Alec Hyslop defends a (modified) version of the traditional analogical inference to other minds and rejects alternatives, but only after subjecting each of...

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

This text meets the requirements of the OCR AS specification for critical thinking. Alec Fisher shows students how they can develop a range of creative and critical thinking skills that are transferable to other subjects and contexts.

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

An infinite lottery machine is used as a foil for testing the reach of inductive inference, since inferences concerning it require novel extensions of probability. Its use is defensible if there is some sense in which the lottery is physically possible, even if exotic physics is needed. I argue that exotic physics is needed and describe several proposals that fail and at least one that succeeds well enough.

This book develops an alternative account of rights according to which rights forfeiture has a much smaller role to play because rights themselves are more contextually contingent. For example, those who threaten to cause harm without a right to do so have weaker claims not to be killed than innocent bystanders or those who have a right to threaten to cause harm. By framing rights as the output of a balance of competing claims, and by laying out a detailed account (...) of how to balance competing claims, Walen provides a more coherent account of when killing in war is permissible. (shrink)

The standard of proof in criminal trials in many liberal democracies is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the BARD standard. It is customary to describe it, when putting a number on it, as requiring that the fact finder be at least 90% certain, after considering the evidence, that the defendant is guilty. Strikingly, no good reason has yet been offered in defense of using that standard. A number of non-consequentialist justifications that aim to support an even higher standard have been (...) offered; all are morally unsound. Meanwhile, consequentialist arguments plausibly support a substantially lower standard — in some cases so low as to undermine the idea that punishment is what is at stake. In this paper, I offer a new retributive justification that supports excluding the instrumental benefits of punishment from the balance that sets the standard. The resulting balance supports a standard arguably in the ballpark of the customary understanding of BARD: a standard requiring that the fact finder have a high, though not maximally high, degree of confidence that the defendant is guilty. (shrink)

A robust, if not absolute, prohibition on treating people merely as a means seems to sit at the core of common sense deontological morality. But the principle prohibiting such treatment, the ‘means principle’ (MP), has been notoriously hard to defend: both the subjective, intention-focused and the objective, causal-role-focused interpretations of what it means to use someone as a means face potent objections. In this paper, my goal is not to defend the MP, but to articulate and defend a new principle, (...) which I call the Restricting Claims Principle (RCP), that explains why a person’s causal role is morally significant. The RCP broadens the basic frame of relevant considerations from the MP’s concern with the dyadic relationship between agent and patient to a global balance of patient-claims on an agent. It distinguishes two kinds of patient-claims that weigh in that balance: restricting and non-restricting. In most cases, these can be distinguished as follows: Restricting claims, if respected as rights, would restrict an agent from doing what she could otherwise permissibly do if the claimant (or his property) were absent; non-restricting claims, if respected as rights, would not in that way restrict an agent. Only restricting claims press to make others worse off than if the claimant were absent. The RCP holds that restricting claims must therefore be substantially weaker than non-restricting ones. The claims of those who would be used as a means are non-restricting, while the claims of those who would be harmed as a side effect are restricting. Thus the RCP can account for the same cases (mostly) as the MP, without having to rely on the MP to do so. (shrink)

We know our own intentional actions in a distinctively first-personal way. Many accounts of knowledge of intentionally doing something, A, assume that grounds for the knowledge would have to establish or indicate that it is true that one is intentionally doing A. In this paper, I argue against this assumption, showing how it entails being in a Moore-paradoxical situation. I argue that if knowledge of intentionally doing A were such that grounds for it must be truth-indicating, then one could always (...) wonder, when doing A, whether A is for one a goal. However, just as wondering whether p is true is incompatible with thinking that one believes p, so wondering whether A is for one a goal is incompatible with thinking that one is intentionally doing A. We must allow, then, that one’s knowledge of intentionally doing A is itself a representation of A as a goal to be accomplished, apt to be grounded by reasons for doing A. I show that the first-personal character of knowledge of acting intentionally resides in its being practical rather than theoretical. (shrink)

Discussions of risk have assumed that risk must be modeled the same in all cases. This is a mistake. Normally, if people know that those affected by an agent’s choice have conflicting interests, th...

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 245-258, March 2022.

This paper examines the relations between, on the one hand, accounts of the distinction between an agent's identifying with, as opposed to feeling alienated from, their attitudes; and on the other, metaphysical accounts of action. It claims that a commitment to an event-causal conception of agency, which would analyse agency in terms of the causal potency of psychological states and events, appears to render mandatory a particular style of account of identification and alienation – namely, the hierarchical model offered by (...) Harry Frankfurt and Michael Bratman. It is argued that such accounts fall foul of a dilemma: the Authority Problem. The failure of attempts to avoid the Authority Problem is then used to motivate an attractive alternative style of account of the distinction, offered by Richard Moran. However, it is pressed that Moran's account rests on claims about agency which seem incompatible with the event-causal conception of agency. By making the links between the metaphysics of agency and accounts of identification and alienation more explicit, the paper allows us to better comprehend both the apparent need for and characteristic failures of some traditional accounts of identification and alienation, as well as make clear the action-theoretical debt incurred by those who would offer an alternative. (shrink)

In an earlier article, I introduced the “restricting claims principle” to explain what is right about the means principle: the idea that it is harder to justify causing or allowing someone to suffer harm if using him as a means than if causing or allowing harm as a side effect. The RCP appeals to the idea that claims not to be harmed as a side effect push to restrict an agent from doing what she would otherwise be free to do (...) for herself or others, given an appropriate account of her baseline freedom. Claims not to be harmed as a means are not in that way ‘‘restricting.’’ The original RCP relied on a counterfactual account of the agent’s baseline freedom: What could the agent permissibly do if the patient were not present? I argue here that that counterfactual baseline fails. The revised RCP relies instead on a ‘‘toolkit baseline’’: Do the patient claims concern the property the agent needs to use? This toolkit baseline reflects the different ways that agents relate to others: as fellow agents with whom they divide up the resources of the world, and as patients who might be affected by their actions. The toolkit baseline, resting on this agent-patient divide, provides a superior account of an agent’s baseline freedom, and a better account of the moral ground for the means principle. (shrink)

S. Matthew Liao and Christian Barry argue that the patient-centered approach to deontology that I have developed—the restricting claims principle —‘is beset with problems.’ They think that it cannot correctly handle cases in which a potential victim sits in the path of an agent doing what she needs to do for some greater good, or in which a person’s property is used to benefit others and harm her. They argue that cases in which an agent does what would be permissible (...) but acts on a malicious reason show that agent intentions, rather than patientclaims, are fundamental to deontology. And they claim that the RCP presupposes the means principle in a way that shows that it is not really offering anything new. I argue here that all of these charges are mistaken. Doing so allows me to offer important refinements to the RCP, to highlight two common mistakes in reasoning about cases, and to set challenges for agentcentered approaches to deontology. (shrink)

According to the Doctrine of Illicit Intentions, it is impermissible both to form and then to act on an illicit intention. An intention is illicit, roughly, if it causes the agent who has it to be, in a certain way, disposed to perform actions that are impermissible. If the range of actions an agent might be directed to perform by an intention includes impermissible actions, then it may be impermissible to form or act on that intention even if, in the (...) end, the agent performs no action that is impermissible (other than forming and acting on an illicit intention itself). (shrink)

Alec Kassman; XIV*—On Punishing, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 221–246, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/7.

Antony Duff’s The Realm of Criminal Law offers an appealing moral reconstruction of the criminal law. I agree that the criminal law should be understood to predicate punishment upon sufficient proof that the defendant has committed a public wrong for which she is being held to account and censured. But the criminal law is not only about censoring people for public wrongs; it must serve other purposes as well, such as preventing people from committing serious crimes and more generally from (...) violating reasonable regulations. These purposes, and perhaps retributive justice, require the criminal law also to mete out harsh treatment, but only insofar as such treatments are proportional to the culpable wrong committed. The problem for the criminal law is that many mala prohibita crimes consist of a minor wrong but also call for a relatively severe punishment. To accommodate that mismatch, it is necessary to complement the criminal law, as Duff and I conceive of it, with what I call “penal law.” Penal law relies on forfeiture to explain why hard treatment is permissible. The forfeiture must be fair, and it comes with its own proportionality limits. But those limits are not as strict as the limits implicit in the criminal law. It allows for penalties that are harsher than the punishments that could justifiably be meted out for many mala prohibita offenses. One and the same act can count as a crime and a penal infraction, and one and the same criminal justice system can and should handle both crimes and the penal infractions. It is, I think, only in that way that we can accommodate both the need to prevent public wrongdoing and the distinct importance of holding people accountable for the commission of public wrongs. (shrink)

The late Alec Nove explores the relationship between Marxist ideas and the Soviet reality and presents a methodology for understanding Soviet type societies.

The atheist who begins to argue his case by saying, ‘Suppose there is an omniscient Being of the sort in which Christians believe ...’ is employing a very familiar move in argumentation. However, most books on argumentation theory ignore ‘suppositions’ completely. Searle omits suppositions entirely from his taxonomy of speech acts and this appears to lead to a similar omission in Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions by van Eemeren and Grootendorst.This paper argues that ‘suppositional argument’ is elegant, powerful and extremely (...) common, that the correct way to understand it is based on Gottlob Frege's distinction between ‘asserted’ and ‘unasserted’ propositions and hence that suppositions are neither assertions nor (and this is more important) assertives. The paper discusses the connections between suppositions and conditionals; it argues that argumentation theory which ignores suppositions is systematically misleading; and it concludes by indicating some possible developments in argumentation theory. (shrink)

When one is intentionally doing something, one represents that thing as a goal to be accomplished. One represents it practically. How should we characterize this practical representation further? In this paper, I argue that when one is intentionally doing something, one's representation of it as a goal to be accomplished must also be knowledge that one is intentionally doing that thing. And I argue that this knowledge must itself be one's intentionally doing that thing. I aim to show, then, that (...) insofar as representing practically just is knowing practically, it is equally acting intentionally. (shrink)

Ideally, should liberals in a pluralistic society be able to agree to abide by a common legal system such that all their disputes are resolved without resort to illegal force? Rawls believes the answer is “yes.” I explain and defend his answer, but I also conclude, focusing on the example of abortion, that the truth is “not necessarily, not always.” Rawls’s conceptions of reasonable citizens and public reason help explain why there is a strong prima facie duty to forswear illegal (...) force. It is based on the duty to respect others, which requires that one be able to justify one's actions to them insofar as they are reasonable and matters of basic justice are at issue. One cannot justify using illegal force to those who reasonably think a law is just; to them it is a form of disrespect. Nonetheless, if one reasonably thinks that a fundamental injustice is tolerated or even established by the law, then one may be no less reasonable than one has reason to be if one uses illegal force, sacrificing this form of respect to right a greater wrong. (shrink)

Jacob Weinrib's Dimensions of Dignity 1 [DD] joins a small but growing literature committed to the reconstruction, as applied theory, of foundational concepts such as justice, authority, and the ru...

Subjects in studies on humans are used as a means of conducting the research and achieving whatever good would justify putting them at risk. Accordingly, consent must normally be obtained before subjects are exposed to any substantial risks to their welfare. Bystanders are also often put at risk, but they are not used as a means. Accordingly—or so I argue—consent is more often unnecessary before bystanders are exposed to similar substantial risks to their welfare.

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records. Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to (...) anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics. In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age. (shrink)

We are likely to have immersive virtual reality and ubiquitous augmented reality in the coming decades. At least some people will use extended reality or “the metaverse” to work, play and shop. In order to achieve the best possible versions of this virtual future, however, we will need to learn from three decades of regulating the Internet. The new virtual world cannot consist of walled corporate fiefdoms ruled only by profitmaximization. The interests of workers, consumers and citizens in virtuality require (...) proactive legislation and oversight. -/- This white paper first addresses the central question the metaverse poses, whether virtual life is inherently more alienating and less authentic than face-to-face life experiences. This question is both a philosophical question about the nature of the good life and an empirical question about the accumulating evidence about the impacts of the digital on subjective well-being. -/- . (shrink)

Certain theorists argue that intention cannot be a wrong-making feature of actions because (a) it is morally impermissible to encourage morally impermissible actions; (b) there are certain putatively impermissible actions that seem to be impermissible because of the intention with which they are performed; and (c) at least some of these actions can permissibly be encouraged. If one accepts (a) and (c), then one should conclude that these actions cannot really be impermissible. This paper rejects the premise that it is (...) always impermissible to encourage impermissible acts. The argument explores three ways one could encourage an act that would be permissible but for its being performed with a wrong-making intention. It argues that there is at most a strong but defeasible presumption against encouraging the performance of impermissible actions. (shrink)

What economic conditions are necessary for us to arrive at a post-work future, and what should a post-work future look like? This chapter argues that only through the democratization of core economic institutions can we properly experiment with post-work imaginaries. I argue, based on principles of participatory autonomy and relational equality, for the democratization of workplaces, finance and investment, and the knowledge commons. Given these necessary structural changes, the possibility of a post-work future becomes a democratic choice by placing democratic (...) decision-making power in the hands of those who are directly affected by workplace decisions, investment decisions, and the collective production of knowledge. Through this democratization process, the potential to reduce working hours, the possibility of building meaningful work, and the chance to decenter work as the mechanism for economic security and meaning-making, all become subject to democratic deliberation and decision-making. (shrink)

Helen Steward accepts what I call the Separation Thesis, the main tenet of which is that the movements one’s body makes when one acts are the causal results of one’s actions. I claim that this threatens to generate a pair of epistemic shortfalls: first, our perception of others’ bodily movements may not reach to their actions themselves; and, second, our own ‘knowledge in intention’ may not reach to the actual bodily movements in which the efficacy of our actions consists. I (...) suggest we should adopt a slogan that Anscombe considered, and say ‘I do what happens’ when I am acting. Then the movements one’s body makes when one acts are seen simply to be one’s actions. (shrink)

The moral justification for targeted killing turns on it being justified as an act of self-defense. That justification can be assessed by addressing five questions: Is the targeted person a threat who lacks the right to threaten? Has the targeted person forfeited some of her claim not to be killed? Even if the answer to the first two questions is positive, is targeted killing a necessary and proportionate response? Is the evidence in favor of targeted killing high enough to meet (...) the relevant standard of proof? And insofar as a person is selected for targeting from a larger group of possible targets, is the selection justifiable? The legal justifiability of targeted killing should aim to track, as much as problems of administrability and limiting unwanted effects allow, the answers to those moral questions. (shrink)

Derek Parfit argued that “Kantians, Contractualists, and Consequentialists … are climbing the same mountain on different sides.” By that he meant that when their views are properly developed, they will converge. One reason to reject his substantive view, however, is that he could not see how to account for the deontological intuition that it is very hard to justify using people as a means. Matthew Oliver offers a clever way for evaluator-neutral consequentialists like Parfit to account for that intuition. But (...) Oliver’s account runs into two problems: the axiology itself is problematic, and it seems inconsistent with other deep deontological intuitions. I offer a different development of contractualism that accounts for the relevant deontological intuitions, but it’s a fundamentally different “mountain.” Convergence is not in sight, but one can still hope that all climbers will eventually migrate to the better mountain. (shrink)

I argue that nonresident aliens, in places that are clearly not U.S. territory, should benefit from constitutional rights. This is a matter of mutuality of obligation. The U.S. claims the authority to hold all people accountable for respecting certain laws, such as the law of war as defined in the Military Commissions Act. Accordingly, it must accord them basic legal rights in return. At the same time, I argue, contra Benjamin Wittes, that this would not lead to absurdly opening the (...) courthouse doors, nor does it require abandoning principle to keep the flood of litigation reasonably contained. Not all harms inflicted by the U.S. government can give rise to a lawsuit, and that the distinction between those who should have a right to sue and those who should not can be drawn in a principled way. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to begin to try to understand the extent to which ethnomethodology (EM) might be informed by some concepts and ideas from the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. This is done in two parts. The first looks at Heidegger's later work and compares his conception of the ontological difference with Garfinkel's work on the difference between EM and formal sociological analysis (FA). The second part turns to Heidegger's earlier work (around Being and Time) and (...) works through a number of affinities between the analysis of Dasein and ethnomethodological versions of everydayness. (shrink)

The focus of Norton's book is the distinction between objectives and values in developing environmental policies. Norton argues that environmentalism is a coalition of many groups working toward common objectives, but unlike other social action movements the environmental coalition does not have shared moral principles.

This paper serves a dual function: (1) it is intended to proffer a stable understanding of our digital engagement on the Internet as a form of labor that is co-opted by digital firms for private profit; (2) it extends the concept of participatory democracy to our digital world, arguing that our collective or common production of value for digital firms (in the form of what I call“knowledge goods”) requires the implementation of participatory democratic governance mechanisms over these digital firms and (...) the experimentation with democratic digital alternatives.Whereas others have argued in favor of democratic control over digital platforms on the basis of the power that digital firms have over user's lives (Engelmann et al.,2020), this paper adds to this discussion by arguing in favor of digital platform democratization based on the value-generating labor contributed by digital users. (shrink)