And faster growth must be seen to improve opportunities for the population as a whole. Further, setting out the evidence--as this book does for Scotland--is vital to overcoming entrenched institutional barriers to policy reform.

Historically, laws and policies to criminalize drug use or possession were rooted in explicit racism, and they continue to wreak havoc on certain racialized communities. We are a group of bioethicists, drug experts, legal scholars, criminal justice researchers, sociologists, psychologists, and other allied professionals who have come together in support of a policy proposal that is evidence-based and ethically recommended. We call for the immediate decriminalization of all so-called recreational drugs and, ultimately, for their timely and appropriate legal regulation. We (...) also call for criminal convictions for nonviolent offenses pertaining to the use or possession of small quantities of such drugs to be expunged, and for those currently serving time for these offenses to be released. In effect, we call for an end to the “war on drugs.”. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of social groups. I argue against prominent views that attempt to unify all social groups or to divide them into simple typologies. Instead I argue that social groups are enormously diverse, but show how we can investigate their natures nonetheless. I analyze social groups from a bottom-up perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. We can characterize any given kind of social group with (...) four complementary profiles: its “construction” profile, its “extra essentials” profile, its “anchor” profile, and its “accident” profile. Together these provide a framework for understanding the nature of groups, help classify and categorize groups, and shed light on group agency. (shrink)

Epistemology orthodoxy is a purist one in the sense that it separates out the epistemic from the practical. What counts as evidence is independent of what we care about. Which beliefs count as justified and which count as knowledge are independent of our practical concerns. In recent years, many epistemologists have abandoned such purist views and embraced varying degrees of pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic. I survey a variety of these views and explore the main arguments that proponents of pragmatic (...) encroachment have offered in addition to the main criticisms of the pragmatic approach. (shrink)

Queen Mary, University of London, School of Law, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK. Tel: +442078825126, Fax: +442089818733, Email: r.ashcroft{at}qmul.ac.uk ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Recent doctrine in both national and international organisations concerned with public health planning and resource allocation has it that direct ethical justification of substantive decisions is so difficult as to be impossible. Instead, we should agree on criteria of procedural justice and reach decisions whose justification lies in (...) how they are arrived at, rather than any direct ethical justification on the ground of substantive moral principles. In this polemical article, I argue that this amounts to a serious dereliction of intellectual duty on the part of the bioethics community. Our role in these settings is to produce and defend the best substantive arguments we can. Failing to do this makes bioethicists at best redundant and at worst leads us to seriously defective conclusions. The argument is illustrated by analysis of the ethical frameworks for resource allocation under the UNAIDS ‘3 by 5’ programme and for pandemic influenza planning. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

It has been argued recently that dogmatism in epistemology is incompatible with Bayesianism. That is, it has been argued that dogmatism cannot be modelled using traditional techniques for Bayesian modelling. I argue that our response to this should not be to throw out dogmatism, but to develop better modelling techniques. I sketch a model for formal learning in which an agent can discover a posteriori fundamental epistemic connections. In this model, there is no formal objection to dogmatism.

In recent years, the effective altruism movement has generated much discussion about the ways in which we can most effectively improve the lives of the global poor, and pursue other morally important goals. One of the most common criticisms of the movement is that it has unjustifiably neglected issues related to institutional change that could address the root causes of poverty, and instead focused its attention on encouraging individuals to direct resources to organizations that directly aid people living in poverty. (...) In this article, I discuss and assess this ‘institutional critique’. I argue that if we understand the core commitments of effective altruism in a way that is suggested by much of the work of its proponents, and also independently plausible, there is no way to understand the institutional critique such that it represents a view that is both independently plausible and inconsistent with the core commitments of effective altruism. (shrink)

Intelligent activity requires the use of various intellectual skills. While these skills are connected to knowledge, they should not be identified with knowledge. There are realistic examples where the skills in question come apart from knowledge. That is, there are realistic cases of knowledge without skill, and of skill without knowledge. Whether a person is intelligent depends, in part, on whether they have these skills. Whether a particular action is intelligent depends, in part, on whether it was produced by an (...) exercise of skill. These claims promote a picture of intelligence that is in tension with a strongly intellectualist picture, though they are not in tension with a number of prominent claims recently made by intellectualists. (shrink)

The nature of measurement is a topic of central concern in the philosophy of science and, indeed, measurement is the essential link between science and mathematics. Professor Ellis's book, originally published in 1966, is the first general exposition of the philosophical and logical principles involved in measurement since N. R. Campbell's Principles of Measurement and Calculation, and P. W. Bridgman's Dimensional Analysis. Professor Ellis writes from an empiricist standpoint. His object is to distinguish and define the basic concepts in measurement, (...) for example: scale, quantity, unit. dimension, number and probability. He discusses the problem of classifying scales of measurement and the special logical problems associated with each kind of scale. A translation of mach's Critique on the Concept of Temperature, which gives his views on the nature of measurement more fully than in any of his other works, is given as an appendix. (shrink)

How ought we differentiate the senses? What, say, distinguishes vision from audition? The question comes in two versions. First, there is the traditional problem of individuating the senses in humans. Second, there is also an important question about what sensory modalities we ought to attribute to non-human animals, a version of the question that has been virtually ignored by philosophers. Modality ought to be construed as an “avenue into” an organism for information external to the central nervous system. Six proposed (...) criteria found in the philosophical literature concerning the senses are reviewed. Initially, four criteria—physics, neurobiology, behavior, and evolutionary or developmental dedication—are shown to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient. Next, two criteria—Aristotle's proper objects of sensation criterion and Grice's sensation or qualia criterion—are considered and rejected. One overarching goal here is to show that there is interesting contemporary work left to be done on this ancient philosophical question. (shrink)

It is common for moral philosophers to reject a moral theory on the basis that its verdicts are unreasonably demanding—it requires too much of us to be a correct account of our moral obligations. Even though such objections frequently strike us as convincing, they give rise to two challenges: Are demandingness objections really independent of other objections to moral theories? Do standard demandingness objections not presuppose that costs borne by the comfortably off are more important than costs borne by the (...) poor? These challenges have led some writers to question whether there really can be convincing demandingness objections, notwithstanding their strong initial appeal. David Sobel has argued that standard demandingness objections are ‘impotent’, Liam Murphy that they can be ‘dissolved’. In this paper, I aim to vindicate the possibility of demandingness objections by addressing these two challenges. (shrink)

"John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has been widely acclaimed as a book whose influence on the discussion of central questions in moral and political philosophy will be permanent. A brief review, writes Dr. Barry, would be of little more value than would be a brief review of Hobbes's Leviathan; instead, in this book he interprets Rawls's main tenets and discusses them with appropriate thoroughness. The book is in three parts. Chapters 1-5 set Rawls's theory in its intellectual context and (...) give an account of its basic features. Chapters 6-11 examine Rawls's claim to have advanced 'two principles of justice' and provided a logical deduction of them by showing that men denied various kinds of information about themselves and their society would choose them as the most rational way of advancing their 'conception of the good'. Chapters 12-15 extend the discussion to cover the most important of Rawls's economic and political deductions. Dr. Barry's argument is that Rawls's 'theory of justice' does not work; but that A Theory of Justice is nonetheless a work with which 'anyone in future who proposes to deal with any of the topics it touches must first come to terms'. His critique may be read either in conjunction with A Theory of Justice (there is a concordance of passages discussed) or independently of it." -- Backcover. (shrink)

This paper defends a non-reductive realist view of the sensible qualities—roughly, the view that the sensible qualities are really instantiated by the external objects of perception, and not reducible to response-independent physical properties or response-dependent relational properties. I begin by clarifying and motivating the non-reductive realist view. I then consider some familiar difficulties for the view. Addressing these difficulties leads to the development and defence of a general theory, inspired by Russellian Monist theories of consciousness, of how the sensible qualities (...) relate to physical reality. I conclude by showing how this theory, which I call ‘Secondary Quality Russellian Monism’, resolves the most significant difficulties for the non-reductive realist view of the sensible qualities. (shrink)

Accuracy‐first epistemology is an approach to formal epistemology which takes accuracy to be a measure of epistemic utility and attempts to vindicate norms of epistemic rationality by showing how conformity with them is beneficial. If accuracy‐first epistemology can actually vindicate any epistemic norms, it must adopt a plausible account of epistemic value. Any such account must avoid the epistemic version of Derek Parfit's “repugnant conclusion.” I argue that the only plausible way of doing so is to say that accurate credences (...) in certain propositions have no, or almost no, epistemic value. I prove that this is incompatible with standard accuracy‐first arguments for probabilism, and argue that there is no way for accuracy‐first epistemology to show that all credences of all agents should be coherent. (shrink)

Introduction. Activist philosophy and the occurrent arts -- The ether and your anger toward a speculative pragmatism -- The thinking-feeling of what happens putting the radical back in empiricism -- The diagram as technique of existence ovum of the universe segmented -- Arts of experience, politics of expression In four movements. First movement. To dance a storm -- Second movement. Life unlimited -- Third movement. The paradox of content -- Fourth movement. Composing the political.

It is widely maintained that a clinical trial is ethical only if some form of equipoise between the treatments being compared obtains. To be in equipoise between two treatments A and B is to be cognitively indifferent between the statement ‘A is strictly more effective than B’ and its negation. It is natural to claim that equipoise regarding A and B is necessary for randomised assignment to treatments A and B to be beneficent and non‐maleficent and is sufficient for such (...) an assignment to be fair. Cashing this out precisely is difficult, and various forms of equipoise have been discussed which consider whose equipoise is relevant to the decision. This is to make judgement of equipoise something to be managed socially, while its prima facie significance is supposedly cognitive. Recent reconstructions of equipoise‐like concepts in epistemology give clues about how to understand equipoise cognitively. In this paper I examine some of this work and discuss how successful it has been. I suggest that while this work is promising, it still has far to go, and that while equipoise remains the best theory we have of the cognitive justification for clinical trials, it is nonetheless incoherent. (shrink)

Evidence based medicine has been a topic of considerable controversy in medical and health care circles over its short lifetime, because of the claims made by its exponents about the criteria used to assess the evidence for or against the effectiveness of medical interventions. The central epistemological debates underpinning the debates about evidence based medicine are reviewed by this paper, and some areas are suggested where further work remains to be done. In particular, further work is needed on the theory (...) of evidence and inference; causation and correlation; clinical judgment and collective knowledge; the structure of medical theory; and the nature of clinical effectiveness. (shrink)

Latin models of the Trinity begin from the existence of one God, and try to explain how one God can be three Persons. I offer an account of this based on an analogy with time-travel. A time-traveler returning to the same point in time repeatedly might have three successive events in his/her life occurring at that one location in public time. So too, God’s life might be such that three distinct parts of His life are always occurring at once, though (...) without any succession between them, and this might give God the triune structure Christian theology believes He has. (shrink)

A common view relating compositional semantics and the objects of assertion holds the following: Sentences φ and ψ expresses the same proposition iff φ and ψ have the same modal profile. Following Dummett, Evans, and Lewis, Stanley argues that this view is fundamentally mistaken. According to Dummett, we must distinguish the semantic contribution a sentence makes to more complex expressions in which it occurs from its assertoric content. Stojnić insists that views which distinguish the roles of content and semantic value (...) must nevertheless ensure a tight connection between the two. But, she contends, there is a crucial disanalogy between the views that follow Lewis and the views that follow Dummett. Stanley’s Dummettian view is argued to contain a fatal flaw: On such views, there is no way to secure an appropriate connection between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. I will review the background issues from Dummett, Evans, Lewis, and Stanley, and provide a principled way of bridging the gap between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

As anyone who has flown out of a cloud knows, the boundaries of a cloud are a lot less sharp up close than they can appear on the ground. Even when it seems clearly true that there is one, sharply bounded, cloud up there, really there are thousands of water droplets that are neither determinately part of the cloud, nor determinately outside it. Consider any object that consists of the core of the cloud, plus an arbitrary selection of these droplets. (...) It will look like a cloud, and circumstances permitting rain like a cloud, and generally has as good a claim to be a cloud as any other object in that part of the sky. But we cannot say every such object is a cloud, else there would be millions of clouds where it seemed like there was one. And what holds for clouds holds for anything whose boundaries look less clear the closer you look at it. And that includes just about every kind of object we normally think about, including humans. Although this seems to be a merely technical puzzle, even a triviality, a surprising range of proposed solutions has emerged, many of them mutually inconsistent. It is not even settled whether a solution should come from metaphysics, or from philosophy of language, or from logic. Here we survey the options, and provide several links to the many topics related to the Problem. (shrink)

In this review of Leon Kass’s Life, liberty and the defense of dignity and Deryck Beyleveld and Roger Brownsword’s Human dignity in bioethics and biolaw. I consider the prospects for a theory of dignity as a basis for bioethics research. I argue that dignity theories are worth exploring in more detail, but that research needs to consider both “antitheory” accounts of the language of bioethics, and to give more weight to accounts of dignity as an outcome of holding positive liberties (...) and as something that has a psychological dimension. (shrink)

Before Duns Scotus, most philosophers agreed that God is identical with His necessary intrinsic attributes--omnipotence, omniscience, etc. This Identity Thesis was a component of widely held doctrines of divine simplicity, which stated that God exemplifies no metaphysical distinctions, including that between subject and attribute. The Identity Thesis seems to render God an attribute, an abstract object. This paper shows that the Identity Thesis follows from a basic theistic belief and does not render God abstract. If also discusses how one might (...) move from the Identity Thesis to the full doctrine of divine simplicity and shows that the Identity Thesis generates a new ontological argument. (shrink)

In his original paper of 1905, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", Einstein described a procedure for synchronizing distant clocks at rest in any inertial system K. Clocks thus synchronized may be said to be in standard signal synchrony in K. It has often been claimed that there are no logical or physical reasons for preferring standard signal synchronizations to any of a range of possible non-standard ones. In this paper, the range of consistent non-standard signal synchronizations, first for any (...) one inertial system, and second for any set of such systems, is investigated, and it is shown that the requirement of consistency leaves much less room for choice than is commonly supposed. Nevertheless consistent non-standard signal synchronizations appear to be possible. However, it is also shown that good physical reasons for preferring standard signal synchronizations exist, if the Special Theory of Relativity yields correct predictions. The thesis of the conventionality of distant simultaneity espoused particularly by Reichenbach and Grunbaum is thus either trivialized or refuted. (shrink)

Clinical trials and other forms of evaluation of medical treatment are held to give an objective assessment of the ‘clinical effectiveness’ of the medical treatments under evaluation. This kind of evaluation is central to the evidence-based medicine movement, as it provides a basis for the rational selection of treatment. The ethical status of randomised clinical trials is widely agreed to depend crucially upon the state of equipoise regarding which of two (or more) treatments is more (or most) effective in a (...) defined population. However, the meaning and nature of ‘clinical effectiveness’ are unclear. in this paper, I discuss the proposals to define clinical effectiveness as a relational property and as an intrinsic property, and the way effectiveness may supervene upon more fundamental physical properties of treatments. I discuss whether effectiveness is a single property or a family of properties; the types of outcome which can be explained by effectiveness properties; and the relationship between ‘objective’ and ‘preference’ outcomes. This paper suggests that while it may be possible to put clinical effectiveness on a proper metaphysical footing, in practice the language of clinical effectiveness is more properly a topic of the human sciences than of the natural sciences. (shrink)

Vagueness as Indeterminacy. I defend the traditional view that a vague term is one with an indeterminate denotation from a bevy of recent challenges.

The view that phenomenally conscious robots are on the horizon often rests on a certain philosophical view about consciousness, one we call “nomological behaviorism.” The view entails that, as a matter of nomological necessity, if a robot had exactly the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as a phenomenally conscious being, then the robot would be phenomenally conscious; indeed it would have all and only the states of phenomenal consciousness that the phenomenally conscious being in question has. We experimentally (...) investigate whether the folk think that certain (hypothetical) robots made of silicon and steel would have the same conscious states as certain familiar biological beings with the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as the robots. Our findings provide evidence that the folk largely reject the view that silicon-based robots would have the sensations that they, the folk, attribute to the biological beings in question. (shrink)

This article argues that, in public and policy contexts, the ways in which many scientists talk about uncertainty in simulations of future climate change not only facilitates communications and cooperation between scientific and policy communities but also affects the perceived authority of science. Uncertainty tends to challenge the authority of chmate science, especially if it is used for policy making, but the relationship between authority and uncertainty is not simply an inverse one. In policy contexts, many scientists are compelled to (...) talk about uncertainty but do not wish to imply that uncertainty is a serious challenge to the authority of scientific knowledge or to its substantial use in policy making. "Boundary-ordering devices, " the contextual discursive attempts to reconcile uncertainty and authority in science, depend critically for their success on their "dual" interpretation: at a general level across a boundary and differently on either side of it. The authors empirically identify a range of such boundary-ordering devices in the climate field. (shrink)

Nietzsche is one of the most important and controversial thinkers in the history of philosophy. His writings on moral philosophy are amongst the most widely read works, both by philosophers and non-philosophers. Many of the ideas raised are both startling and disturbing, and have been the source of great contention. On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most sustained and important contribution to moral philosophy, featuring many of the ideas for which he is best known, including the slave revolt in (...) morals; will to power; genealogy; and perspectivism. The Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Nietzsche on Morality introduces the reader to these and other important Nietzschean themes patiently and clearly. It is the first book to examine the work in such a way, and will be a vital point of reference for any Nietzsche scholar, and essential reading for students coming to Nietzsche for the first time. (shrink)

Edited by four leading members of the new generation of medical and healthcare ethicists working in the UK, respected worldwide for their work in medical ethics, Principles of Health Care Ethics, Second Edition_is a standard resource for students, professionals, and academics wishing to understand current and future issues in healthcare ethics. With a distinguished international panel of contributors working at the leading edge of academia, this volume presents a comprehensive guide to the field, with state of the art introductions to (...) the wide range of topics in modern healthcare ethics, from consent to human rights, from utilitarianism to feminism, from the doctor-patient relationship to xenotransplantation. This volume is the Second Edition of the highly successful work edited by Professor Raanan Gillon, Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics at Imperial College London and former editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, the leading journal in this field. Developments from the First Edition include:_ The focus on ‘Four Principles Method’ is relaxed to cover more different methods in health care ethics. More material on new medical technologies is included, the coverage of issues on the doctor/patient relationship is expanded, and material on ethics and public health is brought together into a new section. (shrink)

The book deepens our understanding of Arendt's conception of the role of violence in her political theory. But it also uses her work as a provocation to think about how we might engage with, build on, or criticize contemporary ideas of the political that have drawn on Arendtian themes-notably via the notion of "agonal" or "agonistic" politics as theorized in recent years by thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe and Bonnie Honig-and how we can read Arendt in different ways to challenge (...) or further our understanding of the political. (shrink)

Things we can say, and the ways in which we can say them, compete with one another. And this has consequences: words we decide not to pronounce have critical effects on the messages we end up conveying. For instance, in saying Chris is a good teacher, we may convey that Chris is not an amazing teacher. How this happens is an unsolvable problem, unless a theory of alternatives indicates what counts, among all the things that have not been pronounced. It (...) is sometimes assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that any word counts, as long as that word could have replaced one that was actually pronounced. We review arguments for going beyond this powerful idea. In doing so, we argue that the level of words is not the right level of analysis for alternatives. Instead, we capitalize on recent conceptual and associated methodological advances within the study of the so-called “language of thought” to reopen the problem from a new perspective. Specifically, we provide theoretical and experimental arguments that the relation between alternatives and words may be indirect, and that alternatives are not merely linguistic objects in the traditional sense. Rather, we propose that competition in language is significantly determined by general reasoning preferences, or thought preferences. We propose that such non-linguistic preferences can be measured and that these measures can be used to explain linguistic competition, non-linguistically, and more in depth. (shrink)

I display the historical roots of perfect being theology in Greco-Roman philosophy, and the distinctive reasons for Christians to take up a version of this project. I also rebut a recent argument that perfect-being reasoning should lead one to atheism.

Individualists about social ontology hold that social facts are “built out of” facts about individuals. In this paper, I argue that there are two distinct kinds of individualism about social ontology, two different ways individual people might be the metaphysical “builders” of the social world. The familiar kind is ontological individualism. This is the thesis that social facts supervene on, or are exhaustively grounded by, facts about individual people. What I call anchor individualism is the alternative thesis that facts about (...) individuals put in place the conditions for a social entity to exist, or the conditions for something to have a social property. Examples include conventionalist theories of the social world, such as David Hume’s theories of promises, money, and government, and collective acceptance theories, such as John Searle’s theory of institutional facts. Anchor individualism is often conflated with ontological individualism. But in fact, the two theses are in tension with one another: if one of these kinds of individualism is true, then the other is very unlikely to be. My aim in this paper is to clarify both, and argue that they should be sharply distinguished from one another. (shrink)

Kant's notion of ‘discipline’ has received considerable attention from scholars of his philosophy of education, but its role in his theoretical philosophy has been largely ignored. This omission is surprising since his discussion of discipline in the first Critique is not only more extensive and expansive in scope than his other discussions but also predates them. The goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive reading of the Discipline that emphasizes its systematic importance in the first Critique. I argue (...) that its goal is to establish a set of rules for the use of pure reason that, if followed, will mitigate and perhaps even eliminate our tendency to make judgments about supersensible objects. Since Kant's justification for these rules relies crucially on claims he has defended in the Doctrine of Elements, I argue further that, far from being a dispensable part of the Critique as commentators have tended to claim, the Discipline is, in fact, the culmination of Kant's critique of metaphysics. (shrink)