Is it possible for an individual that has gone out of being to come back into being again? The English Aristotelian, Thomas White, argued that it is not. Thomas Hobbes disagreed, and used the case of the Ship of Theseus to argue that individuals that have gone out of being may come back into being again. This paper provides the first systematic account of their arguments. It is doubtful that Hobbes has a consistent case against White. Still his (...) criticism may have prompted White to clarify his views on identity over time in his later work. (shrink)

With the rising poverty in the Philippines, Filipino farm workers in Agusan del Sur faced distinctive challenges in their homes and working environment. This study aimed to discuss Filipino farm workers’ lived experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms. Filipino farm workers shared their experiences that tapped into their psychological aspects. Mainly, the problem was stress, worry, and frustration centered on poverty and educational attainment. Some farm workers were likely unaware of the main problem that prolonged their hardships. Still, most have managed (...) to fortify their mental health. This report indicates that most Filipino farm workers in Agusan del Sur have a healthy psychological well-being. However, this statement does not change the intensity of their struggle to survive. (shrink)

A recent challenge to statist arguments defending the right of states to exclude prospective immigrants maintains that such statist arguments prove too much. Specifically, the challenge argues that statist arguments, insofar as they are correct, entail that states may permissibily exclude current members' newcomers by birth, which seems to violate a widely held intuition that members' newcomers by birth ought automatically to be granted membership rights. The basic claim is that statist arguments cannot account for the differntial treatment between prospective (...) immigrants and newcomers by birth. Call this the newcomer-by-birth objection. This article rejects the newcomer-by-birth rejection. It begins by sketching the precise extent to which the objection applies to statist arguments. It then examines the case of newcomers by birth and argues for a principled basis for treating them differentially from prospective immigrants such that a right to exclude prospective immigrants need not entail a right to exclude newcomers by birth. But this distinction holds only in most cases, not all, and therefore the newcomer-by-birth objection is not entirely defeated. With respect to the cases in which the objection does hold, it is argued that such cases are morally akin to international adoption, and thus morally benign. All considered, statist arguments easily survive the newcomer-by-birth objection. (shrink)

I find it hard to say whether TSC this year was the most balanced or the most biased since the first I attended in 1998. That year there were 35 plenary talks, of which 27 were distinctly materialist — that is, they assumed that consciousness ‘arises’ from ‘physical’ processes in the brain. This year there were also 35 plenaries, with 24 devoted to physicalist accounts. I cannot claim absolute precision for these figures, because it is not always easy to make (...) black-and-white distinctions. Research by Imants Barušs (2008) has shown that many scientists have non-physicalist beliefs but do not say so for fear of jeopardising their careers. In that case they may present apparently physicalist papers although physicalist assumptions are not present. (shrink)

May lethal autonomous weapons systems—‘killer robots ’—be used in war? The majority of writers argue against their use, and those who have argued in favour have done so on a consequentialist basis. We defend the moral permissibility of killer robots, but on the basis of the non-aggregative structure of right assumed by Just War theory. This is necessary because the most important argument against killer robots, the responsibility trilemma proposed by Rob Sparrow, makes the same assumptions. We show that the (...) crucial moral question is not one of responsibility. Rather, it is whether the technology can satisfy the requirements of fairness in the re-distribution of risk. Not only is this possible in principle, but some killer robots will actually satisfy these requirements. An implication of our argument is that there is a public responsibility to regulate killer robots ’ design and manufacture. (shrink)

There has been much debate regarding the 'double-effect' of sedatives and analgesics administered at the end-of-life, and the possibility that health professionals using these drugs are performing 'slow euthanasia.' On the one hand analgesics and sedatives can do much to relieve suffering in the terminally ill. On the other hand, they can hasten death. According to a standard view, the administration of analgesics and sedatives amounts to euthanasia when the drugs are given with an intention to hasten death. In this (...) paper we report a small qualitative study based on interviews with 8 Australian general physicians regarding their understanding of intention in the context of questions about voluntary euthanasia, assisted suicide and particularly the use of analgesic and sedative infusions (including the possibility of voluntary or non-voluntary 'slow euthanasia'). We found a striking ambiguity and uncertainty regarding intentions amongst doctors interviewed. Some were explicit in describing a 'grey' area between palliation and euthanasia, or a continuum between the two. Not one of the respondents was consistent in distinguishing between a foreseen death and an intended death. A major theme was that 'slow euthanasia' may be more psychologically acceptable to doctors than active voluntary euthanasia by bolus injection, partly because the former would usually only result in a small loss of 'time' for patients already very close to death, but also because of the desirable ambiguities surrounding causation and intention when an infusion of analgesics and sedatives is used. The empirical and philosophical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

My aim here is to make sense of Plato's account of desire in the middle dialogues. To do that I need to unify or reconcile what are at first sight two quite different accounts: the doctrine of eros in the Symposium and the tripartite theory of motivation in the Republic. It may be that the two theories are after all irreconcilable, that Plato simply changed his mind on the nature of human desire after writing the Symposium and before composing the (...) Republic. But that conclusion can be justified only if attempts to reconcile the two theories end in failure. The attempt must be made first. (shrink)

I criticise a recent variety of argument for the representational theory of experience, which holds that the very idea of perceptual experience entails the representational view. I argue that the representational view is not simply obvious, nor is it contained in the mere idea of the world looking some way. I also clarify and re-present an argument against the representational view due to Charles Travis.

Can an explanation of a set of beliefs cast doubt on the things believed? In particular, can an evolutionary explanation of religious beliefs call the contents of those beliefs into question? Yes - under certain circumstances. I distinguish between natural histories of beliefs and genealogies. A natural history of a set of beliefs is an explanation that puts them down to naturalistic causes. (I try to give an account of natural explanations which favors a certain kind of ‘methodological atheism’ without (...) begging any crucial questions against theists.) A genealogy is an explanation which somehow subverts the claims believed, usually by putting down the beliefs to unreliable causal mechanisms. Some genealogies are natural histories, such as Aquinas’s explanation of the prevalence of Islam and Gibbon’s explanation of the prevalence of Christianity. But not all genealogies are natural histories and not all natural histories are genealogies: witness the Primitive Christians’ explanation of the prevalence of Paganism which relies crucially on supernatural agencies and Hume’s explanation of our moral beliefs which defines moral truth in terms of the idealized outputs of our natural belief-forming mechanisms. However both believers and non-believers postulate a natural propensity of to devotion on the part of human beings a ‘sensus divinitatis’ which often results in false positives and is therefore unreliable. Thus the evolutionary explanation of this propensity does not add much to the skeptical case against religion. I conclude by arguing, as against Plantinga that since on his own showing our sensus divinitatis often malfunctions under optimum conditions, its unreliability constitutes a defeater for the claim that Christian beliefs are properly basic. (shrink)

This paper describes one style of functional analysis commonly used in the neurosciences called task-bound functional analysis. The concept of function invoked by this style of analysis is distinctive in virtue of the dependence relations it bears to transient environmental properties. It is argued that task-bound functional analysis cannot explain the presence of structural properties in nervous systems. An alternative concept of neural function is introduced that draws on the theoretical neuroscience literature, and an argument is given to show that (...) this alternative concept of may help to overcome the explanatory limitations of task-bound functional analysis. (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma is based on the intuitions that in single-player video games fictional acts of murder are seen as morally acceptable whereas fictional acts of sexual assault are seen as morally unacceptable. Recently, it has been suggested that these intuitions may apply across different forms of media as part of a broader Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far. This study aims to empirically explore this issue by determining whether fictional murder is seen as more morally acceptable than fictional sexual (...) assault across different media types, and whether audio-visuality and the degree of agency afforded by the medium influences these judgments. An experimental survey study was developed where participants responded to imaginary fictional scenarios as part of a 2 (engages with fictional murder or fictional sexual assault) X 2 (in a high or low agency) X 2 (audio-visual or non-audio-visual medium) factorial design. It was found that fictional murder was seen to be more morally acceptable than fictional sexual assault across all media types, providing empirical support for the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far. It was also found that the audio-visuality and degree of agency influenced judgments of moral acceptability. (shrink)

Lay persons may have intuitions about morality's objectivity. What do these intuitions look like? And what are their causes and consequences? In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have begun to investigate these questions empirically. This article presents and assesses the resulting area of research as well as its potential philosophical implications. First, we introduce the methods of empirical research on folk moral objectivism. Second, we provide an overview of the findings that have so far been made. Third, we (...) raise a number of methodological worries that cast doubt upon these findings. And fourth, we discuss ways in which lay persons' intuitions aboutmoral objectivity may bear on philosophical claims. (shrink)

A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N (...) = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests. (shrink)

In philosophy, as in many other disciplines and domains, stable disagreement among peers is a widespread and well-known phenomenon. Our intuitions about paradigm cases, e.g. Christensen's Restaurant Case, suggest that in such controversies suspension of judgment is rationally required. This would prima facie suggest a robust suspension of judgment in philosophy. But we are still lacking a deeper theoretical explanation of why and under what conditions suspension is rationally mandatory. In the first part of this paper I will focus on (...) this question. After a critical survey of some recent alternative approaches (diversity as a thread to the reliability, decision problem, acquisition of undercutting defeaters), I will argue that in fact discovering disagreement with an opponent provides me with a rebutting defeater, but only if some further non-trivial conditions are satisfied - among them my acknowledging her as my reliability peer. In the second part of the paper I will explore in more detail the skeptical implications this account has for philosophy. Here, I will defend two claims. First, skepticism about philosophy is mandatory only if the relevant peerness assumption can be justified. Second, in philosophy there is no basis available that would support the relevant peerness assumption. If this is correct, we are not forced into skepticism about philosophy and may rationally retain our philosophical beliefs even in the face of controversy. (shrink)

Intuitively, many people seem to hold that engaging in acts of virtual murder in videogames is morally permissible, whereas engaging in acts of virtual child molestation is morally impermissible. The Gamer’s Dilemma (Luck in Ethics Inf Technol 11:31–36, 2009) challenges these intuitions by arguing that it is unclear whether there is a morally relevant difference between these two types of virtual actions. There are two main responses in the literature to this dilemma. First, attempts to resolve the dilemma by defending (...) an account of the relevant moral differences between virtual murder and virtual child molestation. Second, attempts to dissolve the dilemma by undermining the intuitions that ground it. In this paper, we argue that a narrow version of the Gamer’s Dilemma seems to survive attempts to resolve or dissolve it away entirely, since neither approach seems to be able to solve the dilemma for all cases. We thus provide a contextually sensitive version of the dilemma that more accurately tracks onto the intuitions of gamers. However, we also argue that the intuitions that ground the narrow version of the Dilemma may not have a moral foundation, and we put forward alternative non-moral normative foundations that seem to better account for the remaining intuitive difference between the two types of virtual actions. We also respond to proposed solutions to the Gamer’s Dilemma in novel ways and set out areas for future empirical work in this area. (shrink)

People often talk to others about their personal past. These discussions are inherently selective. Selective retrieval of memories in the course of a conversation may induce forgetting of unmentioned but related memories for both speakers and listeners (Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007). Cuc et al. (2007) defined the forgetting on the part of the speaker as within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting (WI-RIF) and the forgetting on the part of the listener as socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SS-RIF). However, if the forgetting associated with (...) WI-RIF and SS-RIF is to be taken seriously as a mechanism that shapes both individual and shared memories, this mechanism must be demonstrated with meaningful material and in ecologically valid groups. In our first 2 experiments we extended SS-RIF from unemotional, experimenter-contrived material to the emotional and unemotional autobiographical memories of strangers (Experiment 1) and intimate couples (Experiment 2) when merely overhearing the speaker selectively practice memories. We then extended these results to the context of a free-flowing conversation (Experiments 3 and 4). In all 4 experiments we found WI-RIF and SS-RIF regardless of the emotionalvalence or individual ownership of the memories. We discuss our findings in terms of the role of conversational silence in shaping both our personal and shared pasts. (shrink)

The paper reconstructs Moore's Open Question Argument (OQA) and discusses its rise and fall. There are three basic objections to the OQA: Geach's point, that Moore presupposes that ?good? is a predicative adjective (whereas it is in fact attributive); Lewy's point, that it leads straight to the Paradox of Analysis; and Durrant's point that even if 'good' is not synonymous with any naturalistic predicate, goodness might be synthetically identical with a naturalistic property. As against Geach, I argue that 'good' has (...) both predicative and attributive uses and that in moral contexts it is difficult to give a naturalistic account of the attributive 'good'. To deal with Lewy, I reformulate the OQA. But the bulk of the paper is devoted to Durrant's objection. I argue that the post-Moorean programme of looking for synthetic identities between moral and naturalistic properties is either redundant or impossible. For it can be carried through only if 'good' expresses an empirical concept, in which case it is redundant since naturalism is true. But 'good' does not express an empirical concept (a point proved by the reformulated OQA). Hence synthetic naturalism is impossible. I discuss direct reference as a possible way out for the synthetic naturalist and conclude that it will not work. The OQA may be a bit battered but it works after a fashion. (shrink)

Moral realists believe that there are objective moral truths. According to one of the most prominent arguments in favour of this view, ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming, and we have therefore prima facie reason to believe that realism is true. Some proponents of this argument have claimed that the hypothesis that ordinary people experience morality as realist-seeming is supported by psychological research on folk metaethics. While most recent research has been thought to contradict this claim, four prominent earlier studies (...) indeed seem to suggest a tendency towards realism. My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed internal critique of these four studies. I argue that, once interpreted properly, all of them turn out in line with recent research. They suggest that most ordinary people experience morality as “pluralist-” rather than realist-seeming, i.e., that ordinary people have the intuition that realism is true with regard to some moral issues, but variants of anti-realism are true with regard to others. This result means that moral realism may be less well justified than commonly assumed. (shrink)

Quine’s classical classic interpretation succinctly characterized characterizes Carnap’s Aufbau as an attempt “to account for the external world as a logical construct of sense-data....” Consequently, “Russell” was characterized as the most important influence on the Aufbau. Those times have passed. Formulating a comprehensive and balanced interpretation of the Aufbau has turned out to be a difficult task and one that must take into account several disjointed sources. My thesis is that the core of the Aufbau rested on a problem that (...) had haunted German philosophy since the end of the 19th century. In terms fashionable at the time, this problem may be expressed as the polarity between Leben and Geist that characterized German philosophy during the years of the Weimar Republic. At that time, many philosophers, including Cassirer, Rickert and Vaihinger, were engaged in overcoming this polarity. As I will show, Carnap’s Aufbau joined the ranks of these projects. This suggests that Lebensphilosophie and Rickert’s System der Philosophie exerted a strong influence on Carnap’s projects, an influence that is particularly conspicuous in his unpublished manuscript Vom Chaos zur Wirklichkeit. Carnap himself asserted that this manuscript could be considered “the germ of the constitution theory” of the Aufbau. Reading Chaos also reveals another strong but neglected influence on the Aufbau, namely a specific version of neutral monism put forward by the philosopher and psychologist Theodor Ziehen before World War I. Ziehen’s work contributed much to the invention of the constitutional method of quasi-analysis. -/-. (shrink)

Andreas Schmidt and Neil Levy have recently defended nudging against the objection that nudges fail to treat nudgees as rational agents. Schmidt rejects two theses that have been taken to support the objection: that nudges harness irrational processes in the nudgee, and that they subvert the nudgee’s rationality. Levy rejects a third thesis that may support the objection: that nudges fail to give reasons. I argue that these defences can be extrapolated from nudges to some nonconsensual neurointerventions; if Schmidt’s and (...) Levy’s defences succeed, then some nonconsensual neurointerventions neither harness irrationality, nor subvert rationality, nor fail to give reasons. This, I claim, poses a challenge both to opponents of nonconsensual neurointerventions, and to defenders of nudging. (shrink)

Global meta-philosophical skepticism (i.e. completely unrestricted skepticism about philosophy) based upon disagreement faces the problem of self-defeat since it undercuts its motivating conciliatory principle. However, the skeptic may easily escape this threat by adopting a more modest kind of skepticism, that will be called “extensive meta-philosophical skepticism”, i.e., the view that most of our philosophical beliefs are unjustified, except our beliefs in epistemically fundamental principles. As I will argue in this paper, this kind of skepticism is well-motivated, does not undercut (...) the conciliatory principle, but still poses a radical challenge to philosophy as a cognitive discipline. Moreover, I will argue that non-global skepticism that is still extensive undermines itself as well. The deeper reason for this is that this more modest kind of skepticism can only be motivated by the assumption that disagreement with philosophical peers is abundant and that we can identify peers only by relying on track-record arguments. But then one can argue for extensive meta-philosophical skepticism only if one presupposes that those philosophical beliefs that form the basis of track-record evaluations are justified. Here, the threat of self-defeat looms again. I will proceed by first defending the premises of this new anti-skeptical argument against standard objections from the literature. Second, I will show in more detail where the epistemic inconsistency arises in the argument for extensive meta-philosophical skepticism. I conclude with an assessment of the scope and the limits of my argument. (shrink)

Crime-preventing neurointerventions (CPNs) are increasingly being used or advocated for crime prevention. There is increasing use of testosterone-lowering agents to prevent recidivism in sexual offenders, and strong political and scientific interest in developing pharmaceutical treatments for psychopathy and anti-social behaviour. Recent developments suggest that we may ultimately have at our disposal a range of drugs capable of suppressing violent aggression, and it is not difficult to imagine possible applications of such drugs in crime prevention. But should neurointerventions be used in (...) crime prevention, and may the state ever permissibly impose CPNs as part of the criminal justice process? It is widely thought that preventing recidivism is one of the aims of criminal justice, yet existing means of pursuing this aim are often poorly effective, restrictive of basic freedoms, and harmful. Incarceration, for example, tends to be disruptive of personal relationships and careers, detrimental to physical and mental health, highly restrictive of freedom of movement and association, and rarely more than modestly effective at preventing recidivism. Neurointerventions hold the promise of preventing recidivism in ways that are more effective and more humane, but the use of CPNs in criminal justice raises several ethical concerns. CPNs could be highly intrusive and may threaten fundamental human values, such as bodily integrity and freedom of thought, and humanity has a track record of misguided, harmful, and unwarrantedly coercive use of neurotechnological ‘solutions’ to criminality. This collection brings together original contributions from emerging scholars and internationally renowned moral and political philosophers to address these issues. (shrink)

This is a response to Stephen Maitzen’s paper. ‘Moral Conclusions from Nonmoral Premises’. Maitzen thinks that No-Ought-From-Is is false. He does not dispute the formal proofs of Schurz and myself, but he thinks they are beside the point. For what the proponents of No-Ought-From-Is need to show is not that you cannot get SUBSTANTIVELY moral conclusions from FORMALLY non-moral premises but that you cannot get SUBSTANTIVELY moral conclusions from SUBSTANTIVELY non-moral premises. And he believes that he can derive substantively moral (...) conclusions from FORMALLY moral but SUBSTANTIVELY nonmoral premises. However his argument relies on what I call ‘taxonomic essentialism’, the thesis that sentences do not change their semantic characters from context to context or from world to world. In particular, they do not change their META-ETHICAL status from context to context or world to world. If a sentence is non-moral at one world it is non-moral at all the rest. This thesis leads to contradictions (with some propositions as both moral and non-moral) and even if (as is perhaps possible) these contradictions can be avoided, it leads to further consequences that are palpably absurd. Thus It may be possible to derive substantively moral conclusions from premises that are not substantively moral, but if it is, Maitzen has failed to prove the point. (shrink)

Abstract. In Dynamics of Reason Michael Friedman proposes a kind of synthesis between the neokantianism of Ernst Cassirer, the logical empiricism of Rudolf Carnap, and the historicism of Thomas Kuhn. Cassirer and Carnap are to take care of the Kantian legacy of modern philosophy of science, encapsulated in the concept of a relativized a priori and the globally rational or continuous evolution of scientific knowledge,while Kuhn´s role is to ensure that the historicist character of scientific knowledge is taken seriously. (...) More precisely, Carnapian linguistic frameworks, guarantee that the evolution of science procedes in a rational manner locally,while Cassirer’s concept of an internally defined conceptual convergence of empirical theories provides the means to maintain the global continuity of scientific reason. In this paper it is argued that Friedman’s neokantian account of scientific reason based on the concept of the relativized a priori underestimates the pragmatic aspects of the dynamics of scientific reason. To overcome this short-coming, I propose to reconsider C.I. Lewis’s account of a pragmatic the priori, recently modernized and elaborated by Hasok Chang. This may be<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br&g t;<br><br><br><br><br><br>Keywords: Dynamics of reason, Paradigms, Logical Empiricism,Neokantianism, Pragmatism, Mathematics, Communicative Rationality. (shrink)

Rainer Forst and others claim that normative moral and political claims depend for their justification on meeting a requirement of reciprocal and general acceptability (RGA). I focus on a core component of RGA, namely, the idea of reciprocity of reasons, distinguish between two readings of RGA, and argue that if reciprocity of reasons is understood in Forst’s terms, then RGA, even on the most promising reading, may not serve as a requirement of moral or political justification at all. The discussion (...) concludes with constructive observations on a path forward for theorists who nevertheless are inclined to hold on to RGA. (shrink)

This is the introductory essay to the collection of essays: 'Acquaintance: New Essays' (eds. Knowles & Raleigh, forthcoming, OUP). In this essay I provide some historical background to the concept of acquaintance. I examine various Russellian theses about acquaintance that contemporary acquaintance theorists may wish to reject. I consider a number of questions that acquaintance theorists face. I provide a survey of current debates in philosophy where acquaintance has recently been invoked. And I also provide brief summaries of the other (...) essays in this volume. (shrink)

In Writing the Book of the World, Ted Sider argues that David Lewis’s distinction between those predicates which are ‘perfectly natural’ and those which are not can be extended so that it applies to words of all semantic types. Just as there are perfectly natural predicates, there may be perfectly natural connectives, operators, singular terms and so on. According to Sider, one of our goals as metaphysicians should be to identify the perfectly natural words. Sider claims that there is a (...) perfectly natural first-order quantifier. I argue that this claim is not justified. Quine has shown that we can dispense with first-order quantifiers, by using a family of ‘predicate functors’ instead. I argue that we have no reason to think that it is the first-order quantifiers, rather than Quine’s predicate functors, which are perfectly natural. The discussion of quantification is used to provide some motivation for a general scepticism about Sider’s project. Shamik Dasgupta’s ‘generalism’ and Jason Turner’s critique of ‘ontological nihilism’ are also discussed. (shrink)

How does Locke contribute to the development of 18th-century projects for a science of the mind, even though he seems to reject or at least bracket off such an idea himself? Contrary to later understandings of empiricism, Locke goes out of his way to state that his project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2). Locke further specifies that this (...) means his analysis of mental processes will not engage with knowledge of the brain (e.g. in terms of corpuscles and animal spirits), even though he had been the student of Thomas Willis. Now, Kant seemed to make an elementary mistake, given such a clear statement on Locke’s part, when he claimed that Locke’s project was a “physiology of the understanding” (in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). One can ask of course what this physiology of the understanding was, and if it existed, in or out of the Lockean intellectual world (as I have sought to investigate in a 2016 paper). This leads me to inquire into the outcome of his empiricism for a scientific treatment of the mind, including in the sense of a ‘naturalization’ of the mind (with implications also for our understanding of empiricism: Anstey’s influential distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy does not seem useful here). Because if Kant made this charge, there were also many 18th-century thinkers who positively treated Locke as their great forerunner in psychology and related fields: Charles Bonnet and Joseph Priestley among them, just as some prominent physicians such as Cabanis claimed to be ‘finishing the job’ that Locke had started in, e.g. their materialist theories of the passions. What one might term ‘the Locke Problem’ here is: how can one reconcile empiricism and claims about cerebral processes, while seeking to remain a Lockean? Differently put, what is the process of naturalization, a naturalization of? (shrink)

I argue 1) That in his celebrated Is/Ought passage, Hume employs ‘deduction’ in the strict sense, according to which if a conclusion B is justly or evidently deduced from a set of premises A, A cannot be true and B false, or B false and the premises A true. 2) That Hume was following the common custom of his times which sometimes employed ‘deduction’ in a strict sense to denote inferences in which, in the words of Dr Watts’ Logick, ‘the (...) premises, according to the reason of things, do really contain the conclusion that is deduced from them’; that although Hume sometimes uses ‘demonstrative argument’ as a synonym for ‘deduction’, like most of his contemporaries, he generally reserves the word ‘demonstration’ for deductive inferences in which the premises are both necessary and self-evident. 3) That Mr Hume did indeed mean to suggest that deductions from IS to OUGHT were ‘altogether inconceivable’ since if ought represents a new relation or affirmation, it cannot, in the strict sense, be justly deduced from premises which do not really contain it. 4) That in a large and liberal (or perhaps loose and promiscuous) sense Hume does deduce oughts and ought nots from observations concerning human affairs, but that the deductions in question are not inferences, but explanations, since in another sense of ‘deduce’, common in the Eighteenth Century, to deduce B from A is to trace B back to A or to explain B in terms of A; 5) That a small attention to the context of Hume’s remarks and to the logical notions on which they are based would subvert those vulgar systems of philosophy which exaggerate the distinction between fact and value; for just because it is ‘altogether inconceivable’ that the new relation or affirmation OUGHT should be a deduction from others that are entirely different from it, it does not follow that the facts represented by IS and IS NOT are at bottom any different from the values represented by OUGHT and OUGHT NOT. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical and scienti .c discussions of mind developed from a 'proto-concept of mind ',a mythical,tradition- alistic,animistic and quasi-sensory theory about what it means to have a mind. It can be found in many di .erent cultures and has a semantic core corresponding to the folk-phenomenological notion of a 'soul '.It will be argued that this notion originates in accurate and truthful .rst-person reports about the experiential content of a special neurophenomenological state-class called 'out-of-body experiences '.They can be undergone by (...) every human being and seem to possess a culturally invariant cluster of functional and phenomenal core properties similar to the proto-concept of mind. The common causal factor in the emergence and development of the notion of the soul and the proto-concept of mind may consist in a yet to be determined set of properties realized by the human brain, underlying the cluster of phenomenal properties described in the relevant first-person reports. This hypothesis suggests that such a neurofunctional substrate ed human beings at different times, and in widely varying cultural contexts, to postulate the existence of a soul and to begin developing a theory of mind. (shrink)

According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this ‘typicality effect’ holds for the concept of basic needs. Through multiple operationalizations of typicality, our studies yielded evidence for a (...) strong effect of this kind: Participants tended to recall the same core examples of the concept in a free-listing task. They judged some basic needs to be more typical than others. The items that were judged to be more typical were listed more frequently in the free-listing task. These items were listed earlier on in the free-listing task. Typical basic needs, as well as non needs, were classified faster than atypical basic needs in a reaction time study. These findings suggest that the concept of basic needs may have a non-classical structure. If so, the quest for a simple and robust intensional analysis of the concept may be futile. (shrink)

‘Biodiversity’ is widely recognized as an extremely ambiguous concept in conservation science and ecology. It is defined in a number of different and incompatible ways in the scientific literature, and is also “exported” beyond the scientific community, where it may take on a host of other meanings for governments, policy-makers, non-governmental organizations, and the general public at large. One might respond to this ambiguity by either pushing for its clarification, and by extension the adoption of a single, univocal biodiversity concept, (...) or by rejecting the term entirely, replacing it with a relevant, more precise concept in each context. In this paper, I argue for a third approach. Drawing on literature describing change in large organizations, I explore ways in which ambiguity might be seen as productive – as a manner, at the very least, in which we can enable action by a mixed coalition of actors with different and, at times, contradictory interests and value commitments. I explore how this literature – in particular, a taxonomy of rhetorical uses of ambiguous concepts – could enable us to put the ambiguity of biodiversity to work for us, offering us a way to intervene in conflicts about the concept by helping to develop both clearer descriptive analyses and normative “rules for engagement” in debates surrounding biodiversity. (shrink)

A growing number of decision theorists have, in recent years, defended the view that rationality is permissive under risk: Different rational agents may be more or less risk-averse or risk-inclined. This can result in them making different choices under risk even if they value outcomes in exactly the same way. One pressing question that arises once we grant such permissiveness is what attitude to risk we should implement when choosing on behalf of other people. Are we permitted to implement any (...) of the rationally permissible risk attitudes, is there some specific risk attitude that is required when choosing for others, or are we required to defer to the risk attitudes of the people on whose behalf we are choosing? This article elaborates on this question, explains its wider practical and theoretical significance, provides an overview of existing answers, and explores how to go about providing a more systematic account of how to choose on behalf of others in risky contexts. (shrink)

Until very recently the received wisdom on Russell’s moral philosophy was that it is uninspired and derivative, from Moore in its first phase and from Hume and the emotivists in its second. In my view this is a consensus of error. In the latter part of this essay I contend: 1) that Russell’s ‘work in moral philosophy’ had at least three, and (depending how you look at it) up to six ‘main phases’; 2) that in some of those phases, it (...) was not derivative, but on the contrary, highly original; 3) that Russell was a pioneer of two of the chief forms of ethical anti-realism that have dominated debate in this century, emotivism and the error theory (so that if the theory of Human Society was derived from emotivism, it was derived from a family of theories that Russell himself helped to create); 4) that the revolt against Hegelianism, which led to the birth of Analytic Philosophy, had an ethical dimension to it; and 5) that Russell played an important part in the debates that led up to Moore’s Principia Ethica, so that the view form which his own opinions were derived is one that he helped to develop. -/- I also argue that Russell himself pioneered a rather puritanical conception of philosophy which tended to extrude his own writings on politics and practical ethics as not really philosophical. Since this conception has been largely abandoned, it is time to let them back into the fold. I argue that this views of practical affairs are often backed by interesting philosophical arguments, illustrating this thesis with a reconstruction and critique of Russell’s Hobbesian argument for world government. (shrink)

No abstract available. First paragraph: In this issue’s target article, Stier and Schoene-Siefert purport to ‘depotentialize’ the argument from potentiality based on their claim that any human cell may be “converted” into a morally significant entity, and consequently, the argument from potentiality finally succumbs to a reductio ad absurdum. I aim to convey two reasons for skepticism about the innocuousness of the notion of cell convertibility, and hence, the cogency of their argument.

Conceptions of acceptability-based moral or political justification take it that authoritative acceptability constitutes, or contributes to, validity, or justification. There is no agreement as to what bar for authoritativeness such justification may employ. The paper engages the issue in relation to (i) the level of idealization that a bar for authoritativeness, ψ, imparts to a standard of acceptability-based justification, S, and (ii) the degree of discursive purchase of the discursive standing that S accords to people when it builds ψ. I (...) argue that (i) and (ii) are interdependent: high idealization values entail low discursive purchase, while high degrees of purchase require low idealization values. I then distinguish between alethic conceptions of justification that prioritize ends that commit to high idealization values, and recognitive conceptions that favour high discursive purchase. On this basis, I argue for a moderately recognitivist constraint on idealization. To render the recognitive discursive minimum available to relevant people at the site of justification, S should set ψ low enough so that it is a genuine option for actual people to reject relevant views in ways that S recognizes as authoritative. (shrink)

What we traditionally call ‘conscious thought’ actually is a subpersonal process, and only rarely a form of mental action. The paradigmatic, standard form of conscious thought is non-agentive, because it lacks veto-control and involves an unnoticed loss of epistemic agency and goal-directed causal self-determination at the level of mental content. Conceptually, it must be described as an unintentional form of inner behaviour. Empirical research shows that we are not mentally autonomous subjects for about two thirds of our conscious lifetime, because (...) while conscious cognition is unfolding, it often cannot be inhibited, suspended, or terminated. The instantiation of a stable first- person perspective as well as of certain necessary conditions of personhood turn out to be rare, graded, and dynamically variable properties of human beings. I argue that individual representational events only become part of a personal-level process by being functionally integrated into a specific form of transparent conscious self-representation, the ‘epistemic agent model’. The EAM may be the true origin of our consciously experienced firstperson perspective. (shrink)

From David Hume onwards, many philosophers have argued that moral thinking is characterized by a tendency to “project” our own mental states onto the world. This metaphor of projection may be understood as involving two empirical claims: the claim that humans experience morality as a realm of objective facts (the experiential hypothesis), and the claim that this moral experience is immediately caused by affective attitudes (the causal hypothesis). Elsewhere I argued in detail against one form of the experiential hypothesis. My (...) main aim in this paper is to show that, considering recent psychological studies about folk metaethics and the relation between moral judgements and emotions, the causal hypothesis must be considered problematic too. First, the most common argument in favor of the causal hypothesis is based on an implausible premise and a dubious assumption. Second, ordinary people’s moral experience is influenced by a non-affective factor, namely their openness to divergent moral views. And third, projectivism in general and its causal hypothesis in particular might not even hold true for affective moral judgements. This negative assessment of projectivism is significant both for our understanding of moral cognition as an empirical phenomenon and for metaethics. (shrink)

This is a commentary on Adrian Heathcote’s interesting paper ‘Hume’s Master Argument’. Heathcote contends that No-Ought-From-Is is primarily a logical thesis, a ban on Is/Ought inferences which Hume derives from the logic of Ockham. NOFI is thus a variation on what Heathcote calls ‘Hume’s Master Argument’, which he also deploys to prove that conclusions about the future (and therefore a-temporal generalizations) cannot be derived by reason from premises about the past, and that conclusions about external objects or other minds cannot (...) be derived by reason from premises about impressions. Heathcote raises an important question. Having (apparently) argued that our inductive inferences are not justified by reason, Hume puts them down to Custom, and seems to suggest that we OUGHT to indulge this propensity but NOt the superstitious propensities that lead to religious belief. (Query: Why is it right to indulge one non-rational propensity but not the others?) Finally Heathcote argues that just as there are valid, but not formally valid, arguments taking us from claims about inferential relations to claims about what we ought to believe, so there may be valid, but not formally valid, arguments taking us from factual claims about some situation to claims about what we ought to do. -/- I reply that Hume does indeed have a Master Argument and that it does rely on logical principles but not on the logic of Ockham which had been largely forgotten by Hume’s day. Instead Hume relies on the idea widely believed in the 18th Century and taught to Hume at Edinburgh by his logic Professor Colin Drummond, that in a logically valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises. I reconstruct Hume’s Master Argument using this principle. I draw a careful distinction between two theses: 1) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with the aid of logic alone and 2) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with aid of analytic bridge principles. Hume believed the first but not the second. What then is the role of NOFI in the larger argument of the Treatise? To show that the truths of ethics cannot be derived via logic from self-evident truths of some other kind and thus that they are not demonstrable. How can we make sense of Hume’s apparent belief that it is sometimes right to transcend reason and sometimes not? In the case of Custom, we live in a world governed by causal regularities, and, in such a world, induction is in fact a fairly reliable belief-forming mechanism. Thus a suitably qualified spectator (one aware of the kind of world we live in) would tend to approve of indulging it, even if it cannot be justified by reason. However, our superstitious propensities are (and can be known to be) unreliable, since they produce different and inconsistent results in different people. Thus it is it is wrong (something a suitably qualified spectator would disapprove of) to indulge the faculty of Superstition. I also take issue with Heathcote’s penchant for valid, but not formally valid, inferences. I supply the missing premises for Heathcote’s Is/Ought inferences and argue that they are either not true or not necessary. (shrink)

Hume describes skeptical philosophy as having a variety of desirable effects. It can counteract dogmatism, produce just reasoning, and promote social cohesion. When discussing how skepticism may achieve these effects, Hume typically appeals to its effects on pride. I explain how, for Hume, skeptical philosophy acts on pride and how acting on pride produces the desirable effects. Understanding these mechanisms, I argue, sheds light on how, why, when, and for whom skeptical philosophy can be useful. It also illuminates the value (...) of skeptical philosophy for a humanistic education, giving us a reason to include Hume in curricula. (shrink)

Moral and political forms of constructivism accord to people strong, “constitutive” forms of discursive standing and so build on, or express, a commitment to discursive respect. The paper explores dimensions of discursive respect, i.e., depth, scope, and purchase; it addresses tenuous interdependencies between them; on this basis, it identifies limitations of the idea of discursive respect and of constructivism. The task of locating discursive respect in the normative space defined by its three dimensions is partly, and importantly, an ethical task (...) that is beyond constructivism. Interdependencies between these dimensions call into question the possibility of a plausible and coherent form of discursive respect that is deep, inclusive in scope, and rich in purchase. This does not mean that we should reject discursive respect, or constructivism, for that matter. But it suggests that the task of reconciling the dimensions of discursive respect may not allow for widely shareable results. This task needs to be addressed on non-constructivist grounds. Accordingly, we have reasons to concede that constitutive forms of discursive standing are less fundamental in the order of justification than weaker, “derivative” forms, and this is so especially if we take constitutive standing to mark an important good. (shrink)

When surveying the scholarly literature over Wittgensteinian fideism, it is easy to get the sense that the principal interlocutors, Kai Nielsen and D.Z. Phillips, talk past one another, but finding the right words for appraising the distance between the two voices is difficult. In this paper, I seek to appreciate this intellectual distance through an exploration of the varying philosophical aims of Nielsen and Phillips, of the different intellectual imperatives that guide their respective conceptions of philosophical practice. In so doing, (...) I seek to show how a contemplative mode in philosophy may be used to appraise a philosophical dispute and the terms of disagreement. In this case, a contemplative approach to understanding the dispute would frame Nielsen’s and Phillips’ contributions against the backdrop of the ends they conceive philosophy to have. (shrink)

The application of machine-learning technologies to medical practice promises to enhance the capabilities of healthcare professionals in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, of medical conditions. However, there is growing concern that algorithmic bias may perpetuate or exacerbate existing health inequalities. Hence, it matters that we make precise the different respects in which algorithmic bias can arise in medicine, and also make clear the normative relevance of these different kinds of algorithmic bias for broader questions about justice and fairness in healthcare. (...) In this paper, we provide the building blocks for an account of algorithmic bias and its normative relevance in medicine. (shrink)

The Quebec government recently (May 2021) announced that it wants to amend the Canadian constitution so that Quebec will be recognized as a nation. This is a bad idea.

I argue that Kant thought his Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts could reach skeptical empiricists like Hume by providing an overlooked explanation of the mind's a priori relation to the objects of experience. And he thought empiricists may be motivated to listen to this explanation because of an instability and dissatisfaction inherent to empiricism. This article is a précis of my "Kant's Offer to the Skeptical Empiricist" in Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Abstract. Traditional epistemology of knowledge and belief can be succinctly characterized as JTB-epistemology, i.e., it is characterized by the thesis that knowledge is justified true belief. Since Gettier’s trail-blazing paper of 1963 this account has become under heavy attack. The aim of is paper is to study the Gettier problem and related issues in the framework of topological epistemic logic. It is shown that in the framework of topological epistemic logic Gettier situations necessarily occur for most topological models of knowledge (...) and belief. On the other hand, there exists a special class of topological models (based on so called nodec spaces) for which traditional JTB-epistemology is valid. Further, it is shown that for each topological model of Stalnaker’s combined logic KB of knowledge and belief a canonical JTB-model (its JTB-doppelganger) can be constructed that shares many structural properties with the original model but is free of Gettier situations. The topological model and its JTB-doppelganger both share the same justified belief operator and have very similar knowledge operators. Seen from a somewhat different perspective, the JTB-account of epistemology amounts to a simplification of a more general epistemological account of knowledge and belief that assumes that these two concepts may differ in some cases. The JTB-account of knowledge and belief assumes that the epistemic agent’s cognitive powers are rather large. Thereby in the JTB-epistemology Gettier cases do not occur. Eventually, it is shown that for all topological models of Stalnaker’s KB-logic Gettier situations are topologically characterized as nowhere dense situations. This entails that Gettier situations are epistemologically invisible in the sense that they can neither be known nor believed with justification with respect to the knowledge operator and the belief operator of the models involved. (shrink)

This paper attempts to illustrate a process of analysis that will hopefully open a path to more complete and useful definitions of sign and symbol. It applies a form-content analysis to the metaphysical properties of these two concepts. The objective is to locate criteria necessary and sufficient to derive formal definitions for these terms. Wittgenstein’s concept of “forms of representation” is analyzed and applied to the topic. Criteria are outlined that determine the appropriateness of the sign and symbol to be (...) applied as labels. Criteria of definition are then developed using gesture, metaphor, and several other example types to illustrate the use of the criteria in distinguishing between sign and symbol. The structural organization of these two concepts proved to be especially complex and led to what some readers may find somewhat obscure. It is not our intention to be purposefully obscure. (shrink)

Theories of rational decision making often abstract away from computational and other resource limitations faced by real agents. An alternative approach known as resource rationality puts such matters front and center, grounding choice and decision in the rational use of finite resources. Anticipated by earlier work in economics and in computer science, this approach has recently seen rapid development and application in the cognitive sciences. Here, the theory of rationality plays a dual role, both as a framework for normative assessment (...) and as a source of scientific hypotheses about how mental processes in fact work. The latter project, often called rational analysis, depends for its success on a fine-grained characterization of the computational problem facing a decision maker, which may in turn depend on realistic assumptions about what the relevant agent is like. As a consequence, resource rationality involves a delicate, but often fruitful interplay between the normative and the descriptive. (shrink)

The paper challenges the view that public justification sits well with emancipatory and egalitarian intuitions. I distinguish between the depth, scope and the purchase of the discursive standing that such justification allocates, and situate within this matrix Rawls’s view of public justification. A standard objection to this view is that public justification should be more inclusive in scope. This is both plausible and problematic in emancipatory and egalitarian terms. If inclusive public justification allocates discursive standing that is rich in purchase, (...) as seems desirable in emancipatory terms, it may be unable to allocate equal standing to all relevant people. And if it is to allocate equal standing, then the equality of that standing should be construed in terms that allow for unequal discursive purchase. (shrink)

According to non-cognitivism, moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. This paper presents an empirical argument against this view. We begin by showing that non-cognitivism entails the prediction that after some reflection competent ordinary speakers’ semantic intuitions favor that moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. At first sight, this prediction may seem to have been confirmed by previous research on folk metaethics. However, a number of methodological worries (...) lead us to doubt this interpretation. We, therefore, conducted a psychological study that alleviates these worries as far as possible. It turned out that competent ordinary speakers’ reflective semantic intuitions dominantly fail to favor that moral sentences do not aim to represent how things morally are. This challenge to non-cognitivism is defended and supplemented by considering deflationary theories of moral truth and middle ground theories in the cognitivism/non-cognitivism debate. (shrink)