Leibniz claims that God acts in the best possible way, and that this includes creating exactly one world. But worlds are aggregates, and aggregates have a low degree of reality or metaphysical perfection, perhaps none at all. This is Leibniz’s tendency toward acosmism, or the view that there this no such thing as creation-as-a-whole. Many interpreters reconcile Leibniz’s acosmist tendency with the high value of worlds by proposing that God sums the value of each substance created, so that the best (...) world is just the world with the most substances. I call this way of determining the value of a world the Additive Theory of Value (ATV), and argue that it leads to the current and insoluble form of the problem of incompossibility. To avoid the problem, I read “possible worlds” in “God chooses the best of all possible worlds” as referring to God’s ideas of worlds. These ideas, though built up from essences, are themselves unities and so well suited to be the value bearers that Leibniz’s theodicy requires. They have their own value, thanks to their unity, and that unity is not preserved when more essences are added. (shrink)

The apparently circular arguments in Descartes’s Meditations should be read as analytic arguments, as Descartes himself suggested. This both explains and excuses the appearance of circularity. Analysis “digs out” what is already present in the meditator’s mind but not yet “expressly known”. Once this is achieved, the meditator may take the result of analysis as an epistemic starting point independent of the original argument. That is, analytic arguments may be reversed to yield demonstrative proofs that follow an already worked-out order (...) of ideas. The “Cartesian Circle,” for example, is circular only when Descartes’s original analytic argument is mistaken for the demonstration that it enables. This approach to Cartesian Circles is unlike the standard approach, which attempts to show that Descartes’s original arguments do work as demonstrations after all. (shrink)

To explain why God is not the author of sin, despite grounding all features of the world, the early Leibniz marginalized the divine will and defined existence as harmony. These moves support each other. It is easier to nearly eliminate the divine will from creation if existence itself is something wholly intelligible, and easier to identify existence with an internal feature of the possibles if the divine will is not responsible for creation. Both moves, however, commit Leibniz to a necessitarianism (...) that is stronger than what prominent interpreters such as Robert Sleigh and Mogens Lærke have found in the early Leibniz, and stronger than the necessitarianism that threatens his later philosophy. I defend this reading of Leibniz and propose that some features of Leibniz’s later metaphysics, including his “striving possibles” doctrine, are an artifact of the effort to rescue the early theodicy from its unwelcome implications. (shrink)

The topic of fake news has received increased attention from philosophers since the term became a favorite of politicians (Habgood-Coote 2016; Dentith 2016). Notably missing from the conversation, however, is a discussion of fake news and conspiracy theory media as a market. This paper will take as its starting point the account of noxious markets put forward by Debra Satz (2010), and will argue that there is a pro tanto moral reason to restrict the market for fake news. Specifically, we (...) begin with Satz’s argument that restricting a market may be required when i) that market inhibits citizens from being able to stand in an equal relationship with one another, and ii) this problem cannot be solved without such direct restrictions. Our own argument then proceeds in three parts: first, we argue that the market for fake news fits Satz’s description of a noxious market; second, we argue against explanations of the proliferation of fake news that are couched in terms of “epistemic vice”, and likewise argue against prescribing critical thinking education as a solution to the problem; finally, we conclude that, in the absence of other solutions to mitigate the noxious effects of the fake news market, we have a pro tanto moral reason to impose restrictions on this market. At the end of the paper, we consider one proposal to regulate the fake news market, which involves making social media outlets potentially liable in civil court for damages caused by the fake news hosted on their websites. (shrink)

According to many accounts, propaganda is a variety of politically significant signal with a distinctive connection to irrationality. This irrationality may be theoretical, or practical; it may be supposed that propaganda characteristically elicits this irrationality anew, or else that it exploits its prior existence. The view that encompasses such accounts we will call irrationalism. This essay presents two classes of propaganda that do not bear the sort of connection to irrationality posited by the irrationalist: hard propaganda and propaganda by the (...) deed. Faced with these counterexamples, some irrationalists will offer their account of propaganda as a refinement of the folk concept rather than as an attempt to capture all of its applications. The author argues that any refinement of the concept of propaganda must allow the concept to remain essentially political, and that the irrationalist refinement fails to meet this condition. (shrink)

According to a recent survey by the HR Research Institute, as the presence of artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly common in the workplace, HR professionals are worried that the use of recruitment algorithms will lead to a “dehumanization” of the hiring process. Our main goals in this paper are threefold: i) to bring attention to this neglected issue, ii) to clarify what exactly this concern about dehumanization might amount to, and iii) to sketch an argument for why dehumanizing the hiring (...) process is ethically suspect. After distinguishing the use of the term “dehumanization” in this context (i.e., removing the human presence) from its more common meaning in the interdisciplinary field of dehumanization studies (i.e., conceiving of other humans as subhuman), we argue that the use of hiring algorithms may negatively impact the employee-employer relationship. We argue that there are good independent reasons to accept a substantive employee-employer relationship, as well as an applicant-employer relationship, both of which are consistent with a stakeholder theory of corporate obligations. We further argue that dehumanizing the hiring process may negatively impact these relationships because of the difference between the values of human recruiters and the values embedded in recruitment algorithms. Drawing on Nguyen’s (2021) critique of how Twitter “gamifies communication”, we argue that replacing human recruiters with algorithms imports artificial values into the hiring process. We close by briefly considering some ways to potentially mitigate the problems posed by recruitment algorithms, along with the possibility that some difficult trade-offs will need to be made. (shrink)

In this paper we offer an argument against supererogation and in favour of moral perfectionism. We argue three primary points: 1) That the putative moral category is not generated by any of the main normative ethical systems, and it is difficult to find space for it in these systems at all; 2) That the primary support for supererogation is based on intuitions, which can be undercut by various other pieces of evidence; and 3) That there are better reasons to favour (...) perfectionism, including competing intuitions about the good-ought tie-up, and the epistemic preference for theoretical simplicity. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in intellectual humility (IH) has attempted to provide deeper understanding of the virtue as personality trait and its impact on an individual's thoughts, beliefs, and actions. A limitations-owning perspective of IH focuses on a proper recognition of the impact of intellectual limitations and a motivation to overcome them, placing it as the mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility. We developed the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale to assess this conception of IH with related personality constructs. In Studies 1 (...) (n= 386) and 2 (n = 296), principal factor and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-factor model – owning one's intellectual limitations, appropriate discomfort with intellectual limitations, and love of learning. Study 3 (n = 322) demonstrated strong test-retest reliability of the measure over 5 months, while Study 4 (n = 612) revealed limitations-owning IH correlated negatively with dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and hubristic pride and positively with openness, assertiveness, authentic pride. It also predicted openness and closed-mindedness over and above education, social desirability, and other measures of IH. The limitations-owning understanding of IH and scale allow for a more nuanced, spectrum interpretation and measurement of the virtue, which directs future study inside and outside of psychology. (shrink)

I argue that propaganda does not characteristically interfere with individual rationality, but instead with group agency. Whereas it is often claimed that propaganda involves some sort of incitement to irrationality, I show that this is neither necessary nor sufficient for a case’s being one or propaganda. For instance, some propaganda constitutes evidence of the speaker’s power, or else of the risk and futility of opposing them, and there is nothing irrational about taking such evidence seriously. I outline an alternative account (...) of propaganda inspired by Hannah Arendt, on which propaganda characteristically creates or destroys group agency. One aspiring to control the public should have an interest in both creating and suppressing group agency, I argue, both because groups have capacities that individuals don’t, and because participation in group action can have a transformative effect upon the individual. Finally, I suggest that my characterization of propaganda suggests a vision of resistance to propaganda quite unlike the one that emerges from irrational-belief accounts, on which propaganda cannot be resisted by oneself. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that the loss of loved ones requires a revised vision of our relationship to past persons. In particular, I argue that relating to deceased loved ones as points on an ordered, forward-moving timeline—on which they grow more distant from us by the moment—has a distorting and damaging effect on our own identity. If we detach ourselves completely from those who sustain important aspects of our identity, this will cause a jagged break in our narrative where (...) a new self must be constructed (whether by us or our circumstances) ex nihilo. On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to drift into the past with the dead—resigning ourselves to existence as an historical object—we will find that we begin to fade away ourselves. Either way, both the self and the beloved are ultimately lost, since both depend on the lost union. To reject both options is a tremendously difficult task that will require rethinking time and our relationship to the past. I argue that we can look to Kierkegaard’s work on maintaining contemporaneity with the historical past, particularly his warnings about how we must not respond to the loss of a beloved. In the last section of the paper, I offer some suggestions for how we might, in a Kierkegaardian spirit, strive to maintain real union with deceased loved ones, thereby rising above the destructive current of time. (shrink)

{June 2018 UPDATE: This work has been greatly surpassed by "Utilizing Future-Viewing Instruments" which will appear in the July 2018 issue of Progress in Physics. It can now be downloaded in PDF form from their website.} -/- The introduction of new scientific instruments has always played a vital role in the advancement of science and society. All scientific instruments to date have only been able to gain information pertaining to events of our immediate and distant past. Concerning our attempts to (...) gain information about future events, thus far our sciences have been limited to prediction. However, what if we could develop instruments that would enable us, in a wide range of circumstances, to achieve direct empirical access to future states of our world? It is clear that any kind of future-viewing machine would have enormous impacts upon science and society, but what kinds of impacts? Questions as to whether such machines are physically possible and might ever be feasible from an engineering perspective will not be addressed; this work is devoted to exploring the logic of such machines and deducing some of the possibilities of their utilization. (shrink)

The philosophical “problem of evil” goes back at least as far as Epicurus and has remained a powerful argument against the existence of God in contemporary philosophy. The argument is rooted in apparent contradictions between God’s divine attributes and various conditions of human existence. But these contradictions arise only given certain assumptions of what we should expect both God and the world to be like given God’s existence. In this paper, I argue that we can utilize the work of the (...) 20th century French philosopher Simone Weil to craft a coherent metaphysical picture of God, creation, and suffering which rejects these common assumptions. Further, I contend that this picture very plausibly follows from commonly-accepted tenets of traditional monotheism. Given this, I argue that this Weil-inspired framework provides serious reasons for reframing the problem of evil and its corresponding theodicies by presenting a radically different view of how God must relate to creation. Yet, this picture does not necessarily vindicate the theist. I argue that this picture may leave us with a new question about creation in the face of evil. Namely, is it possible to understand God’s initial creative act as Weil describes it—as an act of love? (shrink)

In this paper, we examine how the availability of massive quantities of data i.e., the “Big Data” phenomenon, contributes to the creation, spread, and harms of online misinformation. Specifically, we argue that a factor in the problem of online misinformation is the evolved human instinct to recognize patterns. While the pattern-recognition instinct is a crucial evolutionary adaptation, we argue that in the age of Big Data, these capacities have, unfortunately, rendered us vulnerable. Given the ways in which online media outlets (...) profit from the spread of misinformation by preying on this pattern-finding instinct, we conceptualize the problem that we identify as a morally objectionable form of “epistemic exploitation.” As we argue, the consumer of digital misinformation is often exploited by having her pattern-recognition instinct used against her. This exploitation is morally objectionable because it deprives her of an epistemic good to which she has a right. This epistemic good is the integrity of the pattern-recognition instinct itself which, we argue, is a capacity that allows us to participate in uniquely human goods. While our primary goal is to bring attention to this form of epistemic exploitation, we conclude by briefly evaluating some general solutions to the growing problem of online misinformation. (shrink)

Non-causal accounts of action explanation have long been criticized for lacking a positive thesis, relying primarily on negative arguments to undercut the standard Causal Theory of Action The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016). Additionally, it is commonly thought that non-causal accounts fail to provide an answer to Donald Davidson’s challenge for theories of reasons explanations of actions. According to Davidson’s challenge, a plausible non-causal account of reasons explanations must provide a way of connecting an agent’s reasons, not only to what (...) she ought to do, but to what she actually does. That is, such explanations must be truth-apt, not mere rationalizations. My aim in this paper is to show how a non-causal account of action can provide explanations that are truth-apt and genuinely explanatory. To make this argument, I take as a given an account of the practical syllogism discussed by Michael Thompson and Eric Wiland, according to which the practical syllogism is truly practical rather than propositional in nature. Next, I present my primary positive thesis: reasons for actions have explanatory power in virtue of being parts of a structure—the practical syllogism—that contains the action being explained. I then argue that structural action explanations can meet Davidson’s challenge and that they genuinely explain actions. Finally, I conclude by addressing some objections to my argument. (shrink)

{June 2018 UPDATE: This work has been greatly surpassed by "Utilizing Future-Viewing Instruments" which will appear in the July 2018 issue of Progress in Physics. It can now be downloaded in PDF form from their website.} This is the full text of the paper that was published as a Kindle book on April 6th, 2014. In most respects, it has since been surpassed by "Potentials of Future-Viewing Machines," which is available here in this repository. Nevertheless, this earlier work addresses minutia (...) and interesting considerations that do not appear elsewhere, and it has a large bibliography, so it remains very useful for research purposes. (shrink)

Contemporary action theory is generally concerned with giving theories of action ontology. In this paper, we make the novel proposal that the standard view in action theory—the Causal Theory of Action—should be recast as a “model”, akin to the models constructed and investigated by scientists. Such models often consist in fictional, hypothetical, or idealized structures, which are used to represent a target system indirectly via some resemblance relation. We argue that recasting the Causal Theory as a model can not only (...) accomplish the goals of causal theorists, but also give the theory greater flexibility in responding to common objections. (shrink)

Against the background of continuing inadequacy in global efforts to address climate change and apparent social and political inertia, ever greater interest is being generated in the idea that geoengineering may offer some solution to this problem. I do not take a position, here, on whether or not geoengineering could ever be morally justifiable. My goal in this paper is more modest – but also has broader implications. I aim to show that even if some form of geoengineering might be (...) ethically acceptable in certain specific circumstances, lab-based research into such techniques could nevertheless have morally problematic consequences. I support this claim by explaining that our current state of uncertainty regarding how the impacts of geoengineering interventions could be geographically distributed may help to promote international agreement on fair rules for the governance of geoengineering. In these circumstances of scientific uncertainty, international actors also face uncertainty regarding who the winners and losers could be with respect to potential rules of geoengineering governance, thereby obstructing the pursuit of self-interest in the selection of such rules. Instead of a research first approach, then, we have reason to take a governance first approach – ensuring that fair international institutions to regulate geoengineering activities are established before further research is conducted into how the costs and benefits of such interventions could be distributed. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question of how videographic public announcements (VPAs)---i.e. videos that a wide swath of the public sees and knows that everyone else can see too--- have functioned to mobilize people politically, and how the presence of deepfakes in our information environment stands to change the dynamics of this mobilization. Existing work by Regina Rini, Don Fallis and others has focused on the ways that deepfakes might interrupt our acquisition of first-order knowledge through videos. But I point (...) out that even where every audience member takes a video to be veridical, where first-order knowledge acquisition is secure, an audience aware of deepfakes in their environment will not acquire higher order knowledge in the way that has erstwhile been characteristic for audiences of VPAs. Engaging with ideas from the literatures on public announcement logic, common knowledge, and convention, I enumerate a variety of ways in which we should expect this absence of higher order knowledge to throw up barriers to political mobilization. I go on to apply my analysis of VPAs to the mechanisms by which an uptick in publicly available videos of police brutality over the last decade, mediated by camera phones and social media, was responsible for the largest mass protests in US history in summer 2020. This makes vivid the stakes of the transformation in our mobilizing environment that I've claimed deepfakes effect: where we lose the common-knowledge-generating effects of VPAs, there are fresh obstacles to this sort of mass mobilization. (shrink)

In discussions about responsibility for climate change, it is often suggested that the historical use of natural resources is in some way relevant to our current attempts to address this problem fairly. In particular, both theorists and actors in the public realm have argued that historical high-emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs) – or the beneficiaries of those emissions – are in possession of some form of debt, deriving from their overuse of a natural resource that should have been shared more (...) equitably. These accounts of what might be termed ‘natural debt’ generally focus on one particular natural resource (global GHG sink capacity); invoke a principle of justice by which rights to consume this resource should have been allocated (most commonly, equal per capita shares); and then argue that historical violations of this principle give rise to certain rectificatory duties in the present (generally, duties on the part of those who have historically consumed an excessive amount of the world’s GHG sink capacity, or who have benefitted from such excess consumption, to offer some form of compensation to those who have not – such compensation usually taking the form of emission credits or cash). Though many seem to find it intuitively plausible that historical high-emissions have incurred some form of debt, significant challenges arise in rendering the concept of natural debt both coherent and defensible. Such problems are not, however, my focus in this piece. Instead, I here suggest that discussions about historical responsibility for climate change commonly fail to recognise certain other past injustices concerning natural resources that appear to hold contemporary relevance. In particular, I argue that it is not just the unequal consumption of global GHG sink capacity that may be of moral significance here; but also the way in which the world’s resources have more generally been governed. (shrink)

According to the Polluter Pays Principle, excessive emitters of greenhouse gases have special obligations to remedy the problem of climate change, because they are the ones who have caused it. But what kind of problem is climate change? In this paper I argue that as a moral problem, climate change has a more complex causal structure than many proponents of the Polluter Pays Principle seem to recognize: it is a problem resulting from the interaction of anthropogenic climate effects with the (...) underlying vulnerability and exposure of human communities and other things of value. This means that we should acknowledge more pathways by which human agency contributes to the climate problem and, accordingly, a different landscape of contribution-based remedial responsibilities. (shrink)

In “Regulating social media as a public good: Limiting epistemic segregation” (2022), Toby Handfield tackles a well-known problematic aspect of widespread social media use: the formation of ideologically monotone and insulated social networks. Handfield argues that we can take some cues from economics to reduce the extent to which echo chambers grow up around individual users. Specifically, he argues that tax incentives to encourage network heterophily may be levied at any of three different groups: individual social media users, social media (...) sites/companies, or advertisers who use social media to promote their products and material. In this response, I examine the plausibility of using such incentives on each of the these groups. I argue, first, that using tax incentives on either (1) social media companies or (2) advertisers would be ineffective as these incentives could not feasibly be made strong enough to override the enormous financial gain of the standard social media algorithms. Next, I argue that levying the incentives/penalties on individual users would be a hazard, due to the risk of what is called the epistemic “backfire effect”. Finally, I argue that the problem lies in relying on incentives and disincentives—rather than direct regulation—to increase network heterophily. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence has given us synthetic media that are increasingly easy to create and increasingly hard to distinguish from photographs and videos. Whereas an existing literature has been concerned with how these new media might make a difference for would-be knowers—the viewers of photographs and videos—I advance a thesis about how they will make a difference for would-be communicators—those who embed photos and videos in their speech acts. I claim that the presence of these media in our information environment (...) reduces our ability to show one another things, even as it may increase our resources for telling. And I argue that this has consequences beyond the disruption of knowledge acquisition; showing is a way that we preserve relational equality through superficial asymmetries in political communication, and thereby express respect for our audiences. If synthetic media reduce our options for showing, they then interfere in the way that we manage our relationships in the context of collective political action. (shrink)

In The Epistemology of Groups, Jennifer Lackey investigates the conditions for the possibility of groups telling lies. Central to this project is the goal of holding groups, and individuals within groups, accountable for their actions. I show that Lackey’s total account of group phenomena, however, may open up a means by which groups can evade accusations of having lied, thus allowing them to evade responsibility in precisely the way Lackey set out to avoid. Along the way, I also take note (...) of some interesting implications of Lackey’s view: that it makes groups uniquely susceptible to a lack of self-knowledge and that it creates an interesting mechanism by which groups can lie to themselves. (shrink)

Those in the Gricean tradition take it that successful human communication features an audience who not only arrives at the intended content of the signal, but also recognizes the speaker’s intention that they do so. Some in this tradition have also argued that there are yet further conditions on communicative success, which rule out the possibility of communicating by luck. Supposing that both intention-recognition and some sort of anti-luck condition are correctly included in an analysis of human communication, this article (...) asks what the value of events satisfying these conditions is. I present a puzzle concerning the value of intention-recognition which is analogous to the Meno Problem in epistemology, but ultimately argue that this puzzle is solveable: the signaling-relevant value of intention recognition can be vindicated. However, I argue that the version of this puzzle that concerns the further proposed luck-proofing conditions on communication can not be answered. I argue therefore that communication, as analyzed by many, is no more valuable qua signal than a proper subset of its conditions. Human communication is thennot a uniquely valuable signaling event. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a modified version of well-being subjectivism can avoid the standard, yet unintuitive, conclusion that morally horrible acts may contribute to an agent’s well-being. To make my case, I argue that “Modified Subjectivists” need not accept such conclusions about well-being so long as they accept the following three theoretical addenda: 1) there are a plurality of values pertaining to well-being, 2) there are some objective goods, even if they do not directly contribute to well-being, and (...) 3) some of these values and goods are bound-up with one another. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Dormandy’s ‘True Faith’ presents two views on the proper epistemological stance towards faith: doxastic-partialism and evidentialism. Here, I argue for a third option that cuts across the evidentialism/partialism distinction. I first analyze the Pascalian conception of faith, arguing that Pascal begins with the cognitive attitude of acceptance rather than belief. Next, I discuss Dormandy’s case for evidentialism, and contend that some evidence—the kind gained through transformative experiences—presents a difficulty for her argument. Finally, I offer my proposed view—Partialist Evidentialism—and argue (...) that this approach is necessary for acquiring some unique kinds of evidence for religious faith. (shrink)

Philosophers sometimes wonder whether academic work can ever be truly interdisciplinary. Whether true interdisciplinarity is possible is an open question, but given current trends in higher education, it seems that at least gesturing toward such work is increasingly important. This volume serves as a testament to the fact that such work can be done. Of course, while it is the case that high-level theoretical work can flourish at the intersection of dance and philosophy, it remains to be seen how we (...) might share this with undergraduate students. For many of us in philosophy and dance, a large number of the students we teach are neither philosophy nor dance majors. As such, we are familiar with the challenge of convincing our students to care about our fields. Both philosophy and dance, qua disciplines on a college campus, face similar challenges. These disciplines are often deeply misunderstood, frequently presumed to be “impractical” (a powerful, but confused objection), intimidating, and frivolous. In this chapter, we offer an account of the course we co-taught at Southern Utah University in the Spring of 2016 titled “Movement and Space” as a rough framework for how to introduce the intersection between philosophy and dance to students. We simultaneously attempted to break students of their misconceptions about philosophy and dance, and worked to engage students and professors alike in a truly interdisciplinary educational experience. Treating philosophy as an embodied endeavor, and employing philosophical concepts through the act of dance encouraged students and faculty alike to rethink the fundamental nature of aesthetics. (shrink)

In Joeri Schrijvers’ (2016) book, Between Faith and Belief, Schrijvers discusses various answers to a deceptively simple and yet complex question: what can be said for religious faith “at the end of metaphysics”? Although Schrijvers engages a variety of thinkers in the elaboration of his thesis, he takes particular interest in Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss existential psychologist, whose contemporaries include Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Buber. Although Schrijvers does not discuss it in his manuscript, it is important to note (...) that Binswanger was heavily influenced by the existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. This influence is particularly apparent in Binswanger’s understanding of the transcendental nature of human love. Demonstrating the degree to which Binswanger draws on Kierkegaard, Elisabetta Basso writes, “What is undeniable, in any event, is the fact that Kierkegaard is almost everywhere present in Binswanger’s work” (Basso 2011 p. 35). Anyone familiar with Kierkegaard’s authorship should also be able to see his ideas shining through Binswanger’s work; but what are as interesting as their similarities are their divergences. (shrink)

In defense of anti-essentialism, pragmatist Richard Rorty holds that we may think of all objects as if they were numbers. I find that Rorty’s metaphysics hinges on two rather weak arguments against the essences of numbers. In contrast, Plato’s metaphysics offers a plausible definition of essentiality by which numbers do have essential properties. Further, I argue that Rorty’s argumentative mistake is mischaracterizing Plato’s definition. I conclude that Plato’s definition of “essential” is a robust one which implies that many properties, beyond (...) those we might intuitively think of, can count as essential properties of objects. (shrink)

Researchers and practitioners are increasingly using machine‐generated synthetic data as a tool for advancing health science and practice, by expanding access to health data while—potentially—mitigating privacy and related ethical concerns around data sharing. While using synthetic data in this way holds promise, we argue that it also raises significant ethical, legal, and policy concerns, including persistent privacy and security problems, accuracy and reliability issues, worries about fairness and bias, and new regulatory challenges. The virtue of synthetic data is often understood (...) to be its detachment from the data subjects whose measurement data is used to generate it. However, we argue that addressing the ethical issues synthetic data raises might require bringing data subjects back into the picture, finding ways that researchers and data subjects can be more meaningfully engaged in the construction and evaluation of datasets and in the creation of institutional safeguards that promote responsible use. (shrink)

Having a confirmation bias sometimes leads us to hold inaccurate beliefs. So, the puzzle goes: why do we have it? According to the influential argumentative theory of reasoning, confirmation bias emerges because the primary function of reason is not to form accurate beliefs, but to convince others that we’re right. A crucial prediction of the theory, then, is that confirmation bias should be found only in the reasoning domain. In this article, we argue that there is evidence that confirmation bias (...) does exist outside the reasoning domain. This undermines the main evidential basis for the argumentative theory of reasoning. In presenting the relevant evidence, we explore why having such confirmation bias may not be maladaptive. (shrink)

Reconsidering Reparations is a book about global justice. Its central philosophical argument claims that a just world would be one in which everyone enjoys the capabilities that they need to relate to one another as equals; maintains that realising this vision (in the right way) would serve as reparation for the injustices of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism; and warns that this project is threatened by the climate crisis...

Review of Dominic Roser and Christian Seidel, Climate Justice: An Introduction (trans. Ciaran Cronin).

According to the PubMed resource from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, over 750,000 scientific articles have been published in the ~5000 biomedical journals worldwide in the year 2007 alone. The vast majority of these publications include results from hypothesis-driven experimentation in overlapping biomedical research domains. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of information being generated by the biomedical research enterprise has made it virtually impossible for investigators to stay aware of the latest findings in their domain of interest, let alone to (...) be able to assimilate and mine data from related investigations for purposes of meta-analysis. While computers have the potential for assisting investigators in the extraction, management and analysis of these data, information contained in the traditional journal publication is still largely unstructured, free-text descriptions of study design, experimental application and results interpretation, making it difficult for computers to gain access to the content of what is being conveyed without significant manual intervention. In order to circumvent these roadblocks and make the most of the output from the biomedical research enterprise, a variety of related standards in knowledge representation are being developed, proposed and adopted in the biomedical community. In this chapter, we will explore the current status of efforts to develop minimum information standards for the representation of a biomedical experiment, ontologies composed of shared vocabularies assembled into subsumption hierarchical structures, and extensible relational data models that link the information components together in a machine-readable and human-useable framework for data mining purposes. (shrink)

Recourse to a variety of well-constructed arguments is undoubtedly a significant strategic asset for cultivating more ethical eating habits and convincing others to follow suit. Nevertheless, common obstacles often prevent even the best arguments from getting traction in our lives. For one thing, many of us enter the discussion hampered by firmly-entrenched but largely uninvestigated assumptions about food that make it difficult to imagine how even well-supported arguments that challenge our familiar frames of culinary reference could actually apply to us. (...) When an argument contests our cherished food ways, we are inclined almost reflexively to dodge, downplay, or dismiss it, and all the more anxiously if we suspect it’s a good one. Moreover, even when we find such arguments convincing and resolve to change, we often discover to our chagrin that, when the buffet is open, we lack the will to act on our convictions. Whether the obstacle is a lack of imagination or a failure of will, the way to concrete moral progress is blocked. Our aim here is to consider how other modes of philosophical inquiry can help us to overcome these two obstacles that arise at the margins of philosophy’s argumentative contributions to food ethics. In part I, we diagnose these obstacles as common moral malaises—we call them the malaise of imagination and the malaise of will—that create existential unease for moral agents that can curtail their ability to eat in accordance with what they learn from philosophical arguments. We then propose that other modes of philosophical inquiry can serve as therapy for these malaises. In part II, we argue that philosophical hermeneutics (exemplified by Hans-Georg Gadamer) can treat the malaise of imagination by helping us to excavate and revise hidden prejudices that interfere with our ability authentically to engage arguments that challenge entrenched assumptions about food. In part III, we argue that philosophy as care of the self (exemplified by Pierre Hadot) can treat the malaise of will by helping us to identify habits of thought and action that hamper concrete progress toward new dietary ideals and to replace them, through repetitive exercises, with transformed habits. In a brief conclusion, we identify some benefits of this approach. (shrink)

Transitional Justice (TJ) focuses on the processes of dealing with the legacy of large-scale past abuses (in the aftermath of traumatic experiences such as war or authoritarianism) with the aim of fostering domestic justice and creating the basis for a sustainable peace. TJ however also entails the problem of how a torn society may be able to become a self-determining member of a just international order. This paper presents a minimal conception of TJ, which departs from Rawls' conception of normative (...) stability of the international order, which suggests disentangling the two goals of fostering democracy within torn societies and TJ itself. The scope of TJ is therefore limited to enabling these societies to create minimal internal conditions for joining a just international order on equal footing. This paper makes an original contribution to two different debates, namely normative research on TJ, and post-Rawlsian literature in general. First, it provides a new direction for normative theorizing about TJ which takes both its domestic and international dimensions seriously into consideration. Second, it extends Rawls' political liberal outlook to an area where it is not usually understood to apply. (shrink)

This book chapter is a work of popular philosophy that offers general readers an opportunity to reimagine their relationship to non-human creatures by living vicariously through the experience of Jasmin--a hypothetical college student whose encounters with a cow, goat, and rooster on a visit to a local farm trigger a transformation in her views and actions toward other animals, allowing her to see them for the first time as subjects of their own lives rather than as objects for human use. (...) Though the chapter is written from the perspective of Jasmin's own Christian religious heritage, her awakening to the importance of the lives of other animals and the practices she undertakes in order to live out that new vision resonate with other religious and non-religious traditions, implicitly engaging the traditions of philosophical hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer) and philosophy as a way of life through the practice of spiritual exercises (Pierre Hadot, Martha Nussbaum). This chapter would be appropriate for use in introduction to philosophy courses or first-year writing seminars that seek to offer students an invitational introduction to some of the big ideas in animal and environmental ethics without getting philosophically technical in ways that can alienate beginners. (shrink)

In this essay, we analyze the Black Mirror episode "Arkangel" alongside Nietzsche’s critique of religion. After providing an overview of his critique, we argue that the episode demonstrates how a world enframed by technology itself ends up being just as decadent, or just as pathological, repressive, corrupt, anti-life, and unredemptive as Nietzsche accuses Christianity of being. Nietzsche thought, at one point, that science and technology might provide a non-metaphysical or non-theological solution to what he calls our “metaphysical need.” However, Arkangel (...) shows how technology does not overcome problems of idolatrous forms of religion and can be just another tool for manipulation that produces the same kinds of pathologies. Nietzsche insists that the only way to overcome religion as an oppressive system is to “philosophize with a hammer,” or to deconstruct its idolatrous strictures and the “all too human” forces behind it. Ultimately, this deconstruction requires declaring “the death of God.”. (shrink)

Aims and objectives. Participant narratives from a feminist and queer phe- nomenological study aim to broaden current understandings of trauma. Examin- ing structural marginalisation within perinatal care relationships provides insights into the impact of dominant models of care on queer birthing women. More specifically, validation of queer experience as a key finding from the study offers trauma-informed strategies that reconstruct formerly disempowering perinatal relationships. Background. Heteronormativity governs birthing spaces and presents considerable challenges for queer birthing women who may also have (...) an increased risk of trauma due to structurally marginalising processes that create and maintain socially constructed differences. Design. Analysis of the qualitative data was guided by feminist and queer phe- nomenology. This was well suited to understanding queer women’s storied narra- tives of trauma, including disempowering processes of structural marginalisation. Methods. Semistructured and conversational interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of thirteen queer-identified women who had experiences of birthing in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. Results. Validation was identified as meaningful for queer women in the context of perinatal care in rural Nova Scotia. Offering new perspectives on traditional models of assessment provide strategies to create a context of care that recon- structs the birthing space insofar as women at risk do not have to come out as queer in opposition to the expectation of heterosexuality. Conclusions. Normative practices were found to further the effects of structural marginalisation suggesting that perinatal care providers, including nurses, can challenge dominant models of care and reconstruct the relationality between queer women and formerly disempowering expectations of heteronormativity that govern birthing spaces. Relevance to clinical practice. New trauma-informed assessment strategies recon- struct the relationality within historically disempowering perinatal relationships through potentiating difference which avoids retraumatising women with re- experiencing the process of coming out as queer in opposition to the expectation of heterosexuality. (shrink)

Objective We reviewed human–robot interaction (HRI) participatory design (PD) research with older adults. The goal was to identify methods used, determine their value for design of robots with older adults, and provide guidance for best practices. Background Assistive robots may promote aging-in-place and quality of life for older adults. However, the robots must be designed to meet older adults’ specific needs and preferences. PD and other user-centered methods may be used to engage older adults in the robot development process to (...) accommodate their needs and preferences and to assure usability of emergent assistive robots. Method This targeted review of HRI PD studies with older adults draws on a detailed review of 26 articles. Our assessment focused on the HRI methods and their utility for use with older adults who have a range of needs and capabilities. Results Our review highlighted the importance of using mixed methods and including multiple stakeholders throughout the design process. These approaches can encourage mutual learning (to improve design by developers and to increase acceptance by users). We identified key phases used in HRI PD workshops (e.g., initial interview phase, series of focus groups phase, and presentation phase). These approaches can provide inspiration for future efforts. Conclusion HRI PD strategies can support designers in developing assistive robots that meet older adults’ needs, capabilities, and preferences to promote acceptance. More HRI research is needed to understand potential implications for aging-in-place. PD methods provide a promising approach. (shrink)

This review examines Burke's phenomenological analysis of normative femininity, examining how femininity is implicated in both historical and present racial violence. It lauds Burke's analysis of the temporality of gendered experience—in the Beauvoirean tradition of feminist phenomenology—but it criticizes Burke for coming up short in the critical aspect of their project. It closes with some methodological reflections about doing effect critical phenomenology.

Does utterance understanding require reliable (i.e. non-lucky) recovery of the speaker’s intended proposition? There are good reasons to answer in the affirmative: the role of understanding in supporting testimonial knowledge seemingly requires such reliability. Moreover, there seem to be communicative analogues of Gettier cases in which luck precludes the audience’s understanding an utterance despite recovering the intended proposition. Yet, there are some major problems with the view that understanding requires such reliability. Firstly, there are a number of cases in which (...) understanding seems to occur in a lucky way. In light of these cases I argue that we need to narrow down the precise sense in which understanding precludes luck – the anti-luck condition attached to linguistic understanding is importantly different to anti-luck conditions typically applied to knowledge. Secondly, Megan Hyska has recently argued that, assuming understanding precludes luck, we get a communicative analogue of the value problem for knowledge. i.e. why is it better to meet the other conditions for understanding in a reliable way than in a lucky way? It is natural to assume that we can simply port over our favoured responses to the epistemic value problem in response to Hyska’s challenge. I argue that, due to the difference between epistemic and communicative luck (discussed in response to the first problem), this cannot be done. The epistemic and communicative value problems will require different solutions. I close by sketching the beginnings of an alternative answer to the value problem for communication. (shrink)