The historical sensibility of Western modernity is best captured by the phrase “acting upon a story that we can believe.” Whereas the most famous stories of historians facilitated nation-building processes, philosophers of history told the largest possible story to act upon: history itself. When the rise of an overwhelming postwar skepticism about the modern idea of history discredited the entire enterprise, the historical sensibility of “acting upon a story that we can believe” (...) fell apart to its constituents: action, story form, and belief in a feasible future outcome. Its constituent parts are nevertheless still hold, either separately or in paired arrangements. First, believable stories are still told, but without an equally believable future outcome to facilitate. Second, in the shape of what I call the prospect of unprecedented change, there still is a feasible vision of a future (in prospects of technology and the Anthropocene), but it defies story form. And third, it is even possible to upon that feasible future, but such action aims at avoiding worst case scenarios instead of facilitating best outcomes. These are, I believe, features of an emerging postwar historical sensibility that the theory and philosophy of history is yet to understand. (shrink)

The appearance of consciousness in the universe remains one of the major mysteries unsolved by science or philosophy. Absent an agreed-upon definition of consciousness or even a convenient system to test theories of consciousness, a confusing heterogeneity of theories proliferate. In pursuit of clarifying this complicated discourse, we here interpret various frameworks for the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness through the lens of social insect evolutionary biology. To do so, we first discuss the notion of a forward test (...) versus a reverse test, analogous to the normal and revolutionary phases of the scientific process. Contemporary theories of consciousness are forward tests for consciousness, in that they strive to become a means to classify the level of consciousness of arbitrary states and systems. Yet no such theory of consciousness has earned sufficient confidence such that it might be actually used as a forward test in ambiguous settings. What is needed now is thus a legitimate reverse test for theories of consciousness, to provide internal and external calibration of different frameworks. A reverse test for consciousness would ideally look like a method for referencing theories of consciousness to a tractable model system. We introduce the Ant Colony Test as a rigorous reverse test for consciousness. We show that social insect colonies, though disaggregated collectives, fulfill many of the prerequisites for conscious awareness met by humans and honey bee workers. A long lineage of philosophically-neutral neurobehavioral, evolutionary, and ecological studies on social insect colonies can thus be redeployed for the study of consciousness in general. We suggest that the ACT can provide insight into the nature of consciousness, and highlight the ant colony as a model system for ethically performing clarifying experiments about consciousness. (shrink)

“As time passes, news about the now hotter Earth buzzes through the bird village. […] As Kingfisher casts his gaze upon the events that have unfolded, he can’t help but feel a sense of unease creeping up within him. He decides to collect all the scientific information concerning climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.” -/- —In “GHG Emissions”; The Kingfisher Story Collection.

Human vision briefly retains a trace of a stimulus after it disappears. This trace—iconic memory—is often believed to be a surrogate for the original stimulus, a representational structure that can be used as if the original stimulus were still present. To investigate its nature, a flicker-search paradigm was developed that relied upon a full scan (rather than partial report) of its contents. Results show that for visual search it can indeed act as a surrogate, with little cost for alternating (...) between visible and iconic representations. However, the duration over which it can be used depends on the type of task: some tasks can use iconic memory for at least 240 ms, others for only about 190 ms, while others for no more than about 120 ms. The existence of these different limits suggests that iconic memory may have multiple layers, each corresponding to a particular level of the visual hierarchy. In this view, the inability to use a layer of iconic memory may reflect an inability to maintain feedback connections to the corresponding representation. (shrink)

Three theories contend as explanations of perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust as well as other cases of genocide: structural, intentional, and situational. Structural explanations emphasize the sense in which no single individual or choice accounts for the course of events. In opposition, intentional/cutltural accounts insist upon the genocides as intended outcomes, for how can one explain situations in which people ‘step up’ and repeatedly kill defenseless others in large numbers over sustained periods of time as anything other than a (...) choice? Situational explanations offer a type of behavioral account; this is how people act in certain environments. Critical to the situational account as I discuss it is the ‘Asch paradigm’, i.e. experimentally attested conditions for eliciting conformityof behavior regardlesss of available evidence of prior beliefs. In what follows, I defend what I term above a version of situational explanations of perpetrator behavior. Moreover, I maintain that the factors that explain provide an understanding as well. While not committed to the complete irrelevance or exclusion of cultural or structural factors, nonetheless situational analyses can account both for what happened and why. A cardinal virtue of this version of situational explanations consists in showing how shallow the problem of understanding turns out to be for such cases. (shrink)

In fundamental rights adjudication, should judges defer to the judgment of other decision makers? How can they defer, without betraying the respect that judges ought to accord those rights? How can they refuse to defer, without betraying the respect that judges ought to accord to other decision makers? I argue that only principles of comity justify deference, and their reach is limited. Comity never forbids the judges to take and to act upon a different view of fundamental rights from (...) that of another decision maker. I elaborate this view by reference to the decision of the House of Lords in Adan and Aitseguer [2001] 1 All ER 593. (shrink)

Matthews discusses the role of our ability to make a judgment of taste (judgment of beauty) within Kant's notion of the structure of the mind. In doing this she does not simply rely upon what we can learn from the first part of the third critique, the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgment', but draws upon Kant's philosophy as a whole, including the first two critiques and the second part of The Critique of Judgment, the 'Critique of Teleological Judgment'. She (...) looks at how the ability to judge beauty links to other aspects of the mind: in particular to our ability to make moral judgments and to our ability to cognize experience, the latter involving a selection of those aspects of nature which lend themselves to the kind of ordering of which our minds are predisposed. Matthews identifies a link in Kant's thinking between creativity and aesthetic judgment. That is, she understands Kant to be saying that aesthetic judgment makes revolutionary ways of thinking possible (p.71). However, in her introduction she writes 'Beauty need not lead to knowledge or moral activity in order to have value in our lives' (p.1). Matthews points out that her aim in this book is to show that the feeling of beauty serves a larger purpose for Kant. The relevant feature of the experience of beauty is its 'ability to orient rational beings in a sensible world'. Her book is dedicated to explaining how the experience of beauty does this. The feeling of beauty, she writes, 'acts as a mediating link between theoretical and practical reason' (p.1). (shrink)

What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by (...) a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding. (shrink)

In this paper, we intend to promote an analysis of the use of the artificial language Heptapod B in Story of Your Life written by Ted Chiang and in its filmic adaptation, Arrival, written by Eric Heisserer and directed by Denis Villeneuve in relation to the authors’ views on the metaphysics of time. In both literary and filmic texts, the glossopoeia is used as a plot device upon which the alien race’s time perception is constructed and explicated in (...) connexion with the strong metaphor provided by Fermat’s principle of least time. Throughout the article, we discuss these hybrid interfaces of literature, cinema and science, researching the stories’ specific diegeses, the writers’ own elicitations as well as various texts on the Philosophy of time. The result consists of a comprehensive exegesis of the problematics generated by the narratives and an extensive philosophical debate on the subject. (shrink)

I challenge the common picture of the “Standard Story” of Action as a neutral account of action within which debates in normative ethics can take place. I unpack three commitments that are implicit in the Standard Story, and demonstrate that these commitments together entail a teleological conception of reasons, upon which all reasons to act are reasons to bring about states of affairs. Such a conception of reasons, in turn, supports a consequentialist framework for the evaluation of (...) action, upon which the normative status of actions is properly determined through appeal to rankings of states of affairs as better and worse. This covert support for consequentialism from the theory of action, I argue, has had a distorting effect on debates in normative ethics. I then present challenges to each of these three commitments, a challenge to the first commitment by T.M. Scanlon, a challenge to the second by recent interpreters of Anscombe, and a new challenge to the third commitment that requires only minimal and prima facie plausible modifications to the Standard Story. The success of any one of the challenges, I demonstrate, is sufficient to block support from the theory of action for the teleological conception of reasons and the consequentialist evaluative framework. I close by demonstrating the pivotal role that such arguments grounded in the theory of action play in the current debate between evaluator-relative consequentialists and their critics. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is now in its seventh year. The goals of this National Center for Biomedical Computing are to: create and maintain a repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies; build tools and web services to enable the use of ontologies and terminologies in clinical and translational research; educate their trainees and the scientific community broadly about biomedical ontology and ontology-based technology and best practices; and collaborate with a variety of groups who develop and use ontologies and (...) terminologies in biomedicine. The centerpiece of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a web-based resource known as BioPortal. BioPortal makes available for research in computationally useful forms more than 270 of the world's biomedical ontologies and terminologies, and supports a wide range of web services that enable investigators to use the ontologies to annotate and retrieve data, to generate value sets and special-purpose lexicons, and to perform advanced analytics on a wide range of biomedical data. (shrink)

This study is a theoretical work in the field of sociology of religion which aims to explain the origin of the act of sin and the fundamental motives of crime and deviation tendencies in this context, from Adam’s story in the Qur'an, the main source of Islam. Sin is regarded as a negative act in religious-cultural sense where one struggles for life and tries to protect itself. Though a direct correlation cannot be established with belief values, the sense of (...) sin can be effective in shaping our everyday life and controlling our behavior. Adam’s story is worthy of examination in this context as it carries the qualification of being a religious text that allows us to study the nature of sin. This is based on the Qur'anic text which we think is the simplest form of expression. Adam and Eve, Satan, Abel and Cain are the actors of this story and prototypes helping us to analyze the nature of sin. In this sense, sin acts in the form of various crimes and deviance behaviors as the result of man's eternity of property, power and status struggle in the person of these prototypes. Some theories which have been put forward about crimes and deviations can give a certain explanation on the subject. Also there is the possibility of giving more comprehensive factual explanations about the act of sin which contains a great deal of crime and deviant behavior, moving from the story of Adam. (shrink)

I introduce an underdiscussed type of moral luck, which I call interpersonal moral luck. Interpersonal moral luck characteristically occurs when the actions of other moral agents, qua morally evaluable actions, affect an agent’s moral status in a way that is outside of that agent’s capacity to control. I suggest that interpersonal moral luck is common in collective contexts involving shared responsibility and has interesting distinctive features. I also suggest that many philosophers are already committed to its existence. I then argue (...) that agents who are susceptible to interpersonal moral luck are usually for this reason defeasibly entitled to make demands of those agents who are the source of that luck. This is the phenomenon of normative entanglement. I conclude by discussing some of the important ways in which normative entanglement can shape the norms that govern the actions of agents in collective contexts as well as explain some of our intuitions about what participants in these contexts owe one another. (shrink)

Take a strip of paper with 'once upon a time there'‚ written on one side and 'was a story that began'‚ on the other. Twisting the paper and joining the ends produces John Barth’s story Frame-Tale, which prefixes 'once upon a time there was a story that began'‚ to itself. I argue that the ability to understand this sentence cannot be explained by tacit knowledge of a recursive theory of truth in English.

(The Kindle book can be ordered for $3.21 from Amazon) -/- Thinking is a fundamental activity of our species – those that give names to other creatures and call themselves humans. Textbooks tell us that there is about 1.2 kg of matter called the brain inside the human body. It sounds small but actually is proportionally the biggest among all animals on Earth. -/- I became more aware of thinking at around 5th grade upon hearing about an ancient paradox. (...) It can be summarized as follows. -/- ¤ -/- Once upon a time, there was a stupid king. In his kingdom lived a sage who was highly respected for his intelligence. The King did not appreciate this fact. Maybe the Sage made fun of the King’s intellect, but I am not so sure. Anyway, one day, the King summoned the Sage, intending to kill him. -/- The King said, “Wise man, I heard you earn a living by thinking and arguing. Now I give you two options to die.” -/- The Sage said, “Please tell me the choices, Your Majesty.” -/- The King continued, “You live by your tongue, so I will let you say one sentence before you die. If what you say is true, you will die by hanging. If what you say is false, you will die by beheading.” -/- Little did the King know that this was a stupid order. After a short while, the Sage confidently spoke his “last words”, which actually were what saved his life: -/- “Your Majesty, I am about to be beheaded!” -/- ¤ -/- As a “wild animal” going out into life from a young age, my brain spent a lot of time and energy looking for food. Now that I have become older, my body no longer needs so much sustenance. However, my mind craves a different type of nourishment: food for thought. -/- Food for thought can directly lead to food (on the table). My main job as a scientist exemplifies what I have just stated. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe it has been “thought for food” all along, like in such a sequence as TFFTTTFTFFTTFFFT... -/- In the hyper-chaotic infosphere today, we are surrounded by the noises of information, not only as wavy shores or waterfalls but also mega-tsunamis, through Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube, etc. More than ever, tranquility and calmness are necessary. Like what you have seen in wilderness video clips, predators such as lions, bears, and alligators act lightning-fast when catching prey. But when food is served, the natural world returns to its peaceful, soothing silence. -/- This short book is in its own tidy infosphere, where each little story is also brief and self-contained. Despite this small appearance, I hope the content inside carries the value of tranquility and life observation. The book is petite, but pretty sure not malnourished. A not-too-small detail is that the way the content was shaped and distilled reflects some innovations of mine and my research team: the mindsponge theory, a new theory of serendipity, the bayesvl R package, the BMF analytics, as well as other experiences from working in the field of science. After all, scientific works were my main source of food (before this book sells well – if it does). -/- Welcome to the priceless sober moments – with a chicken-burger price tag! -/- I hope this book will bring readers some moments of calmness, peaceful smiles, and maybe a couple of good laughs too. -/- ~~~ -/- *This update: December 12, 2023 (Third edition, with additions). (shrink)

Trope theory is a leading metaphysical theory in analytic ontology. One of its classic statements is found in the work of Donald C. Williams who argued that tropes qua abstract particulars are the very alphabet of being. The concept of an abstract particular has been repeatedly attacked in the literature. Opponents and proponents of trope theory alike have levelled their criticisms at the abstractness of tropes and the associated act of abstraction. In this paper I defend the concept of a (...) trope qua abstract particular by rejecting arguments that purport to show that tropes should not be understood as abstract and by arguing that the abstractness of tropes plays an indispensable role in one of our more promising trope-theoretic analyses of universals and of concrete objects. (shrink)

Arrival offers a useful thought experiment in the philosophy of mind and language. Assessing human linguists' interpretive efforts to understand the alien heptapod form of life in both the movie and the novella from which it was adapted (Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”) teach us how our understanding of selfhood shapes our conception of agency. Arrival’s reflexive commentary on the cinematic experience is also an argument for the value of learning to communicate in cinematic language.

A popular “Reductionist” account of personal identity unifies person stages into persons in virtue of their psychological continuity with one another. One objection to psychological continuity accounts is that there is more to our personal identity than just mere psychological continuity: there is also an active process of self-interpretation and self-creation. This criticism can be used to motivate a rival account of personal identity that appeals to the notion of a narrative. To the extent that they comment upon the (...) issue, proponents of narrative accounts typically reject Reductionist metaphysics that (ontologically) reduce persons to aggregates of person stages. In contrast to this trend, we seek to develop a narrative account of personal identity from within Reductionist metaphysics: we think person stages are unified into persons in virtue of their narrative continuity with one another. We argue that this Reductionist version of the narrative account avoids some serious problems facing non-Reductionist versions of the narrative account. (shrink)

This article argues that Max Scheler’s conception of “religious acts” and his criticisms of types of “difference” help rethink the relevance of discernment and decision making, especially today, in an age in which we are faced with an unprecedented range of "options" in nearly every area of social lives. After elucidating Scheler’s engagements with religion in On the Eternal in Man, his work is then applied to rethinking more deeply the four steps of Christian discernment developed by the 5th century (...) Mystic, John Cassian. Since Scheler’s work offers detailed and passionate depictions of the religious relevance of "values", it is an untapped resource for expanding upon Cassian’s still relevant work on discernment; an expansion that is necessary in order to demonstrate the often overlooked importance of discernment. This article concludes by employing the work of these two thinkers to show how discernment can help “sort-out,” like good "money changers", the differences between 1) finite values and supreme values, 2) an authentic and inauthentic doctrine of God 3) true differences and superficial differences, and 4) the social imaginaries of theomorphism and anthropomorphism. (shrink)

According to the fitting attitude (FA) analysis of value concepts, to conceive of an object as having a given value is to conceive of it as being such that a certain evaluative attitude taken towards it would be fitting. Among the challenges that this analysis has to face, two are especially pressing. The first is a psychological challenge: the FA analysis must call upon attitudes that shed light on our value concepts while not presupposing the mastery of these concepts. (...) The second challenge is normative: the FA analysis must account for the fittingness of the relevant attitudes in terms of a kind of normativity intimately related to these attitudes, but again without presupposing the mastery of the relevant value concepts. In this paper, we show that real progress is possible if we pay close attention to the nature of the attitudes recruited by the analysis. More specifically, we claim that an FA analysis that appeals to emotions conceived as evaluative attitudes — as opposed to, for instance, evaluative judgements or evaluative perceptions — has the best prospects of meeting the two challenges and of putting the FA analysis on a strong footing. (shrink)

What happens when someone acts? A familiar answer goes like this. There is something that the agent wants, and there is an action that he believes conducive to its attainment. His desire for the end, and his belief in the action as a means, justify taking the action, and they jointly cause an intention to take it, which in turn causes the corresponding movements of the agent's body. I think that the standard story is flawed in several respects. The (...) flaw that will concern me in this paper is that the story fails to include an agent-or, more precisely, fails to cast the agent in his proper role. (shrink)

When you type the word “serendipity” in a word-processor application such as Microsoft Word, the autocorrection engine suggests you choose other words like “luck” or “fate”. This correcting act turns out to be incorrect. However, it points to the reality that serendipity is not a familiar English word and can be misunderstood easily. Serendipity is a very much scientific concept as it has been found useful in numerous scientific discoveries, pharmaceutical innovations, and numerous humankind’s technical and technological advances. Therefore, there (...) have been many books written around the concept. So why do we need this additional book? This is not just another book about serendipity. It has evolved from the Editor’s question lingering for a decade after finishing his widely cited article (coauthored with Prof. Nancy K. Napier of Boise State University, ID, USA) “Serendipity as a strategic advantage?” in T. Wilkinson’s edited volume Strategic Management in the 21st Century, published by Praeger. The Editor and contributing authors have tried to achieve the following in this title. Demystifying the Serendipity Myth The phenomenon of serendipity has always been thought of as a “miracle”. It is the mystery of human innovation and one of the ultimate secrets of our society. But serendipity is not just a lucky coincidence nor any hidden conspiracy. This book explores the science of the information process behind this seemingly miraculous phenomenon. It connects human society with nature, going back to the root of our existence and looking at the flame of survival to discover the harmony in making creativity. Presenting the nuts and bolts of being an adventurer of science The authors present their conceptual investigations into serendipity’s nature and its mechanism by examining interesting real events and stories. The content is thought-provoking, and readers are led to question and explore their own life stories and problems along the journey of reading this book. Catching an elusive high-value target requires great strategies and efforts. But there are no dark secrets here because this is the “way of nature” – how we humans have always strived for innovation without realizing the blueprints behind such processes. Unlike other books on serendipity, this book will show you that a powerful “secret” is closer than you think. Delivering practical uses for different audiences By understanding the conditionality and survival drivers of serendipity, individuals or organizations can make better decisions on creating the right environment to facilitate the encounter and attainment of this valuable phenomenon. For scientists: With clear explanations of the information processes underlying serendipity, flexible theoretical frameworks of mindsponge and the 3D principle of creativity, researchers are provided with the tools they need to dig deeper into their own fields of study and find practical applications, be it psychology, economics, sociology, or anything that involves innovation (which is, in fact, every scientific discipline). For curious casual readers: Everybody needs innovation to make breakthroughs or spice up one’s life. If you think great ideas come to people randomly from an unknown fairy place, this book will convince you otherwise without taking away that awe and wonder. But above all, you will know how to become more creative, scientifically and straightforwardly, with no snake oil and no weird tricks. For ambitious business people: The flame that brought about great successes throughout human history is within you. But you can only use it if you understand it. While others wait for serendipity to come, you will be able to actively hunt for those precious moments. As it has always been: the best hunters triumph, not the passive wanderers. And in this age of information chaos, finding the golden fruits is not easy. Those from information technology know this problem well, and this book is the treasure map that they have been seeking to navigate that stormy ocean looking for jewels. Like a kingfisher tracking its prey through the water, waiting to gracefully strike, with serendipity, a person seizes the prize of creativity amid the chaos of life. ¤ ¤ ¤ Official introduction: The book explores the nature, underlying causes, and the information processing mechanism of serendipity. It proposes that natural or social survival demands drive serendipity, and serendipity is conditional on the environment and the mindset, on both individual and collective levels. From Darwin's evolution theory to Sun Tzu's war tactics, major innovations throughout human history are unified by this key concept. In the rapidly changing world, information is abundant but rather chaotic. The adaptive power of serendipity allows people to notice treasures within this wild sea, but only for those who understand how it works. To increase the probability of encountering and attaining serendipity, one should employ the mindsponge mechanism and the 3D process of creativity, for without these frameworks, serendipity is truly an elusive target. The book also discusses methods to build environments and cultures rich in navigational and useful information to maximize the chance of finding and capitalizing on serendipity. As a skill, serendipity has a resemblance to how kingfishers observe and hunt their prey. (shrink)

Despite their purported demographic and institutional decline, White evangelical voters were instrumental in the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and even more so in his 2020 loss. The story of Trump’s electoral successes among Christian voters in the last two elections is in large part the story of religious nationalism—and White Christian nationalism in particular—because Trump personifies the convergence of nationalism-infused forms of messianism and apocalypticism intrinsic to White evangelicalism, which culminate in QAnon cultic ideology. However, these (...) same ethnoreligious/nationalist patterns and logics extend much further back than Trump’s insurgent candidacy. This chapter traces the recurring, resurgent patterns of “zombie nationalism” among White evangelical Christians in the United States over the last half century that emerged in response to periods of significant societal change and certain recurring sociopolitical issues. In particular, alongside established elective affinities around ethnicity (whiteness) and religion (Christianity), this chapter makes the case for incorporating gender and sexual politics as key factors in the articulation and legitimation of religious nationalism in the United States. White Christian nationalism tends to reemerge as a salient political force during periods of rapid social change and diversification, driven by racialized religious grievances symptomatic of Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, or the paradoxical internalization and reprojection of a person’s or group’s perceived endangerment, victimhood, and/or suffering, in order to gain power. Drawing on examples of marriage equality and reproductive rights, this chapter demonstrates how an understanding of sexual politics is key to both apprehending and breaking the cyclical reanimation of White Christian nationalism. Escaping the nihilistic impulses driving these cycles will require White evangelicals to develop new hermeneutical tools capable of transforming the exclusionary patterns of racism, ethnocentrism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy that fuel the engine of ressentiment animating zombie nationalism. (shrink)

*Runner-up for the 2021 Royal Institute for Philosophy Essay Prize*: What should we think about ‘acts of conscience’, viz., cases where our personal judgments and public authority come into conflict such that principled resistance to the latter seems necessary? Philosophers mainly debate two issues: the Accommodation Question, i.e., ‘When, if ever, should public authority accommodate claims of conscience?’ and the Justification Question, i.e., ‘When, if ever, are we justified in engaging in acts of conscience – and why?’. By contrast, a (...) third important topic – the Conduct Question, i.e., ‘How should we act, morally speaking, when engaging in acts of conscience?’ – has been mostly neglected. This paper aims to offer concrete guidance for persons wishing to engage in acts of conscience in morally virtuous ways. I argue that such agents are subject to two basic prima facie duties: duties to oneself related to demands of integrity and duties to others related to demands of civility. I explain both duties in detail, arguing with regard to, that in light of what I call ‘the paradox of conscience’, we need to rethink our views about both ‘conscience’ and ‘integrity’; and with regard to, that, building upon Rawls’ ‘duty of civility’, we should embrace at least seven general principles for undertaking acts of conscience in a morally conscientious manner. (shrink)

According to the standard story given by reductive versions of the Causal Theory of Action, an action is an intrinsically mindless bodily movement that is appropriately caused by an intention. Those who embrace this story typically take this intention to have a coarse-grained content, specifying the action only down to the level of the agent's habits and skills. Markos Valaris argues that, because of this, the standard story cannot make sense of the deep reach of our non-observational (...) knowledge of action. He concludes that we therefore have to jettison its conception of actions as mindless bodily movements animated from the outside by intentions. Here we defend the standard story. We can make sense of the reach of non-observational knowledge of action once we reject the following two assumptions: (i) that an intended habitual or skilled action is a so-called basic action—that is, an action that doesn't involve any finer-grained intentions—and (ii) that an agent, in acting, is merely executing one intention rather than a whole hierarchy of more or less fine-grained intentions. We argue that (i) and (ii) are false. (shrink)

The epistemological consequences of paradox are paradoxical. They can be usefully generated by telling a series of once-upon-a-time stories that make various philosophical points, starting out innocent and ending up, well, paradoxical. This is an introduction to my Live Skepticism, defended in Skepticism Comes Alive.

ABSTRACT: A report on the pioneering of a new pedagogy designed to challenge students to use and improve their memory, increase their awareness of logical fallacies and tacitly embedded contradiction(s) and sensitize them to the deeply symbolic nature of thought in all its expressions (math, logos, music, picture and motor skills), as created, by the author, from in situ research at a senior level (ESL) course in Storytelling at one of East Asia’s premiere second languages university, and from teaching children (...) in several university summer programs. -/- As a Visiting Professor of Foreign Languages, I recently had a glorious opportunity to innovate curriculum and teaching techniques in an East Asian university classroom. Under the auspices of teaching senior level thematic courses in English as a Foreign Language, or more specifically, “storytelling,” I was blessed with the opportunity to innovate both on the level of curriculum and pedagogy. -/- But let me backtrack to set up my story from the start. All of this began in a children’s ESL class at a private language institute where I was given some newly formed intermediate level English classes for middle school students on a new campus that had yet to form a library. While waiting for my standard textbooks to arrive I began innovating with one of my own childrens’ stories titled The Tale of the Purple People Eater (a three page mythic story written in the late 90s. Please see appendix). In working with this story, because I envisioned presenting it orally (from memory) at first as a way to introduce students to memory arts exercises, I was compelled to read it over many times, which, to my surprise revealed a troubling feature: it was riddled with contradictions in every paragraph. At any rate, with the middle school aged students I only touched on this feature very briefly and focused more on language acquisition exercises. The tale nevertheless impressed upon me this bizarre aspect of language where a story can appear naturally cogent on the surface, but can also come apart at the seems if taken “literally.” Hence, later while teaching Storytelling in university with a rather dry textbook, I was invited to supplement the class with exercises of my own. Here I was curious to try work shopping the ‘Tale of The Purple People Eater’ with young adults. This involved three stages: 1) Memory work — or engaging with the unpublished story orally; 2) Exploring the contradictory nature of language and thought; 3) Probing the “deeply-symbolic” nature of meaning. -/- Of course, all of these levels have a long history of precedence in our civilization. Memory arts — though defunct now — had been highly developed in the ancient world, not least among bards who performed oral recitations from memory of the entire Illiad and Odyssey. Dialectics — now transmuted into the debate for show and prizes — had a deeper epistemological mission to discover truth and achieve enlightenment (i.e. Socrates, Boethius and St-Augustine). And if it could not be done via contradictory-prone rationality, it would do it by re-attaching or re-membering broken meanings via the sym-bol (“throwing together”), as per our lineage of platonic poets who created a world compelling enough to make us ask where Jesus went during his (underworld journey) three days in the crypt? Or, and, on what terrain did Dante travel? -/- Lets look at all three: Memory work can be very simple: it amounts to an oral recitation of the story in class followed by a homework assignment wherein the students are asked to reproduce the story (in writing) from memory. They can then compare ‘notes’ in class and by working in groups attempt to produce one version per group of the story in question. In this way we invite them to engage with ‘live’ stories as did our oral-history ancestors. Likewise, by writing it down (“for the first time”) they are re-living the act of our first bardic writer(s) who wove together a collection of competing versions of a popular legend to produce a standard. Very primal work! If Plato thought that writing meant the end of memory in his time, imagine what smart phones are doing to memory now. Contradictions too are easy to work with. It suffices to project a written version of the teacher’s story on the classroom screen — no note taking! — and let students have ample time to read it over and over, at first to check with their own memorized version, and later to seek out logical contradictions in the prose. Any way to ‘repair’ the story? Does it lose credibility because of contradictions? Can it be real without being true? Can it be true without being real? Do reality (L. res = matter) and truth (Gk. a-leithea = un-forgetting) etymologically speaking, share the same domain? -/- Further, if below the surface-meaning the story falls apart, its apparent mythical meaning immediately is called into question. This is a good time to ask the students to propose a (deeper) interpretation. On the surface, the obvious meaning of the Tale of the Purple People Eater, a world in which a purple ogre predatorily feasted on the purple race of the United Peoples of Benetton (a multi-racial nation representing every “skin colour of the rainbow”), revolves around racism, and indeed everyone save for one, thought the story was about racism. -/- I, the author, had the challenge of discovering the deeper meaning of my own story. Because it was written inspirationally one morning, the way we might record the memory of a dream from the night before in a journal, I also was ignorant of the story’s meaning. As luck would have it, a few days before I was to give my class feedback on their interpretations, a meditation on the color “purple” led to the book “The Color Purple” which I first heard of from a friend who, in my reply to a question about the book she was reading (in 1985), summarized it succinctly in one sentence about a black woman’s sexual awakening and liberation. I quickly got the book from the university library as well as the film which I viewed several times before my next class. -/- To my utter amazement, after reading the Tale of the Purple People Eater in light of the Color Purple and adjusting the meaning of color in the tale from the color of people’s complexion to the “color of people’s souls” (to commensurate with the film) as depicted in their clothing and other accoutrements (e.g. automobiles) as reflective of the “health of their souls” (white for revolt, purple for majesty, etc…) where the enslaved Celie is surrounded by drab lifeless colors in the beginning of the film in contrast to the liberated woman she has become in the end of the story symbolized by the extraordinary intensity of the purple shawl that bedecks her like an African queen, the tale can be considered, in part, as a kind of back story of the inner evolution of the book’s and film’s protagonist. -/- Many other cross-polenised metaphors come to the fore: Hippocrates in the tale is the mail man in the film; St-Yves anti-ageing gel is a metaphor for remaining in “childhood (sexual) slavery”; the Ex-Thrax vaccine is the spiritual laxative in the form of letters from Africa (from Ex-Lax and Thrace, a “wild place”) that eases Celie out of her yoke; the egg-shaped conference table with the pointy end in the tale is the kitchen table in the last meeting where Celie threatens her husband with the pointy end of the knife in the film… -/- Of course, the students could not be expected to decode the meaning of a story of this nature whose collective unconscious connotations the author himself had to go to great lengths to excavate almost like a detective of the subconscious. What was important here was the shared engagement between mind and narrative and how it acted as a vehicle for 1) re-membering, 2) becoming aware that all language is a metaphorical cover and 3) that the deep symbol and fused metaphor are divided not by external time and space but by external reality (in the Latin sense, res) and internal truth (in the Greek sense, aleithea). Myth then, in its highest meaning is a hybrid form (of these two) of narrative. Hence both parts real and true. (shrink)

The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where ‘theory of mind’ and moral judgment meet. Preschool children’s judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side-effect is brought about 'on purpose' when the side-effect itself is morally bad but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of ‘on-purpose’ (as opposed to purpose influencing moral judgment). Judgments of intentional action are (...) usually assumed to be purely factual. That these judgments are sometimes partly normative — even in preschoolers — challenges current understanding. Young children’s judgments regarding foreseen side-effects depend upon whether the children process the idea that the character does not care about the side-effect. As soon as preschoolers effectively process the ‘theory of mind’ concept, NOT CARE THAT P, children show the side-effect effect.idea.. (shrink)

There is a current debate about the grammar of intention: do I intend to φ, or that I φ? The equivalent question in Aristotle relates especially to choice. I argue that, in the context of practical reasoning, choice, as also wish, has as its object an act. I then explore the role that this plays within his account of the relation of thought to action. In particular, I discuss the relation of deliberation to the practical syllogism, and the thesis that (...) the conclusion of the second is an action. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and study the characteristic function of a neutrosophic set. After given the fundamental definitions of neutrosophic set operations generated by the characteristic function of a neutrosophic set ( Ng for short), we obtain several properties, and discussed the relationship between neutrosophic sets generated by Ng and others. Finally, we introduce the neutrosophic topological spaces generated by Ng . Possible application to GIS topology rules are touched upon.

Open theists argue that God's relationship to time, as conceived in classical theism, is erroneous. They explain that it is contradictory for an atemporal being to act in a temporal universe, including experiencing its temporal successions. Contrary to the atemporalists, redemptive history has shown that God interacts with humans in time. This relational nature of God nullifies the classical notion of God as timelessly eternal. Therefore, it lacks a philosophical and theological basis. Because God is in time, He does not (...) know all future contingencies and, therefore, changes. This study examines open theism's appropriation of the A and B theories of time to the divine-human relationship. The study argues that divine temporality does not solve the tension of divine-human relationships, especially in relation to the future. Further, historical divine temporality does not negate the fact of divine atemporality. It mainly stems from God's choice to create temporal creatures and His relationship with them. Furthermore, if it is not logically and metaphysically contradictory for an omnipresent being to act in space, then it follows that an atemporal being can act in time. Whether time is understood from the metric or psychological point of view, it does not transcend God, and therefore, the limitation it places on human creatures with respect to the future does not apply to God. Lastly, although a few philosophers reject the notion of eternity as timelessly eternal, the doctrine has a philosophical and theological basis in the Scripture. (shrink)

In this article, responding to assertions that the principle of double effect has no place in legal analysis, I explore the overlap between double effect and negligence analysis. In both, questions of culpability arise in situations where a person acts with no intent to cause harm but where reasonable foreseeability of unintended harm exists. Under both analyses, the determination of whether such conduct is permissible involves a reasonability test that balances that foreseeable harm against the good intended by the actor's (...) conduct. In both, absent a finding that the foreseeable harm is unreasonable in light of that intended good, no liability will be imposed upon the actor. Even conceding, however, such general similarity between double effect and negligence analysis - disagreement over the proper interpretation of the reasonability criterion at play in negligence poses an additional challenge for the attempt to correlate negligence with double effect. Economic efficiency interpretations of negligence, for example, purportedly based on the Learned Hand Formula and the RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF THE LAW OF TORTS, propose that culpability depends upon a utilitarian balancing of good effects of conduct (utility) versus its harmful foreseeable consequences (magnitude of risk of injury). Based on such an interpretation of negligence, however, contrasts between actors' states of mind, and normative differences between kinds of goods and harms, ultimately fade into the background and become irrelevant as essential conditions for properly assessing liability. This article elaborates and defends the view that double effect analysis lies at the heart of negligence theory. Part I elucidates in more detail the principle of double effect and describes its prima facie operation in negligence analysis. Part II considers and rejects the economic efficiency interpretation that has been offered as a theory of negligence, overcoming the challenge that such an interpretation presents for the effort to locate double effect analysis in the law. Part III illustrates and confirms the overlap between double effect and negligence by consideration of a series of case applications. The Article proposes that the weighing of conflicting values in double effect analysis and negligence is not achieved - as proposed by law and economics theory with respect to negligence - by imposing a consequentialist-utilitarian reduction of all value to a single concept of good and eliminating the relevance of traditional state of mind distinctions between intention and foreseeability. Instead, each mode of analysis recognizes that distinct culpability determinations flow naturally and plausibly from an appreciation of the traditional legal distinctions made between various types of goods and harms, and upon whether such goods and harms come about as result of an actor's intention or mere foreseeability. Keywords: Double effect, negligence, intention, foreseeability, choice, law and economics, utilitarianism, consequentialism, weighing of values. (shrink)

In 1906, Henry Stephens Salt published a short collection of essays that presented several rhetorically powerful, if formally deficient arguments for the vegetarian position. By interpreting Salt as a moral sentimentalist with ties to Aristotelian virtue ethics, I propose that his aesthetic argument deserves contemporary consideration. First, I connect ethics and aesthetics with the Greek concepts of kalon and kalokagathia that depend equally on beauty and morality before presenting Salt’s assertion: slaughterhouses are disgusting, therefore they should not be promoted. I (...) suggest three areas of development since Salt’s death that could be fruitfully plumbed to rebuild this assertion into a contemporary argument: an updated analysis of factory farm conditions, insights from moral psychologists on the adaptive socio-biological benefits of disgust as a source of cognitive information, and hermeneutical considerations about the role of the audience that allow blameworthiness for slaughterhouse atrocities to be laid upon the meat-eater. (shrink)

What happens to our minds when we listen to a story or read a book? How about when we watch a play or film? Any story, like a piece of music, plays out across our minds and in the process changes the nature of our notes and expands their range. Stories – whether told orally, read in a book, scrolled through or watched upon screen or stage – enable a metamorphosis of our minds through biological and sociocultural (...) processes operating in concert. (shrink)

We are affected by the world: when I place my hand next to the fire, it becomes hot, and when I plunge it into the bucket of ice water, it becomes cold. What goes for physical changes also goes for at least some mental changes: when Felix the Cat leaps upon my lap, my lap not only becomes warm, but I also feel this warmth, and when he purrs, I hear his purr. It seems obvious, in other words, that (...) perception (at least, and at least under ordinary conditions) is a matter of being affected by the agency of perceptible objects. Call this doctrine affectionism. Durand of St.-Pourçain rejects affectionism. The paper has three parts. In the first part, I sketch, briefly, what motivates Durand to reject affectionism. In the second part, I will take up the affectionist doctrine as defended by Durand's older contemporary at Paris, Godfrey of Fontaines, who holds that the object of all our mental acts (not just perceptions, but also thoughts and desires) is the efficient cause of those acts, or, in other words, all mental acts (not just perception) come about owing to the affection of the relevant mental faculty by the agency of the object. As it turns out, Godfrey develops a celebrated argument against the thesis that the object is not the efficient cause but a mere sine qua non cause. Hence his position offers a challenge to Durand's position, a challenge, I argue in the third part, Durand meets. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the primordial role of narratives in human self-creation as essentially cultural beings.

The literature acknowledges a distinction between immoral, amoral and moral management. This paper makes a case for the employee (at any level) as a moral agent, even though the paper begins by highlighting a body of evidence which suggests that individual moral agency is sacrificed at work and is compromised in deference to other pressures. This leads to a discussion about the notion of discretion and an examination of a separate, contrary body of literature which indicates that some individuals in (...) corporations may use their discretion to behave in a socially entrepreneurial manner. My underlying assumption is that CSR isn’t solely driven by economics and that it may also be championed as a result of a personal morality, inspired by employees’ own socially oriented personal values. A conceptual framework is put forward and it is suggested that individuals may be categorized as Active or Frustrated Corporate Social Entrepreneurs; Conformists or Apathetics, distinguished by their individualistic or collectivist personal values. In a discussion of the nature of values, this paper highlights how values may act as drivers of our behavior and pays particular attention to the values of the entrepreneur, thereby linking the existing debate on moral agency with the field of corporate social responsibility. (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)

In this paper we introduce the notion of filter on the neutrosophic crisp set, then we consider a generalization of the filter’s studies. Afterwards, we present the important neutrosophic crisp filters. We also study several relations between different neutrosophic crisp filters and neutrosophic topologies. Possible applications to database systems are touched upon.

It is argued here that cognitive science currently neglects an important source of insight into the human mind: the effects created by magicians. Over the centuries, magicians have learned how to perform acts that are perceived as defying the laws of nature, and that induce a strong sense of wonder. This article argues that the time has come to examine the scientific bases behind such phenomena, and to create a science of magic linked to relevant areas of cognitive science. Concrete (...) examples are taken from three areas of magic: the ability to control attention, to distort perception, and to influence choice. It is shown how such knowledge can help develop new tools and indicate new avenues of research into human perception and cognition. (shrink)

By considering the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a case study, I bring Tolkien’s explication of mythopoesis in “On Fairy Stories” to bear on the current popularity of superhero films to argue that such works qualify as cinematic examples of Tolkienesque fantasy tales. After summarizing Tolkien’s criteria for the genre in Nietzschean aesthetic terms, I both demonstrate how the builders of the MCU have crafted a sub-created fictional world and defend the existence of fairy stories in visual media (...) from Tolkien’s own criticism of such a possibility. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce new types of neutrosophic crisp sets with three types 1, 2, 3. After given the fundamental definitions and operations, we obtain several properties, and discussed the relationship between neutrosophic crisp sets and others. Also, we introduce and study the neutrosophic crisp point and neutrosophic crisp relations. Possible applications to database are touched upon.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of ""neutrosophic crisp neighborhoods system for the neutrosophic crisp point ". Added to, we introduce and study the concept of neutrosophic crisp local function, and construct a new type of neutrosophic crisp topological space via neutrosophic crisp ideals. Possible application to GIS topology rules are touched upon.

Consequentialist theories determine rightness solely based on real or expected consequences. Although such theories are popular, they often have difficulty with generalizing intuitions, which demand concern for questions like “What if everybody did that?” Rule consequentialism attempts to incorporate these intuitions by shifting the locus of evaluation from the consequences of acts to those of rules. However, detailed rule-consequentialist theories seem ad hoc or arbitrary compared to act consequentialist ones. We claim that generalizing can be better incorporated into consequentialism by (...) keeping the locus of evaluation on acts but adjusting the decision theory behind act selection. Specifically, we should adjust which types of dependencies the theory takes to be decision-relevant. Using this strategy, we formulate a new theory, generalized act consequentialism, which we argue is more compelling than rule consequentialism both in modeling the actual reasoning of generalizers and in delivering correct verdicts. (shrink)

Can video games or the playing of such games be morally objectionable? Many attempts to justify our intuitions about the morality of certain games or game activities are either unsuccessful or fall short. This is mainly due to a normative gap between reality and virtuality that classical approaches to moral philosophy cannot bridge. I am investigating to what extent an accurate action analysis can help us to justify our intuitions that, in some cases, something is ethically wrong with video games. (...) To do so, I am using Frankfurt’s volition theory to show how virtual game actions can be evaluated based on virtue ethics. This virtue ethical assessment is compatible with Ostritsch’s (2017) endorsement view. Especially in light of the gamification of our surroundings, the question of the ethical status of video gaming is becoming more and more urgent. By arguing that a virtue ethical approach can tell us more about the ethical aspects of video gaming, I will also argue that virtue ethics (because of similar problems in these fields) is promising regarding the ethics of simulation, art, and literature. (shrink)

Purpose. The author believes that the main topic of philosophical studies of Heraclitus was not nature, not dialectics, and not political philosophy; he was engaged in the development of philosophical anthropology, and all other questions raised by him were subordinated to it to one degree or another. It is anthropology that is the most "dark" part of the teachings of this philosopher, therefore the purpose of this article is to identify the hidden anthropological message of Heraclitus. In case of success, (...) it will become clear what made him "darken". Theoretical basis. The methodological basis of the article is the anthropological understanding of fragments of Heraclitus’ texts presented in a historical and philosophical context. Originality. The philosophical concept of Heraclitus is still a mystery for researchers of his work. The author of the article proposed such a variant of interpretation, within the framework of which different elements of this concept fit into a consistent model. Conclusions. The article proves that although the anthropological turn in philosophy is traditionally associated with the activities of the sophists and Socrates, the previous philosophical thought was also not devoid of anthropological ideas. Moreover, pre-Socratic philosophers posed problems, the interpretation of which brought the doctrine of man to the level of high-order abstractions, while surprisingly preserving the concreteness of the life-meaning questions that confront him. And one of the brightest representatives of pre-Socratic anthropology was Heraclitus of Ephesus. Religion was the motivator that made him study the world, man, and society. The doctrine of the Logos developed by Heraclitus had a tremendous impact on Plato and Philo of Alexandria, and through them on the author of the Fourth Gospel, who begins his story with a "Greek" rethinking of the mystery of the Incarnation. If Heraclitus claimed that a person carries a particle of the Logos, then John proclaimed that the Logos itself incorporated a particle of man. Despite all the differences between these approaches, each of them postulated the cosmic significance of human existence, which means that it brought anthropology to the ontological level. (shrink)

The debate over the merits of originalism has advanced considerably in recent years, both in terms of its intellectual sophistication and its practical significance. In the process, some prominent originalists—Lawrence Solum and Jeffrey Goldsworthy being the two discussed here—have been at pains to separate out the linguistic and normative components of the theory. For these authors, while it is true that judges and other legal decision-makers ought to be originalists, it is also true that the communicated content of the constitution (...) is its original meaning. That is to say: the meaning is what it is, not what it should be. Accordingly, there is no sense in which the communicated content of the constitution is determined by reference to moral desiderata; linguistic desiderata do all the work. In this article, I beg to differ. In advancing their arguments for linguistic originalism, both authors rely upon the notion of successful communications conditions. In doing so they implicitly open up the door for moral desiderata to play a role in determining the original communicated content. This undercuts their claim and changes considerably the dialectical role of linguistic originalism in the debate over constitutional interpretation. (shrink)

Previous work in Game Studies has centered on several loci of investigation in seeking to understand virtual gameworlds. First, researchers have scrutinized the concept of the virtual world itself and how it relates to the idea of “the magic circle”. Second, the field has outlined various forms of experienced “presence”. Third, scholarship has noted that the boundaries between the world of everyday life and virtual worlds are porous, and that this fosters a multiplicity of identities as players identify both with (...) themselves-offline and themselves-in-game. Despite widespread agreement that these topics are targets for research, so far those working on these topics do not have mutually agreed-upon framework. Here we draw upon the work of Alfred Schutz to take up this call. We provide a phenomenological framework which can be used to describe the phenomena of interest to Game Studies, as well as open new avenues of inquiry, in a way acceptable and useful to all. This helps to distinguish the core of the field from the supplemental theoretical and critical commitments which characterize diverse approaches within the field. (shrink)

Some environmentalists have argued that an effective ecological conscience may be rooted in a perspective that is either anthropocentric or sentiocentric. But, neither seems to have had any substantial effect on the ways in which our species treats nature. In looking to successfully awaken the ecological conscience, the focus should be on extending moral consideration to the land (wherein doing so includes all of the soils, waters, plants, animals, and the collectivity of which these things comprise) by means of coming (...) to love the land. Coming to love the land involves coming to view the land’s interests as our own—and, conferring upon the land a kind of moral patient-hood. In order to perceive the land’s “subjectivity,” and so, to come to love the land, we must relearn the way to look at the land by viewing its personality through the lens of he or she who can already do so, i.e., the nature writer. (shrink)

Moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. Recent philosophical work assumes that people can often accurately identify instances of grandstanding. In contrast, we argue that people are generally unable to reliably recognize instances of grandstanding, and that we are typically unjustified in judging that others are grandstanding as a result. From there we argue that, under most circumstances, to judge others as grandstanders is to fail to act with proper intellectual humility. We then examine the significance of (...) these conclusions for moral discourse. More specifically, we propose that moral discourse should focus on others’ stated reasons and whether their actions manifest respect. (shrink)