In ‘Pro-life arguments against infanticide and why they are not convincing’ Joona Räsänen argues that Christopher Kaczor's objections to Giubilini and Minerva's position on infanticide are not persuasive. We argue that Räsänen's criticism is largely misplaced, and that he has not engaged with Kaczor's strongest arguments against infanticide. We reply to each of Räsänen's criticisms, drawing on the full range of Kaczor's arguments, as well as adding some of our own.

Offers a compelling vision of how to achieve and conduct a liberal but democratic society through the ideal of Neutrality--between people and ideas of the good--and using the tool of Neutral dialogue.

I argued in ‘Pro‐life arguments against infanticide and why they are not convincing’ that arguments presented by pro‐life philosophers are mistaken and cannot show infanticide to be immoral. Several scholars have offered responses to my arguments. In this paper, I reply to my critics: Daniel Rodger, Bruce P. Blackshaw and Clinton Wilcox. I also reply to Christopher Kaczor. I argue that pro‐life arguments still are not convincing.

to small scales. Further, it is often useful to describe motor control and sensorimotor coordination in terms of external elds such as force elds and sensory images. We survey the basic concepts of eld computation, including both feed-forward eld operations and eld dynamics resulting from recurrent connections. Adaptive and learning mechanisms are discussed brie y. The application of eld computation to motor control is illustrated by several examples: external force elds associated with spinal neurons, population coding of direction in motor (...) cortex, continuous transformation of direction elds, and linear gain elds and coordinate transformations in posterior parietal cortex. Next we survey some eld-based representations of motion, including direct, Fourier, Gabor and wavelet or multiresolution representations. Finally we consider brie y the application of these representations to constraint satisfaction, which has many applications in motor control. (shrink)

Written for the general reader and the student of moral philosophy, this book provides a clear and unified treatment of Kant's theory of morals. Bruce Aune takes into account all of Kant's principal writings on morality and presents them in a contemporary idiom. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important (...) books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In this book the author examines the stubborn philosophical belief in moral responsibility, surveying the philosophical arguments for it, but focusing on the system that supports these arguments: powerful social and psychological factors that hold the belief in moral responsibility firmly in place.--Publisher's description.

Where Medicine Went Wrong explores how the idea of an average value has been misapplied to medical phenomena, distorted understanding and lead to flawed medical ...

Philosophers writing on the subject of human action have found it tempting to introduce their subject by raising Wittgenstein's question, 'What is left over if you subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?' The presumption is that something of particular interest is involved in an action of raising an arm that is not present in a mere bodily movement, and the philosopher's task is to specify just what this is. Unfortunately, such (...) an approach does not take us very far, since a person could properly be said to raise his (or her) arm while asleep or hypnotized even though he (or she) would not be performing an action in the sense of 'action' with which philosophers are particularly concerned. To avoid this kind of difficulty I shall approach the subject of human action is a more academic way: I shall expound some important rival theories of human action, and introduce the relevant issues by commenting critically on those theories. One of the issues I eventually introduce is a metaphysical one. A theory of action makes sense, I contend, only on the assumption that there are such 'things' as actions (or events). After considering some key arguments bearing on the issue I conclude that, as matters currently stand in philosophy, a metaphysically noncommittal attitude toward actions and events seems justified. (shrink)

Editors provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible.

The Darwinian concept of natural selection was conceived within a set of Newtonian background assumptions about systems dynamics. Mendelian genetics at first did not sit well with the gradualist assumptions of the Darwinian theory. Eventually, however, Mendelism and Darwinism were fused by reformulating natural selection in statistical terms. This reflected a shift to a more probabilistic set of background assumptions based upon Boltzmannian systems dynamics. Recent developments in molecular genetics and paleontology have put pressure on Darwinism once again. Current work (...) on self-organizing systems may provide a stimulus not only for increased problem solving within the Darwinian tradition, especially with respect to origins of life, developmental genetics, phylogenetic pattern, and energy-flow ecology, but for deeper understanding of the very phenomenon of natural selection itself. Since self-organizational phenomena depend deeply on stochastic processes, self-organizational systems dynamics advance the probability revolution. In our view, natural selection is an emergent phenomenon of physical and chemical selection. These developments suggest that natural selection may be grounded in physical law more deeply than is allowed by advocates of the autonomy of biology, while still making it possible to deny, with autonomists, that evolutionary explanations can be modeled in terms of a deductive relationship between laws and cases. We explore the relationship between, chance, self-organization, and selection as sources of order in biological systems in order to make these points. (shrink)

Pascal’s wager uses decision theory to argue that it is rational to attempt to nurture belief in God, based on the expected utility of believing (infinite happiness) compared to not believing (at best, only finite happiness). A belief in an eternal conscious torment in hell (infinite suffering) for non-believers makes the differences in expected utility even more apparent, strengthening the argument. Similar reasoning can also be used to calculate the expected moral value of actions, including procreation. Under theism, if possible (...) future children might suffer eternal conscious torment, the expected moral value of procreation is extremely negative. This implies that theists have a moral obligation not to procreate, which for most theists, entails a moral obligation to be celibate or to undergo sterilisation surgery. (shrink)

Restorative Free Will examines free will as an adaptive capacity that evolved in humans and many other species, and restores free will to species excluded by claims of human uniqueness. Restorative Free Will recognizes the basic biological value of both libertarian and compatibilist elements of free will, and explains how these traditionally opposed accounts of free will capture an essential element of foraging animals' free will.

In the past couple of decades several different accounts of the logic of practical reasoning have been proposed.1 The account I have recommended on a number of occasions is clearly the simplest, because it requires no special logical principles, holding that, in respect of deduction, practical reasoning is adequately understood as involving only standard assertoric principles. My account has recently encountered various objections, the most dismissive of which is that it is too simple to deal with complicated cases of practical (...) inference. I am not daunted by these objections. My aim here is to offer some observations that will make the merits of my account easier to appreciate. (shrink)

The ‘hard problem’ is hard because of the special epistemological status of consciousness, which does not, however, preclude its scientific investigation. Data from phenomenologically trained observers can be combined with neurological investigations to establish the relation between experience and neurodynamics. Although experience cannot be reduced to physical phenomena, parallel phenomenological and neurological analyses allow the structure of experience to be related to the structure of the brain. Such an analysis suggests a theoretical entity, an elementary unit of experience, the protophenomenon, (...) which corresponds to an activity site in the brain. The structure of experience is determined by connections between these activity sites; the connections correspond to temporal patterns among the elementary units of experience, which can be expressed mathematically. This theoretical framework illuminates several issues, including degrees of consciousness, nonbiological consciousness, sensory inversions, unity of consciousness and the unconscious mind. (shrink)

A survey of moral theology from its biblical origins to the eve of the Reformation, demonstrating that Reformed moral sensibilities were received and developed from the greater church tradition.

This essay explores some concerns about the quality of informed consent in patients whose autonomy is diminished by fatal illness. It argues that patients with diminished autonomy cannot give free and voluntary consent, and that recruitment of such patients as subjects in human experimentation exploits their vulnerability in a morally objectionable way. Two options are given to overcome this objection: (i) recruit only those patients who desire to contribute to medical knowledge, rather than gain access to experimental treatment, or (ii) (...) provide prospective subjects the choice to participate in standard doubleblind study or receive the experimental treatment. Either option would guarantee that patients in desperate conditions are given a more meaningful choice and a richer freedom, and thus a higher quality of informed consent, than under standard randomized trials. Keywords: autonomy, double-blind trials, prerandomized and randomized trials, informed consent CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Uses real-life examples and five basic moral principles to encourage teens to make the right choices in various situations related to friends, family, school, and relationships.

Darwinism is defined here as an evolving research tradition based upon the concepts of natural selection acting upon heritable variation articulated via background assumptions about systems dynamics. Darwin’s theory of evolution was developed within a context of the background assumptions of Newtonian systems dynamics. The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, or neo-Darwinism, successfully joined Darwinian selection and Mendelian genetics by developing population genetics informed by background assumptions of Boltzmannian systems dynamics. Currently the Darwinian Research Tradition is changing as it incorporates new information (...) and ideas from molecular biology, paleontology, developmental biology, and systems ecology. This putative expanded and extended synthesis is most perspicuously deployed using background assumptions from complex systems dynamics. Such attempts seek to not only broaden the range of phenomena encompassed by the Darwinian Research Tradition, such as neutral molecular evolution, punctuated equilibrium, as well as developmental biology, and systems ecology more generally, but to also address issues of the emergence of evolutionary novelties as well as of life itself. (shrink)

Two essential elements of free will—internal locus of control and confident self-efficacy—have been studied extensively by psychologists but neglected by philosophers. As a result of this neglect, philosophers have worked with a distorted view of free will. Existentialists exaggerate internal locus of control while undercutting self-efficacy; most contemporary philosophers have taken both internal locus of control and self-efficacy for granted, ignoring their importance and the problems generated by their absence. By taking advantage of psychological research on internal locus of control (...) and self-efficacy, this paper develops a richer and more realistic account of the value of free choice and the real threats to free will. (shrink)