We address a recent proposal concerning ‘surplus structure’ due to Nguyen et al.. We argue that the sense of ‘surplus structure’ captured by their formal criterion is importantly different from—and in a sense, opposite to—another sense of ‘surplus structure’ used by philosophers. We argue that minimizing structure in one sense is generally incompatible with minimizing structure in the other sense. We then show how these distinctions bear on Nguyen et al.’s arguments about Yang-Mills theory and on the hole argument.

The fine-tuning argument can be used to support the Many Universe hypothesis. The Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy objection seeks to undercut the support for the Many Universe hypothesis. The objection is that although the evidence that there is life somewhere confirms Many Universes, the specific evidence that there is life in this universe does not. I will argue that the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy is not committed by the fine-tuning argument. The key issue is the procedure by which the universe with life (...) is selected for observation. Once we take account of the procedure, we find that the support for the Many Universe hypothesis remains. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a recent article, Samir Okasha presented an argument that suggests that there is no rational way to choose among scientific theories. This would seriously undermine the view that science is a rational enterprise. In this article, I show how a suitably nuanced view of what scientific rationality requires allows us to sidestep this argument. In doing so, I present a new argument in favour of voluntarism of the type favoured by van Fraassen. I then show how such a (...) view of scientific rationality gives a precise interpretation of what Thomas Kuhn thought. _1_ Introduction _2_ Okasha’s Argument _3_ Rationality Can Be Silent _4_ Arrow Undermined _5_ The Informational-Basis Escape _6_ Theory Choice at the Level of the Individual Scientist _7_ Kuhn Vindicated _8_ Trade-offs and Partial Commensurability _9_ Conclusion. (shrink)

I insightfully discuss the question: what is pseudoscience?

The independence problems for functionalism stem from the worry that if functional properties are defined in terms of their causes and effects then such functional properties seem to be too intimately connected to these purported causes and effects. I distinguish three different ways the independence problems can be filled out – in terms of necessary connections, analytic connections and vacuous explanations. I argue that none of these present serious problems. Instead, they bring out some important and over-looked features of functionalism.

Over the past decade, a number of accounting and financial reporting frauds have led to lost stock wealth, destroyed public trust, and a worldwide recession that called for necessary reform. Regulatory responses and systemic reforms quickly followed, and we show that, while necessary, these reforms are insufficient. The purpose of this paper is to forward virtuous professionalism as a necessary path toward restoring financial reporting systems. We take the position of external observer and analyze the accounting profession over time to (...) assess what has transpired within our financial reporting systems. Our analysis reveals that the combined influence of commercialism and regulatory response has led to a systemic decline in accounting’s professional ideals and, as a result, an erosion of public trust. We then propose virtuous professionalism as a necessary process for restoring financial reporting systems based on sociological, professional, and philosophical theories. We argue that virtuous professionalism is necessary for restoring the public servant identity of the accounting professional. We conclude that efforts to restore financial reporting systems should begin with reforms that restore professional identity shaped by virtues. (shrink)

This paper investigates the role of conditionals in hypothetical reasoning and rational decision making. Its main result is a proof of a representation theorem for preferences defined on sets of sentences (and, in particular, conditional sentences), where an agent’s preference for one sentence over another is understood to be a preference for receiving the news conveyed by the former. The theorem shows that a rational preference ordering of conditional sentences determines probability and desirability representations of the agent’s degrees of belief (...) and desire that satisfy, in the case of non-conditional sentences, the axioms of Jeffrey’s decision theory and, in the case of conditional sentences, Adams’ expression for the probabilities of conditionals. Furthermore, the probability representation is shown to be unique and the desirability representation unique up to positive linear transformation. (shrink)

I defend Pascal's Wager from a particular way of evading it, the mixed strategy approach. The mixed strategies approach suggests that Pascal's Wager does not obligate one to believe in God, because one can get the same infinite expected utility from other strategies besides the strategy of believing in God. I will show that while there's nothing technically wrong with the mixed strategy approach, rationality requires it to be applied in such a way that Pascal's Wager doesn't lose any force.

Suppose you find yourself in a situation in which you can either save both A and B or save only C. A, B and C are relevantly similar – all are strangers to you, none is more deserving of life than any other, none is responsible for being in a life-threatening situation, and so on. John Taurek argued that when deciding what to do in such a situation, you should flip a coin, thereby giving each of A, B and C (...) a 50% chance of survival . Only by doing this can we treat each person with the appropriate degree of respect. Taurek seemed to be employing the “Equal Greatest Chance” principle , according to which, when deciding whom to save, one must give each person the greatest possible chance of survival consistent with everyone else having the same chance. An obvious alternative is the “Save the Greater Number” principle . I describe an example that shows that EGC is false. I show that the example also demonstrates the falsity of other related views, including Jens Timmermann’s “Individualist Lottery Principle.” I conclude that SGN is true. And I extend the argument to other kinds of cases, showing that which person should be saved may depend on whether some additional well-being may be gained for someone in the process. (shrink)

Corporations and investors are responding to recent major ethical scandals with increased attention to the social impacts of business operations. In turn, business colleges and their international accrediting body are increasing their efforts to make students more aware of the social context of corporate activity. Business education literature lacks data on student attitudes toward such education. This study found that postscandal business students, particularly women, are indeed interested in it. Their interest is positively related to their past donation, volunteerism, and (...) non-profit organization membership activities, whether limited or extensive. Some evidence supports the proposition that education can modify internal principles over time. We offer suggestions for classroom and program uses of these findings in hopes of enriching the vision of future business managers. (shrink)

Diversity of opinion both presents problems and aff ords opportunities. Diff erences of opinion can stand in the way of reaching an agreement within a group on what decisions to take. But at the same time, the fact that the differences in question could derive from access to different information or from the exercise of diff erent judgemental skills means that they present individuals with the opportunity to improve their own opinions. This paper explores the implications for solutions to the (...) former (aggregation) problem of supposing that individuals exploit these opportunities. In particular, it argues that rational individual revision of opinion implies that aggregation problems are unstable in a certain sense and that solving them by exploiting the information embedded in individual opinion has profound implications for the conditions that we should impose on aggregation procedures. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how a solution to Lewis’ problem of temporary intrinsics is also a response to McTaggart’s argument that the A-series is incoherent. There are three strategies Lewis considers for solving the problem of temporary intrinsics: perdurantism, presentism, and property-indexing. William Lane Craig (Analysis 58(2):122–127, 1998) has examined how the three strategies fare with respect to McTaggart’s argument. The only viable solution Lewis considers to the problem of temporary intrinsics that also succeeds against McTaggart, Craig claims, is (...) presentism. This gives us prima facie reason to be presentists. But there is a strategy Craig does not consider-indexing, or relativizing, the copula. In this paper, I show that to the degree that indexing the copula solves the problem of temporary intrinsics, it also shows the invalidity of McTaggart’s argument. The upshot: the copula-indexer needn’t affirm the unreality of time, nor need she embrace presentism. (shrink)

Dominic Lopes proposes that seeing-in admits of kinds. He thus suggests five ways of seeing-in that he feels do justice to the variety of pictorial representations. More recently Dan Cavedon-Taylor has argued that the space of seeing-in marked out by Lopes is incomplete, and thus proposes a sixth kind of seeing-in that fits neatly into the taxonomy. I argue that the phenomenon of seeing-in does not divide in as many ways as Lopes and Cavedon-Taylor propose. I show that the purported (...) cases of pseudo-design seeing do not demonstrate that actual design properties are not experienced and as such these cases can be captured by the other ‘ways of seeing-in’ that Lopes identifies. I also argue against the claim that actualism is a distinct kind of seeing-in. Thus the space of seeing-in ought to be significantly reduced. (shrink)

In thinking the passage from the “all-human cerebrum” to what one might call the contemporary “all-too-human” cerebrum in neo-liberal societies and beyond to the “all-too-transhuman” cerebrum in the cybernetic society, in contrasting Wells’s idea of a new world order with the dystopia of the disordering un-world, in considering the prospects of a “world brain” faced with the realities of the “global mnemotechnical system”, in highlighting the differences between the global and authoritarian instrument of “control” in Wells and the descriptions of (...) the control society by Deleuze, and finally, in critiquing the “unifying of the general intelligence services of the world” in Wells and the capturing of the “general intellect”, this paper maps the contemporary prospects of the “world brain” against the backdrop of the worldweariness of the present. (shrink)

Achieving a high quality of life is dependent upon how individuals face adversity. Positive psychological interventions are well-suited to support coping efforts; however, experimental research is limited. The purpose of the current research was to examine whether different savoring interventions could increase important coping resources in response to a social-evaluative hassle. We completed an experimental mixed subject design study with a university student sample. All participants completed a hassle induction task and were then randomly assigned into different intervention groups. Positive (...) emotion ratings were collected at three points in time. Results revealed a significant time x intervention interaction effect, such that individuals in the savoring the moment intervention reported higher levels of positive emotions compared to individuals assigned to the true control group, guided imagery control group, and savoring through reminiscence intervention. Such findings represent a significant extension to savoring theory and offer support for savoring the moment exercises as a primary prevention strategy to bolster effective responses to social-evaluative hassles. (shrink)

This work examines the rise of postmodernism in management scholarship and argues that the prevalence of postmodernist thought reflects a lack of understanding by management researchers of the core principles upon which Western business endeavour is based. The author highlights postmodernism’s methodological and conceptual failings, such as disbelief in material progress and economic advancement, and its denial of generalizable laws to direct management research. In its place, the author proposes a return to traditional modernist principles in management research, based on (...) scientific evidence. This ground breaking, timely work will spark debate and challenge previously accepted claims of postmodernism, a nice retort to the anti-business/anti-capitalist literature now prevalent in academia. (shrink)

One of the least understood aspects of the world-wide “greening of markets” is the emergence of local “ethical marketplaces” and the subset of alternative business models described as “ethical businesses.” But previous research has demonstrated the ability of local politicians to encourage their regions toward more ethical marketplaces. This paper explores the impact radical centrist third party representation has on the emergence of ethical businesses across Great Britain. To understand this relationship, we utilize a novel data set of organizations with (...) membership in Ethical Junction, the United Kingdom's largest network for ethical businesses. We use a zero-inflated Poisson regression to model the connection, and find a meaningful relationship, between third-party political representation on British local councils and the presence of ethical businesses within local authorities. This presents an example of the way in which radical political change may be part of a wider social movement toward greening markets. (shrink)

Insurers draw on sophisticated models for the probability distributions over losses associated with catastrophic events that are required to price insurance policies. But prevailing pricing methods don’t factor in the ambiguity around model-based projections that derive from the relative paucity of data about extreme events. I argue however that most current theories of decision making under ambiguity only partially support a solution to the challenge that insurance decision makers face and propose an alternative approach that allows for decision making that (...) is responsive to both the evidential situation of the insurance decision maker and their attitude to ambiguity. (shrink)

Case-based reasoning is a familiar method of evaluating sentences. But when applied to conditionals, it seems to lead to implausible conclusions. In this paper I argue that the problem arises from equating the probability of a conditional sentence on the evidential supposition of some condition with the conditional probability of the former, given the latter.

This essay explores a series of sovereign ‘machines’ – slaves, puppets, automata – in political theory from Benjamin to Agamben. It is now well-documented that the philosophical question of ‘the machine’ – of whether a complex system requires a human operator or whether it can function autonomously – is also a crucial political question that haunts every discussion of sovereignty from Hobbes onwards. However, my wager in what follows is that this machine is not just a metaphor for a metaphysical (...) situation – whether it be rationality, bureaucratization, neutralization, historicism or governmentality – but a material phenomenon that carries transformative political promise and threat. To summarize the argument of this essay, I contend that ‘sovereign machines’ like slavery, puppets, automata or clockwork, lens, optics and mirrors (Hobbes, Kantorowicz, Benjamin, Lacan,... (shrink)

The idea of the common good has been a signature feature of Catholic social teaching and so of modern Catholic engagement in public affairs. It has recently been suggested that the notion is now obsolete due to changes in the culture and politics of the West. In keeping with this suggestion, some argue that Catholics should abandon it in favor of an appeal based on lower intermediate goods in a manner more related to Augustine’s engagement with the largely pagan culture (...) of his time than to Aquinas’s categories tailored to an integrally Christian society. I argue that such a solution misreads aspects of the tradition and of the present political and cultural situation and I suggest some alternative grounds on which Catholic engagement with contemporary public life should proceed and that thinking again about the common good is a necessary part of such engagement. (shrink)

Decision theory is concerned with how agents should act when the consequences of their actions are uncertain. The central principle of contemporary decision theory is that the rational choice is the choice that maximizes subjective expected utility. This entry explains what this means, and discusses the philosophical motivations and consequences of the theory. The entry will consider some of the main problems and paradoxes that decision theory faces, and some of responses that can be given. Finally the entry will briefly (...) consider how decision theory applies to choices involving more than one agent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Rhetoric of Philosophical Politics in Plato's Seventh LetterV. Bradley LewisThe name Syracuse has come to stand as an emblem of the problematic relationship between philosophy and politics. While the sources1 differ on specifics, we can be confident that Plato visited there at least three times between 387 and 362 B.C. On his first trip, during the reign of Dionysius I, he became acquainted with Dion, the tyrant's (...) brother-in-law. When the elder Dionysius died, Dion, a devotee of philosophy, apparently contrived for the old man's son, namesake, and successor to invite Plato back, believing that the young tyrant could be philosophically educated and convinced to lay down tyranny in favor of a new regime based on the rule of law. The plan was defeated, however, by a combination of Dionysius's dissolute life and opposition by Dion's enemies at court. Dion was exiled, and Plato returned to the Academy. Dion implored Plato to return to Syracuse on the basis of reports of Dionysius II's renewed resolution to take up philosophy and by the tyrant himself (who seems to have made some thinly veiled threats against the still-exiled Dion). Plato's second visit to Dionysius was no more successful than the first, however, and he considered himself fortunate to have escaped with his life. After a meeting at which Plato recounted the events of his final trip, Dion marshaled an expeditionary force, which included volunteers from the Academy, and set out to expel Dionysius II by violence. The effort succeeded, but the new regime was itself riven by faction, and Dion was assassinated in 353.2The principal legacy of this ill-starred episode is contained in the letters that have come down to us under the name of Plato, particularly those numbered seven and eight. Scholarly discussion of Plato's Seventh Letter has usually focused on three questions: the doctrinal content of the letter and its relationship to the doctrinal content of the dialogues; the character of the letter as an apologia for Plato's Syracusan activities; and the general authenticity of the letter. While the second of these questions focuses correctly [End Page 23] on the rhetorical character of the letter, it ignores the most obvious aspect, namely, the letter's explicit addressees: the friends and comrades of Dion, and their request for political advice. If we take this rhetorical element with sufficient seriousness, we will see that the content of the letter is fully consistent with the teachings of the political dialogues, a point that tells in favor of the authenticity of the letter. Specifically, a focus on the rhetorical character of the letter reveals that its content is determined mostly by what emerges as an effort by Plato to influence his correspondents by moderating their understandable desire for vengeance and thus to forestall further bloodshed and disorder in Syracuse. What is most important about the letter, then, is not so much its account of Plato's actions in Syracuse, but its unveiling of his intentions with respect to Dion's followers. It is not the philosophical-political blueprint, sketched vaguely in the Seventh Letter, that is most important,3 but the concrete effort to mitigate the passions of his correspondents. Read in this light, the letter becomes even more important, since it contradicts the popular image of Plato as a proponent of dangerous political utopianism and portrays a more subtle relationship between philosophy and politics.1. Dion's intentions, Plato's apologyTo the extent that the rhetoric of the letter has been treated, commentators have usually focused on Plato's (or whoever the author) defense of his own actions in Sicily.4 While there is certainly warrant for this approach, the most important fact about the letter concerns its intended audience, the "relatives and comrades of Dion."5 As Plato explains in the opening of the letter, these are the men who have sought not only his advice, but his cooperation in completing the political project halted by Dion's death at the hands of several of his other purported "allies."The most striking feature of the rhetorical structure is that, while the letter... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Classics and the Uses of ReceptionJames Bradley WellsCharles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas, eds. Classics and the Uses of Reception. Classical Receptions. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. xiv + 335 pp. 20 black-and-white figs. Paper, $36.95.Passion and parrhesia characterize this collection of twenty-three essays on applications of reception theory and practice to classical studies. Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas originally conceived of this project as an invitation to (...) "wider debate about the uses of reception within classics" (2). This volume is the product of an admirably collaborative process, which did not serve to put contributors on message with any particular ideological or theoretical stance but created a forum for sustained dialogue, a sort of salon whose doors are now open to broader participation. Classics and the Uses of Reception throws down challenges to conventional ways of thinking about texts, history, modes of perception, and styles of analysis; this willingness to take a stand gives the collection its passionate quality.Some authors speak to the capacity that reception has for enabling classics to join the fray of contemporary intellectual life with more commitment and to become more attractive to today's students. The essays are intensely self-reflexive and practice a confrontational parrhesia that dismantles assumptions, admits its faults, and prefers open-endedness to gift-wrapped conclusions. This book is a provocation, not a primer, even if there are many fine illustrations of what reception theory and practice look like—and it is not a point of entry for research on, say, pastoral poetry, Sophocles' Antigone, or the Venus de Milo. Prospective readers who hope to find here the footing necessary to make their own receptionalist forays will still need to read their Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, although many essays do describe the intellectual genealogy of reception, both in its theoretical dimensions and in terms of particular topics in classical studies. These topics are appealingly diverse.Diverse too—or divergent in this case?—are the rhetorical strategies of the essays in the collection. In addition to authors who conform to the generic parameters of the expository essay, some authors adopt an insistently centrifugal style that replicates the openendedness of the point of reception, the moment of interaction between a text and its interlocutor. I get that, but I had trouble with the essays that read like theory interloping. I use theory and savor the specificity [End Page 135] of definition, the hyperqualification of thought aspiring to exactitude sans simplicity for its own sake, and complex sentence structure that is a reflex of the ideas it conveys, so if I locate some of the essays in this collection on the spectrum of, at one end, stupefying displays of jargon, and, at the other, postmodern-cute, we are talking about the alienation of an interested reader. In what follows, I summarize, necessarily crudely, the contents of the twenty-three essays in Classics and the Uses of Reception.The first two essays, Martindale's "Introduction: Thinking Though Reception" (1–13) and William W. Batstone's "Provocation: The Point of Reception Theory" (14–20), preface the two sections of the book, "Part I: Reception in Theory" and "Part II: Studies in Reception." A core thread in Classics and the Uses of Reception is the problem of history, which Martindale weighs vis-à-vis reception specifically as it pertains to classics. In light of key tenets of reception theory—first, that meaning is situated but not instantiated and, second, that meaning is a product of the dialogue that emerges in the interface of two horizons of expectations, that of the classical text, broadly conceived to include all communicative media, and that of the reader—reception in classics offers the prospect of retooling how the discipline approaches history so that classicists might more rigorously disclose present dimensions of their encounters with antiquity. Batstone's essay addresses a danger to which virtually any methodology is susceptible: to command an analytical vista impervious to the hints—indeed, responsibility to acknowledge—that what we see has something to do with us. Easing over a palette of thinkers that includes Kristeva, Gadamer, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, and Freud, Batstone's discussion of subjectivity and... (shrink)

This paper argues that God is not logically able to condemn a person to Hell by considering what is entailed by accepting the best argument to the contrary, the so-called free will defense expounded by Christian apologists Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig. It argues that the free will defense is logically fallacious, involves a philosophical fiction, and is based on a fraudulent account of Scripture, concluding that the problem of postmortem evil puts would-be believers in a logical and moral (...) straightjacket from which there is no escape without heresy or contradiction. -/- 1. Imagining an Afterlife in Hell -- 2. Essential Doctrines of Christianity -- 3. The Logical Puzzle Involved -- 4. Plumbing the Depths of Christian Doctrine a Little - 4.1 Christianity’s Commitment to Theism - 4.1.1 God’s Omnipotence - 4.1.2 God’s Omniscience - 4.1.3 God’s Omnibenevolence (Moral Perfection) - 4.2 The Doctrines of Salvation and Damnation - 4.2.1 Salvation and Heaven - 4.2.2 Damnation and Hell - 4.2.3 The Inhabitants of Hell – 5. The Issue of Inconsistency Again - 5.1 The Missing Concept of Responsibility - 5.2 God’s Responsibility for Evil in General - 5.3 The Charge of Inconsistency Reinforced -- 6. The Christian Cross: A Logical Straightjacket -- 7. The Art of Apologetics -- 8. Craig’s Apologetics - 8.1 Craig’s Purported Proof of Consistency - 8.1.1 A Problem with the Entailment Condition - 8.1.2 A Problem with the Consistency Condition - 8.1.3 Is Craig’s Optimal World the Best God Could Create? - 8.1.4 A Heavenly Refutation - 8.1.5 “Heaven Isn’t a Possible World” - 8.1.6 “Heaven Isn’t a Feasible World” -- 9. Free Will, Foreknowledge, and Predestination - 9.1 Compatibilist versus Incompatibilist Meanings of “Free Will” - 9.2 Free Will, Predestination, and Being Sent to Hell - 9.3 Consequences of Being Predestined to Hell -- 10. Summary. (shrink)

This dissertation interprets the lack of uniqueness in probability representations of agents' degrees of belief in the decision theory of Richard Jeffrey as a formal statement of an important epistemological problem: the underdetermination of our attributions of belief and desire to agents by the evidence of their observed behaviour. A solution is pursued through investigation of agents' attitudes to information of a conditional nature. ;As a first step, Jeffrey's theory is extended to agents' conditional attitudes of belief and desire by (...) introduction of a definition of conditional desirability. The second step is an analysis of agents' attitudes to conditionals. Following Adams it is argued that the probability of a conditional is the conditional probability of its consequent given the antecedent. Since numerous 'trivialization' results show that no proposition could be such that this were the case, it is proposed that conditionals express a variable proposition as a function of the context in which they are asserted. The consequent technical treatment of conditionals as proposition-valued functions of sets of possible worlds delivers Adams' thesis as a natural consequence without fear of trivialization. ;Conditionals are the underlying objects of the decision theory that is presented in the final chapter. A representation theorem is proven for preferences defined over sets of such conditionals satisfying certain closure conditions, where an agent is understood to prefer one conditional over another just in case she prefers that the former by true rather than the latter. The theorem establishes that a rational preference ranking of conditionals implies the existence of a unique probability function and a desirability function unique up to choice of scale, that agree with the preference ranking, and that these functions satisfy both the axioms of Jeffrey's decision calculus and Adams' thesis. The theorem is interpreted as saying that elicitation of an agent's choices amongst conditional options suffices to determine our attributions of belief and desire to them. (shrink)

I raise some problems for David Deutsch's (2016) attempt to develop a confirmation theory for branching worlds.

In this paper I defend the view that positing analytic, constitutive connections among concepts best explains certain semantic-cum-conceptual intuitions. Jerry Fodor and Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence offer alternative explanations according to which such intuitions can be explained without positing analyticities. I argue that these alternative explanations fail. As a partial diagnosis of their failure, I suggest that critics have failed to recognize the extent to which a psychologized notion of analyticity must depart from the traditional notion of ‘truth in (...) virtue of meaning alone’. (shrink)

Although most cogently formulated by philosophers such as St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), al Ghazali (1058-1111), and Gottfried Leibniz (1646- 1716), cosmological arguments have a powerful appeal also to those nonphilosophers who feel that the "ultimate" explanation for the existence of the natural universe is that it was created by some sort of supernatural entity, viz., God.

The present study, grounded in gender schema theory, employed a posttest experimental design to examine how television might influence girls’ perceptions of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Girls (6-9 years old) were either exposed to stereotypical or counter-stereotypical STEM female television characters. In a posttest following exposure, girls reported math and science self-efficacy, preference for STEM and stereotypical careers, and perceptions of scientists’ gender using the draw-a-scientist procedure. Girls in the stereotype condition reported more interest in stereotypical careers and (...) were more likely to perceive scientists as males than girls in the counter-stereotype STEM condition or a no exposure control. Girls in the counter-stereotype STEM condition did not differ from the no exposure control in any of the dependent variables. Results suggest that onetime exposure to televised stereotypes may activate existing gender schema, but that onetime exposure to televised counter-stereotypes may not have the capacity to alter girls’ STEM schema. (shrink)

In the Dialogues Hume attaches great importance to an objection to the design argument which states, negatively, that from phenomena which embody evil as well as good there can be no analogical inference to the morally perfect deity of traditional theism and, positively, that the proper conclusion as regards moral character is an indifferent designer. The first section of this paper sets out Hume's points, and the next three offer an updating of Hume's objection which will apply to Swinburne's Bayesian (...) form of the design argument. The final section concludes that Hume's objection, suitably developed, holds against most of the main theistic arguments, even in their Bayesian form. (shrink)