In some cultures, people tend to believe that it is very important to be sexually exclusive in romantic relationships and idealise monogamous romantic relationships; but there is a tension in this ideal. Sex is generally considered to have value, and usually when we love someone we want to increase the amount of value in their lives, not restrict it without good reason. There is thus a call, not yet adequately responded to by philosophers, for greater clarity in the reasons §why (...) it might be reasonable for a couple to adopt a policy of sexual exclusivity. This article argues that we cannot justify the demand for sexual exclusivity by a need to protect the relationship from the risk of one partner ‘trading-up’, or by appealing to jealousy. However, sexual exclusivity can be intelligible if it supports the romantic relationship and helps to distinguish it from other relationships. Nonetheless, sexual exclusivity ought not to be the hegemonic social norm that it currently is in some societies because this diminishes the potential value it might have and gives the idea of faithfulness the wrong focus. (shrink)

Sexual infidelity is widespread, but it is also widely condemned, yet relatively little philosophical work has been done on what makes it wrong and how wrong it is. In this paper, I argue that sexual infidelity is wrong if it involves breaking a commitment to be sexually exclusive, which has special significance in the relationship. However, it is not necessarily worse than other kinds of infidelity, and the context in which it takes place ought to be considered. I finish the (...) paper by looking at how the hegemonic norm of monogamy makes infidelity both more likely and more difficult to deal with. (shrink)

Natasha McKeever argues that prima facie, a friends-with-benefits relationship can be, at the same time, a good friendship. This is because sex is compatible with friendship in that it can complement and potentially even strengthen the three core characteristics of friendship: mutual liking, mutual caring, and mutual sharing. She acknowledges that, by generating uncertainty and having the potential to generate feelings of romantic love, sex does pose risks to friendship. However, she argues that while these risks are significant considerations, (...) they can be mitigated and managed and so do not provide strong reasons against friends-with-benefits relationships. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt has a comprehensive and, at times, compelling, account of love, which are outlined in several of his works. However, he does not think that romantic love fits the ideal of love as it ‘includes a number of vividly distracting elements, which do not belong to the essential nature of love as a mode of disinterested concern’. In this paper, I argue that we can, nonetheless, learn some important things about romantic love from his account. Furthermore, I will suggest, (...) conversely, that there is distinct value in romantic love, which derives from the nature of the relationship on which it is based. Frankfurt tries to take agape and reformulate it so that it can also account for love of particular people. Whilst he succeeds, to some extent, in describing parental love, he fails to accurately describe romantic love and friendship, and, moreover, overlooks what is distinctly valuable about them. Although it was not his intention to describe romantic love, by failing to include features such as reciprocity in his account of love, Frankfurt leaves no room for a kind of love that is important and valuable to many people. (shrink)

The norm of monogamy is pervasive, having remained widespread, in most Western cultures at least, in spite of increasing tolerance toward more diverse relationship types. It is also puzzling. People willingly, and often with gusto, adhere to it, yet it is also, prima facie at least, highly restrictive. Being in a monogamous relationship means agreeing to give up certain sorts of valuable interactions and relationships with other people and to severely restrict one’s opportunities for sex and love. It is this (...) restrictiveness which has led for calls among some philosophers for the justification of the norm, and some have argued that it cannot be justified. John McMurtry, for example, writing in 1972, compared monogamy to private property and argued that it serves the capitalist order (McMurtry 1972, 596–97). More recently, Harry Chalmers (2019) has argued that monogamy is morally impermissible. In this chapter we argue that rather than justify the norm, we ought to explain and understand its pervasiveness. Not everyone who follows the norm is doing so blindly, irrationally, or immorally. Indeed, many people are monogamous because being monogamous supports their needs and best enables them to flourish. We suggest that the human need for trust and attachment could underlie many people’s desires for monogamy and, therefore, explain monogamy’s pervasiveness. Focusing on the human need for trust and attachment security can also help us to understand why sexual infidelity can feel like such a betrayal. It can make sense to mutually agree to exclusivity in relationships, in spite of the apparent restrictions this brings. In a sense, not all restrictions are restrictive, because holding ourselves to limits on our behavior can in fact help us to invest in and experience the things we value most. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that we can make sense of moral norms against consensual, adult incest by appealing to the value of familial relationships and the potential for sex to damage them. Viewing sex as unconscionable between family members helps to enable the loving intimacy normally associated with family relationships. Therefore, there is good reason for incest, even when consensual and between adults, to remain taboo. That being said, I argue that there is insufficient legal justification for all consensual, (...) adult incest to be criminalised. I examine four potential arguments in favor of consensual, adult incest being illegal, and conclude that none of them succeeds in justifying a total legal prohibition against it. (shrink)

It is usually taken for granted that romantic relationships will be sexual, but it seems that there is no necessary reason for this, as it is possible for romantic relationships to not include sex. Indeed, sometimes sex is a part of a romantic relationship for only a relatively short period of it. Furthermore, scientific explanations of the link between sex and love don’t seem fully satisfying because they tell us only about the mechanics of sex, rather than its meaning or (...) phenomenology. Therefore, the question of why it is that the archetypal romantic relationship includes sex, calls for philosophical analysis, yet it has been under-explored in philosophy. In this paper, I attempt to remedy this. I argue that sex is important to romantic love because it partly constitutes, builds, and expresses four of the central goods of a romantic relationship: 1) pleasure, 2) union, 3) intimacy, and 4) vulnerability and care. Thus, sex can be, and often is, an important vehicle for romantic love, though it is not essential for it. (shrink)

In this chapter, Natasha McKeever and Luke Brunning consider (sexual) jealousy in romantic life. They argue that jealousy is best understood as an emotional response to the threatened loss of love or attention, to which one feels deserving, because of a rival. Furthermore, the general value of jealousy can be questioned, and jealousy’s instrumental value needs to be balanced against a range of potential harms. They assess two potential ways of managing jealousy (which are not mutually exclusive)—firstly by adopting (...) a policy of monogamy and secondly by engaging in emotional work. Neither of these methods is easy, and neither will solve jealousy altogether, but Brunning and McKeever argue that the second strategy should be taken more seriously. (shrink)

In Sascha Settegast’s recently published article, “Prostitution and the Good of Sex” in Social Theory and Practice, he argues that prostitution is intrinsically harmful. In this article, I object to his argument, making the following three responses to his account: 1) bad sex is not “detrimental to the good life”; 2) bad sex is not necessarily unvirtuous; 3) sex work is work as well as sex, and so must be evaluated as work in addition to as sex.

This paper is about what we call Deontically-flavored Nominal Constructions (DNCs) in English, such as "No ice cream" or "Dogs on leash only". DNCs are often perceived as commands and have been argued to be a type of non-canonical imperative, much like root infinitives in German or Russian. We argue instead that DNCs at their core are declaratives that cite a rule but can be used performatively in the right context. We propose that DNCs contain an elided deontic modal, i.e., (...) allowed, whose presence explains their distributional restrictions and interpretational properties. Among other things, we speculate on the licensing conditions of DNCs (the presence of 'only' or the negative determiner 'no'), suggesting that these are tied to the properties of discourses in which rules can be used naturally. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on Daoist praxeology and language in order to build something of a moral realist position (the contours of which may differ from most western versions insofar as it need not commit to moral cognitivism) that hinges on the seemingly paradoxical notions of ineffable moral truths and non-transferable moral skill.

In the Gorgias, Plato contrasts pastry cooking unfavorably with medicine, in order to illustrate the difference he believes exists between a mere knack and a genuine art. I attempt to show that Plato’s treatment of cooking distorts or misconceives that activity, and does so in order to shore up his arguments about the distinction between arts and knacks, and about the separation and hierarchy between minds and bodies. Plato’s treatment of cookery seems to be informed not by the activity (...) of cookery itself, but by medicine, the activity against which it is set. In contrast, I shall suggest that attending to foodmaking directly can challenge Plato’s art/knack and soul/body dichotomies in several important ways. My method combines close examination of the passage with more speculative reflections on the significance and consequences of Plato’s ideas about cooking. (shrink)

Many traditional martial artists assert that MMA is not a martial art, denying that the ‘martial skill’ of MMA constitutes a ‘martial art’, and citing the sportive and entertainment aspects of MMA competitions as antithetical to the spirit of martial arts, lacking the integrity, discipline, and tradition found in martial arts. Today, these criticisms are even more relevant in light of the fact that the typical MMA fighter no longer practices a single discipline but is versed in a variety of (...) techniques and utilizes a variety of strength and conditioning modalities. In addition, with the development of social media and mainstream media’s acceptance of MMA as a legitimate sport, MMA is now more than ever about entertainment. We argue that MMA is a martial art, but it is not always practiced as one. By drawing upon Socrates’ distinction in Plato’s Gorgias between ‘knacks’ and ‘crafts’, we clarify the difference between ‘martial skills’ and ‘martial arts’. Using this distinction, we examine whether the sportive and entertainment aspects of MMA are, in fact, antithetical to the spirit of martial arts. We argue that the latter is, but the former is not. (shrink)

For sentences such as (1), "Columbus knows that the sea is unpredictable", there is a face-value theory, according to which ‘that’-clauses are singular terms denoting propositions. Famously, Prior raised an objection to the theory, but defenders of the face-value theory such as Forbes, King, Künne, Pietroski and Stanley urged that the objection could be met by maintaining that in (1) ‘to know’ designates a complex relation along the lines of being in a state of knowledge having as content. Is the (...) theory safe, then? The aim of this paper is to show that a new problem for the theory arises if we consider attributions of skills, knacks, propensities and abilities. (shrink)

This essay will examine scholarly attempts at distilling a proto-ethical philosophy from the Daoist classic known as the Zhuangzi. In opposition to interpretations of the text which characterize it as amoralistic, I will identify elements of a natural normativity in the Zhuangzi. My examination features passages from the Zhuangzi – commonly known as the “knack” passages – which are often interpreted through some sort of linguistic, skeptical, or relativistic lens. Contra such readings, I believe the Zhuangzi prescribes an art (...) of living – or shù [術] – which incorporates a few motifs familiar to certain threads of philosophical naturalism. Building on existing scholarship which treats of the praxeology of the text, I argue that the naturalist themes present in the Zhuangzi support an unusual, but robust, view of moral expertise. (shrink)

Wie verändern sich Mensch und Körper durch Technik? Und welches Menschenverständnis vertritt der Transhumanismus? Anna Puzio befasst sich in der ersten philosophischen Studie zur Anthropologie des Transhumanismus mit führenden Personen des Feldes, u. a. mit Nick Bostrom, David Pearce und Natasha Vita-More. Neben Körperoptimierung und Medizintechnologien beleuchtet sie auch Alltagstechnologien wie Wearables. Dabei entwickelt sie einen neuen Ansatz zur Technikanthropologie und ein neues inklusives Menschen- und Körperverständnis im Anschluss an Donna Haraway und den Kritischen Posthumanismus im amerikanischen Raum.

Creations of many contemporary artists indicate the emergence of technoculture. Although artistic manifestations of technoculture may appear to be a provocation, they encourage fundamental ontological questions, such as whether a person has unchanging nature; what was and is our relationship to the Other, and what it should be; to what extent can body and mind be altered before they stop being “human”; what is the future of our species. To properly understand the works of technoculture artists, it appears necessary to (...) have a thorough grasp post- and transhumanism as their key sources of inspiration. As a result, the developed tools will be employed to indicate which aspects of technoculture are a manifestation of post- and transhumanist ideas. This analysis is based primarily on the works of Stelarc and Orlan – two widely commented artists of technoculture. (shrink)

Het idee dat burgerschapsonderwijs noodzakelijkerwijs democratisch is omdat ze door een democratische staat wordt georganiseerd, is een bedenkelijke assumptie. Veronderstellen dat goed burgerschap overigens beperkt kan blijven tot een reeks van ‘meetbare’ kenniscomponenten (bv. kennis van presidenten, koningen), overtuigingen (bv., ‘er zijn mensenrechten’) en ‘competenties’ (bv. ‘kunnen omgaan met meningsverschillen’) is niet enkel een karikatuur maken van de democratie zelf, maar getuigt evenzeer van een democratisch paternalisme.

Internationale vergelijkingen vormen een waardvolle bron van inzicht bij het analyseren van maatschappelijke problemen en het beoordelen van beleidsmatige antwoorden op die problemen. Vergelijkend onderzoek levert vaak interessante of nuttige informatie op doordat er verschillen én overeenkomsten worden geconstrueerd, bijvoorbeeld: hoe ‘leefbaar’ is Toronto vergeleken met Berlijn? Zelfs wanneer de definities verschillen en de gebruikte meeteenheden enigszins onnauwkeurig kunnen zijn – bijvoorbeeld “leefbaar voor wie en ten opzichte van wat?” – zijn vergelijkingen leerrijk en aanleiding voor verdere reflectie. Maar internationale (...) vergelijkingen kunnen op verschillende manieren ook problematisch zijn. (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.