Scholars, journalists, and activists working on climate change often distinguish between “individual” and “structural” approaches to decarbonization. The former concern choices individuals can make to reduce their “personal carbon footprint” (e.g., eating less meat). The latter concern changes to institutions, laws, and other social structures. These two approaches are often framed as oppositional, representing a mutually exclusive forced choice between alternative routes to decarbonization. After presenting representative samples of this oppositional framing of individual and structural approaches in environmental communication, we (...) identify four problems with oppositional thinking and propose five ways to conceive of individual and structural reform as symbiotic and interdependent. (shrink)

There is a deeply entrenched view in philosophy and physics, the closed systems view, according to which isolated systems are conceived of as fundamental. On this view, when a system is under the influence of its environment this is described in terms of a coupling between it and a separate system which taken together are isolated. We argue against this view, and in favor of the alternative open systems view, for which systems interacting with their environment are conceived of as (...) fundamental, and the environment's influence is represented via the dynamical equations that govern the system's evolution. Taking quantum theories of closed and open systems as our case study, and considering three alternative notions of fundamentality: (i) ontic fundamentality, (ii) epistemic fundamentality, and (iii) explanatory fundamentality, we argue that the open systems view is fundamental, and that this has important implications for the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of science, and for metaphysics. (shrink)

Joshua Greene has argued that the empirical findings of cognitive science have implications for ethics. In particular, he has argued (1) that people’s deontological judgments in response to trolley problems are strongly influenced by at least one morally irrelevant factor, personal force, and are therefore at least somewhat unreliable, and (2) that we ought to trust our consequentialist judgments more than our deontological judgments when making decisions about unfamiliar moral problems. While many cognitive scientists have rejected Greene’s dual-process theory of (...) moral judgment on empirical grounds, philosophers have mostly taken issue with his normative assertions. For the most part, these two discussions have occurred separately. The current analysis aims to remedy this situation by philosophically analyzing the implications of moral dilemma research using the CNI model of moral decision-making – a formalized, mathematical model that decomposes three distinct aspects of moral-dilemma judgments. In particular, we show how research guided by the CNI model reveals significant conceptual, empirical, and theoretical problems with Greene’s dual-process theory, thereby questioning the foundations of his normative conclusions. (shrink)

The deaths of those on whom our practical identities rely generate a sense of disorientation or alienation from the world seemingly at odds with life being meaningful. In the terms put forth in Cheshire Calhoun’s recent account of meaningfulness in life, because their existence serves as a metaphysical presupposition of our practical identities, their deaths threaten to upend a background frame of agency against which much of our choice and deliberation takes place. Here I argue for a dual role for (...) grief in addressing this threat to life’s meaningfulness. Inasmuch as grief’s object is the loss of our relationship with the deceased as it was prior to their death, grief serves to alert us to the threat to our practical identities that their deaths pose to us and motivates us to defuse this threat by revising our practical identities to reflect the modification in our relationship necessitated by their deaths. Simultaneously, the emotional complexity and richness of grief episodes provides an abundance of normative evidence regarding our relationship with the deceased and our practical identities, evidence that can enable us to re-establish our practical identities and thereby recover a sense of our lives as meaningful. (shrink)

Many philosophers assume that, when making moral decisions under uncertainty, we should choose the option that has the greatest expected moral value, regardless of how risky it is. But their arguments for maximizing expected moral value do not support it over rival, risk-averse approaches. In this paper, I present a novel argument for maximizing expected value: when we think about larger series of decisions that each decision is a part of, all but the most risk-averse agents would prefer that we (...) consistently choose the option with the highest expected value. To the extent that what we choose on a given occasion should be guided by the entire series of choices we prefer, then on each occasion, we should choose the option with the highest expected moral value. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what the attitude of hope consists in. We argue that shortcomings in recent theories of hope have methodological roots in that they proceed with little regard for the rich body of literature on the emotions. Taking insights from work in the philosophy of emotions, we argue that hope involves a kind of normative perception. We then develop a strategy for determining the content of this perception, arguing that hope is a perception of practical reasons. (...) Our proposal stands in contrast with familiar views on which hope is fundamentally about the good. We conclude by considering the increasingly popular idea that some hopes are non-intentional and thus, by implication, non-perceptual. We reply by arguing that our perceptual theory plausibly generalizes to these instances of hope. (shrink)

What explains the outcomes of chance processes? We claim that their setups do. Chances, we think, mediate these explanations of outcome by setup but do not feature in them. Facts about chances do feature in explanations of a different kind: higher-order explanations, which explain how and why setups explain their outcomes. In this paper, we elucidate this 'mediator view' of chancy explanation and defend it from a series of objections. We then show how it changes the playing field in four (...) metaphysical disputes concerning chance. First, it makes it more plausible that even low chances can have explanatory power. Second, it undercuts a circularity objection against reductionist theories of chance. Third, it redirects the debate about a prominent argument against epistemic theories of chance. Finally, it sheds light on potential chancy explanations of the Universe's origin. (shrink)

Transcendental philosophy was not born like Athena out of Zeus’s head, mature and in full armour from the very beginning. That is why in both prefaces to the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787) Kant introduces the concept of transcendental philosophy as an “idea.” The idea understood architectonically develops slowly and only gradually acquires a definite form. As witnessed by the works of Kant himself and of his predecessors and followers, the idea of transcendental philosophy has undergone a series (...) of changes and adjustments compared to the initial plan. In this context, my goal is not simply exegesis and historical investigation of transcendental philosophy, but also to look at it from a systematic and methodological perspective. I examine the concept of transcendental philosophy from the viewpoint of programmatic metaphilosophy. The first part discusses programmatics as a distinct subsection of metaphilosophy. I argue that Kant’s architectonic methodology and the methodology of Lakatos can be used to understand the inception, development and degradation of philosophical systems. In the second part I look at the project of transcendental philosophy and the stages of its development from the standpoint of architectonics. The third part shows that Lakatos’s methodology can provide a detailed insight into the elements of transcendental philosophy, a clear idea of its logic and identify the component parts that can be improved and developed. In spite of the different levels of detailing and epistemological prerequisites, the methodologies of Kant and Lakatos can be combined to achieve a metaphilosophically informed and progressive understanding of philosophical projects. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

We identify several ongoing debates related to implicit measures, surveying prominent views and considerations in each debate. First, we summarize the debate regarding whether performance on implicit measures is explained by conscious or unconscious representations. Second, we discuss the cognitive structure of the operative constructs: are they associatively or propositionally structured? Third, we review debates whether performance on implicit measures reflects traits or states. Fourth, we discuss the question of whether a person’s performance on an implicit measure reflects characteristics of (...) the person who is taking the test or characteristics of the situation in which the person is taking the test. Finally, we survey the debate about the relationship between implicit measures and (other kinds of) behavior. (shrink)

Time may be infinite in both directions. If it is, then, if persons could live at most once in all of time, the probability that you would be alive now would be zero. But if persons can live more than once, the probability that you would be alive now would be nonzero. Since you are alive now, with certainty, either the past is finite, or persons can live more than once.

Philosophers often claim that doing philosophy makes people better thinkers. But what evidence is there for this empirical claim? This paper reviews extant evidence and presents some novel findings. We discuss standardized testing scores, review research on Philosophy for Children and critical thinking skills among college students, and present new empirical findings. On average philosophers are better at logical reasoning, more reflective, and more open-minded than non-philosophers. However, there is an absence of evidence for the claim that studying philosophy led (...) to these differences. We present some preliminary and suggestive evidence that, although some of these differences may be attributable to philosophical training, others appear to be selection effects. The key takeaway is that more data are needed. We conclude by urging philosophers and interdisciplinary collaborators to gather more data to test the claim that studying philosophy makes people better thinkers. (shrink)

This essay develops a theory of identities, selves, and ‘the self’ that both explains the sense in which selves are narratively constituted and also explains how the self relates to a person's individual autobiographical identity and to their various social identities. I argue that identities are the contents of narratively structured representations, some of which are hosted individually and are autobiographical in form, and others of which are hosted collectively and are biographical in form. These identities, in turn, give rise (...) to selves of various sorts—true selves, autobiographical selves, public and private selves, merely possible selves, and so on—which are the characters (or presupposed subjects) that appear in our various identities. Although the theory I develop bears some obvious affinities with the view that selves are fictional characters, the two views are in fact distinct, for reasons explained at the end. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Hutcheson has a theory of obligation that is different in important ways from the views of his predecessors and that his theory may not be as problematic as critics have claimed. In section (I) I sketch a brief picture of the rich conceptual landscape surrounding the concept of obligation in the Early Modern period. I focus on the five figures Hutcheson explicitly references: Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, their French translator and commentator Jean Barbeyrac, as (...) well as G. W. Leibniz and Richard Cumberland. In section (II) I offer an account of Hutcheson’s theory of obligation and illustrate that not only does Hutcheson have a view on what previous figures called the source, end, and object of obligation, he also focuses on the epistemological question of the origin of our idea of obligation as opposed to the metaphysical question of the efficient cause of obligation. Furthermore, although Hutcheson shares with his predecessors the idea that obligation implies a certain kind of necessity, he conceives of this necessity in a unique way, namely in terms of the necessity of a perception. In section (III) I defend Hutcheson’s theory of obligation against three objections: 1. that it makes a sham of obligation by locating its source within the human being, 2. that it is reducible to divine command theory, and 3. that, in the end, Hutcheson has no real or meaningful theory of obligation. My hope is that, at the very least, appraising these objections helps further clarify the theory of obligation that Hutcheson presents in his works. (shrink)

Right after Philo’s about-face in Part 12 of the Dialogues, he gives an argument that the dispute between the theist and the atheist is merely verbal. Since everything is at least a little like everything else, the atheist must concede that the source of order is at least remotely like a human intellect, even if this source is something like a rotting turnip. This passage provides a major argument for dismissing Hume’s apparent avowals of theism in the Dialogues and elsewhere, (...) since Philo’s assertions are so loose as to let in a rotting turnip. The right reading of the passage is more interesting. The paragraph was written in 1776, right before Hume’s death. It’s thus one of the few philosophical texts written late enough to reflect his encounter with the French philosophes in the 1760s. We have good biographical evidence that Hume was criticized for being too much of a theist in France. The turnip is rotting not in order to make fun of the argument from design, but in order to make fun of d’Holbach's and Diderot's account of the origin of life, accounts that generalized dramatically from John Needham’s observations of nematodes in rotting wheat. In the rotting turnip paragraph, Hume is attempting to establish that the dispute between the theist and the atheist isn’t empirically tractable, that atheists will never outflank the apophatic theologian on the question of whether human minds are unlike God, and that if atheists are consistent with their analogical methods, they ought to be more open to the argument from design. (shrink)

Several interpreters argue that Kant believes we have a duty to act “from duty.” If there is such a duty, however, then Kant's moral theory faces a serious problem, namely that of an allegedly vicious infinite regress of duties. No serious attempt has been made to determine how Kant might respond to this problem and insufficient work has been done to determine whether he even believes we have a duty to act from duty. In this paper I argue that not (...) only does Kant not hold that there is a duty to act from duty, but he also explicitly rejects the idea. (shrink)

It is typically wrong to act in a way that foreseeably makes some impending harm worse. Sometimes it is permissible to do so, however, if one also offsets the harm increasing action by doing something that decreases the badness of the same harm by at least as much. This chapter argues that the standard deontological constraint against doing harm is not compatible with the permissibility of harm increases that have been offset. Offsetting neither prevents one's other actions from doing harm (...) nor ensures that the harm those actions do is made permissible by any of the constraint's familiar provisos. To make sense of offsetting, the old constraint against doing harm should be replaced with a new constraint against making unoffset harm increases. The chapter discusses how to formulate the new constraint so that it can handle both the offsetting cases that the old constraint gets wrong as as well as the non-offsetting cases that the old constraint gets right. Adopting this constraint against unoffset harm increases may have important implications both for theoretical questions about the sources of deontological constraints as well as for practical questions, such as whether buying carbon offsets can make emitting carbon dioxide permissible. (shrink)

For Kant, philosophical investigations are inherently analytic. The proper method of philosophy is analysis, and the object of analysis are concepts. Hence, Kant’s short description of philosophy as “rational cognition […] from concepts” (KrV, A 837/B 865) can be substituted by “philosophy is conceptual analysis”. The article shows that Kant follows a representationalism about concepts and a combination of intensional and extensional feature semantics. Against the claim that Kant is a proponent of the concept-judgement-inversion, it is argued that concepts are (...) being articulated in form of singular terms, propositions, and sets of propositions alike. Kant interlinks different kinds of concepts with different kinds of definitions, as the reconstruction of his theory of definitions reveals. Philosophy foremost deals with what Kant calls “given” empirical and pure concepts. Such concepts are object of analysis, i.e., explication and exposition. The article ends with answers to five possible objections. Is philosophy all about analysis? (shrink)

Within psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science, theory of mind refers to the cognitive ability to reason about the mental states of other people, thus recognizing them as having beliefs, knowledge, intentions and emotions of their own. In this project, we construct a natural language inference (NLD) dataset that tests the ability of a state of the art language model, RoBERTa-large finetuned on the MNLI dataset, to make theory of mind inferences related to knowledge and belief. Experimental results suggest that the (...) model struggles with such inferences, including after attempts for further finetuning. (shrink)

Religious fictionalism is the theory that it is morally and intellectually legitimate to affirm religious sentences and to engage in public and private religious practices, without believing the content of religious claims. This article discusses the main features of fictionalism, contrasts hermeneutic, and revolutionary kinds of fictionalism and explores possible historical and recent examples of religious fictionalism. Such examples are found in recent theories of faith, pragmatic approaches to religion, and mystical traditions in religious theology.

What are the properties of composite objects, and how do the properties of composite objects and the properties of their proper parts relate to one another? The answers to these questions depend upon which view of composition one adopts. One view, which I call the orthodox view, is that composite objects are numerically distinct from their proper parts, individually and collectively. Another view, known as composition as identity, is that composite objects are numerically identical to their proper parts, taken together. (...) I argue that the orthodox view entails that the intuitive picture of composite objects and their properties that most accept is false. Not so for composition as identity. I also show that all of the available alternatives face serious difficulties. This puts composition as identity at an advantage over the orthodox view, at least when it comes to accounting for the properties of composite objects. (shrink)

Als Plato de hedendaagse academie zou aanschouwen, zou hij niet alleen stomverbaasd zijn over de massificatie en de byzantijnse bureaucratie, maar gezien het ethische doel van de universiteit zou hij ook reden hebben om bezorgd te zijn.

We provide counterexamples to some purported characterizations of dilation due to Pedersen and Wheeler :1305–1342, 2014, ISIPTA ’15: Proceedings of the 9th international symposium on imprecise probability: theories and applications, 2015).

This paper discusses Raimo Tuomela's we-mode account in his recent book "Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents" and develops the idea that mode should be thought of as representational. I argue that in any posture – intentional state or speech act – we do not merely represent a state of affairs as what we believe, or intend etc. – as the received view of 'propositional attitudes' has it –, but our position relative to that state of affairs and thus (...) ourselves. That is, we represent the subject through what I call "subject mode" and its position through what I call "position mode". I argue that the key to understanding collective intentionality is to understand how we represent others as co-subjects of positions rather than as their objects. This is shown on various levels of collective intentionality. On the non-conceptual level of joint attention we experience others as co-subjects who we attend with rather than to and who we are at least also disposed to act jointly with. On the conceptual level of the we-mode we represent others as co-subjects of positions of knowledge, intention, belief and shared values. Organizations and thus group agents in Tuomela's sense I propose to understand in terms of what I call "role mode", that is, in terms of the positions individuals and groups take as occupants of certain roles, for example, as committee members, or as chancellor of Germany. I try to show how this account, while very much in the spirit of Tuomela's, can avoid his fictionalism about group agents and some other problems of his account, while steering between the Scylla of excessive individualism and the Charybdis of extreme collectivism. (shrink)

Computational systems biologists create and manipulate computational models of biological systems, but they do not always have straightforward epistemic access to the content and behavioural profile of such models because of their length, coding idiosyncrasies, and formal complexity. This creates difficulties both for modellers in their research groups and for their bioscience collaborators who rely on these models. In this paper we introduce a new kind of visualization that was developed to address just this sort of epistemic opacity. The visualization (...) is unusual in that it depicts the dynamics and structure of a computer model instead of that model’s target system, and because it is generated algorithmically. Using considerations from epistemology and aesthetics, we explore how this new kind of visualization increases scientific understanding of the content and function of computer models in systems biology to reduce epistemic opacity. (shrink)

The present paper proposes a route to modal claims that allows us to infer to certain possibilities even if they are sensorily unimaginable and beyond the evidential capacity of stipulative imagining. After a brief introduction, Sect. 2 discusses imaginative resistance to help carve a niche for the kinds of inferences about which this essay is chiefly concerned. Section 3 provides three classic examples, along with a discussion of their similarities and differences. Section 4 recasts the notion of potential explanation in (...) Lipton’s (Inference to the best explanation, Routledge, Abingdon, 2004) in order to accommodate inferences to possibility claims; Sect. 5 then attempts to characterise a principle underlying such inferences. Section 6 concludes by discussing how the proposal relates to other modal epistemologies, with emphasis on the potential of such inferences to produce genuinely new ideas. (shrink)

Many profess a belief in the importance of school integration. In this essay I argue that the evidence tells against the sincerity of this belief.

The Black Lives Matter movement has called for the abolition of capital punishment in response to what it calls “the war against Black people” and “Black communities.” This article defends the two central contentions in the movement’s abolitionist stance: first, that US capital punishment practices represent a wrong to black communities rather than simply a wrong to particular black capital defendants or particular black victims of murder, and second, that the most defensible remedy for this wrong is the abolition of (...) the death penalty. (shrink)

I develop a contractualist theory of just intelligence collection based on the collective moral responsibility to deliver security to a community and use the theory to justify certain kinds of signals interception. I also consider the rights of various intelligence targets like intelligence officers, service personnel, government employees, militants, and family members of all of these groups in order to consider how targets' waivers or forfeitures might create the moral space for just surveillance. Even people who are not doing anything (...) prejudicial to other states' security can be modeled as ceding rights against diagnostic collection--light touch collection limited to ascertaining if someone is likely an intelligence threat--as part of their duty to support just foreign institutions. Foreign intelligence officers could not perform the same job potential targets can reasonably demand their intelligence agencies perform on their behalf without this ceding of rights. More invasive forms of collection can only be justified if officers can reasonably model their citizens consenting to being the target of the same sort of collection by adversary states. (shrink)

In a recent paper Shieva Kleinschmidt has argued that if certain scenarios involving extended simple regions are possible (so-called ‘Place Cases’), then no logic of location with only one primitive locative notion (i.e., no ‘parsimonious logic of location’) will suffice to describe all of the locative possibilities. Since almost all existing logics of location are parsimonious (and apparently for good reason) the argument is a considerable obstacle to the development of a satisfactory logic of location. Kleinschmidt suggests that the best (...) way out of the difficulty is to deny the possibility of Place Cases by denying that extended simple regions are possible. I argue that much the same problem arises even in cases not involving extended simple regions or indeed exotic regions of any kind. Thus, simply denying the possibility of extended simple regions will not save parsimonious logics of location. (shrink)

This chapter outlines the philosophy of the Pan-African conferences 1900–1945 and situates Pan-Africanism in a European context. It presents Pan-Africanism as part of European history and realities and as a conceptual framework for the African diaspora in Europe. It calls for reframing European histories and realities in ways that are neither racially exclusive nor nationalistic.

The ‘Big 3’ theories of well-being—hedonism, desire-satisfactionism, and objective list theory—attempt to explain why certain things are good for people by appealing to prudentially good-making properties. But they don’t attempt to explain why the properties they advert to make something good for a person. Perfectionism, the view that well-being consists in nature-fulfilment, is often considered a competitor to these views (or else a version of the objective list theory). However, I argue that perfectionism is best understood as explaining why certain (...) properties are prudentially good-making. This version of perfectionism is compatible with each of the Big 3, and, I argue, quite attractive. (shrink)

Whatever the merits idealized liberal accounts of citizenship education may have in the seminar room, in this essay I argue that they are both unpersuasive and ineffectual. This is the case, because they are insufficiently attentive to the empirical realities, first (a) with respect to how real – versus imaginary – school systems function; and second, (b) with respect to the broader political context in which citizenship education policies are implemented. Because so much is already known about the former, I (...) devote more attention in this essay to the latter. (shrink)

Suppose that A explains B. Do A and B need to be true? Provided that we have metaphysical explanation in mind, orthodoxy answers “yes:” metaphysical explanation is factive. This article introduces and defends a non-factive notion of metaphysical explanation. I argue that we need a non-factive notion of explanation in order to make sense of explanationist arguments where we motivate a view by claiming that it offers better explanations than its competitors. After presenting and rejecting some initially plausible rivals, I (...) account for non-factive metaphysical explanation by drawing on existing applications of structural equation models to metaphysical grounding. (shrink)

The ‘black box’ in Stoic axiology refers to the mysterious connection between the input of Stoic deliberation (reasons generated by the value of indifferents) and the output (appropriate actions). In this paper, I peer into the black box by drawing an analogy between Stoic and Kantian axiology. The value and disvalue of indifferents is intrinsic, but conditional. An extrinsic condition on the value of a token indifferent is that one's selection of that indifferent is sanctioned by context-relative ethical principles. The (...) value of an indifferent that does not meet this condition is normatively silenced, such that it fails to constitute a reason for action. (shrink)

Most advanced industrial societies are ‘work-centered,’ according high value and prestige to work. Indeed, belief in an interpersonal moral duty to work is encoded in both popular attitudes toward work and in policies such as ‘workfare’. Here I argue that despite the intuitive appeal of reciprocity or fair play as the moral basis for a duty to work, the vast majority of individuals in advanced industrialized societies have no such duty to work. For current economic conditions, labor markets, and government (...) policies entail that the conditions for a reciprocity-based argument to apply to most workers are not usually met. More specifically, many workers fail to provide valuable goods through working or their working does not result in net social benefit. Concurrently, many workers do not receive adequate benefits from working in that they neither have their basic needs met or do not even enjoy an improvement in welfare thanks to working. Hence, workers neither provide nor receive the benefits needed for a reciprocity-based duty to work to apply to them. Furthermore, these conditions are conditions over which workers themselves have very little control. Most workers therefore could not fulfill their ostensible duty to work even if they made conscientious efforts to do so. In most cases, a person who fails to work morally wrongs no one, and in the case of any particular individual or worker, the defeasible presumption ought to be that she has no duty to work. (shrink)

Knowledge is central to epistemology. Indeed, the word ‘epistemology’ comes from the Greek word epistêmê, which is often translated as ‘knowledge.’ But what is knowledge? Why do we value it? How is it acquired? And how much of it do we have? This article explores the nature, significance, sources, and extent of human knowledge.

Human capital is that body of skills, knowledge, or dispositions that enhances the value of individuals’ contributions to economic production. Because human capital is both a byproduct of, and an important ingredient in, cooperative productive activities, it is subject to demands of justice. Here I consider what comparative justice in human capital benefits and burdens amounts to, with a special concern for the place of equality in allocating such burdens and benefits. Identifying these demands is complicated by the fact that (...) human capital is not discretely produced or exploited, making it difficult to envision human capital justice in historical terms. I defend a non-historical alternative that (I contend) both distributive and relational egalitarians can embrace, namely that that an allocation of human capital burdens and benefits is just only if under that distribution, no individual prefers another’s ledger of benefits and burdens to her own. (shrink)

Fodor argued that learning a concept by hypothesis testing would involve an impossible circularity. I show that Fodor's argument implicitly relies on the assumption that actually φ-ing entails an ability to φ. But this assumption is false in cases of φ-ing by luck, and just such luck is involved in testing hypotheses with the kinds of generative random sampling methods that many cognitive scientists take our minds to use. Concepts thus can be learned by hypothesis testing without circularity, and it (...) is plausible that this is how humans in fact acquire at least some of their concepts. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize theory-biased and overly individualist approaches to understanding others and introduce the PAIR account of joint attention as a pragmatic, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that this relation obtains in virtue of intentional contents in the minds of the co-attenders, and – against the received understanding of intentional states as propositional attitudes – that we should recognize what I call “subject mode” and “position mode” intentional content. Based on findings from developmental psychology, I propose that (...) subject mode content represents the co-attenders as co-subjects, who are like them and who are at least disposed to act jointly with them. I conclude by arguing that in joint attention we experience and understand affective, actional and perceptual relations at a non-conceptual level prior to the differentiation of mind and body. (shrink)

Awareness and concern about climate change are widespread. But rates of pro-environmental behaviour are low. This is partly due to the way in which pro-environmental behaviour is framed—as a sacrifice or burden that individuals bear for the planet and future generations. This framing elicits well-known cognitive biases, discouraging what we should be encouraging. We should abandon the self-sacrifice framing, and instead frame pro-environmental behaviour as intrinsically desirable. There is a large body of evidence that, around the world, people who are (...) living more environmentally lifestyles are happier than those not doing so. This is the message we should be spreading. (shrink)

The issue of voting rights for older children has been high on the political and philosophical agenda for quite some time now, and not without reason. Aside from principled moral and philosophical reasons why it is an important matter, many economic, environmental, and political issues are currently being decided—sometimes through indecision—that greatly impact the future of today’s children. Past and current generations of adults have, arguably, mortgaged their children’s future, and this makes the question whether (some) children should be granted (...) the right to vote all the more pressing. Should (some) children be given the right to vote? Moreover, does the answer to this question depend on civic education, on whether children have been deliberately prepared for the exercise of that right? These are the questions that will occupy us in this article. Our answer to the first will be that older children—children roughly between 14 and 16 years of age1—ought to be given the right to vote. (shrink)

The fact of evolution raises important questions for the position of moral realism, because the origin of our moral dispositions in a contingent evolutionary process is on the face of it incompatible with the view that our moral beliefs track independent moral truths. Moreover, this meta-ethical worry seems to undermine the normative justification of our moral norms and beliefs. If we don’t have any grounds to believe that the source of our moral beliefs has any ontological authority, how can our (...) moral judgments be justified in an objective way? In this chapter, I argue that while traditional moral realism is untenable in the light of evolution, normative justification should not be handed the same fate. It is precisely in the fact that moral norms and beliefs are grounded in evolved, innate and therefore universally shared intuitions that those norms and beliefs can be objective-for-us. Such an internalist justification allows us to differentiate moral right from wrong, not because some feature of the external world forces us to acknowledge this, but because our moral nature forces us to project this moral judgment on the world. What’s more, guided by this innate moral compass we can both assess and realize moral progress. (shrink)

In Why It's OK to Speak Your Mind, Hrishikesh Joshi argues that the open exchange of ideas is essential for the flourishing of individuals and society. He provides two arguments for this claim. First, speaking your mind is essential for the common good: we enhance our collective ability to reach the truth if we share evidence and offer different perspectives. Second, speaking your mind is good for your own sake: it is necessary to develop your rational faculties and exercise intellectual (...) independence, both of which are essential for living a good life. In this paper, I consider the implications of Joshi’s argument and raise several objections to his view. (shrink)

Many philosophers argue that religious schools are guilty of indoctrinatory harm. I think they are right to be worried about that. But in this article, I will postulate that there are other harms for many individuals that are more severe outside the religious school. Accordingly the full scope of harm should be taken into account when evaluating the harm that some religious schools may do. Once we do that, I suggest, justice may require that we choose the lesser harm. To (...) simplify matters, I focus my attention on the stigmatic harm done to Muslims, and the role that Islamic schools might be expected to play in mitigating that harm. If the full weight of stigmatic harm is factored into the ethical analysis concerning Islamic schools, then I suggest that there are sufficiently weighty pro tanto reasons for Muslim parents to prefer an Islamic school over the alternatives, notwithstanding the potential indoctrinatory harm. (shrink)

This paper introduces two new paradoxes for standard deontic logic (SDL). They are importantly related to, but distinct from Ross' paradox. These two new paradoxes for SDL are the simple weakening paradox and the complex weakening paradox. Both of these paradoxes arise in virtue of the underlaying logic of SDL and are consequences of the fact that SDL incorporates the principle known as weakening. These two paradoxes then show that SDL has counter-intuitive implications related to disjunctive obligations that arise in (...) virtue of deontic weakening and in virtue of decisions concerning how to discharge such disjunctive obligations. The main result here is then that theorem T1 is a problematic component of SDL that needs to be addressed. (shrink)

Een veelgehoorde kritiek op islamitische scholen is dat kinderen er worden geïndoctrineerd en dat dit in strijd is met het doel van onderwijs in een democratische samenleving. Dit artikel onderzoekt de principiële vraag of ouders ervoor zouden kunnen kiezen om hun kind naar een school te sturen waar hij of zij geïndoctrineerd wordt, bijvoorbeeld omdat zij denken dat het kind op een religieuze school minder kans loopt te worden gestigmatiseerd. Daarnaast wordt bekeken of het waarschijnlijk is dat kinderen op islamitische (...) scholen in Nederland daadwerkelijk geïndoctrineerd worden. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline the ways that reification as a pathology of what I call “cybernetic society” shapes the fundamental structures of the self and our shared social reality. Whereas the classical theory of reification was a diagnostic attempt to understand the failure of class consciousness, I believe we must push this thesis further to show how is fundamentally an ontological and not a merely cognitive or epistemic concern. By this I mean that it is a pathology of consciousness (...) as well as social praxis and, as such, infects the ontological substrates of social reality. In effect, reification is a collective rather than merely subjective phenomenon. I explore this dialectic between our subjective and social dimensions of being to show how reification actively shapes self and world. I end with a discussion of how this theory of reification as an ontological concept can be used to overcome it via what I term “ontological coherence,” or the capacity of the self to reflect dialectically on the shapes of sociality that one inhabits, opening it up to evaluative reflection and critique. (shrink)

In Nederland worden al geruime tijd zowel op landelijk als op lokaal niveau en zowel vanuit het beleid als door bezorgde ouders uiteenlopende inspanningen geleverd om onderwijssegregatie tegen te gaan. In dit artikel wordt betoogd dat we desondanks voor een zware opgave staan, aangezien het uitoefenen van individuele vrijheid en het streven naar sociale gelijkheid voor spanningen kan zorgen. In het artikel wordt de stelling uitgewerkt dat sociale integratie in het onderwijs via gemengde scholen niet per se de enige en (...) beste manier is om het ideaal van gelijke kansen te realiseren. Verder stellen we dat een onderscheid moet worden gemaakt tussen vrijwillige en onvrijwillige vormen van onderwijssegregatie. Als alternatief voor integratie worden daarom de mogelijkheden voor vrijwillige separatie geëxploreerd. (shrink)