The Value of Trees project, funded bythe International Development Research Council ofCanada (IDRC), supported the joint efforts of theUniversity of Alberta and the University of Zimbabweto investigate the economic costs and benefitsassociated with trees and forests in the small holderfarming sector in Zimbabwe. The Value of Trees project provided funding for graduate students andfaculty from the two participating universities tocarry out studies in the disciplines of forestry,agricultural economics, and sociology in order toprovide policy recommendations regarding the role ofwoodlands in sustainable (...) small holder farming in acontext where agricultural production appears to putincreasing stress on woodlands. The numerous projectsincluded such topics as the following: the use offuelwood under conditions of scarcity, tree tenure andlocal institutions in woodland use and sustainability,gender and wealth as related to tree planting andconservation, time preferences in natural resourceconsumption, ownership and economic impact ofeucalyptus woodlots, cultural and economic valuesassociated with woodlands, and uses and conflictsrelating to woodlands across different land categoriessuch as resettlement land and state forests. Manyother studies were not funded by, but were associatedwith Value of Trees. The findings fall withintwo broad categories. The first set includes thosedirectly related to generating values for differentaspects of the woodlands, particularly from theperspectives of rural households. The main finding isthat despite being highly valued by local people forboth economic and social reasons, woodlands are rankedlower in importance by local farmers than agriculturalland. The second set of findings relates to thecomplexities of the social system of the woodlands.Local institutions, history, resource conflicts, andtenure issues emerge as key to understanding the waythat people interact with the woodlands. Finally,local people have valuable knowledge and strategies tooffer in the design of sustainable management. Thepolicy implications of these findings for Zimbabwe arethat economic incentives could be important in asustainable woodlands strategy, but that anysuccessful program must incorporate an understandingof the profoundly complex and at times contradictoryhuman dynamics of woodland use and values. (shrink)

This book gives an account of a full spectrum of property rights and their relationship to individual liberty. It shows that a purely deontological approach to justice can deal with the most complex questions regarding the property system. Moreover, the author considers the economic, ecological, and technological complexities of our real-world property systems. The result is a more conceptually sound account of natural rights and the property system they demand. If we think that liberty should be at the centre of (...) justice, what does that mean for the property system? Economists and lawyers widely agree that a property system must be composed of many different types of property: the kind of private ownership one has over one's person and immediate possessions, as well as the kinds of common ownership we each have in our local streets, as well as many more. However, theories of property and justice have not given anything approaching an adequate account of the relationship between liberty and any other form of property other than private ownership. It is often thought that a basic commitment to liberty cannot really tell us how to arrange the major complexities of the property system, which diverge from simple private ownership. Property and Justice demonstrates how philosophical rigour coupled with interdisciplinary engagement enables us to think clearly about how to deal with real-world problems. It will be of interest to political philosophers, political theorists, and legal theorists working on property rights and justice. (shrink)

Billy Dunaway develops and defends a framework for realism about morality. He defends the idea that moral properties are privileged parts of reality which are the referents for our moral terms. He suggests how it is that we can know about morality, and what the limits to moral disagreement are.

This new study provides a refreshing look at the issue of exceptions and shows that much of the problem stems from a failure to recognize at least two kinds of exception-ridden law: ceteris paribus laws and ideal laws. Billy Wheeler offers the first book-length discussion of ideal laws. The key difference between these two kinds of laws concerns the nature of the conditions that need to be satisfied and their epistemological role in the law’s formulation and discovery. He presents (...) a Humean-inspired approach that draws heavily on concepts from the information and computing sciences. Specifically, Wheeler argues that laws are best seen as algorithms for compressing empirical data and that ideal laws are needed as 'lossy compressors' for complex data. Major figures in the metaphysics of science receive special attention such as Ronald Giere, Bas van Fraassen, Nancy Cartwright, David Lewis and Marc Lange. This book is essential reading for philosophers of science and will interest metaphysicians, epistemologists and others interested in applying concepts from computing to traditional philosophical problems. (shrink)

Hillel Steiner argues that a necessary and sufficient condition for the compossibility of a set of rights is that those rights be extensionally differentiable. However, given that two or more actions can extensionally overlap without thereby being mutually unperformable, if such actions are specified in the relevant rights, then those rights will not be incompossible, notwithstanding their extensional overlap. The set of compossible sets of rights then is greater than the subset of extensionally differentiable rights, and extensional differentiability is a (...) sufficient but unnecessary condition of compossibility. (shrink)

This paper looks at the phenomenon of ethical vagueness by asking the question, how ought one to reason about what to do when confronted with a case of ethical vagueness? I begin by arguing that we must confront this question, since ethical vagueness is inescapable. I then outline one attractive answer to the question: we ought to maximize expected moral value when confronted with ethical vagueness. This idea yields determinate results for what one rationally ought to do in cases of (...) ethical vagueness. But what it recommends is dependent on which substantive theory of vagueness is true; one can't draw conclusions about how to reason about vagueness in ethics in the absence of concrete assumptions about the nature of vagueness. (shrink)

This article intervenes into contemporary scholarship on affect by bringing different affect theories into the same analytical frame. Analysing commercial surrogacy in India through three different conceptualizations of affect found in the work of Michael Hardt, Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi reveals how affect emerges as a malleable state in the practice of, as a circulatory force in the debates around, and as an ephemeral intensity in the spontaneous resistance to surrogacy. Based on this analysis, I suggest that integrating different (...) theories of affect enables more holistic examinations of corporeal regulation by opening our understanding to the multiple lives of affect that operate on the level of political economy, cultural signification and material intensity simultaneously. (shrink)

We are becoming increasingly dependent on robots and other forms of artificial intelligence for our beliefs. But how should the knowledge gained from the “say-so” of a robot be classified? Should it be understood as testimonial knowledge, similar to knowledge gained in conversation with another person? Or should it be understood as a form of instrument-based knowledge, such as that gained from a calculator or a sundial? There is more at stake here than terminology, for how we treat objects as (...) sources of knowledge often has important social and legal consequences. In this paper, I argue that at least some robots are capable of testimony. I make my argument by exploring the differences between instruments and testifiers on a well-known account of knowledge: reliabilism. On this approach, I claim that the difference between instruments and testifiers as sources of knowledge is that only the latter are capable of deception. As some robots can be designed to deceive, so they too should be recognized as testimonial sources of knowledge. (shrink)

Ben Bryan argues that the strongest challenge to natural rights theory is to explain how it overcomes the Problem of Authority. Given that our natural rights are multiply realisable by a range of equally reasonable social conventions, how or why ought one particular realisation have authority? I argue that Thomistic and Kantian solutions to this problem do not count as solutions from natural rights theory, and therefore offer my own solution. When theories of natural rights describe the rights we have (...) in terms that refer not only to moralised act-types, but rather, tell us which non-moralised act-types ought to be moralised in the relevant way, they avoid the Problem of Authority altogether. Such theories of natural rights are singularly realisable at the level of regulative conventional rules, and only multiply realisable at the level of constitutive conventional rules. The latter form of multiple realisability does not raise the Problem of Authority. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene por objeto destacar la relevancia de una noción de “muerte impersonal” en el horizonte de una indagación no antropocentrada de lo biopolítico. En tanto no se rige por la teleología del principio antrópico, la filosofía contemporánea considera lo impersonal como una resistencia al biopoder, aunque suele concentrarse en los avatares del concepto de Vida. Aquí, avanzamos en el examen de los rasgos de la muerte impersonal en dos pensadores cuyas obras resultan fundamentales para estas líneas de trabajo (...) contemporáneas. En Nietzsche, analizamos la cuestión de la “muerte libre” y la imagen de la ceniza, dando cuenta de las posibilidades que allí se vislumbran para una reivindicación de lo impersonal. Luego, subrayamos sus semejanzas y derivaciones en los conceptos blanchotianos de “momento deseado” y “tiempo muerto”. (shrink)

Adriaan Peperzak’s knowledge of the history of philosophy and his Continental philosophical nexus gives his Before Ethics a unique and welcome flavor. In eight essays on contemporary ethics written between 1969 and 1997, Peperzak analyzes our utilitarian, Kantian-deontological, and virtue-oriented ethical convictions in a thorough and enlightening manner.

Quasi-realist Expressivists offer accounts of normative truth, normative facts, and normative properties which make their view apparently indistinguishable from Realist views on these subjects. This chapter explores the idea that there is still a substantial metaphysical difference between Realism and Quasi-realism, since they differ over the extent to which normative properties are metaphysically elite in David Lewis’s sense. Eliteness is an explanatory notion, and Realists need the explanatory features of eliteness to explain how different communities refer to the same property (...) with their word “ought.” While Quasi-realists can agree with Realists about which property “ought” refers to, the same resources they use to explain normative truth, reference, and facthood also explain why the referential facts are this way. Thus eliteness does not enter the explanatory picture for the Quasi-realist, and the metaphysics of obligation looks very different on the Realist and Quasi-realist views. (shrink)

Lockean approaches to property take it that persons can unilaterally acquire private ownership over hitherto unowned resources. Such natural law accounts of property rights are often thought to be of limited use when dealing with the complexities of natural resource use outside of the paradigm of private ownership of land for agricultural or residential development. The tragedy of the commons has been shown to be anything but an inevitability, and yet Lockeanism seems to demand that even the most robust common (...) property arrangements be converted to privatized units. This often motivates a move away from natural law in the moral analysis of property rights. I argue however that it is not the deontological nature of Lockean principles that are at fault, but rather the manner of their application. Lockean theory often exhibits a bias in favour of private property: assuming that only private property can protect one’s interest in autonomy, and therefore asserting that each individual has a power of private acquisition. Starting with a claim against interference however enables us to mould the appropriate property rights to each individual’s particular interest in autonomy. This sometimes leads to private ownership, but often leads to various forms of commons. (shrink)

Informational structural realism (ISR) offers a new way to understand the nature of the “structure” that structural realists claim our best scientific theories get right about the world. According to Luciano Floridi, who has given the most detailed formulation of ISR so far, this structure is composed of information representing binary differences. In this paper I assess whether ISR offers a good way to resolve the tension between the no miracle argument (often taken to support scientific realism) and the pessimistic (...) meta-induction (often taken to support antirealism). With regards to this important motivation for structural realism, I shall argue that ISR faces insurmountable difficulties. However, I agree that interpreting “structure” in terms of information can be profitable for the realist. Instead, I offer a new version of ISR that borrows from algorithmic information theory. As a result, a more realist version of ISR is provided. (shrink)

Across career development and academic advising literature, scholars describe a common and unsettling tension between when to challenge and support students’ goals. Many programs of study include selective admission or gateway prerequisite courses. Students may also need to modify their goals while pursuing competitive employment or graduate school programs. As career professionals and academic advisors begin to perceive that students may not be able to achieve their aspirations, they may discuss different pathways and alternative careers. Some academic advisors use predictive (...) analytics to identify students who may not progress within their chosen degree program, which further compounds the ethical dilemma. If practitioners do not engage in ethical inquiry and deliver feedback carefully, some students could experience distress or pivot away from their goals unnecessarily. As they discuss career alternatives, practitioners can consider the integrated literature review included in this article. Practitioners can use scholars’ different frameworks and thematic recommendations to bring equity and ethical integrity to their career conversations. (shrink)

This paper advances two theses about evolutionary debunking arguments in ethics. The first is that, while such arguments are often motivated with the rhetoric of ‘luck', proponents of these arguments have not distinguished between the kinds of luck that might lead to the formation of a true belief. Once we make the needed distinctions, the relevance of the kind of luck which can be derived from broadly evolutionary explanations to the epistemological conclusions debunkers draw is suspect. The second thesis is (...) that debunkers might successfully show that epistemic luck is relevant to their concerns. But they will need to include specific premises about the kind of evolutionary mechanism that explains the beliefs that the debunker targets. Proponents of debunking arguments, if they continue to insist on using luck-based considerations, are then hostage to empirical fortune in a way not previously recognized. (shrink)

La Giovanna di Bresson mette a fuoco la dialettica tra documenti storici e finzioni narrative: una riflessione attenta sul rapporto tra memoria e limiti insuperabili di ogni tentativo di rappresentazione.

L’historiographie concernant les voyageuses fait fréquemment référence à la « poussière », la « négligence » et l’oubli. Ironiquement, en employant le langage qu’utilisaient ces dames souvent oubliées pour dépeindre des pays et des paysages inconnus, ces références font écho aux affirmations de certains chercheurs pour qui la littérature de voyage féminine est encore une terra incognita à découvrir. D’où l’appel répété, depuis environ une dizaine d’années, de lexicographes et d’historiens de...

Is it possible to gain knowledge about the real world based solely on experiences in virtual reality? According to one influential theory of knowledge, you cannot. Robert Nozick's truth-tracking theory requires that, in addition to a belief being true, it must also be sensitive to the truth. Yet beliefs formed in virtual reality are not sensitive: in the nearest possible world where P is false, you would have continued to believe that P. This is problematic because there is increasing awareness (...) from philosophers and technologists that virtual reality is an important way in which we can arrive at beliefs and knowledge about the world. Here I argue that a suitably modified version of Nozick's sensitivity condition is able to account for knowledge from virtual reality. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize a growing movement within public policy circles that self-identifies as neoliberal. The issue I take up here is the sense in which the neoliberal label signals a turn away from libertarian political philosophy. The are many import ant figures in this movement, but my focus here will be on Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center, not least because he has most prolifically written against libertarian political philosophy. Neoliberals oppose the idea that the rights that libertarianism (...) claims people have are useful guides for making the world a freer place because they forestall too much governmental/democratic political action that they purport to be necessary for increasing freedom. Wilkinson mistakenly takes libertarianism to be a set of ideal public policies for achieving a perfectly free society. If it were, he would be right to turn away from it. But placing rights to freedom at the center of their theory of justice does not commit libertarians to an all-or-nothing approach to political change. Consequences and strategy matter – particularly in a non-ideal world – without abandoning the idea that each individual has a right to freedom. In mistaking libertarian moral claims as a set of policy prescriptions, Wilkinson complains that idealistic policy prescriptions not only fail to take account of how those who disagree will respond to such policies if implemented, but also thereby undermines the justice of those policies in the first instance. Wilkinson proposes that change in the direction of freedom must go through the proper channels of actually-existing democratic legitimacy. It as this stage that Wilkinson’s project comes into direct conflict with libertarianism. Whilst libertarianism is not committed to any particular method of creating a free society under non-ideal conditions, and therefore does not rule out democratic political activism as one among many means of doing that, it cannot be committed to the permanence of democratic political authority, and this is what Wilkinson’s neoliberalism demands above all else. It turns out that Foucault’s characterization of neoliberalism long ago is still accurate to Wilkinson’s own view: that neoliberalism is not about creating a society of free individuals, it is about designing the state apparatus in ways that are inspired by the workings of free society – it is about legitimizing the chains, not breaking them. Neoliberalism is not a pragmatic alternative to libertarianism, but rather a gross misapplication of it. (shrink)

This paper is about avoiding commitment to an ontology of possible worlds with two primitives: a hyperintensional connective like ‘in virtue of’, and primitive quantification into predicate position. I argue that these tools (which some believe can be independently motivated) render dispensable the ontology of possible worlds needed by traditional anaylses of modality. They also shed new light on the notion of truth-at-a-world.

This essay examines whether or not absurdity is intrinsic to human life. It takes Camus’ interpretation of ‘The Absurd’ as its conceptual starting point. It traces such thought back to Schopenhauer, whose work is then critically analysed. This analysis focuses primarily on happiness and meaning. This essay accepts some of Schopenhauer’s premises, but rejects his conclusions. Instead, it considers Nietzsche’s alternatives and the role of suffering in life. It posits that suffering may help people acquire meaning and escape absurdity. It (...) then analyses the role of compassion in absurdity, in reference to Nietzsche’s work and Buddhist teachings. Lastly, it examines absurdity in relation to death, rejecting the notion that death exacerbates absurdity. This paper understands absurdity to be a natural part of the human condition, as characterised by suffering, death and an absence of meaning. It concludes that although human life is absurd by nature, it need not remain so. (shrink)

De acuerdo con la formulación de Haraway y Tsing, el Plantacionoceno sería un modo de nombrar esta época que permitiría, con mayor especificidad que el Antropoceno, señalar las características del sistema mundial moderno. En este artículo revisamos las diferentes versiones del Antropoceno y el tipo de problemas que habilita (especialmente los de la escala y la agencia material). Luego nos abocamos a la emergencia de la noción de simbiosis como forma de hacer comunidad más allá de lo humano tal como (...) aparece primero en Michel Serres y luego en Haraway, el marco ofrecido por la ecocrítica materialista y el modo en que el Plantacionoceno se justifica. Adoptando este enfoque, leemos las narrativas fundacionales de la identidad argentina como aquellas donde esta es figurada como la del varón valiente (primero un marginal y luego un héroe nacional) cuya tarea principal es borrar (material y simbólicamente) el legado indígena. Por último, abordamos la novela de Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Las aventuras de la China Iron, donde el poema épico nacional de José Hernández, Martín Fierro, es totalmente re-escrito. A lo largo de esta indisciplinada narración de alteración de mundos, la plantación es transformada en una humildad no jerárquica que nos ubica en el umbral de un plantismo queer. (shrink)

Over the last few decades climate change has been gaining importance in international scientific and political debates. However, the social sciences, especially in Latin America, have only lately become interested in the subject and their approach is still vague. Scientific understanding of global environmental change and the process of designing public policies to face them are characterized by their complexity as well as by epistemic and normative uncertainties. This makes it necessary to problematize the way in which research efforts understand (...) ‘the social’ of climate change. How do ‘the climate’ and ‘the social’ interpenetrate as scientific objects? What does the resulting field look like? Is the combination capable of promoting reflexivity and collaboration on the issue, or does it merely become dispersed with diffuse boundaries? Our paper seeks to answer these and other related questions using Chile as a case study and examining peer-reviewed scientific research on the topic. By combining in-depth qualitative content analysis of each paper with a statistical meta-analysis, we were able to: characterize the key content and forms of such literature; identify divisions and patterns within it; and, discuss some factors and trends that may help explain these. We conclude that the literature displays two competing trends: while it is inclined to become fragmented beyond the scope of the ‘mitigation’ black box, it also tends to cluster along the lines of methodological distinctions traditionally contested within the social sciences. This, in turn, highlights the persistence of disciplinary divisions within an allegedly interdisciplinary field. (shrink)

It is often claimed that realism about normativity entails that it is difficult for us to know anything about it. I refine this thought by characterizing realism as a thesis which is committed to explaining a semantic thesis about possible uses of normative language: that normative terms like ‘ought’ are semantically stable, in the sense that the term refers to the same property even if it is used differently. There are independent arguments which show that a realist view, if it (...) is plausible, should entail semantic stability for ‘ought’. In this paper I argue that, if the realist succeeds in explaining semantic stability, the realist view implies that normative beliefs will be at risk of being false, and hence not knowledge. Central to this argument is a phenomenon I call meta-semantic risk. I argue that the phenomenon of meta-semantic risk gives rise to a significant dose of normative skepticism for the realist, but it does not entail wholesale skepticism, since the epistemic threats are only contingent, and threatens only precise normative beliefs. I close by sketching two arguments that may show that even this limited form of skepticism counts significantly against the realist view. (shrink)

"Wokini, " translated from Lakota, means "seeking a new beginning." On that theme, the famous athlete joins the bestselling author to blend modern therapeutic principles and Native American tradition.

RESUMEN En el marco de las concepciones compensatorias de la naturaleza humana, la negatividad asignada a lo humano se «dialectiza». A partir de dicha constatación, señalaremos las dificultades que ello implica en el abordaje de las cuestiones actuales en torno al hombre. Evidenciaremos la importancia de renovar la noción de «ausencia de naturaleza» que circula en cierta línea alemana de problematización de lo humano, de la cual la noción de «pobreza» postulada por Heidegger constituirá el exemplum. Valiéndome de la interpretación (...) de la «pobreza» realizada por M. Blanchot, indicaré la posibilidad de leer la ausencia de naturaleza no en tanto pura negatividad sino como pasividad no dialectizable que afecta al hombre.PALABRAS CLAVE POBREZA, PASIVIDAD, BLANCHOT, HEIDEGGER, ESPOSITOABSTRACT Human negativity is “dialectized” within the framework of the compensatory conceptions of Human Nature. After analysing this point, we will call attention to the difficulties it implies when approaching the contemporary questions around the Human Being. We will demonstrate the importance of renewing the notion of ‘absence of nature’ that circulates in a certain German line of research on the human, of which the notion of ‘poverty’ postulated by Heidegger will constitute the exemplum. Making use of the interpretation of “poverty” made by M. Blanchot, we will indicate the possibility of reading the absence of nature not as pure negativity but as nondialectizable passivity that affects Man.KEYWORDS POVERTY, PASSIVITY, BLANCHOT, HEIDEGGER, ESPOSITO. (shrink)

The algorithmic theory of laws claims that the laws of nature are the algorithms in the best possible compression of all empirical data. This position assumes that the universe is compressible and that data received from observing it is easily reproducible using a simple set of rules. However, there are three sources of evidence that suggest that the universe as a whole is incompressible. The first comes from the practice of science. The other two come from the nature of the (...) universe itself: the presence of chaotic behavior and the nature of quantum systems also suggests that the universe is incompressible. This paper evaluates these sources and argues that none provides a convincing case to reject the algorithmic theory of laws. (shrink)

It is often said that the best system account of laws needs supplementing with a theory of perfectly natural properties. The ‘strength’ and ‘simplicity’ of a system is language-relative and without a fixed vocabulary it is impossible to compare rival systems. Recently a number of philosophers have attempted to reformulate the BSA in an effort to avoid commitment to natural properties. I assess these proposals and argue that they are problematic as they stand. Nonetheless, I agree with their aim, and (...) show that if simplicity is interpreted as ‘compression’, algorithmic information theory provides a framework for system comparison without the need for natural properties. (shrink)