How, if at all, does one's intention to realize an end bear on the justification for taking the means to that end? Theories that allow that intending an end directly provides a reason to take the means are subject to a well-known "bootstrapping" objection. On the other hand, "anti-psychologistic" accounts—which seek to derive instrumental reasons directly from the reasons that support adopting the end itself—have unacceptable implications where an agent faces multiple rationally permissible options. An alternative, predictive, role for intention (...) in means-end reasoning is considered and rejected. A new proposal is then developed, according to which instrumental reasons are not merely reasons to perform an act necessary for a given end, but to perform the act for the sake of that end. (shrink)

In jurisdictions where voluntary assisted dying is legal, eligibility assessments, prescription and administration of a VAD substance are commonly performed by senior doctors. Junior doctors’ involvement is limited to a range of more peripheral aspects of patient care relating to VAD. In the Australian state of Victoria, where VAD has been legal since June 2019, all health professionals have a right under the legislation to conscientiously object to involvement in the VAD process, including provision of information about VAD. While this (...) protection appears categorical and straightforward, conscientious objection to VAD-related care is ethically complex for junior doctors for reasons that are specific to this group of clinicians. For junior doctors wishing to exercise a conscientious objection to VAD, their dependence on their senior colleagues for career progression creates unique risks and burdens. In a context where senior colleagues are supportive of VAD, the junior doctor’s subordinate position in the medical hierarchy exposes them to potential significant harms: compromising their moral integrity by participating, or compromising their career progression by objecting. In jurisdictions intending to provide all health professionals with meaningful conscientious objection protection in relation to VAD, strong specific support for junior doctors is needed through local institutional policies and culture. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

In this paper, we claim that, if you justifiably believe that you ought to perform some act, it follows that you ought to perform that act. In the first half, we argue for this claim by reflection on what makes for correct reasoning from beliefs about what you ought to do. In the second half, we consider a number of objections to this argument and its conclusion. In doing so, we arrive at another argument for the view that justified (...) beliefs about what you ought to do must be true, based in part on the idea that the epistemic and practical domains are uniform, in a sense we spell out. We conclude by sketching possible implications of our discussion for the debates over what is wrong with akrasia and pragmatic encroachment on justified belief and knowledge. (shrink)

Inattentional blindness studies have shown that an unexpected object may go unnoticed if it does not share the property specified in the task instructions. Our aim was to demonstrate that observers develop an attentional set for a property not specified in the task instructions if it allows easier performance of the primary task. Three experiments were conducted using a dynamic selective-looking paradigm. Stimuli comprised four black squares and four white diamonds, so that shape and colour varied together. Task instructions specified (...) shape but observers developed an attentional set for colour, because we made the black–white discrimination easier than the square–diamond discrimination. None of the observers instructed to count bounces by squares reported an unexpected white square, whereas two-thirds of observers instructed to count bounces by diamonds did report the white square. When attentional set departs from task instructions, you may fail to see what you were told to look for. (shrink)

Inattentional blindness studies have shown that an unexpected object may go unnoticed if it does not share the property specified in the task instructions. Our aim was to demonstrate that observers develop an attentional set for a property not specified in the task instructions if it allows easier performance of the primary task. Three experiments were conducted using a dynamic selective-looking paradigm. Stimuli comprised four black squares and four white diamonds, so that shape and colour varied together. Task instructions specified (...) shape but observers developed an attentional set for colour, because we made the black–white discrimination easier than the square–diamond discrimination. None of the observers instructed to count bounces by squares reported an unexpected white square, whereas two-thirds of observers instructed to count bounces by diamonds did report the white square. When attentional set departs from task instructions, you may fail to see what you were told to look for. (shrink)

White's dense article on narrative discusses the ways that different groups of 20th century historians, particularly historical theorists (see pp.8-9), have constructed and deconstructed narrative as a means of communicating history. White himself acknowledges that narrativity challenges the scientific of history, but suggests that narrativity is not only unavoidable, but also offers a form of literary or allegorical truth.\n\nWhite first discusses the critiques of narrative as a means of communication--it focuses too heavily on political players, it is "unscientific," it is (...) inherently limited because narrative itself cannot be objective (although it's authors sometimes claim it to be).\n\nHe then moves on to discuss other, heavily theoretical, takes on why narrative is still useful as a means of historical communication: that narrative works because it performs as a trope which readers can easily recognize from myth and fiction, or, that narrative works because it allows us to transform events from the present to a synthesized past.\n\nWhite's article is difficult to read, but important background for anyone who wants to see what people have said about narrative in the past 100 years--and why it is still important. (shrink)

We argue that (1) a purported example of an infinite inference we humans can actually perform admits a faithful, finitary description, and (2) infinite inference contravenes any view which does not grant our minds uncomputable powers. These arguments block the strategy, dating back to Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language, of using infinitary inference rules to secure the determinacy of arithmetical truth on conventionalist grounds.

It has become increasingly difficult to place a value on the work that doctors do. Yet fiscal pressures have lead to economic incentives for performing certain kinds work instead of others. So the question arises: what are the ethics and consequences of trying to objectively compare the many services physicians offer?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some More Reflections on Emotions, Thoughts, and TherapyDemian Whiting (bio)Keywordsdepression, pedophilia, phenomenology, noncognitive, treatmentThe primary objective of my paper was to show that where a person's representations of the world are eliciting the wrong emotions then treatment of those problems in emotion cannot be about treating the eliciting representations. And it is worth clarifying two points about my claim here. First, although I take my claim to apply to (...) cases where accurate representations are eliciting the wrong emotions, the same point does, I believe, just as well apply to cases where distorted representations are eliciting the wrong emotion. So, for instance, even if the pedophile mistakenly took an adult to be a child and was aroused by that perception, I think that we would still want to claim that there is here—in addition to a possible disturbance in cognition—a problem in emotion. This is because representations of young children should not elicit feelings of sexual arousal, however distorted those representations may themselves be. Second, it is important to emphasize that the kinds of cases that I have in mind are not cases where a person's emotions contradict the thoughts that the person has about the world. The pedophile's arousal at the thought of young children does not contradict any thoughts that the pedophile has about children. Neither does the person who has a propensity to feel anxious have any thoughts that contradict his anxiety. In fact, I believe that emotions cannot contradict our thoughts, because that would require emotion to have the representational character of thought, and emotions being affective states, or types of feelings, do not have that character of thought. Problems in emotion then have to be described in other ways, such as in terms of an emotion's violation of a moral norm or in terms of an emotion's likely adverse effects on the person's behavior or rationality, and certainly it was in these other ways that I intended the cases that I described to be taken.Now, there are to be found in my paper three ways in which someone may reply to my argument (although only two of these ways take the form of actual responses in the paper). To begin with, it might be claimed that amending problems in emotion must be about altering cognitions, as emotions themselves consist of cognitions. I describe in a note to my paper a number of reasons why I think we should reject cognitive accounts of emotions. I also state in the introduction that a purely affective (and, thereby, noncognitive) account of emotion successfully describes the phenomenology, or experience [End Page 255], of emotion. And I would also want to (therefore) resist David Pugmire's suggestion that sometimes a "person's portrayal of an emotionally charged situation is actually prefigured in their emotion"—if by that Pugmire means that emotions sometimes consist of such thoughts. "Black thoughts" may be "despair's footholds," but I would argue that this means nothing more than the fact that such thoughts often act as a nonconstitutive cause of depression. Finally, I should remark that I do not intend my claim that to evaluate oneself negatively may just consist in feeling low about oneself to be a concession to the cognitive theorist of emotion. This is because the purpose of that claim is not to (confusingly) suggest that our cognitive evaluations may consist of noncognitive emotions, but rather to suggest that it is a mistake to think of our evaluations as being cognitive in nature. According to the noncognitivist project in meta-ethics our evaluations are properly seen as being expressions of our noncognitive attitudes.The second way of responding to my argument is to concede that emotions are noncognitive in nature, but to argue that each particular emotion is triggered by its own special kind of thought (e.g., fear might be thought to be necessarily triggered by perceived dangers, anger by perceived slights). On the face of it, however, the claim that our emotions are necessarily triggered by certain kinds of thoughts looks simply false. Our own observation of how emotions originate, together with the empirical studies that I... (shrink)

How should we respond to the humanity of others? Should we care for others’ well-being? Respect them as autonomous agents? Largely neglected is an answer we can find in the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism: we should love all. This paper argues that an ideal of love for all can be understood apart from its more typical religious contexts and moreover provides a unified and illuminating account of the the nature and grounds of morality. I defend a novel (...) account of love for all that avoids serious worries about the incoherence or impossibility of loving everyone. Doing so requires countenancing a neglected form of love. Love admits as its object not just individual entities like people and groups; we can also bear a love for the Fs in general---for all the Joneses, all the philosophers, or even all the human beings. I go on to argue that while it is possible for ordinary agents like us to love all, we shouldn't. Instead, we should approximate love for all. The minimal approximation of love for all is, surprisingly, respect; I derive the basic, structural features of deontological ethics (including anti-paternalism and anti-aggregation) from the ideal of loving all. (NB: This paper used to be titled "Ethics in the Shadow of Love" and has been cited as an unpublished manuscript under that title.). (shrink)

Starting from Summa Theologiae 1.2.3.obj.2, I consider some aspects of the term propositum as it occurs in his works. The objection divides “everything thatappears in the world” into what is natural and what is a proposito, and argues that each of these can be accounted for by causes other than God. I suggest that what is a proposito be called “the purposed,” and I try to clarify Aquinas’s understanding of purpose in relation to other notions in his writings, in particular (...) nature, fortune, and above all deliberation or “counsel,” which is the prelude to choice. After some reflection on the theme of “deliberated will” and on the contrast between deliberating and being deliberate, I return to Aquinas’s reply to the objection I began with, then conclude with reference to a recent discussion of the difference between ends and purposes. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Republicanism of Rawls's Liberalism: An Open Question Property‐Owning Democracy Justice and Stability Tocqueville on the Ills of Democratic Personality The Republican Response Some Objections Conclusion: Lessons for Republicans and Liberals References.

I argue that its appearing to you that P does not provide justification for believing that P unless you have independent justification for the denial of skeptical alternatives – hypotheses incompatible with P but such that if they were true, it would still appear to you that P. Thus I challenge the popular view of ‘dogmatism,’ according to which for some contents P, you need only lack reason to suspect that skeptical alternatives are true, in order for an experience as (...) of P to justify belief that P. I pursue three lines of objection to dogmatism, having to do with probabilistic reasoning, considerations of future or hypothetically available justification, and epistemic circularity. I briefly sketch a fall-back position which avoids the problems raised. (shrink)

Models not only represent but may also influence their targets in important ways. While models’ abilities to influence outcomes has been studied in the context of economic models, often under the label ‘performativity’, we argue that this phenomenon also pertains to epidemiological models, such as those used for forecasting the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic. After identifying three ways in which a model by the Covid-19 Response Team at Imperial College London may have influenced scientific advice, policy, and individual responses, (...) we consider the implications of epidemiological models’ performative capacities. We argue, first, that performativity may impair models’ ability to successfully predict the course of an epidemic; but second, that it may provide an additional sense in which these models can be successful, namely by changing the course of an epidemic. (shrink)

What is a normative reason for acting? In this paper, I introduce and defend a novel answer to this question. The starting-point is the view that reasons are right-makers. By exploring difficulties facing it, I arrive at an alternative, according to which reasons are evidence of respects in which it is right to perform an act, for example, that it keeps a promise. This is similar to the proposal that reasons for a person to act are evidence that she ought (...) to do so; however, as I explain, it differs from that proposal in two significant ways. As a result, I argue, the evidence-based account of reasons I advance shares the advantages of its predecessor while avoiding many of the difficulties facing it. (shrink)

This paper constitutes a defence of an affective account of emotion. I begin by outlining the case for thinking that emotions are just feelings. I also suggest that emotional feelings are not reducible to other kinds of feelings, but rather form a distinct class of feeling state. I then consider a number of common objections that have been raised against affective accounts of emotion, including: (1) the objection that emotion cannot always consist only of feeling because some emotions - (...) for example, indignation and regret - necessarily have a cognitive component (say, the perception of a lost opportunity in the case of regret); (2) the objection that emotion cannot consist only of feeling because in order to explain how emotions have intentional objects we will have to recognise that emotion consists of cognition; and (3) the objection that emotion cannot consist only of feeling because emotion, but not feeling, can be variously assessed or evaluated. However, I demonstrate how an affective account of emotion might be successfully defended against all of the objections that are cited. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, (...) Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized, in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself... (shrink)

Supererogation has gained attention as a means of explaining the voluntary behaviours of individuals and organizations that are done for the benefit of others and which go above what is required of legislation and what may be expected by society. Whilst the emerging literature has made some significant headway in exploring supererogation as an ethical lens for the study of business there remain several important issues that require attention. These comprise, the lack of primary evidence upon which such examinations have (...) been made, attention has been given to only singular pro-social acts of organizations, and the focus has been upon the actions of large organizations. Furthermore, Heyd’s (Supererogation, Cambridge University Press, 1982) original taxonomy of six supererogatory acts, comprising Moral Heroism, Beneficence, Volunteering, Favour, Forgiveness and Forbearance, has been considered to be complete and other forms of supererogatory acts have not yet been explored. In order to address these gaps this study poses the research questions: First, it studies how a single, contemporary SME performs multiple supererogatory acts in its attempts to address its social and environmental goals that go beyond CSR. Second, it seeks to gain a deeper theoretical understanding of Heyd’s (Supererogation, Cambridge University Press, 1982) taxonomy of six forms of supererogation through the capture of primary data. This research makes a three-year case study examination of a single SME that has been formally recognized for its work in addressing social and environmental issues at local, national and global levels. Primary data are acquired of the supererogatory acts that it performs through a three-year participant observation case study, utilizing 61 interviews and 3 focus groups with internal and external stakeholders. In doing so, it addresses the empirical limitations of the extant research, substantiates each of the forms that supererogatory acts may take, and makes a contribution to the theory of supererogation by identifying a further class of act that is ‘Sharing’. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Margaret Cavendish’s remarks on beauty. According to it, Cavendish takes beauty to be a real, response-independent quality of objects. In this sense, Cavendish is an aesthetic realist. This position, which remains constant throughout her philosophical writings, contrasts with the non-realist views that were soon after to dominate philosophical reflections on matters of taste in the early modern period. It also, I argue, contrasts with the realism of Cavendish’s contemporary, Henry More. While (...) there are passages in Cavendish’s work that might seem to count against my reading—specifically, passages on disagreement in aesthetic judgement, on the power of beauty to elicit the passions, and on our inability to specify the nature of beauty—I show that, when situated against the background of Cavendish’s broader metaphysical and epistemological views, those passages in fact support the realist interpretation. (shrink)

From beginning to end, the poem is literally made up of relations…[that] constitute a method of contemplation and criticism, a way of inviting the reader to think in terms of one thing in terms of another. Consider, for example, Odysseus' trip to Chryse in book 1, a passage I never read without surprise: in this tense and heavily charged world, in which everything seems to have been put into potentially violent contention, why are we given this slow and deliberate journey, (...) so heavily formulaic in texture? The answer is that this is a ritual of reconciliation, a kind of healing, which will receive its most ample performance at the great movement in book 24 when Achilles and Priam share their sorrows. A movement begins here that will run throughout the poem.It is by such an art of arrangement, by placing one thing against another, that Homer criticizes the world of book 1 with which he began; not, as we expect of a writer today, by elaborating competitive languages of motives and value but by ordering his materials into patterns of experience that teach the reader something different from anything the material itself seems to say.1 In a way the poem, as a whole thus has the form of argument; not, of course, argument in the ratiocinative sense of a thesis supported by propositions, from which it can be said to proceed by the rules of logic or the laws of probability, but argument as an activity of critical engagement, a definition of resources and a testing of limits, that results in the creation of a new position taken by the writer and offered to the reader. An argument goes on in the text, but its method is closer to that of music than debate.· 1. Cf. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition chap. 6, for another view of the ways that formula and image combine.James B. White is a professor in the law school, the college, and the committee on the ancient Mediterranean world at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Legal Imagination, Constitutional Criminal Procedure, and a book on rhetoric and culture, from which the present article is drawn. (shrink)

It has normally been assumed that whatever empirical and metaphysical problems it may raise, mind-body dualism would satisfy a number of deeply engrained intuitions about the mental for which nondualist theories have no plausible account. In what follows I shall argue that this is true only for a special class of dualist theories. I distinguish transcendental dualism from the other forms that dualist theories may take. And I argue that where the intuitions about subjectivity that have seemed to motivate and (...) support dualism are concerned, only transcendental dualism has an advantage over nondualist theories; nontranscendental versions of dualism are open to the same objections that have made nondualist accounts of the mind seem implausible. Moreover, I argue that the usual objections to transcendental dualism are inconclusive. I shall argue, however, that with regard to a crucial intuition concerning the subjective point of view - that we have a form of privileged access to our own qualitative mental states - transcendental dualism is at a disadvantage relative to some nondualist and nontranscendental theories. And I shall argue that if a theory fails to satisfy this intuition, its other advantages carry very little weight. Thus I claim that transcendental versions of dualism do not offer viable alternatives to nontranscendental theories of mind. (shrink)

This paper argues for a theory of phenomenal intentionality (herein referred to as ‘Structuralism’), according to which perceptual experiences only possess intentional content when their phenomenal components are appropriately related to one another. This paper responds to the objections (i) that Structuralism cannot explain why some experiences have content while others do not, or (ii) why contentful experiences have the specific contents that they have. Against (i), I argue that to possess content, an experience must present itself as an (...) experience of something distinct from itself, and that only experiences whose components are suitably structured satisfy this requirement. Against (ii), I argue that Structuralists can provide a deeper explanation of perceptual content than other theories of phenomenal intentionality by showing how the content-determining relations among our experiences depend on the selection pressures under which our perceptual systems developed. (shrink)

Recent research into the nature of self in artificial and biological systems raises interest in a uniquely determining immutable sense of self, a “metaphysical ‘I’” associated with inviolable personal values and moral convictions that remain constant in the face of environmental change, distinguished from an object “me” that changes with its environment. Complementary research portrays processes associated with self as multimodal routines selectively enacted on the basis of contextual cues informing predictive self or world models, with the notion of the (...) constant, per-vasive and invariant sense of self associated with a multistable attractor set aiming to ensure personal integrity against threat of disintegrative change. This paper proposes that an immutable sense of self emerges as a global attractor which can be described as a project ideal self-situation embodied in frontal medial processes during more or less normal adolescent development, and that thereafter serves to orient agency in the more or less free development of embodied potentials over the life course in effort to realize project conditions, phenomenally identified with the felt pull towards this end as purpose of and source of meaning in life. So oriented, life-long self-development aims to embody solutions to problems at different timescales depending on this embodied purpose, ultimately in the service of evolutionary processes securing organism populations against threats of disintegrative change over timespans far beyond that of the individual. After characterizing the target sense of self, research circling this target is briefly surveyed. Self as global project and developmental neural correlates are proposed. Then, the paper discusses some implications for research in biological and artificial systems. Building from earlier work in cognitive neurorobotics, discussion affirms the value of reinforcement rituals including prayer in metaphysical self-development, considers implications for value alignment and rights associated with free will in the context of artificial intelligence and robot religion, and concludes by emphasizing the importance of self-development toward project ideals as source of meaning in life in the current social-political environment. (shrink)

A popular response to the Exclusion Argument for physicalism maintains that mental events depend on their physical bases in such a way that the causation of a physical effect by a mental event and its physical base needn’t generate any problematic form of causal overdetermination, even if mental events are numerically distinct from and irreducible to their physical bases. This paper presents and defends a form of dualism that implements this response by using a dispositional essentialist view of properties to (...) argue that the psychophysical laws linking mental events to their physical bases are metaphysically necessary. I show the advantages of such a position over an alternative form of dualism that merely places more “modal weight” on psychophysical laws than on physical laws. The position is then defended against the objection that it is inconsistent with dualism. Lastly, some suggestions are made as to how dualists might clarify the contribution that mental causes make to their physical effects. (shrink)

The structural-systematic philosophy requires a moral theory. This essay seeks to determine whether either of two recent works, Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes and Michael Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Morality, should influence that theory. It first argues that Greene’s fails to make its case for utilitarianism over deontology. It then argues that Tomasello’s thesis that early humans developed moralities of sympathy and fairness, particularly when taken in conjunction with aspects of Alan Gewirth’s moral theory, fits well with the moral (...) theory envisaged by extant works on the structural-systematic philosophy. The envisaged theory maintains the objectivity of human rights. (shrink)

This article examines the intersections of Confucian philosophy and feminist ethics of care. It explains the origins and contribution of care ethics to modern ethical discourse and the controversy that surrounds this ethical theory. The article discusses the emergence of comparative research on the compatibility (or incompatibility) of Confucian ren and feminist care. It first explores the question whether it is philosophically feasible to disassociate Confucian ren from its historical context by deploying it for contemporary feminist debates, especially considering that, (...) strictly speaking, no direct counterpart in the original Confucian texts is an exact match to the words “care” or “caring.” Following this exploration, the article investigates what ren is and whether Confucian ren is feminist care, what the “No Exit” Objection and the “Domesticity” Objection are, and how ren or caring in Confucian philosophy can answer these objections. The article concludes with an affirmation of the social transformative power of ren and its feminist potential. (shrink)

Abstract: One approach to alignment with human values in AI and robotics is to engineer artiTicial systems isomorphic with human beings. The idea is that robots so designed may autonomously align with human values through similar developmental processes, to realize project ideal conditions through iterative interaction with social and object environments just as humans do, such as are expressed in narratives and life stories. One persistent problem with human value orientation is that different human beings champion different values as ideal, (...) meaning that the values to which an AI should be aligned are ambiguous. Prior work considered human development of purpose and source of meaning in life in terms of project ideal conditions, in effect establishing lifelong value orientations according to which intermediate situations are evaluated. The present work compares views on motivating values from St. Augustine and from popular cognitive science. These accounts are described as divergent error theories which present to their proponents as mutually exclusive yet accurate accounts of personal experience due to differential development of variable innate potentials. SpeciTically, the hypothesis proposed is that differential development of spindle neural projections establishes enduring connections between prior established relatively immediate routine processes entrained during childhood and prioritized in popular cognitive science, and later developing higher-level social and self-processes entrained during adolescence and emphasized in Augustine's account, with these projections hard-wiring lifelong motivating value orientations more or less inaccessible to modiTication through material interaction. Robot experiments informed by this study may evaluate variable value orientation by design, with for example autonomous robots developing motivating associations with temporally distal project ideal conditions through love for humanity, as described by Augustine, and others pursuing adaptive Tit to passing norms consistent with popular contemporary accounts. (shrink)

Lorenzo Magnani’s Understanding Violence: The Intertwining of Morality, Religion and Violence is a big 23 book. Not big in the sense of page count or prepublication advertisement, but big in the sense of pregnant 24 with potential application. Professor Magnani is explicit in his intentions, “to show how violence is de facto 25 intertwined with morality, and how much violence is hidden, and invisibly or unintentionally performed" 26 (page 273) while confessing a personal motivation, “warning myself (and every reader) that (...) violence is 27 traceable back to my (our) own door.” (page 66) This is not an easy task, given the slippery expanse of his 28 subject, to drag violence out of the shadows, bringing it home to each personal purveyor. But Magnani 29 succeeds, and fruitfully. Understanding Violence deftly exposes violence in its myriad forms from individual 30 aggression to colliding global-historical narratives. It does this by detailing the processes whereby people act 31 from moralities of their own creation, adopting various moral frameworks including those specific to 32 religions, social and political groups, as well as personal constructs, and in terms of which "they engage and 33 disengage both intentionally and unintentionally, in a strict interplay between morality and violence." (page 34 184) Resolving these complex dynamics through simple models and illustrations, Understanding Violence 35 elevates the reader from the forest-for-the-trees perpetual-crisis-blindness symptomatic of the present era, to 36 a position from which personal moral commitments as practical, as necessary, and as the source of hidden 37 violence are clearly visible. Moreover, due to the practicality of Magnani’s demonstrations, it continues in 38 this work long after the text itself is laid back on the shelf. (shrink)

This slim text (184 pages, including endnotes, references, and an index) makes a useful addition to the literature on K–12 curricular matters, specifically on the place of the arts and aesthetics in the curriculum. The book is, as the author proclaims, a manifesto that advocates for the teaching of the arts to “all school-aged students” (p. 1), more specifically, “aesthetic education... ought to be a compulsory part of education for all students” (p. 2). That is, for Dr. D'Olimpio, aesthetic education (...) is the central concern, but she argues that the arts are the best avenue through which to introduce those concerns, both in practice (making/performing) and in reception (perception/interpretation). She does acknowledge that the arts are not the only avenue to aesthetic engagement, but they are the most reliable. D'Olimpio takes the position that the aim/purpose of education is ultimately to nurture individual “flourishing,” her interpretation of the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia. Inclusion of aesthetic education may well contribute to a reorientation in curricular practice that has a wider focus and is more receptive to alternative perspectives (other than utilitarian, consumerist orientations) that might point to multiple avenues to the good life. (shrink)

“Informed consent” is a legal instrument that allows individuals to define their own interests and to protect their bodily privacy. In current medical practice, patients who have consented to surgery are considered to have implied consent to anaesthesia, even though anaesthesia is associated with its own particular set of risks and consequences that are quite separate from those associated with surgery. In addition, anaesthetists often perform interventions that are the only medical treatment received by a patient. Anaesthetists, therefore, should always (...) obtain separate consent for anaesthesia, and should regard the process of consent as a stimulus for active, fluid reciprocal discussion with patients about treatment options. (shrink)

This article uses the work of Judith Butler as a platform upon which to unpack the consequences of women living in a patriarchy and the slender performance that I argue we are unwittingly engaged in. In this critical approach to the gender divide and the political dimensions of anorexia in the 21st century, this article aims to highlight some of the key concerns arising out of society’s stereotypes and norms for women and how the struggle to both conform and resist (...) these are played out on their bodies. Turning to the work of Marion Woodman and the concept of a ‘ritual of transformation’, I explore Butler’s notion of re-citation through the use of ritual, a rite aimed at liberation and a reconnection to our matriarchal lineage. This ritual can be found in the most mundane of tasks and through repetition we have the power to both conceive of new ways of living and strengthen our subversive possibilities. This ritual becomes an act which places critical agency back in our hands, something removed as we are shepherded by consumerism and mass-capitalism. It’s through a framework of Feminist Liberation Theology and Body Theology that this all takes place. If, as Butler says, our behaviour creates our reality then we must change our behaviour! (shrink)

Most guidelines and proposalsfor Internet research ethics are based onregulations for human subjects research. In therelated research, Internet material is viewedas animate and described as people. Humanitiesresearchers have rarely been a part of thedebate about Internet research ethics and thepractices of these scholars have not been takeninto consideration when drafting most of theguidelines. This threatens to limit the kindsof Internet research that can be performed – critical strategies are particularlydiscouraged – and the ways that researchers andother users understand the Internet.Researchers (...) who use human subjects models havenot fully acknowledged computer mediation, theconstructed aspects of Internetrepresentations, and the screen. If we viewInternet material as cultural production thenthe models for Internet research would be ArtHistory and Visual Culture, English andLiterary Studies, Film and Media Studies, Musicand Sound Studies, and Theatre and PerformanceStudies. A more complete integration of theseapproaches into Internet Studies – either as asole investigatory strategy or in tandem withother forms of inquiry – would changeresearchers' ethical questions. It would alsoshow instances in which human subjectsguidelines do not apply to complex Internetmaterial. It is imperative to demonstrate thatInternet material is not people because thisconception makes highly constructed words andimages seem natural and stereotypedrepresentations appear to be real. (shrink)

Are predictions about how one will freely and intentionally behave in the future ever relevant to how one ought to behave? There is good reason to think they are. As imperfect agents, we have responsibilities of self-management, which seem to require that we take account of the predictable ways we're liable to go wrong. I defend this conclusion against certain objections to the effect that incorporating predictions concerning one's voluntary conduct into one's practical reasoning amounts to evading responsibility for (...) that conduct. There is, however, some truth to this sort of objection. To understand the legitimate role of self-prediction in practical reasoning, we need to distinguish instances of coping responsibly with an anticipated failure to behave as one ought, on the one hand, from mere acquiescence in one's flaws, on the other. I argue that, to draw this distinction, we must recognize certain limits on the use of self-prediction as a ground of choice. (shrink)

Alan Gewirth’s work on moral and political philosophy attracted a great deal of attention between 1978 and 2000, but has received very little attention since then. This essay aims to revive interest in Gewirth’s work by providing a more direct and straightforward version of his core argument for objective moral rights and duties and clarifying how a Gewirthian moral and political theory can proceed beyond the conclusion of the core argument.

Citizenship education is a complex matter, and not least the place of civic virtues in it. This is illustrated by a consideration of the civic virtue of gratitude. Two conceptions of gratitude are explored. Gratitude seen as a debt is examined and Kant’s exposition of it, including his objections to a person’s getting himself into the position where he has to show gratitude as a beneficiary, is explored. An alternative conception of gratitude as recognition is developed. This, it is (...) claimed, has more relevance to the kind of gratitude it would be appropriate for citizens of a democratic state to feel. The educational implications of these views are indicated. (shrink)

Miles Davis, supremely cool behind his shades. Billie Holiday, eyes closed and head tilted back in full cry. John Coltrane, one hand behind his neck and a finger held pensively to his lips. These iconic images have captivated jazz fans nearly as much as the music has. Jazz photographs are visual landmarks in American history, acting as both a reflection and a vital part of African American culture in a time of immense upheaval, conflict, and celebration. Charting the development of (...) jazz photography from the swing era of the 1930s to the rise of black nationalism in the ’60s, Blue Notes in Black and White is the first of its kind: a fascinating account of the partnership between two of the twentieth century’s most innovative art forms. Benjamin Cawthra introduces us to the great jazz photographers—including Gjon Mili, William Gottlieb, Herman Leonard, Francis Wolff, Roy DeCarava, and William Claxton—and their struggles, hustles, styles, and creative visions. We also meet their legendary subjects, such as Duke Ellington, sweating through a late-night jam session for the troops during World War II, and Dizzy Gillespie, stylish in beret, glasses, and goatee. Cawthra shows us the connections between the photographers, art directors, editors, and record producers who crafted a look for jazz that would sell magazines and albums. And on the other side of the lens, he explores how the musicians shaped their public images to further their own financial and political goals. This mixture of art, commerce, and racial politics resulted in a rich visual legacy that is vividly on display in Blue Notes in Black and White. Beyond illuminating the aesthetic power of these images, Cawthra ultimately shows how jazz and its imagery served a crucial function in the struggle for civil rights, making African Americans proudly, powerfully visible. (shrink)

In accordance with a recent statement released by the World Health Organization, the Canadian province of Ontario is moving to ban payment for plasma donation. This is partially based on contentions that remuneration for blood and blood products undermines autonomy and personal dignity. This paper is dedicated to evaluating this claim. I suggest that traditional autonomy-based arguments against commodification of human body parts and substances are less compelling in the context of plasma donation in Canada, but that there is another (...) autonomy-based objection to paid plasma donation that has not received sufficient attention. Namely, the stigma that surrounds exchanging plasma for payment makes it difficult to make an autonomous decision to engage in this activity. I suggest that this problem can be overcome in one of two ways; by banning payment for plasma, or by reducing the stigma surrounding this practice. I provide an indication of how we might work to achieve the latter, contending that this possibility should be taken seriously, due to the difficulties in achieving a sufficient supply of plasma without remuneration. (shrink)

In his thoughtful review of my book Absolute Knowledge, in the Fall 1984 Owl, John McCumber identifies several potentially problematic aspects of my interpretation of Hegel’s Logic as transcendental ontology. I would like to respond to several of his objections, not polemically, but rather in order to contribute to a conversation I value. The relevant issues are: 1) dialectical necessity, 2) the specificity of the philosophy of nature, 3) the historical relativity of the system, 4) the Logic as “ground,” (...) and 5) ontology and theology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Nature of Schopenhauer's Platonic Ideas and Their Relation to Individuals The Exclusion of Mathematical Ideas The Exclusion of Value Ideas Schopenhauer's Justification of His Restriction of Ideas to Ideas in Nature Schopenhauer's Theory of Art Considered in Itself Irresoluble Conflicts between Plato and Schopenhauer Notes References Further Reading.

It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as heuristics for generating causal judgments under uncertainty and are a pervasive source of bias in causal judgment. More sophisticated clues such as mechanism clues and repeated interventions (...) are derived from the 14. Research on the use of empirical information and conditional probabilities to identify causes has used scenarios in which several of the clues are present, and the use of empirical association information for causal judgment depends on the presence of singular clues. It is the singular clues and their origin that are basic to causal understanding, not multiple instance clues such as empirical association, contingency, and conditional probabilities. (shrink)

Recent developments in neuroscience have inspired proposals to perform deep brain stimulation on psychopathic detainees. We contend that these proposals cannot meet important ethical requirements that hold for both medical research and therapy. After providing a rough overview of key aspects of psychopathy and the prospects of tackling this condition via deep brain stimulation, we proceed to an ethical assessment of such measures, referring closely to the distinctive features of psychopathic personality, particularly the absence of subjective suffering and a lack (...) of moral motivation. Scrutiny of these factors reveals that two essential bioethical criteria, individual medical benefit and voluntary informed consent, cannot be met in performing neurosurgical experiments or treatments on psychopathic inmates. (shrink)

It is right for a person to believe a proposition if and only if that proposition is true. On this view, truth is a norm for belief. Some, myself included, go further and suggest that truth is the fundamental norm for belief, relative to which other norms governing belief are derivative. Call this the truth view. In a recent paper, Clayton Littlejohn objects to the truth view on the grounds that it cannot explain why epistemic evaluation has an ‘inward-looking focus’, (...) that is, why it concerns a person’s reasons for believing. He takes this not only to undermine the truth view but also to motivate the knowledge view, associated with Timothy Williamson, according to which knowledge is the fundamental norm for belief. In this paper, I show that the truth view can account for the 'inward-looking focus' of epistemic evaluation. In doing so, I draw on some ideas from ethics, specifically, ideas about moral worth. This provides a defence of the truth view and blocks a route to the knowledge view. In addition, it also delivers an account of epistemic evaluation which reveals it to mirror - in structure, not substance - moral evaluation. (shrink)

We discuss first a "stance" methodology toward the problem of personhood. This is to ask first, what it is to take something to be a person, and then to move via a notion of appropriateness to an answer to what it is to be a person. We argue that the distinctions between persons and non-persons, between agents and patients, and between subjects and mere objects are deeply connected. All three distinctions are themselves traced to a fundamental distinction within the space (...) of reasons -- between, that is, two sorts of material inferential propriety. These two structures of inference are made explicit by indicative and subjunctive conditionals. Tracing personhood to the fundamentally stereoscopic structure of material inference sheds light not only on notions of freedom, agency, and personhood, but on the nature of modal judgments, on the conceptual space of causation, and on the semantics of the explicitating conditionals. We conclude with a pragmatic argument for belief in persons. (shrink)

This book comprises essays centered on Aristotle’s objectivist conception of eudaimonia, especially the roles played in it by activities of theoretical and practical intellect and the quality of our relationships with one another. Common objections to grounding this conception in the “proper function” of a human being are answered by appeal to the role played by Aristotle’s teleologically driven essentialism. His struggle to reconcile living in accordance with distinctively human virtues with the ideal of living a “divine” contemplative life (...) is explored, along with puzzles about how to reconcile his conception of eudaimonia as the ultimate end of human action with the parallel requirements that virtuous agents choose to engage in virtuous action “for itself” and that friends love their friends “for themselves.” Readings of Aristotle’s “eudaimonism” as a form of rational egoism are challenged by appeal to an original account of the ideal friend as an “other self,” one that stresses appreciation of the friend’s character “for itself” (apart from any relationships in which it happens to stand to the agent’s own needs and/or tastes) but acknowledges the role played by pleasure in “character friendship.” The friend’s good is not, as on “colonizing ego” readings, part of the agent’s own. Rather, the ideal friend recognizes the value her friend’s activity has for him and she take pleasure in his activity as such. This explains why even the maximally self-sufficient (and so most godlike) agent, who needs nothing from a friend, will nevertheless want to have at least one. (shrink)

Background Victoria was the first Australian state to legalize voluntary assisted dying (elsewhere known as physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia). Some institutions indicated they would not participate in voluntary assisted dying. The Victorian government issued policy approaches for institutions to consider Objective To describe and analyse publicly available policy documents articulating an institutional objection to voluntary assisted dying in Victoria. Methods Policies were identified using a range of strategies, and those disclosing and discussing the nature of an institutional objection were thematically (...) analysed using the framework method. Results The study identified fifteen policies from nine policymakers and developed four themes: (1) extent of refusal to participate in VAD, (2) justification for refusal to provide VAD, (3) responding to requests for VAD, and (4) appeals to state-sanctioned regulatory mechanisms. While institutional objections were stated clearly, there was very little practical detail in most documents to enable patients to effectively navigate objections in practice. Conclusion This study demonstrates that despite having clear governance pathways developed by centralized bodies (namely, the Victorian government and Catholic Health Australia), many institutions’ public-facing policies do not reflect this guidance. Since VAD is contentious, laws governing institutional objection could provide greater clarity and regulatory force than policies alone to better balance the interests of patients and non-participating institutions. (shrink)

A questionnaire study was performed among Swedish organic livestock farmers to determine their view of animal welfare and other ethical issues in animal production. The questionnaire was sent to 56.5% of the target group and the response rate was 75.6%. A principal components analysis (exploratory factor analysis) was performed to get a more manageable data set. A matrix of intercorrelations between all pairs of factors was computed. The factors were then entered into a series of multiple regression models to explain (...) five dependent variables. Respondents were well educated and had long experience of farming. 81% were full-time farmers. They generally had a very positive attitude towards organic animal husbandry. They considered allowing animals their natural behavior a central aim, which is in accordance with organic philosophy. Farmers tended to be less approving of concepts like animal rights, dignity, and intrinsic value. When analyzing correlations between the factors, two groups of farmers emerged that were only partially correlated, representing different attitudes and behavioral dispositions. These may be interpreted as two subpopulations of organic livestock farmers in Sweden: those who saw organic farming as a lifestyle (``pioneer attitude'''') and entrepreneurs, who considered making money and new challenges more important. Their view of animal welfare differed. While the pioneers considered natural behavior a key issue, this was less important to the entrepreneurs, who also had a more approving attitude towards invasive operations such as castration and were more critical of the organic standards. (shrink)

Readers of Philosophical Psychology may be most familiar with Ron Sun by way of an article recently appearing in this journal on creative composition expressed within his own hybrid computational intelligence model, CLARION (Sun, 2013). That article represents nearly two decades’ work in situated agency stressing the importance of psychologically realistic architectures and processes in the articulation of both functional, and reflectively informative, AI and agent- level social-cultural simulations. Readers may be less familiar with Sun’s 2001 “prolegomena” to related multi-agent (...) (proto-social) research also from this journal. That article argues that “a proper balance between “objective” social reality and individual cognitive processes” is necessary in order to understand “how individual belief systems... and the social/cultural belief system ... interact” (Sun, 2001, pages 10 and 23). This issue remains central in Sun’s 2012 edited volume, Grounding Social Sciences in the Cognitive Sciences, here addressed from within the expanding field of pioneering researchers bent on orchestrating that proper balance, the “cognitive social sciences.” Its fifteen chapters are sectioned according to culture, politics, religion, and economics, and closes with an especially rewarding pair of contributions from Gintis, and McCubbins and Turner, under the heading of “unifying perspectives.” Most entries – but for Sun’s own - are serviceably summarized in the introductory overview. So, rather than follow suit, this review will focus on setting out Sun’s vision, noting how this text helps us to realize it more clearly, with a positive focus on a few entries in particular. (shrink)

This thesis is an examination of Alfred North Whitehead's epochal theory of time. Two necessary conditions for Whitehead's epochal theory are analyzed. First, Whitehead's requirement that events "become" is examined, with the result that becoming is found not to be an objective, physical feature of events in Whitehead's theory as is commonly thought. Second, the requirement that events be discrete is examined, with the result that this requirement is found to be incompatible with contemporary quantum theory, contrary to Whitehead's claim (...) that it is compatible. (shrink)