In order to create a good world, we need to learn how to do it - how to resolve our appalling problems and conflicts in more cooperative ways than at present. And in order to do this, we need traditions and institutions of learning rationally devoted to this end. When viewed from this standpoint, what we have at present - academic inquiry devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how - is an intellectual and human disaster. We (...) urgently need a new, more rigorous kind of inquiry that gives intellectual priority to the tasks of articulating our problems of living and proposing and critically assessing possible cooperative solutions. This new kind of inquiry would have as its basic aim to improve, not just knowledge, but also personal and global wisdom - wisdom being understood to be the capacity to realize what is of value in life. To develop this new kind of inquiry we will need to change almost every branch and aspect of the academic enterprise. (shrink)

In this article, I present some worries about the possible impact of global efforts to aid the needy in some of the world’s most desperate regions. Among the worries I address are possible unintended negative consequences that may occur elsewhere in a society when aid agencies hire highly qualified local people to promote their agendas; the possibility that foreign interests and priorities may have undue influence on a country’s direction and priorities, negatively impacting local authority and autonomy; and the (...) related problem of outside interventions undermining the responsiveness of local and national governments to their citizens. -/- Another issue I discuss is the possibility that efforts to aid the needy may involve an Each-We Dilemma, in which case conflicts may arise between what is individually rational or moral, and what is collectively rational or moral. Unfortunately, it is possible that if each of us does what we have most reason to do, morally, in aiding the needy, we together will bring about an outcome which is worse, morally, in terms of its overall impact on the global needy. -/- The article ends by briefly noting a number of claims and arguments that I made in my 2017 Uehiro Lectures regarding how good people should respond in a world of need. As I have long argued, I have no doubt that those who are well off are open to serious moral criticism if they ignore the plight of the needy. Unfortunately, however, for a host of both empirical and philosophical reasons, what one should do in light of that truth is much more complex, and murky, than most people have realized. (shrink)

One of our most sophisticated accounts of objective chance in quantum mechanics involves the Deutsch-Wallace theorem, which uses state-space symmetries to justify agents’ use of the Born rule when the quantum state is known. But Wallace argues that this theorem requires an Everettian approach to measurement. I find that this argument is unsound. I demonstrate a counter-example by applying the Deutsch-Wallace theorem to the de Broglie-Bohm pilot-wave theory.

This reply affirms Temkin’s critical perspective on effective altruism but seeks to draw out its constructive implications. It first encourages Temkin to defend the practical urgency of global poverty in the face of doubts about aid effectiveness. It then argues for a more holistic conception of effectiveness to mitigate these doubts. It considers some alternative aid strategies that respond to this broader conception. Finally, it exhorts effective altruists to think more seriously about the reform of global institutions.

David Lewis holds that a single possible world can provide more than one way things could be. But what are possible worlds good for if they come apart from ways things could be? We can make sense of this if we go in for a metaphysical understanding of what the world is. The world does not include everything that is the case—only the genuine facts. Understood this way, Lewis's “cheap haecceitism” amounts to a kind of metaphysical (...) anti-haecceitism: it says there aren't any genuine facts about individuals over and above their qualitative roles. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics 1.8, Aristotle seems to argue that certain external goods are needed for happiness because, in the first place, they are needed for virtuous activity. This has puzzled scholars. After all, it seems possible for a virtuous agent to exercise her virtuous character even under conditions of extreme hardship or deprivation. Indeed, it is natural to think these are precisely the conditions under which one's virtue shines through most clearly. Why then does Aristotle think that a wide range (...) of external goods is required for virtuous activity, and therefore, for happiness? -/- I argue that there is good sense to be made of Aristotle's stance on external goods. Specifically, I explain how, on this view, a range of external goods is required for the full exercise of virtue, and I show that it is only this full exercise that is constitutive of eudaimonia. Drawing on passages in Politics 7.13 and Nicomachean Ethics 3.1, I develop and defend a distinction between the "mere" exercise of virtue, and the full or complete exercise of virtue. I argue that, for Aristotle, the distinguishing feature of this distinction is the value of the virtuous action's ends. An action that fully expresses virtue aims at an end that is unqualifiedly good, while an action that merely exercises virtue does not. I argue that the external goods Aristotle mentions in NE 1.8 are necessary for performing actions with unqualifiedly good ends, and so necessary for the complete exercise of virtue. In addition to providing a more satisfactory account than existing proposals of the role of external goods in Aristotelian happiness, my interpretation has two additional upshots. First, it brings to light an under-appreciated and independently compelling feature of Aristotle's ethical thought: the value of virtuous actions depends in part on the value of the ends they aim to realize. Second, it finds in Aristotle a distinct and powerful way of thinking about the badness of certain kinds of misfortune and deprivation: they are bad in part because they prevent us from fully realizing our capacity for moral agency, from fully engaging with value in the world. (shrink)

Universities need to change dramatically in order to help humanity make progress towards as good a world as possible.

It is commonly believed that intrinsically bad possible worlds are inconsistent with the perfect goodness of God. A perfectly good being could not exist in possible worlds that are intrinsically bad. Indeed it is widely believed that possible worlds that are insufficiently good are inconsistent with a perfectly good God. Modal atheological arguments aim to show that, since the pluriverse includes intrinsically bad worlds and insufficiently good worlds, there necessarily does not exist a perfectly good (...) God. I show that modal atheological arguments are in general invalid. Modal atheological arguments fail to show that there exists no perfectly good God even on the assumption that there are extremely bad worlds in the pluriverse. Modal atheological arguments depend entirely on the logic of modality in S5. But the logic of S5 ensures that a perfectly good God is consistent with extremely bad possible worlds and so guarantees that a perfectly good God is consistent with a plenitudinous pluriverse. (shrink)

Governance encompasses the processes by which organizations are directed, controlled and held to account. It includes the authority, accountability, leadership, direction, and control exercised in an organization. Greatness can be achieved when good governance principles and practices are applied throughout the whole organization. Ethical Governance requires that public officials adhere to high moral standards while serving others. Authentic Governance entails the systematic process of continuous, gradual, and routine personal/corporate improvement, steering, and learning that lead to sustainable high personal/corporate performance (...) and excellence. Thus authentic governance represents the ability to discern right from wrong and the commitment to do what is right, good, and proper. Benevolent governance is perceived to be for benefit of the population as a whole. Sikhism, a panentheistic religion, originated in the Punjab province of the Indian subcontinent, during the 15th century. It is one of the youngest and fifth major world religions, founded by Guru Nanak. The fundamental beliefs of Sikhism have been enshrined in the sacred scripture, Sri Guru Granth Sahib [1-3]. These beliefs include faith in one universal creator, unity of all humankind, engaging in selfless service, striving for social justice for all, honest livelihood and ethical conduct while living a householder's life. Sri Guru Grant Sahib provides very useful insights for governance through religious or secular organizations, that address human rights, education, or diplomacy to end all forms of disparity/discrimination among people [4-5]. In this article, an attempt is made to understand how the doctrines of Sikhism encourage us for better governance and by which means. Whether these doctrines align with the above-mentioned forms of governance or conflict with these. It is pointed out the most of the attributes of good, ethical, authentic and benevolent governance are genuinely supported by the Sikh doctrines. The adherence to democratic and republican organizations, for providing high-quality governance, is encouraged in Sikh principles and practices. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the number of bots online, varying from Web crawlers for search engines, to chatbots for online customer service, spambots on social media, and content-editing bots in online collaboration communities. The online world has turned into an ecosystem of bots. However, our knowledge of how these automated agents are interacting with each other is rather poor. Bots are predictable automatons that do not have the capacity for emotions, meaning-making, creativity, and (...) sociality and it is hence natural to expect interactions between bots to be relatively predictable and uneventful. In this article, we analyze the interactions between bots that edit articles on Wikipedia. We track the extent to which bots undid each other’s edits over the period 2001–2010, model how pairs of bots interact over time, and identify different types of interaction trajectories. We find that, although Wikipedia bots are intended to support the encyclopedia, they often undo each other’s edits and these sterile “fights” may sometimes continue for years. Unlike humans on Wikipedia, bots’ interactions tend to occur over longer periods of time and to be more reciprocated. Yet, just like humans, bots in different cultural environments may behave differently. Our research suggests that even relatively “dumb” bots may give rise to complex interactions, and this carries important implications for Artificial Intelligence research. Understanding what affects bot-bot interactions is crucial for managing social media well, providing adequate cyber-security, and designing well functioning autonomous vehicles. (shrink)

-/- Very few (if any) people believe that the world was created, and is maintained, by a thoroughly contemptible and malicious being. Do we have good reason for our disbelief? In the first part of this paper I offer an argument for the non-existence of such a being. According to this argument there is just too much good - too may good things - in the world for the ‘malicious being’ theory to be plausible. In (...) the second part of the paper I briefly consider the applicability of similar arguments to three other possible beings. (shrink)

Many common arguments for physicalism begin with the principle that the cosmos is “causally closed.” But how good are the arguments for causal closure itself? I argue that the deductive, a priori arguments on behalf of causal closure tend to beg the question. The extant inductive arguments fare no better. They commit a sampling error or a non-sequitur, or else offer conclusions that remain compatible with causal openness. In short, we have no good arguments that the physical (...) class='Hi'>world is causally closed. (shrink)

Geach and Thomson have argued that nothing is just plain good, because ‘good’ is, logically, an attributive adjective. The upshot, according to Geach and Thomson, is that consequentialism is unacceptable, since its very formulation requires a predicative use of ‘good’. Reactions to the argument have, for the most part, been uniform. Authors have converged on two challenging objections . First, although the logical tests that Geach and Thomson invoke clearly illustrate that ‘good’, as commonly used, is (...) an attributive, they don’t show that ‘good’ lacks an intelligible predicative interpretation. Second, even if the English word ‘good’ fails to express the property of goodness, we can just stipulate that ‘good*’ expresses goodness and thus formulate consequentialism accordingly. The second objection is one way of voicing skepticism about the method of drawing substantive philosophical conclusions from considerations about ordinary language. In this essay, we present an argument, inspired by Geach and Thomson, which isn’t susceptible to the same objections but which supports the same conclusion. The significance of our argument for ethics is obvious; it challenges the intelligibility of standard consequentialism, and even certain forms of non-consequentialism. One might be inclined to think that a more sophisticated consequentialism, which relies on ‘good {possible world/state of affairs/outcome}’ instead of just ‘good’, evades the criticism. But we explain why the criticism can’t be so easily evaded. (shrink)

This paper proposes a way to undercut anarchist objections to taxation without endorsing an authoritarian justification of government coercion. The argument involves public goods, as understood by economists and others. But I do not analyse options of autonomous prisoners and the like; for, however useful otherwise, these abstractions underestimate the real-world task of sorting out the prerogatives of and limits on ownership. Proceeding more contextually, I come to recommend a shareholder addendum to the doctrine of public goods. This recommendation (...) involves modifying the public goods argument for government coercion to include a contributor-specific compensation provisio, thinking of contributors as investors, and including among the latter those whose investment is in the form not of a market transaction strictly speaking but of sacrifice. To reach this recommendation I constrain the market liberal''s limited endorsement of taxation by drawing on the (idealized) postcommunist privatizer''s continuing commitment to populism. (shrink)

Evaluativism (Carruthers 2018) and reflexive imperativism (Barlassina and Hayward 2019) agree that valence—the (un)pleasantness of experiences—is a natural kind shared across all affective states. But they disagree about what valence is. For evaluativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of representing its worldly object as good/bad; for reflexive imperativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of commanding its subject to get more/less of itself. I argue that reflexive imperativism is superior to evaluativism according to Carruthers’s own standards. He maintains (...) that a theory of valence should account for its phenomenology and role in imagination-based decision-making. I show that it is reflexive imperativism, rather than evaluativism, that fits this explanatory bill. (shrink)

This paper is about guessing: how people respond to a question when they aren’t certain of the answer. Guesses show surprising and systematic patterns that the most obvious theories don’t explain. We argue that these patterns reveal that people aim to optimize a tradeoff between accuracy and informativity when forming their guess. After spelling out our theory, we use it to argue that guessing plays a central role in our cognitive lives. In particular, our account of guessing yields new theories (...) of belief, assertion, and the conjunction fallacy—the psychological finding that people sometimes rank a conjunction as more probable than one of its conjuncts. More generally, we suggest that guessing helps explain how boundedly rational agents like us navigate a complex, uncertain world. (shrink)

Much of the excitement and concern with virtual reality (VR) has to do with the impact of virtual experiences on our moral conduct in the “real world”. VR technologies offer vivid simulations that may impact prosocial dispositions and abilities or emotions related to morality. Whereas some experiences could facilitate particular moral behaviors, VR could also inculcate bad moral habits or lead to the surreptitious development of nefarious moral traits. In this chapter, I offer an overview of the ethical debate (...) about using VR to improve morality. I start by clarifying the rationale of using VR for good, drawing on moral enhancement literature, branches of the science of morality, and the specific potentials of this technology. Then, I will briefly focus on three prominent domains of socio-moral improvement: the use of VR for enhancing empathy, reducing implicit biases, and improving pro-environmental behavior. After that, I shall consider three ethical objections to the enthusiasm for using VR in order to improve human morality. Finally, I will recapitulate the main points of the chapter and provide a few concluding thoughts on future avenues of discussion on how VR can make us act (morally) better. (shrink)

Charlotte Witt covers a remarkable amount of ground in this concise and elegantly written book. Coming in at under 150 pages, she artfully weaves together Aristotle’s theory of functions with contemporary work on cultural transmission and apprenticeship, ideas about self-creation with theories of aspiration and transformative experience, and reflections on the relationships among social norms and games with thoughts about social roles and the nature of hierarchy. At the heart of it is an elaboration and defense of a thoroughly externalist (...) account of social normativity. Witt takes skilled experts, especially artisans like chefs and carpenters, as paradigm cases for theorizing about social normativity. She uses them to argue that the ultimate source of many normative obligations is found not in the acquiescence, attitudes, or any other features internal to those on whom those obligations fall. Rather, the demands are rooted in the world itself, and flow from specific circumstances, especially from the constraints those circumstances impose on different actors in virtue of the tasks they need to perform. The result is a view that depicts social normativity not just as external to individuals but also unavoidably role specific; what is right for a chef is not necessarily right for a carpenter, and what makes for a good nurse might make for a poor drill sergeant. Witt’s presentation of this package of ideas is both careful and austere, and it makes for a wonderfully thought provoking read. Social Goodness: On the Ontology of Social Norms will reward the careful attention of anyone interested in social ontology, especially the metaphysical foundations of normativity, the nature of social norms, and the relationship between social roles and the self. (shrink)

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

A perceptual realism that is naive in a good way must be naively realistic about world and mind. But contemporary self-described naive realists often have trouble acknowledging that both the good cases of successful perception and the bad cases of illusion and hallucination involve internal experiential states with intentional contents that present the world as being a certain way. They prefer to think about experience solely in relational terms because they worry that otherwise we won’t be (...) able to escape from radical skepticism. I argue that experiential relations to objects require that their subjects be in internal experiential states. But this does not mean that these states are our epistemological starting point which can be known independently of any knowledge of the external world. We do escape the epistemological predicament of radical skepticism because the good cases are primary over the bad ones. But this is not because the good cases alone provide reasons for belief, but because we do not need a reason to think we are in a good case, but do need a reason to think we are not, and such a reason must come from a good case. So bad cases can only be thought of as deviations from good cases. And we can only understand experiences as states with contents distinct from their objects and present in good and bad cases once we understand misrepresentation, that is, bad cases, and therefore only as we ascribe knowledge of the external world to ourselves. (shrink)

It is often assumed that how we talk about the world matters a great deal. This is one reason why conceptual engineers seek to improve our linguistic practices by advocating novel uses of our words, or by inventing new ones altogether. A core idea shared by conceptual engineers is that by changing our language in this way, we can reap all sorts of cognitive and practical benefits, such as improving our theorizing, combating hermeneutical injustice, or promoting social emancipation. But (...) how do changes at the linguistic level translate into any of these worthwhile benefits? In this paper, we propose the nameability account as a novel answer to this question. More specifically, we argue that what linguistic resources are readily available to us directly affects our cognitive performance on various categorization-related tasks. Consequently, our performance on such tasks can be improved by making controlled changes to our linguistic resources. We argue that this finding supports and extends recent motivations for conceptual engineering, as categorization plays an important role in both theoretical and practical contexts. (shrink)

Kant’s body offered a constant target for his own remarks, both in correspondence and during his lunchtime conversations. Several good descriptions of Kant’s body have come down to us over the centuries, as well as a number of visual representations, but these are remarkably limited, given his stature in the world of ideas. A new description of Kant, written by a novelist who visited Kant while passing through Königsberg, has recently come to light. It is reproduced here — (...) in English translation as well as the original German — and earlier descriptions of Kant are briefly recounted. (shrink)

This chapter will amount to a detailed exposition and exploration of one of the most prominent arguments against the existence of an unsurpassable world: the argument from addition. Endorsed by a variety of thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Alvin Plantinga, and William Rowe, the argument from addition uses the possibility of adding good things to a candidate unsurpassable world to argue that every world is surpassable. While widely endorsed, the argument has come under recent criticism. (...) By carefully working through a targeted version of the argument, I set out to establish the following: (i) that a world can always contain more good things; (ii) that a suitably restricted additive aggregation principle allows us to say that adding more good things in a certain way is an improvement, and (iii) that objections to the argument from widespread value incomparability fail. (shrink)

The world never stands still. There is always a Brownian movement of economic subjects and objects on the face of it. But, if we have been visualizing this movement over a relatively long period of time, then we can distinguish the acceleration and increase in the volume of movements along individual commodity routes, the growth and formation of new subjects of international economic relations. From time to time, "accelerators" of this movement appear, either in the form of new types (...) of energy to service production, or technologies to simplify the exchange and distribution of benefits. The market, controlled by the "invisible hand", is gradually taking over the whole world, and some new goods appear to meet the needs. We use technologies and devices described in unreal fantasy plots of classical literature already today in real life. The speed of change is exciting on the one hand and is frightening on the other hand. In the modern world, it would seem, everything is mobile. The quality and cost of transportation has no longer been a physical obstacle to any exchange and travel. The forms of modern financial transactions for service international economic relations, their speed and coverage are impressive. Enterprises, in terms of capitalization, exceed the national incomes of states and do not have spatial territorial boundaries, being the main players in international economic relations along with states, their associations and international organizations. Digitalization is no longer a challenge for society, but our present. It seems sometimes that the world allegedly wants to slow down the further development of mankind and creates obstacles in the form of wars, epidemics and crises. Such obstacles become challenges for the development of economic entities of all levels. Change always creates unexpected opportunities for someone and insurmountable restrictions for other one. Change always leads to a redistribution of forces. Changes are needed to overthink the nature and direction of movement. Changes are the certain reorganization of the world economic system. The world is always on the verge of changes. What will they be this time? (shrink)

The best arguments for possible worlds as states of affairs furnish us with equally good arguments for impossible worlds of the same sort. I argue for a theory of impossible worlds on which the impossible worlds correspond to maximal inconsistent classes of propositions. Three objections are rejected. In the final part of the paper, I present a menu of impossible worlds and explore some of their interesting formal properties.

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the universe, and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe; and learning how to create a good, civilized, enlightened, wise world. We have solved the first great problem of learning – we did that when we created modern science and technology in the 17th century. But we have not yet solved the second one. That combination of solving the first problem, failing to solve the (...) second one, is very, very, dangerous. Almost all our current global problems have arisen as a result. Modern science and technology immensely increase our powers to act (for some of us), but not our power to act wisely. Modern science and technology lead to modern industry, modern agriculture, travel, medicine, hygiene and armaments, and these in turn lead to much that is of benefit, but also to all our current global problems: population growth, habitat destruction, loss of wild life, mass extinction of species, lethal modern war, the menace of nuclear weapons, pollution of earth, sea and air, antibiotic resistance, degradation of democracy facilitated by the internet and, most serious of all, the climate crisis. Now that we have modern science and technology, wisdom has become, not a private luxury, but a public necessity. But how is it to be achieved? Here is the solution. We can learn from the solution to the first great problem of learning how to solve the second one. That was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment, but in implementing it, the philosophes of the Enlightenment blundered. They got the progress-achieving methods of science wrong; they failed to generalize them properly; and they applied them, not to social life but to creating social science. Their mistakes are still built into academia today. In order to learn how to create a civilized, enlightened world, the key thing we need to do is to cure academia of the structural blunders we have inherited from the Enlightenment. We need to bring about a revolution in science, and in academia more broadly so that the basic aim becomes wisdom, and not just knowledge – wisdom being the capacity, active endeavour and desire to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, wisdom thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. The outcome of the revolution we need would be universities radically transformed, so that they become rationally and actively devoted to helping people solve problems of living, including global problems, thus making progress to as good, civilized, enlightened a world as possible. (shrink)

Meaning in life is too important not to study systematically, but doing so is made difficult by conceptual indeterminacy. An approach to meaning that is promising but, indeed, conceptually vague is Jonathan Haidt’s ‘cross-level coherence’ account. In order to remove the vagueness, I propose a concept of ‘good fit’ that a) captures central aspects of meaning as it is discussed in the literature; b) brings the subject of meaning under the survey of the dynamicist or ‘embodied-embedded’ philosophy of cognition; (...) and c) allows the theoretical discussion on meaning to become more focused and systematic. The article addresses two apparent problems with the idea of ‘good fit,’ namely the fact that both challenges and relations of an agent with the outside world are central to meaning. It is finally pointed out which implications adopting the concept of ‘good fit’ instead of ‘meaning’ would have. (shrink)

A number of moral philosophers have endorsed instances of the following curious argument: it would be better if a certain moral theory were true; therefore, we have reason to believe that the theory is true. In other words, the mere truth of the theory—quite apart from the results of our believing it or acting in accord with it—would make for a better world than the truth of its rivals, and this fact provides evidence of the theory’s truth. This form (...) of argument may seem to be an obvious non-starter. After all, the fact that the truth of some empirical claim, say, the claim that there is an afterlife, would be desirable does not, by itself, give us any reason to believe it. But I argue that, when it is properly understood, this form of argument—which I call the better world argument—is valid in moral philosophy. I develop and defend a version of the argument that rests on the view that the correct moral theory cannot exhibit a certain form of self-defeat—a form that, as far as I know, has not been discussed in the literature. I also identify two promising applications of this form of argument. The first is a defense of permissions to promote one’s own private aims, rather than promote the greater good, and the second, an argument against the possibility of moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Suppose you want to do as much good as possible. What should you do? According to members of the effective altruism movement—which has produced much of the thinking on this issue and counts several moral philosophers as its key protagonists—we should prioritise among the world’s problems by assessing their scale, solvability, and neglectedness. Once we’ve done this, the three top priorities, not necessarily in this order, are (1) aiding the world’s poorest people by providing life-saving medical treatments (...) or alleviating poverty itself, (2) preventing global catastrophic risks, such as those posed by nuclear war or rogue artificial intelligence, and (3) ending factory farming. These claims are both plausible and striking. If correct, they should prompt a stark revision of how we approach our altruistic activities. However, the project of determining how to do the most good—as opposed to say, whether we should do the most good—has only recently, within the last ten years, become the subject of serious academic attention. Many key claims have not yet been carefully scrutinised. This is a cause for concern: are effective altruists doing good badly? In this thesis, I critique and develop some of the latest claims about how individuals can do the most good. I do this in three areas: the value of saving lives (preventing premature deaths), how best to improve lives (making people happier during their lives), and cause prioritisation methodology (frameworks for determining which problems are the highest priorities). In each case, I raise novel theoretical considerations that, when incorporated, change the analysis. Roughly speaking, my main conclusions are (1) saving lives is not as straightforwardly good we tend to suppose, may not be good at all, and is not clearly a priority; (2) happiness can be measured through self-reports and, based on the self-reported evidence, treating mental health stands out as an overlooked problem that may be an even more cost-effective way to improve lives than alleviating poverty; (3) the cause prioritisation methodology proposed by effective altruists needs to be moderately reconceptualised and, when it is, it turns out it is not as illuminating a tool as we might have thought and hoped. (shrink)

Good governance, first appeared in the nineties within the United Nations, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund refers to describe how public organizations best conduct public affairs and deliver public goods and services. Today, about three decades later good governance seems to be still popular since there are still many challenges ahead for many governments especially in less-developed and developing countries. Hence the notion of good governance was emerged as a normative commencement of the principles, (...) values and ethics to realise the acts of governance. Some thoughts on good governance and related topics advocated by three great ancient philosophers, who appear to be relevant at the present time are considered herein. One of the said philosophers is Kautilya (also known as Chanakya and Vishnugupta), who lived in India around 150AD. The others are the two great Greek philosophers Plato (427- 347BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), who stand with Socrates as the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the West. The thoughts are extracted from that detailed manual of state-craft and the science of living known as the Arthashastra written by one of classical India’s greatest minds Kautilya, Plato’s great work known as ‘The Republic’ and Aristotle’s treatise titled ‘The Politics”. The objective of this paper is to study the thoughts of ancient Greek philosophers who lived many centuries ago and their ideas are still relevant today. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch a liberal studies course designed to explore our fundamental problem of thought and life: How can our human world exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? The fundamental character of this problem provides one with the opportunity to explore a wide range of issues. What does physics tell us about the universe and ourselves? How do we account for everything physics leaves out? How can living brains be conscious? If (...) everything occurs in accordance with physical law, what becomes of free will? How does Darwin's theory of evolution contribute to the solution to the fundamental problem? What is the history of thought about this problem? What is of most value associated with human life? What kind of civilized world should we seek to help create? Why is the fundamental problem not a part of standard education in schools and universities? What are the most serious global problems confronting humanity? Can humanity learn to make progress towards as good a world as possible? These are some of the questions that can be tackled as an integral part of exploring the fundamental problem. But the course does not merely wander at random from one issue to another. Taking the fundamental problem as central provides the course with a coherent structure. The course would be conducted as a seminar, and it would respond to queries and suggestions from students. (shrink)

Nietzsche regarded nihilism as an outgrowth of the natural sciences which, he worried, were bringing about “an essentially mechanistic [and hence meaningless] world.” Nihilism in this sense refers to the doctrine that there are no values, or that everything we might value is worthless. In the last issue of Modern Horizons, I offered this conditional explanation of the relation of science and nihilism: that a scientific worldview is nihilistic insofar as it rules out the existence of anything that cannot (...) in principle be precisely picked out or identified.i What kinds of entities would a scientific worldview eliminate on the basis of such an assumption? The list is long and various, but it includes those intentional (mentalii) entities of our consciousness that underwrite the existence of persons, and more basically of thought itself – e.g., belief, value, agency, truth, and meaning. I argued in that previous paper that intentional concepts are ultimately inscrutable, and yet impossible coherently to deny. I claimed that we could no more doubt the existence of values than we could doubt reality itself – and when I spoke of values I had in mind the (suspicion-engendering) concept of the good, and was even toying with the related idea of the Logos (an even more suspect concept). There are a several attractive reasons why the idea of the good, or the Logos, might be regarded with suspicion, and why either might reasonably be discarded as a pseudo concept. Leaving the latter concern until later, we might worry that insisting on the possibility of an overarching good supports the idea of a total worldview, or that we are gradually progressing towards a single correct vision of things. A progressivist, totalising vision would seem to foreclose on outlooks, values, and persons that deviate from its most likely trajectory, and may stymie or interfere with incommensurate forms of otherness,iii awkward disturbances, and idiosyncrasies threatening its more well-established precincts – perhaps whatever stands out as strange, rare, and indissolubly individual. The idea of an emerging universal standard of values thus might amount to a source of oppression, e.g., if it provides a warrant to transform a currently limited universally prescriptive set of global practices and institutes into an ever more elaborate totalising hierarchy. In the discussion below, I will say why the good, conceived as the Logos, suggests a more salutary trajectory for individuals, and erodes support for either a totalitarian vision or a dissolving nihilistic outlook on the world. (shrink)

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and (...) the ideological nature of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

Some philosophers advance the claim that the phenomena of logical omniscience and of the indiscernibility of metaphysical statements, which arise in (certain) interpretations of normal modal logic, provide strong reasons in favour of impossible world approaches. These two specific lines of argument will be presented and discussed in this paper. Contrary to the recent much-held view that the characteristics of these two phenomena provide us with strong reasons to adopt impossible world approaches, the view defended here is that (...) no such ‘knock-down arguments’ do emanate on those grounds. This is not to rule out that there cannot be any other good reasons for assuming impossible world semantics. However, the discussion of a further argument for impossible worlds will suggest that different attempts to argue for them likely present intertwined problems. (shrink)

Theorists of liberal neutrality, including in this context David Miller, claim that it is unjust for environmental policy to privilege a particular conception of the good by appealing to normative principles derived from any substantive conception of human flourishing. However, analysis of Miller's arguments reveals the inability of procedural justice thus understood to adequately engage with the complex and contested issue of the relationship between human beings and the rest of the world. Miller's attempt to distinguish categories of (...) public goods generally, and environmental goods in particular, according to the possibility of reasonable disagreement, is seriously flawed. It results in an inability to distinguish between want-regarding and ideal-regarding justifications for the public provision of environmental goods, and more generally, an inability to recognise ecological sustainability as an important aspect of the common good. Effective environmental policy is not rendered illegitimate or unjust by incompatibility with liberal neutrality. (shrink)

A Guide to Good Reasoning has been described by reviewers as “far superior to any other critical reasoning text.” It shows with both wit and philosophical care how students can become good at everyday reasoning. It starts with attitude—with alertness to judgmental heuristics and with the cultivation of intellectual virtues. From there it develops a system for skillfully clarifying and evaluating arguments, according to four standards—whether the premises fit the world, whether the conclusion fits the premises, whether (...) the argument fits the conversation, and whether it is possible to tell. (shrink)

This open access book presents a comparative study of two classics of world literature, offering the first sustained study of what unites and divides the Nicomachean Ethics and the Bhagavad Gita. -/- Asking what the texts think is the nature of moral action and how it relates to the highest good, Roopen Majithia shows how the Gita stresses the objectivity of knowledge and freedom from being a subject, while the Ethics emphasizes the knower, working out Aristotle’s central commitment (...) to the idea of substance as the primary building block of the world. Yet both the Gita and the Ethics explain variety in human behaviour in terms of three driving forces. Both agree moral agency is a construct that is a function of background, education and habit, presupposing a cultural, political and economic infrastructure. -/- What distinguishes the texts is how the content of right action is generated. Reading them together, alert to their individual accounts of how the practical relates to the reflective dimensions of life, Majithaia enriches our understanding of two cornerstone texts in the Greek and Indian philosophical traditions. -/- The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollectionsdotcom. Open access was funded by The Marjorie Young Bell Faculty Fund and The Hart Almerrin Massey Endowment. (shrink)

Plausibly, one important part of a good life is doing work that makes a contribution, or a positive difference to the world. In this paper, however, I explore contribution pessimism, the view that people will not always have adequate opportunities for making contributions. I distinguish between three interestingly different and at least initially plausible reasons why this view might be true: in slogan form, things might become too easy, they might become too good, or we might be (...) too late. Now, one response to these problems might be to deliberately attempt to undo them. However, I claim that this solution is intuitively misguided, and argue that explaining this supports a holistic approach to the value of contributions. Finally, I argue that if contribution pessimism is correct, it could provide an explanation of some widely held intuitions about issues in population ethics, with implications about the practical issue of how much priority we should give to addressing risks of human extinction. (shrink)

At present universities are devoted to the acquisition of specialized knowledge and technological know-how. They fail to do what they most need to do: help the public acquire a good understanding of what our problems are, what needs to be done to solve them. Universities do not even conceive of their task in that way. The result is that the public, by and large, fails to appreciate just how serious the problems that face us are, and so fails to (...) put pressure on governments to act in the ways that are required. -/- Modern science and technology make possible modern industry and agriculture, modern power production and travel, modern hygiene and medicine, modern armaments: these in turn have led to much that is of great benefit, but also to the global problems that threaten our future. Science divorced from the capacity to solve problems of living wisely is a disaster. It is that disaster that academia, as at present constituted, is designed to produce – and has produced: the modern world. We have to learn how to solve the grave global problems that confront us. That in turn requires that our institutions of learning – our schools and universities – are designed and devoted to the job. At present they are not. In giving priority to the pursuit of knowledge, they fail to do what most needs to be done and, even worse, are the source of our problems. It is absolutely vital, for the future of humanity, that universities are transformed radically so that they give absolute priority to the all-important task of helping the public come to understand what our problems are, and what we need to do about them. And as a result get governments to act. -/- The book demonstrates that universities as at present constituted violate reason and, as a result, betray humanity. Cure universities of their structural irrationality, and they would come actively to promote actions required to solve global problems, and help humanity make progress toward a better world. The book spells out in detail the changes that need to be made to academic inquiry, why they need to be made, and how they would enable universities to empower humanity to solve current global problems. (shrink)

The hermeneutic pragmatism explored in this article timely examines how “post-truth” claims over-estimate semantic freedoms while at the same time underestimating semantic and pre-semantic restraints. Such pragmatism also timely examines how formalists err by committing the reverse errors. Drawing on insights from James, Peirce, Putnam, Rorty, Gadamer, Derrida, and others, such hermeneutic pragmatism explores (1) the necessary role of both internal and objective experience in meaning, (2) the resulting instrumental nature of concepts required to deal with such experience, (3) the (...) related need for workability to apply to the “the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted,” (4) the inherent role of morality and other norms in measuring such workability, (5) the semantic as well as experiential nature of our workable realities, (6) the semantic freedoms involved in constructing, framing, and retaining our workable realities and concepts, and (7) the semantic, pre-semantic, and other restraints on constructing, framing, and retaining our workable realities and concepts. -/- Such hermeneutic pragmatism also introduces Eunomia, a real-world alternative to Dworkin’s superhuman judge Hercules. Named after the Greek goddess of good order, the human Eunomia represents the reasonable judge excellently versed in (among other things) legal theory, legal practice, linguistics, and philosophy of language. Additionally, in its appendices, this article surveys the pragmatic restraints of “implementives” and provides a detailed overview of pragmatic “workability” restraints for both law and fact. -/- (By “sense” the title of this article means not only “meaning conveyed or intended” but also “capacity for effective application of the powers of the mind as a basis for action or response.” See Sense, MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY (11th ed. 2014) “Workable” has the broad meaning discussed in Sections II, IV, and Appendix C of the Article, and "good" is further explored in the section on Eunomia, namesake of the Greek goddess of good order.) -/- Keywords: Pragmatism, Hermeneutic, Truth, Rule of Law, William James, C.S. Peirce, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Gadamer, Habermas, Derrida, Lon Fuller, H.L.A. Hart, Post-truth, Postmodernism, Trump, Rhetoric, Meaning, Interpretation, Metaphor, Category, Lifeworld, Formalism, Framing, Deconstruction. (shrink)

This dissertation undertakes a philosophical analysis of “natural capital” and argues that this concept has prompted economists to view Nature in a radically novel manner. Formerly, economists referred to Nature and natural products as a collection of inert materials to be drawn upon in isolation and then rearranged by human agents to produce commodities. More recently, nature is depicted as a collection of active, modifiable, and economically valuable processes, often construed as ecosystems that produce marketable goods and services gratis. Nature (...) is depicted as consisting of various unproduced mechanisms or “natural machines” that are first discovered and then channeled so as to serve human ends. In short, nature as an ideal is a kind of garden that is characterized by natural objects purposefully arranged by intentional human agents. This dissertation first lays out working definitions of the key terms, such as capital and Nature, and then traces the historical roots of natural capital in the writings of eminent classical political economists, such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. I then examine the question of substitutes for “critical natural capital”, and argue that the preservation paradox is warranted: no one can restore or preserve a part of Nature without turning it into an artifact. Following the recent work of Debra Satz and Michael Sandel, I finish my dissertation by situating the question of natural capital in the broader context of whether some goods should not be for sale, particularly those I define as Basic Ecological Goods. (shrink)

True beliefs and truth-preserving inferences are, in some sense, good beliefs and good inferences. When an inference is valid though, it is not merely truth-preserving, but truth-preserving in all cases. This motivates my question: I consider a Modus Ponens inference, and I ask what its validity in particular contributes to the explanation of why the inference is, in any sense, a good inference. I consider the question under three different definitions of ‘case’, and hence of ‘validity’: the (...) orthodox definition given in terms of interpretations or models, a metaphysical definition given in terms of possible worlds, and a substitutional definition defended by Quine. I argue that the orthodox notion is poorly suited to explain what's good about a Modus Ponens inference. I argue that there is something good that is explained by a certain kind of truth across possible worlds, but the explanation is not provided by metaphysical validity in particular; nothing of value is explained by truth across all possible worlds. Finally, I argue that the substitutional notion of validity allows us to correctly explain what is good about a valid inference. (shrink)

I begin with by discussing cases that seem to show that a range of norms – norms like Choose the best!, Believe the truth!, and even Keep your promises! – fail to map out an important part of normative space. At the core of the problem is the observation that in some cases we can only conform to these norms by luck, in a way that is not creditable to us. I outline a prevalent diagnosis of the problem of luck, (...) which I label perspectivist. According to this diagnosis, the problem with a range of objectivist norms is that they make reference to facts that may lie outside our perspectives, not being present to our minds. An agent’s perspective is a kind of representation of the world: her evidence, knowledge, beliefs, experiences, etc. The first aim of this paper is to argue that the perspectivist diagnosis of the problem of luck is not ultimately correct. The correct diagnosis, I argue, is feasibilist: in some situations it is not feasible to choose, act, or believe in ways that conformity to objectivist norms robustly depends on. That is, it is sometimes not feasible to manifest dispositions that robustly enough track what one ought to do or believe, according to norms like those listed above. The same, I argue, is true of perspectivist norms: sometimes it is not feasible to track facts about our own perspectives. This shift in focus from the limits of our perspectives to limits on what dispositions it is feasible to manifest has, I argue, deep ramifications for normative theory. My second aim is to sketch an alternative, feasibilist way of thinking about a more subject-directed kind of normativity, one that takes into account our limitations as human agents. The result is a normative picture that unifies the practical and theoretical domains. (shrink)

Many influential Western feminists of diverse backgrounds have expressed concerns that multiculturalism, while strengthening the power of racial ethnic minorities vis-à-vis the majority, worsens the position of its most vulnerable members, women. Despite their good intentions, these feminists have been consistently dismissive of the voices of racial ethnic women, many of whom argue for the importance of sustaining their own “illiberal” cultures within the Western context. I offer a Third World feminist defense of multiculturalism by paying attention to (...) these women whose varying assessments of multiculturalism are less unequivocally negative, more ambivalent and complex, and even affirming and positive. (shrink)

Zuko’s plight illuminates the process of aspiration, including common challenges to the aspirant. As Agnes Callard understands it, aspiration typically involves a “deep change in how one sees and feels and thinks.” And this deep change is often intertwined with a change in what contemporary philosopher Christine Korsgaard calls practical identity, a “description under which you value yourself, . . . under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.” But as Zuko (...) shows, practical identities are complex, sometimes unwieldy, and changes in explicit self-conceptions can take work, time, and perhaps some luck to bring about the deep change one aspires to. Even after he explicitly disavows his past actions, Zuko finds himself reverting to past behaviors, doing things that (on some level) he wishes he would not. These actions frustrate him— “Why am I so bad at being good?”— but they are not mere lapses in judgment. They come naturally and express an identity that Zuko had long embraced and cultivated but is now trying to leave behind. The arc of Zuko’s transformation illustrates the interplay between two dimensions of practical identity. On the one hand, as Korsgaard’s account emphasizes, our explicit self-conceptions and values matter. They guide our actions and shape how we see the world. But Zuko’s struggles suggest that such self-conceptions and aspirations are only part of the story. According to Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, our practical identity depends more on our existential engagement with the world than on our explicit self-conceptions. And these different dimensions of practical identity do not always align. As William Blattner writes, “Some of the most challenging conflicts in our lives arise when who we are existentially engaged in being stands in tension with who we think of ourselves as being.” Zuko is frustrated because, despite consciously trying to change, his being-in-the-world conflicts with his Korsgaardian practical identity. His world is still shaped (residually) by an identity he wants to shed. The way Zuko’s world and actions continue to be shaped by an identity he is trying to leave behind highlights a key difficulty of transformation. Zuko’s desire to prove his worth to his father and his rage have so thoroughly permeated his being-in-the-world that they are second nature. They shape his orientation toward the world and fuel his firebending. For better and worse, his spontaneous actions do not always fall in step with his conscious commitments. The same skills and dispositions Zuko previously cultivated as central to his identity now lead to unwanted actions and keep him from aspired-to actions. To become good in the way he wants, Zuko must not only cultivate the dispositions that will allow his aspired-to identity to become part and parcel of his being-in-the-world, but he must clear out or modify the residual influence of his past identity and related dispositions and values. -/- . (shrink)

I introduce the concept of “The Blue Print” as the ultimate reality and declare its existence. “The Blue Print” means God’s blueprint. Once we accept the existence of “The Blue Print”, the world will be truly recognized as mathematics. From this perspective, this essay also discusses the relationship between life and mathematics, or more broadly, the relationship between ethics or goodness and mathematics.

The New Demon World Objection claims that reliabilist accounts of justification are mistaken because there are justified empirical beliefs at demon worlds—worlds at which the subjects are systematically deceived by a Cartesian demon. In this paper, I defend strongly verific (but not necessarily reliabilist) accounts of justification by claiming that there are two ways to construct a theory of justification: by analyzing our ordinary concept of justification or by taking justification to be a theoretic term defined by its role (...) in the theory of knowledge. The former route is not promising because of the splintered nature of our ordinary concept of justification—or perhaps because there is no single such concept. On the other hand, if justification is defined by the role it plays in the theory of knowledge, then there is good reason to think that justification must be strongly truth-conductive since the term was introduced by Edmund Gettier to play the primary role in converting true belief into knowledge. And if that is right, then there will be no justified empirical belief at demon worlds. The real lesson of the demon world is then turned on its head: justification does not supervene on what one shares with one’s deceived doppelganger. (shrink)

It feels like the world is ending. In the midst of apocalyptic times it’s tempting to cling on tightly to what we still have. But what if our desire to save the world is part of the problem? -/- Theology for the End of the World suggests that in responding to the deeply entwined systems of capitalism, racism and patriarchy we should stop trying to unearth a ‘good version’ of Christianity which stands opposed to these forms (...) of violence and seek instead to reckon with the role that Christianity has played in making the world we now inhabit. How has Christianity shaped the histories of marriage and the family? How did Christianity invent race and give birth to capitalism? Grappling with the ambivalent inheritance of Christianity, a tradition passed down by enslaved people and enslavers; by violent husbands, resourceful wives and courageous sex workers; by rich people and the dispossessed, the book suggests Christians should give up on trying to redeem the world – a social order founded on violence and exploitation – and seek instead to end it. (shrink)

In the 1750s Optimism, the Leibnizian doctrine that the actual world is the best possible world, popularised by Pope in 1733 in his Essay on Man, was a hot topic. In 1759 Kant wrote and published a brief essay defending Optimism, Attempt at some Reflections on Optimism. Kant’s aim in this essay is to establish that there is one and only one best possible world. In particular, he argues against the claim that, for every possible world, (...) there is a possible world better than it and against the claim that there are two or more equally good possible worlds that are better than all the rest. Although it is not clear why, Kant was later dissatisfied with his essay. In this article I shall reconstruct, discuss, and evaluate Kant’s arguments. My evaluation will be negative, and so I think Kant had reasons to be dissatisfied with his essay. (shrink)