In 2018 Academic Placement Data and Analysis ran a survey of doctoral students and recent graduates on the topics of diversity and inclusivity in collaboration with the Graduate Student Council and Data Task Force of the American Philosophical Association. We submitted a preliminary report in Fall 2018 that describes the origins and procedure of the survey [1]. This is our final report on the survey. We first discuss the demographic profile of our survey participants and compare it to the United (...) States general population, its doctoral students, and APA membership, finding several areas of underrepresentation (i.e. gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic, and veteran status). We then discuss the results of questions regarding diversity and inclusivity. We find, for instance, that participant comfort in philosophy depends on gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and language status and that participants most often mentioned the theme of diversity when asked how philosophy could be more inclusive. Finally, we discuss the results of questions related to graduate program and placement. We find, for example, that underrepresented graduates are both less likely to recommend their graduate program to others and less likely to prefer an academic job. We close by making some recommendations for the APA and for the discipline based on our findings. (shrink)

This study steps beyond the traditional arguments of feminism and examines homebirth from a libertarian perspective. It addresses the debate over homebirth and midwifery, which includes the use of direct-entry midwives as well as the philosophical implications of individual autonomy expressed through consumer choice. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that the medical establishment gains economic and political control primarily through medical licensing, and uses the state to undermine personal freedom as it advances a government-enforced monopoly on birth. At the same time, (...) empirical studies have established a substantial record of high safety and low medical complication rates for homebirth as compared to hospital births. Ultimately, the state’s restriction on medical choices is incompatible with the nonaggression principle and voluntarism, and therefore, with libertarianism. (shrink)

Copi's method of deduction is formalized and shown to be complete.

In this chapter, against the backdrop of campus responses to Israel and Gaza, I consider the mission of the university and whether that mission is served by institutional neutrality. On my view, it is not so easy (and may be impossible) to prise apart universities’ core functions and “public matters.” I argue that institutional neutrality is at best a useful fiction and at worst a way of concealing universities’ commitments and reinscribing the status quo. Along the way, I offer a (...) primer on academic and expressive freedoms in the context of universities, and on the importance of articulating and balancing core university values, including the duty of care. I conclude by offering advice on when universities should take a public stand on socio-political matters. -/- [This chapter is forthcoming in 2026 in an as-yet untitled edited collection edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch and published by University of Regina Press.]. (shrink)

The role of the physiological processes involved in human vision escapes clarification in current literature. Many unanswered questions about vision include: 1) whether there is more to lateral inhibition than previously proposed, 2) the role of the discs in rods and cones, 3) how inverted images on the retina are converted to erect images for visual perception, 4) what portion of the image formed on the retina is actually processed in the brain, 5) the reason we have an after-image with (...) antagonistic colors, and 6) how we remember space. This theoretical article attempts to clarify some of the physiological processes involved with human vision. The global integration of visual information is conceptual; therefore, we include illustrations to present our theory. Universally, the eyeball is 2.4 cm and works together with membrane potential, correspondingly representing the retinal layers,photoreceptors, and cortex. Images formed within the photoreceptors must first be converted into chemical signals on the photoreceptors’ individual discs and the signals at each disc are transduced from light photons into electrical signals. We contend that the discs code the electrical signals into accurate distances and are shown in our figures. The pre-existing oscillations among the various cortices including the striate and parietal cortex,and the retina work in unison to create an infrastructure of visual space that functionally ‘‘places” the objects within this ‘‘neural” space. The horizontal layers integrate all discs accurately to create a retina that is pre-coded for distance. Our theory suggests image inversion never takes place on the retina,but rather images fall onto the retina as compressed and coiled, then amplified through lateral inhibition through intensification and amplification on the OFF-center cones. The intensified and amplified images are decompressed and expanded in the brain, which become the images we perceive as external vision. (shrink)

This thesis examines the key moral principles that should govern decision-making by police and military when using lethal force. To this end, it provides an ethical analysis of the following question: Under what circumstances, if any, is it morally justified for the agents of state-sanctioned security institutions to use lethal force, in particular the police and the military? Recent literature in this area suggests that modern conflicts involve new and unique features that render conventional ways of thinking about the ethics (...) of armed conflict, and the use of lethal force, as inadequate or redundant. In particular, there is an increased concern with the moral difficulties created by “non-standard” cases. This is where the police or military are obliged to operate outside their conventional contexts. In such non-standard cases, on what moral basis can (or should) state actors – especially the police and military – use lethal force? One approach argues that there is nothing morally exceptional about the use of lethal force by police or military. This says the only available moral justification for using lethal force is killing in self-defence or defence of others. In contrast, I use an institutional approach to develop a moral framework for the state’s morally exceptional use of lethal force. The institutional approach is concerned with the ends (telos) or purpose of a social institution. It says that the moral purpose of a social institution alters the moral responsibilities of its agents; what is referred to as role morality. My analysis demonstrates that there is an important moral distinction between justified killing in self-defence and state-sanctioned uses of lethal force. My claim is that police and military uses of lethal force are not morally justified in the same way as the average person’s use of lethal force (i.e. self-defence or defence of others). Instead, I argue that the state-sanctioned institutional role of police and military give these state actors special moral duties, and therefore exceptional moral justification, for using lethal force. I argue that the institutional end of the police is the preservation of public safety. This includes using lethal force where it is necessary to protect life and prevent serious injury to jurisdictional inhabitants. In contrast, a morally responsible state uses military force to defend the “common good.” That is, when it is necessary to defend the peaceful functioning of a state from armed threats or other forms of political violence. I then conclude that non-standard cases require the addition of jus ad vim (or the just use of military force short-of-war) as a hybrid element to the moral framework for the state-sanctioned use of lethal force. This provides a better way of applying ethics to the use of military force when defending the common good against serious threats in non-standard cases. This is because jus ad vim complements the conventional military paradigm by permitting the use of military capabilities to defend the common good. But, at the same time, it inhibits the move towards the more destructive levels of violence characteristic of conventional warfighting. (shrink)

Theory of mind, also known as mindreading, refers to our ability to attribute mental states to agents in order to make sense of and interact with other agents. Recently, theorists in this literature have advanced a broad conception of mindreading. In particular, psychologists and philosophers have examined how we attribute knowledge, intention, mentalistically-loaded stereotypes, and personality traits to others. Moreover, the diversity of our goals in a social interaction – precision, efficiency, self/in-group protection – generates diversity in the mindreading processes (...) we employ. Finally, the products of mindreading are varied, as well. We produce different sorts of mindreading explanations depending on our epistemic goals and the situational context. In this article, I piece together these different strands of research to present a broad conception of mindreading that is complex, messy, and interesting. (shrink)

Mirror neurons are widely regarded as an important key to social cognition. Despite such wide agreement, there is very little consensus on how or why they are important. The goal of this paper is to clearly explicate the exact role mirror neurons play in social cognition. I aim to answer two questions about the relationship between mirroring and social cognition: What kind of social understanding is involved with mirroring? How is mirroring related to that understanding? I argue that philosophical and (...) empirical considerations lead us to accord a fairly minimal role for mirror neurons in social cognition. (shrink)

Can phenomenological evidence play a decisive role in accepting or rejecting social cognition theories? Is it the case that a theory of social cognition ought to explain and be empirically supported by our phenomenological experience? There is serious disagreement about the answers to these questions. This paper aims to determine the methodological role of phenomenology in social cognition debates. The following three features are characteristic of evidence capable of playing a substantial methodological role: novelty, reliability, and relevance. I argue that (...) phenomenological evidence lacks all three criteria and, consequently, should not play a substantial role in debates about social cognition. (shrink)

This is a penultimate draft of a paper that will appear in Handbook of Imagination, Amy Kind (ed.). Routledge Press. Please cite only the final printed version.

This chapter argues that a Peircean philosophy of sex offers a non-reductionist approach to sex as a biological category. The chapter surveys traditional biological accounts of sex categories and several social constructivist accounts of sex. It then provides an overview of Peirce’s scholastic realism and his ethics of inquiry. While Peirce regarded the distinction between the sexes as a rare “polar distinction”, the chapter works to recover the nuanced view of sex that Peirce ought to have adopted had he extended (...) his scholastic realism to reproductive biology. Ultimately, the Peircean account offered treats sex differences as norms expressed as bimodal distributions. The chapter concludes by illustrating some applications of this Peircean philosophy of sex, and gesturing to those that we can yet barely imagine. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the challenges socially extended minds pose for mainstream, individualistic accounts of social cognition. I argue that individualistic accounts of social cognition neglect phenomena important to social cognition that are properly emphasized by socially extended mind accounts. Although I do not think the evidence or arguments warrant replacing individualistic explanations of social cognition with socially extended explanations, I argue that we have good reason to supplement our individualistic accounts so as to include the ways in which (...) situational context affects social interactions. The result, I hope, is a more sophisticated individualism that offers a more comprehensive account of how we think and act together. (shrink)

Imagination seems to play an epistemic role in philosophical and scientific thought experiments, mindreading, and ordinary practical deliberations insofar as it generates new knowledge of contingent facts about the world. However, it also seems that imagination is limited to creative generation of ideas. Sometimes we imagine fanciful ideas that depart freely from reality. The conjunction of these claims is what I call the puzzle of knowledge through imagination. This chapter aims to resolve this puzzle. I argue that imagination has an (...) epistemic role to play, but it is limited to the context of discovery. Imagination generates ideas, but other cognitive capacities must be employed to evaluate these ideas in order for them to count as knowledge. Consideration of the Simulation Theory's so-called "threat of collapse” provides further evidence that imagination does not, on its own, yield new knowledge of contingent facts, and it suggests a way to supplement imagination in order to get such knowledge. (shrink)

A new translation and edition of Aristotle's Protrepticus (with critical comments on the fragments) -/- Welcome -/- The Protrepticus was an early work of Aristotle, written while he was still a member of Plato's Academy, but it soon became one of the most famous works in the whole history of philosophy. Unfortunately it was not directly copied in the middle ages and so did not survive in its own manuscript tradition. But substantial fragments of it have been preserved in several (...) works by Iamblichus of Chalcis, a third century A.D. neo-Pythagorean philosopher and educator. On the basis of a close study of Iamblichus' extensive use and excerption of Aristotle's Protrepticus, it is possible to reconstruct the backbone of the lost work, and then to flesh it out with the other surviving reports about the work from antiquity (for example in Alexander of Aphrodisias and other ancient commentators on Aristotle). It is also possible to identify several papyrus fragments of the work, and many references and literary allusions in later authors, especially Cicero, whose own lost dialogue Hortensius was a defense of philosophy modeleld on Aristotle's. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey’s thinking on universities, their function, and what is required in support of that function was deeply influenced by University of Berlin founder Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reform of the Prussian educational system. This chapter traces that influence and describes Dewey’s role as one of the founders of the modern American conception of academic freedom. It concludes with a consideration of threats posed to universities and academic freedom by authoritarianism, and possible responses to those threats offered (...) by Peirce and Dewey. (shrink)

Disagreeing with others about how to interpret a social interaction is a common occurrence. We often find ourselves offering divergent interpretations of others’ motives, intentions, beliefs, and emotions. Remarkably, philosophical accounts of how we understand others do not explain, or even attempt to explain such disagreements. I argue these disparities in social interpretation stem, in large part, from the effect of social categorization and our goals in social interactions, phenomena long studied by social psychologists. I argue we ought to expand (...) our accounts of how we understand others in order to accommodate these data and explain how such profound disagreements arise amongst informed, rational, well-meaning individuals. (shrink)

I defend the view that a significant ethical distinction can be made between justified killing in self-defense and police use of lethal force. I start by opposing the belief that police use of lethal force is morally justified on the basis of self-defense. Then I demonstrate that the state’s monopoly on the use of force within a given jurisdiction invests police officers with responsibilities that go beyond what morality requires of the average person. I argue that the police should primarily (...) be concerned with preserving public safety. As a consequence, police have additional moral permissions to use lethal force. But this also means that the principle of restraint is inherent to the policing function and therefore police are obliged to go to greater lengths to avoid killing. I concede that the just use of police force can be made difficult in extreme situations such as a mass riot. In such cases, police should take proportionate actions necessary to protect the lives of inhabitants by restoring order, which might include calling on military support. I conclude with a cautionary note opposing militarization of the policing role. (shrink)

Direct Perception is the view that we can see others' mental states, i.e. that we perceive others' mental states with the same immediacy and directness that we perceive ordinary objects in the world. I evaluate Direct Perception by considering whether we can see intentions, a particularly promising candidate for Direct Perception. I argue that the view equivocates on the notion of intention. Disambiguating the Direct Perception claim reveals a troubling dilemma for the view: either it is banal or highly implausible.

Understanding the mechanics of consciousness remains one of the most important challenges in modern cognitive science. One key step toward understanding consciousness is to associate unconscious physiological processes with subjective experiences of sensory, motor, and emotional contents. This article explores the role of various cellular membrane potential differences and how they give rise to the dynamic infrastructure of conscious experience. This article explains that consciousness is a body-wide, biological process not limited to individual organs because the mind and body are (...) unified as one entity; therefore, no single location of consciousness can be pinpointed. Consciousness exists throughout the entire body, and unified consciousness is experienced and maintained through dynamic repolarization during inhalation and expiration. Extant knowledge is reviewed to provide insight into how differences in cellular membrane potential play a vital role in the triggering of neural and non-neural oscillations. The role of dynamic cellular membrane potentials in the activity of the central nervous system, peripheral nervous system, cardiorespiratory system, and various other tissues (such as muscles and sensory organs) in the physiology of consciousness is also explored. Inspiration and expiration are accompanied by oscillating membrane potentials throughout all cells and play a vital role in subconscious human perception of feelings and states of mind. In addition, the role of the brainstem, hypothalamus, and complete nervous system (central, peripheral, and autonomic)within the mind-body space combine to allow consciousness to emerge and to come alive. This concept departs from the notion that the brain is the only organ that gives rise to consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that political envy is central to unraveling the racial dynamics in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. Building upon Sara Protasi’s taxonomy of envy and, in particular, from her analysis of some DTRT scenes, we conduct a more thorough interrogation of how political emotions, most notably envy, shape race relations in the film. We start by summarizing Protasi’s account of envy and then review two alternative accounts of political emotions. After elucidating what envy is and (...) how it becomes politically valenced, we analyze three key scenes that are the most emblematic of political envy: 1) a discussion between three Black characters on the street corner, 2) an exchange between the film’s main character, Mookie, and his racist co-worker, Pino; and 3) the film’s climactic riot sequence. Our analysis of these three scenes, in addition to complementing previous readings of Do The Right Thing, highlight envy’s potential to either impede or promote political action. (shrink)

This article argues that we ought to reject Gregory Currie’s “Trace Account” of documentary film. According to the Trace Account, a film is a documentary so long the majority of its constitutive images are traces of the film’s subject matter. The argument proceeds by considering how proponents of the Trace Account could respond to Noel Carroll’s charge that their analysis is radically revisionary. I argue that the only responses available are either implausible or show that a fully worked out version (...) of the Trace Account collapses into Carroll’s own, rival definition of documentary. I then consider how advocates of the Trace Account might attempt to rescue the theory by reframing it as an account of a genre or as a theory of evaluation and argue that neither attempt would succeed. Given this, we ought to embrace Carroll’s own account of documentary, according to which a film is documentary if and only if it is a film of presumptive assertion. (shrink)

This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research (...) program encompassing both revisionary and more traditionally inspired approaches to folk psychology. After reviewing the origins of pluralistic folk psychology, the papers in the current issue are introduced. These papers fall into three thematic clusters: Folk-psychological strategies beyond propositional attitude attribution ; Enculturation and regulative folk psychology ; and Defenses of pluralism. (shrink)

We often have affective responses to fictional events. We feel afraid for Desdemona when Othello approaches her in a murderous rage. We feel disgust toward Iago for orchestrating this tragic event. What mental architecture could explain these affective responses? In this paper I consider the claim that the best explanation of our affective responses to fiction involves imaginative desires. Some theorists argue that accounts that do not invoke imaginative desires imply that consumers of fiction have irrational desires. I argue that (...) there are serious worries about imaginative desires that warrant skepticism about the adequacy of the account. Moreover, it is quite difficult to articulate general principles of rationality for desires, and even according to the most plausible of these possible principles, desires about fiction are not irrational. (shrink)

This paper defends two main claims. First, that political philosophy deserves a central place in AI Ethics’ curricula. This is a claim about the content of the AI Ethics class. The second claim is about the form of the AI Ethics class: namely, that considerations originating in political philosophy must inform the way in which AI Ethics is taught. The basic idea animating both claims, is that AI has powerful political implications and that preparing students to navigate these implications requires (...) paying close attention to both the cognitive and practical learning goals of the AI Ethics course. (shrink)

Most people think of themselves as pretty good at understanding others’ beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions. Accurate mindreading is an impressive cognitive feat, and for this reason the philosophical literature on mindreading has focused exclusively on explaining such successes. However, as it turns out, we regularly make mindreading mistakes. Understanding when and how mind misreading occurs is crucial for a complete account of mindreading. In this paper, I examine the conditions under which mind misreading occurs. I argue that these patterns (...) of mind misreading shed light on the limits of mindreading, reveal new perspectives on how mindreading works, and have implications for social epistemology. (shrink)

Our experiences with the external world are possible mainly through vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell providing us a sense of reality. How the brain is able to seamlessly integrate stimuli from our external and internal world into our sense of reality has yet to be adequately explained in the literature. We have previously proposed a three-dimensional unified model of consciousness that partly explains the dynamic mechanism. Here we further expand our model and include illustrations to provide a better conception (...) of the ill-defined space within the self, providing insight into a unified mind-body concept. In this article, we propose that our senses “super-impose” on an existing dynamic space within us after a slight, imperceptible delay. The existing space includes the entire intrapersonal space and can also be called the “the body’s internal 3D default space”. We provide examples from meditation experiences to help explain how the sense of ‘self’ can be experienced through meditation practice associated with underlying physiological processes that take place through cardio-respiratory synchronization and coherence that is developed among areas of the brain. Meditation practice can help keep the body in a parasympathetic dominant state during meditation, allowing an experience of inner ‘self’. Understanding this physical and functional space could help unlock the mysteries of the function of memory and cognition, allowing clinicians to better recognize and treat disorders of the mind by recommending proven techniques to reduce stress as an adjunct to medication treatment. (shrink)

Conscious but incapacitated patients need protection from both undertreatment and overtreatment, for they are exceptionally vulnerable, and dependent on others to act in their interests. In the United States, the law prioritizes autonomy over best interests in decision making. Yet U.S. courts, using both substituted judgment and best interests decision making standards, frequently prohibit the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from conscious but incapacitated patients, such as those in the minimally conscious state, even when ostensibly seeking to determine what patients would (...) have wanted. In the United Kingdom, under the Mental Capacity Act of 2005, courts decide on the best interests of incapacitated patients by, in part, taking into account the past wishes and values of the patient. This paper examines and compares those ethicolegal approaches to decision making on behalf of conscious but incapacitated patients. We argue for a limited interpretation of best interests such that the standard is properly used only when the preferences of a conscious, but incapacitated patient are unknown and unknowable. When patient preferences and values are known or can be reasonably inferred, using a holistic, all-things-considered substituted judgment standard respects patient autonomy. (shrink)

What is it that we are doing when we make ethical claims and judgments, such as the claim that we morally ought to assist refugees? This dissertation introduces and defends a novel theory of ethical thought and discourse. I begin by identifying the surface features of ethical thought and discourse to be explained, including the realist and cognitivist (i.e. belief-like) appearance of ethical judgments, and the apparent close connection between making a sincere ethical judgment and being motivated to act on (...) it. I examine prominent attempts to explain these features, with a focus on recent ‘hybrid’ theories combining elements of expressivism and cognitivism. Despite their initial promise, I argue that extant hybrid theories are nevertheless committed to problematic semantic, metasemantic, or pragmatic assumptions. I then discuss what I take to be the strongest existing option, ethical neo-expressivism (Bar-On and Chrisman, 2009; Bar-On, Chrisman, and Sias, 2014), and develop it into an explicitly hybrid theory proposing that ethical judgments incorporate both motivationally-charged affective states and moral beliefs. I then supplement this account with a theory of the proper function (following Millikan, 1984) of ethical claims and judgments, arguing that they function simultaneously to track the morally salient features of social situations, and to coordinate our behavior around these features. Finally, I defend one of the cognitivist commitments of the theory – namely, that objective moral knowledge is possible – by applying recent work on the epistemology of fundamental or ‘core’ intellectual commitments (Lynch, 2012; Pritchard, 2016) to the moral realm. (shrink)

Clinical Legal Education programmes now take place in most law schools in England and Wales. However, legal education continues to be predominantly focused on the analysis and application of rules, doctrines, and theories to hypothetical scenarios or essay questions. This form of pedagogy either minimises or ignores the role of the client in terms of supplying lawyers with knowledge pertinent to their case. In other words, it overlooks the fact that the lawyer’s acquisition of knowledge is not confined to technical (...) rationality. This article seeks to achieve three broad aims. First, to contribute to the debate concerning the epistemology of reflective practice. Second, to develop a theoretical reflective cycle, informed by Kant’s transcendental idealism, which seeks to maximise knowledge acquisition in legal education, namely knowledge supplied by the client. Third, to address implicit bias using the proposed reflective cycle. An optimal pedagogy for using this cycle is Clinical Legal Education, namely live client clinics. (shrink)

The conventional view of Just War thinking holds that militaries operate under “special” moral rules in war. Conventional Just War thinking establishes a principled approach to such moral exceptionalism in order to prevent arbitrary or capricious uses of military force. It relies on the notion that soldiers are instruments of the state, which is a view that has been critiqued by the Revisionist movement. The Revisionist critique rightly puts greater emphasis on the moral agency of individual soldiers: they are not (...) mere instruments of the state. Although Revisionism has something particularly important to contribute when applied to cases that are short-of-war, where an individual agent’s moral culpability plays a greater role, soldiers fighting wars are not wholly autonomous moral agents. An Institutionalist approach that responds to Revisionist criticisms is a plausible alternative to the conventional Just War account for grounding the moral exceptionalism of war. For the Institutionalist, soldiers are moral agents with state-imposed obligations whose fundamental responsibility is the performance of the proper moral ends of the military institution they serve. If this is true, then soldiers have a moral obligation to be attentive to the moral corruption of the military institution of which they are a part. (shrink)

How good are we at imagining what it is like to be someone else? Clearly, we sometimes get it right. Proponents of empathy suggest that it is an important and useful tool in our interactions with other people. But, also clearly, there are many inauspicious instances where we badly misimagine what it is like to be someone else. In this paper, I consider the epistemic utility of empathic imagination. I argue that most views fail to explain the distinctive patterns of (...) success and failure of empathic imagination, and I put forward a view that seems to offer the best explanation of those patterns. (shrink)

Current research on the various forms of autoscopic phenomena addresses the clinical and neurological correlates of out-of-body experiences, autoscopic hallucinations,and heautoscopy. Yet most of this research is based on functional magnetic resonance imaging results and focuses predominantly on abnormal cortical activity. Previously we proposed that visual consciousness resulted from the dynamic retinogeniculo-cortical oscillations, such that the photoreceptors dynamically integrated with visual and other vision-associated cortices, and was theorized to be mapped out by photoreceptor discs and rich retinal networks which synchronized (...) with the retinotopic mapping and the associated cortex. The feedback from neural input that is received from the thalamus and cortex via retinogeniculo-cortical oscillations and sent to the retina is multifold higher than feed-forward input to the cortex. This can effectively translate into out-of-body experiences projected onto the screen formed by the retina as it is perceived via feedback and feed-forward oscillations from the reticular thalamic nucleus, or “internal searchlight”. This article explores the role of the reticular thalamic nucleus and the retinogeniculo-cortical oscillations as pivotal internal components in vision and various autoscopic phenomena. (shrink)

The US-Australia strategic relationship has evolved from more or less an adversarial position in the 19th century to an Australia largely dependent on the US during the Cold War to the interdependent partnership we see today. Strategic interdependence means that the US-Australia relationship is not merely a one-sided affair; that Australia has something of substance to offer the strategic relationship. Part of the reason that the relationship is strong is because of a shared language, similar social values, and compatible political-legal (...) systems. Moreover, the relationship has been thoroughly institutionalised via intelligence cooperation, defence science collaboration, and extensive personal relationships. But what the US really seems to value is Australia’s reliability as an ally. I argue that Australia best demonstrates its reliability as an ally, however, when it follows US strategic decision-making for the right reasons. This sense of reliability is more akin to trustworthiness than it is to loyalty. History demonstrates that Australia has not always agreed with the US. But agreeing doesn’t matter so much when Australia has established a track record of consistently applying sound reasoning to its strategic decisions and it has made substantive contributions to jointly sought after strategic outcomes. (shrink)

Psychologists have long noted the correlation between empathy and prosocial outcomes. Empathetic people are happier, healthier, more cooperative, and more altruistic than people who are less empathetic. However, empathy is not a panacea for all social ills. Critics argue that empathy is idiosyncratic, easily manipulated, biased in favor of one's in-group, and exacerbates rather than relieves underlying inequalities. The praise and critique of empathy raise an interesting question: Can we improve empathy? It depends on what kind of capacity empathy is. (...) I argue that empathy is comprised of both skills and habits. Both skills and habits can be improved, though the process for improvement is quite different for each. I argue that theoretical and empirical considerations support the idea that we can improve both the skills and habits that underlie empathy. If this is right, it shows that it is possible to harness the positive outcomes of empathy while avoiding some of the darker sides of empathy. Finally, I consider whether empathy is an intellectual or moral virtue. (shrink)

Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Bertram Gawronski articulate a careful defense of research on implicit bias. They argue that though there is room for improvement in various areas, when we set the bar appropriately and when we are comparing relevant events, the test–retest stability and predictive ability of implicit bias measures are respectable. Edouard Machery disagrees. He argues that theories of implicit bias have failed to answer four fundamental questions about measures of implicit bias, and this undermines their utility in (...) further scientific research and policy making. In this article, I offer my perspective on this important debate. I argue that there is a theoretical mismatch in debating the merits of a research program on the terms of a specific theory within the research program. Nevertheless, the discussion allows us to see which questions are answered from within the perspective of a particular theory. I argue that the emphasis should be on whether implicit bias theories predict novel facts. (shrink)

Empathy is many things to many people. Depending on who you ask, it is feeling what another person feels, feeling bad for another person’s suffering, understanding what another person feels, imagining yourself in another person’s situation and figuring out what you would feel, or your brain activating as if you were experiencing the emotion another person is experiencing. These are just some of the various notions of empathy that are at play in philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and primatology. (...) In this chapter, we will not stipulate a definition of empathy per se. Instead, we will review the development of empathy and purported mechanisms of empathy, which will allow us to tease apart various dimensions of empathy related concepts. Understanding the various dimensions of empathy provides context for some recent critiques of empathy as a moral compass and suggests several directions for future fruitful scientific and philosophical work on empathy. (shrink)

In this chapter, I explore the importance of ethics education for senior military officers with responsibilities at the strategic level of government. One problem, as I see it, is that senior commanders might demand “ethics” from their soldiers but then they are themselves primarily informed by a “morally skeptical viewpoint” (in the form of political realism). I argue that ethics are more than a matter of personal behavior alone: the ethical position of an armed service is a matter of the (...) collective responsibility of the people who constitute it, and senior military officers, having authority to give the orders, have a particularly important role. First, I discuss the continued prominence of a neorealist mindset in strategic thinking. Neorealist theory assumes that ethics is a largely irrelevant concern for strategic decision-makers. In contrast, I argue that consideration of moral values should be at the center of strategic theory and practice. Then, in the second section, I explore the “professional ethics” of senior military officers in order to develop an appreciation of the shared values and expectations regarding required conduct within any professional military service. I argue that senior military leaders should be concerned with what it means to be “good” and that this concept of the good can, and should, be applied across cultures and national boundaries. In the final section, I examine armed conflict and briefly discuss the moral reasoning involved to justify deliberate killing and destruction. I conclude that senior military officers require an understanding of sound moral reasoning to implement effective strategy. (shrink)

We have various strategies available to us for understanding another person’s state of mind. Cognitive empathy may be achieved by mental simulation, i.e. by imagining yourself in another’s situation and figuring out what you would think and feel in that situation. Alternatively, you could consider all the relevant information about the person’s situation and folk psychology and draw a sophisticated inference to the best explanation of that person’s perspective. In this chapter, I examine the conditions under which we are likely (...) to use these two familiar strategies for cognitive empathy and when they are likely to be effective. In addition, I discuss a third underexplored pattern of reasoning in understanding others. Self-serving goals, such as anxiety reduction, self-esteem, and confirmation of one’s worldview, distort cognitive empathy. I consider these different strategies in light of hybrid theories of cognitive empathy. (shrink)

In the face of the increasing substitution of free speech for academic freedom, I argue for the distinctiveness and irreplaceability of the latter. Academic freedom has evolved alongside universities in order to support the important social purpose universities serve. Having limned this evolution, I compare academic freedom and free speech. This comparison reveals freedom of expression to be an individual freedom, and academic freedom to be a group-differentiated freedom with a social purpose. I argue that the social purpose of academic (...) freedom behooves an inclusive approach to group differentiation. (shrink)

According to embodied cognition, the philosophical and empirical literature on theory of mind is misguided. Embodied cognition rejects the idea that social cognition requires theory of mind. It regards the intramural debate between the Theory Theory and the Simulation Theory as irrelevant, and it dismisses the empirical studies on theory of mind as ill conceived and misleading. Embodied cognition provides a novel deflationary account of social cognition that does not depend on theory of mind. In this chapter, l describe embodied (...) cognition’s alternative to theory of mind and discuss three challenges it faces. (shrink)

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors (...) We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection. (shrink)

This paper delves into the philosophical debate surrounding determinism and free will, exploring the compatibility of these two concepts in light of contemporary understanding in physics, psychology, and philosophy. The author critiques Ayer's perspective on free will and determinism, employing examples from quantum mechanics and neuroscience to argue for a deterministic framework of understanding human choices and actions. The paper introduces the concept of "Soft Free Will" as a reconciliation between determinism and the human experience of making choices, positing that (...) free will exists not as an ontological reality, but as a psychological phenomenon rooted in our limited understanding of the complexities involved in decision-making. Through a comprehensive analysis, the paper underscores the importance of acknowledging the deterministic nature of human behavior while also appreciating the subjective experience of choice, ultimately arguing that the progression of scientific understanding will continue to reveal the mechanics of choice without negating our experience of free will. (shrink)

This chapter offers a plea for the media to reframe its coverage of campus controversies from free expression to academic freedom. These freedoms are entwined, but distinct. Freedom of expression is extended to all persons with no expectation of quality control, apart from legal prohibitions against defamation, threats, etc. By contrast, academic freedom is a cluster of freedoms afforded to scholarly personnel for a particular purpose – namely, the pursuit of universities’ academic mission to seek truth and advance understanding in (...) the service of society. An academic freedom framing better reflects the distinctive social purpose around which universities are organized, as well as universities’ duty of care to employees and students. While universities have a legal and moral duty of care to all employees and students, the unjust, exclusionary past and present of higher education arguably makes that duty particularly acute in the case of equity-deserving (e.g., racialized, Indigenous, disabled or 2SLGBTQ+) people. Finally, academic freedom framing for campus media stories is less monolithic than free expression framing, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of campus controversies while keeping universities accountable to the public they serve. In this chapter, I survey three very different campus controversies at a single Canadian university, and the media response each received. I show how an academic freedom frame for those stories would have produced better reportage while reducing opportunities for bad actors to manipulate both universities and the media. At the end of the day, the real crisis at universities isn’t the cancellation of ill-judged events that were never a part of the academic mission; it is the ongoing erosion of academic freedom. (shrink)

I defend a modified rights-based unjust threat account for morally justified killing in self-defense. Rights-based moral justifications for killing in self-defense presume that human beings have a right to defend themselves from unjust threats. An unjust threat account of self-defense says that this right is derived from an agent’s moral obligation to not pose a deadly threat to the defender. The failure to keep this moral obligation creates the moral asymmetry necessary to justify a defender killing the unjust threat in (...) self-defense. I argue that the other rights-based approaches explored here are unfair to the defender because they require her to prove moral fault in the threat. But then I suggest that the unjust threat account should be modified so that where the threat is non-culpable or only partially culpable, the defender should seek to share the cost and risk with the threat in order for both parties to survive. (shrink)

This paper utilizes Robert Smithson's philosophy as a kind of counterpoint, rather than refutation, to many of Hegel's convictions on the nature and function of art in world historical spirit.

In a recent article [AJP, 2013], Saul Smilansky argues that our own existence is regrettable and that we should prefer not to have existed at all. I show why Smilansky's argument is fallacious, if we understand terms like ‘regrettable’ and ‘prefer’ in a straightforward non-deviant way.

Many people claim to have had direct perceptual awareness of God. William Alston, Richard Swinburne, Gary Gutting, and others have based their philosophical views on these reports. But using analogies from our encounters with humans whose abilities surpass our own, we realize that something essential is missing from these reports. The absence of this element renders it highly unlikely that these people have actually encountered a divine being. (Published Online August 11 2004).

In this chapter I provide resources for assessing the charge that post-secondary students are self-censoring. The argument is advanced in three broad steps. First, I argue that both a duality at the heart of the concept of self-censorship and the term’s negative lay connotation should incline us to limit the charge of self-censorship to a specific subset of its typical extension. I argue that in general we ought to use the neutral term “refrainment from speech,” reserving the more normatively charged (...) “self-censorship” for cases of bad refrainment. In the second step of the argument, I seek to narrow down what counts as bad refrainment by mapping broad categories of possible reasons for and consequences of refrainment from speech. I argue that in general refrainment from speech is only bad if it is for bad (or what I will later term vicious) reasons or has pernicious consequences. When considering pernicious consequences, I argue that we should be concerned in particular about systems that perpetuate the coercive silencing of marginalized voices. I draw on Kristie Dotson’s work to describe two means by which marginalized voices are systemically silenced: testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering. After considering these types of silencing, I circle back to the post-secondary context to assess whether there is cause for concern if, as some reports suggests, US college students are refraining from speech within the educational context. (shrink)