought’, according to which the ethical principle that one ought to be wronged by another person rather than wrong them is intuitively coherent but the standard theory makes it incoherent. In this paper, I take up Almotahari and Rabern’s challenge and offer a refinement of the standard theory to handle the (...) puzzle. I propose that ‘ought’ is evaluated relative to contextual parameters (e.g., Kratzer’s conversational backgrounds, Finlay and Snedegar’s alternative sets) and those contextual parameters are sensitive to agents as well as possible worlds. (shrink)

Researchers have recognized that interpersonal trust consists of different dimensions. These dimensions suggest that trust can be rational, cognitive, or affective. Affect, which includes moods and emotions, is likely to have a direct impact on the affective dimension. On the other hand, there are also studies showing that affect indirectly influence cognitive judgments. Nonetheless, in this chapter we argue that the impact of affect on judgment will not be the same on all individuals. In effect, the impact varies, depending on (...) the individual's attention to affect, motivation to use or guard against affect, or regulation of affect. All this may suggest that an individual's abilities or tendencies to manage affect will have implication on his or her trust relationships with others. (shrink)

Devant le constat du déclin toujours plus rapide de la diversité biologique et les limites des res- sources disponibles pour l’enrayer, il est nécessaire de déterminer quels moyens devraient être engagés dans sa protection. Pour ce faire, une méthode efficace serait d’évaluer les bénéfices tirés de la biodiversité afin d’estimer rationnellement les coûts légitimes de sa protection. L’évaluation économique, qui se présente d’emblée sur un mode quantitatif, serait alors un outil précieux. Dans ce texte, nous présentons différentes méthodes d’évaluation économique (...) de la biodiversité ainsi que certaines de leurs limites méthodologiques. Par la suite, nous montrons qu’en dépit de ses avantages pratiques, l’évaluation économique échoue à représenter l’ensemble des valeurs en jeu dans la protection de la biodiversité. Nous décrivons alors trois types de valeurs incommen- surables avec des bénéfices économiques : la valeur de legs, qui renvoie aux obligations de trans- mission du patrimoine naturel dont nous avons hérité ; la valeur d’existence, qui renvoie à la considération morale d’intérêts autres que ceux des êtres humains ; la valeur de transformation, qui renvoie à la capacité d’examiner et de critiquer nos préférences et inclinaisons afin d’inclure celles-ci dans une vision du monde rationnelle et cohérente. Pour conclure, nous plaidons en faveur de l’élaboration de méthodes de concertation et d’évaluation participatives et pluralistes permettant de rendre compte de la diversité et de l’hétérogénéité des valeurs de la biodiversité. (shrink)

Individuals of many animal species are said to have a personality. It has been shown that some individuals are bolder than other individuals of the same species, or more sociable or more aggressive. In this paper, we analyse what it means to say that an animal has a personality. We clarify what an animal personality is, that is, its ontology, and how different personality concepts relate to each other, and we examine how personality traits are identified in biological practice. Our (...) analysis shows that biologists often study specific personality traits, such as boldness, sociability or aggressiveness, rather than personalities in general. We claim that personality traits are best understood as dispositions and that they are operationally defined in terms of certain sets of behaviours, which are studied in specific experimental set-ups. Furthermore, we develop an integrative philosophical account that specifies and formalises three criteria for identifying personality traits, which are used in biological practice. For an individual animal to have a personality trait it must, first, behave differently than others. Second, these behavioural differences must be stable over a certain time, and third, they must be consistent in different contexts. (shrink)

David Miller argues that national identity is indispensable for the successful functioning of a liberal democracy. National identity makes important contributions to liberal democratic institutions, including creating incentives for the fulfilment of civic duties, facilitating deliberative democracy, and consolidating representative democracy. Thus, a shared identity is indispensable for liberal democracy and grounds a good claim for self-determination. Because Miller’s arguments appeal to the instrumental values of a national culture, I call his argument ‘instrumental value’ arguments. In this paper, I examine (...) the instrumental value arguments and show that they fail to justify a group’s right to self-determination. (shrink)

Patricia Williams in her book, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, describes being denied entrance in the middle of the afternoon by a “saleschild.” Utilizing the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this article explores their interaction phenomenologically. This small interaction of seemingly simple misunderstanding represents a limit condition in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis. His phenomenological framework does not explain the chasm between the “saleschild” and Williams, that in a sense they do not participate in the same world. This interaction between the “saleschild” and (...) Williams represents a moment when the two contest exactly what is reason in our society. To the extent that society discerns one’s actions as reasonable and the other’s actions as unreasonable, our society participates in determining that which constitutes reason. Williams’s work speaks precisely to this chasm as evident in her text’s subtitle, Memoirs of a Mad Woman. This decision relegates one subject to “judiciousness” and relegates the other to “madness.”. (shrink)

Government transparency and accountability during Covid 19: The data underpinning decisions.

The standard semantics for counterfactuals ensures that any counterfactual with a true antecedent and true consequent is itself true. There have been many recent attempts to amend the standard semantics to avoid this result. I show that these proposals invalidate a number of further principles of the standard logic of counterfactuals. The case against the automatic truth of counterfactuals with true components does not extend to these further principles, however, so it is not clear that rejecting the latter should be (...) a consequence of rejecting the former. Instead I consider how one might defuse putative counterexamples to the truth of true-true counterfactuals. (shrink)