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12311.891003
What is to be a human person? Since the cognitive revolution half a century ago, the analytic philosophy of mind has interpreted the question as the mind-body problem: how are mental states that have cognitive or semantic content related to their concomitant brain states or causal neural processes? Let me call this the vertical problem. Functionalism seems to offer the most convincing account of this relationship: the mind is not the brain; the mind is what the brain does.
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12754.891253
The literature on epistemic responsibility has traditionally focused on justified belief formation and actions that lead to it. Similarly, accounts of collective epistemic responsibility have addressed the issue of collective belief formation and associated actions. However, cases in which we face an epistemic harm that could be prevented only by a collective action, requiring an effort of an unorganized group, have been left out of these discussions. Examples of collectively preventable epistemic harms include a premature abandonment of a promising research program within a given scientific domain, or the prevalence of pernicious biases in a certain field of study. In this paper we propose an account of collective epistemic responsibility, which fills this gap. Building on Hindriks’ (2018) account of collective moral responsibility, we introduce the Epistemic Duty to Join Forces. Our theory provides an account of the responsibilities of scientists to prevent epistemic harms during inquiry. It also suggests fruitful applications to other discussions, such as those concerning epistemic injustice and epistemically pernicious groups.
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41889.8913
You're a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Of course you are! How could you not be? (Okay, if you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out here.) And if you're a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, you love Uncle Iroh. …
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70613.891337
This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page.
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189721.891371
Messiah: Al is a good man. He leads a fulfilling life. Those around him appreciate him and treat him with respect. Shortly before his death, he makes an unsettling discovery. Unbeknownst to him, those in his community believe he is a Messiah: someone chosen by God, with innate virtue, and deserving of unconditional respect. As it happens, Al really is a good man, worthy of respect. But if, counterfactually, his behaviour and personality were disagreeable, those around him would continue to be positively disposed towards him. They all interpret Al’s behaviour through the lens of the “Messiah-script,” without seeing him for who he really is.
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247232.891401
According to a standard interpretation, Plato’s conception of our moral psychology evolved over the course of his written dialogues. In his earlier dialogues, notably the Protagoras, Meno, and Gorgias, Plato’s Socrates maintains that we always do what we believe is best. Many commentators infer from this that Socrates holds that the psyche is simple, in the sense that there is only one ultimate source of motivation: reason. By contrast, in the Republic, Phaedrus, and Timaeus, Socrates holds that the psyche is complex, or has three distinct and semi-autonomous sources of motivation, which he calls the reasoning, spirited, and appetitive parts. While the rational part determines what is best overall and motivates us to pursue it, the spirited and appetitive parts incline us towards different objectives, such as victory, honor, and esteem, or the satisfaction of our desires for food, drink, and sex.
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353903.891419
This paper examines an ancient debate over the rationality of perception. What leads the Stoics to affirm, and the Epicureans to deny, that to form a sense-impression is an activity of reason? The answer, we argue, lies in a disagreement over what is required for epistemic success. For the Stoics, epistemic success consists in believing the right propositions, and only rational states, in virtue of their predicational structure, put us in touch with propositions. Since they identify some sense-impressions as criteria of truth and thus as the basis for epistemic success, the Stoics maintain that sense-impressions must be rational. The Epicureans agree with the Stoics that sense-impressions function as criteria of truth, and also agree broadly on what it means for a state to be rational, but deny that sense-impressions are rational because (1) they think that epistemic success must be supported by a state that is necessarily error-free and (2) accept that rational states can be false. In reconstructing this debate, we refine the standard interpretation of the fundamental difference between Epicurean and Stoic epistemology and also develop parallels with epistemological debates today. One upshot is a more nuanced appreciation of the merits of Epicurean epistemology vis-à-vis the Stoics.
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537941.891465
Koreans have been key players in Asian intellectual history and have
historically been great propagators of intercultural adaptation. The
“Three Teachings” of China, in the form of Buddhism,
Confucianism, and Daoism (sometimes written “Taoism”), had
all made their way into Korea by the fifth century CE, blending with
the pre-existing institutions and culture there. Korean Confucians had
used Confucian ideas, especially those advocating hierarchy and moral
leadership, to bolster a powerful state bureaucracy in order to
provide society with a rigidly structured and organised modus
vivendi.
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540091.891483
A central tension shaping metaethical inquiry is that normativity appears to be subjective yet real, where it’s difficult to reconcile these aspects. On the one hand, normativity pertains to our actions and attitudes. On the other, normativity appears to be real in a way that precludes it from being a mere figment of those actions and attitudes. In this paper, I argue that normativity is indeed both subjective and real. I do so by way of treating it as a special sort of artifact, where artifacts are mind-dependent yet nevertheless can carve at the joints of reality. In particular, I argue that the properties of being a reason and being valuable for are grounded in attitudes yet are still absolutely structural.
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555293.891497
“The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he” (ThomasRainsborough, spokesman for the Levellers at the Putnam Debates)What does it mean to say that everyone is equal? It does not mean that everyone has (or should have) the same amount of nice things, money, or happiness. …
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555364.891512
An important question confronting feminist philosophers is why women are sometimes complicit in their own subordination. The dominant view holds that complicity is best understood in terms of adaptive preferences. This view assumes that agents will naturally gravitate away from subordination and towards flourishing as long as they do not have things imposed on them that disrupt this trajectory. However, there is reason to believe that ‘impositions’ do not explain all of the ways in which complicity can arise. This paper defends a phenomenological account of complicity, which offers an alternative explanation.
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630160.891527
The law of contracts, at least in its orthodox expression, concerns
voluntary, or chosen, legal obligations. When Brody accepts
Susan’s offer to sell him a canoe for a set price, the
parties’ choices alter their legal rights and duties. Their
success at changing the legal landscape depends on a background system
of rules that specify when and how contractual acts have legal
effects, rules that give the offer and acceptance of a
bargain-exchange a central role in generating obligations. Contract
law conceived as a body of rules empowering individuals to shape their
own rights and responsibilities presents an object of philosophical
study.
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632444.891541
Farbod Akhlaghi (2021) presents an original argument against both noncognitivism and naturalism in metaethics. The argument revolves around the idea that wholesale moral error is at least epistemically possible. Akhlaghi thinks that neither noncognitivists nor naturalists are able to explain this on the assumption that their theories are true. He takes this to show that noncognitivism and naturalism are false. In this reply, I argue that metaethical theories should at most allow for the epistemic possibility of wholesale moral error on one particular conception of epistemic possibility, and that neither noncognitivists nor naturalists have trouble doing so. In section 2, I argue that metaethical theories should allow for the epistemic possibility of wholesale moral error only if epistemic possibility consists in having a non-zero probability given our evidence. In section 3, I reconstruct Akhlaghi’s argument against noncognitivism and naturalism. In section 4, I argue that it fails. Section 5 concludes.
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696830.891555
It is a common thought that authoritative law is necessary because we disagree about justice. This idea often rests on law’s purported instrumental value, on its ability to get us, imperfect and biased agents, closest to a just society: we do best, from the perspective of justice independently defined, by having clear legal rules to follow and rights to respect. In The Doctrine of Right, Kant rejects such an instrumental conception of law and instead defends the more controversial claim that, absent authoritative law, there will often be no answer to be had about what justice (or, for Kant, right) requires of us in our interactions with one another. On this view, in a situation without authoritative law—in a state of nature—a person is unable coherently to pursue the aim of acting rightly. Authoritative law is required for Kant, then, not because a person, in obeying the law, is thereby more likely to do what right demands; rather, it is required because without it, there will often be no sense to be made of this question of what right demands.
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899812.89157
Legal positivists maintain that the legality of a rule is fundamentally determined by social facts. Yet for much of legal history, ordinary officials used legal terminology in ways that seem inconsistent with positivism. Judges regularly cited, analyzed, and predicated their decisions on the ‘laws of justice’ which they claimed had universal legal import. This practice, though well-documented by historians, has received surprisingly little philosophical attention; I argue that it invites explanation from positivists. After taxonomizing the positivist’s explanatory options, I suggest that the most viable option appeals to conceptual change: classical Romans, early modern Europeans, founding-era Americans were not using ‘law’ (or ‘lex’ or ‘jus’) to refer to the subject matter of contemporary legal philosophy. But the strategy is costly. It renders positivism’s truth surprisingly parochial. And it supplies new reasons for doubting positivist accounts of contemporary practices, including the treatment of moral principles in modern adjudication.
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899859.891584
‘Mathematical psychics’ was the name of the approach and the book by Edgeworth for a burgeoning scientific approach, also pioneered by Pareto, for that part of psychology on which economics rests. The nature of the subject of this approach raises the prospect that this approach can also be of interest to practitioners of other sciences related to psychology, which is why an attempt is made here to give an overview of the contents of this approach and some results already achieved with it in economics. In addition, some problems outside economics, narrowly construed, are indicated, for the solution of which one might also make fruitful use of mathematical psychology.
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974385.891598
This article presents two related challenges to the idea that, to ensure policy evaluation is comprehensive, all costs and benefits should be aggregated into a single, equity-weighted wellbeing metric. The first is to point out how, even allowing for equity-weighting, the use of a single metric limits the extent to which we can take distributional concerns into account. The second challenge starts from the observation that in this and many other ways, aggregating diverse effects into a single metric of evaluation necessarily involves settling many moral questions that reasonable people disagree about. This raises serious questions as to what role such a method of policy evaluation can and should play in informing policy-making in liberal democracies. Ultimately, to ensure comprehensiveness of policy evaluation in a wider sense, namely, that all the diverse effects that reasonable people might think matter are kept score of, we need multiple metrics as inputs to public deliberation.
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988490.891616
Adolescents are routinely treated differently from adults, even when they possess agential capacities that are not dissimilar. Some instances of differential treatment rely on the assumption that responsible adults or institutions are better placed to direct an adolescent’s life. In this article we attempt to make philosophical sense of one notable case of differential treatment of adolescents: the concurrent consents doctrine in the law of England and Wales (and other jurisdictions).1 Our discussion of this doctrine may shed light on the justification for treating adolescents differently from (and paternalistically compared to) adults in medical and other domains.
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1025182.89163
The Animal Breeding Research Organisation (ABRO) was formed as a result of the recommendations of a joint Committee of the Agricultural Improvement Council and the Agricultural Research Council, set up in 1943, to consider the directions which research in animal genetics and breeding in Great Britain should take to advance scientific knowledge and assist animal production in the farming industry.
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1055740.891646
The important ‘no-envy’ fairness criterion has typically been attributed to Foley (1967) and sometimes to Tinbergen (1946, 1953). We reveal that Jan Tinbergen introduced ‘no-envy’ as a fairness criterion in his article “Mathematiese Psychologie” published in 1930 in the Dutch journal Mens en Maatschappij and translated as “Mathematical Psychology” in 2021 in the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. Our article accompanies the translation: we introduce Tinbergen’s 1930 formulation of the ‘no-envy’ criterion, compare it to other formulations, and comment on its significance for the fairness literature in philosophy and economics.
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1163117.891661
Suppose I take a nasty fall while biking. But I remain conscious. Here is the obvious first thing for a formal epistemologist to do: increase my credence in the effectiveness of this brand of helmets. …
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1181044.891675
On J586, a planet peopled by sentient vegetation, seven blobs of color, stacked high like scoops of ice cream, float in a test tube-like container. The super-powered guardian of J586 sits opposite the hovering cyan and magenta patches and tentatively addresses something that looks more like a traffic light than an organism. The guardian slowly asks these blobs about who and what they are. Remarkably, the blobs explain that they have been exiled from their homeworld and express their deep regret for the chaos they have just wrought on J586.
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1181102.891688
Democracy is in trouble, and it is democracy’s own fault—that is Robert Talisse’s intriguing contention is his recent book, Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place (2019). What gets democracy into trouble, according to Talisse, is the idea that a democratic form of government is intrinsically valuable, which in turn entails a deliberative conception of democracy that, in combination with the social-psychological fact of social sorting, leads to rampant polarization. According to Talisse, we therefore need to put democracy in its place by resisting the expansive view of the scope of democracy and making room for non-political spaces of interaction, in which we can form civic friendships. However, in what follows, I argue that what Talisse has actually provided is an excellent reason for rejecting rather than merely mitigating the detrimental effects of the idea that democracy is intrinsically valuable. Specifically, we ought to stop fetishizing democracy and instead embrace an instrumentalist view of democracy as a social practice that is instituted and maintained for purposes external to itself. Once we do this, democracy no longer needs saving from itself.
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1189594.891706
[Note: I wrote this about a year ago. This was before several excellent books came out on this topic, e.g. here and here. I have only read the first of these but I have not updated what I wrote in light of it. …
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1215438.891723
Relational egalitarian accounts of justice have become widely accepted in recent years, and proponents have played a central role in a broader critical reaction to accounts of justice that focus primarily on distributive matters. According to relational egalitarians, the fundamental value that grounds requirements of justice is egalitarian social relationships. Justice, for relational egalitarians, then, is at bottom about the terms on which individuals relate to each other. Most uncontroversially, on relational egalitarian views, justice requires that individuals do
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1351727.891747
Are ethical virtues the same for everyone regardless of geographical, historical, and social context? Or are they keyed to the local environment in a way that means they vary across contexts? Ethical virtues govern behaviour across all the situations of one’s life. The fundamental structures of human life are the same for everyone, but how these structures play out depends on our context. Does this mean that ethical virtues are universal, reflecting the basic structures of the human condition, or local, reflecting the conditions in which those structures play out? This chapter addresses this question through the motivational structure of ethical virtues. It begins by outlining an empirical model of evaluative attitudes, then argues that the motivational structure of each ethical virtue is a cluster of such attitudes. For many virtues, the relevant attitudes depend on the specific challenges of the environment. Those virtues will thus be local in their details. The chapter concludes by identifying two varieties of universality: the attitudes composing ethical integrity do not refer to the environment at all; one attitude in the virtue of honesty refers to environmental features that are themselves universal.
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1384929.891872
If given the unfortunate choice, you should impose a risk of moderate harm on an individual rather than a risk of death, other things equal. That’s because moderate harm is better for someone than death. This relation holds under uncertainty: risking moderate harm is better for someone than risking their death, keeping likelihoods constant. After all, if your parachute might fail, would you rather jump from a height that will leave you with chronic moderate pain you if it fails or one that will kill you if it does?
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1385050.891887
I propose and defend a novel view called ‘de se consequentialism’, which is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it demonstrates — contra Doug Portmore, Mark Schroeder, Campbell Brown, and Michael Smith, among others — that a consequentialist theory employing agent-neutral value is logically consistent with agent-centered constraints. Second, de se consequentialism clari es both the nature of agent-centered constraints and why philosophers have found them puzzling, thereby meriting attention from even dedicated non-consequentialists. Scrutiny reveals that moral theories in general, whether consequentialist or not, incorporate constraints by assessing states in a rst-personal guise. Consequently, it is no coincidence that de se consequentialism mimics constraints: its distinctive feature is the very feature through which non-consequentialist theories enact them.
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1429373.891901
One proposed criterion for discerning legitimate value influences in science is to allow values that further justice-related social aims. According to this moral account, promoting human egalitarian values is legitimate and productive in science because of the moral superiority of those values. I argue that we can have a more general and feasible guide for science without appealing to the social aims of science. Earlier proposals that are more empirically focused (e.g., highlighting the significance of knowledge) can better achieve the intended outcomes of the moral account.
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1564953.891955
The very idea of moral luck poses a puzzle. In fact, Bernard Williams, who introduced the phrase “moral luck,” writes that he “expected to suggest an oxymoron” (Williams 1993: 251). As I will understand it here, moral luck occurs when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment, despite the fact that a significant aspect of what he is assessed for depends on factors beyond his control (Nagel 1979). Williams (1981) had suggested that the idea of luck—or being outside of our control—is simply inconsistent with the idea of moral assessment. The more specific claim that will be the focus here is that the idea of luck is inconsistent with a particular form of moral assessment, namely, moral blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. And in fact, I will focus on a specific kind of moral blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, namely, that associated with moral responsibility understood as accountability. In this sense of responsibility, we are responsible agents insofar as we are subjects of legitimate moral demands and apt candidates for being held to account when it comes to meeting those demands.1