Those who want to deny the ‘ought implies can’ principle often turn to weakened views to explain ‘ought implies can’ phenomena. The two most common versions of such views are that ‘ought’ presupposes ‘can’, and that ‘ought’ conversationally implicates ‘can’. This paper will reject both views, and in doing so, present a case against any pragmatic view of ‘ought implies can’. Unlike much of the literature, I won't rely on counterexamples, but instead will argue that each of these views fails (...) on its own terms. ‘Ought’ and ‘can’ do not obey the negation test for presupposition, and they do not obey the calculability or the cancelability tests for conversational implicature. I diagnose these failures as partly a result of the importance of the contrapositive of ‘ought implies can’. I end with a final argument emphasizing the role the principle plays in moral thinking, and the fact that no pragmatic account can do it justice. (shrink)

Amartya Sen has made a major contribution to the theory of social justice, and of gender justice, by arguing that capabilities are the relevant space of comparison when justice-related issues are considered. This article supports Sen's idea, arguing that capabilities supply guidance superior to that of utility and resources (the view's familiar opponents), but also to that of the social contract tradition, and at least some accounts of human rights. But I argue that capabilities can help us to construct a (...) normative conception of social justice, with critical potential for gender issues, only if we specify a definite set of capabilities as the most important ones to protect. Sen's "perspective of freedom" is too vague. Some freedoms limit others; some freedoms are important, some trivial, some good, and some positively bad. Before the approach can offer a valuable normative gender perspective, we must make commitments about substance. (shrink)

The study investigated the management of students’ academic failure among secondary school students for high productivity in Obingwa Local Government Area of Abia State. The study was guided by two research questions and two hypotheses. Descriptive survey research design was used while the population of the study comprised thirty public secondary schools. A sample size of 10 secondary schools was selected from the 30 public secondary schools using stratified random sampling technique. Self-designed instrument entitled “Management Students’ Academic Failure Questionnaire” (MSAFQ) (...) was utilized. The validity of the instrument was ensured. Test retest method was used and reliability co-efficient of 0.80 and 0.83 was obtained through Cronbach Alpha Statistics. Mean was used to answer the research questions while Z-test statistics was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significant. The findings include but not limited to: lack of instructional material and inability of the teachers to stimulate students are causes of academic failures among students. It is therefore recommended that the government or appropriate agency should ensure adequate supply of functional instructional resources and teachers’ should do well to motivate students to learn thereby save students from incessant failures that could mar their future and life expectations. (shrink)

Just as humans can draw conclusions responsibly or irresponsibly, so too can computers. Machine learning systems that have been trained on data sets that include irresponsible judgments are likely to yield irresponsible predictions as outputs. In this paper I focus on a particular kind of inference a computer system might make: identification of the intentions with which a person acted on the basis of photographic evidence. Such inferences are liable to be morally objectionable, because of a way in which they (...) are presumptuous. After elaborating this moral concern, I explore the possibility that carefully procuring the training data for image recognition systems could ensure that the systems avoid the problem. The lesson of this paper extends beyond just the particular case of image recognition systems and the challenge of responsibly identifying a person’s intentions. Reflection on this particular case demonstrates the importance (as well as the difficulty) of evaluating machine learning systems and their training data from the standpoint of moral considerations that are not encompassed by ordinary assessments of predictive accuracy. (shrink)

Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have increasingly turned to model-independent strategies as tools in searching for a wide range of possible BSM effects. In this paper, we describe the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SM-EFT) and analyse it in the context of the philosophical discussions about models, theories, and (bottom-up) (...) effective field theories. We find that while the SM-EFT is a quantum field theory, assisting experimentalists in searching for deviations from the SM, in its general form it lacks some of the characteristic features of models. Those features only come into play if put in by hand or prompted by empirical evidence for deviations. Employing different philosophical approaches to models, we argue that the case study suggests not to take a view on models that is overly permissive because it blurs the lines between the different stages of the SM-EFT research strategies and glosses over particle physicists' motivations for undertaking this bottom-up approach in the first place. Looking at EFTs from the perspective of modelling does not require taking a stance on some specific brand of realism or taking sides in the debate between reduction and emergence into which EFTs have recently been embedded. (shrink)

The idea of artificial intelligence for social good is gaining traction within information societies in general and the AI community in particular. It has the potential to tackle social problems through the development of AI-based solutions. Yet, to date, there is only limited understanding of what makes AI socially good in theory, what counts as AI4SG in practice, and how to reproduce its initial successes in terms of policies. This article addresses this gap by identifying seven ethical factors that are (...) essential for future AI4SG initiatives. The analysis is supported by 27 case examples of AI4SG projects. Some of these factors are almost entirely novel to AI, while the significance of other factors is heightened by the use of AI. From each of these factors, corresponding best practices are formulated which, subject to context and balance, may serve as preliminary guidelines to ensure that well-designed AI is more likely to serve the social good. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen conceptualizes socialism as luck egalitarianism constrained by a community principle. The latter mitigates certain inequalities to achieve a shared common life. This article explores the plausibility of the community constraint on inequality in light of two related problems. First, if it is voluntary, it fails as a response to “the abandonment objection” to luck egalitarianism, as it would not guarantee imprudent people sufficient resources to avoid deprivation and to function as equal citizens in a democratic society. Contra (...) Cohenite socialism, this appears unjust. Second, if it is instead enforced, coercive equalization beyond sufficiency-constrained luck egalitarianism, which is possibly necessary to achieve a shared common life, seems to require unjustified restrictions on liberty. I therefore argue that the constraint is most plausibly specified as requiring enforcement of sufficiency and only voluntary equalization thereafter. I also note, skeptically, why this constraint might be morally preferable to a purely sufficientarian alternative. (shrink)

“Philosophy is constitutive of good citizenship. It becomes part of what you are when you are a good citizen – a thoughtful person. Philosophy has manyroles. It can be just fun, a game that you play. It can be a way you try to approach your own death or illness, or that of a family member. I’m just focusing on the place where I think I can win over people, and say ‘Look here, you do care about democracy don’t you? (...) Then you’d better see that philosophy has a place.’”. (shrink)

Love, S. (2007). Using somatic awareness as a guide for making healthy life choices. Somatics Magazine- Journal Of The Mind/Body Arts and Sciences, Volume XV, Number 2, pages 40-43. (Silver Love is same person as author Martha C. Love).

Tradução do artigo "Mill between Aristotle and Bentham".

A self-fulfilling prophecy in neuroprognostication occurs when a patient in coma is predicted to have a poor outcome, and life-sustaining treatment is withdrawn on the basis of that prediction, thus directly bringing about a poor outcome for that patient. In contrast to the predominant emphasis in the bioethics literature, we look beyond the moral issues raised by the possibility that an erroneous prediction might lead to the death of a patient who otherwise would have lived. Instead, we focus on the (...) problematic epistemic consequences of neuroprognostic SFPs in settings where research and practice intersect. When this sort of SFP occurs, the problem is that physicians and researchers are never in a position to notice whether their original prognosis was correct or incorrect, since the patient dies anyway. Thus, SFPs keep us from discerning false positives from true positives, inhibiting proper assessment of novel prognostic tests. This epistemic problem of SFPs thus impedes learning, but ethical obligations of patient care make it difficult to avoid SFPs. We then show how the impediment to catching false positive indicators of poor outcome distorts research on novel techniques for neuroprognostication, allowing biases to persist in prognostic tests. We finally highlight a particular risk that a precautionary bias towards early withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment may be amplified. We conclude with guidelines about how researchers can mitigate the epistemic problems of SFPs, to achieve more responsible innovation of neuroprognostication for patients in coma. (shrink)

Bimal Krishna Matilal (1935-1991) was a Harvard-educated Indian philosopher best known for his contributions to logic, but who also wrote on wide variety of topics, including metaethics. Unfortunately, the latter contributions have been overlooked. Engaging with Anglo-American figures such as Gilbert Harman and Bernard Williams, Matilal defends a view he dubs ‘pluralism.’ In defending this view he draws on a wide range of classical Indian sources: the Bhagavad-Gītā, Buddhist thinkers like Nāgārjuna, and classical Jaina concepts. This pluralist position is somewhere (...) between relativism and absolutist realism. Unlike the relativist, he argues that there is a genuinely universal morality; unlike the absolutist, he argues that there are multiple, but often conflicting and incommensurable, moral frameworks and ideals. This paper will explain his objections to relativism, as well as flesh out his suggestive remarks about his own pluralistic account. (shrink)

This is a Belarusian translation of an essay interpreting the much-neglected Second Part of Kant's book, Conflict of the Faculties, entitled “An old question raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?”, by showing the close relationship between the themes it deals with and those Kant addresses in the Supplements and Appendices of Perpetual Peace. In both works, Kant portrays the philosopher as having the duty to promote a “secret article”, without which his vision of a lasting international peace through (...) the agency of a federation of states is bound to fail. Both works identify this article as involving the necessity of publicity as a transcendental condition for peace, and call for philosophers to engage politicians and lawyers in a creative attitude towards lawmaking. Kant’s visionary program has failed to reach its goal up to now, not because it is too idealistic, but because philosophers have failed to take up the challenge. (shrink)

This article considers two related and fundamental issues about morality in a virtual world. The first is whether the anonymity that is a feature of virtual worlds can shed light upon whether people are moral when they can act with impunity. The second issue is whether there are any moral obligations in a virtual world and if so what they might be. -/- Our reasons for being good are fundamental to understanding what it is that makes us moral or indeed (...) whether any of us truly are moral. Plato grapples with this problem in book two of The Republic where Socrates is challenged by his brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon. They argue that people are moral only because of the costs to them of being immoral; the external constraints of morality. -/- Glaucon asks us to imagine a magical ring that enables its wearers to become invisible and capable of acting anonymously. The ring is in some respects analogous to the possibilities created by online virtual worlds such as Second Life, so the dialogue is our entry point into considering morality within these worlds. These worlds are three dimensional user created environments where people control avatars and live virtual lives. As well as being an important social phenomenon, virtual worlds and what people chose to do in them can shed light on what people will do when they can act without fear of normal sanction. -/- This paper begins by explaining the traditional challenge to morality posed by Plato, relating this to conduct in virtual worlds. Then the paper will consider the following skeptical objection. A precondition of all moral requirements is the ability to act. There are no moral requirements in virtual worlds because they are virtual and it is impossible to act in a virtual world. Because avatars do not have real bodies and the persons controlling avatars are not truly embodied, it is impossible for people to truly act in a virtual world. We will show that it is possible to perform some actions and suggest a number of moral requirements that might plausibly be thought to result. Because avatars cannot feel physical pain or pleasure these moral requirements are interestingly different from those of real life. Hume’s arguments for why we should be moral apply to virtual worlds and we conclude by considering how this explains why morality exists in these environments. (shrink)

Some contextually sensitive expressions are such that their context independent conventional meanings need to be in some way supplemented in context for the expressions to secure semantic values in those contexts. As we’ll see, it is not clear that there is a paradigm here, but ‘he’ used demonstratively is a clear example of such an expression. Call expressions of this sort supplementives in order to highlight the fact that their context independent meanings need to be supplemented in context for them (...) to have semantic values relative to the context. Many philosophers and linguists think that there is a lot of contextual sensitivity in natural language that goes well beyond the pure indexicals and supplementives like ‘he’. Constructions/expressions that are good candidates for being contextually sensitive include: quantifiers, gradable adjectives including “predicates of personal taste”, modals, conditionals, possessives and relational expressions taking implicit arguments. It would appear that in none of these cases does the expression/construction in question have a context independent meaning that when placed in context suffices to secure a semantic value for the expression/construction in the context. In each case, some sort of supplementation is required to do this. Hence, all these expressions are supplementives in my sense. For a given supplementive, the question arises as to what the mechanism is for supplementing its conventional meanings in context so as to secure a semantic value for it in context. That is, what form does the supplementation take? The question also arises as to whether different supplementives require different kinds of supplementation. Let us call an account of what, in addition to its conventional meaning, secures a semantic value for a supplementive in context a metasemantics for that supplementive. So we can put our two questions thus: what is the proper metasemantics for a given supplementive; and do all supplementives have the same metasemantics? In the present work, I sketch the metasemantics I formulated for demonstratives in earlier work. Next, I briefly consider a number of other supplementives that I think the metasemantics I propose plausibly applies to and explain why I think that. Finally, I consider the prospects for extending the account to all supplementives. In so doing, I take up arguments due to Michael Glanzberg to the effect that supplementives are governed by two different metasemantics and attempt to respond to them. (shrink)

Does having a mental disorder, in general, affect whether someone is morally responsible for an action? Many people seem to think so, holding that mental disorders nearly always mitigate responsibility. Against this Naïve view, we argue for a Nuanced account. The problem is not just that different theories of responsibility yield different verdicts about particular cases. Even when all reasonable theories agree about what's relevant to responsibility, the ways mental illness can affect behavior are so varied that a more nuanced (...) approach is needed. (shrink)

Response-dependence theories have historically been very popular in aesthetics, and aesthetic response-dependence has motivated response-dependence in ethics. This chapter closely examines the prospects for such theories. It breaks this category down into dispositional and fittingness strands of response-dependence, corresponding to descriptive and normative ideal observer theories. It argues that the latter have advantages over the former but are not themselves without issue. Special attention is paid to the relationship between hedonism and response-dependence. The chapter also introduces two aesthetic properties that (...) lead to wrong kinds of reasons problems for aesthetic response-dependence: insightfulness and the capacity to change one’s perspective. These properties do not have obvious parallels in the ethical domain, and so present an obstacle for response-dependence even in aesthetics. The chapter ends by examining replies on behalf of the response-dependence theorist, ultimately suggesting that a restricted form of response-dependence is the most promising way forward for fans of such theories. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence research and regulation seek to balance the benefits of innovation against any potential harms and disruption. However, one unintended consequence of the recent surge in AI research is the potential re-orientation of AI technologies to facilitate criminal acts, term in this article AI-Crime. AIC is theoretically feasible thanks to published experiments in automating fraud targeted at social media users, as well as demonstrations of AI-driven manipulation of simulated markets. However, because AIC is still a relatively young and inherently (...) interdisciplinary area—spanning socio-legal studies to formal science—there is little certainty of what an AIC future might look like. This article offers the first systematic, interdisciplinary literature analysis of the foreseeable threats of AIC, providing ethicists, policy-makers, and law enforcement organisations with a synthesis of the current problems, and a possible solution space. (shrink)

Discussions of aesthetic reasons and normativity are becoming increasingly popular. This piece outlines six basic questions about aesthetic reasons, normativity, and value and discusses the space of possible answers to these questions. I divide the terrain into two groups of three questions each. First are questions about the shape of aesthetic reasons: what they favour, how strong they are, and where they come from. Second are relational questions about how aesthetic reasons fit into the wider normative landscape: whether they are (...) distinctive, what their normative status is, and how they interact with each other and with non-aesthetic reasons. This piece aims to provide a taxonomy to clarify and organise the burgeoning literature and to make a few concrete suggestions for avenues of future research. (shrink)

Contemporary discourse is littered with nasty and derailed disagreements. In this paper we hope to help clean things up. We diagnose two patterns of thought that often plague and exacerbate controversy. We illustrate these patterns and show that each involves both a logical mistake and a failure of intellectual charity. We also draw upon recent work in social psychology to shed light on why we tend to fall into these patterns of thought. We conclude by suggesting how the intellectual virtues (...) can militate against these fallacies, focusing on the virtues of charity and humility. (shrink)

We have witnessed the athleticization of political discourse, whereby debate is treated like an athletic contest in which the aim is to vanquish one's opponents. When political discourse becomes a zero-sum game, it is characterized by suspicions, accusations, belief polarization, and ideological entrenchment. Unfortunately, athleticization is ailing the classroom as well, making it difficult for educators to prepare students to make valuable contributions to healthy civic discourse. Such preparation requires an educational environment that fosters the intellectual virtues that characterize an (...) examined life. This, in turn, requires an amicable and hospitable atmosphere in which a student enjoys the freedom to discover and articulate what she believes, how well her beliefs hang together, and what underlying assumptions or biases might be at work—without the fear that her self-disclosure will trigger immediate accusations and pigeonholing from fellow students. Educating for intellectual virtue is crucial for meeting these challenges and in this chapter we contribute to this strategy by offering some tools and guidance for promoting productive discussion of controversial issues. In the first two sections, we identify and explain two fallacious patterns of thought that often encumber discussion of controversial issues: assailment-by-entailment and the attitude-to-agent fallacy. In effect, these sections diagnose two diseases of discourse. We conclude each section with practical suggestions—in the form of thinking routines—for curing these ills. We will argue that part of the cure is to be found in the intellectual virtues. In particular, we will discuss how the virtues of intellectual charity, humility and carefulness can inoculate the mind against the fallacies we identify. (shrink)

Ordinary morality judges agents blameworthy for negligently produced harms. In this paper I offer two main reasons for thinking that explaining just how negligent agents are responsible for the harms they produce is more problematic than one might think. First, I show that negligent conduct is characterized by the lack of conscious control over the harm, which conflicts with the ordinary view that responsibility for something requires at least some conscious control over it. Second, I argue that negligence is relevantly (...) indistinguishable from inadvertence, which is ordinarily thought to excuse agents from responsibility. I argue that the parallels between negligence and inadvertence suggest that negligent agents are not responsible for the harms they produce, while proposing an alternative model for distinguishing between negligence and inadvertence that does justice to our intuitions. (shrink)

For the full text of this article see "Download Options PhiPapers Archive and click Download from Archive" at the bottom of this page. First 500 words of article: To my surprise last spring, an article titled “Gut Almighty”, which briefly explained the latest emotion theories on how intuition comes from the gut, was featured in Psychology Today (Flora, 2007) at the same time that my article on gut instinctual somatic responses and healthy life choices was published in Somatics Spring 07 (...) issue (Love, 2007). I wondered if two articles published on the gut in one month might surely be a record, as the gut has not seemed to have so much attention in the media since Gershon’s (1998) book acclaiming it through his neurological research to have a mind of its own. -/- In the months I awaited the publication of my article, I reread Gershon’s (1998) book and it was again delightful to me to read that a scientific investigation actually uncovered evidence that the gut has a separate capacity to generate and record vital responses and functions as what he calls our second brain. Gershon outlines the biological functions of the gut as being its own intelligent brain and having its own vitality that is in communication with, but not dependent upon, the head brain. As I combed through his book and shared emails with my colleague, Robert Sterling, it became quite clear to us that Gershon’s work was supportive of the clinical findings in the work we did as guidance counselors in the 70s. Our work centered around assisting people to assess the meaning of their experiences through an awareness on the empty-full instinctual feeling responses that they identified in the gut region of the body. We found with the people that we counseled that these gut responses were linked to the dynamic struggles of balancing the two needs of the person for acceptance and for feeling in control of one’s own responses (the freedom to respond naturally), and that these two needs were instinctual and necessary to fulfill on a moment to moment basis for continued vitality of the person. Similar to Gershon’s findings, it was also our conclusion that the gut area of the body contains a feeling response center that holds a relationship to the thinking processes of the person, but is a separate response center from the thinking head responses and certainly not dependent upon it. -/- Feeling inspired by Gershon’s (1998) work and the attention recently given to the gut in the literature and media, I decided to write a second article for Somatics that further explains the specific technique of the Somatic Reflection Process (SRP). The intention of this article is to answer the questions about the process that I have been asked in the past year by many friends and colleagues who read my first article last Spring on the findings of Robert Sterling’s and my somatic work as guidance counselors. I am including both the method and a protocol for facilitating the SRP, as well as a brief summary of a recent research study using the SRP protocol presented (Love, 2005). (shrink)

Worker well-being is a hot topic in organizations, consultancy and academia. However, too often, the buzz about worker well-being, enthusiasm for new programs to promote it and interest to research it, have not been accompanied by universal enthusiasm for scientific measurement. Aim to bridge this gap, we address three questions. To address the question ‘What is worker well-being?’, we explain that worker well-being is a multi-facetted concept and that it can be operationalized in a variety of constructs. We propose a (...) four-dimensional taxonomy of worker well-being constructs to illustrate the concept’s complexity and classify ten constructs within this taxonomy. To answer the question ‘How can worker well-being constructs be measured?’, we present two aspects of measures: measure obtrusiveness (i.e., the extent to which obtaining a measure interferes with workers’ experiences) and measure type (i.e., closed question survey, word, behavioral and physiological). We illustrate the diversity of measures across our taxonomy and uncover some hitherto under-appreciated avenues for measuring worker well-being. Finally, we address the question ‘How should a worker well-being measure be selected?’ by discussing conceptual, methodological, practical and ethical considerations when selecting a measure. We summarize these considerations in a short checklist. It is our hope that with this study researchers – working in organizations, in academia or both – will feel more competent to find effective strategies for the measurement worker well-being and eventually make policies and choices with a better understanding of what drives worker well-being. (shrink)

Invoking three desiderata (empirical adequacy, conceptual precision, and sensitivity to social positioning), this paper argues that poverty is best understood as the deprivation of certain human capabilities. It defends this way of conceiving of poverty against standard alternatives: lack of income, lack of resources, inequality, and social exclusion.

This article argues that a person’s well-being at a time and the goodness of her life are two distinct values. It is commonly accepted as platitudinous that well-being is what makes a life good for the person who lives it. Even philosophers who distinguish between well-being at a time and the goodness of a life still typically assume that increasing a person’s well-being at some particular moment, all else equal, necessarily improves her life on the whole. I develop a precise (...) statement of this standard assumption, and then show that it is subject to counterexamples. The possibility of such counterexamples depends only on premises similar to those sometimes invoked to argue that a person’s well-being over a long period is not simply the aggregate well-being of the shorter periods that compose the long period. The refutation of the standard assumption linking well-being and life-goodness entails that these are distinct and sometimes divergent values. As an alternative to the standard assumption, it is proposed that well-being is best understood as an ingredient in a good life. (shrink)

Imagine you are casually browsing an online bookstore, looking for an interesting novel. Suppose the store predicts you will want to buy a particular novel: the one most chosen by people of your same age, gender, location, and occupational status. The store recommends the book, it appeals to you, and so you choose it. Central to this scenario is an automated prediction of what you desire. This article raises moral concerns about such predictions. More generally, this article examines the ethics (...) of artificial social cognition—the ethical dimensions of attribution of mental states to humans by artificial systems. The focus is presumptuous aim attributions, which are defined here as aim attributions based crucially on the premise that the person in question will have aims like superficially similar people. Several everyday examples demonstrate that this sort of presumptuousness is already a familiar moral concern. The scope of this moral concern is extended by new technologies. In particular, recommender systems based on collaborative filtering are now commonly used to automatically recommend products and information to humans. Examination of these systems demonstrates that they naturally attribute aims presumptuously. This article presents two reservations about the widespread adoption of such systems. First, the severity of our antecedent moral concern about presumptuousness increases when aim attribution processes are automated and accelerated. Second, a foreseeable consequence of reliance on these systems is an unwarranted inducement of interpersonal conformity. (shrink)

This article addresses three questions about well-being. First, is well-being future-sensitive? I.e., can present well-being depend on future events? Second, is well-being recursively dependent? I.e., can present well-being depend on itself? Third, can present and future well-being be interdependent? The third question combines the first two, in the sense that a yes to it is equivalent to yeses to both the first and second. To do justice to the diverse ways we contemplate well-being, I consider our thought and discourse about (...) well-being in three domains: everyday conversation, social science, and philosophy. This article’s main conclusion is that we must answer the third question with no. Present and future well-being cannot be interdependent. The reason, in short, is that a theory of well-being that countenances both future-sensitivity and recursive dependence would have us understand a person’s well-being at a time as so intricately tied to her well-being at other times that it would not make sense to consider her well-being an aspect of her state at particular times. It follows that we must reject either future-sensitivity or recursive dependence. I ultimately suggest, especially in light of arguments based on assumptions of empirical research on well-being, that the balance of reasons favors rejecting future-sensitivity. (shrink)

The focus in the literature on scientific explanation has shifted in recent years towards model-based approaches. In recent work, Alisa Bokulich has argued that idealization has a central role to play in explanation. Bokulich claims that certain highly-idealized, structural models can be explanatory, even though they are not considered explanatory by causal, mechanistic, or covering law accounts of explanation. This paper focuses on Bokulich’s account in order to make the more general claim that there are problems with maintaining that a (...) structural criterion can capture the way that highly-idealized models explain. This paper examines Bokulich’s claim that the structural model explanation of quantum wavefunction scarring, featuring semiclassical mechanics, is deeper than the explanation provided by the local quantum model. The challenge for Bokulich is to show that the semiclassical model answers a wider range of w-questions, as this is her method of assessing structural information. I look at two reasonable approaches employing w-questions, and I argue that neither approach is ultimately satisfactory. Because structural similarity has preferences for more fundamental models, I argue that the local quantum model provides explanations that at least as deep as the semiclassical ones. The criterion either wrongly identifies all models as explanatory, or prefers models from fundamental theory. Either way, it cannot capture the way that highly-idealized models explain. (shrink)

This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is, roughly, a prediction that brings about its own truth. Although true predictions are hard to fault, self-fulfilling prophecies are often regarded with suspicion. In this article, we vindicate this suspicion by explaining what self-fulfilling prophecies are and what is problematic about them, paying special attention to how their problems are exacerbated through automated prediction. Our descriptive account of self-fulfilling prophecies articulates the four elements that define them. Based on this account, we begin our critique by showing (...) that typical self-fulfilling prophecies arise due to mistakes about the relationship between a prediction and its object. Such mistakes—along with other mistakes in predicting or in the larger practical endeavor—are easily overlooked when the predictions turn out true. Thus we note that self-fulfilling prophecies prompt no error signals; truth shrouds their mistakes from humans and machines alike. Consequently, self-fulfilling prophecies create several obstacles to accountability for the outcomes they produce. We conclude our critique by showing how failures of accountability, and the associated failures to make corrections, explain the connection between self-fulfilling prophecies and feedback loops. By analyzing the complex relationships between accuracy and other evaluatively significant features of predictions, this article sheds light both on the special case of self-fulfilling prophecies and on the ethics of prediction more generally. (shrink)

There has been a growing trend to include non-causal models in accounts of scientific explanation. A worry addressed in this paper is that without a higher threshold for explanation there are no tools for distinguishing between models that provide genuine explanations and those that provide merely potential explanations. To remedy this, a condition is introduced that extends a veridicality requirement to models that are empirically underdetermined, highly-idealised, or otherwise non-causal. This condition is applied to models of electroweak symmetry breaking beyond (...) the Standard Model. (shrink)

Several prominent voices have called for a democratization of science through deliberative processes that include a diverse range of perspectives and values. We bring these scholars into conversation with extant research on democratic deliberation in political theory and the social sciences. In doing so, we identify systematic barriers to the effectiveness of inclusive deliberation in both scientific and political settings. We are particularly interested in what we call misidentified dissent, where deliberations are starkly framed at the outset in terms of (...) dissenting positions without properly distinguishing the kinds of difference and disagreement motivating dissent. (shrink)

It’s interesting and a bit surprising how little attention philosophy has given to the status of emoji, those funny little symbols that punctuate text messages, Twitter, and other digital spaces. They have become ubiquitous, but maybe because they’re seen as frivolous or a “lower” form of communication, philosophy hasn’t paid them much mind. But they are an interesting aesthetic phenomenon. They are part language, part representational image. They are phenomenologically interesting in their effect on how we experience the written word. (...) They punctuate, accentuate, emphasize, and add flavor to our communication in ways that are difficult to achieve otherwise. It would not be ridiculous to say that they represent a genuine linguistic development—a change in conventional orthography, and of an almost unbelievably sudden and dramatic, even revolutionary, kind. (shrink)

The discussion of the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Γ is usually taken to include three ‘versions’ of the principle: an ontological, psychological, and logical one. In this article I develop an interpretation of Metaphysics Γ3 and a parallel text, De interpretatione 14, in order to show that these texts are concerned with two related but different principles: a version of the Principle of Identity, and a corollary to this, which concerns the ability to accept two ‘opposite’ items (...) at the same time. I argue that these principles must be considered separately in order to properly understand Aristotle’s remarks about PNC in Metaphysics Γ, and in order to defend his approach in these remarks against certain objections raised against the discussion in Metaphysics Γ by Jan Łukasiewicz in his "Über den Satz des Widerspruchs bei Aristoteles". The main result of my interpretation is to distinguish in the discussion of PNC in Metaphysics Γ three principles: one concerning linguistic items (words and statements), one concerning thoughts (δόξαι), and one concerning objects or states of affairs. (shrink)

Therapeutic Jurisprudence (‘TJ’) and virtue ethics are major parallel forces for good in legal practice. Both seek to understand and mediate frailness in human behaviour and explain why such ‘goodness’ is important for lawyers and their clients. But while a TJ practitioner and a virtue ethicist are often in agreement, they are fraternal rather than identical twins. This paper is addressed to those practising lawyers for whom TJ may become a central motivation to practice law, by reflecting on the moral (...) advantages that virtue ethics can offer such practitioners in their daily decision making. (shrink)

I will argue here that for many of us the act of dressing our bodies is evidence of intentional expression before different audiences. It is important to appreciate that intentionality enables us to understand how and why we act the way we do. The novel contribution this paper makes to this examination is employing clothing as a means of revealing the characteristics of intentionality. In that, it is rare to identify one exemplar that successfully captures the relationships between the cognitive (...) and physical characteristics of its application. Nevertheless, this paper will not attempt to fully encompass the traditional approaches associated with this concept but instead employ both the early and later writings of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau‑Ponty and his claim that our lived bodies are an expressive space from which we act intentionally. In other words, that the manner by which we dress our bodies is likely to offer a significant means of revealing the character of intentionality in everyday life and by this, claim that clothing can communicate. Accordingly, this first‑person account closely examines both the cognitive and physical experience of a simple clothing example: ‘what to wear?’ and the experience of an everyday clothing purchase in a store and its subsequent impact when the item of clothing is worn for different audiences. The ensuing discussion systematically examines the significance of marrying Merleau‑Ponty’s writings with this everyday example through private and public audiences and in abstract and public spaces. (shrink)

This paper offers a fresh strategy for responding to J.L. Schellenberg’s argument from divine hiddenness, called the dianthropic strategy. First, it shows how Schellenberg’s understanding of openness is deficient by arguing that openness to relationship is consistent with initial concealment. Then, the paper develops the dianthropic strategy, which focuses on the role of other persons in making a relationship between God and the nonbeliever more likely. It distinguishes this strategy from the responsibility argument and anticipates objections.

Aristotle determines eristic argument as argument which either operates upon the basis of acceptable premisses (endoxa) and merely give the impression of being deductive, or argument which truly is deductive but operates upon the basis of premisses which seem to be acceptable, but are not (or, again, argument which uses both of these mechanisms). I attempt to understand what Aristotle has in mind when he says that someone is deceived into accepting premisses which seem to be acceptable but which are (...) really not, and how this disqualifies such arguments from being dialectical. In the first section of the paper I interpret Aristotle’s notion of endoxa in terms of a relational concept of acceptability. Real Índoxa are propositions which are accepted by a qualified group or individual. False endoxa may also be accepted by someone or some group, and may even be true, but they are used to serve the purposes of eristical argumentation, which departs from certain standards of dialectical argumentation articulated in the notion of endoxa as a norm for premiss-acceptance. In particular, eristic arguments may even be valid in the sense of a syllogismos while still failing to be proper dialectical arguments. In the second part of the paper I consider how this can be, in examining certain types of fallacies in the Sophistical Refutations and the relationship between fallacious argumentation and false endoxa. (shrink)

Important advances in biomedical and behavioral research ethics have occurred over the past few decades, many of them centered on identifying and eliminating significant harms to human subjects of research. Comprehensive attention has not been paid to the totality of harms experienced by animal subjects, although scientific and moral progress require explicit appraisal of these harms. Science is a public good and the prioritizing within, conduct of, generation of, and application of research must soundly address questions about which research is (...) morally defensible and valuable enough to support through funding, publication, tenure, and promotion. Likewise, educational pathways of re-imagined science are critical. (shrink)