This chapter contains sections titled: A Residual Individualism Vygotsky's Legacy Reconciling Vygotsky and McDowell Personalism Final Thoughts on Education.

An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Empirical results already imply that social cognition is not reducible to the workings of individual cognitive mechanisms. To galvanize this interactive turn, we provide an operational definition of social interaction and distinguish the different explanatory roles – contextual, enabling and constitutive – it can play in social cognition. (...) We show that interactive processes are more than a context for social cognition: they can complement and even replace individual mechanisms. This new explanatory power of social interaction can push the field forward by expanding the possibilities of scientific explanation beyond the individual. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a way to conceive of free speech that begins by redefining speech. My definition affirms the fact that speaking is an activity that goes on among people in a community. Speaking, I will suggest, is an activity that involves not only the present speaker, but also others who act as listeners and potential speakers. I contend that liberal conceptions of free speech have often proven ill equipped to address certain free speech issues, precisely because they (...) have tended to conceive of speech not as a collective activity in which participation involves both speaking and listening, but as an individualized activity in which only speakers and their utterances are relevant.Of course not all liberal notions of speech are radically individualistic; a useful distinction might be made between "solipsistic" liberal models, and "two-or-more-person" models. The latter sort do ascribe some sort of role to those who hear and respond to speech. John Stuart Mill's arguments for the value of free speech, for example, display a significant emphasis on the role of the community. Mill's model emphasizes the importance of free debate and discussion as a means by which to improve one's ideas. One of his chief arguments in support of free speech is that collecting others' responses to one's speech enables one to develop clearer, stronger ideas. But such a view only addresses others' roles as speakers--as producers of ideas. My position recognizes an even broader role for these others; I shall suggest that listening/potential speaking are themselves aspects of speaking. Thus, others' interests are do not become relevant (and eligible for protection) only when others themselves become speakers; the interests of listeners (and even "ignorers") as listeners must be taken into account in evaluating whether speech in a particular situation is free.¯ The conception I develop defines speaking as collective, thereby illuminating the role played in it by listeners/potential speakers. In the bulk of activities that go under the name "speech", a community of "others" (listeners, potential listeners, "ignorers") plays some sort of role. Those instances of speaking in which there are no relevant others may be defined in terms of their relation to speech-with-listeners. That is, they are exceptions to the general cases, and their presence in the category "speaking" can be understood by reference to one of these general cases. My original motivation for developing this conception of speech was to provide a way to illuminate those forms of sexual harassment that consist of sexist speech. I intend for the conception to characterize free speech in such a way that preventing someone from using sexist language does not (at least automatically) constitute a violation of their free speech rights, but in fact may increase the level of freedom of the community. I develop my account by first providing a critical outline of one version of a liberal conception of free speech.In the course of this outline, I examine two central liberal justifications for protecting speech; the argument from individual rights and the argument from utility. I conclude this section by making explicit my criticisms of this liberal conception. Following this, I turn to develop an alternative collective conception of speaking and of free speaking. I argue that this conception is preferable for two reasons; first, because speaking is a collective activity, and to treat it otherwise is to mask its powers and disguise the benefit or harm it may bring to users. Second, a collective conception of speaking preserves the values of free speech advanced in liberal views better than does a liberal conception. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A common conclusion of lab dishonesty studies is that subjects cheat to a very modest extent even when they cannot get caught. The modest level of cheating is attributed to subjects’ moral feelings which restrict their cheating to a level that enables them to retain their self-image as honest individuals. The present paper questions this claim, reporting the results of two experiments which uncover a discrepancy between self-portrayed honesty and actual dishonest behavior. The experiments reveal, first, that self- (...) class='Hi'>portrayed honesty is stricter than practical honesty, suggesting that when facing an opportunity to benefit from dishonest behavior, subjects trade off some of their self-image as honest persons for dishonestly-generated payoffs. Secondly, dishonesty out of lab, in subjects’ self-chosen environment, is greater than in the lab, with a considerable fraction of subjects cheating to the maximum extent possible. We suggest that it is not a concern about their self-image that holds subjects back from cheating maximally, but rather a concern about their social image. The modest level of dishonesty observed in the lab presumably reflects caution subjects exercise in an unsafe setup. Given an environment where they feel safe to reap the fruits of dishonesty without compromising their image as honest persons in the eyes of others, the image they have of themselves hardly plays a role in curbing their unethical behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America by Jack TurnerShannon SullivanJack Turner Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. xv + 199pp, incl. index.Don’t let the size of this slim volume fool you: Awakening to Race is chock-full of fresh insights and original arguments regarding individualism and race in the American democratic tradition. Individualism in (...) America often takes atomistic forms that are antithetical to a rich sense of the social constitution of the self. For that reason, individualism often is viewed as antithetical to a critical consciousness of how race and white racism operate. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner boldly takes the bull of American individualism by its horns. He argues that the rhetoric of individualism can be used against, rather than in service of an allegedly colorblind society in which independent, post-racial individuals pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The result of Turner’s skillful intervention into American political philosophy is to take back individualism from conservative forces and refashion it into a progressive tool for racial justice movements.Turner sets the stage for his intervention in chapter one, which provides an overview of the book. Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Awakening to Race proceeds to focus on Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison and concludes with James Baldwin. One of the primary tasks of chapter one is to outline the book’s major Emersonian theme, which is that an individualist notion of self-reliance should lead a person to become more, rather than less aware of structural and social injustices. Properly understood, individualism should lead to an awakening to race, as Turner’s book is aptly titled, not to ignoring or failing to see it. An individual who wishes to be self-reliant should be wary and watchful of the ways in which she depends on social structures, including those of social injustice. An atomistic notion of the individual is not adequate to this task; an Emersonian democratic individual is needed instead. As Turner explains with reference to adherents of atomistic individualism, “their failure to awaken to the socially indebted nature of the self desensitizes them to structural—and thus racial—injustice” (11).Chapter two turns to Tocqueville, Emerson, and (to a lesser extent) Thoreau to flesh out this idea. In this chapter, Turner develops [End Page 170] Emerson’s notion of self-reliance as “a politically dynamic ethical ideal, one that can motivate and energize democratic political action” rather than withdrawal from society (29). To do so, Turner references Tocqueville’s analysis of race in the United States, which reveals an affinity between white individualism and white supremacy. White individuals could contrast themselves with black slaves to reassure themselves that they were free while simultaneously ignoring their dependence on social and legal structures of white supremacy to ensure their psychological and personal sense of personhood. Individual self-sufficiency can operate as a racialized marker of freedom that is in bad faith because it evades its dependence on race and racism. With Emerson, Turner argues that genuine self-sufficiency requires reckoning with all sorts of ways that one is dependent on and complicit with societal structures, including those of white supremacy. Drawing on Emerson’s anti-slavery addresses, Turner develops a theory of democratic individual responsibility that requires of genuine self-reliance that it not interfere with the self-reliance of others. This requirement obligates the individual to take political and other forms of action to ensure that his or her free, self-reliant life is not dependent on the exploitation of others (45).In addition to its nonexploitation obligation, democratic individualist responsibility includes a democratic egalitarian obligation. Turner develops the latter idea in chapter three through the work of Frederick Douglas. While Douglas’s notion of self-help often is read as atomistically individualist, Turner shows how it is instead tied to social responsibility. In the case of Douglasian self-help, “ought implies can” and so requiring of people that they help themselves means ensuring that they have the resources available to do so (62). While dominant notions of self-help have been used in the United States... (shrink)

This book develops a novel theory of intentionality. It argues that intentionality is an internal essential relation of constitution between an intentional state and an object or between such a state and a possible state of affairs as subsisting. The author's main claim is that intentionality is a fundamentally modal property, hence a non (scientifically) natural property in that it does not supervene, either locally or globally, on its nonmodal physical basis. This is the property, primarily for an intentional mental (...) state, to be constituted by the entities it is about. In the case of intentionality of reference, such constituents are objects, in the sense of individuals; in the case of intentionality of content, such constituents are possible states of affairs as subsisting. Constitution is meant in a mereologically literal sense: those constituents are essential parts of the relevant states. As a result, the theory claims not only that intentionality is relational, but also that is an internal, essential relation holding between an intentional state and its object or proposition-like content. Intentionality as Constitution will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and cognitive science. (shrink)

The dispute between individualism and anti-individualism is about the individuation of psychological states, and individualism, on some accounts, is committed to the claim that psychological subjects together with their environments do not constitute integrated computational systems. Hence on this view the computational states that explain psychological states in computational accounts of mind will not involve the subject''s natural and social environment. Moreover, the explanation of a system''s interaction with the environment is, on this view, not the primary goal of (...) computational theorizing. Recent work in computational developmental psychology (by A. Karmiloff-Smith and J. Rutkowska) as well as artificial agents or embedded artificial systems (by L.P. Kaelbling, among others) casts doubt on these claims. In these computational models, the environment does not just trigger and sustain input for computational operations, but some computational operations actually involve environmental structures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Theology.After Wittgenstein. By FERGUS KERR. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Pp. xii + 202. Fergus Kerr's Theology.After Wittgenste,in is written in the spirit of Wittgenstein's remark: "I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own!' If Kerr's book stimulates theologians to read Wittgenstein with sympathy and to reassess their practices in light (...) of his philosophical enterprise, his impact will not end with the waning of the fruitless wrangling over "Wittgensteinian fideism." Kerr offers a three-fold argument: (1) that Wittgenstein's life and philosophical practice evinced a religious sensibility deeply opposed to the Platonic and Cartesian substructures of modern theology; (2) that these substructures involve an " indifference to community and... antipathy to the body" (vii) which Wittgenstein strives to overcome; and (3) that with our liberation from the grip of the myth of the ·self as a private mental ego, we can set ·a new agenda for rearticulating the doctrines and problems of Christian theology. Kerr's approach is distinguished by two factors. First, he is entirely free of the disciple-like awe which has led many commentators to wrestle something profound and true out of every Wittgensteinian pronouncement. He writes: "Wittgenstein had thoughts that were deep, together with others that seem tentative, and even, to my mind, quite idiotic" (35). The fact that a writer sympathetic with -Wittgenstein can now feel free to acknowledge this opinion shows that with Kerr we are well beyond hagiography. Second, Kerr plunges into Wittgenstein from a review of the Cartesianism of modern theology. He reviews a wide spectrum of 20th century theologians and finds them infested with views about the self that stem from Plato and Descartes. Hence he comes at Wittgenstein with an interest in developing "a non-metaphysical understanding of the place of the self in nature and history," in overcoming antipathies toward the body and toward communities, and in " renouncing a certain nostalgia for spiritual purity " in the interest of tiaking a new look at theological issues (52). In remarks reminiscent of Keynes's unmasking of the origins of common sense, Kerr assures the reader that unless theologians explore the metaphysical substructures of their practiee and discourse, they will "remain prisoners of whatever philosophical school was in the ascendant 30 years earlier,... or 350 years earlier" (3). To make good on this claim he sketches " the modern view of the self in Descartes, Kant, James, and 837 338 BOOK REVIEWS Moore, and then traces this view in Rahner, and more briefly, Kiing, Cupitt, Ogden, and several other theologians. The main lineaments of this view are that the self is a privately, introspectively mental entity only unessent~ally related to the human body, that the self's epistemic. function consists in knowing an external reality, and that its moral role consists in an intensely private individualism. Correlated with each of these functions are, respectively, what Kerr calls "the absolute conception of reality" (the view that objectivity is the condition of valid knowl.edge and that objectivity requires the transcendence of every contingent, bodily, or community-based aspect of one's viewpoint), and the implication that the individual consciousness approximates "the actus purus of apophatic theology, i.e., God " (20). To clear the ground for a portrayal of "Wittgenstein's religious sensibility, Kerr offers a brief, accurate account of the mistake committed by apologists who have wished to deploy the concepts "language-game " and " form of life" to show that " religious talk supposedly constitutes a distinctive and autonomous 'language-game' which outsiders could not understand, let alone expose as incoherent or erroneous " (28). Kerr rig·htly argues that it is impossible to apply these central analytic tools to a large-scale phenomenon like religion. He finds Wittgenstein's own attitude towards religions far richer and subtler than "Wittgensteinian fideism." Was Wittgenstein religious~ Kerr concludes that he was: "While one cannot dispute Georg von Wright's judgment that he did not have a Christian faith, many passages in Culture and Value disclose a sympathetic and penetrating understanding of the matter that few Christians... could match" (36). That this understanding was at... (shrink)

We are social primates, for whom language-mediated co-operative thinking (‘co-cognition’) is a central element of our shared life. Psychological concepts may be illuminated by appreciating their role in enriching and improving such co-cognition — a role which is importantly different from that of enabling detailed prediction and control of thoughts and behaviour. This account of the nature of psychological concepts (‘co-cognitivism’) has social anti-individualism about thought content as a natural corollary. The combination of co-cognitivism and anti-individualism (...) further suggests that, in addition to the familiar first person authority with which we ascribe thoughts to ourselves, there may also be something deserving the name ‘second person authority’. (shrink)

Reflection on testimony provides novel arguments for anti-individualism. What is anti-individualism? Sanford Goldberg's book defends three main claims under this heading: first, facts about the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers ; second, an individual's epistemic entitlement to accept a piece of testimony depends on facts about her peers ; third, processes by which some humans acquire knowledge from testimony includes activities performed for them by others. Each of these three claims is argued for (...) separately from premises about the ways in which humans, adult and child, succeed in gaining knowledge by testimony. The three arguments provide the structure for Anti-Individualism.Goldberg's argument for the first claim – that the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers – begins from uncontroversial facts about testimony. Gaining knowledge by testimony depends on knowing the meanings of some utterances, and it is possible to know the meaning of a person's utterance while knowing little that would distinguish this person from anyone else. The best explanation of how this is possible involves postulating linguistic norms which entail facts about the linguistic meanings of utterances. Now in some cases of testimony, a hearer acquires a belief whose content is the linguistic meaning of a speaker's utterance, where the linguistic meaning of this utterance is determined by linguistic norms. But linguistic norms might have been different from what they are even while the person's and her audience's non-relational properties remained unaltered. And in such a case, the hearer would have acquired a belief with a different content. Therefore, ‘Psychological facts such as believing that p do not supervene on the individualistic facts regarding the subject’ …. (shrink)

Reflection on testimony provides novel arguments for anti-individualism. What is anti-individualism? Sanford Goldberg's book defends three main claims under this heading: first, facts about the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers ; second, an individual's epistemic entitlement to accept a piece of testimony depends on facts about her peers ; third, processes by which some humans acquire knowledge from testimony includes activities performed for them by others . Each of these three claims is argued (...) for separately from premises about the ways in which humans, adult and child, succeed in gaining knowledge by testimony. The three arguments provide the structure for Anti-Individualism.Goldberg's argument for the first claim – that the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers – begins from uncontroversial facts about testimony. Gaining knowledge by testimony depends on knowing the meanings of some utterances, and it is possible to know the meaning of a person's utterance while knowing little that would distinguish this person from anyone else . The best explanation of how this is possible involves postulating linguistic norms which entail facts about the linguistic meanings of utterances . Now in some cases of testimony, a hearer acquires a belief whose content is the linguistic meaning of a speaker's utterance, where the linguistic meaning of this utterance is determined by linguistic norms . But linguistic norms might have been different from what they are even while the person's and her audience's non-relational properties remained unaltered . And in such a case, the hearer would have acquired a belief with a different content . Therefore, ‘Psychological facts such as believing that p do not supervene on the individualistic facts regarding the subject’ …. (shrink)

The aim of the present thesis is to reconcile two opposing intuitions; one originating from mainstream individualistic epistemology and the other one from social epistemology. In particular, conceiving of knowledge as a cognitive phenomenon, mainstream epistemologists focus on the individual as the proper epistemic subject. Yet, clearly, knowledge-acquisition many times appears to be a social process and, sometimes, to such an extent—as in the case of scientific knowledge—that it has been argued there might be knowledge that is not (...) possessed by any individual alone. In order to make sense of such contradictory claims, I combine virtue reliabilism in mainstream epistemology with two hypotheses from externalist philosophy of mind, viz., the extended and distributed cognition hypotheses. Reading virtue reliabilism along the lines suggested by the hypothesis of extended cognition allows for a weak anti-individualistic understanding of knowledge, which has already been suggested on the basis of considerations about testimonial knowledge: knowledge, many times, has a dual nature; it is both social and individual. Provided, however, the possibility of distributed cognition and group agency, we can go even further by making a case for a robust version of antiindividualism in mainstream epistemology. This is because knowledge may not always be the product of any individual’s cognitive ability and, thereby, not creditable to any individual alone. Knowledge, instead, might be the product of an epistemic group agent’s collective cognitive ability and, thus, attributable only to the group as a whole. Still, however, being able—on the basis of the hypothesis of distributed cognition—to recognize a group as a cognitive subject in itself allows for proponents of virtue reliabilism to legitimately apply their individualistic theory of knowledge to such extreme cases as well. Put another way, mainstream individualistic epistemologists now have the means to make sense of the claim that p is known by S, even though it is not known by any individual alone. (shrink)

This paper considers the character of moral peoplehood, our life as a people, and the rules and principles through which that life is expressed. In so far as those rules and principles take legal form, as determining the ground rules of association and denoting political rights and duties, this moral community is also a jural community. The paper engages with Bernard Williams’s thought with a view to resolving the tension between two conceptions of the constitution that differ in (...) their account of the relationship between norms and time. Williams offers the prospect of a non-Kantian liberalism that grows out of the habits and minds of persons but which does not collapse into relativism. I argue that Williams’s account of moral personhood devotes insufficient attention to the dynamics of moral deliberation, essential to the growth of personhood. I argue that Williams’s account of moral peoplehood is similarly deficient in that it overlooks the role constitutional deliberation plays in constructing the jural community. Plural politics requires accepted ground rules and the sense that we are a unity of plural associates, and this is what constitutional deliberation aims to provide. (shrink)

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and (...) behavior, individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims—explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individualism has more recently been understood as a global supervenience claim. While explanatory individualism has remained controversial, ontological individualism thus understood is almost universally accepted. In this paper (...) I argue that ontological individualism is false. Only if the thesis is weakened to the point that it is equivalent to physicalism can it be true, but then it fails to be a thesis about the determination of social facts by facts about individual persons. Even when individualistic facts are expanded to include people’s local environments and practices, I shall argue, those still underdetermine the social facts that obtain. If true, this has implications for explanation as well as ontology. I first consider arguments against the local supervenience of social facts on facts about individuals, correcting some flaws in existing arguments and affirming that local supervenience fails for a broad set of social properties. I subsequently apply a similar approach to defeat a particularly weak form of global supervenience, and consider potential responses. Finally, I explore why it is that people have taken ontological individualism to be true. (shrink)

‘Courageous or Indifferent Individualism’ is the subject on which I have been asked to speak, and I must first attempt to interpret what the conveners of this conference had in mind in asking me to speak on this subject. First of all, individualism must be taken for granted as our fate as modern persons; but, second, there is more than one kind of individualism and we must discriminate between them. Courage is the first, though not the highest, of the classical (...) virtues. Indifference cannot be considered a virtue in any context.Thus I might reformulate my title as ‘Virtuous or Vicious Individualism.’ Put this way, my subject might seem to be concerned exclusively with ethics. Ethics will be central in my discussion, but I want to talk about more than ethics. I want to talk about the philosophical anthropology which lies behind these two forms of individualism, and I about their connection with different kinds of political and economic policy.But before I proceed further I want to be honest about why, after reading the position papers and other materials sent to me in advance, I think I was asked to participate in this conference and speak on this subject. If I am wrong, you can correct me in the discussion period. I believe it is because the American economy, American political influence, and American culture are all exercising an enormous pressure in a single direction on Europe, and indeed on the whole world, to be more like us, to be Americanized.As a strong critic of recent tendencies in my country, I think I have been asked to help you understand the nature of this pressure and even maybe to suggest some ways it might be resisted. Later this year I will go to Italy and Brazil with the same mission. Globalization is often a euphemism for this kind of Americanization and I have begun to feel that it is into the discussion of globalization that I am being pulled. (shrink)

We cannot rethink the ethical and political dimensions of memory—especially its role in constituting persons and identities—without rethinking the nature of memory itself. I first describe a traditional epistemological view of memory, according to which memory is a faculty for preserving knowledge of the past, and then juxtapose a relational theory of memory developed by Sue Campbell. The relational theory is represented in terms of a distinction between actions and achievements; this distinction enables us to both clarify and defend (...) the shift from an epistemological to a political conception of memory. On the resulting view, accuracy, not truth, is the appropriate norm for evaluating memory, and remembering is no longer conceived as an interior process. In the penultimate section I confront an objection to a relational theory of memory—and to relational theories of cognition generally—and suggest a strategy of response. (shrink)

Maria Morales’s striking and thought-provoking argument in Perfect Equality is that John Stuart Mill’s egalitarianism unifies his practical philosophy and that this element of his thought has been neglected in recent revisionary scholarship. Placing Mill’s arguments for the substantive value of “perfect equality” in The Subjection of Women at the center of her analysis, Morales develops a distinctive interpretation of Mill as an egalitarian liberal. Morales also aims to counter many recent communitarian critiques of liberalism as founded upon a conception (...) of the self as atomistic and individualistic. Like other Mill scholars, Morales sees Mill’s liberalism as an appealing alternative to the dominant Rawlsian theory, and she offers Mill’s approach as a response to “the still popular view that liberalism is structurally incompatible with a rich conception of the human good, particularly with a substantive commitment to equality”. Mill’s theory is not “doggedly individualistic,” and it rejects the model of liberal social life as atomistic and abstract. The well-constituted communities of the title are based upon “sympathetic, cooperative, and egalitarian values”. (shrink)

The paper addresses a prima facie tension between two popular views about concepts. The first is the doctrine that some concepts are constitutively perceptual/experiential, so that they can be possessed only by suitably experienced subjects. This is a classic empiricist theme, but its most conspicuous recent appearance is in literature on phenomenal concepts. The second view is anti-individualism: here, the view that concept possession depends not only on a thinker’s internal states and relations to the concepts’ referents, but also on (...) certain of her relations to sociolinguistic peers. In recent works, Derek Ball and Michael Tye have in effect argued that the doctrines are incompatible, and their conclusion is that no concepts depend on experience. In reply, Bénédicte Veillet endorses those authors’ incompatibilism, but argues that it is anti-individualism that we should reject. I develop an approach to reconciliation that is more promising than any considered by these theorists. Against Veillet, I defend a version of anti-individualism about phenomenal concepts, but against Ball and Tye, I argue that they can be possessed only by suitably experienced thinkers. (shrink)

The author draws on arguments from contemporary philosophy of mind to provide an argument for sociological collectivism. This argument for nonreductive individualism accepts that only individuals exist but rejects methodological individualism. In Part I, the author presents the argument for nonreductive individualism by working through the implications of supervenience, multiple realizability, and wild disjunction in some detail. In Part II, he extends the argument to provide a defense for social causal laws, and this account of social causation does (...) not require any commitment to intentionality or agency on the part of individuals. (shrink)

This chapter is on when and how formalization and model building contribute to theory construction in methodological individualism. It shows that formalization is not always needed but can sometimes be useful for making assumptions explicit and for deriving implications that would appear out of reach of, or even go counter to, informal reasoning. The chapter focuses on examples from different theoretical approaches and research fields, including meanwhile ‘classic’ as well as more recent contributions. We sketch both insights that do not (...) require elaborate formalization as well as implications that do require some degree of formalization. The exposition itself is largely informal. (shrink)

I argue that there are liberal reasons to reject what I call “Global Individualism”, which is the conjunction of two views strongly associated with liberalism: moral individualism and social individualism. According to the first view, all moral properties are reducible to individual moral properties. The second holds that the social world is composed only of individual agents. My argument has the following structure: after suggesting that Global Individualism does not misrepresent liberalism, I draw on some recent insights in (...) social ontology to show that it is inconsistent with the satisfaction of an important liberal principle related to the protection of individual rights over time. As I hold, to solve this problem we need to accept group agents acting as moral agents, which in turn commits us to the weaker notion of normative individualism (a view that is consistent with the existence of some group moral properties). I conclude with the suggestion that even this solution is costly for liberalism, for the conjunction of group moral agency and normative individualism makes the latter unstable and compels liberals to a much less individualistic stance than expected. (shrink)

This paper suggests that libertarian and (related) contractarian ideas would be less vulnerable to certain forms of criticism if they would more carefully disentangle their legal and moral standards for the assess­ment of institutions from empirical, methodological, and epistemological assumptions about individualism and non-cognitivism. Holding apart several meanings of individualism different issues can be treated separately. It will be shown that the justification of libertarian norms raises some problems which are not too easily solved within a non-cognitivist approach. No attempt (...) to solve them is made subsequently but how far in principle the ‘argumentation possibility frontier’ might be shifted out for that purpose is outlined. In this respect the paper might be regarded as a companion to Viktor Vanberg’s brillant reconstruction of contractarian liberalism in this issue of Analyse & Kritik (pp. 113–149). (shrink)

This article asserts that traditionally dominant models of health promotion in the US are fairly characterized by methodological individualism. This schema produces a focus on the individual as the node of intervention. Such emphasis results in a number of scientific and ethical problems. I identify three principal ethical deficiencies: first, the health promotions used are generally ineffective, which violates canons of distributive justice because scarce health resources are expended on interventions that are unlikely to produce health benefits. Second, the health (...) promotions used tend to expand health inequalities between the affluent and the least well-off. Third, the health promotions used are likely to intensify stigma against the least well-off, a deficiency that itself may exacerbate the ‘densely-woven patterns of disadvantage’ that characterize life on the tail of the social gradient. Because Powers and Faden’s health sufficiency model of social justice argues that the amelioration of such clusters of disadvantage should be the primary ethical goal of public health policy, methodologically individualist models of health promotion are ethically deficient and should not stand as primary approaches for health promotion in a just social order. (shrink)

Smith is generally regarded as an individualist without qualification. This paper argues that his predominantly individualist policy prescription is rooted in a more complex philosophy. He sees nature, including human nature, as a vast machine supervised by God and designed to maximise human happiness. Human weaknesses, as well as strengths, display the wisdom of God and play their part in this scheme. While Smith pays lip service to justice, it is really social order that pre-occupies him, and within that, (...) the defence of property. Individuals are valued as bearers of property. As persons, individuals are deceived by nature into acting in a socially beneficial way. In different ways Smith systematically denies the autonomy of the individual with respect to the whole of which he is part. For Smith, individual liberty is, not the end, but the means, of sustaining social order and property. (shrink)

How can one examine the sources of people's beliefs, tastes, and preferences without falling into the self‐refuting determinism that has so often characterized the most systematic theory of preferences, Marxism? Cultural Theory's attempt to do so posits five anthropologically derived, competing “ways of life"— individualism, egalitarianism, hierarchism, fatalism, and withdrawal from social life—that are intended to apply to all forms of culture and, therefore, to provide a universal framework for explaining people's preferential biases. Richard Ellis's defense of (...) Cultural Theory, however, does not adequately address the concerns expressed in my critique of it. Ellis fails to instance a single case of a premodern culture containing the five ways of life; he does not show that exclusivist premodern versions of “individualism” and “egalitarianism” are more than superficially comparable to the inclusive modern variants of these alleged universals; and he adds new evidence to support my claim that in modern societies, people's preferences are largely unlinked to the particular social relations identified by Cultural Theory. While Ellis overtly denies that Cultural Theory is deterministic, his search for links between preferences and social relations shows that this denial cannot be sustained.Cultural Theory's reductionism stems from its neglect of historically contingent cultural traditions that thwart a priori attempts to predict culture. This ahistori‐cism transforms a myopic view of American politics as a battle of egalitarianism against individualism into a timeless truth, providing ideological self‐affirmation for “individualists” but diminishing the prospects for being able to explain or criticize individualism—or any other political preference. (shrink)

Neuroscience needs theory. Ideas without data are blind, and yet mechanisms without concepts are empty. Friston's free energy principle paradigmatically illustrates the power and pitfalls of current theoretical biology. Mighty metaphors, turned into mathematical models, can become mindless metaphysics. Then, seeking to understand everything in principle, we may explain nothing in practice. Life can't live in a map.

Much social theory tends to emphasize the external goods of social practices, often neglecting the internal goods of those practices. For example, many analyses of religious rituals over-emphasize the instrumental and individualistic ends of prayer and liturgy by describing such religious practices as effective means for achieving external ends like positive emotions, psychological benefits, social status, or social capital. By contrast, we use a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective to analyze the relational goods, such as trust and (...) intimacy, which are expressed and sustained through ritualized social practices. Using ethnographies of Haitian and Ghanaian Christians in the U.S., we demonstrate that prayer and liturgy can also be understood as constitutive-ends practices, practices in which human persons engage to sustain relations with others because there are goods inherent to those relationships. We further argue that in many religious practices, the end goals and the means—i.e. specific aspects of the practice—are inseparable. Our approach to developing theory combines critical engagement with numerous other theorists and also exploring how well various theories can explain the motivations and experiences of participants in the religious rituals where we conducted our ethnographies. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the views that for purposes of distributive justice, groups don't matter and the past doesn't matter. Justice is concerned with living individuals and with future individuals. The view that groups don't matter I call ethical individualism. The view that the past doesn't matter I call ethical presentism. I apologize for the neologism. It is not only ugly, but inaccurate, given my concern with future individuals. A better but even uglier term, would be “ethical non-past-ism.”.

Movements tend to employ instituent practices and to acquire constitutive characteristics when they set up the material foundations of their collective autonomy, i.e. when they establish socially reproductive commons, democratically producing forms of life that respond to basic needs of the participants to the commons. The legal recognition of the sphere of the commons and the freedom of people to share, co-establish and self-regulate whole infrastructures of their social production is therefore not a negligible change but a complete (...) reversal of the logic currently underlying our legal order. It is, therefore, clear that to the end of multiplying and expanding the sphere of the commons we need to invent a new theory of a law of the commons and a hybrid and transitional semi-state ius communis, which will be capable of incorporating the acquis of social movements and receptive to emerging forms of life of the oppressed. (shrink)

There is a prima facie conflict between the semantical theory of direct reference and an intuitively plausible view often called 'individualism'. Direct reference theory is the view that certain expressions pick out their referent directly, without any intervening semantical mechanism. In order to describe the meaning of a sentence which contain such an expression, we have to mention the referent itself. Individualism is a view that mental states are individuated without reference to the subject's environment, either social or physical, (...) and therefore without mentioning an external object of reference. ;I argue that there is no conflict because it is a mistake to carry over the results of a semantical theory into a theory of mental content. My argument ultimately relies on a certain understanding of the difficult notions of mental content and linguistic meaning, gained in part by a close analysis of the historical context in which the theory of reference emerged out of the parallel work in the theory of intentionality. Fundamentally, the elucidation of these concepts is the principal aim of the dissertation, rather than the dismantling of an apparent conflict between two currently accepted views. ;There are two ways in which the conflict may be thought to arise. One argument relies on the identification of linguistic meaning with mental content. Against this I argue that we cannot hold both direct reference and the thesis, crucial to the argument, that linguistic meaning is identical to the thought-content of a competent. The short argument for conflict, therefore, fails. ;The second argument for the conflict is less direct. There are some thoughts, called De Re, which are said to constitute a direct connection between thinker and object. It is often thought that such thoughts are the ones attributed correctly using directly referential expressions. But what we attribute in such cases are just mental states whose attribution essentially involves the extra-mental objects of thought themselves, pace individualism. I argue that this argument depends on a conception of De Re, inherited from W. V. O. Quine, which mistakenly collapses issues of mental content with those of thought-attribution. (shrink)

Theories that recognize group rights face an important challenge from both friends of rights and friends of groups: that rights discourse cannot accord priority to the needs of group life over those of any individual person because the theory of moral value which underwrites rights language cannot recognize groups as having oveniding interests or importance. The full import of this objection has often been missed by those against whom it is levelled because they focus on claims by groups against (...) non-group members. However the full weight of the problem is most apparent in claims groups make against their own members (what Kymlicka calls "internal restrictions"). In this paper I look more closely at the objection from internal restrictions to clarify what is -- and what is not -- at stake. I clarify: (i) why the moral theory that underpins rights language poses a problem that must be addressed; and (ii) why the strategies most commonly pursued by advocates of group rights do not make this problem go away. However, although it is true that some forms of collectivism are ruled out by rights discourse, distinguishing between the ethical and methodological commitments of a theory makes apparent that adopting some form of methodological collectivism need not imply a collectivist theory of moral value. Neither the (ethical) individualism of rights theory nor the (methodological) collectivism of most theories that value group membership are grounds for rejecting the coherence of group rights. (shrink)

Young adult literature has been studied to understand how authors represent characters who denotes their version of experiencing mental disability or social distress. Thus the following thematic analysis of young adult novels points a question, that whether portrayal of mental disability/social distress is empowering or not. Certainly, mental disabilities seem to be different in novels: in their attempts to represent mental disability/social distress as a real experience, they’re sometimes also attached to popular conceptions of protagonist’s love-affair. Hence, (...) to focus on novels representing mental disability/social distress; themes are hypothesized to explore the identity of the protagonist, society’s influence on protagonist and whether novel romanticize or represents realistic portrayal of disability/distress. Six novels have been selected-One memory of Flora Banks, Everything-Everything, All the Bright Places, 13 Reasons Why, When we Collided and Will Grayson, Will Grayson. These novels calls attention towards how society aggravates disability and shun those who don’t meet certain expectations to be mentally healthy. Literature is a powerful social force and conversation starter about disability/distress awareness to address and deal with challenges. Thus it’s important to recognize that it plays a key role in the empowerment and appreciation for disability which has been the center of this analysis. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how it is to be explained that an action or object X counts as Y. I argue that John Searle's notion of a constitutive rule should not be employed because it involves a confusion. Instead, I propose an explanatory framework containing the following three elements: 1) The X-action or object is involved in certain social practices. 2) These practices confer properties on the X-items, in addition to their physical properties. 3) In virtue of (...) these additional properties the X-items fall under the Y-concept. Moreover, I stress that the social practices mentioned under 1) look differently from case to case and involve various constellations of prescriptive rules and interpersonal patterns of intentions. To illustrate and corroborate these claims, I discuss several cases of socially constituted actions and objects, in particular, the case of money, where I reject Searle's claim that something counts as money in virtue of giving its owner the right to buy something. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rethinking "Intersectionality":Michelle Obama, Presumed Subjects, and Constitutive PrivilegeErin C. TarverIn February 2008, Michelle Obama famously said to a gathering of supporters, "For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country." (Associated Press 2008). Her comment was swiftly seized upon by journalists and members of rival political campaigns, who used it to portray Mrs. Obama as "angry" and unpatriotic. In the weeks that (...) followed, Mrs. Obama's undergraduate sociology thesis on black students at Princeton was cited as further evidence of her supposed racial resentment and lack of patriotism, and there were widespread rumors that an audiotape existed of her using the word whitey.1 Around the same time, Fox News ran a headline referring to Mrs. Obama as "Obama's Baby Mama" (Koppleman 2008). Subsequently, there was a concerted effort on the part of Mr. Obama's campaign to "soften" her image through appearances on the shows The View and Paula's Party, and a speech at the Democratic National Convention that highlighted her motherhood and adoration of her husband, and avoided mention of her own career or political work. Despite such efforts, and perhaps in tension with the Obama family's general popularity following Mr. Obama's election, Mrs. Obama was later characterized by a cable news pundit as being reminiscent of "Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress" (The O'Reilly Factor 2009) and thus as a potential political liability for the Obama administration.While some feminists decried the "momification" (Traister 2008) of Michelle Obama as an act of appeasement by an administration that would [End Page 150] capitulate to the oppressive expectations of a public unwilling to find expressions of independent thought or professional ambitions appropriately First Lady-like, other critics noted that Mrs. Obama was being reviled more for daring to suggest that the United States' racial history was far from being strictly historical, opening her to the charge of being an angry Negro—while, ironically, being accused of "playing the race card." Others have pointed out that specific formulations such as "baby mama" are illustrative of the fact that such representations of Mrs. Obama are not easily classifiable as either sexist or racist, but instead draw on both sorts of tropes, as have such familiar representations of black women as promiscuous, or as militant, emasculating mammies.In this article, I consider methodologies for theorizing the function of such oppressions in the public discourses surrounding Michelle Obama, and suggest that a consideration of their manifestations in this context illustrates the need for more complex theoretical tools that can problematize the constitutive effects of such discourse for a multiplicity of subjects. Through parallel analyses of Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Fanon's Black Skin White Masks, I foreground the theoretical pitfall the consideration of sex- or race-based oppressions tends to occasion: the tacit presumption of some ostensibly "neutral" subject whose constitution is inadequately addressed. I suggest, with theorists of intersectionality, that this problem will not be solved merely by the addition of alternative explanatory frameworks (e.g., adding racism to sexism as a discrete phenomenon), since doing so is neither adequately representative of the experience of oppressions nor sufficient to the task of undermining the normative/perverse dichotomy or presumption of generic subjectivity that sustains them. However, I also argue that the work of intersectionality theorists should be taken farther than it has frequently been in the past (which, though given lip service by much of the feminist community, has not always been taken to imply the need for a major methodological shift), extending its insights to offer a critique of foundational subjectivity. Concomitantly, I argue that a failure by feminist philosophers to offer this critique could unintentionally result in the reinscription of the normativity of particular sorts of subjects—which is precisely what theorists of intersectionality have been concerned to call into question. I suggest that an analysis of the discourse surrounding Michelle Obama demonstrates that insofar as the intersectionality paradigm is understood merely to require the interrogation of overlapping oppressions on a given subject or subjects, and thus as leaving uninterrogated the constitutively privileging and subjectivizing effects of oppressive discourse, uses of intersectionality will reiterate... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Good Neighbors Make Good Fences: Frost’s “Mending Wall”Zev TrachtenbergDefenders of the institution of private property have considered at length its benefits to individuals: for Aristotle it allows for the practice of certain virtues; for Hegel it allows for the expression of free human personality. 1 Property is also, of course, seen as the foundation of political society: for Locke men form government to enforce their property rights; for Jefferson (...) property enables citizens to participate in their institutions of self-government. 2But there is a level of human experience between simple individuality and the formal rules and rights articulated and enforced by society. I have in mind the more immediate form of human association evoked by the word community. Let me offer a rough-and-ready distinction. The social contract tradition prompts us to think of society in terms of the cooperative human enterprise of protecting individuals’ interests; the concept of society calls to mind formal voluntary agreements and associations, contracts, the economy, ultimately laws and rights. 3 We can think of community, by contrast, in affective terms; it calls to mind the direct human relations of people who share a place and mode of living. 4 A society has laws and a government; a community has customs and a culture.In this essay, then, I want to explore the relationship between property and community. It is, I think, an ambiguous one: property can be accused of corroding the human connections that constitute community life, but the maintenance of a property regime can also be seen as itself a communal enterprise. 5 This ambiguity is displayed vividly in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” 6 Reading the poem can help us see the complex ways in which property and community are intertwined. [End Page 114]I“Mending Wall” has two characters: its narrator and his neighbor, owners of adjacent farms, who meet each Spring to repair the stone wall that stands between their properties. The narrator, at first glance, seems to take a somewhat skeptical attitude toward property. (We shall see that his attitude is in fact more complicated.) The poem opens with his words “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”—a phrase he repeats later, making it a kind of slogan for the position on property he personifies. That position seems to reject human attempts to inscribe the arbitrary divisions of property holdings on the land. The narrator sees in natural processes an attempt to cast off this artificial imposition: that which doesn’t love a wall “sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, /And spills the upper boulders in the sun.” He recognizes that asserting a separation between the two parcels of property by erecting a wall is futile. For, he recognizes, the two parcels are one, connected underneath the wall by natural forces that work unconsciously but actively against human efforts to divide them.The neighbor, by contrast, speaks for an individualistic belief in the value of marking property holdings. “Good fences make good neighbors” are his only words in the poem, repeated in the last line like a counter-slogan to the narrator’s. The neighbor first offers his slogan in response to the fact that the wall is not needed for the practical purpose of keeping his and the narrator’s goods separate. Their goods do not need a wall to be kept apart: they have no cows to wander back and forth across the line, and the narrator’s “apple trees will never get across/And eat the cones under [the neighbor’s] pines.” For the neighbor, that is, the utility of the wall is not economic. Rather it serves to define the sort of relationship he wishes to have with those who surround him: his slogan expresses an ideology of human separation. In the neighbor’s eyes, apparently, all that makes a neighbor is the mere fact of owning an adjacent farm, hence what makes a good neighbor is his separateness. For what else could characterize the goodness of neighbors who are made good by fences?The neighbor thus personifies a position on property that disvalues community. Property is marked by walls, whose main function in his view... (shrink)

This paper examines a recent, influential argument for individualism in psychology defended by Jerry Fodor and others, what I call the argument from causal powers. I argue that this argument equivocates on the crucial notion of "causal powers", and that this equivocation constitutes a deep problem for arguments of this type. Relational and individualistic taxonomies are incompatible, and it does not seem in general to be possible to factor the former into the latter. The distinction between powers and properties plays (...) a central role in my argument. (shrink)

An experimental paradigm that purports to test young children’s understanding of social norms is examined. The paradigm models norms on Searle’s notion of a constitutive rule. The experiments and the reasons provided for their design are discussed. It is argued that the experiments do not provide direct evidence about the development of social norms and that the concepts of a social norm and constitutive rule are distinct. The experimental data are re-interpreted, and suggestions for how to deal (...) with the present criticism are presented that do not require abandoning the paradigm as such. Then the conception of normativity that underlies the experimental paradigm is rejected and an alternative view is put forward. It is argued that normativity emerges from interaction and engagement, and that learning to comply with social norms involves understanding the distinction between their content, enforcement, and acceptance. As opposed to rule-based accounts that picture the development of an understanding of social norms as one-directional and based in enforcement, the present view emphasizes that normativity is situated, reciprocal, and interactive. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a game-theoretic solution to the rule-following paradox in terms of what I will call basic constitutive practices. The structure of such a practice P constitutes what it is to take part in P by defining the correctness conditions of our most basic concepts as those actions that lie on the correlated equilibrium of P itself. Accordingly, an agent S meant addition by his use of the term ‘+’ because S is taking part in a basic (...) constitutive practice of adding where quus-like answers are ruled out by not lying on the equilibrium. The resulting picture of language will preserve the objectivity and correctness conditions of meaning, all the while providing room for the community as a whole to make a mistake. I also argue that by accepting the account presented, we have a strong reason to reject the idea that language is rule-governed. (shrink)

Rather than ask if expertise is under threat, this paper uses case studies to show how expertise is enabled. Its appearance can be traced to how the already known evokes sensibility, judging, thinking and languaging. As defined below, it draws on epistemic cycles. Using Secchi and Cowley’s (2021) 3M model, this posits a second cut between the micro and the macro. In the mesosphere, people create temporary domains or what William James (1991) calls ‘little worlds’. Within these corpora popularia, the (...) new is made possible – expertise sets off unimagined outcomes. Thus, many concerns cannot be solved by scientific correlates of a natural ontological attitude: indeed, the truism clarifies many social challenges. We lack social institutions that dedicate expertise to goals like ecosocial justice and life-sustaining relations. Once the necessary expertise is traced to epistemic cycles, we can demand of institutions that they create bodies that seek to bring a rich future to evolution. (shrink)

Within much contemporary social ontology there is a particular methodology at work. This methodology takes as a starting point two or more asocial or atomic individuals. These individuals are taken to be perfectly functional agents, though outside of all social relations. Following this, combinations of these individuals are considered, to deduce what constitutes a social group. Here I will argue that theories which rely on this methodology are always circular, so long as they purport to describe the (...) formation of all social groups, as they must always presuppose a pre-existing collectivity. Such methodology also produces various distortions in our theories, such as voluntarism. I focus on the workings of Plural Subject Theory as laid out by Margaret Gilbert in On Social Facts. I show that the formation of a plural subject always requires communication, and that communication always requires a pre-existing collectivity. i examine the elements within Plural Subject Theory which protect gilbert from these accusations of circularity, and argue against them. I finalise by suggesting that what Plural Subject Theory, and social ontology in general, requires as a theoretical starting point is not atomic individuals and their combinations, but rather combinations of already socialised or embedded individuals. (shrink)

The doctrine of methodological individualism is clarified and different versions of it are distinguished. The main thesis of the article is that methodological individualism is either a false doctrine or else a doctrine compatible with functionalism, structuralism, and Marxism. Positively it is maintained that, for all we know, collective entities such as power structures may shape our beliefs and values; these beliefs and values may explain some of our actions and expectations. These actions and expectations, together with similar actions and (...) expectations of other people, caused in a similar fashion, may in turn constitute social phenomena. This means that, for all we know, in our best explanations of some social phenomena we may well need to have recourse to collective entities. (shrink)

The notion of knowledge as socially constituted is explored within a broad philosophical and psychological context. It is suggested that this epistemic commitment represents a significant challenge to conventional understandings of psychological phenomena and is a salient perspective associated with the Weltanschauugen philosophy of science, the social constructionist movement in social psychology, the feminist critique, and recent contributions to the psychology of gender. Regarding the latter, the conceptual revisions of Chodorow, Gilligan, and Bem are outlined as exemplars of (...) a view of knowledge as socially constituted. (shrink)

In Part I, the author argued for nonreductive individualism (NRI), an account of the individual-collective relation that is ontologically individualist yet rejects methodological individualism. However, because NRI is ontologically individualist, social entities and properties would seem to be only analytic constructs, and if so, they would seem to be epiphenomenal, since only real things can have causal power. In general, a nonreductionist account is a relatively weak defense of sociological explanation if it cannot provide an account of how (...) class='Hi'>social properties can participate in causal relations. In this article, the author extends NRI to address this weakness and provides an account of social causation that he refers to as supervenient causation. Key Words: individualism • collectivism • social realism • social causation. (shrink)

An account of the ontological nature of collectives would be useful for several reasons. A successful theory would help to show us a route through the thicket of views known as “methodological individualism”. It would have a bearing on the plausibility of legal positivism. It would be relevant to the question whether collectives are capable of acting. The debate about the ontology of collectives is therefore important for such fields as the theory of action, social and political philosophy, the (...) philosophy of law and the philosophy of social science. I hope to contribute to the debate by proposing an account of collectives, and by showing its theoretical soundness and utility. In its essentials, my proposal is that collectives are “mereological sums” of “stages” of persons linked by a “unity relation”. The influence on this account of some theories of personal identity will perhaps be obvious. But the motivation is different, for it lies at least as much in the ability of the theory to help us deal with the issues already mentioned as in problems concerning the identity of collectives over time. I acknowledge that my proposal is not commonsensical; however, I believe that no account could be both commonsensical and adequate. I will begin by introducing some constraints on a theory of collectives. (shrink)

This article repudiates the dichotomy that African ethics is communitarian (relational) and Western ethics is individualistic. ‘Communitarianism’ is the view that morality is ultimately grounded on some relational properties like love or friendship; and, ‘individualism’ is the view that morality is ultimately a function of some individual property like a soul or welfare. Generally, this article departs from the intuition that all morality including African ethics, philosophically interpreted, is best understood in terms of individualism. But, in this article, I limit (...) myself to the literature in the African moral tradition; and, I argue that it is best construed in terms of individualism contrary to the popular stance of communitarianism. I defend my view by invoking two sorts of evidences. (1) I invoke prima facie evidence, which shows that both secular and religious moral thinkers in the tradition tend to understand it in individualistic terms. And, (2) I invoke concrete evidence, I show that the two terms that can be said to be definitive features of African ethical framework, namely: personhood and dignity, are individualistic. I conclude by considering possible objections against my defense of individualism as a central feature of African ethics. (shrink)

Existing debate on procreative selection focuses on the well-being of the future child. However, selection decisions can also have significant effects on the well-being of others. Moreover, these effects may run in opposing directions; some traits conducive to the well-being of the selected child may be harmful to others, whereas other traits that limit the child’s well-being may preserve or increase that of others. Prominent selection principles defended to date instruct parents to select a child, of the possible children they (...) could have, likely to have a good (or nonbad) life, but they do not instruct parents to independently take the well-being of others into account. We refer to these principles as individualistic selection principles. We propose a new selection principle—Procreative Altruism—according to which parents have significant moral reason to select a child whose existence can be expected to contribute more to (or detract less from) the well-being of others than any alternative child they could have. We present the case for adopting Procreative Altruism alongside any of the major individualistic selection principles proposed to date and defend this two-principle model against a range of objections. (shrink)

How should deontological theories that prohibit actions of type K — such as intentionally killing an innocent person — deal with cases of uncertainty as to whether a particular action is of type K? Frank Jackson and Michael Smith, who raise this problem in their paper "Absolutist Moral Theories and Uncertainty" (2006), focus on a case where a skier is about to cause the death of ten innocent people — we don’t know for sure whether on purpose or not — (...) by causing an avalanche; and we can only save the people by shooting the skier. One possible deontological attitude towards such uncertainty is what Jackson and Smith call the threshold view, according to which whether or not the deontological constraint applies depends on our degree of (justified) certainty meets a given threshold. Jackson and Smith argue against the threshold view that it leads to implausible paradoxical moral dilemmas in a special kind of case. In this response, we show that the threshold view can avoid these implausible moral dilemmas, as long as the relevant deontological constraint is grounded in individualistic patient-based considerations, such as what an individual person is entitled to object to. (shrink)

Past criticisms to the contrary, methodological individualism in the social sciences is neither trivial nor obviously false. In the style of Weber's sociology, it restricts the ultimate explanatory repertoire of social science to agents' reasons for action. Although this restriction is not obviously false, it ought not to be accepted, at present, as a regulative principle. It excludes, as too far-fetched to merit investigation, certain hypotheses concerning the influence of objective interests on large-scale social phenomena. And these (...) hypotheses, in fact, merit empirical consideration. The attractiveness of methodological individualism as a regulative principle depends on two independent confusions, the conflation of an agent's reasons for action with the beliefs, needs, desires, or goals which are the reasons why he acted as he did, and the identification of explaining a phenomenon and describing its causes. (shrink)

James Ross tells us that his is the most sustained and systematic account of analogy in 500 years; he places his work beside the classical theories of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Cajetan. The boast may not be far off the mark, for this is a most significant treatise. What we have here is an explanation of a deeply pervasive feature of language. Its subject matter is the obvious occurrence in speech of the same word with different meanings. In its systematic explanation (...) the book classifies the variety of same word/different meaning relationships, identifies the basic principles and underlying structures of the phenomena, and shows the necessities at work in the generation of meaning through this analogy feature of language. The thesis boldly stated reads: "analogy of meaning... is the consequence of underlying synchronic structure composed of linguistic inertia... and linguistic force". Ross calls his work a portrayal rather than a science, and properly so, for the key predicates in his account are metaphorically extended from other realms of discourse. Words such as linguistic inertia, force, dominate, entrenchment, craftbound, and benchmark are given extended life in this special discourse on analogy. (shrink)