I argue that the criterion of just cause is not independent of proportionality and other valid jus ad bellum criteria. One cannot know whether there is a just cause without knowing whether the other (valid) criteria (apart from ‘right intention’) are satisfied. The advantage of this account is that it is applicable to all wars, even to wars where nobody will be killed or where the enemy has not committed a rights violation but can be justifiably (...) warred against anyway. This account also avoids the inefficiency of having proportionality considerations come up at two different points: in a separate criterion of just cause and in the criterion of proportionality proper. ‘Right intention’, the subjective element of the justification of a war, on the other hand, is not to be subsumed under the criterion of just cause: there can be a just cause without anybody knowing it. Conversely, however, the subjective element requires that those responsible for waging the war do know that the justifying objective conditions are fulfilled. This is in one sense more demanding than traditional just war theory; in another sense, however, it is less demanding: nobody needs to intend to fight for a ‘just aim’. (shrink)

What one is ultimately interested in with regard to ‘just cause’ is whether a specific war, actual or potential, is justified. I call this ‘the applied question’. Answering this question requires knowing the empirical facts on the ground. However, an answer to the applied question regarding a specific war requires a prior answer to some more general questions, both descriptive and normative. These questions are: What kind of thing is a ‘just cause’ for war (an aim, (...) an injury or wrong suffered, or something different altogether)? I call this ‘the formal question’. Then there is what I call the ‘the general substantive question’. Depending on the previous answer to the formal question, the general substantive question can be formulated as: ‘Which causes are just?’ or as ‘Under what conditions is there a just cause?’ A final question, which has recently elicited increased interest, is what I call ‘the question of timing’: does the ‘just cause’ criterion only apply to the initiation of a war or also to the continuation of a war, that is, can a war that had a just cause at the beginning lose it at some point in its course (and vice versa)? I argue that a just cause is a state of affairs. Moreover, the criterion of just cause is not independent of proportionality and other valid jus ad bellum criteria. One cannot know whether there is a just cause without knowing whether the other (valid) criteria (apart from ‘right intention’) are satisfied; and this account has certain theoretical and practical advantages. As regards the general substantive question, I argue that all kinds of aims can, in principle, be legitimately pursued by means of war, even aims that might sound dubious at first, like vengeance or the search for glory. Thus, the pursuit of such aims does not make the war disproportionate or deprive it of just cause. As regards the question of timing, I argue that the criteria of jus ad bellum apply throughout the war, not only at the point of its initiation. While starting a war at t1 might be justified, continuing it at time t2 might be unjustified (and vice versa), and this insight does not require an addition to jus ad bellum but is already contained in it. (shrink)

This article asks whether a country that suffers from serious environmental problems caused by another country could have a just cause for a defensive war? Danish philosopher Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen has argued that under certain conditions extreme poverty may give a just cause for a country to defensive war, if that poverty is caused by other countries. This raises the question whether the victims of environmental damages could also have a similar right to self-defense. Although the article (...) concerns justice of war, we will concentrate only on the issue of what can be just causes of war, instead of evaluating the entire justification of war. This is to say that we will limit our discussion to the question concerning just cause and leave aside more general questions concerning justness and moral permissibility of war. Our aim is to list the questions that must be made and settled if defensive war in the case of serious environmental problems is said to have (or not to have) a just cause. We will argue that there are three questions that are most important in this context. They are the question concerning liability, the question of collective responsibility, and the question whether environmental harms may create a “sufficient reason” for raising a war. (shrink)

In this chapter, I add to the new body of philosophical literature that addresses African approaches to just war by reflecting on some topics that have yet to be considered and by advancing different perspectives. My approach is two-fold. First, I spell out a foundational African ethic, according to which one must treat people’s capacity to relate communally with respect. Second, I derive principles from it to govern the use of force and violence, and compare and contrast their implications (...) for war with other recent African views and especially with some prominent accounts in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. I argue that the approaches to military conflict prescribed by the Afro-communal ethic and its derivative principles differ, and in some prima facie plausible ways, from the views of thinkers that include Thomas Hurka, David Luban, Larry May, Jeff McMahan, and Michael Walzer. In particular, I conclude that the African perspectives ground some interesting and under-explored approaches to just causes for war that merit consideration, including the ideas that military conflict could in principle be justified in order to protect a people’s culture or to correct an aggressor’s vice. (shrink)

A surprisingly large number of scholars believe that (a) we are blameworthy, and therefore punishable, only for what we have control over; (b) we have control only over our actions and intentions, not the consequences of our actions; and therefore (c) if two agents perform the very same action (e.g., attempting to kill) with the very same intentions, then they are equally blameworthy and deserving of equal punishment – even if only one of them succeeds in killing. This paper argues (...) against these “equivalence theorists” that harmful consequences do make a moral difference, that the harm produced by the killer’s attempt retroactively makes her action more blameworthy, and therefore deserving of more punishment, than the failed attempter’s attempt. The primary argument for this “non-equivalence theory” is an analogy with gambling. Just as a gambler makes a deal with the casino to allow metaphysical luck to retroactively determine the “profit status” of her bet, so too the attempted killer makes a deal with “the casino of morality” to allow metaphysical luck to retroactively determine the moral status of her attempt. She makes the “moral deal” that if her attempt succeeds, her attempt was more blameworthy than if her attempt does not succeed. And it is the greater blameworthiness of the killer’s attempt that justifies our intuition that the killer should be punished more harshly than the failed attempter. (shrink)

A famous Indian argument for jus ad bellum and jus in bello is presented in literary form in the Mahābhārata: it involves events and dynamics between moral conventionalists (who attempt to abide by ethical theories that give priority to the good) and moral parasites (who attempt to use moral convention as a weapon without any desire to conform to these expectations themselves). In this paper I follow the dialectic of this victimization of the conventionally moral by moral parasites to its (...) philosophical culmination in the fateful battle, which the Bhagavad Gītā precedes. Arjuna’s lament is an internalization of the logic of conventional moral expectations that allowed moral parasitism, and Krishna’s push for a purely procedural approach to moral reasoning (bhakti yoga) does away with the good as a primitive of explanation and provides the moral considerations that allow us to see that the jus ad bellum and jus in bello coincide: the just cause is the approximation to the procedural ideal (the Lord), which is also just conduct. Jeff McMahan is correct in claiming that it is wrong for the unjust to attack the just. But it is also not obviously correct that it is the same set of moral considerations in war and peace that mark out the sides, for peace is largely characterizable by conventional morality, which all are forced to abandon in war. Walzer is correct that there are different sets of standards at play at war and peace, and that getting hands dirty in immorality is a price worth paying in war, but Walzer is thereby incorrect for a subtle reason: conventional standards by way of which jus ad bellum and jus in bello appear corrupt are themselves actually corrupt when the need for a just war arises. It is because moral parasites use conventional morality as a means of hostility and not as a means of fair, inclusive social interaction that conventional morality is corrupted and turned into a tool of the unjust. It is hence unjust to employ these standards to judge those whose cause is just, though such a judgement is conventional. Those who fight for a just cause thereby justly get their hands dirty by departing from conventional moral standards. But this is to the disadvantage of parasites who can only function in a climate where the conventionally good are constrained by conventional morality. Just war so understood deprives parasites their weapon of choice. (shrink)

Causal pluralists hold that that there is not just one determinate kind of causation. Some causal pluralists hold that ‘cause’ is ambiguous among these different kinds. For example, Hall (2004) argues that ‘cause’ is ambiguous between two causal relations, which he labels dependence and production. The view that ‘cause’ is ambiguous, however, wrongly predicts zeugmatic conjunction reduction, and wrongly predicts the behaviour of ellipsis in causal discourse. So ‘cause’ is not ambiguous. If we are to (...) disentangle causal pluralism from the ambiguity claim, we need to consider what other linguistic approaches are available to the causal pluralist. I consider and reject proposals that ‘cause’ is a general term, that the term is an indexical, and that the term conveys different kinds of causation through implicature or presupposition. Finally, I argue that causal pluralism is better handled by treating ‘cause’ as a univocal term within a dynamic interpretation framework. (shrink)

This chapter presents a series of experiments that elicit causal judgments using statements that do not include the verb "to cause". In particular, our interest is in exploring the extent to which previously observed effects of normative considerations on agreement with what we call "cause"-statements, i.e. those of the form "X caused ..." extend as well to those of the form "X V-ed Y", where V is a lexical causative. Our principal finding is that in many cases the (...) effects do not extend in this way, and moreover that the cases where we do find the same pattern are those where the causal verb used has a negative valence of its own. We draw two main conclusions from this finding. First, it reveals how the almost exclusive focus on "cause"-statements in the experimental study of causal judgment has led to findings that are unrepresentative of the full range of ordinary causal thinking, and provides a proof of concept as to how this thinking can be studied in its full variety. Second, the results of our experiments provide significant indirect support for the contention that the effect of moral considerations on agreement with "cause"-statements reflect the fact that these statements are most often used to assign responsibility for an event, and not just to describe the causal structure of what happened. It is not causal judgments in general that result from a process in which normative considerations play a role, but perhaps only those judgments that express a determination of moral responsibility. (shrink)

This paper explores the question of whether the United Nations should engage in preventive military actions. Correlatively, it asks whether UN preventive military actions could satisfy just war principles. Rather than from the standpoint of the individual nation state, the ethics of preventive war is discussed from the standpoint of the UN. For the sake of brevity, only the legitimate authority, just cause, last resort, and proportionality principles are considered. Since there has been disagreement about the specific (...) content of these principles, a third question also is explored: How should they be formulated? Moreover, these questions are addressed in the context of a particular issue: the goals of the non-proliferation and the abolition of weapons of mass destruction. (shrink)

What would be the consequence of embracing skepticism about free will and/or desert-based moral responsibility? What if we came to disbelieve in moral responsibility? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some maintain? Or perhaps increase anti-social behavior as some recent studies have suggested (Vohs and Schooler 2008; Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall 2009)? Or would it (...) rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of what Bruce Waller calls the “moral responsibility system” (2014, p. 4)? These questions are of profound pragmatic importance and should be of interest independent of the metaphysical debate over free will. As public proclamations of skepticism continue to rise, and as the mass media continues to run headlines announcing free will and moral responsibility are illusions, we need to ask what effects this will have on the general public and what the responsibility is of professionals. (shrink)

In this paper we examine whether and how powers ontologies can back formal causation. We attempt to answer three questions: i) what is formal causation; ii) whether we need formal causation, and iii) whether formal causation need powers and whether it can be grounded in powers. We take formal causal explanations to be explanations in which something's essence features prominently in the explanans. Three kinds of essential explanations are distinguished: constitutive, consequential, and those singling out something's propria. This last kind (...) of explanation has been somewhat overlooked in the literature, but we argue that it features in much of the most relevant uses of formal explanations in philosophy and science. These are the explanations for why an object has certain propertis that are not, properly speaking, parts of its essence, but that belong to it more intimately than just being part of its consequential essence: they are the properties that ‘flow’ from something's essence. It is argued that a powers metaphysics is uniquely placed to make sense of this last phenomenon. We then distinguish three grades of involvement in which powers might be salient for formal causal explanations: i) powers might be the subject matter of the essence operator, ii) the essence of something might include (or be exhausted) by powers, or iii) powers can explain how propria can flow from something's constitutive existence. (shrink)

Interest in just war theory has boomed in recent years, as a revisionist school of thought has challenged the orthodoxy of international law, most famously defended by Michael Walzer [1977]. These revisionist critics have targeted the two central principles governing the conduct of war (jus in bello): combatant equality and noncombatant immunity. The first states that combatants face the same permissions and constraints whether their cause is just or unjust. The second protects noncombatants from intentional attack. In (...) response to these critics, some philosophers have defended aspects of the old orthodoxy on novel grounds. Revisionists counter. As things stand, the prospects for progress are remote. In this paper, we offer a way forward. We argue that exclusive focus on first-order moral principles, such as combatant equality and noncombatant immunity, has led revisionist and orthodox just war theorists to engage in “proxy battles.” Their first-order moral disagreements are at least partly traceable to second-order disagreements about the nature and purpose of political theory. These deeper disputes have been central to the broader discipline of political theory for several years; we hope that bringing them to bear on the ethics of war will help us move beyond the present impasse. (shrink)

Causal Dispositionalism provides an account of causation based on an ontology of causal powers, properties with causal essence. According to the account, causation can be analysed in terms of the interaction of powers and its subsequent production of their effect. Recently, Baltimore, J. A. has raised a challenge against two competing approaches, the compositional view and the mutual manifestation view, to explain what makes powers interactive – the interaction gap. In this paper, we raise the challenge of explaining what makes (...) powers productive – the production gap. While Baltimore’s verdict is tentatively favouring, we find both approaches wanting. Our conclusion is that Causal Dispositionalists should take Baltimore’s and our critique seriously. Powers cannot cause their effects just by bearing the name “causal”. To deserve their names, more metaphysical details are needed. (shrink)

When it comes to explaining someone’s puzzling, objectionable, or otherwise problematic behavior, one type of explanation occasionally employed in the service of doing so is as follows: “That’s just so-and-so being so-and-so.” But what, exactly, do explanations of the type “That’s just so-and-so being so-and-so” mean? More specifically, in what way, if any, is it meaningful or informative to say such things? And what is the precise function of such explanations of someone’s behavior? Is it merely to present (...) what one takes to be the underlying causes of the behavior, or something beyond that? In what follows, I lay out a few possibilities—basic possibilities, to be precise, given philosophy’s keen interest in fundamentals—with respect to the various meanings, functions, and moral implications of explanations of the type “That’s just so-and-so being so-and-so.” While doing so, I apply these basic possibilities to three tokens of this kind of explanation: “That’s just Manny being Manny” (in reference to Manny Ramirez, the former professional baseball player), “That’s just Charlie being Charlie” (in reference to Charlie Rose, the former television host), and “That’s just Trump being Trump” (in reference to Donald Trump, the current President of the United States). (shrink)

In this paper I offer a close reading of Aristotle’s argument in the Nicomachean Ethics 3.5.1114a31–b25 and try to show that despite considerable interpretive difficulties, some clear structure can nevertheless be discerned. While Aristotle’s main concern in this passage is to refute the so-called asymmetry thesis – the thesis that virtue is voluntary, but vice is not – there is much more in it than just a dialectical encounter. Aristotle wants to respond to a more general objection, which has (...) as its target the voluntariness of both virtue and vice, and which is provoked by some of his ideas in EN 3.4 and 3.5. Further, I will try to show why Aristotle thinks that we are only co-causes of our dispositions. In my opinion, his reasons have nothing to do with compatibilist or incompatibilist considerations as they are commonly understood in modern philosophy. In particular, he does not want to argue that nature is aitios of our dispositions just as ourselves are. Rather, we are co-causes of our dispositions because we are causal origins of actions without which a certain good, which is the final cause of our actions and of our dispositions, cannot be achieved. Finally, I will try to show that Aristotle’s discussion implies that there is no more to the responsibility for dispositions than there is to the responsibility for actions. (shrink)

Drawing upon John Rawls’s framework in The Law of Peoples, this paper argues that MNEs have a responsibility to promote well-ordered social and political institutions in host countries that lack them. This responsibility is grounded in a negative duty not to cause harm. In addition to addressing the objection that promoting well-ordered institutions represents unjustified interference by MNEs, the paper provides guidance for managers of MNEs operating in host countries that lack just institutions. The paper argues for understanding (...) corporate responsibility in relation to the specific institutional environment in which MNEs operate. (shrink)

I critically examine the South African university student and worker protests of 2015/2016 in light of moral principles governing the use of force that are largely uncontested in both the contemporary Western and African philosophies of just war, violence and threats. Amongst these principles are: “discrimination”, according to which force should be directed not towards innocent bystanders but instead should target those particularly responsible for injustice; “likely success”, meaning that, instead of being counter-productive, the use of force must be (...) reasonably expected to advance a just cause; and “last resort”, which entails that only the least force necessary to rebut injustice should be employed. I invoke these and related principles to appraise a wide array of types of student/worker protests, noting which of them accorded with the principles and which did not. I also reply to defences that some South Africans have recently made of protesting with coercion and destruction. (shrink)

We typically judge that hasteners are causes of what they hasten, while delayers are not causes of what they delay. These judgements, I suggest, are sensitive to an underlying metaphysical distinction. To see this, we need to pay attention to a relation that I call positive security-dependence, where an event E security-depends positively on an earlier event C just in case E could more easily have failed to occur if C had not occurred. I suggest that we judge that (...) an event C is a cause of a later event E only if E security-depends positively on C. This explains our causal judgements in typical cases of hastening and delaying as well as in atypical cases, where we judge that hasteners are not causes of what they hasten or that delayers are causes of what they delay. (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)

Cheating during examinations is triggered by peer influence. It makes every learner know and do what should not be done. Cheating during examinations defeats the purpose of understanding, applying and creating ideas as stipulated in the revised Bloom's taxonomy by Anderson. The study reported here was designed to delve into the reasons and aspirations of the respondents in their cheating engagement. Sixteen (16) key informants, selected using random sampling procedure among Junior and Senior High School learners of Roxas National Comprehensive (...) High School in Palawan during the months of June to October 2016, completed open-ended questionnaires and took part in the interview. NVivo software was used in the analysis of the themes that emerged from the data. This study discovered that friendship is manipulated, for it makes doing right things unacceptable and things to be avoided like cheating seem right and acceptable. The behavior about cheating during examination is deeply rooted in the culture of pakikisama (social acceptance/liking) and utang ng loob (debt of gratitude). If a learner does not share his or her answers, he or she will be labeled as walang pakisama (no concern).This paper then argues that honesty should not be just a policy; rather, honesty in this case, is the only policy. Condemning academic dishonesty must not merely rest in the enrollment forms, but by constant moral reminder and intervention of teachers who have a responsibility to hone learners' decorum on honesty and maturity. (shrink)

The status of the laws of nature in Hobbes’s Leviathan has been a continual point of disagreement among scholars. Many agree that since Hobbes claims that civil philosophy is a science, the answer lies in an understanding of the nature of Hobbesian science more generally. In this paper, I argue that Hobbes’s view of the construction of geometrical figures sheds light upon the status of the laws of nature. In short, I claim that the laws play the same role as (...) the component parts – what Hobbes calls the “cause” – of geometrical figures. To make this argument, I show that in both geometry and civil philosophy, Hobbes proceeds by a method of synthetic demonstration as follows: 1) offering a thought experiment by privation; 2) providing definitions by explication of “simple conceptions” within the thought experiment; and 3) formulating generative definitions by making use of those definitions by explication. In just the same way that Hobbes says that the geometer should “put together” the parts of a square to learn its cause, I argue that the laws of nature are the cause of peace. (shrink)

The debate on whether and why misinformation is bad primarily focuses on the spread of false beliefs as its main harm. From the assumption that misinformation primarily causes harm through the spread of false beliefs as a starting point, it has been contended that the problem of misinformation has been exaggerated. Its tendency to generate false beliefs appears to be limited. However, the near-exclusive focus on whether or not misinformation dupes people with false beliefs neglects other epistemic harms associated with (...) it. Specifically, I show that misinformation also causes trouble for the epistemic goods of truth attainment, intellectual autonomy and debate pluriformity. Moreover, for each of these goods, I argue that emphasizing error-avoidance exacerbates, rather than mitigates, the harms caused by misinformation. These oversights and dilemmas show that prioritizing error-avoidance in the fight against misinformation is not a neutral default policy or necessarily a net positive. A shift in focus away from the spread of false beliefs as the main harm of misinformation is needed to better understand and counter its negative effects. (shrink)

Abstract: Heart attacks, or myocardial infarctions, are a leading cause of mortality worldwide. Early prediction and accurate analysis of potential risk factors play a crucial role in preventing heart attacks and improving patient outcomes. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive review of datasets related to heart attack analysis and prediction. We begin by examining the various types of datasets available for heart attack research, encompassing clinical, demographic, and physiological data. These datasets originate from diverse sources, including hospitals, research (...) institutions, and public health agencies. Our analysis aims to identify common features, data quality, and potential biases in these datasets. Next, we explore the predictive modeling techniques employed in heart attack prediction. Machine learning algorithms, such as decision trees, support vector machines, and deep neural networks, have gained prominence in predicting heart attacks. We discuss the strengths and limitations of these methods and highlight recent advancements in predictive modeling. Furthermore, we delve into the critical risk factors associated with heart attacks. Factors such as age, gender, hypertension, diabetes, and cholesterol levels are examined for their significance in predicting cardiac events. We also investigate the role of lifestyle factors, including smoking, diet, and physical activity, in heart attack risk assessment. Additionally, this review addresses the importance of data preprocessing and feature engineering in improving prediction accuracy. Feature selection methods, missing data handling, and data scaling techniques are discussed to enhance the robustness of heart attack prediction models. In conclusion, this comprehensive dataset review provides valuable insights into the state of heart attack analysis and prediction. It serves as a resource for researchers and healthcare professionals seeking to better understand the datasets available for heart attack research and the methods employed for accurate prediction. Ultimately, our efforts in dataset analysis and predictive modeling contribute to the advancement of preventive cardiology and the reduction of heart attack-related morbidity and mortality. (shrink)

At first, I explain how Bergmann reads Meinong. As regards his method, Bergmann’s stated aim is to examine Meinong’s thought through all the stages of its development; but he is very selective in choosing exactly what to consider, not just within each of Meinong’s texts, but equally among his texts – indeed he completely ignores Meinong’s mature works. Moreover, he often alters Meinong’s thought by translating it into his foil ontology. As regards the content, Bergmann interprets Meinong as a (...) reist and a nominalist. I try to show that such a view is not correct. I then discuss this interpretation by focusing on which Meinong Bergmann reads, that is, which writings he refers to and at the same time which of Meinong’s theories he criticizes. I sketch the four phases of the development of Meinong’s thought distinguished by Bergmann: his first theory of relations, the theory of the objects of higher order, of objectives, and finally object theory. I present Bergmann’s critique and compare his distinction of different degrees of independence, which establish differences of status among categories of existents, with Meinong’s distinction between kinds of being. Finally, taking into account also Meinong’s mature work, I offer an assessment of Bergmann’s proposal to rethink object theory. Considering Meinong’s theory of incomplete objects, I show that Bergmann would have found in Meinong an ally not only in the battle against representationalism, as he maintains, but also in that against nominalism. (shrink)

I argue that embryonic stem cell research is fair to the embryo, even on the assumption that the embryo has attained full personhood and an attendant right to life at conception. This is because the only feasible alternatives open to the embryo are to exist briefly in an unconscious state and be killed or to not exist at all. Hence, one is neither depriving the embryo of an enduring life it would otherwise have had nor is one causing the embryo (...) pain. I also argue that a rational agent in a situation relevantly similar to that of the embryo would consent to such research, and I use this insight to ground two justice-based arguments in favor of this research. (shrink)

Contrary to intuitions that human beings are free to think and act with “buck-stopping” freedom, philosophers since Holbach and Hume have argued that universal causation makes free will nonsensical. Contemporary neuroscience has strengthened their case and begun to reveal subtle and counterintuitive mechanisms in the processes of conscious agency. Although some fear that determinism undermines moral responsibility, the opposite is true: free will, if it existed, would undermine coherent systems of justice. Moreover, deterministic views of human choice clarify the conditions (...) in which we ought to protect people from themselves, for example when they cannot give informed consent to medical procedures. Some of the most unresolved questions in this domain are just now emerging; they include robot ethics and the responsibilities of groups. We propose a philosophical and scientific research program to apply complex systems science to these problems. (shrink)

In the consolidated cases Altitude Express v. Zarda, Bostock v. Clayton County, and R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Although the parties disagree as to the appropriate formulation of a but-for test to determine whether or not there was a discriminatory outcome, all parties do agree to the use of such a test, which asks “whether the evidence (...) shows ‘treatment of a person in a manner which but for that person’s sex would be different.’” City of Los Angeles, Dep’t. of Water and Power v. Manhart, 435 U.S. 702, 711 (1978). However, but-for tests confuse more than they clarify the inquiry; a discriminatory outcome cannot be explained by appeal to just a discrete characteristic of a particular person. Individuals are not discriminated against because of these characteristics per se. Rather, they are discriminated against because of the social meanings and expectations that attach to these characteristics. Beyoncé and Taylor Swift illustrate the difference between individual-level causation and social explanation in two separate songs, “If I Were a Boy” and “The Man.” The explanation for why the counterfactual ‘male’ Beyoncé and Swift are evaluated differently than their current ‘female’ versions does not lie in individual-level features considered apart from the social world, but in social-level roles and expectations associated with those features. For this reason, a social explanation test—one that asks whether the social meanings of sex characteristics, rather than the characteristics per se, explain the outcome in question—is more suitable for determining whether or not Title VII has been violated. (shrink)

The 2007 financial crisis has deeply shaken the world economy. The causes and consequences of this crisis have been hotly debated in economics ever since. However, the impact of financial markets on justice is also a growing field of study, to which the book recently edited by Lisa Herzog provides a valuable contribution. The book is not intended to tackle technical discussions on the functioning of financial markets and institutions, which are broadly presented in the introduction (chapter 1). Rather, it (...) aims at making clear how financial markets and institutions affect justice and at proposing potential institutional reforms. The book is divided into three parts. The first four chapters scrutinize several possible normative frameworks for studying financial markets beyond the simple ‘free-market’ model. The second part studies the legal framework that applies to financial markets, discusses how it failed to prevent harm and injustices, and proposes reforms. The final part looks at particular financial institutions and analyses how they impact justice. (shrink)

This paper aims at providing an epistemic defense of democracy based on John Dewey’s idea that democracies do not only find problems and provide solutions to them but they also articulate problems....

According to the dominant position in the just war tradition from Augustine to Anscombe and beyond, there is no "moral equality of combatants." That is, on the traditional view the combatants participating in a justified war may kill their enemy combatants participating in an unjustified war - but not vice versa (barring certain qualifications). I shall argue here, however, that in the large number of wars (and in practically all modern wars) where the combatants on the justified side violate (...) the rights of innocent people ("collateral damage"), these combatants are in fact liable to attack by the combatants on the unjustified side. I will support this view with a rights-based account of liability to attack and then defend it against a number of objections raised in particular by Jeff McMahan. The result is that the thesis of the moral equality of combatants holds good for a large range of armed conflicts while the opposing thesis is of very limited practical relevance. (shrink)

One method for preventing the spread of the coronavirus and other contagious diseases is through social distancing. Therefore, creating a tool to measure and quickly discover the precise distance is necessary. In order to prevent physical contact between individuals, this study aimed to detects individuals’ physical distance, through an inaugurated battery-powered device that monitors physical distance through wireless technology. Specifically, in public or crowded areas, to lessen the spread of the virus. This study focuses on detecting people’s physical distance in (...) the region of interest utilizing an Ultrasonic and VL53L0X sensors and determining the significant difference between the two sensors in monitoring physical distance. This study employs an applied experimental research design. The efficiency of both sensors in measuring physical distance was evaluated through analysis. The Ultrasonic and VL53L0X sensors underwent 15 tests. Furthermore, the researchers effectuated a t-test to determine the significant difference between the two sensors. Data gathered revealed that the sensors’ combined mean in terms of measuring physical distance indicates that the ultrasonic sensor performed better than VL53L0X, measuring 134.7 cm, notwithstanding 99.8 cm for the VL53L0X sensor. Complementary to this, the results of the t-test show that the VL53L0X sensor and Ultrasonic sensor have a significant difference in terms of distance precision. (shrink)

Jeff McMahan has argued against the moral equivalence of combatants (MEC) by developing a liability-based account of killing in warfare. On this account, a combatant is morally liable to be killed only if doing so is an effective means of reducing or eliminating an unjust threat to which that combatant is contributing. Since combatants fighting for a just cause generally do not contribute to unjust threats, they are not morally liable to be killed; thus MEC is mistaken. The (...) problem, however, is that many unjust combatants contribute very little to the war in which they participate—often no more than the typical civilian. Thus either the typical civilian is morally liable to be killed, or many unjust combatants are not morally liable to be killed. That is, the liability based account seems to force us to choose between a version of pacifism, and total war. Seth Lazar has called this “The Responsibility Dilemma”. But I will argue that we can salvage a liability-based account of war—one which rejects MEC—by grounding the moral liability of unjust combatants not only in their individual contributions but also in their complicit participation in that war. On this view, all enlistees, regardless of the degree to which they contribute to an unjust war, are complicitously liable to be killed if it is necessary to avert an unjust threat posed by their side. This collectivized liability based account I develop avoids the Responsibility Dilemma unlike individualized liability-based accounts of the sort developed by McMahan. (shrink)

Just war scholars are increasingly focusing on the importance of jus post bellum – justice after war – for the legitimacy of military campaigns. Should something akin to jus post bellum standards apply to terrorist campaigns? Assuming that at least some terrorist actors pursue legitimate goals or just causes, do such actors have greater difficulty satisfying the prospect-of-success criterion of Just War Theory than military actors? Further, may the use of the terrorist method as such – state (...) or non-state – jeopardize lasting peace in a way that other violent, for instance military, strategies do not? I will argue that there appears to be little reason to believe that terrorist campaigns are in principle less able to secure or at least contribute to a lasting peace than military campaigns; quite to the contrary. Or, put differently, if terrorism is an unlikely method for securing peace, then war is an even more unlikely one. (shrink)

McMahan’s own example of a symmetrical defense case, namely his tactical bomber example, opens the door wide open for soldiers to defend their fellow-citizens (on grounds of their special obligations towards them) even if as part of this defense they target non-liable soldiers. So the soldiers on both sides would be permitted to kill each other and, given how McMahan defines “justification,” they would also be justified in doing so and hence not be liable. Thus, we arrive, against McMahan’s intentions, (...) at a moral equality of combatants. In addition, his own account of liability cannot deal adequately with symmetrical defense cases in the first place. This undermines his presupposition that justification defeats liability, which is central to his defense of the moral inequality of combatants. I shall argue that McMahan’s attempts to counter these objections fail and that therefore his general claim of the moral inequality of combatants remains unpersuasive. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest that for some proposed solutions to global justice problems, incompatibility with the necessary features of international law is a reason to reject them. I illustrate this by discussing the problem raised by the case of unjust combatants, that is, combatants lacking a just cause for war. I argue that the principle of inequality of combatants, which suggests that we ought to prohibit those without a just cause for war from fighting, is (...) not only a bad international legal principle, but also a bad principle of global justice. (shrink)

The vast majority of work on the ethics of war focuses on traditional wars between states. In this chapter, I aim to show that this is an oversight worth rectifying. My strategy will be largely comparative, assessing whether certain claims often defended in discussions of interstate wars stand up in the context of civil conflicts, and whether there are principled moral differences between the two types of case. Firstly, I argue that thinking about intrastate wars can help us make progress (...) on important theoretical debates in recent just war theory. Secondly, I consider whether certain kinds of civil wars are subject to a more demanding standard of just cause, compared to interstate wars of national-defence. Finally, I assess the extent to which having popular support is an independent requirement of permissible war, and whether this renders insurgencies harder to justify than wars fought by functioning states. (shrink)

Just war theory is currently dominated by two positions. According to the orthodox view, provided that jus in bello principles are respected, combatants have an equal right to fight, regardless of the justice of the cause pursued by their state. According to “revisionists” whenever combatants lack reasons to believe that the war they are ordered to fight is just, their duty is to disobey. I argue that when members of a legitimate state acting in good faith are (...) ordered to fight, they acquire a pro-tanto obligation to obey which does not depend for its validity on the justice of the cause being pursued. However, when the war is unjust, this obligation may be overridden, under certain conditions, by the obligation not to contribute to the unjustified killing of innocents. This is because the pro-tanto force of the duty to obey the law is best understood in terms of “presumptive”, rather than “exclusionary” reasons for action. This approach captures the insights of both the orthodox and the revisionist view, while avoiding the problems that afflict each of them. (shrink)

Binding specificity is a centrally important concept in molecular biology, yet it has received little philosophical attention. Here I aim to remedy this by analyzing binding specificity as a causal property. I focus on the concept’s role in drug design, where it is highly prized and hence directly studied. From a causal perspective, understanding why binding specificity is a valuable property of drugs contributes to an understanding of causal selection—of how and why scientists distinguish between causes, not just causes (...) from noncauses. In particular, the specificity of drugs is precisely what underwrites their value as experimental interventions on biological processes. (shrink)

Catholic integralism is a tradition of thought which insists upon the ideal nature of political arrangements on which the Church can mandate the State to advance the supernatural good of the baptized. Thomas Pink, one of the foremost defenders, has proposed controversially that these arrangements are ideal because the Church possesses rights to civil coercive authority. But I argue this fact would not entail – by itself – the ideal nature of those arrangements. To the contrary, I argue that integralism (...) is unjust, even assuming Pink’s claims are true. The integralist ideal necessarily involves violating moral duties toward unbaptized citizens. Integralism does so in imposing differential civic burdens upon baptized/unbaptized citizens and in implying that non-Catholics might be rightly excluded from power merely on account of religious beliefs, both without just cause. I conclude by showing that readings of the relevant Catholic teaching can be given which are non-integralist. (shrink)

The destruction wrought by even just wars lends undeniable appeal to radical pacifism, according to which all wars are unjust. Yet radical pacifism is fundamentally flawed. In the past decade, a moderate and more defensible form of pacifism has emerged. According to what has been called ‘contingent pacifism’, it is very unlikely that it is morally permissible to wage any given war. This chapter develops the doctrine of contingent pacifism by distinguishing and developing various versions of it, and by (...) assessing the merits and drawbacks of each. According to ‘proportionality-based’ contingent pacifism, almost all wars with just causes are unjust ‘tout court’ because the in bello harms such wars impose on the innocent are too great relative to the relevant evils averted by achieving the war’s aims. After arguing against this view, the chapter introduces a novel, more defensible form of contingent pacifism, called ‘epistemic-based’ contingent pacifism, according to which the prevalence of mistaken judgements regarding the justness of wars, combined with the devastating harmfulness of unjust wars, requires imposing prohibitions against waging war, where the strength of the prohibition varies according to whether the government has a history of mistakes or deception regarding the justness of wars. (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)

Till just few decades ago, scholars used to use the label ‘Ockhamism’ to mark a turning-point in the history of mediaeval philosophy, above all in the history of natural philosophy. That turning-point was exemplified by the once so-called ‘Buridanian school’, today known simply as ‘Parisian school of natural philosophy’, whose leading representative was for sure John Buridan. But looking carefully at some crucial points of the Picard master’s idea of ‘nature’, concerning specifically the relationship between God and secondary causes (...) on one side, and the role played by free will, both the divine and the human one, on the other side, one will find out that Buridan’s ‘Ockhamism’ is at least questionable: Scotus’ modal logic is the conceptual framework, within which he redetermines the boundaries of natural laws, but the ‘pure ockhamist’ idea of the prevalence of the will on the intellect in God’s nature is the source of an image of the world in which voluntary behaviours and natural laws are intertwined. Therefore, Buridan’s natural philosophy results as a peculiar synthesis of two of the main divergent lines of thinking of late mediaeval philosophy. (shrink)

This article focuses on the ethical implications of so-called ‘collateral damage’. It develops a moral typology of collateral harm to innocents, which occurs as a side effect of military or quasi-military action. Distinguishing between accidental and incidental collateral damage, it introduces four categories of such damage: negligent, oblivious, knowing and reckless collateral damage. Objecting mainstream versions of the doctrine of double effect, the article argues that in order for any collateral damage to be morally permissible, violent agents must comply with (...) high standards of care. In order for incidental harm to be permissible, an agent must take pains to avoid such harm even at higher cost to him- or herself. It is argued that accidentally but negligently caused collateral damage may be just as difficult to excuse as incidental harm. Only if high precautionary standards of care are met, can unintended harm to innocents – incidental or accidental – be permissible. In practice, such a strong commitment to avoiding harm to civilians may well lead us to question more generally and rethink more radically how violent conflicts ought to be fought, how military violence ought to be used and whether there are better ways of achieving those aims that we think are legitimate than those we are currently using. (shrink)

The doctrine of the moral equality of combatants holds that combatants on either side of a war have equal moral status, even if one side is fighting a just war while the other is not. This chapter examines arguments that have been offered for and against this doctrine, including the collectivist position famously articulated by Walzer and McMahan’s influential individualist critique. We also explore collectivist positions that have rejected the moral equality doctrine and arguments that some individualists have offered (...) in its favor. We defend a non-categorical version of the moral equality doctrine, according to which combatants on either side of a just war sometimes (but not always) have equal moral status. On our view, some degree of culpability is necessary for liability, and non-culpable combatants may therefore sometimes remain non-liable even when they fight for an unjust cause. (shrink)

Although some claim that the term cyber war is merely metaphorical, there are good reasons to see cyber war as a form of warfare ‐ even if it is not war as we have hitherto known it. This poses the question whether the principles of the Just War Tradition, which claims to offer an alternative for pacifism and realism, apply to this specific kind of war too. This article argues that the jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality (...) are applicable, and that actually applying them would limit the harm cyber-attacks currently cause. Most cyber-attacks of recent years wrongly target civilians, and this amounts to a serious breach of these principles. The final part of this article looks at those who actually conduct the cyber-attacks, the cyber soldiers ‐ how do they fit into the military profession, and to what extent can we expect them to uphold the principles of Just War? (shrink)

Just as sadness is not always a symptom of mood disorder, irrational beliefs are not always symptoms of illness. Pathological irrational beliefs are distinguished from non-pathological ones by considering whether their existence is best explained by assuming some underlying dysfunctions. The features from which to infer the pathological nature of irrational beliefs are: un-understandability of their progression; uniqueness; coexistence with other psycho-physiological disturbances and/or concurrent decreased levels of functioning; bizarreness of content; preceding organic diseases known to be associated with (...) irrational beliefs; treatment response to medical intervention, etc. Severe irrationality is sometimes caused by normal human motivation rather than by mental or physical dysfunction. Pure forms of self-deception may satisfy the diagnostic criteria of delusional disorder, but there may be no evidence that suggests that they are caused by illness. Although those with pathological delusions do not recognize their delusions as symptomatic of illness, differentiating pathological beliefs from normal irrational beliefs is vitally important: If a belief is pathological, psychiatrists must seriously consider treating the patient against her will. If it is not pathological, conversely, involuntary treatments are prohibited because they offend her basic autonomy. (shrink)

This paper deals with Aristotle’s concept of chance, such as it is presented in Physics II 4-6. The central section of the article concentrates on an analysis of Aristotle’s definition of chance and its essential peculiarities: the fact of being an incidental (efficient) cause and the fact of existing in the domain of what is for the sake of an end. According to Rossi, both characteristics would correspond to a causal aspect (in an incidental sense) and to a non (...) causal aspect (or just apparently causal) of chance. Finally, the author also tries to show the structural connection between the aforementioned aspects, taking as a key point the thesis of coincidence among the formal, final, and efficient causes. (shrink)

1. Introduction: a look back at the reasons vs. causes debate. 2. The interventionist account of causation. 3. Four objections to interventionism. 4. The counterfactual analysis of event causation. 5. The role of free agency. 6. Causality in the human sciences. -- The reasons vs. causes debate reached its peak about 40 years ago. Hempel and Dray had debated the nature of historical explanation and the broader issue of whether explanations that cite an agent’s reasons are causal or not. Melden, (...) Peters, Winch, Kenny and Anscombe had contributed their anticausal conceptions. The neo-Wittgensteinians seemed to be winning the day when in 1963 Donald Davidson published his seminal paper “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”. Davidson’s paper devastated the Wittgensteinian camp. It contained, among other things, a powerful attack on the logical connection argument. Davidson argued that the existence of a logical or conceptual connection between descriptions can never eliminate a causal relation, which holds between events simpliciter, not between events under certain descriptions. Davidson maintained that in a way, reasons can be causes. When somebody acts for a certain reason, his intentional attitudes, or rather changes in his attitudes, cause his bodily movements. Davidson also argued that rationalization is a species of causal explanation. For the definition of action, he argued that intentional actions are bodily movements caused in the right way by beliefs and desires that rationalize them. Davidson’s paper paved the way for causal theories of action, which superseded neo-Wittgensteinian analyses in the following decades. The causal theory was rapidly adopted by Alvin Goldman, David Armstrong, Paul Churchland, Myles Brand and many others, entering the mainstream and dominating the philosophy of action to this very day. In 1971 Georg Henrik von Wright published his book "Explanation and Understanding". The second chapter did not deal with agency, but with causation. It developed a new account of causation, the interventionist or experimentalist account. Focusing on causation, von Wright remedied a major shortcoming of the reasons vs. causes debate. The concept of causality, and the nature of the causal relation, received little attention in this debate, a fact that holds true for both camps. Mostly it was simply taken for granted that, as Hempel had declared, “causal explanation is a special type of deductive-nomological explanation”. One camp then aligned intentional explanations with D-N explanations, while the other camp insisted on their disparity. So strictly speaking, the label “reasons/causes debate” was a misnomer. The controversy dealt primarily with the question as to whether intentional explanations can take the form of D-N explanations, while the notion of causation, and the metaphysics of the causal relation, were left obscured. With von Wright’s new approach, the situation changed. Von Wright was primarily concerned with causation, but his approach contained an implicit attack on the causal theory of action as well. His core idea was that the notion of causality is intimately linked with, or even derived from, the notion of intentionally making something happen. Other philosophers, even Hume, had considered such a connection before, but often just to reject this view, regarding it as a kind of myth belonging to the infancy of the human mind. Von Wright took the idea seriously. He submitted the analysis that p is the cause of q if and only if by doing p we could bring about q. The causal theory of action was also concerned with the relation between causation and agency, to which its name bears witness. The causal theory of action holds that actions are bodily movements with a certain causal history. This is why von Wright’s account constituted a momentous challenge to the causal theory: it reversed the direction of conceptual dependency between both notions. Davidson and his followers tried to define what an intentional action is by using the notion of causation. The causal condition which the causal theory sets is part of the definition of “doing something intentionally”. Von Wright claimed that the conceptual dependency is the other way round. He used the notions of doing, and bringing about, to explain what causal relations are. So, instead of a causal theory of action, he advocated an agency theory of causation, as it may be dubbed. It is remarkable how seldom this clash of opinions about conceptual primacy is reflected in the literature. There are few exceptions: Fred Stoutland noticed the conflict, and he published a number of papers in which he compared Davidson’s and von Wright’s views. Von Wright’s book "Explanation and Understanding" was widely read and discussed in the seventies, especially in Europe. But it strikes me that especially in North America, where the causal theory of action became the orthodoxy of the day, von Wright’s challenge went largely unnoticed. Even Davidson did not seem to take it seriously. He nowhere takes notice of the interventionist theory of causation, while he does discuss von Wright’s earlier book "Norm and Action". As is well-known, Davidson favoured an alternative account of causation, based on “the principle of the nomological character of causality”, as he somewhat clumsily called it, or, later and less clumsily, “the cause-law thesis”. Davidson’s firm adherence to a nomological theory of causality may explain why he did not take much interest in alternative accounts. [...] -/- . 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Businesses cause social harm, meaning harm to society at large and not just to those with whom a business is contractually linked. Evidence introduced: normative claims that businesses should be "socially responsible"; positive claims that they contribute to social well-being; and negative claims that they are sometimes military-like, causing extensive harm for which no one is held personally responsible. The latter point to corporate survivalism, which acknowledges no mandatory civil responsibilities. Neither law nor social pressure has yet counteracted (...) this mind set. Business ethics might, but not if its practitioners examine only narrowly contractual relationships. (shrink)