Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

This paper sets out an account of trust in AI as a relationship between clinicians, AI applications, and AI practitioners in which AI is given discretionary authority over medical questions by clinicians. Compared to other accounts in recent literature, this account more adequately explains the normative commitments created by practitioners when inviting clinicians’ trust in AI. To avoid committing to an account of trust in AI applications themselves, I sketch a reductive view on which discretionary authority is exercised by AI (...) practitioners through the vehicle of an AI application. I conclude with four critical questions based on the discretionary account to determine if trust in particular AI applications is sound, and a brief discussion of the possibility that the main roles of the physician could be replaced by AI. (shrink)

Frankfurt cases are supposed to provide us with counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities. Among the most well known responses to these cases is what John Fischer has dubbed the flicker of freedom strategy. Here we revisit a version of this strategy, which we refer to as the fine-grained response. Although a number of philosophers, including some who are otherwise unsympathetic to Frankfurt’s argument, have dismissed the fine grained response, we believe there is a good deal to be said (...) on its behalf. We argue, in particular, that reflection on certain cases involving omissions undermines the main objections to the response and also provides the groundwork for an argument in support of it. (shrink)

A natural suggestion and increasingly popular account of how to revise our logical beliefs treats revision of logic analogously to the revision of scientific theories. I investigate this approach and argue that simple applications of abductive methodology to logic result in revision-cycles, developing a detailed case study of an actual dispute with this property. This is problematic if we take abductive methodology to provide justification for revising our logical framework. I then generalize the case study, pointing to similarities with more (...) recent and popular heterodox logics such as naïve logics of truth. I use this discussion to motivate a constraint—logical partisanhood—on the uses of such methodology: roughly: both the proposed alternative and our actual background logic must be able to agree that moving to the alternative logic is no worse than staying put. (shrink)

A retelling of Plato's famous cave allegory. Inspired by Dōgen, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.

ABSTRACT Many of our common-sense moral judgments seemingly imply the existence of moral luck. I attempt to avoid moral luck while retaining most of these judgments. I defend a view on which agents have moral equality of opportunity. This allows us to account for our anti-moral-luck intuitions at less cost than has been previously recognized.

According to Schopenhauer’s compensation argument for pessimism, the non-existence of the world is preferable to its existence because no goods can ever compensate for the mere existence of evil. Standard interpretations take this argument to be based on Schopenhauer’s thesis that all goods are merely the negation of evils, from which they assume it follows that the apparent goods in life are in fact empty and without value. This article develops a non-standard variant of the standard interpretation, which accepts the (...) relevance of the negativity thesis but rejects that the argument assumes that life’s goods are all empty and valueless. Instead, it argues that whatever value negative goods might possess, they do not have the kind of value to compensate for positive evils. This involves additional development of the negativity thesis and a defence of it against objections from Byron Simmons (2021). (shrink)

Etiquette and other merely formal normative standards like legality, honor, and rules of games are taken less seriously than they should be. While these standards are not intrinsically reason-providing in the way morality is often taken to be, they also play an important role in our practical lives: we collectively treat them as important for assessing the behavior of ourselves and others and as licensing particular forms of sanction for violations. This chapter develops a novel account of the normativity of (...) formal standards where the role they play in our practical lives explains a distinctive kind of reason to obey them. We have this kind of reason to be polite because etiquette is important to us. We also have this kind of reason to be moral because morality is important to us. This parallel suggests that the importance we assign to morality is insufficient to justify it being substantive. (shrink)

I argue that certain species of belief, such as mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs, are insulated from a form of Harman-style debunking argument whereas moral beliefs, the primary target of such arguments, are not. Harman-style arguments have been misunderstood as attempts to directly undermine our moral beliefs. They are rather best given as burden-shifting arguments, concluding that we need additional reasons to maintain our moral beliefs. If we understand them this way, then we can see why moral beliefs are vulnerable (...) to such arguments while mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs are not—the very construction of Harman-style skeptical arguments requires the truth of significant fragments of our mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs, but requires no such thing of our moral beliefs. Given this property, Harman-style skeptical arguments against logical, mathematical, and normative beliefs are self-effacing; doubting these beliefs on the basis of such arguments results in the loss of our reasons for doubt. But we can cleanly doubt the truth of morality. (shrink)

The adoption of web-based telecare services has raised multifarious ethical concerns, but a traditional principle-based approach provides limited insight into how these concerns might be addressed and what, if anything, makes them problematic. We take an alternative approach, diagnosing some of the main concerns as arising from a core phenomenon of shifting trust relations that come about when the physician plays a less central role in the delivery of care, and new actors and entities are introduced. Correspondingly, we propose an (...) applied ethics of trust based on the idea that patients should be provided with good reasons to trust telecare services, which we call sound trust. On the basis of this approach, we propose several concrete strategies for safeguarding sound trust in telecare. (shrink)

Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have increasingly turned to model-independent strategies as tools in searching for a wide range of possible BSM effects. In this paper, we describe the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SM-EFT) and analyse it in the context of the philosophical discussions about models, theories, and (bottom-up) (...) effective field theories. We find that while the SM-EFT is a quantum field theory, assisting experimentalists in searching for deviations from the SM, in its general form it lacks some of the characteristic features of models. Those features only come into play if put in by hand or prompted by empirical evidence for deviations. Employing different philosophical approaches to models, we argue that the case study suggests not to take a view on models that is overly permissive because it blurs the lines between the different stages of the SM-EFT research strategies and glosses over particle physicists' motivations for undertaking this bottom-up approach in the first place. Looking at EFTs from the perspective of modelling does not require taking a stance on some specific brand of realism or taking sides in the debate between reduction and emergence into which EFTs have recently been embedded. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

Introductory Chapter to the _Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition_ (CUP, 2009).

I investigate syntactic notions of theoretical equivalence between logical theories and a recent objection thereto. I show that this recent criticism of syntactic accounts, as extensionally inadequate, is unwarranted by developing an account which is plausibly extensionally adequate and more philosophically motivated. This is important for recent anti-exceptionalist treatments of logic since syntactic accounts require less theoretical baggage than semantic accounts.

Both Philip and Andrew are philosophy students whose interests converge around the philosophy of technology broadly understood. Philip's interest is specifically aimed toward the ethics of Transhumanism and depictions of Transhumanism in works of fiction. On the other hand, Andrew finds himself more focused on religious behavior in the technological world. While the two perspectives might not seem that close, there is certain to be an overlap in Andrew and Philip's shared understanding of how technological phenomena play (...) a crucial role concerning religion and society. (shrink)

Michael Moore’s recent book Mechanical Choices: The Responsibility of the Human Machine is full of rich, insightful discussion of many important issues related to free will and moral responsibility. I will focus on one particular issue raised by Moore: the question of whether we can have control over the past. Moore defends a compatibilist account of moral responsibility on which there are some possible cases in which agents do have such control. But Moore seeks to avoid positing too much control (...) over the past. I will argue that Moore’s attempt is not successful. Furthermore, I will try to show that compatibilists in general face a serious challenge regarding control over the past. In sections 1 and 2 I will explore Moore’s views. In section 3 and 4 I will offer a general argument against compatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism. (shrink)

The principle of alternative possibilities tells us that an agent is morally responsible for an action only if he could have done otherwise. Frankfurt-style cases provide an extremely influential challenge to the PAP . And Frankfurt-style compatibilists are motivated to accept compatibilism about responsibility and determinism in part due to FSCs. But there is a significant tension between our judgments about responsibility in FSCs and our judgments about responsibility in certain omissions cases. This tension has thus far largely been treated (...) as an internal puzzle for defenders of FSCs to solve. My goal here is to regiment this tension into a clear argument which undermines the FSC based critique of PAP. I will also argue that there is an in principle reason to doubt that Frankfurt-Style Compatibilists will be able to successfully respond to my argument. (shrink)

Expressivists explain the expression relation which obtains between sincere moral assertion and the conative or affective attitude thereby expressed by appeal to the relation which obtains between sincere assertion and belief. In fact, they often explicitly take the relation between moral assertion and their favored conative or affective attitude to be exactly the same as the relation between assertion and the belief thereby expressed. If this is correct, then we can use the identity of the expression relation in the two (...) cases to test the expressivist account as a descriptive or hermeneutic account of moral discourse. I formulate one such test, drawing on a standard explanation of Moore's paradox. I show that if expressivism is correct as a descriptive account of moral discourse, then we should expect versions of Moore's paradox where we explicitly deny that we possess certain affective or conative attitudes. I then argue that the constructions that mirror Moore's paradox are not incoherent. It follows that expressivism is either incorrect as a hermeneutic account of moral discourse or that the expression relation which holds between sincere moral assertion and affective or conative attitudes is not identical to the relation which holds between sincere non-moral assertion and belief. A number of objections are canvassed and rejected. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the continued circulation and use of retracted science as a complex problem: Multiple stakeholders throughout the publishing ecosystem hold competing perceptions of this problem and its possible solutions. We describe how we used a participatory design process model to co-develop recommendations for addressing this problem with stakeholders in the Alfred P. Sloan-funded project, Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS). After introducing the four core RISRS recommendations, we discuss how the issue of retraction-related stigma (...) gives rise to recommendation #4, Educate stakeholders about retraction and pre- and post-publication stewardship of the scholarly record. This recommendation is important for training publishing professionals and realizing this recommendation will require further collaborative design work across scholarly communications. We highlight ongoing stakeholder work which is now re-starting the design cycle. We conclude with a discussion of ongoing activities facilitating uptake and refinement of RISRS research and the implementation agenda. (shrink)

The problem of the many threatens to show that, in general, there are far more ordinary objects than you might have thought. I present and motivate a solution to this problem using many-one identity. According to this solution, the many things that seem to have what it takes to be, say, a cat, are collectively identical to that single cat.

A person presented with adequate but not conclusive evidence for a proposition is in a position voluntarily to acquire a belief in that proposition, or to suspend judgment about it. The availability of doxastic options in such cases grounds a moderate form of doxastic voluntarism not based on practical motives, and therefore distinct from pragmatism. In such cases, belief-acquisition or suspension of judgment meets standard conditions on willing: it can express stable character traits of the agent, it can be responsive (...) to reasons, and it is compatible with a subjective awareness of the available options. (shrink)

Sometimes a fact can play a role in a grounding explanation, but the particular content of that fact make no difference to the explanation—any fact would do in its place. I call these facts vacuous grounds. I show that applying the distinction between-vacuous grounds allows us to give a principled solution to Kit Fine and Stephen Kramer’s paradox of ground. This paradox shows that on minimal assumptions about grounding and minimal assumptions about logic, we can show that grounding is reflexive, (...) contra the intuitive character of grounds. I argue that we should never have accepted that grounding is irreflexive in the first place; the intuitions that support the irreflexive intuition plausibly only require that grounding be non-vacuously irreflexive. Fine and Kramer’s paradox relies, essentially, on a case of vacuous grounding and is thus no problem for this account. (shrink)

It is regrettably common for theorists to attempt to characterize the Humean dictum that one can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ just in broadly logical terms. We here address an important new class of such approaches which appeal to model-theoretic machinery. Our complaint about these recent attempts is that they interfere with substantive debates about the nature of the ethical. This problem, developed in detail for Daniel Singer’s and Gillian Russell and Greg Restall’s accounts of Hume’s dictum, is of (...) a general type arising for the use of model-theoretic structures in cashing out substantive philosophical claims: the question of whether an abstract model-theoretic structure successfully interprets something often involves taking a stand on non-trivial issues surrounding the thing. In the particular case of Hume’s dictum, given reasonable conceptual or metaphysical claims about the ethical, Singer’s and Russell and Restall’s accounts treat obviously ethical claims as descriptive and vice versa. Consequently, their model-theoretic characterizations of Hume’s dictum are not metaethically neutral. This encourages skepticism about whether model-theoretic machinery suffices to provide an illuminating distinction between the ethical and the descriptive. (shrink)

According to a traditional view, humans are superior to their non‐human terrestrial companions because they alone are “rational animals.” Although the traditional view is presupposed by our social and legal institutions, it has been called into question by modern science: Darwin himself claimed that humans differ in degree rather than in kind from animals, and recent discoveries in comparative animal cognition have seemed to confirm Darwin's assertion. Sustaining the traditional view in light of these discoveries calls out for a careful (...) comparison of the human mind with its precursors, the vertebrate mind and the mammalian mind. Psychological capacities shared across the animal kingdom are repurposed in humans, rendering humans uniquely capable of rationality. To be rational is to respond appropriately to value. Humans as such are not rational animals, but have the potential to become rational animals. This potential marks a morally relevant difference in kind between humans and non‐human animals. (shrink)

I show that Wittgenstein's critique of G.H. Hardy's mathematical realism naturally extends to Paul Benacerraf's influential paper, ‘Mathematical Truth’. Wittgenstein accuses Hardy of hastily analogizing mathematical and empirical propositions, thus leading to a picture of mathematical reality that is somehow akin to empirical reality despite the many puzzles this creates. Since Benacerraf relies on that very same analogy to raise problems about mathematical ‘truth’ and the alleged ‘reality’ to which it corresponds, his major argument falls prey to the same critique. (...) The problematic pictures of mathematical reality suggested by Hardy and Benacerraf can be avoided, according to Wittgenstein, by disrupting the analogy that gives rise to them. I show why Tarskian updates to our conception of ‘truth’ discussed by Benacerraf do not answer Wittgenstein's concerns. That is, because they merely presuppose what Wittgenstein puts into question, namely, the essential uniformity of ‘truth’ and ‘proposition’ in ordinary discourse. (shrink)

In PI 189, Wittgenstein's interlocutor asks, ‘But are the steps then not determined by the algebraic formula?’. Wittgenstein responds, ‘The question contains a mistake’. What is the mistake contained in the interlocutor's question? Wittgenstein's elaboration is neither explicit nor its intended upshot transparent. In this paper, I offer a reading on which the interlocutor's question arises from illicitly crossing different pictures of ‘determination’. I begin by working through Wittgenstein's machine analogy in PI 193, which illustrates picture‐crossing in our ways of (...) talking about a machine. Using the lessons from this analogy, I show how the interlocutor's ‘mistake’ can be diagnosed in similar terms: their confusion about the power of a rule to determine its applications rests on mistakenly crossing a behavioural and a mathematical sense of ‘determine’—thereby concocting a mystifying picture of rule‐following. (shrink)

According to the traditional Christian understanding, being devoted to God is partly constitutive of human welfare. I explicate this tradition view, in three stages. First, I sketch a general theory of well-being which I call ‘Platonic Personalist Perfectionism.’ Second, I show how being devoted to God is uniquely perfective. I discuss three different components of the posture of devotion: abnegation (surrender of one’s will to God), adoration (responding to God’s goodness with attention, love and praise), and existential dependence (receiving one’s (...) self-worth as an unmerited gift from God). All three components of devotion are perfective in a dual way: they are salvific (they remediate a great harm) and consummative (they confer a great benefit). Third, I respond to the objection that devotion involves subjugating oneself, and thus amounts to an all-things-considered harm, notwithstanding whatever benefits it confers. I argue that so long as one’s acts of abnegating, adoring, and existentially depending are acts of one’s own, then subjugation is not essential to devotion. However, devotion does diminish one if the object of one’s devotion is unsuitable. I argue that the only suitable object of devotion is the God of traditional theism. (shrink)

With respect to the metaphysics of infinity, the tendency of standard debates is to either endorse or to deny the reality of ‘the infinite’. But how should we understand the notion of ‘reality’ employed in stating these options? Wittgenstein’s critical strategy shows that the notion is grounded in a confusion: talk of infinity naturally takes hold of one’s imagination due to the sway of verbal pictures and analogies suggested by our words. This is the source of various philosophical pictures that (...) in turn give rise to the standard metaphysical debates: that the mathematics of infinity corresponds to a special realm of infinite objects, that the infinite is profoundly huge or vast, or that the ability to think about infinity reveals mysterious powers in human beings. First, I explain Wittgenstein’s general strategy for undermining philosophical pictures of ‘the infinite’ – as he describes it in Zettel; and then show how that critical strategy is applied to Cantor’s diagonalization proof in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics II. (shrink)

This paper develops a philosophical account of moral disruption. According to Robert Baker (2013), moral disruption is a process in which technological innovations undermine established moral norms without clearly leading to a new set of norms. Here I analyze this process in terms of moral uncertainty, formulating a philosophical account with two variants. On the Harm Account, such uncertainty is always harmful because it blocks our knowledge of our own and others’ moral obligations. On the Qualified Harm Account, there is (...) no harm in cases where moral uncertainty is related to innovation that is “for the best” in historical perspective, or where uncertainty is the expression of a deliberative virtue. The two accounts are compared by applying them to Baker’s historical case of the introduction of mechanical ventilation and organ transplantation technologies, as well as the present-day case of mass data practices in the health domain. (shrink)

Russellianism is the view that the meaning of a proper name is the individual designated by the name. Together with other plausible assumptions, Russellianism entails the following: Sentences containing proper names express Russellian propositions, which involve the individual designated by the name as a direct constituent, and which can be represented as sets of individuals and properties. Moreover, as they occur in ordinary belief reports, ‘that’-clauses designate Russellian propositions. Such belief reports are true if and only if the subject of (...) the belief report bears the belief relation to the proposition designated by the ‘that’-clause. In defending this doctrine, some Russellians appeal to propositional guises, which, roughly speaking, are ways of grasping propositions. However, some Russellians don’t appeal to such entities. In this paper, I explain the varieties of Russellianism and then argue for Modest Russellianism: Believing a Russellian proposition is essentially mediated by guises, so that an agent can’t believe a Russellian proposition without standing in some appropriate relation to both the proposition and a guise. Nonetheless, guises don’t feature in the semantics of ordinary belief reports, so that an adequate account of the meaning of such belief reports needn’t invoke guises. (shrink)

I examine Hume’s ‘construal of the basic structure of human agency’ and his ‘analysis of human agency’ as they arise in his investigation of causal power. Hume’s construal holds both that volition is separable from action and that the causal mechanism of voluntary action is incomprehensible. Hume’s analysis argues, on the basis of these two claims, that we cannot draw the concept of causal power from human agency. Some commentators suggest that Hume’s construal of human agency is untenable, unduly skeptical, (...) or uniquely entailed by the limits of empiricism. However, as I argue, these criticisms depend either on a misunderstanding of Hume’s analysis of human agency or on a neglect of the historical context of his view. (shrink)

Cognitivists about intention hold that intending to do something entails believing you will do it. Non-cognitivists hold that intentions are conative states with no cognitive component. I argue that both of these claims are true. Intending entails the presence of a belief, even though the intention is not even partly the belief. The result is a form of what Sarah Paul calls Non-Inferential Weak Cognitivism, a view that, as she notes, has no prominent defenders.

Engineers are traditionally regarded as trustworthy professionals who meet exacting standards. In this chapter I begin by explicating our trust relationship towards engineers, arguing that it is a linear but indirect relationship in which engineers “stand behind” the artifacts and technological systems that we rely on directly. The chapter goes on to explain how this relationship has become more complex as engineers have taken on two additional aims: the aim of social engineering to create and steer trust between people, and (...) the aim of creating automated systems that take over human tasks and are meant to invite the trust of those who rely on and interact with them. (shrink)

I show that the model-theoretic meaning that can be read off the natural deduction rules for disjunction fails to have certain desirable properties. I use this result to argue against a modest form of inferentialism which uses natural deduction rules to fix model-theoretic truth-conditions for logical connectives.

Moore’s paradox, the infamous felt bizarreness of sincerely uttering something of the form “I believe grass is green, but it ain’t”—has attracted a lot of attention since its original discovery (Moore 1942). It is often taken to be a paradox of belief—in the sense that the locus of the inconsistency is the beliefs of someone who so sincerely utters. This claim has been labeled as the priority thesis: If you have an explanation of why a putative content could not be (...) coherently believed, you thereby have an explanation of why it cannot be coherently asserted. (Shoemaker 1995). The priority thesis, however, is insufficient to give a general explanation of Moore-paradoxical phenomena and, moreover, it’s false. I demonstrate this, then show how to give a commitment-theoretic account of Moore Paradoxicality, drawing on work by Bach and Harnish. The resulting account has the virtue of explaining not only cases of pragmatic incoherence involving assertions, but also cases of cognate incoherence arising for other speech acts, such as promising, guaranteeing, ordering, and the like. (shrink)

Autonomous weapons systems (AWS), sometimes referred to as “killer robots”, are receiving evermore attention, both in public discourse as well as by scholars and policymakers. Much of this interest is connected with emerging ethical and legal problems linked to increasing autonomy in weapons systems, but there is a general underappreciation for the ways in which existing law might impact on these new technologies. In this paper, we argue that as AWS become more sophisticated and increasingly more capable than flesh-and-blood soldiers, (...) it will increasingly be the case that such soldiers are “in the power” of those AWS which fight against them. This implies that such soldiers ought to be considered hors de combat, and not targeted. In arguing for this point, we draw out a broader conclusion regarding hors de combat status, namely that it must be viewed contextually, with close reference to the capabilities of combatants on both sides of any discreet engagement. Given this point, and the fact that AWS may come in many shapes and sizes, and can be made for many different missions, we argue that each particular AWS will likely need its own standard for when enemy soldiers are deemed hors de combat. We conclude by examining how these nuanced views of hors de combat status might impact on meaningful human control of AWS. (shrink)

The burden of research ethics review falls not just on researchers, but on those who serve on research ethics committees (RECs). With the advent of automated text analysis and generative artificial intelligence, it has recently become possible to teach models to support human judgment, for example by highlighting relevant parts of a text and suggesting actionable precedents and explanations. It is time to consider how such tools might be used to support ethics review and oversight. This commentary argues that with (...) a suitable strategy of engagement, artificial intelligence can be used in a variety of ways that can genuinely support RECs and manage their workload and improve the quality of review. It would be wiser to take an active role in the development of AI tools for ethics review, rather than to adopt ad hoc tools after the fact. (shrink)

Angela Mendelovici’s book The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality is a paradigm-establishing monograph within the phenomenal intentionality research program. Mendelovici argues that extant theories of intentionality that do not appeal to consciousness are both empirically and metaphysically inadequate, and a coherent, consciousness-based alternative can adequately explain (or explain away) all alleged cases of intentionality. While I count myself a fellow traveler, I discuss four choice-points where Mendelovici has taken, I believe, the wrong fork. (1) The explanatory relation that holds between intentional (...) and phenomenal properties is not identity but realization. (2) The mechanism that generates derivatively representational states is not content self-ascription but neural re-wiring. (3) The source of semantic structure within phenomenal-intentional states is not external structure and/or second-order co-instantiation but primitive phenomenal ascription. (4) The mode of presence of contents within phenomenal-intentional states is not being part of a superficial characterization, but being monadically present as an intentional object. (shrink)

It is plausible that there are epistemic reasons bearing on a distinctively epistemic standard of correctness for belief. It is also plausible that there are a range of practical reasons bearing on what to believe. These theses are often thought to be in tension with each other. Most significantly for our purposes, it is obscure how epistemic reasons and practical reasons might interact in the explanation of what one ought to believe. We draw an analogy with a similar distinction between (...) types of reasons for actions in the context of activities. The analogy motivates a two-level account of the structure of normativity that explains the interaction of correctness-based and other reasons. This account relies upon a distinction between normative reasons and authoritatively normative reasons. Only the latter play the reasons role in explaining what state one ought to be in. All and only practical reasons are authoritative reasons. Hence, in one important sense, all reasons for belief are practical reasons. But this account also preserves the autonomy and importance of epistemic reasons. Given the importance of having true beliefs about the world, our epistemic standard typically plays a key role in many cases in explaining what we ought to believe. In addition to reconciling (versions of) evidentialism and pragmatism, this two-level account has implications for a range of important debates in normative theory, including the interaction of right and wrong reasons for actions and other attitudes, the significance of reasons in understanding normativity and authoritative normativity, the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ normativity, and whether there is a unified source of authoritative normativity. (shrink)

Kant begins the First Section of the Groundwork with a statement that is one of the most memorable in all his writings: “There is nothing it is possible to think of anywhere in the world, or indeed anything at all outside it, that can be held to be good without limitation, excepting only a good will” (Ak 4:393).[i] Due to the textual prominence of this claim, readers of the Groundwork have usually proceeded to read that work, and Kant’s other ethical (...) works as well, on the assumption that the truth of that assertion, and therefore the conception of the good will, both occupy a fundamental place in Kantian ethics. The assumption, however, becomes increasingly hard to sustain as we gain more familiarity with Kant’s ethical writings and better understanding of his ethical theory.[ii] As for the concept of the good will, Kant does avow the intention of “developing” it (Ak 4:397), and he goes on to thematize concepts that he thinks of as related to the good will (the moral worth of an action, acting from duty). But he never provides an explicit account of what he takes a ‘good will’ to be.[iii]. (shrink)

A theory of the first-person plural occupies a unique place in philosophical investigations into intersubjectivity and social cognition. In order for the referent of the first-person plural—“the We”—to come into existence, it seems there must be a shared ground of communicative possibility, but this requires a non-circular explanation of how this ground could be shared in the absence of a pre-existing context of communicative conventions. Margaret Gilbert’s and John Searle’s theories of collective intentionality capture important aspects of the We, but (...) fail to fully account for this shared ground of communicative possibility. This paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intercorporeity helps reconcile the positive aspects of these accounts while also explaining how the genesis of the social world is continuous with perceptual life in general. This enables an account of the first-person plural as dependent on reciprocal communicative interaction without the need to posit a primitive or primordial “we-mode” of consciousness. “Intercorporeity” designates a bodily openness to others that is not fundamentally different in kind from the general style of bodily comportment found in Merleau-Ponty’s rich analyses of perceptual life. (shrink)

The orthodox view in contemporary epistemology is that Edmund Gettier refuted the JTB analysis of knowledge, according to which knowledge is justified true belief. In a recent paper Moti Mizrahi questions the orthodox view. According to Mizrahi, the cases that Gettier advanced against the JTB analysis are misleading. In this paper I defend the orthodox view.

Many philosophers maintain that the ability to do otherwise is compatible with comprehensive divine foreknowledge but incompatible with the truth of causal determinism. But the Fixity of the Past principle underlying the rejection of compatibilism about the ability to do otherwise and determinism appears to generate an argument also for the incompatibility of the ability to do otherwise and divine foreknowledge. By developing an account of ability that appeals to the notion of explanatory dependence, we can replace the Fixity of (...) the Past with a principle that does not generate this difficulty. I develop such an account and defend it from objections. I also explore some of the account's implications, including whether the account is consistent with presentism. (shrink)

Strong claims have been made for emergence as a new paradigm for understanding science, consciousness, and religion. Tracing the past history and current definitions of the concept, Clayton assesses the case for emergent phenomena in the natural world and their significance for philosophy and theology. Complex emergent phenomena require irreducible levels of explanation in physics, chemistry and biology. This pattern of emergence suggests a new approach to the problem of consciousness, which is neither reducible to brain states nor proof of (...) a mental substance or soul. Although emergence does not entail classical theism, it is compatible with a variety of religious positions. Clayton concludes with a defence of emergentist panentheism and a Christian constructive theology consistent with the new sciences of emergence. (shrink)

Husserl introduces a phenomenological concept called “motivation” early in the First Investigation of his magnum opus, the Logical Investigations. The importance of this concept has been overlooked since Husserl passes over it rather quickly on his way to an analysis of the meaningful nature of expression. I argue, however, that motivation is essential to Husserl’s overall project, even if it is not essen- tial for defining expression in the First Investigation. For Husserl, motivation is a relation between mental acts whereby (...) the content of one act make some fur- ther meaningful content probable. I explicate the nature of this relation in terms of “evidentiary weight” and differentiate it from Husserl’s notion of Evidenz, often translated as “self-evidence”. I elucidate the importance of motivation in Husserl’s overall phenomenological project by focusing on his analyses of thing-perception and empathy. Through these examples, we can better understand the continuity between the Logical Investigations and Husserl’s later work. (shrink)

This paper has two goals: (1) to defend a particular response to the problem of resultant moral luck and (2) to defend the claim that we are only responsible for what we could have avoided. Cases of overdetermination threaten to undermine the claim that we are only responsible for what we could have avoided. To deal with this issue, I will motivate a particular way of responding to the problem of resultant moral luck. I defend the view that one's degree (...) of responsibility is immune to moral luck but the scope of events for which one is responsible is subject to moral luck. I will then argue that this view allows us to explain away certain intuitions about responsibility and overdetermination (as well as similar intuitions regarding Frankfurt Cases). As a result, the claim that we are only responsible for what we could have avoided becomes significantly more plausible. (shrink)