Currently, there are many advocacy interventions aimed at reducing animal consumption. We report results from a lab (N = 267) and a field experiment (N = 208) exploring whether, and to what extent, some of those educational interventions are effective at shifting attitudes and behavior related to animal consumption. In the lab experiment, participants were randomly assigned to read a philosophical ethics paper, watch an animal advocacy video, read an advocacy pamphlet, or watch a control video. In the field experiment, (...) we measured the impact of college classes with animal ethics content versus college classes without animal ethics content. Using a pretest, post-test matched control group design, humane educational interventions generally made people more knowledgeable about animals used as food and reduced justifications and speciesist attitudes supporting animal consumption. None of the interventions in either experiment had a direct, measurable impact on self-reported animal consumption. These results suggest that while some educational interventions can change beliefs and attitudes about animal consumption, those same interventions have small impacts on animal consumption. (shrink)

Knowledge of human uses of animals is an important, but understudied, aspect of how humans treat animals. We developed a measure of one kind of knowledge of human uses of animals – knowledge of factory farming. Studies 1 (N = 270) and 2 (N = 270) tested an initial battery of objective, true or false statements about factory farming using Item Response Theory. Studies 3 (N = 241) and 4 (N = 278) provided evidence that responses to a 10-item Knowledge (...) of Factory Farming Scale predicted a reduction in consumption of animal products (rs = −.17- −.27) and approval of political actions aimed at factory farming (rs = .2 – .24). Path models from Studies 3 and 4 suggested that different kinds of knowledge uniquely predicted different outcomes. The Knowledge of Factory Farming scale was a unique predictor of approval of political actions concerning factory farmed animals but not animal consumption. Knowledge of Animals Used as Food predicted animal consumption but not political actions concerning farmed animals. These results highlight that different kinds of knowledge can be relevant for different animal related outcomes. (shrink)

The World Trade Organisation, and the international trade regime within which it operates, is regularly evaluated in terms of distributive outcomes or opportunities. A less-established concern is the extent to which the institutional structure of the trade regime enables agents to exert control over the economic forces to which they’re subject. This oversight is surprising, as trade negotiations amongst states have profound impacts upon what options remain open to those states and their citizens in regulating their economies. This article contributes (...) to filling this lacuna in the literature. Following on from recent neo-republican work on global and international justice, it argues that a major problem with the WTO is that it fails to effectively mitigate the domination of some states by others within its negotiations. Such domination prevails despite the employment of negative consensus as a decision-making procedure. (shrink)

This paper makes a case for why philosophy would be beneficial if promoted among the subjects offered to secondary students in Aotearoa New Zealand. Philosophical inquiry in the form of Philosophy for Children (P4C) has made some inroads at the primary level, but currently very few students are offered philosophy as a subject at the secondary level. Philosophy is suited to be offered as a standalone subject and incorporated into the National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA) system. Philosophy has been (...) shown to benefit students in numerous ways, including the development of their critical thinking. Critical thinking is a focus of education around the world, including in the New Zealand Curriculum, and this focus on critical thinking could precipitate a focus on philosophy. (shrink)

According to what Douglas calls ‘the consent requirement’, neuro-correctives can only permissibly be provided with the valid consent of the offender who will undergo the intervention. Some of those who endorse the consent requirement have claimed that even though the requirement prohibits the imposition of mandatory neurocorrectives on criminal offenders, it may yet be permissible to offer offenders the opportunity to consent to undergoing such an intervention, in return for a reduction to their penal sentence. I call this the (...) neurocorrective offer. In this chapter I consider the coercion-based objection to the neurocorrective offer, which claims that offenders cannot provide valid consent to undergoing a neurocorrective on the basis of this offer because it is inherently coercive. Having outlined early formulations of this argument, I point out that there are in fact two different versions of this objection, which appeal to different understandings of the concepts of coercion, consent and voluntariness. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 9, September 2019, Page 64-66.

Does Normative Behaviourism Offer an Alternative Methodology in Political Theory?

The Action Theory of Exchanges is based on three main assumptions: i) an exchange is motivated by people having convergent preferences, ii) people exchange actions, and iii) offers and acceptances are crucial parts of an exchange and they bring about rights and obligations. The main aim of this paper is to discuss three aspects of this theory to better understand its ontological implications and, possibly, improve it. I first examine the expression “transferring the ownership” by showing an ontological issue behind (...) it; after that, I propose an interpretation that might solve this issue. I then show that convergent preferences are not enough to motivate an exchange; accordingly, one has to introduce two more preferences possessed by the agents. I finally propose a characterization of buying and selling (and buyer and seller) which, in addition to being compatible with the Action Theory of Exchanges, has the advantage of accounting for both monetary and non-monetary exchanges. (shrink)

This is one of those "fun" examples of a semantic paradox, written for undergraduates.

Libertarian views of freedom claim that, although determinism would rule out our freedom, we are nevertheless free on some occasions. An odd implication of such views (to put it mildly) seems to be that indeterminism somehow enhances or contributes to our agency. But how could that be? What does indeterminism have to offer agency? This paper develops a novel answer, one that is centred around the notion of explanation. In short, it is argued that, if indeterminism holds in the (...) right places, then the best explanation of the history of the world necessarily cites facts about our agency. Along the way, alternative proposals regarding the significance of indeterminism are considered and, ultimately, rejected in favour of the one developed in this paper. (shrink)

I distinguish two senses of the word “offer.” I do so within a brief pastiche, which I put down to the influence of the European Union.

We argue that the ethical case for instituting vaccine benefit programs is justified by 2 widely recognized values: (1) reducing overall harm from COVID-19 and (2) protecting disadvantaged individuals. We then explain why they do not coerce, exploit, wrongfully distort decision-making, corrupt vaccination's moral significance, wrong those who have already been vaccinated, or destroy willingness to become vaccinated. However, their cost impacts and their effects on public perception of vaccines should be evaluated.

The primary aim of this essay is to investigate modalities of resistance to sexual violence. It begins from the observation that the nature of what we understand ourselves to be resisting—that is, how we define the scope, content, and causes of sexual violence—will have profound implications for how we are able to resist. I critically engage one model of resistance to sexual violence: feminist philosophical scholarship on self-defense, highlighting several shortcomings in how the feminist self-defense discourse inadvertently frames sexual violence. (...) Holding these criticisms in mind, I expand the landscape of resistance to sexual violence by considering the new possibilities that empathy might offer. The work of two contemporary women of color feminists—Roxane Gay and Tarana Burke—launches further exploration of empathy’s alternative modes of resistance. By focusing on empathy between survivors of sexual violence, we can expand our understanding of the possibilities of resistance by redistributing and broadening our attention in three main ways: from action to affect and attitude, from a spatially and temporally limited event to something more expansive, and from the individual through the interpersonal to the structural. (shrink)

This paper presents the history of the Frankfurt School’s inclusion of normative concerns in social science research programs during the period 1930-1955. After examining the relevant methodology, I present a model of how such a program could look today. I argue that such an approach is both valuable to contemporary social science programs and overlooked by current philosophers and social scientists.

Justice for children and during childhood and the particular political, social and moral status of children has long been a neglected issue in ethics, and in social and political philosophy. The application of general, adult-oriented theories of justice to children can be regarded as particularly problematic. Philosophers have only recently begun to explore what it means to consider children as equals, what goods are especially valuable to them, and what are the obligations of justice different agents have toward children. In (...) addition, while philosophers have extensively written about global poverty and inequality, the issue of disadvantages during childhood, especially child poverty, has only been superficially addressed. This also applies to the Capability Approach (CA) as a normative theory. Although the socio-scientific and economic literature on how to conceptualize capabilities and functionings of children and how to measure them in the context of poverty and wellbeing is steadily growing, the normative aspects of these issues are still under-theorized. The CA offers a unique framework to engage with both the topic of justice for children and questions concerning what justice implies and demands with regard to children living and growing up in disadvantaged circumstances. Furthermore, justice and disadvantage during childhood is a compellingly interdisciplinary topic that invites the combination of ethical and philosophical reasoning together with socio-scientific theories and empirical knowledge. In this special issue of Ethical Perspectives we bring together theoretical and empirically informed discussions that explore the CA in relation to children and the many disadvantages they can face in their lives. (shrink)

This special issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy focuses on unintended intrauterine death (UID) and preterm delivery (both phenomena that are commonly—and unhelpfully—referred to as “miscarriage,” “spontaneous abortion,” and “early pregnancy loss”). In this essay, I do two things. First, I outline contributors’ arguments. Most contributors directly respond to “inconsistency arguments,” which purport to show that abortion opponents are unjustified in their comparative treatment of abortion and UID. Contributors to this issue show that such arguments often rely on (...) a grossly oversimplified picture of abortion opponents’ views. Furthermore, contributions in this issue weigh in on issues regarding UID with theoretical import and therapeutic implication beyond the inconsistency argument debate. These papers can be mined for principles that better inform us about anembryonic pregnancies (i.e., nonviable pregnancies in which a gestational sac exists but no embryonic pole can be seen via transvaginal ultrasound), UID-prevention research, the law concerning UID (especially post-Dobbs), policies for handling embryonic remains, and moral psychology as it relates to UID, emotion, and empathy. In each case, conceptual philosophical analysis might bring about therapeutic benefits for those affected by UID. Philosophers, therefore, are in position not only to provide clarity—careful analysis and discussion of UID and related phenomena—but are also in position to genuinely help people affected by UID. (shrink)

In this special issue we will investigate, from the perspective of agricultural ethics the potential to develop a Responsible Research and Innovation approach to agriculture, and the limitations to such an enterprise. RRI is an emerging field in the European research and innovation policy context that aims to balance economic, socio-cultural and environmental aspects in innovation processes. Because technological innovations can contribute significantly to the solution of societal challenges like climate change or food security, but can also have negative societal (...) consequences, it is assumed that social and ethical aspects should be considered during the R&I process. For this reason, the emerging concept of RRI calls for ethical reflection on the nature, scope and applicability of responsibility and innovation in innovation practices in general, and the way social–ethical issues can be applied and addressed in agriculture. (shrink)

Defining Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence remain controversial and disputed. They stem from a longer-standing controversy of what is the definition of consciousness, which if solved could possibly offer a solution to defining AI and AGI. Central to these problems is the paradox that appraising AI and Consciousness requires epistemological objectivity of domains that are ontologically subjective. I propose that applying the philosophy of art, which also aims to define art through a lens of epistemological objectivity where the (...) domains are ontologically subjective, can further elucidate this unsolved question. In this sense, Art and AI and ultimately consciousness are multifaceted domains where conventional complexity theory and current philosophical approaches may be augmented by aesthetic principles ranging from classical Aristotelian essentialism to Wittgensteinian anti-essentialism. This approach of AI as art may offer novel solutions to characterising and elucidating the ciphers of consciousness and AI. (shrink)

Neuroscience can relate to ethics and normative issues via the brain’s cognitive control network. This network accomplishes several executive processes, such as planning, task-switching, monitoring, and inhibiting. These processes allow us to increase the accuracy of our perceptions and our memory recall. They also allow us to plan much farther into the future, and with much more detail than any of our fellow mammals. These abilities also make us fitting subjects for responsibility claims. Their activity, or lack thereof, is at (...) the heart of culpability. For instance, planning to kill someone is strong evidence of what the law calls mens rea—a guilty mind. Claims about norms, or ethical “should” claims, express two-level propositions, directed at the behaving person at one level, and at that person’s mind and cognitive control network at another level. Thus, “People should stop themselves from hurting others,” is a claim about how people should behave and also a claim about how their cognitive control networks should behave—i.e., they should inhibit harmful behavior, or the intentions leading up to it. Planning is both an ability of the full person, and of that person’s mind. Neuroscience affirms the common notion, seen both in law and folk psychology, that what makes us guilty or culpable are certain events and states that exist in our minds. Overt behavior, including speech, is fallible evidence of these states and processes. Cases of negligence still involve the executive processes, but “negatively,” in that negligence results when certain types of executive activity fail to take place. (shrink)

In the late 19th century Husserl studied our internal sense of time passing, maintaining that its deep connections into experience represent prima facie evidence for it as the basis for all investigations in the sciences: Phenomenology was born. Merleau-Ponty focused on perception pointing out that any theory of experience must in accord with established aspects of biology i.e. embodied. Recent analyses suggest that theories of experience require non-reductive, integrative information, together with a specific property connecting them to experience. Here we (...) elucidate a new class of information states with just such properties found at the loci of control of complex biological systems, including nervous systems. Complexity biology concerns states satisfying self-organized criticality. Such states are located at critical instabilities, commonly observed in biological systems, and thought to maximize information diversity and processing, and hence to optimize regulation. Major results for biology follow: why organisms have unusually low entropies; and why they are not merely mechanical. Criticality states form singular self-observing systems, which reduce wave packets by processes of perfect self-observation associated with feedback gain g=1. Analysis of their information properties leads to identification of a new kind of information state with high levels of internal coherence, and feedback loops integrated into their structure. The major idea presented here is that the integrated feedback loops are responsible for our ‘sense of self’, and also the feeling of continuity in our sense of time passing. Long-range internal correlations guarantee a unique kind of non-reductive, integrative information structure enabling such states to naturally support phenomenal experience. Being founded in complexity biology, they are ‘embodied’; they also fulfill the statement that ‘The self is a process’, a singular process. High internal correlations and RenéThom-style catastrophes support non-digital forms of information, gestalt cognition, and information transfer via quantum teleportation. Criticality in complexity biology can ‘embody’ cognitive states supporting gestalts, and phenomenology’s senses of ‘self,’ time passing, existence and being. (shrink)

There are strong moral reasons to acknowledge that third parties can have the standing to forgive. Third-party refusals to forgive can reinforce the moral agency and value of women and disrupt the gendering of forgiveness. Third-party forgiveness can also be crucial for restorative justice aims, like recognizing the value of wrongdoers. Lastly, many victim-only accounts of forgiveness are problematic and utilize an individualistic conception of the self that reinforces the logic of misogyny. Victim-only accounts of forgiveness can also restrict focus (...) to the victim's suffering, thereby neglecting the importance of healing and the relevance of third-party forgiveness for facilitating healing. (shrink)

It is argued that the hard problem of consciousness, i.e. the fact that we have experience, stems from a conceptual confusion between consciousness and experience. It is concluded that experience has to be considered as a basic characteristic of ongoing interactions at even the most simple level, while consciousness is better defined as reflexive awareness, possible since symbolic language was developed. A dynamic evolutionary point of view is proposed to make more appropriate distinctions between experience, awareness and consciousness. Experience can (...) be defined as a characteristic linked closely to specific pattern matching, a characteristic which is already apparent at the molecular level at least. Awareness then can be regarded as the special experience of one or more central, final modules in the animal neuronal brain. From evolutionary considerations, awareness can be understood functionally and physiologically. As such, awareness is what experience is to animals. Finally, consciousness could be defined as reflexive awareness, instead of using the term as synonymous to awareness. The ability for reflexive awareness is distinctly different from animal and human awareness and depends upon the availability of a separate frame of reference, as provided by symbolic language. As such, words have made reflexive awareness - a specific and infrequent form of awareness - possible. Conciousness might be defined as the experience evoked by considering, i.e. thinking about experiences themselves. Explaining and understanding awareness and consciousness as evolved biological characteristics of the functioning of animals and later humans, poses no philosophical problems. The nature of experience itself remains elusive, but this is not a problem specific toawareness or consciousness. If there is a hard problem of explaining consciousness, than this actually must be considered as the hard problem of explaining experience. While the definition of experience could be broadened to include all molecular and biological pattern specific recognition events, the true nature of consciousness might be better understood when considering it as a very specific form of awareness, made possible by language. (shrink)

Much recent philosophical work on social freedom focuses on whether freedom should be understood as non-interference, in the liberal tradition associated with Isaiah Berlin, or as non-domination, in the republican tradition revived by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. We defend a conception of freedom that lies between these two alternatives: freedom as independence. Like republican freedom, it demands the robust absence of relevant constraints on action. Unlike republican, and like liberal freedom, it is not moralized. We show that freedom as (...) independence retains the virtues of its liberal and republican counterparts while shedding their vices. Our aim is to put this conception of freedom more firmly on the map and to offer a novel perspective on the logical space in which different conceptions of freedom are located. (shrink)

This paper is an opinionated guide to the literature on normative epistemic reasons. After making some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of normative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states, and concluding that they are not mental states. In §3, I examine the distinction between normative epistemic reasons there are and normative epistemic reasons we possess. I offer a novel account of this distinction and argue that (...) we in fact ought to acknowledge a threefold distinction between objective, possessed, and apparent normative epistemic reasons. In §4, I discuss the question of which normative reasons for doxastic attitudes are the epistemic ones, evaluating reasons against a simple evidentialist answer. Finally, in §5, I look at the role of reasons in epistemology, considering challenges to viewing reasons as the building blocks of epistemic normativity and maintaining that the challenges recommend a novel bi-level epistemology rather than a marginalization of reasons in epistemology. (shrink)

The paper is an opinionated tour of the literature on the reasons for which we hold beliefs and other doxastic attitudes, which I call ‘operative epistemic reasons’. After drawing some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of operative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states. I recommend a pluralist non-mentalist view that takes seriously the variety of operative epistemic reasons ascriptions and allows these reasons to be both propositions (...) and truth-making facts. In §3, I turn to consider what it takes for a consideration to be an operative epistemic reason, examining three conditions – the representational, treating, and explanatory conditions – that have been proposed. I offer a novel view about the explanatory condition. In §4, I discuss the special case of inferential operative reasons and examine attempts to understand them in terms of rule-following, sketching a competence-based spinoff of dispositionalism. Finally, in §5, I consider whether there are non-inferential operative reasons, observing that one needn't countenance them to be a foundationalist but then developing a view about what they are and how they do and don't differ from inferential reasons. (shrink)

Philosophers have spilled a lot of ink over the past few years exploring the nature and significance of grounding. Kit Fine has made several seminal contributions to this discussion, including an exact treatment of the formal features of grounding [Fine, 2012a]. He has specified a language in which grounding claims may be expressed, proposed a system of axioms which capture the relevant formal features, and offered a semantics which interprets the language. Unfortunately, the semantics Fine offers faces a number of (...) problems. In this paper, I review the problems and offer an alternative that avoids them. I offer a semantics for the pure logic of ground that is motivated by ideas already present in the grounding literature, and for which a natural axiomatization capturing central formal features of grounding is sound and complete. I also show how the semantics I offer avoids the problems faced by Fine’s semantics. (shrink)

The accepted narrative treats John Stuart Mill’s Kinds as the historical prototype for our natural kinds, but Mill actually employs two separate notions: Kinds and natural groups. Considering these, along with the accounts of Mill’s nineteenth-century interlocutors, forces us to recognize two distinct questions. First, what marks a natural kind as worthy of inclusion in taxonomy? Second, what exists in the world that makes a category meet that criterion? Mill’s two notions offer separate answers to the two questions: natural (...) groups for taxonomy and Kinds for ontology. This distinction is ignored in many contemporary debates about natural kinds and is obscured by the standard narrative that treats our natural kinds just as a development of Mill’s Kinds. (shrink)

Frege-Geach worries about embedding and composition have plagued metaethical theories like emotivism, prescriptivism and expressivism. The sharpened point of such criticism has come to focus on whether negation and inconsistency have to be understood in descriptivist terms. Because they reject descriptivism, these theories must offer a non-standard account of the meanings of ethical and normative sentences as well as related semantic facts, such as why certain sentences are inconsistent with each other. This paper fills out such a solution to (...) the negation problems, following some of the original emotivist ideas about the interplay of interests in conversation. We communicate both to share information and coordinate our actions, and we use distinctively normative language like deontic ‘must’ and ‘may’ to negotiate what people are to do. The kinds of disagreement involved in such negotiation can illuminate the issues with negation and inconsistency. This paper outlines a dynamic semantic system in which these ideas can bear fruit, developing the scorekeeping model of conversation. The result is clarification about what Frege-Geach worries can mean for nondescriptive semantics. (shrink)

With twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of science’s unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the spectres of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of recently expressed concerns regarding Canada's death of evidence controversy. The (...) worry, raised by Stathis Psillos, is that as constructivist accounts of science demoted the previously secure status of evidence for drawing justified conclusions in science, we were left with no rational delineation between the right and wrong values for science. The implication for the death of evidence controversy is that we may have no rational grounds for claiming that the Canadian Government is wrong to interfere with scientific enterprise. But he does offer another avenue for reaching the conclusion that the wrong social values are directing the current stifling of some sectors of Canadian science. Psillos draws from standpoint epistemologies to devise a salient defence of ‘valuing evidence’ as a universalizable social value. That is, government bodies ought to enable scientific research via adequate funding as well as political non-interference. In this paper, I counter that non-epistemic values can be rationally evaluated and that standpoint epistemology’s universalizable standpoint provides an inadequate framework for negotiating social values in science. Regarding, I draw from the evidence-based medicine debate in philosophy of medicine and from feminist empiricist investigations into the science–values relationship in order to make the argument for empirically driven value arbitration. If social values can be rationally chosen in the context of justification, then we can have grounds for charging the Canadian leadership with being ‘at war with science’. I further argue that my recommended empiricist methodology is preferable to Psillos’s search for universalizable perspectives for negotiating social values in science because the latter method permits little more than the trivial conclusion that evidence is valuable to science. (shrink)

This is a draft of a chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, edited by David Plunkett and Tristram McPherson. I offer an overview of hybrid views in metaethics, with main focus on hybrid cognitivist views such as those defended by Daniel Boisvert and David Copp, and on hybrid expressivist views such as those defended by Michael Ridge and myself.

This collection addresses two different audiences: 1) historians and philosophers of the life sciences reflecting on collaborations across disciplines, especially as regards defining and addressing Grand Challenges; 2) researchers and other stakeholders involved in cross-disciplinary collaborations aimed at tackling Grand Challenges in the life and medical sciences. The essays collected here offer ideas and resources both for the study and for the practice of goal-driven cross-disciplinary research in the life and medical sciences. We organise this introduction in three sections. (...) The first section provides some background and context. The second motivates our take on this topic and then outlines the central ideas of each paper. The third section highlights the specificity and significance of this approach by considering: a) how this collection departs from existing literature on inter- and trans-disciplinarity, b) what is characteristic about this approach, and c) what role this suggests for the history and philosophy of the life sciences in addressing Grand Challenges. (shrink)

Animal ethicists have recently debated the ethical questions raised by disenhancing animals to improve their welfare. Here, we focus on the particular case of breeding hens for commercial egg-laying systems to become blind, in order to benefit their welfare. Many people find breeding blind hens intuitively repellent, yet ‘welfare-only’ positions appear to be committed to endorsing this possibility if it produces welfare gains. We call this the ‘Blind Hens’ Challenge’. In this paper, we argue that there are both empirical and (...) theoretical reasons why even those adopting ‘welfare-only’ views should be concerned about breeding blind hens. But we also argue that alternative views, which (for example) claim that it is important to respect the telos or rights of an animal, do not offer a more convincing solution to questions raised by the possibility of disenhancing animals for their own benefit. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: With this article, I advance a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability. I argue that Foucault’s insights offer the most astute tools with which to engage in this intellectual enterprise. Genealogy, the technique of investigation that Friedrich Nietzsche famously introduced and that Foucault took up and adapted in his own work, demonstrates that Foucault’s historicist approach has greater explanatory power and transgressive potential for analyses of disability than his critics in disability studies have thus far recognized. I (...) show how a feminist philosophy of disability that employs Foucault’s technique of genealogy avoids ahistorical, teleological, and transcultural assumptions that beleaguer much work in disability studies. The article also situates feminist philosophical work on disability squarely in age-old debates in (Eurocentric) Western philosophy about universalism vs. relativism, materialism vs. idealism, realism vs. nominalism, and freewill vs. determinism, as well as contributes to ongoing discussions in (Western) feminist philosophy and theory about (among other things) essentialism vs. constructivism, identity, race, sexuality, agency, and experience. (shrink)

Is knowledge necessary or sufficient or both necessary and sufficient for acceptable practical reasoning and rational action? Several authors (e.g., Williamson, Hawthorne, and Stanley) have recently argued that the answer to these questions is positive. In this paper I present several objections against this view (both in its basic form as well in more developed forms). I also offer a sketch of an alternative view: What matters for the acceptability of practical reasoning in at least many cases (and in (...) all the cases discussed by the defenders of a strong link between knowledge and practical reasoning) is not so much knowledge but expected utility. (shrink)

Samuel Alexander was one of the first realists of the twentieth century to defend a theory of categories. He thought that the categories are genuinely real and grounded in the intrinsic nature of Space-Time. I present his reduction of the categories in terms of Space-Time, articulate his account of categorial structure and completeness, and offer an interpretation of what he thought the nature of the categories really were. I then argue that his theory of categories has some advantages over (...) competing theories of his day, and finally draw some important lessons that we can learn from his realist yet reductionist theory of categories. (shrink)

Two priority problems frustrate our understanding of Spinoza on desire [cupiditas]. The first problem concerns the relationship between desire and the other two primary affects, joy [laetitia] and sadness [tristitia]. Desire seems to be the oddball of this troika, not only because, contrary to the very definition of an affect, desires do not themselves consist in changes in one's power of acting, but also because desire seems at once more and less basic than joy and sadness. The second problem concerns (...) the priority of desires and evaluative judgements. While 3p9s and 3p39s suggest that evaluative judgements are posterior to desires, Andrew Youpa has recently argued that passages in Ethics 4 indicate that rational evaluative judgements can give rise to, rather than arise out of, desires. I aim to offer solutions to these problems that reveal the elegance and coherence of Spinoza's account of motivation. Ultimately, I argue that whereas emotions and d.. (shrink)

Cornell realists maintain that irreducible moral properties have earned a place in our ontology in virtue of the indispensable role they play in a variety of explanations. These explanations can be divided into two groups: those that employ thin ethical concepts and those that employ thick ethical concepts. Recent work on thick concepts suggests that they are not inherently evaluative in their meaning. If correct, this creates problems for the moral explanations of Cornell realists, since the most persuasive moral explanations (...) are those that employ thick concepts. If thick concepts are not inherently evaluative, then the most plausible explanations on offer cannot support Cornell realism. Moral explanations employing thin concepts, however, are too flimsy to support the view. Unless proponents can develop a compelling story about thick concepts or thin explanations, Cornell realism is in trouble. (shrink)

In 2012, the politician Todd Akin caused a firestorm by suggesting, in the context of an argument about the moral permissibility of abortion, that some forms of rape were. This seemed to imply that other forms of rape must not be legitimate. In response, several commentators pointed out that rape is a and that there are. While the intention of these commentators was clear, I argue that they may have played into the very stereotype of rape endorsed by Akin. Such (...) a response, I claim, actually obscures a range of sexual harms, including some that may not rise to the level of being a crime. I also offer some thoughts on the moral psychology behind anti-abortion arguments of the kind advanced by Akin. (shrink)

Plato’s account of pleasure in Republic IX has been treated as an ill-conceived and deeply flawed account that Plato thankfully retracted and replaced in the Philebus. I am convinced, however, that this received view of the Republic’s account is false. In this paper, I will not concern myself with whether, or in what way, Plato’s account of pleasure in the Republic falls short of what we find in the Philebus, but will rather focus on the merits of the former. My (...) concern will be further narrowed down to the first half of the third proof: the proof involves two criteria for the evaluation of pleasures, the criteria of purity and of truth, both of which yield the result that the philosopher’s pleasures are the most pleasant (because it turns out that only those pleasures are pure and only they are true). I will be addressing the criterion of purity, which is based on a psychological/phenomenological account of pleasure and pain. This account has been harshly criticized as full of ambiguity and confusion, as I explain in detail below. I believe, however, that these criticisms result from misunderstanding, and failing to appreciate the complexity of, Plato’s account. In this paper, I will offer an interpretation of Plato’s psychological account of pleasure and pain in Republic IX, showing that this account is, contrary to its detractors, both interesting and persuasive on many points. (shrink)

What does truth have to do with freedom? That is, what is the relationship between our political and epistemic principles? In this paper, I grapple and reject Rorty's reasons for thinking that the former can't be based on the latter, but offer an alternative argument that supports his over-all conclusion that our epistemic and political values are ultimately intertwined.

The aim of this article is twofold. First, I want to offer an introduction of and a comparison between three accounts of philistinism. Secondly, I show how the phenomenon of philistinism, a failure to speak for oneself, helps to develop an original perspective on Wittgenstein’s moral thought. It is often claimed that Wittgenstein’s personal ethics were quite unorthodox because he repeatedly seems to have supported destruction, war and slavery. I argue that, in the light of my discussion of philistinism, (...) the remarks upon which such conclusions are based should be read differently. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider whether an argument for compatibilism about free will and determinism might be developed from the thought that God’s agency seems consistent with the rational determination of at least some divine actions by the True and the Good. I attempt to develop such an argument and then consider how to respond to it from the point of view of my own position, which I call Agency Incompatibilism. I argue that a crucial premise in the argument is (...) ambiguous and offer responses to the argument on behalf of the Agency Incompatibilist, on each of the two disambiguations. (shrink)

Kathryn Gines's book details Hannah Arendt 's racial and conceptual biases against Black people in the US and post-colonial Africa. Gines makes original and significant contributions to feminist philosophy by applying various feminist and anticolonial strategies, including standpoint theory and multidirectionality, to Arendt 's political essays and concepts. Feminist critiques of Arendt in general and racial critiques of "Reflections on Little Rock" in particular are not new; however, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question offers a novel and comprehensive racial critique (...) of Arendt 's major writings. Gines offers a "sustained analysis of Arendt 's treatment of the Black experience in the United States", as well as racial violence within the contexts of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and French and British imperialism and colonialism. In this review I will offer an overview of the book as a whole, before evaluating the extent of Gines's critique as it pertains to Arendt 's misguided judgments and her theory of judgment. (shrink)

In this article, I use science-fiction scenarios drawn from Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion Cantos” (Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion) to explore a cluster of issues related to the evolutionary history and neural bases of human moral cognition, and the moral desirability of improving our ability to make moral decisions by techniques of neuroengineering. I begin by sketching a picture of what recent research can teach us about the character of human moral psychology, with a particular emphasis (...) on highlighting the importance of our evolutionary background as social mammals. I then consider how the moral psychology of intelligent machines might differ from our own, and argue that the differences would depend on the extent to which their evolutionary background resembled our own. I offer two very different case studies—the “Technocore AIs” that have evolved from early, parasitic computer programs, and the mysterious “Shrike,” who travels backward through time. I close by looking at the character of Aenea, a messianic figure that is a joint descendant of humans and machines. I argue that while the sort of “moral enhancement” she represents is far beyond the scope of either contemporary neuroscience or artificial intelligence research, it nevertheless represents a worthwhile goal. (shrink)

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's proposal that social and legal institutions should steer individuals toward some options and away from others-a stance they dub "libertarian paternalism"-has provoked much high-level discussion in both academic and policy settings. Sunstein and Thaler believe that steering, or "nudging," individuals is easier to justify than the bans or mandates that traditional paternalism involves. -/- This Article considers the connection between libertarian paternalism and the regulation of reproductive choice. I first discuss the use of nudges to (...) discourage women from exercising their right to choose an abortion, or from becoming or remaining pregnant. I then argue that reproductive choice cases illustrate the limitations of libertarian paternalism. Where choices are politicized or intimate, as reproductive choices often are, nudges become not much easier to justify than traditional mandates or prohibitions. Even beyond the context of reproductive choice, it is not obvious how much easier nudges are to justify than bans or mandates. -/- Part I of this Article briefly introduces Sunstein and Thaler's libertarian paternalism. Part II then turns to the context of reproductive choice. Part II.A reviews restrictions on the right to choose an abortion-particularly post-Casey regulations such as waiting periods, requirements that women receive certain types of information, and requirements that women undergo ultrasound-that pitch themselves as steering choice without entirely closing off the right to choose an abortion. This distinction between nudges and prohibitions echoes Sunstein and Thaler's proposals, but works to subordinate women's choices to the judgment of (often male) experts and administrators-hence my term "libertarian patriarchalism." Part II.B reviews efforts to nudge women-particularly teenagers, HIV-positive women, and others thought to be unsuitable mothers-to avoid pregnancy. -/- Part III considers the normative implications of nudging reproductive decisions. In Part III.A, I argue that the political nature of reproductive choices presents a problem for nudges. I do so by considering a parallel with voting rights. Empirical research shows that voters are more likely to choose the candidate listed first on the ballot. Yet we do not empower the administrator in charge of ballot design to choose a default rule that nudges individuals toward the candidate he sincerely believes would promote choosers' welfare. Given the political nature of reproductive choices, a policymaker's attempting to nudge reproductive decisionmaking in the direction he prefers-or indeed in any direction-fails to show adequate respect for the chooser's agency. In Part III.B, I offer an argument that targets the use of nudges in the context of pregnancy. Finally, in Part III.C, I argue that nudges do not merely add choices to an existing menu, but change the substantive choices available to individuals and thereby impose more-than-trivial costs on them. I conclude by exploring the implications of my arguments for nudges more generally. (shrink)

Tim Maudlin has influentially argued that Humeanism about laws of nature stands in conflict with quantum mechanics. Specifically Humeanism implies the principle Separability: the complete physical state of a world is determined by the intrinsic physical state of each space-time point. Maudlin argues Separability is violated by the entangled states posited by QM. We argue that Maudlin only establishes that a stronger principle, which we call Strong Separability, is in tension with QM. Separability is not in tension with QM. Moreover, (...) while the Humean requires Separability to capture the core tenets of her view, there's no Humean-specific motivation for accepting Strong Separability. We go on to give a Humean account of entangled states which satisfies Separability. The core idea is that certain quantum states depend upon the Humean mosaic in much the same way as the laws do. In fact, we offer a variant of the Best System account on which the systemization procedure that generates the laws also serves to ground these states. We show how this account works by applying it to the example of Bohmian Mechanics. The 3N-dimensional configuration space, the world particle in it and the wave function on it are part of the best system of the Humean mosaic, which consists of N particles moving in 3-dimensional space. We argue that this account is superior to the Humean account of Bohmian Mechanics defended by Loewer and Albert, which takes the 3N-dimensional space, and its inhabitants, as fundamental. (shrink)

We point out a yet unnoticed flaw in Dutch Book arguments that relates to a link between degrees of belief and betting quotients. We offer a set of precise conditions governing when a nonprobabilist is immune to the classical Dutch Book argument. We suggest that diachronic Dutch Book arguments are also affected.

According to a popular view, privacy is a function of people not knowing or rationally believing some fact about you. But intuitively it seems possible for a perpetrator to violate your right to privacy without learning any facts about you. For example, it seems plausible to say that the US National Security Agency’s PRISM program violated, or could have violated, the privacy rights of the people whose information was collected, despite the fact that the NSA, for the most part, merely (...) collected information without examining it, and thus, for the most part, did not acquire knowledge about specific people. This pair of judgements creates the challenge of aligning one of the most popular accounts of what privacy is with a suitable account of the right to privacy. Call this the alignment challenge. -/- In this paper, I criticize two recent attempts to answer the alignment challenge: one based on risk, proposed by Björn Lundgren, and one based on modal robustness, proposed by Carissa Véliz. I then offer my preferred response, which I call the inquiry account. According to this account, the right to privacy protects against certain forms of inquiry. This account explains why there is a gap between what privacy is a what the right to privacy protects people against. Moreover, it explains why it is possible to violate someone’s right to privacy without obtaining knowledge. (shrink)