Written in 1949, La Scoperta di Marx was first published in 1958 in Pier Paolo Pasolini, L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (Editore Longanesi). It is published here, along the first English translation of the poem, with the permission of Garzanti Libri.

The notion of “empire” in Hardt and Negri’s political theory indicates a new postmodern sovereignty, able to lead the capital accumulation in the global market era. With the concept of “empire”, Hardt and Negri want to overtake the imperialism doctrines, considered by the two authors unable to understand correctly the global world. The aim of this essay is to clarify the conceptual contraposition between “empire” and “imperialism” offering a brief description of the international debate raised by the publication (...) of “Empire” by Hardt and Negri, in order to present the different positions and describe strengths, contradictions and aporias. (shrink)

This study focuses on the ideas of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the most influential thinkers of recent period, about the concepts of the Empire, Multitude and Biopolitical production. These concepts being at the center of contemporary political discussions problematise the ideaitonal foundations of the idea of Empire evaluated as a new form of sovereignty, the economic transformation in the contemporary capitalism and the new form of subjectivity in this age. To Negri and Hardt, Empire is seen (...) as a logic of network operating at global level and a new logic of sovereignty and governance going beyond the political boundaries of nation states as form of sovereignty. In this regard, multitude is evaluated as a collective and joint social subject against the power and command forms of empire. As for biopolitical production, it is defined as the production of life in which feelings, symbols, communication and cooperation go beyond the understanding that centers the production of tangible goods within the capitalist production and work organization. These three concepts draw an important framework in terms of understanding the economic, political transformation of the contemporary world. In this study, it was aimed at interpreting the nature of global changes brought forward by the Negri and Hardt thought within the boundaries of these three concepts. (shrink)

This study focuses on the ideas of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the most influential thinkers of recent period, about the concepts of the Empire, Multitude and Biopolitical production. These concepts being at the center of contemporary political discussions problematise the ideaitonal foundations of the idea of Empire evaluated as a new form of sovereignty, the economic transformation in the contemporary capitalism and the new form of subjectivity in this age. To Negri and Hardt, Empire is seen (...) as a logic of network operating at global level and a new logic of sovereignty and governance going beyond the political boundaries of nation states as form of sovereignty. In this regard, multitude is evaluated as a collective and joint social subject against the power and command forms of empire. As for biopolitical production, it is defined as the production of life in which feelings, symbols, communication and cooperation go beyond the understanding that centers the production of tangible goods within the capitalist production and work organization. These three concepts draw an important framework in terms of understanding the economic, political transformation of the contemporary world. In this study, it was aimed at interpreting the nature of global changes brought forward by the Negri and Hardt thought within the boundaries of these three concepts. (shrink)

In this paper, I will provide an interpretation of Foucauldian theoretical understanding on natures of power from sovereign power to biopolitics. In order to give further depth and texture to what he means by biopolitics, I will attempt to connect biopolitics with his earlier work Discipline and Punish. The term ‘biopolitics’ was actually mentioned by Foucault on the last chapter of his History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, where he also claimed it as a technology of power linked to (...) biopower. Foucault wrote that the highest function of biopolitics is not to kill, but to invest life through and through in the machineries of production. If that is the case, then, biopolitics aims to ensure the longevity, health, and wellness of the social bodies. However, if biopolitics is the politics that safeguard life, how come that the innumerable individuals are situated in dire condition? To answer this question, the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt will be used to understand further the nature of biopolitics and its effects in the social terrain specially in the contemporary society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, see the following excerpt: -/- Though his work has until now gone untranslated and been largely ignored in English scholarship, the historian of philosophy François Châtelet played a major role in the development of French thought that is on par with that of his more well-known contemporaries. Born in 1925, Châtelet was founding member of the University of Vincennes, Paris VIII’s experimental department of philosophy alongside Michel Foucault in the aftermath of the 1968 student protests. (...) In 1983, he would establish the Collège Internationale de Philosophie in Paris along with other prominent philosophers, an institution that in Alessandra Campana’s words, is at “the forefront of militant and engaged critical thinking,” in which it has sought to “relocate philosophy at the intersection of science, politics, psychoanalysis, art and literature, jurisprudence, and economy.” Châtelet’s association with radical educational institutions and the interdisciplinarity of research undertaken at the latter both point to what can be understood to be the essence of his philosophical project: that the history of philosophy is also a politics of philosophy. La Grèce Classique, La Raison, L’État, which was first published in 1978 and appears here in translation for the first time under the title Classical Greece, Reason, and the State, is exemplary in this regard, providing a powerful critique of the history of philosophy and its purported Greek origins. As Deleuze argues, Châtelet reveals that “Athens was not the advent of an eternal reason, but the singular event of a provisional rationalisation. In this view, the essence of classical philosophy cannot be extended to the contemporary era—neither in its original form, or in a revised form that has been modified and updated across the passage of time. Therefore, by politicising philosophy and its history, Châtelet’s work also shows philosophy to be indicative of a particular cultural moment, rather than as an the state, philosophy, and the tyranny of the logos · isolated discipline cut off from the influences of material life. He establishes a form of ‘rational empiricism’ for conducting a history of political philosophy that rejects universality for potentiality. Said otherwise, his work is indicative of what might be called the poststructuralist critique of historical narrative surrounding the canon of western thought, a critique that Michael Hardt rightfully argues “has problematised the foundations of philosophical and political thought.” However, Châtelet has made important contributions to the poststructuralist approach to theorising the western tradition that remain novel and insightful to a contemporary audience, rather than simply being one of many to problematise philosophy’s purported foundations. (shrink)

O presente artigo busca analisar como o conceito de massas é analisado na filosofia dita pós-moderna. Usando a intersecção entre Filosofia da Linguagem e Filosofia Política, o conceito se metamorfoseia em diversos autores (Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze) para desembocar naqueles que trabalham o conceito atualmente em filosofia: Michael Hardt e Antonio Negri.

In this interview, the italian philosopher Antonio Negri reports about his book Empire, written with Michael Hardt, edited in the 2000 and considered one of the most important contributions in the contemporary political theory. Negri narrates the context in which the book was born and discusses some of the principal critiques addressed to his thought.

This collection for a course in Social Thought and the Critique of Power includes selections from Sandra Bartkey, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, Juergin Habermas, Margaret Kohn, Saskia Sassen, Margit Mayer, David Ciavatta, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Jeremy Waldron. Selections include material on the city, neoliberalism, computer-mediated life, precarity, cosmopolitanism, and gender. This packet may still be available as a print-on-demand title at the Ryerson University Bookstore.

A presente dissertação tem como horizonte de pesquisa o conjunto de postulados e reflexões do filósofo espanhol Paul B. Preciado, a partir do qual este afirma que a noção de Multidão, tal como pensada por Michael Hardt e Antonio Negri, pode ser compreendida em termos de um “devir-revolucionário, multitudinário, constituído por singularidades diferenciadas”. Enquanto movimentos contraculturais, os deslocamentos subversivos onto-epístemo-políticos deflagrados pela Multidão comportam a possibilidade de promover a emancipação das singularidades que os compõem, bem como das políticas (...) identitárias estabelecidas. Neste sentido, a pesquisa propõe investigar como ocorre este processo de emancipação das subjetividades e singularidades, de modo a compreender como de fato é mobilizado o conceito de Multidão na teoria preciadiana, primeiro como “sujeito queer” e, posteriormente, como força des-identitária, isto é, como novo “sujeito político contemporâneo”. Para tal, será necessário estabelecer e analisar como o assujeitamento e a exploração capitalística são compreendidos na atualidade. Será utilizada como ferramenta hermenêutica para tal objetivo certos aspectos do pensamento de Judith Butler que permitem elucidar a produção concreta dos sujeitos, a exigência sistemática de assujeitamento ao cis-heteropatriarcado e a vulnerabilização dos sujeitos-individuados. Além disso, serão utilizados certos aspectos da teoria hardt-negriana que permitem esclarecer quais são as origens do conceito de Multidão e como os autores propõem a completa metamorfose da democracia enquanto plataforma para políticas emancipatórias, enfatizando o poder constituinte da biopolítica afirmativa da Multidão. Esta abertura conceitual possibilita contextualizar o recorte têmporo-espacial salientado por Preciado, a partir do qual fundamenta o conceito de farmacopornografia para identificar as mutações do capitalismo e seus mecanismos de exploração, como a sujeição social e a servidão maquínica. Desse modo, ao se reconhecer os mecanismos de dominação e exploração, torna-se viável a proposição de estratégias de subversão e práticas micropolíticas enquanto linhas de fuga que convergem com o conceito de Multidão, relida como insurgência contrafarmacopornográfica de desestabilização capitalística. (shrink)

In the introduction to the volume, the editors explain the overarching aim of the volume and contextualize the main themes of its chapters. Even if the notions of biopolitics and biopower have played a crucial role in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences over the last decades, they have been used in various and at times diverging senses, which has also produced different narratives about the history of biopolitics. The main aim of the volume is to clarify whether and (...) to what extent the concept of biopolitics is applicable to antiquity. To answer such questions, the chapters collected in the volume address three main topics, namely the possible presence of biopolitical discourse in ancient thought, the extent to which the application of a biopolitical approach to ancient thought requires qualifications, and some influential contemporary interpretations of the relation between biopolitics and antiquity. (shrink)

The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1–11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions12–14, produce an abnor- mally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of (...) judgements on moral dilemmas that pit compelling considerations of aggregate welfare against highly emotionally aversive behaviours (for example, having to sacrifice one person’s life to save a number of other lives)7,8. In contrast, the VMPC patients’ judgements were normal in other classes of moral dilemmas. These findings indicate that, for a selective set of moral dilemmas, the VMPC is critical for normal judgements of right and wrong. The findings support a necessary role for emotion in the generation of those judgements. (shrink)

A commonly held view is that a central aim of metaphysics is to give a fundamental account of reality which refers only to the fundamental entities. But a puzzle arises. It is at least a working hypothesis for those pursuing the aim that, first, there must be fundamental entities. But, second, it also seems possible that the world has no foundation, with each entity depending on others. These two claims are inconsistent with the widely held third claim that the fundamental (...) just is the foundational. It is tempting to resolve the puzzle by rejecting the first or second claim, perhaps because it is obscure how the third claim might plausibly be challenged. But I develop a new analysis of fundamentality which challenges the third claim by allowing for an entity to be fundamental without being foundational. The analysis, roughly, is that an entity is fundamental just in case not all facts about it are grounded in facts about other entities. The possibility of fundamentality without foundations not only provides for a novel resolution to the puzzle, but has applications to some live debates: for example, it undermines Jonathan Schaffer's modal argument for priority monism. (shrink)

According to a historically popular view, emotions are normative experiences that ground moral knowledge much as perceptual experiences ground empirical knowledge. Given the analogy it draws between emotion and perception, sentimental perceptualism constitutes a promising, naturalist-friendly alternative to classical rationalist accounts of moral knowledge. In this paper, we consider an important but underappreciated objection to the view, namely that in contrast with perception, emotions depend for their occurrence on prior representational states, with the result that emotions cannot give perceptual-like access (...) to normative properties. We argue that underlying this objection are several specific problems, rooted in the different types of mental states to which emotions may respond, that the sentimental perceptualist must tackle for her view to be successful. We argue, moreover, that the problems can be answered by filling out the theory with several independently motivated yet highly controversial commitments, which we carefully catalogue. The plausibility of sentimental perceptualism, as a result, hinges on further claims sentimental perceptualists should not ignore. (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)

Should we regret the fact that we are often more emotionally resilient in response to the deaths of our loved ones than we might expect -- that the suffering associated with grief often dissipates more quickly and more fully than we anticipate? Dan Moller ("Love and Death") argues that we should, because this resilience epistemically severs us from our loved ones and thereby "deprives us of insight into our own condition." I argue that Moller's conclusion is correct despite resting on (...) a mistaken picture of the nature and significance of grief. Unlike Moller, I contend that grief is a composite emotional process, rather than a single mental state; that grief is a species of emotional attention rather than perception; and that grief is a form of activity directed at placing our relationships with the deceased on new terms. It is precisely because grief has these three features that it facilitates the scrutiny of our practical identities and thus fosters self-knowledge and self-understanding. (shrink)

There may be a limit on our capacity to suppress anthropocentric tendencies toward non-human others. Normally, we do not reach this limit in our dealings with animals, the environment, etc. Thus, continued striving to overcome anthropocentrism when confronted with these non-human others may be justified. Anticipation of super artificial intelligence may force us to face this limit, denying us the ability to free ourselves completely of anthropocentrism. This could be for our own good.

According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with normative appearances or judgments. But guise of the normative theories differ sharply over the content of the normative representation, with the two main versions being the guise of reasons and the guise of the good. Chapter 6 defends the comparative thesis that the guise of reasons thesis is more promising than the guise of the good. The central idea is that observations from the theory of (...) content determination can be used in order to constrain possible theories of the representational contents associated with desire. The authors argue that the initially most promising versions of the guise of the good fail to meet these constraints, and then explain the steep challenge confronting any who wish to craft a new guise of the good theory which meets the constraints while also preserving the initial motivations for adopting any guise of the normative theory at all. But a simple version of the guise of reasons not only avoids the troubles besetting the guise of the good but proceeds immediately from a deep diagnosis of the source of its difficulties. (shrink)

This paper, while neutral on questions about the minimality of truth, argues for the non-minimality of truth-aptness.

Van Fraassen’s (1989) infamous best of a bad lot objection is widely taken to be the most serious problem that afflicts theories of inference to the best explanation (IBE), for it alleges to show that we should not accept the conclusion of any case of such reasoning as it actually proceeds. Moreover, this is supposed to be the case irrespective of the details of the particular criteria used to select best explanations. The best of a bad lot objection is predicated (...) on, and really only requires, the idea that in any real case of IBE where one hypothesis is favored as best over those with which it competes, it is always the case that it is more likely that the true explanation is to be found in the set of unformulated and unconsidered logical alternatives to the set of actually considered hypotheses. On this basis, Van Fraassen believes that accepting the conclusion of IBEs so understood is irrational and this is simply because such inferences are supposedly not probative. In this paper the best of a bad lot objection will be addressed and it will be shown that Van Fraassen’s notorious criticism of IBE depends on a problematic conflation of two notions of rationality and thus that his criticism of IBE involves a damning equivocation. In essence, he conflates ideal standards of rationality with epistemic standards of rationality and, in so doing, makes it appear to be the case that we should not accept the conclusions of IBEs. But, when we disambiguate the concepts of rationality at work in the argument Van Fraassen’s conclusion simply does not follow. (shrink)

Social media use is soaring globally. Existing research of its ethical implications predominantly focuses on the relationships amongst human users online, and their effects. The nature of the software-to-human relationship and its impact on digital well-being, however, has not been sufficiently addressed yet. This paper aims to close the gap. I argue that some intelligent software agents, such as newsfeed curator algorithms in social media, manipulate human users because they do not intend their means of influence to reveal the user’s (...) reasons. I support this claim by defending a novel account of manipulation and by showing that some intelligent software agents are manipulative in this sense. Apart from revealing a priori reason for thinking that some intelligent software agents are manipulative, the paper offers a framework for further empirical investigation of manipulation online. (shrink)

Grief is our emotional response to the deaths of intimates, and so like many other emotional conditions, it can be appraised in terms of its rationality. A philosophical account of grief's rationality should satisfy a contingency constraint, wherein grief is neither intrinsically rational nor intrinsically irrational. Here I provide an account of grief and its rationality that satisfies this constraint, while also being faithful to the phenomenology of grief experience. I begin by arguing against the best known account of grief's (...) rationality, Gustafson's strategic or forward-looking account, according to which the practical rationality of grief depends on the internal coherence of the component attitudes that explain the behaviors caused by grief, and more exactly, on how these attitudes enable the individual to realize states of affairs that she desires. While I do not deny that episodes of grief can be appraised in terms of their strategic rationality, I deny that strategic rationality is the essential or fundamental basis on which grief's rationality should be appraised. In contrast, the heart of grief's rationality is backward-looking. That is, what primarily makes an episode of grief rational qua grief is the fittingness of the attitudes individuals take toward the experience of a lost relationship, attitudes which in turn generate the desires and behaviors that constitute bereavement. Grief thus derives its essential rationality from the objects it responds to, not from the attitudes causally downstream from that response, and is necessarily irrational when the behaviors that constitute an individual's grieving are inappropriate to the object of that grief. So while the strategic rationality of an episode of grief contributes to whether it is on the whole rational, no episode of grief can be rational unless the actions that constitute grieving accurately gauge the change in a person's normative situation wrought by the loss of her relationship with the deceased. (shrink)

I develop a psychological account for how it is that we use imagination to metaphysically modalize, i.e., to reach conclusions about metaphysical modality. Specifically, I argue that Nichols and Stich’s (2003) cognitive theory of imagination can be extended to metaphysical modalizing. I then use the extension to explicate philosophical disagreements about whether a scenario is metaphysically possible. Thereafter, I address Nichols’ (2006) objection that psychologizing imagination makes it clear that imagination is unreliable when used to metaphysically modalize. The end result (...) is a naturalistic account for how imagination enables us to metaphysically modalize. (shrink)

Different people reason differently, which means that sometimes they reach different conclusions from the same evidence. We maintain that this is not only natural, but rational. In this essay we explore the epistemology of that state of affairs. First we will canvass arguments for and against the claim that rational methods of reasoning must always reach the same conclusions from the same evidence. Then we will consider whether the acknowledgment that people have divergent rational reasoning methods should undermine one’s confidence (...) in one’s own reasoning. Finally we will explore how agents who employ distinct yet equally rational methods of reasoning should respond to interactions with the products of each others’ reasoning. We find that the epistemology of multiple reasoning methods has been misunderstood by a number of authors writing on epistemic permissiveness and peer disagreement. (shrink)

Psychopaths exhibit diminished ability to grieve. Here I address whether this inability can be explained by the trademark feature of psychopaths, namely, their diminished capacity for interpersonal empathy. I argue that this hypothesis turns out to be correct, but requires that we conceptualize empathy not merely as an ability to relate (emotionally and ethically) to other individuals but also as an ability to relate to past and present iterations of ourselves. This reconceptualization accords well with evidence regarding psychopaths’ intense focus (...) on the temporal present and difficulties in engaging in mental time travel, as well as with the essentially egocentric and identity-based nature of grief. -/- . (shrink)

According to rational will views of paternalism, the wrongmaking feature of paternalism is that paternalists disregard or fail to respect the rational will of the paternalized, in effect substituting their own presumably superior judgments about what ends the paternalized ought to pursue or how they ought to pursue them. Here I defend a version of the rational will view appealing to three rational powers that constitute rational agency, which I call recognition, discrimination, and satisfaction. By appealing to these powers, my (...) version of the rational will view can rank the wrongfulness of paternalistic acts in terms of the extent to which such acts (a) amount to supplanting the paternalized individual’s identity as a rational agent with that of the paternalist, and (b) the degree of mistrust the paternalistic act shows in the paternalized individual’s rational agency. My rational powers account thus provides a more complete account of why paternalism is a powerful, but not decisive or absolute, objection to an act or policy. My rational powers account also provides powerful explanations of why rational suasion deflects charges of paternalism; why consenting to intercessions in one’s rational agency negates paternalism; why we ordinarily believe that strong paternalism is more objectionable than weak paternalism; and why we ordinarily believe that hard paternalism is more objectionable than soft paternalism. (shrink)

Natural scientific views on the human being have the tendency to reduce selfhood toa static object. This tendency arguably derives from the need to objectify the present in which the human being is found. Phenomenology avoids such a reduction by engaging with the present instead of distancing from it for the sake of analysis. This beneficence that derives froma phenomenological view of reality is argued to be a warranted view a counseling therapist should adopt. Not only can a therapist who (...) involves phenomenological perspectives in their practice succeed in viewing their clients non-instrumentally, but such a therapist can also “Be” genuine. The paper conceives of the therapist capable of performing these phenomenological tasks in therapy as adopting a mode of Being which we highlight as akin to the ancient concept: hypostasis. This conception in turn is shown to have epistemological ramifications for the meaning of “understanding”, which is shown quite suitably in the example of therapeutic presence. Heidegger’s Dasein serves as conceptual example of self in the paper to elucidate the connection between hypostasis and understanding throughout. (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)

Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily p iff, and because, there is some x whose essence ensures that p. Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there are basic necessities that cannot be explained. Thus, Hale style essentialism falls short of what Wilsch (...) calls the explanation-challenge (EC) for the metaphysics of necessity. Without endorsing the EC, I argue that Hale’s argument for basic, unexplained necessities fails due to a misunderstanding of the structure of essentialist explanations. Getting clear about the structure of essentialist explanations of necessity leads to a re-evaluation of crucial circularity- and regress-arguments that have been discussed in the debate about essentialism. (shrink)

This paper aims to uncover some of the important contributions the phenomenological method can offer to philosophical issues in literary studies. It leads us to the idea that the archetypes found in fiction are intuited phenomenologically. This idea is then linked to a social constructive attainment of meaning for reality. From the intersubjectivity provided by phenomenology, empathy with characters in fiction is then displayed as more than an intellectual activity, as it becomes known to have practical implications. It is framed (...) as involving the same processes as the empathy we have with people in the real world. This equivalency allows for the plausibility of the notion that fiction-making is a necessary process for our interpretations of reality. It designates our involvement in fiction as beneficial to our experience of the real world and supports the notion it can train us to empathize. Such training is displayed to be posssible from phenomenology’s role in the process of empathy. Phenomenology's method de-centers the Cartesian ego to prevent any impasse between internal consciousness and the external world. Since they are bridged together by intentionality, we learn that phenomenology is a method that can contribute to how we conceive of empathy. (shrink)

De burgemeester van Etterbeek liet tijdens de afgelopen periode van vrieskou daklozen van straat halen. Soms tegen hun wil in. Omdat het soms nodig is om mensen tegen zichzelf te beschermen.

Abstract. Richard Feldman’s Uniqueness Thesis holds that “a body of evidence justifies at most one proposition out of a competing set of proposi- tions”. The opposing position, permissivism, allows distinct rational agents to adopt differing attitudes towards a proposition given the same body of evidence. We assess various motivations that have been offered for Uniqueness, including: concerns about achieving consensus, a strong form of evidentialism, worries about epistemically arbitrary influences on belief, a focus on truth-conduciveness, and consequences for peer disagreement. (...) We argue that each of these motivations either misunderstands the commitments of permissivism or is question-begging. Better understanding permissivism makes it a much more plausible position. (shrink)

Solidarity is a widespread but under-explored phenomenon. In this paper, I give a philosophical account of solidarity, answering three salient questions: What motivates acts of solidarity? What unifies different acts into tokens of a single type of act, one of solidarity? And what values do acts of solidarity exhibit? The answer to all three, I argue, involves a certain way of relating to others: identifying with them on the basis of shared features, and identifying with the larger group that one (...) and the others both belong to. (shrink)

Meursault, the protagonist of Camus' The Stranger, is unable to grieve, a fact that ultimately leads to his condemnation and execution. Given the emotional distresses involved in grief, should we envy Camus or pity him? I defend the latter conclusion. As St. Augustine seemed to dimly recognize, the pains of grief are integral to the process of bereavement, a process that both motivates and provides a distinctive opportunity to attain the good of self-knowledge.

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)

This paper shows how the availability heuristic can be used to justify inference to the best explanation in such a way that van Fraassen's infamous "best of a bad lot" objection can be adroitly avoided. With this end in mind, a dynamic and contextual version of the erotetic model of explanation sufficient to ground this response is presented and defended.

I propose a framework, derived from moral theory, for assessing the moral status of intelligent machines. Using this framework, I claim that some current and foreseeable intelligent machines have approximately as much moral status as plants, trees, and other environmental entities. This claim raises the question: what obligations could a moral agent (e.g., a normal adult human) have toward an intelligent machine? I propose that the threshold for any moral obligation should be the "functional morality" of Wallach and Allen [20], (...) while the upper limit of our obligations should not exceed the upper limit of our obligations toward plants, trees, and other environmental entities. (shrink)

In the exploratory study reported here, we tested the efficacy of an intervention designed to train teenagers with Möbius syndrome (MS) to increase the use of alternative communication strategies (e.g., gestures) to compensate for their lack of facial expressivity. Specifically, we expected the intervention to increase the level of rapport experienced in social interactions by our participants. In addition, we aimed to identify the mechanisms responsible for any such increase in rapport. In the study, five teenagers with MS interacted with (...) three naïve participants without MS before the intervention, and with three different naïve participants without MS after the intervention. Rapport was assessed by self-report and by behavioral coders who rated videos of the interactions. Individual non-verbal behavior was assessed via behavioral coders, whereas verbal behavior was automatically extracted from the sound files. Alignment was assessed using cross recurrence quantification analysis and mixed-effects models. The results showed that observer-coded rapport was greater after the intervention, whereas self-reported rapport did not change significantly. Observer-coded gesture and expressivity increased in participants with and without MS, whereas overall linguistic alignment decreased. Fidgeting and repetitiveness of verbal behavior also decreased in both groups. In sum, the intervention may impact non-verbal and verbal behavior in participants with and without MS, increasing rapport as well as overall gesturing, while decreasing alignment. (shrink)

Many economists and social theorists hypothesize that most societies could soon face a ‘post-work’ future, one in which employment and productive labor have a dramatically reduced place in human affairs. Given the centrality of employment to individual identity and its pivotal role as the primary provider of economic and other goods, transitioning to a ‘post-work’ future could prove traumatic and disorienting to many. Policymakers are thus likely to face the difficult choice of the extent to which they ought to satisfy (...) individual citizens’ desires to work in a socioeconomic environment in which work is in permanent decline. Here I argue that policymakers confronting a post-work economy should discount, or at least consider problematic, the desire to work because it is very likely that this desire is an adaptive preference. An adaptive preference is a preference for some state of affairs within a limited set of options formed under unjust conditions. The widespread desire for work has been formed under unjust labor conditions to which individuals are compelled to submit in order to meet material and ethical needs. Furthermore, the prevalence of the ‘work dogma’ in contemporary societies precludes nearly all individuals from seeing alternatives to work as live options. (shrink)

I argue that prioritarianism cannot be assessed in abstraction from an account of the measure of utility. Rather, the soundness of this view crucially depends on what counts as a greater, lesser, or equal increase in a person’s utility. In particular, prioritarianism cannot accommodate a normatively compelling measure of utility that is captured by the axioms of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s expected utility theory. Nor can it accommodate a plausible and elegant generalization of this theory that has been (...) offered in response to challenges to von Neumann and Morgenstern. This is, I think, a theoretically interesting and unexpected source of difficulty for prioritarianism, which I explore in this article. (shrink)

There are many things that can be done to educate young people about controversial topics - including historical monuments - in schools. At the same time, however, we argue that there is little warrant for optimism concerning the educational potential of classroom instruction given the interpretative frame of the state-approved history curriculum; the onerous institutional constraints under which school teachers must labour; the unusual constellation of talents history teachers must possess; the frequent absence of marginalized voices in these conversations; and (...) finally, the not unlikely indifference - if not outright hostility - expressed by far too many members of the dominant group. For these reasons, we think it best to expand the scope of educational possibilities one is willing to consider. (shrink)

Defends Kantian paternalism: Interference with an individual’s liberty for her own sake is justified absent her actual consent only to the extent that such interference stands a reasonable chance of preventing her from exercising her liberty irrationally in light of the rationally chosen ends that constitute her conception of the good. More specifically, interference with an individual’s liberty is permissible only if, by interfering, we stand a reasonable chance of preventing that agent from performing actions she chose due to distorted (...) reasoning and which would result in that agent’s rationally chosen ends not being as fully realized as they would have been had she so acted. -/- Applied to suicide intervention Kantian paternalism implies that such intervention is justified to the extent that it prevents a person from ending her life when, due to distorted reasoning, she engages in suicidal behavior that is at odds with her rationally chosen ends. (shrink)

Face-coverings were widely mandated during the Covid-19 pandemic, on the assumption that they limit the spread of respiratory viruses and are therefore likely to save lives. I examine the following ethical dilemma: if the use of face-masks in social settings can save lives then are we obliged to wear them at all times in those settings? I argue that by en-masking the face in a way that is phenomenally inconsistent with or degraded from what we are innately programmed to detect (...) as human likeness, we are degrading the social quality of our relations. Drawing on my previously published proof that Self is socially reflexive (mutually mirrored) rather than monadic in its constitution, I conclude that any widespread en-masking is also deleterious to humanity and therefore unethical. (shrink)

The social welfare functional approach to social choice theory fails to distinguish a genuine change in individual well-beings from a merely representational change due to the use of different measurement scales. A generalization of the concept of a social welfare functional is introduced that explicitly takes account of the scales that are used to measure well-beings so as to distinguish between these two kinds of changes. This generalization of the standard theoretical framework results in a more satisfactory formulation of welfarism, (...) the doctrine that social alternatives are evaluated and socially ranked solely in terms of the well-beings of the relevant individuals. This scale-dependent form of welfarism is axiomatized using this framework. The implications of this approach for characterizing classes of social welfare orderings are also considered. (shrink)

In the first section, I characterize skeptical theism more fully. This is necessary in order to address some important misconceptions and mischaracterizations that appear in the essays by Maitzen, Wilks, and O’Connor. In the second section, I describe the most important objections they raise and group them into four “families” so as to facilitate an orderly series of responses. In the four sections that follow, I respond to the objections.

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)

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)

Disability Justice in Public Health Emergencies is the first book to highlight contributions from critical disability scholarship to the fields of public health ethics and disaster ethics. It takes up such contributions with the aim of charting a path forward for clinicians, bioethicists, public health experts, and anyone involved in emergency planning to better care for disabled people—and thereby for all people—in the future. Across 11 chapters, the contributors detail how existing public health emergency responses have failed and still fail (...) to address the multi-faceted needs of disabled people. They analyze complications in the context of epidemic and pandemic disease and emphasize that vulnerabilities imposed upon disabled people track and foster patterns of racial and class domination. -/- The central claim of the volume is that the ethical and political insights of disability theory and activism provide key resources for equitable disaster planning for all. The volume builds upon the existing efforts of disability communities to articulate emergency planning priorities and response measures that take into account the large body of qualitative and quantitative research on disabled people’s health, needs, and experiences. It is only by listening to disabled people’s voices that we will all fare better in future public health emergencies. (shrink)

There is a loud and persistent drum beat of support for schools, for citizenship, for diversity and inclusion, and increasingly for labor market readiness with very little critical attention to the assumptions underlying these agendas, let alone to their many internal contradictions. Accordingly, in this book I examine the philosophical, motivational, and practical challenges of education theory, policy, and practice in the twenty-first century. As I proceed, I do not neglect the historical, comparative international context so essential to better understanding (...) where we are, as well as what is attainable in terms of educational justice. I argue that we must constructively critique some of our most cherished beliefs about education if we are to save the hope of real justice from the rhetoric of imagined justice. (shrink)

Most epistemologists maintain that we are rationally required to believe what our evidence supports. Generally speaking, any factor that makes it more probable that a given state of affairs obtains (or does not obtain) is evidence (for that state of affairs). In line with this view, many metaethicists believe that we are rationally required to believe what’s morally right and wrong based on what our moral evidence (e.g. our moral intuitions, along with descriptive information about the world) supports. However, sometimes (...) we get information about our evidence, such as a theory that explains that all moral intuitions are ultimately caused by evolutionary forces. Such genealogical claims like this take form as a puzzle about how to rationally respond to higher-order evidence in moral epistemology. How should we change our moral views in response to genealogical claims about the evolutionary origin of our moral beliefs or about widespread moral disagreement? This introductory chapter first explains the issue about how to change our moral views based on an easily accessible example. Then it shows how recent debates about the puzzle of higher-order evidence bears on recent debates in moral epistemology, notably the debates about evolutionary debunking arguments in metaethics, the epistemic significance of moral peer disagreement, moral testimony, and collective moral knowledge before it introduces the chapters of this book. (shrink)