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45717.019214
Let’s say you like ? more than ?, ? more than ?, and ? more than ?. Then your likes form a loop. But is it wise to have such a loop of likes? An old way to show that it is not wise is to show that, if you have a loop of likes, then you are prey to a wealth pump — that is, a scheme where you pay for what you know you could keep for free. The old wealth pump goes like this: Let’s say you start with?. Then a man asks you if you want to trade ? for ?. Since you like ? more than ?, you make this trade. Then the man asks if you want to trade? for ?. Since you like ? more than?, you make this trade too. And then the man asks if you want to pay a small sum to trade ? for ?. Since you like ? more than ?, you pay the small sum and make the trade from ? to ?. Now, you are back to ?, but you have less wealth: You paid for what you knew you could have kept for free, which does not seem wise.
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53441.019342
Is the ideal of value neutrality in science (a) achievable, (b) desirable, and, (c) not detrimental? Alex van den Berg and Tay Jeong (2022) passionately defend the ideal of value neutrality. In this reply, I would like to fine-tune some of their arguments as well as refute others. While there seems to be a broad consensus among philosophers of science that value neutrality is not achievable, one could still defend it as an ideal to aspire to for the sciences (including social sciences). However, I argue that the ideal of value neutrality advanced by van den Berg and Jeong is detrimental, therefore not desirable. We should rather adjust our view of science towards scientific pluralism and perspectivism in combination with strategies to productively deal with values in science. The latter approach is, pace van den Berg and Jeong, more conducive to democracy and egalitarianism than the ideal of value neutrality.
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166247.019362
Participatory and collaborative approaches in sustainability science and public health research contribute to co-producing evidence that can support interventions by involving diverse societal actors that range from individual citizens to entire communities. However, existing philosophical accounts of evidence are not adequate to deal with the kind of evidence generated and used in such approaches.
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166311.019375
With the recent renewed interest in AI, the field has made substantial advancements, particularly in generative systems. Increased computational power and the availability of very large datasets has enabled systems such as ChatGPT to effectively replicate aspects of human social interactions, such as verbal communication, thus bringing about profound changes in society. In this paper, we explain that the arrival of generative AI systems marks a shift from ‘interacting through’ to ‘interacting with’ technologies and calls for a reconceptualization of socio-technical systems as we currently understand them. We dub this new generation of socio-technical systems synthetic to signal the increased interactions between human and artificial agents, and, in the footsteps of philosophers of information, we cash out agency in terms of ‘poiêsis’. We close the paper with a discussion of the potential policy implications of synthetic socio-technical system.
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168666.019387
There is a profound lack of respect, tolerance, and empathy in contemporary politics. Within the past few decades, political opponents have steadily grown to dislike, distrust, fear, and loathe each other; moreover, members of polarized groups perceive one another as closed minded, arrogant, and immoral.1 However, new empirical research suggests that intellectual humility may be useful in bridging political divisions.2 For this reason, a growing number of psychologists and philosophers maintain that intellectual humility is an antidote to some of democracy’s ills.
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224340.019397
America’s school choice advocates have been making great arguments for decades. Only recently, though, have they started to actually win arguments. What changed? In The Parent Revolution, Corey DeAngelis argues that the key variable was a change in strategy. …
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465047.019408
I found myself yesterday scurrying to pick up my daughter early from her first day at a new school. My mission? To apply carefully selected, attractive, expensive Etsy nametags, emblazoned with her formerly favorite non-animal—unicorns—to the spare clothing in the almost-regulation-size wooden box in her cubby. …
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537556.019419
Buddhism was introduced to the Korean Peninsula from China during the
Korean Three Kingdoms period. It first arrived in Koguryŏ, a
kingdom on the northern end of the peninsula, in 372 CE and then in
Paekche, a kingdom on the southwest of the peninsula, in 384 CE. It
arrived in Shilla, a kingdom on the southeast of the peninsula, in 521
CE by way of Koguryŏ. The influence of Chinese Buddhism on Korean
Buddhism cannot be treated lightly because Korea imported mostly
sinologized Buddhism, not Indian Buddhism. However, Korea added its
own color and historical and social context. Throughout history, Buddhism has significantly influenced the
worldview of the Korean people, instilling concepts such as karma and
the interconnectedness of all things.
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547471.019429
One of the central aims of James Buchanan’s long and fruitful career was to identify constitutional rules that could contain rent seeking. A central task for constitutional theorists is to identify constitutional rules that prohibit or limit rent seeking, in order to ensure that a society’s economic system benefits all and preserves their liberty. However, there is a related, but equally dangerous phenomenon that Buchanan does not explicitly address as a variant of rent seeking: the attempt by sectarian groups to capture governmental apparatus to impose their values on others. The goal of these ideologues is not economic gain, but evaluative gain. Co-opting state power, they force those with different values to share or at least submit to their own sectarian vision of the good society. Like rent seeking, this activity tends to undermine the gains from trade in a market order. These activities give the sectarian an unequal gain in utility and may impose a utility loss on others. In this broad sense, sectarian ideologues collect a rent. If we can specify the sense in which ideologues collect a rent, we can expand the reach of Buchanan’s research program. Towards this end, I develop an account of what I shall call ideological rent seeking and the ideological rent seeker. I then extend Buchanan’s approach to constitutional choice to cover the mitigation of ideological rents. The best constitutional rules are those that constrain a weighted sum of economic and ideological rent seeking.
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549928.019441
Matthew Leisinger (2020) argues that previous interpretations of John Locke’s account of akrasia (or weakness of will) are mistaken and offers a new interpretation in their place. In this essay, we aim to recapitulate part of this debate, defend a previously articulated interpretation by responding to Leisinger’s criticisms of it, and explain why Leisinger’s own interpretation faces textual and philosophical problems that are serious enough to disqualify it as an accurate reconstruction of Locke’s views. In so doing, we aim to shed further light on Locke’s views on the various ways in which humans are prone to err in their pursuit of happiness.
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549949.019452
In this paper, we consider two ways in which traditional approaches to testing lay moral theories have oversimplified our picture of moral psychology. Based on thought experiments (e.g., Foot 1967 and Thomson 1976) concerning the moral permissibility of certainly killing one to certainly saving five, psychological experiments (e.g., Cushman et al.
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549976.019463
This article summarizes John Locke’s considered views on freedom, explaining that freedom is a power of the mind to act in accordance with its volitions, that freedom is a power that can belong only to substances, that we have the freedom to will in many cases, including the power to hold our wills undetermined and thereby suspend the prosecution of our desires. This is a seemingly reasonable account of how our minds work, and should work, when we make (important) decisions. But Locke takes us to be morally responsible and accountable, not just for suspending when it is appropriate, but also for spending our time wisely during suspension, in the proper investigation of what would most conduce to our happiness. The problem is that we are prone to motivated irrationality during suspension when deciding what to investigate and for how long to do so. And thus we need to stop and consider whether we are succumbing to such irrationality before making the ultimate decision. This, I argue, leads to an infinite regress and forces Locke into an unsurmountable dilemma.
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562516.019476
The concept of white ignorance refers to phenomena of not-knowing that are produced by and reinforce systems of white supremacist domination and exploitation. I distinguish two varieties of white ignorance, belief-based white ignorance and practice-based white ignorance. Belief-based white ignorance consists in an information deficit about systems of racist oppression. Practice-based white ignorance consists in unresponsiveness to the political agency of persons and groups subject to racist oppression. Drawing on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, I contend that an antiracist politics that conceives of its epistemic task in terms of combating practice-based white ignorance offers a more promising frame for liberatory struggle. A focus on practice-based white ignorance calls for a distinctive form of humility that involves recognition of the limits of one ’s own political agency in relation to others, which is integral to democratic relations between free, equal, yet mutually dependent persons.
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620199.019489
In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of what it means to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities.
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630186.019502
We argue that there are neither scientific nor social reasons to require gathering ethno-racial data, as defined in the US legal regulations if researchers have no prior hypotheses as to how to connect this type of categorisation of human participants of clinical trials with any mechanisms that could explain alleged interracial health differences and guide treatment choice. Although we agree with the normative perspective embedded in the calls for the fair selection of participants for biomedical research, we demonstrate that current attempts to provide and elucidate the criteria for the fair selection of participants, in particular, taking into account ethno-racial categories, overlook important epistemic and normative challenges to implement the results of such race-sorting requirements. We discuss existing arguments for and against gathering ethno-racial statistics for biomedical research and present a new one that refers to the assumption that prediction is epistemically superior to accommodation. We also underline the importance of closer interaction between research ethics and the methodology of biomedicine in the case of population stratifications for medical research, which requires weighing non-epistemic values with methodological constraints.
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648751.019513
I’ve finished my two-year leave at OpenAI, and returned to being just a normal (normal?) professor, quantum complexity theorist, and blogger. Despite the huge drama at OpenAI that coincided with my time there, including the departures of most of the people I worked with in the former Superalignment team, I’m incredibly grateful to OpenAI for giving me an opportunity to learn and witness history, and even to contribute here and there, though I wish I could’ve done more. …
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662856.019522
D espite F. A. Hayek s apparent rejection of the very idea of social justice, this essay develops a theory of social justice from entirely Hayekian components. Hayek recognizes two concepts of social justice—local and holistic. Local social justice identifies principles that can be used to judge the justice of certain specific economic outcomes. Hayek rejects this conception of social justice on the grounds that specific economic outcomes are not created by moral agents, such that social justice judgments are a category mistake, like the idea of a “moral stone” (Hayek 1978, 78). But if one understands social justice as the principles that ought to govern the social order as a whole, as John Rawls ([1971] 1999) did, then Hayek is on board. Hayek agrees with Rawls that we cannot use contractarian principles to evaluate particular economic outcomes, and he supports Rawls’s attempt to identify the general principles that should govern social systems (Hayek 1978, 100).
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662877.019533
This essay explores and criticizes Matteo Bonotti’s argument that parties and partisans in a publicly justified polity should appeal primarily, if not exclusively, to accessible justificatory reasons to fulfill their political duties. I argue that political parties should only support coercive policies if they rationally believe that the coercive law or policy in question can be publicly justified to those subject to the law or policy in terms of their own private—specifically intelligible—reasons. I then explore four practical differences between our two approaches. In contrast to Bonotti’s accessible reasons approach, the intelligibility approach (1) facilitates the provision of assurance between citizens and political officials, (2) requires that parties and partisans support fewer coercive policies, (3) allows more exemptions from generally applicable laws, and (4) facilitates logrolling and alliance formation.
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662933.019544
Catholic integralism claims that governments must secure the earthly and heavenly common good. God authorizes two powers to do so. The state governs in matters temporal, the Catholic Church in matters spiritual. Since the church has the nobler end of salvation, it may direct the state to help enforce church law. The integralist adopts two seemingly conflicting norms of justice: (a) coercion into the faith is always unjust, but (b) coercion to keep the faith is just. But if religious coercion is wrong at the start of the Christian life, why is it permitted after that? The integralist answer is baptism. Baptism serves as a normative transformer: it transforms religious coercion from unjust to just. My thesis is that baptism fails as a normative transformer. I critique Thomas Aquinas’ approach to this question and then adapt gratitude, associative, and natural duty theories of political obligation to repair his argument. These strategies fail.
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720676.019555
by a factor of at least sixteen. She also presents a positive thesis, namely that the Great Fact occurred when Western societies began toascribe dignityand liberty tothe bourgeoisie by changing their rhetoric. I argue that McCloskey’s positive thesis can benefit from an illuminating moral psychological distinction between what Peter Strawson has called “social morality” and “individual ideal” or what I shall refer to as moral rules and personal ideals or aspirations. McCloskey’s positive thesis can be mapped onto these two categories and thus separated into two distinct theses: the Imperatival Thesis and the Aspirational Thesis. The former holds that societies that stopped blaming and ostracizing the bourgeoisie for their characteristic activities were the first to develop, whereas the latter holds that societies stopped ostracizing the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie started innovating because they took on new aspirations and ideals. These twin theses help to explain how the ideas of dignity and rhetoric operate in Bourgeois Dignity.
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720789.019567
Gerald Gaus was one of the leading liberal theorists of the early twenty-first century. He defended liberal order based on its unique capacity to handle deep disagreement and pressed liberals toward a principled openness to pluralism and diversity. Yet, almost everything written about Gaus’s work is evaluative: determining whether his arguments succeed or fail. This essay breaks from the pack by outlining underlying themes in his work. I argue that Gaus explored how to sustain moral relations between persons in light of the institutional threats of social control, evaluative pluralism, and institutional complexity, and the psychological threat of acting solely from what I shall call the mere first-personal point of view. The idea of public justification is the key to sustaining moral relations in the face of such challenges. When a society’s moral and political rules are justified to each person, moral relations survive the threats they face.
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720819.019583
This essay defends Catholic integralism. Integralists propose that governments exist to secure the common good: temporal and spiritual. God authorizes two powers to govern humankind: the state governs in matters temporal, the church in matters spiritual. When their missions intersect, the church is sovereign owing to its nobler purpose. Christian states must make their authority available to the church to secure religious ends. Despite rejecting integralism, most Catholic political philosophers are perfectionist: states exist to promote the authentic individual and common good. These natural law perfectionists agree that states exist to promote natural goods: goods, such as health and friendship, that anyone can see as such through the use of reason. Yet in contrast with integralism, they deny that states should promote supernatural goods: goods, such as faith and hope, that we only grasp through revelation. Most Catholic perfectionists treat natural and supernatural goods asymmetrically. Integralists reject the asymmetry. God authorizes the church to promote supernatural goods, and the church may direct the state to advance its mission. On this basis, I argue that integralists can mount a powerful philosophical argument against standard natural law perfectionism—the symmetry argument. It claims that natural law perfectionists cannot justify their asymmetric treatment of goodness. Integralism, in contrast, treats the good symmetrically.
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778559.019593
In The Order of Public Reason, Gerald Gaus uses Hayekian insights to give a contractarian justification for the specific social rules the rules that comprise the social order of a free people. But in doing so, Gaus inadvertently endorses a kind of skepticism about our ability to justify the institutions that comprise our social order as a whole. The disadvantage of a political theory so pervasively skeptical is that, while contractors can arrive at a series of specific solutions to their social problems, they have no way to assure themselves that their moral nature and their moral practices as a whole are sufficiently sound that the rules they endorse are genuinely morally binding. I argue that this problem can be solved in political practice through the adoption of a civil religion. Civil religions provide narratives and social practices that assure members of free orders that their regimes are good or justified on the whole. In this way, we can introduce the idea of civil religion into contractarian political theory as a social technology for sustaining a free social order.
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778603.019612
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have defended “nudging” people into making better choices. A nudge, they claim, “is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.” A nudge, then, is a kind of intervention, but not a coercive one: “To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.” Examples abound, from automatic enrollment in savings programs to the deployment of housefly images in urinals to reduce spillover.
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778744.019624
Democratic theorists have proposed a number of competing justifications for democratic order, but no theory has achieved a consensus. While expecting consensus may be unrealistic, I nonetheless contend that we can make progress in justifying democratic order by applying competing democratic theories to different stages of the democratic process. In particular, I argue that the selection of political officials should be governed in accord with aggregative democracy. This process should prize widespread participation, political equality, and proper preference aggregation. I then argue that the selection of public policies by political officials should be governed in accord with deliberative democracy. This process should prize high quality deliberation and political equality. A process democracy is a democracy that joins an aggregative process for selecting officials with a deliberative process for selecting policies. Democracy is justified and legitimate when it is structured in this way.
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778762.019635
Political philosophers are overwhelmingly liberal: freedom and equality are the fundamental political values. Yet, in much of the world, people adopt religious anti-liberalisms. States must bring people into harmony with the cosmic moral order, not protect their autonomy. In this essay, I argue against Catholic integralism, the most intellectually sophisticated and long-standing Christian anti-liberalism. Most people believe that we should treat peoples of all race, nationalities, and creeds as equals. But Catholic integralism treats people unequally according to their creed because it coercively privileges one creed above all others—its own. So integralism treats its citizens unfairly.
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803305.019646
In Canada medical assistance in dying (MAiD) excludes individuals who have a mental health disorder as their sole underlying medical condition (MD-SUMC). This suggests mental illness is conceptually distinct from somatic illness, a position that requires further analysis. The Canadian government has postponed legislation on mental health conditions since it is highly controversial compared to physical illness, and this will allow them to collect more data on the issue (Government of Canada 2024a). Aside from the legislative reality in Canada, Jeffrey Kirby (2022) has described three positions that scholars have taken up regrading the ethical permissibility of MAiD for MD-SUMC: (a) accept that MAiD for MD-SUMC is ethically permissible; (b) presently oppose MAiD for MD-SUMC, but maintain that MAiD for MD-SUMC could become ethically permissible should the current eligibility criteria better align with the relevant empirical data; and (c) oppose MAiD for MD-SUMC on “philosophical grounds” and maintain that no alteration could make the practice ethically permissible.
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827441.019656
What Is It Like to Be a (Rawlsian) Liberal? Some Comments on Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life
Liberalism is today mostly understood as a political doctrine that is essentially about how constitution and law should be designed to regulate the exercise of state power and to guarantee that institutions meet some fairness criteria. …
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1033978.019667
The problem this paper addresses is that scientists have to take normatively charged decisions which can have a significant impact on individual members of the public or the public as a whole. And yet mechanisms to exercise democratic control over them are often absent. Given the normative nature of these choices, this is often perceived to be at odds with basic democratic principles. I show that this problem applies in similar ways to civil service institutions and draw on political philosophy literature on the civil service (e.g.
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1056237.019677
Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231187408 DOI: 10.1177/17456916231187408 www.psychologicalscience.org/PPS style, Cecilia Heyes challenged basic assumptions of rich nativist approaches to “norm psychology” and proposed a lean alternative explanation of how humans come to be normative creatures. We agree with many of Heyes’s criticisms of rich nativist accounts. But we think that this well-founded critique neither necessitates nor justifies an account as lean as Heyes’s proposed alternative. We thus argue for two main points in this commentary. First, conceptually, there is ample space between overly rich and overly lean accounts for theoretical approaches that view humans as starting with cognitive structures, capacities, and motivations richer than Heyes’s proposed lean ones but leaner than the rich domain-specific ones suggested by nativist norm psychology. Second, empirically, such third-way theories do indeed capture more accurately the normative capacities in early child development.