Results for 'Moral vagueness'

957 found
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  1. Moral Vagueness Is Ontic Vagueness.Miriam Schoenfield - 2016 - Ethics 126 (2):257-282.
    The aim of this essay is to argue that, if a robust form of moral realism is true, then moral vagueness is ontic vagueness. The argument is by elimination: I show that neither semantic nor epistemic approaches to moral vagueness are satisfactory.
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  2. Moral Vagueness as Semantic Vagueness.Rohan Sud - 2019 - Ethics 129 (4):684-705.
    Does moral vagueness require ontic vagueness? A central challenge for nonontic treatments of moral vagueness arises from the referential stability of moral terms across small changes in how they are applied: if moral vagueness is not ontic vagueness, it’s hard to explain this referential stability. Pointing to this challenge, Miriam Schoenfield has argued that moral vagueness is ontic vagueness, at least for a moral realist. I disagree. I (...)
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  3. Moral realism and semantic accounts of moral vagueness.Ali Abasnezhad - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (3):381-393.
    Miriam Schoenfield argues that moral realism and moral vagueness imply ontic vagueness. In particular, she argues that neither shifty nor rigid semantic accounts of vagueness can provide a satisfactory explanation of moral vagueness for moral realists. This paper constitutes a response. I argue that Schoenfield's argument against the shifty semantic account presupposes that moral indeterminacies can, in fact, be resolved determinately by crunching through linguistic data. I provide different reasons for rejecting (...)
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  4. Towards a Realist Shifty Semantic Account of Moral Vagueness.Z. Huey Wen - forthcoming - Acta Analytica.
    A widely shared intuition says moral statements like “Aborting at 150 days is permissible” seem vague. But what is the nature of such vagueness? This article proposes a novel, shifty semantic account of moral vagueness which argues: Moral vagueness is essentially a semantic phenomenon existing in our imperfect (moral) language; the referents of vague moral terms may shift under the right circumstance; our usage of vague moral terms may contribute to such (...)
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  5. Do we have moral obligations towards future people? Addressing the moral vagueness of future environmental scenarios.Gabriela Arriagada Bruneau - 2018 - Veritas: Revista de Filosofía y Teología 40:49-65.
    In this paper, I will be primarily concerned with moral issues regarding future people and the environment. When it comes to the future, we have deontological and epistemic limitations. The closer to the present, the higher the certainty and the knowledge we have about facts. Thus, when we intend to find moral clarity regarding a future scenario, we deal with an inverse relation between certainty and time. The main problem is that most ways of dealing with moral (...)
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  6.  73
    Vagueness and law: philosophical and legal perspectives.Geert Keil & Ralf Poscher - 2016 - In Geert Keil & Ralf Poscher (eds.), Vagueness and Law: Philosophical and Legal Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Vague expressions are omnipresent in natural language. As such, their use in legal texts is virtually inevitable. If a law contains vague terms, the question whether it applies to a particular case often lacks a clear answer. One of the fundamental pillars of the rule of law is legal certainty. The determinacy of the law enables people to use it as a guide and places judges in the position to decide impartially. Vagueness poses a threat to these ideals. In (...)
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  7. Vague Value.Tom Dougherty - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2):352-372.
    You are morally permitted to save your friend at the expense of a few strangers, but not at the expense of very many. However, there seems no number of strangers that marks a precise upper bound here. Consequently, there are borderline cases of groups at the expense of which you are permitted to save your friend. This essay discusses the question of what explains ethical vagueness like this, arguing that there are interesting metaethical consequences of various explanations.
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  8. Vague parts and vague identity.Elizabeth Barnes & J. R. G. Williams - 2009 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 90 (2):176-187.
    We discuss arguments against the thesis that the world itself can be vague. The first section of the paper distinguishes dialectically effective from ineffective arguments against metaphysical vagueness. The second section constructs an argument against metaphysical vagueness that promises to be of the dialectically effective sort: an argument against objects with vague parts. Firstly, cases of vague parthood commit one to cases of vague identity. But we argue that Evans' famous argument against will not on its own enable (...)
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  9. The Problem of Ethical Vagueness for Expressivism.Nicholas Baima - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4):593-605.
    Ethical vagueness has garnered little attention. This is rather surprising since many philosophers have remarked that the science of ethics lacks the precision that other fields of inquiry have. Of the few philosophers who have discussed ethical vagueness the majority have focused on the implications of vagueness for moral realism. Because the relevance of ethical vagueness for other metaethical positions has been underexplored, my aim in this paper is to investigate the ramifications of ethical (...) for expressivism. Ultimately, I shall argue that expressivism does not have the resources to adequately account for ethical vagueness, while cognitivism does. This demonstrates an advantage that cognitivism holds over expressivism. (shrink)
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  10. Sex, Vagueness, and the Olympics.Helen L. Daly - 2015 - Hypatia 30 (4):708-724.
    Sex determines much about one's life, but what determines one's sex? The answer is complicated and incomplete: on close examination, ordinary notions of female and male are vague. In 2012, the International Olympic Committee further specified what they mean by woman in response to questions about who, exactly, is eligible to compete in women's Olympic events. I argue, first, that their stipulation is evidence that the use of vague terms is better described by semantic approaches to vagueness than by (...)
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  11. Personhood, Vagueness and Abortion.Justin Mcbrayer - 2007 - Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 9 (1).
    In a recent paper, Lee Kerckhove and Sara Waller (hereafter K & W) argue that the concept of personhood is irrelevant for the abortion debate.1 Surprisingly, this irrelevance is due merely to the fact that the predicate ‘being a person’ — hereafter ‘personhood’ — is inherently vague. This vagueness, they argue, reduces ‘personhood’ to incoherency and disqualifies the notion from being a useful moral concept. In other words, if ‘personhood’ isn’t a precise notion with well-defined boundaries, then it (...)
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  12. How to Dissolve the Moral Problem.Jussi Suikkanen - forthcoming - Belgrade Philosophical Annual.
    According to The Moral Problem, there is so much metaethical disagreement because it is difficult to explain both the objectivity and the practicality of moral judgments in the framework provided by the Humean picture of human psychology. Smith himself hoped to solve this problem by analysing the content of our moral judgments in terms of what our fully rational versions would want us to do. This paper first explains why this solution to the moral problem remains (...)
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  13. Integrity, Moral Courage and Innere Führung.Peter Olsthoorn - 2016 - Ethics and Armed Forces 3 (1):32-36.
    The aim of this paper is to examine the usefulness of the somewhat related notions of integrity, moral courage, and Innere Führung (the leadership concept used by the German military) as a means of making military personnel behave ethically. Of these three notions, integrity is mentioned most often within military organizations, and the largest part of what follows is therefore devoted to a description of what integrity is, and what the drawbacks of this notion are for the military. This (...)
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  14. On Vague Eschatology.Michael J. Almeida - 2008 - Faith and Philosophy 25 (4):359-375.
    Ted Sider’s Proportionality of Justice condition requires that any two moral agents instantiating nearly the same moral state be treated in nearly the same way. I provide a countermodel in supervaluation semantics to the proportionality of justice condition. It is possible that moral agents S and S' are in nearly the same moral state, S' is beyond all redemption and S is not. It is consistent with perfect justice then that moral agents that are not (...)
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  15. Delineating The Moral Domain in Moral Psychology.Renatas Berniūnas - 2014 - Problemos 86:90-101.
    The aim of this paper is to review current debate about the moral domain in the moral psychological literature. There is some vagueness in respect to the usage of the very concept of ‘morality’. This conceptual problem recently has been re-addressed by several authors. So far, there is little agreement, nobody seems to agree about how to delineate the moral domain from other ‘non-moral’ normative domains. Currently, there are several positions that disagree about the scope (...)
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  16. The Incoherence of Moral Relativism.Carlo Alvaro - 2020 - Cultura 17 (1):19-38.
    Abstract: This paper is a response to Park Seungbae’s article, “Defence of Cultural Relativism”. Some of the typical criticisms of moral relativism are the following: moral relativism is erroneously committed to the principle of tolerance, which is a universal principle; there are a number of objective moral rules; a moral relativist must admit that Hitler was right, which is absurd; a moral relativist must deny, in the face of evidence, that moral progress is possible; (...)
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  17. Ubuntu as a Moral Theory and Human Rights in South Africa.Thaddeus Metz - 2011 - African Human Rights Law Journal 11 (2):532-559.
    There are three major reasons that ideas associated with ubuntu are often deemed to be an inappropriate basis for a public morality. One is that they are too vague, a second is that they fail to acknowledge the value of individual freedom, and a third is that they a fit traditional, small-scale culture more than a modern, industrial society. In this article, I provide a philosophical interpretation of ubuntu that is not vulnerable to these three objections. Specifically, I construct a (...)
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  18. Space travel does not constitute a condition of moral exceptionality. That which obtains in space obtains also on Earth!Maurizio Balistreri & Steven Umbrello - 2022 - Medicina E Morale 71 (3):311-321.
    There is a growing body of scholarship that is addressing the ethics, in particular, the bioethics of space travel and colonisation. Naturally, a variety of perspectives concerning the ethical issues and moral permissibility of different technological strategies for confronting the rigours of space travel and colonisation have emerged in the debate. Approaches ranging from genetically enhancing human astronauts to modifying the environments of planets to make them hospitable have been proposed as methods. This paper takes a look at a (...)
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  19. Is It Impossible to Be Moral?Michael J. Almeida - 2005 - Dialogue 44 (1):3-13.
    ABSTRACT: Recent work in moral theory includes an intriguing new argument that the vagueness of moral properties, together with two well-known and well-received metaethical principles, entails the incredible conclusion that it is impossible to be moral. I show that the argument equivocates between “it is true that A and B are morally indistinguishable” and “it is not false that A and B are morally indistinguishable.” As expected the argument is interesting but unsound. It is therefore not (...)
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  20. Evaluational adjectives.Alex Silk - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1):1-35.
    This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions (...)
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  21. Saying More (or Less) than One Thing.Andrea Iacona - 2010 - In Richard Dietz & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Cuts and clouds: vagueness, its nature, and its logic. New York: Oxford University Press.
    In a paper called 'Definiteness and Knowability', Tim Williamson addresses the question whether one must accept that vagueness is an epistemic phenomenon if one adopts classical logic and a disquotational principle for truth. Some have suggested that one must not, hence that classical logic and the disquotational principle may be preserved without endorsing epistemicism. Williamson’s paper, however, finds ‘no plausible way of substantiating that possibility’. Its moral is that ‘either classical logic fails, or the disquotational principle does, or (...)
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  22. Normative Commitments in Metanormative Theory.Pekka Väyrynen - 2018 - In Jussi Suikkanen & Antti Kauppinen (eds.), Methodology and Moral Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 193-213.
    First-order normative theories concerning what’s right and wrong, good and bad, etc. and metanormative theories concerning the nature of first-order normative thought and talk are widely regarded as independent theoretical enterprises. This paper argues that several debates in metanormative theory involve views that have first-order normative implications, even as the implications in question may not be immediately recognizable as normative. I first make my claim more precise by outlining a general recipe for generating this result. I then apply this recipe (...)
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  23. “Putting the linguistic method in its place”: Mackie’s distinction between conceptual and factual analysis.Tammo Lossau - 2019 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 22 (1):92-105.
    Early in his career and in critical engagement with ordinary language philosophy, John Mackie developed the roots of a methodology that would be fundamental to his thinking: Mackie argues that we need to clearly separate the conceptual analysis which determines the meaning of an ordinary term and the factual analysis which is concerned with the question what, if anything, our language corresponds to in the world. I discuss how Mackie came to develop this distinction and how central ideas of his (...)
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  24. Pacifism without Right and Wrong.Daniel Diederich Farmer - 2011 - Public Affairs Quarterly 25 (1):37-52.
    Moral philosophers generally regard pacifism with disdain. Forty years ago, Jan Narveson called it a "bizarre and vaguely ludicrous" doctrine, and that assessment is, in some form or other, still common today. Few contemporary ethicists self-identify as pacifists, and in peace and war studies, just war theory is now the standard. That standard perpetuates the stereotype of pacifism as naïve and wrongheaded. The only way to make nonviolent commitments respectable under the prevailing view is by subsuming them under just (...)
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  25. Balancing commitments: Own-happiness and beneficence.Donald Wilson - 2017 - Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy 2017.
    There is a familiar problem in moral theories that recognize positive obligations to help others related to the practical room these obligations leave for ordinary life, and the risk that open-ended obligations to help others will consume our lives and resources. Responding to this problem, Kantians have tended to emphasize the idea of limits on positive obligations but are typically unsatisfactorily vague about the nature and extent of these limits. I argue here that aspects of Kant’s discussion of duties (...)
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  26. Value Incomparability and Indeterminacy.Cristian Constantinescu - 2012 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (1):57-70.
    Two competing accounts of value incomparability have been put forward in the recent literature. According to the standard account, developed most famously by Joseph Raz, ‘incomparability’ means determinate failure of the three classic value relations ( better than , worse than , and equally good ): two value-bearers are incomparable with respect to a value V if and only if (i) it is false that x is better than y with respect to V , (ii) it is false that x (...)
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  27. Frege plagiarized the Stoics.Susanne Bobzien - 2021 - In Fiona Leigh (ed.), Themes in Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic Philosophy, Keeling Lectures 2011-2018, OPEN ACCESS. University of Chicago Press. pp. 149-206.
    In this extended essay, I argue that Frege plagiarized the Stoics --and I mean exactly that-- on a large scale in his work on the philosophy of logic and language as written mainly between 1890 and his death in 1925 (much of which published posthumously) and possibly earlier. I use ‘plagiarize' (or 'plagiarise’) merely as a descriptive term. The essay is not concerned with finger pointing or casting moral judgement. The point is rather to demonstrate carefully by means of (...)
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  28. Fairness as “Appropriate Impartiality” and the Problem of the Self-Serving Bias.Charlotte Newey - 2016 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (3):695-709.
    Garrett Cullity contends that fairness is appropriate impartiality (See Cullity (2004) Chapters 8 and 10 and Cullity (2008)). Cullity deploys his account of fairness as a means of limiting the extreme moral demand to make sacrifices in order to aid others that was posed by Peter Singer in his seminal article ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’. My paper is founded upon the combination of (1) the observation that the idea that fairness consists in appropriate impartiality is very vague and (2) (...)
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  29. Teaching Ethics Without Confusing Questions - Illustrated By the Example of Schopenhauer's Ethics.Matthias Holweger - 2023 - Journal of Didactics of Philosophy 7:1-17.
    Like many other philosophical disciplines, ethics is sometimes highly abstract. And many key notions of the discipline are vague, ambiguous or both. Abstractness, vagueness, and ambiguity invite confusion. My objective in this paper is to draw attention to a serious problem that, despite being widespread, has so far remained largely unrecognized: the confusion of different questions in teaching ethics. This confusion occurs, for example, when a philosopher’s viewpoint is presented as an answer to one question, but in fact, the (...)
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  30. Chancy Counterfactuals, Redux.J. Robert G. Williams - 2012 - Analytic Philosophy 53 (4):352-361.
    Chancy counterfactuals are a headache. Dylan Dodd (2009) presents an interesting argument against a certain general strategy for accounting for them, instances of which are found in the appendices to Lewis (1979) and in Williams (2008). I will argue (i) that Dodd’s understates the counterintuitiveness of the conclusions he can reach; (ii) that the counterintuitiveness can be thought of as an instance of more general oddities arising when we treat vagueness and indeterminacy in a classical setting; and (iii) the (...)
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  31. Abortion, Personhood and the Potential for Consciousness.Robert Larmer - 1995 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 12 (3):241-251.
    The view that the fetus' potential for human consciousness confers upon it the right to life has been widely criticised on the basis that the notion of potentiality is so vague as to be meaningless, and on the basis that actual rights cannot be deduced from the mere potential for personhood. It has also been criticised, although less commonly, on the basis that it is not the potential to assume consciousness, but rather the potential to resume consciousness which is morally (...)
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  32. Messages in Art and Music.Małgorzata A. Szyszkowska - 2010 - Dialogue and Universalism 20 (3-4):97-109.
    In his article untitled Messages in Art Jerrold Levinson discusses the idea of a message behind a work of art. He argues that despite certain disclaimers put forward by artists it is „hard to deny that artworks (...) very often do have messages, and far from inexpressible ones”. From given examples it would seem that Levinson assumes that musical work just as other artworks sometimes generate messages and that in order for a work of music to be successful in expression (...)
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  33. Better brains, better selves? The ethics of neuroenhancements.Richard H. Dees - 2007 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 17 (4):371-395.
    : The idea of enhancing our mental functions through medical means makes many people uncomfortable. People have a vague feeling that altering our brains tinkers with the core of our personalities and the core of ourselves. It changes who we are, and doing so seems wrong, even if the exact reasons for the unease are difficult to define. Many of the standard arguments against neuroenhancements—that they are unsafe, that they violate the distinction between therapy and enhancements, that they undermine equality, (...)
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  34. Is Micheal Garnett's Theory of Coercion Correct.Marie Oldfield - manuscript
    What is coercion and why do we care? Coercion is widespread and used especially when raising children, but on its darker side coercion can have devastating consequences. We are worried about coercion as it can invalidate consent. This is seen in the USA where campus rape cases have soared in recent years and brought consent and coercion back to the forefront of debate. Coercion is a hotly debated legal, political and ethical concept. However, in all this debate we have seen (...)
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  35.  65
    The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings.Michael J. Almeida - 2008 - New York: Routledge.
    _The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings_ addresses the problems an Anselmian perfect being faces in contexts involving unlimited options. Recent advances in the theory of vagueness, the metaphysics of multiverses and hyperspace, the theory of dynamic or sequential choice, the logic of moral and rational dilemmas, and metaethical theory provide the resources to formulate the new challenges and the Anselmian responses with an unusual degree of precision. Almeida shows that the challenges arising in the unusual contexts involving unlimited options (...)
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  36. Deep Indeterminacy in Physics and Fiction.George Darby, Martin Pickup & Jon Robson - 2017 - In Otávio Bueno, Steven French, George Darby & Dean Rickles (eds.), Thinking About Science, Reflecting on Art: Bringing Aesthetics and Philosophy of Science Together. New York: Routledge.
    Indeterminacy in its various forms has been the focus of a great deal of philosophical attention in recent years. Much of this discussion has focused on the status of vague predicates such as ‘tall’, ‘bald’, and ‘heap’. It is determinately the case that a seven-foot person is tall and that a five-foot person is not tall. However, it seems difficult to pick out any determinate height at which someone becomes tall. How best to account for this phenomenon is, of course, (...)
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  37. Rethinking Fetal Personhood in Conceptualizing Roe.Rosemarie Garland-Thomson & Joel Michael Reynolds - 2022 - American Journal of Bioethics 22 (8):64-68.
    In this open peer commentary, we concur with the three target articles’ analysis and positions on abortion in the special issue on Roe v. Wade as the exercise of reproductive liberty essential for the bioethical commitment to patient autonomy and self-determination. Our proposed OPC augments that analysis by explicating more fully the concept crucial to Roe of fetal personhood. We explain that the development and use of predictive reproductive technologies over the fifty years since Roe has changed the literal image, (...)
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  38. Mad Speculation and Absolute Inhumanism: Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Weirding of Philosophy.Ben Woodard - 2011 - Continent 1 (1):3-13.
    continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...)
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  39. Suicide, Euthanasia and Human Dignity.Friderik Klampfer - 2001 - Acta Analytica 16:7-34.
    Kant has famously argued that human beings or persons, in virtue of their capacity for rational and autonomous choice and agency, possess dignity, which is an intrinsic, final, unconditional, inviolable, incomparable and irreplaceable value. This value, wherever found, commands respect and imposes rather strict moral constraints on our deliberations, intentions and actions. This paper deals with the question of whether, as some Kantians have recently argued, certain types of (physician-assisted) suicide and active euthanasia, most notably the intentional destruction of (...)
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  40. Towards a Biological Explanation of Sin in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz”.Christopher Ketcham - 2020 - Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy 3:1-25.
    Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s 1959 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz is on one level a theological reflection on the human propensity to sin. Not coincidentally, the story is located in an Albertinian abbey in the former American southwest six hundred years after a nuclear holocaust, recounting three separate historical periods over the following twelve hundred years: a dark age, a scientific renaissance, and finally a time of technological achievement where a second nuclear holocaust is imminent. Miller asks the question of (...)
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  41. Daniel Dennett’s and Sam Harris’ Confrontation on the Problem of Free Will.Zahra Khazaei, Nancey Murphy & Tayyebe Gholami - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Theological Research 22 (2):27-48.
    This paper seeks to explain and evaluate, by an analytic method, the conflict between determinism and free will from the viewpoint of two physicalist reductionist philosophers, namely, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. Dennett is a compatibilist philosopher who tries to show compatibility between determinism and free will, while Sam Harris is a non-compatibilist philosopher who turns to determinism with the thesis that our thoughts and actions have been pre-determined by the neurobiological events associated with them, and thus, considers free will (...)
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  42. The ‘Arguments Instead of Intuitions’ Account of Thought Experiments.Friderik Klampfer - 2018 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 18 (1):191-203.
    After decades of receiving a lot of attention on the epistemological level, the so-called ‘problem of intuitions’ is now in the center of debates on the metaphilosophical level. One of the reasons for this lies in the unfruitfulness of the epistemological discussions that recently subsided without producing any significant or broadly accepted theory of intuitions. Consequently, the metaphilosophical level of discussion of the ‘problem of intuitions’ inherits the same difficulties of the epistemological level. The significance of Max Deutsch’s book The (...)
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  43. Dignity at the Limit: Jean-Luc Nancy on the Possibility of Incommensurable Worth.Bryan Lueck - 2016 - Continental Philosophy Review 49 (3):309-323.
    Dignity, according to some recent arguments, is a useless concept, giving vague expression to moral intuitions that are better captured by other, better defined concepts. In this paper, I defend the concept of dignity against such skeptical arguments. I begin with a description of the defining features of the Kantian conception of dignity. I then examine one of the strongest arguments against that conception, advanced by Arthur Schopenhauer in On the Basis of Morality. After considering some standard accounts of (...)
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  44. Kant’s Religion and the Reflective Judgment.Noam Hoffer - 2013 - In Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca & Margit Ruffing (eds.), Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht. Akten des XI. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. Boston: de Gruyter. pp. 883-898.
    Kant's “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” seems an odd element in Kant's oeuvre. Parts of it seem like scholastic theology or an arbitrary effort to reconcile the Kantian philosophical system with the doctrines of Christianity1. One of the most troubling notions is that of radical evil. Not only is the motivation for introducing the notion unclear, it is also difficult to grasp the line of argumentation, and furthermore accept its conclusion that there must be an innate propensity for (...)
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  45. The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement: the ethical analysis of a failure, and its lessons.Luciano Floridi - 2015 - Ethics and Information Technology 17 (2):165-173.
    The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement was originally meant to harmonise and enforce intellectual property rights provisions in existing trade agreements within a wider group of countries. This was commendable in itself, so ACTA’s failure was all the more disappointing. In this article, I wish to contribute to the post-ACTA debate by proposing a specific analysis of the ethical reasons why ACTA failed, and what we can learn from them. I argue that five kinds of objections—namely, secret negotiations, lack of consultation, (...) of formulation, negotiations outside any international body, and the creation of a new governing body outside already existing forums—had only indirect ethical implications. This takes nothing away from their seriousness but it does make them less compelling, because agreements should be evaluated, ethically, for what they are, rather than for the alleged reasons why they are being proposed. I then argue that ACTA would have caused three ethical problems: an excessive and misplaced kind of responsibility, a radical decrease in freedom of expression, and a severe reduction in information privacy. I conclude by indicating three lessons that can help us in shaping a potential ACTA 2.0. First, we should acknowledge the increasingly vital importance of the framework of implicit expectations, attitudes, and practices that can facilitate and promote morally good decisions and actions. ACTA failed to perceive that it would have undermined the very framework that it was supposed to foster, namely one promoting some of the best and most successful aspects of our information society. Second, we should realise that, in advanced information societies, any regulation affecting how people deal with information is now bound to influence the whole ‘onlife’ habitat within which they live. So enforcing IPR becomes an environmental problem. Third, since legal documents, such as ACTA, emerge from within the infosphere that they affect, we should apply to the process itself, which one day may lead to a post-ACTA treaty, the very framework and ethical values that we would like to see promoted by it. (shrink)
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  46. Why Should We Try to be Sustainable? Expected Consequences and the Ethics of Making an Indeterminate Difference.Howard Nye - 2021 - In Chelsea Miya, Oliver Rossier & Geoffrey Rockwell (eds.), Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene. Open Book Publishers. pp. 3-35.
    Why should we refrain from doing things that, taken collectively, are environmentally destructive, if our individual acts seem almost certain to make no difference? According to the expected consequences approach, we should refrain from doing these things because our individual acts have small risks of causing great harm, which outweigh the expected benefits of performing them. Several authors have argued convincingly that this provides a plausible account of our moral reasons to do things like vote for policies that will (...)
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  47. The Autonomy of Psychology.Tim Crane - 1999 - In Robert Andrew Wilson & Frank C. Keil (eds.), MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, USA: MIT Press.
    Psychology has been considered to have an autonomy from the other sciences (especially physical science) in at least two ways: in its subject-matter and in its methods. To say that the subject-matter of psychology is autonomous is to say that psychology deals with entities—properties, relations, states—which are not dealt with or not wholly explicable in terms of physical (or any other) science. Contrasted with this is the idea that psychology employs a characteristic method of explanation, which is not shared by (...)
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  48. Sociologia do Trabalho: O Trabalho e a Sua Evolução Conceitual ao Longo Da História – Sobre A Definição de Trabalho.Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva - manuscript
    SOCIOLOGIA DO TRABALHO: O TRABALHO E A SUA EVOLUÇÃO CONCEITUAL AO LONGO DA HISTÓRIA – SOBRE A DEFINIÇÃO DE TRABALHO -/- -/- SOCIOLOGY OF WORK: WORK AND ITS CONCEPTUAL EVOLUTION THROUGH HISTORY – ON THE DEFINITION OF WORK -/- -/- Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva – IFPE-BJ, CAP-UFPE e UFRPE. E-mails: [email protected] e [email protected]. WhatsApp: (82)98143-8399. -/- -/- RESUMO -/- Começamos, diminuto, com uma análise da complexidade do conceito de “trabalho”. Apresento ao leitor as várias interpretações que o mesmo termo (...)
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  49. Unconscious motives and intentional action.Michael Ladner - manuscript
    Few philosophers would deny that unconscious motives enter into causal explanations of human behavior. But many would be reluctant to say that deeply unconscious motives have anything to do with the intentionality with which we act. I argue to the contrary that deeply unconscious motives can indeed contribute to agent-intentionality on the following condition: If she were self-aware and honest with respect to her unconscious motive, the agent would believe that it constituted her reason for the action of which it (...)
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  50. Consciousness Semanticism: A Precise Eliminativist Theory of Consciousness.Jacy Reese Anthis - 2022 - In Valentin Klimov & David Kelley (eds.), Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2021. Springer International Publishing. pp. 20-41.
    Many philosophers and scientists claim that there is a ‘hard problem of consciousness’, that qualia, phenomenology, or subjective experience cannot be fully understood with reductive methods of neuroscience and psychology, and that there is a fact of the matter as to ‘what it is like’ to be conscious and which entities are conscious (Chalmers, 1995). Eliminativism and related views such as illusionism argue against this; they claim that consciousness does not exist in the ways implied by everyday or scholarly language. (...)
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