At first sight, if A is all-things-considered better than B and B is all-things-considered better than C, the judgment that A is all-things-considered better than C seems to follow. This should be a straight-forward consequence of the transitivity of the \all-things-considered better than" relation. However, if we deny that transitivity is a logical axiom of those relations involving comparatives, then it might turn out that betterness is not transitive. Following Temkin's terminology, a relation R will be de ned (...) as nontransitive i either it is intransitive (i.e. aRb and bRc yet :(aRc)) or if transitivity cannot be applied, for there is no single relation R that holds between all the alternatives. More spefici cally, this could happen in a case where the obtaining of the better-than relation depends on different factors according to the nature of the relata. As a result, there are two main strategies available to question the axiom of transitivity: the rst is by providing an effective counterexample displaying cRa as well as (aRb ^ bRc), hence yielding a cycle. The second, more general way, is to show that all-things-considered betterness is a relation that conceptually involves comparison-dependent betterness relations, so that it is likely that transitivity fails to apply across different alternatives. The aim of this paper is to investigate part of the recent attack on the transitivity of better than, to conclude that there seems to be no cogent reason why this would not be a transitive relation. (shrink)

The Rachels–Temkin spectrum arguments against the transitivity of better than involve good or bad experiences, lives, or outcomes that vary along multiple dimensions—e.g., duration and intensity of pleasure or pain. This paper presents variations on these arguments involving combinations of good and bad experiences, which have even more radical implications than the violation of transitivity. These variations force opponents of transitivity to conclude that something good is worse than something that isn’t good, on pain of rejecting the (...) good altogether. That is impossible, so we must reject the spectrum arguments. (shrink)

If A is better than B and B is better than C, then A is better than C, right? Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels say: No! Betterness is nontransitive, they claim. In this paper, I discuss the central type of argument advanced by Temkin and Rachels for this radical idea, and argue that, given this view very likely has sceptical implications for practical reason, we would do well to identify alternative responses. I propose one such response, which employs the idea (...) that rational agents might regard some options as incommensurate in value, and will reasonably employ a heuristic of status quo maintenance to avoid suboptimal choices from incommensurate goods. (shrink)

Why should ‘better than’ be transitive? The leading answer in ethics is that values do not change with context. But this cannot be the entire source of transitivity, I argue, since transitivity can fail even if values never change, so long as they are complex, with multiple dimensions combined non-additively. I conclude by exploring a new hypothesis: that all alleged cases of nontransitive betterness, such as Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, can and should be modelled as the result of complexity, (...) not context-relativity. (shrink)

John Taurek argues that, in a choice between saving the many or the few, the numbers should not count. Some object that this view clashes with the transitivity of ‘better than’; others insist the clash can be avoided. I defend a middle ground: Taurek cannot have transitivity, but that doesn’t doom his view, given a suitable conception of value. I then formalize and explore two conceptions: one context-sensitive, one multidimensional.

In 'Rethinking the Good', Larry Temkin makes two core claims. First, the goodness of a distribution is sometimes ‘essentially comparative’ – it sometimes depends on which alternative distribution(s) it is compared to. Second, such cases threaten the transitivity of ‘all things considered better than’. I argue that the goodness of a distribution may indeed depend on what other distributions are feasible. But contrary to Temkin, I also argue that transitivity holds even when the goodness of a distribution depends (...) on the feasible set of which it is a member. (shrink)

When solving a complex problem in a group, should group members always choose the best available solution that they are aware of? In this paper, I build simulation models to show that, perhaps surprisingly, a group of agents who individually randomly follow a better available solution than their own can end up outperforming a group of agents who individually always follow the best available solution. This result has implications for the feminist philosophy of science and social epistemology.

The essentially comparative conception of value entails that the value of a state of affairs does not depend solely upon features intrinsic to the state of affairs, but also upon extrinsic features, such as the set of feasible alternatives. It has been argued that this conception of value gives us reason to abandon the transitivity of the better than relation. This paper shows that the support for intransitivity derived from this conception of value is very limited. On its most (...) plausible interpretations, it merely provides a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for intransitivity. It is further argued that the essentially comparative conception of value appears to support a disjunctive conclusion: there is incommensurability of value or betterness is not transitive. Of these two alternatives, incommensurability is preferable, because it is far less threatening to our other axiological commitments. (shrink)

Scholars working on Kant’s Anticipations of Perception generally attribute to him an argument that invalidly infers that objects have degrees of intensive magnitude from the premise that sensations do. I argue that this rests on an incorrect disambiguation of Kant’s use of Empfindung as referring to the mental states that are our sensings, rather than the objects that are thereby sensed. Kant’s real argument runs as follows. The difference between a representation of an empty region of space and/or time and (...) a representation of that same region as occupied by an object entails that, in addition to their extensive magnitude, objects must be represented as having a matter variable in intensive magnitude. Since it is the presence of sensation in a cognition that marks the difference between representing only the extensive magnitude of the object and the object as a whole, it is sensation that represents its intensive magnitude. (shrink)

Despite being assailed for decades by disability activists and disability studies scholars spanning the humanities and social sciences, the medical model of disability—which conceptualizes disability as an individual tragedy or misfortune due to genetic or environmental insult—still today structures many cases of patient–practitioner communication. Synthesizing and recasting work done across critical disability studies and philosophy of disability, I argue that the reason the medical model of disability remains so gallingly entrenched is due to what I call the “ableist conflation” of (...) disability with pain and suffering. In an effort to better equip healthcare practitioners and those invested in health communication to challenge disability stigma, discrimination, and oppression, I lay out the logic of the ableist conflation and interrogate examples of its use. I argue that insofar as the semiosis of pain and suffering is structured by the lived experience of unwelcome bodily transition or variation, experiences of pain inform the ableist conflation by preemptively tying such variability and its attendant disequilibrium to disability. I conclude by discussing how philosophy of disability and critical disability studies might better inform health communication concerning disability, offering a number of conceptual distinctions toward that end. (shrink)

In what respects is Western civilization superior or inferior to its rivals? In raising this question we are addressing a particularly strong form of the problem of relativism. For in order to compare civilizations one with another we would need to be in possession of a framework that is neutral and objective, a framework based on principles of evaluation which would be acceptable, in principle, to all human beings. Morality will surely provide one axis of such a framework (and we (...) note in passing that believers in Islam might quite reasonably claim that their fellow-believers are characteristically more moral than are many in the West). Criteria such as material wellbeing, too, will need to play a role, as also will happiness or pleasure (and again we note that it is not clear a priori that there is more happiness in the West than there is among the citizens of other civilizations). Since, however, these axes of evaluation do not run in tandem, we cannot expect to be able to formulate some single criterion which would enable us to rank civilizations in a simple unilinear order. Even happiness (pace some proponents of the utilitarian philosophy) comes in different types, and to count in the civilization stakes the happiness involved would presumably need to be of the right kind. Thus it is not clear that happiness derived from, say, taking drugs or torturing small animals is going to be able to count in favor of a civilization as much as, say, happiness derived from reading poetry or planting corn. Hence, for these and other reasons, we will have to deal with a multidimensional framework, in which some civilizations may excel along some axes but do badly on others. A further problem turns on the fact that there is no such relation as better than. Rather, when A is better than B then this is always in some respect C. Yet even when we compare one thing with another in some given respect we are not always dealing with a simple linear order. This is because the relation ‘being better than in respect C’ is not in every case transitive.. (shrink)

"Nothing Better Than Death" is a comprehensive analysis of the near-death experiences profiled on my website at www.near-death.com. This book provides complete NDE testimonials, summaries of various NDEs, NDE research conclusions, a question and answer section, an analysis of NDEs and Christian doctrines, famous quotations about life and death, a NDE bibliography, book notes, a list of NDE resources on the Internet, and a list of NDE support groups associated with IANDS.org - the International Association for Near-Death Studies. -/- The (...) unusual title of this book, "Nothing Better Than Death," was inspired by NDE experiencer Dr. Dianne Morrissey who once said, "If I lived a billion years more, in my body or yours, there's not a single experience on Earth that could ever be as good as being dead. Nothing." -/- Having read every NDE book I could get my hands on, I didn't want to create just another NDE book. My motivation was to give readers a large variety of information about NDEs challenging both the seasoned NDE enthusiast as well as the novice. This book gives readers the means to understand the NDE phenomenon from the perspective of a large number of some of the most profound NDEs ever documented. My hope is that you will enjoy this book, my labor of love, and that you will be truly blessed by the heavenly insights within it. (shrink)

The fact of evolution raises important questions for the position of moral realism, because the origin of our moral dispositions in a contingent evolutionary process is on the face of it incompatible with the view that our moral beliefs track independent moral truths. Moreover, this meta-ethical worry seems to undermine the normative justification of our moral norms and beliefs. If we don’t have any grounds to believe that the source of our moral beliefs has any ontological authority, how can our (...) moral judgments be justified in an objective way? In this chapter, I argue that while traditional moral realism is untenable in the light of evolution, normative justification should not be handed the same fate. It is precisely in the fact that moral norms and beliefs are grounded in evolved, innate and therefore universally shared intuitions that those norms and beliefs can be objective-for-us. Such an internalist justification allows us to differentiate moral right from wrong, not because some feature of the external world forces us to acknowledge this, but because our moral nature forces us to project this moral judgment on the world. What’s more, guided by this innate moral compass we can both assess and realize moral progress. (shrink)

In order to uncover the inner workings of our capacities, we look to ‘effects’. Most of us have the capacity to distinguish between spoken ‘ba’ and ‘fa’ sounds. One thought is that this is achieved through aural sensitivities that detect changes in vibration picked up by the eardrum. But the McGurk Effect suggests that there is more to the story. Without changing the incoming vibrations, sound experience can be modulated by showing a video of a mouth making a ‘ba’ sound (...) or a ‘fa’ sound with a consistent sound overlaid. We learn that our overall auditory experiences are at least in part determined by visual cues in addition to what’s first picked up by our eardrums. The McGurk Effect gives us a hint into the inner workings of audition and helps us better understand the capacity to discriminate sounds of a certain sort. -/- In the present paper, the focus is on emotional capacities and a well known effect – recalcitrance. Recalcitrant emotions, such as fearing the dog even though one knows that the dog is harmless or being angry with one’s partner even when one realises it was only in a dream that the partner was nasty, have played the role of effect in much theorising about emotions. But in my view, we’ve stayed a bit too close to home, aiming to fit the effect into a paradigm – the representationalist paradigm – that isn’t fit for purpose. I will use this criticism as a launching off point to introduce a different way of thinking about emotions that is better suited to making sense of recalcitrance. I will argue that emotions are transitions between representational states rather than being representational states themselves. The view is better suited to make sense of recalcitrance and, at the end of the paper, I will offer reasons for thinking that main points that speak in favour of a representationalist approach to emotion can be recaptured or explained away by the transitions view. (shrink)

This paper is the first major and a thorough study on the Merger & Acquisition (M&A) activities in Vietnam’s emerging market economy, covering almost entirely the M&A history after the launch of Doi Moi. The surge in these activities since mid-2000s by no means incidentally coincides with the jump in FDI and FPI inflows into the nation. M&A industry in Vietnam has its socio-cultural traits that could help explain economic happenings, with anomalies and transitional characteristics, far better than even the (...) most complete set of empirical data. Proceeds from the sales of existing assets and firms have mainly flowed into the highly speculative industries of securities, banking, non-bank financials, portfolio investments and real estates. The impact of M&A on Vietnam’s long-term prosperity is thus highly questionable. An observable high degree of volatility in the M&A processes would likely blow out the high ex ante expectations by many speculators, when ex post realizations finally arrive. The effect of the past M&A evolution in Vietnam has been indecisively positive or negative, with significant presence of rent-seeking and likelihood of causing destructive entrepreneurship. From a socio-economic and cultural view, the degree of positive impacts may result in domestic entrepreneurship which will perhaps be the single most important indicator. (shrink)

"Nothing Better Than Death" is a comprehensive analysis of the near-death experiences profiled on the www.near-death.com website. This book provides complete NDE testimonials, summaries of various NDEs, NDE research conclusions, a Question and Answer section, an analysis of NDEs and Christian doctrines, famous quotations about life and death, a NDE bibliography, book notes, a list of NDE resources on the Internet, and a list of NDE support groups associated with IANDS.org - the International Association for Near-Death Studies. The unusual title (...) of this book, "Nothing Better Than Death," was inspired by NDE experiencer Dr. Dianne Morrissey who once said, "If I lived a billion years more, in my body or yours, there's not a single experience on Earth that could ever be as good as being dead. Nothing.". (shrink)

We have argued that the counterfactual comparative account of harm and benefit (CCA) violates the plausible adequacy condition that an act that would harm an agent cannot leave her much better off than an alternative act that would benefit her. In a recent paper in this journal, however, Neil Feit objects that our argument presupposes questionable counterfactual backtracking. He also argues that CCA proponents can justifiably reject the condition by invoking so-called plural harm and benefit. In this reply, we argue (...) that Feit’s lines of criticism are both unsuccessful. (shrink)

The author takes a look at sixty-two near-death experiences and shares them with the reader. They range in topics from God, Heaven, Hell, Reincarnation and Suicide, to name a few. Did these people truly see into the next world? Did they reveal hat awaits each one of us as we walk through that portal? Does it really matter what faith we are or how good or bad we are in this life? This book delivers to the reader compelling testimonies from (...) credible people who are absolutely convinced theire's was an experience of life after death. (shrink)

Epistemic accounts of scientific collaboration usually assume that, one way or another, two heads really are more than twice better than one. We show that this hypothesis is unduly strong. We present a deliberately crude model with unfavorable hypotheses. We show that, even then, when the priority rule is applied, large differences in successfulness can emerge from small differences in efficiency, with sometimes increasing marginal returns. We emphasize that success is sensitive to the structure of competing communities. Our results suggest (...) that purely epistemic explanations of the efficiency of collaborations are less plausible but have much more powerful socioepistemic versions. (shrink)

The other major question in the history of political philosophy besides the issue of distributive justice is what the best form of government is. In Western philosophy, the received view is democracy. However, this paper challenges this thesis by presenting arguments against democracy relying in significant part on empirical data from political science and political psychology. Moreover, it presents a general case for a hybrid view over democracy for the legislative and executive branches that appends a meritocracy or rule by (...) the merited from Eastern philosophy to democracy. (shrink)

[Significantly updated in Chapter 6 of Awareness and the Substructure of Knowledge] In order for a reason to justify an action or attitude it must be one that is possessed by an agent. Knowledge-centric views of possession ground our possession of reasons, at least partially, either in our knowledge of them or in our being in a position to know them. On virtually all accounts, knowing P is some kind of non-accidental true belief that P. This entails that knowing P (...) is a kind of non-accidental true representation that P. I outline a novel theory of the epistemic requirement on possession in terms of this more general state of non-accidental true representation. It is just as well placed to explain the motivations behind knowledge-centric views of possession, and it is also better placed to explain the extent of the reasons we possess in certain cases of deductive belief-updates and cases involving environmental luck. I conclude with three reflections. First, I indicate how my arguments generate a dilemma for Errol Lord’s view that possessing reasons is just a matter of being in a position to manifest one’s knowledge how to use them. Second, I explain how my view can simultaneously manage cases of environmental luck without falling prey to lottery cases. Finally, I sketch the direction for a further range of counterexamples to knowledge-centric theories of possession. (shrink)

Technology could be used to improve morality but it could do so in different ways. Some technologies could augment and enhance moral behaviour externally by using external cues and signals to push and pull us towards morally appropriate behaviours. Other technologies could enhance moral behaviour internally by directly altering the way in which the brain captures and processes morally salient information or initiates moral action. The question is whether there is any reason to prefer one method over the other? In (...) this article, I argue that there is. Specifically, I argue that internal moral enhancement is likely to be preferable to external moral enhancement, when it comes to the legitimacy of political decision-making processes. In fact, I go further than this and argue that the increasingly dominant forms of external moral enhancement may already be posing a significant threat to political legitimacy, one that we should try to address. Consequently, research and development of internal moral enhancements should be prioritised as a political project. (shrink)

Recently, Derek Parfit has offered a novel solution to the “Repugnant Conclusion” that compared with the existence of many people whose quality of life would be very high, there is some much larger number of people whose existence would be better but whose lives would be barely worth living. On this solution, qualitative differences between two populations will often entail that the populations are merely “imprecisely” comparable. According to Parfit, this fact allows us to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating (...) the transitivity of better than. In this paper, I argue that Parfit’s view nevertheless implies two objectionable conclusions. The first is an alternative version of the Repugnant Conclusion that, Parfit suggests, may not be all that repugnant. The second is a revised version of the first that is nearly identical to the Repugnant Conclusion. I conclude that Parfit’s view offers no escape from repugnance. (shrink)

Counterfactual thinking involves the imagination of non-factual alternatives to reality. We investigated the spontaneous generation of both upward counterfactuals, which improve on reality, and downward counterfactuals, which worsen reality. All subjects gained $5 playing a computer-simulated blackjack game. However, this outcome was framed to be perceived as either a win, a neutral event, or a loss. "Loss" frames produced more upward and fewer downward counterfactuals than did either "win" or "neutral" frames, but the overall prevalence of counterfactual thinking did not (...) vary with outcome valence. In addition, subjects who expected to play the game again made more upward counterfactuals and were less satisfied with the outcome than were subjects who did not expect to play again. However, once subjects saw the cards from which they could have selected had they "hit" again (two winning cards and two losing cards), all subjects generated primarily upward counterfactuals and showed a corresponding decrease in satisfaction. These results implicate both cognitive and motivational factors in the generation of counterfactuals and tell us something about the functional value of counterfactual thinking: downward counterfactuals provide comfort; upward counterfactuals prepare one for the future. (shrink)

This is a reply to Luke Roelof's comments (2017) on my paper "A Dilemma for Russellian Monists about Consciousness" (2015). On both Russellian monism and dualism, experiences are distinct from neural-functional states and they are correlated with some neural-functional states and not others. The only difference between them concerns the status of the extra-logical principles linking experiences with their neural-functional correlates (e. g. increasing S1 firing rates results in increasing pain): Russellian monists hold that they are a priori and necessary, (...) while dualists say that they are a posteriori and contingent. How are we to decide between them? Roelofs suggests that Russellian monism is simpler than dualism. I argue against this. Both face the "T-shirt problem": both require a swarm of extra-logical principles linking brain states with experiences. The Russellian monist might engage in some unbridled speculation: they are somehow derivable from small set of more basic extra-logical principles ("principles of combination"), even if we cannot supply the details. But the dualist can do the same. The only difference is that the dualist will speculate that those more basic principles are contingent rather than necessary a priori. Given our limited evidence, there is no reason (and in particular no simplicity-based reason) to prefer the Russellian monist's speculations to the dualist's parallel speculations. (shrink)

Michel de Montaigne famously argued in “Man is No Better Than the Animals” that humans and non-human animals cannot be dichotomized based on language or reasoning abilities, among other characteristics. This article examines a selection of writing features at play in the text and discusses how successfully they convey Montaigne’s claims. Throughout, I argue that Montaigne presents a superficially convincing case for doubting a categorical distinction between humans and animals on linguistic and rational grounds through the use of rhetorical questions, (...) listing, appeals to authority, point of view, imagery, and narrative anecdotes. However, Montaigne’s rejection of a human/animal distinction appears self-refuting since the form and content of his text both suggest that humans typically possess some degree of unique language and reasoning capacities. (shrink)

In their thought-provoking paper, Legg and Hutter consider a certain abstrac- tion of an intelligent agent, and define a universal intelligence measure, which assigns every such agent a numerical intelligence rating. We will briefly summarize Legg and Hutter’s paper, and then give a tongue-in-cheek argument that if one’s goal is to become more intelligent by cultivating music appreciation, then it is bet- ter to use classical music (such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven) than to use more recent pop music. The (...) same argument could be adapted to other media: books beat films, card games beat first-person shooters, parables beat dissertations, etc. We leave it to the reader to decide whether this argument tells us something about classical music, something about Legg-Hutter intelligence, or something about both. (shrink)

The first section of this paper asks why the notion of consensus has recently come to the fore in the medical humanities, and suggests that the answer is a function of growing technological and professional complexity. The next two sections examine the concept of consensus analytically, citing some of the recent philosophical literature. The fourth section looks at committee deliberations and their desirable outcomes, and questions the degree to which consensus serves those outcomes. In the fifth and last section it (...) is suggested that if I am to subscribe to a consensual outcome responsibly I must be personally committed to it, and that this requires a form of knowledge I call ‘fiduciary’, in this case knowledge of the competence and trustworthiness of other participants in deliberation whose expertise may have influenced my agreement. (shrink)

Section 1 of this article presents a mathematical analysis of the longterm global urbanization dynamics and demonstrates that it could be described as a series of phase transitions between attraction basins. This makes it possible to suggest new approaches to the analysis of global social macroevolution. Section 2 presents a threestage model of the macroevolution of the World System statehood (early – developed – mature state) that, we believe, describes the main features of political macroevolution better than the twostage model (...) proposed by Claessen and Skalník (early – mature state). This model has been used as a basis for the analysis of changes in the development of political structures from the prestate polities and the most primitive early states (and their analogues) till the modern supercomplex states. In this section we also analyze the relationship between the growth of the territory controlled by the World System states and the growth of the statehood complexity. Finally, Section 3 attempts at the detection of the correlation between the global evolution of political structures and global urbanization processes. This study confirms the presence of a system of attraction basins and phase transitions within the World System macroevolutionary development field, as well as the presence of mathematically interpretable correlations and interrelations between the analyzed global processes – political, urbanizing, demographic, technological, and sociostructural. (shrink)

Some emotional representations seem to be unreliable. For instance, we are often afraid when there is no danger present. If emotions such as fear are so unreliable, what function do they have in our representational system? This is a problem for representationalist theories of emotion. I will argue that seemingly unreliable emotional representations are reliable after all. While many mental states strike an optimal balance between minimizing inaccurate representations and maximizing accurate representations, some emotional representations only aim at maximizing accuracy. (...) They detect important phenomena such as danger based on little evidence, which will lead to a lot of false alarms. When it matters, however, these emotional representations will detect danger and other important phenomena. Often, one is better scared (and wrong) than sorry. (shrink)

Digital Health Tools (DHTs), also known as patient self-surveilling strategies, have increasingly been promoted by health-care policy makers as technologies that have the capacity to transform patients’ lives. At the heart of the debate is the notion of empowerment. In this paper, we argue that what is required is not so much empowerment but rather a shift to enabling DHTs as digital companions. This will enable policy makers and health-care system designers to provide a more balanced view—one that capitalises on (...) the benefits of DHTs, while minimising the risks of potential harms. -/- . (shrink)

Some emotional representations seem to be unreliable. For instance, we are often afraid when there is no danger present. If emotions such as fear are so unreliable, what function do they have in our representational system? This is a problem for representationalist theories of emotion. I will argue that seemingly unreliable emotional representations are reliable after all. While many mental states strike an optimal balance between minimizing inaccurate representations and maximizing accurate representations, some emotional representations only aim at maximizing accuracy. (...) They detect important phenomena such as danger based on little evidence, which will lead to a lot of false alarms. When it matters, however, these emotional representations will detect danger and other important phenomena. Often, one is better scared (and wrong) than sorry. (shrink)

Can it be better or worse for a person to be than not to be, that is, can it be better or worse to exist than not to exist at all? This old 'existential question' has been raised anew in contemporary moral philosophy. There are roughly two reasons for this renewed interest. Firstly, traditional so-called “impersonal” ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, have counter-intuitive implications in regard to questions concerning procreation and our moral duties to future, not yet existing people. Secondly, (...) it has seemed evident to many that an outcome can only be better than another if it is better for someone, and that only moral theories that are in this sense “person affecting” can be correct. The implications of this Person Affecting Restriction will differ radically, however, depending on which answer one gives to the existential question. Melinda Roberts (2003) and Matthew Adler (2009) have defended an affirmative answer to the existential question using an assumption that one can asribe a zero level of wellbeing to a person in a world in which that person doesn't exist. Contrariwise, Derek Parfit (1984), John Broome (1999), and others have worried that if we take a person’s life to be better for her than non-existence, then we would have to conclude that it would have been worse for her if she did not exist, which is absurd: Nothing would have been worse or better for a person if she had not existed. The paper suggests that an affirmative answer to the existential question can avoid such absurdities: One can claim that, say, it is better for a person to exist than not to exist, without implying that it would have been worse for a person if she had not existed or that her level of wellbeing would then have been lower. (shrink)

Better than any other single work, Daniel enables us to understand the significance of the transition Buber made from his early mysticism to the philosophy of dialogue. The book is written in the form of five dialogues, in each of which Daniel and his friends explore a crucial philosophical problem-the nature of interconnection of unity, creativity, action, form, and realization as these illuminate the relations of man to God and the world. Daniel occupies a central position in Buber's life work.

Welfarism is a theory of value (or the good) simpliciter. Theories of value are fundamentally concerned with explaining what makes some possible worlds better than others. Welfarism is the view according to which the relative value of possible worlds is fully determined by how individuals are faring—or, in other words, by the facts about well-being that obtain—in these worlds. This entry begins by distinguishing between various forms of welfarism (pure vs. impure welfarism, and then narrow vs. wide welfarism). It then (...) outlines some of the key attractions of welfarism. Finally, it surveys some of the most serious objections to welfarism (including malicious pleasure, the well-being of the wicked, great works of art, the non-identity problem, human extinction, transitivity of betterness, and distribution). (shrink)

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition - such as (...) mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time we do not possess mental autonomy (M-autonomy) in this sense. Empirical data from research on mind wandering and nocturnal dreaming clearly show that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly an automatic, non-agentive process and that personal-level cognition is an exception rather than the rule. This raises an interesting new version of the mind-body problem: How is subpersonal cognition causally related to personal-level thought? More fine-grained phenomenological descriptions for what we called “conscious thought” in the past are needed, as well as a functional decomposition of umbrella terms like “mind wandering” into different target phenomena and a better understanding of the frequent dynamic transitions between spontaneous, task-unrelated thought and meta-awareness. In an attempt to lay some very first conceptual foundations for the now burgeoning field of research on mind wandering, the third section proposes two new criteria for individuating single episodes of mind-wandering, namely, the “self-representational blink” (SRB) and a sudden shift in the phenomenological “unit of identification” (UI). I close by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between mind wandering research and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The role of China in the world economy is constantly growing. In particular we observe that it plays more and more important role in the support of theworld economic growth (as well as high prices of certain very important commodities). In the meantime the perspectives of the Chinese economy (as well as possible fates of the Chinese society) remain unclear, whereas respective forecasts look rather contradictory. That is why the search for new aspects and modes of analysis of possible development (...) of China turns out to be rather important for the forecasting of global futures. This article employs a combination of scientific methods that imply (a) the analysis at the level of Chinese economic model; (b) the analysis at regional level (at this level the Chinese economic model is compared with the regional East Asian model); (c) the analysis at the global level that relies on the modified world-system approach that allows to answer the question whether China will replace the USA as the global leader. It is important that the analysis is conducted simultaneously in economic, social, demographic, and political dimensions. As regards the analysis of specific features of the Chinese model as an especial type of the East Asian model (that is based on the export orientation, capital & technology importation, as well as cheap labor force), we note as organic features of the Chinese model the totalitarian power of the Communist Party and the immenseness of resources. As regards special features of the Chinese model, we note (in addition to “cheap ecology” and cheap labor force) and emphasize that China has a multilevel (in a way unique) system of growth driving forces, where, as opposed to developed states, the dominant role belongs not to native private capital, but to state corporations, local authorities and foreign business. This explains the peculiarities of the Chinese investment (or rather overinvestment), which determines high growth rate up to a very significant degree. A unique feature of the Chinese model is the competition of provinces and territories for investments and high growth indicators. As regards perspectives of the global hegemony of China, we intend to demonstrate that, on the one hand, economic and political positions of China will strengthen in the forthcoming decades, but, on the other hand, China, assuming all possible future success, will be unable to take the USA position in the World System. We believe that in a direct connection with the development of globalization processes the hegemony cycle pattern is likely to come to its end, which will lead to the World System reconfiguration and the emergence of its new structure that will allow the World System to continue its further development without a hegemon. Finally, the article describes some possible scenarios of the development of China. We demonstrate that China could hardly avoid serious difficulties and critical situations (including those connected with demographic problems); however, there could be different scenarios of how China will deal with the forthcoming crisis. We also come to the conclusion that it would be better for China to achieve a slowdown to moderate growth rates (that would allow China to go through the forthcoming complex transition period with less losses) than to try to return at any cost to explosive growth rates attested in the 2000s. (shrink)

Can we conceive of disorder in a positive sense? We organize our desks, we discipline our children, we govern our polities--all with the aim of reducing disorder, of temporarily reversing the entropy that inevitably asserts itself in our lives. Going all the way back to Hesiod, we see chaos as a cosmogonic state of utter confusion inevitably reigned in by laws of regularity, in a transition from fearful unpredictability to calm stability. In contrast to a similar early Chinese notion of (...) chaotic disorder (luan), early Daoists posit a type of chaos that is to be cultivated rather than feared. This chaos is a primal disorder, akin to Hesiod's, but rather than threatening disruption, it is replete with creative potential and through spontaneous action yields orderly processes that proceed from the concretion of things to their dissolution and back, in a complex web of relations. This processional activity, although taken in one sense as cosmogonic, in a more important sense is immanent at every moment of activity. This article identifies terms of chaos, such as dun dun 沌 沌, hundun 渾 沌, and xingming 涬 溟 in Laozi and Zhuangzi and examines the passages in which they occur. Analyzing these passages brings us to a better understanding of "chaos" in a Chinese sense and to a familiarity with related terms in its semantic field, such as xuan 玄 (dark, mysterious), miao 妙 (subtle/profound), wei 微 (minute/inchoate), xiao 小 (small/minute), and pu 樸 (uncarved block). We see that the Daoist ideal is to return to a chaotic inchoateness by melding with the cosmos and there finding a repository of creative potential. This notion of chaos as the inchoate is used a springboard into understanding the origins of Daoist spontaneity. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that punishment has an expressive dimension. Advocates of expressive theories have different views about what makes punishment expressive, what kinds of mental states and what kinds of claims are, or legitimately can be expressed in punishment, and to what kind of audience or recipients, if any, punishment might express whatever it expresses. I shall argue that in order to assess the plausibility of an expressivist approach to justifying punishment we need to pay careful attention to whether the (...) things which punishment is supposed to express are aimed at an audience. For the ability of any version of expressivism to withstand two important challenges, which I call the harsh treatment challenge’ and the ‘publicity challenge’ respectively. will depend on the way it answers them. The first of these challenges has received considerable discussion in the literature on expressive theories of punishment; the second considerably less. This is unfortunate. For careful consideration of the publicity challenge should lead us to favor a version of the expressive theory which has been under-discussed: the view on which punishment has an intended audience, and on which the audience is society at large, rather than—as on the most popular version of that view—the criminal. Furthermore, this view turns out to be better equipped to meet the harsh treatment challenge, and to be so precisely because of the way in which it meets the publicity challenge. (shrink)

I examine the reasons Aristotle presents in Physics VIII 8 for denying a crucial assumption of Zeno’s dichotomy paradox: that every motion is composed of sub-motions. Aristotle claims that a unified motion is divisible into motions only in potentiality (δυνάμει). If it were actually divided at some point, the mobile would need to have arrived at and then have departed from this point, and that would require some interval of rest. Commentators have generally found Aristotle’s reasoning unconvincing. Against David Bostock (...) and Richard Sorabji, inter alia, I argue that Aristotle offers a plausible and internally consistent response to Zeno. I defend Aristotle’s reasoning by using his discussion of what to say about the mobile at boundary instants, transitions between change and rest. There Aristotle articulates what I call the Changes are Open, Rests are Closed Rule: what is true of something at a boundary instant is what is true of it over the time of its rest. By contrast, predications true of something over its period of change are not true of the thing at either of the boundary instants of that change. I argue that this rule issues from Aristotle’s general understanding of change, as laid out in Phys. III. It also fits well with Phys. VI, where Aristotle maintains that there is a first boundary instant included in the time of rest, but not a “first in which the mobile began to change.” I then show how this rule underlies Aristotle’s argument that a continuous motion cannot be composed of actual sub-motions. Aristotle distinguishes potential middles, points passed through en route to a terminus, from actual middles. The Changes are Open, Rests are Closed Rule only applies to actual middles, because only they are boundaries of change that the mobile must arrive at and then depart from. On my reading, Aristotle argues that the instant of arrival, the first instant at which the mobile has come to be at the actual middle, cannot belong to the time of the subsequent motion. If it did, the mobile would already be moving towards the next terminus and thus, per Phys. VI 6, would have already left. But it cannot have moved away from the midpoint at the very same moment it has arrived there. This means that the instant of arrival must be separated from the time of departure by an interval of rest. I show how Aristotle’s reasoning applies generally to rule out any continuous reflexive motion or continuous complex rectilinear motion. On my interpretation, however, the argument does not apply to every change of direction. When, as in the case of projectile motion, multiple movers and their relative powers explain why the mobile changes directions, distinct sub-motions are not involved. Aristotle holds that such motions cannot be continuous, not because they involve intervals of rest, but because they involve multiple causes of motion. My interpretation of the Changes are Open, Rests are Closed Rule allows us to make better sense of Aristotle’s argument than any previous interpretation. (shrink)

A 2017 Nature report was widely touted as hailing the arrival of the artificial womb. But the scientists involved claim their technology is merely an improvement in neonatal care. This raises an under-considered question: what differentiates neonatal incubation from artificial womb technology? Considering the nature of gestation—or metaphysics of pregnancy—(a) identifies more profound differences between fetuses and neonates/babies than their location (in or outside the maternal body) alone: fetuses and neonates have different physiological and physical characteristics; (b) characterizes birth as (...) a physiological, mereological and topological transformation as well as a (morally relevant) change of location; and (c) delivers a clear distinction between neonatal incubation and ectogestation: the former supports neonatal physiology; the latter preserves fetal physiology. This allows a detailed conceptual classification of ectogenetive and ectogestative technologies according to which the 2017 system is not just improved neonatal incubation, but genuine ectogestation. But it is not an artificial womb, which is a term that is better put to rest. The analysis reveals that any ethical discussion involving ectogestation must always involve considerations of possible risks to the mother as well as her autonomy and rights. It also adds a third and potentially important dimension to debates in reproductive ethics: the physiological transition from fetus/gestateling to baby/neonate. (shrink)

According to one prominent strand of mainstream logic and metaphysics, identity is indistinguishability. Priest has recently argued that this permits counterexamples to the transitivity and substitutivity of identity within dialetheic metaphysics, even in paradigmatically extensional contexts. This paper investigates two alternative regimentations of indistinguishability. Although classically equivalent to the standard regimentation on which Priest focuses, these alternatives are strictly stronger than it in dialetheic settings. Both regimentations are transitive, and one satisfies substitutivity. It is argued that both regimentations provide (...) better candidates to occupy the core theoretical role of numerical identity than does the standard regimentation. (shrink)

Larry Temkin famously argues that what he calls spectrum arguments yield strong reason to reject Transitivity, according to which the ‘all-things-considered better than’ relation is transitive. Spectrum arguments do reveal that the conjunctions of independently plausible claims are inconsistent with Transitivity. But I argue that there is very strong independent reason to reject such conjunctions of claims, and thus that the fact that they are inconsistent with Transitivity does not yield strong reason to reject Transitivity.

Most properties have comparatives, which are relations. For instance, the property of width has the comparative relation denoted by `_ is wider than _'. Let us say a property is reducible to its comparative if any statement that refers to the property has the same meaning as another statement that refers to the comparative instead. Width is not reducible to its comparative. To be sure, many statements that refer to width are reducible: for instance, `The Mississippi is wide' means the (...) same as `The Mississippi is wider than most rivers'. But some statements that refer to width are not reducible: for instance, `Electrons have zero width' is not. A property is not reducible to its comparative if it has absolute degrees, and specifically an absolute zero. A property's comparative relation places things in an order from those that have the property least to those that have it most. If there is an absolute zero point somewhere in this ordering, the property is not reducible to its comparative. For width, there is an absolute zero at one end of the ordering, so width is not reducible. The property of goodness is reducible to its comparative, betterness. In particular, there is no absolute zero of goodness. Things are ordered by betterness – some things are better than others – but nothing is absolutely good or absolutely bad. This is an exaggeration. In certain applications, goodness does have absolute degrees of a sort, and an absolute zero. For instance, it makes sense to say an event is good, and another event bad. These are absolute degrees of a sort, but they are themselves reducible to betterness. To say an event is good simply means the event is better than what would otherwise have happened. The goodness of lives has a different sort of absolute zero. Lives are ordered by betterness; some lives are better than others. We can make sense of the question `Where in this ordering is the division between lives that are good and those that are bad?' The division between good and bad lives is again reducible to betterness. To say a person's life is good means it is better that the person should continue living, rather than that she should die. Or it may mean it is better that her life should be lived rather than that it should never have been lived at all. As it is often put: a good life is a life worth living. Derek Parfit appears to attach a different sense to the idea of a good life. He appears to mean a life that contains a preponderance of good things (such as pleasure) over bad things (such as pain). If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it has zero goodness in this sense. In this sense, absolute goodness and the absolute zero of goodness are not reducible to betterness. However, this is a naturalistic sense of goodness, and it is subject to the open-question objection. If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it is an open question whether it has zero goodness. It might, for instance, be a bad thing that this life should be lived. In discussing the evil of death, some philosophers seem to have been searching for an absolute goodness that is not reducible to betterness. Thomas Nagel speaks of an asymmetry between what is good about life and what is bad about death. But if a person's life is good, that only means it would be better that she should continue living than that she should die. And if a person's death would be bad, that only means it would be worse that she should die than that she should continue living. So there can be no asymmetry. (shrink)

It is possible that the world contains infinitely many agents that have positive and negative levels of well-being. Theories have been developed to ethically rank such worlds based on the well-being levels of the agents in those worlds or other qualitative properties of the worlds in question, such as the distribution of agents across spacetime. In this thesis I argue that such ethical rankings ought to be consistent with the Pareto principle, which says that if two worlds contain the same (...) agents and some agents are better off in the first world than they are in the second and no agents are worse off than they are in the second, then the first world is better than the second. I show that if we accept four axioms – the Pareto principle, transitivity, an axiom stating that populations of worlds can be permuted, and the claim that if the ‘at least as good as’ relation holds between two worlds then it holds between qualitative duplicates of this world pair – then we must conclude that there is ubiquitous incomparability between infinite worlds. I show that this is true even if the populations of infinite worlds are disjoint or overlapping, and that we cannot use any qualitative properties of world pairs to rank these worlds. Finally, I argue that this incomparability result generates puzzles for both consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories of objective and subjective permissibility. (shrink)

In the face of an impossibility result, some assumption must be relaxed. The Mere Addition Paradox is an impossibility result in population ethics. Here, I explore substantially weakening the decision-theoretic assumptions involved. The central finding is that the Mere Addition Paradox persists even in the general framework of choice functions when we assume Path Independence as a minimal decision-theoretic constraint. Choice functions can be thought of either as generalizing the standard axiological assumption of a binary “betterness” relation, or as providing (...) a general framework for a normative (rather than axiological) theory of population ethics. Path Independence, a weaker assumption than typically (implicitly) made in population ethics, expresses the idea that, in making a choice from a set of alternatives, the order in which options are assessed or considered is ethically arbitrary and should not affect the final choice. Since the result establishes a conflict between the relevant ethical principles and even very weak decision-theoretic principles, we have more reason to doubt the ethical principles. (shrink)

We begin by showing that every theory of the value of uncertain prospects must have one of three unpalatable properties. _Reckless_ theories recommend giving up a sure thing, no matter how good, for an arbitrarily tiny chance of enormous gain; _timid_ theories permit passing up an arbitrarily large potential gain to prevent a tiny increase in risk; _non-transitive_ theories deny the principle that, if A is better than B and B is better than C, then A must be better than (...) C. Having set up this trilemma, we study its horns. Non-transitivity has been much discussed; we focus on drawing out the costs and benefits of recklessness and timidity when it comes to axiology, decision theory, and normative uncertainty. (shrink)

The transition of C. albicans from unicellular yeast form to filamentous form i.e., pseudohyphae and hyphae is referred to as morphogenesis. C. albicans has the ability to respond to environmental conditions and accordingly changing its cell morphology. Three main morphological forms of C. albicans are unicellular yeast, pseudohyphae and hyphae. The effect of different growth media (Horse serum medium, RPMI-1640, MSGB), incubation temperatures (34˚C, 37˚C, 40˚C) and pH values (5.4, 6.4, 7.4) on germ tube production by C. albicans was evaluated. (...) Horse serum medium noticeably promotes filamentation while RPMI-1640 medium shows moderate filamentation and MSGB media shows moderately low filamentation. The germ tube of C. albicans developed early in 1.5 hr at high temperature i.e., 40˚C. Incubation temperature of 37˚C was associated with highest germ tube formation while 34˚C shows low filamentation. A pH of 5.4 also induces low filamentation, pH 6.4 gives moderately lower than pH 7.4. A pH of 7.4 was best suited for germ tube induction. The peak of mycelium production appears between 1.5 and 6 hr after inoculation of C. albicans culture. These results suggested that environmental factors are important in selectively favoring yeast or hyphal form, most important being the growth medium, incubation temperature and external pH value. (shrink)

Philosophical work on the concept of consent in the past few decades has got to grips with it as a rich notion. We are increasingly sensitive to consent not as a momentary, atomic, transactional thing, but as a complex idea admitting of various qualities and dimensions. In this paper we note that the recognition of this complexity demands a theoretical framework quite different to those presently extant, and we suggest that the enactive approach is one which offers significant value in (...) this regard. In consonance with arguments made by Laurie Penny about how consent is a continuous and dynamic process, we outline how an enactive approach identifies consent as temporally extended (rather than momentarily transactional), and as affected by the skilfulness of the agents involved, the fitness of community provided resources to negotiate the consensual relationship over time, and the unfolding of circumstances in the situation in which the joint action is taking place. We argue that the value of an enactive perspective on consent is in highlighting these complexities, and providing resources to articulate and theorise them in ways that are not open to other current approaches. (shrink)