In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle examines the nature of happiness, which he defines as a specially good kind of life. He considers the nature of practical reasoning, friendship, and the role and importance of the moral virtues in the best life. This new edition features a revised translation and valuable new introduction and notes.

A letter replying to Bayne et al. "Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond", 2024, arguing that the search for consciousness "beyond" healthy adult humans should begin with other animals.

Although parents are the default legal surrogate decision-makers for minor children in the U.S., shared decision making in a pluralistic society is often much more complicated, involving not just parents and pediatricians, but also grandparents, other relatives, and even community or religious elders. Parents may not only choose to involve others in their children’s healthcare decisions but choose to defer to another; such deference does not imply agreement with the decision being made and adds complexity when disagreements arise between surrogate (...) decision-makers for minor children and their physicians. I argue that clinicians and ethicists have a duty to consider voices marginalized by hierarchical structures, including but not limited to gender-based inequalities. This approach involves negotiating potential conflicts: between respecting differences of culture and religion, on one hand, and assuring that the wishes of those who are most invested in children’s lives are considered, on the other. (shrink)

Motivational trade-off behaviours, where an organism behaves as if flexibly weighing up an opportunity for reward against a risk of injury, are often regarded as evidence that the organism has valenced experiences like pain. This type of evidence has been influential in shifting opinion regarding crabs and insects. Critics note that (i) the precise links between trade-offs and consciousness are not fully known; (ii) simple trade-offs are evinced by the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, mediated by a mechanism plausibly too simple (...) to support conscious experience; (iii) pain can sometimes interfere with rather than support making trade-offs rationally. However, rather than undermining trade-off evidence in general, such cases show that the nature of the trade-off, and its underlying neural substrate, matter. We investigate precisely how. (shrink)

Illusionists and a posteriori physicalists agree entirely on the metaphysical nature of reality — that all concrete entities are composed of fundamental physical entities. Despite this basic agreement on metaphysics, illusionists hold that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, whereas a posteriori physicalists hold that it does. One explanation for this disagreement would be that either the illusionists have too demanding a view about what consciousness requires, or the a posteriori physicalists have too tolerant a view. However, we will argue that (...) this divergence of opinion is merely an upshot of the semantic indeterminacy of the term 'conscious' and its cognates. We shall back up this diagnosis by showing how semantic indeterminacy of the kind in question is a pervasive feature of language. By illustrating this pattern with a range of historical examples, we shall show how the dispute between the illusionists and a posteriori physicalists is one instance of a common kind of terminological imprecision. The disagreement between them is thus not substantial. In effect, the two sides differ only about how to make an indeterminate term precise. The moral is that they should stop looking for arguments designed to settle the dispute in their favour. (shrink)

In this article, we outline a novel approach to understanding the role of responsibility in health promotion. Efforts to tackle chronic disease have led to an emphasis on personal responsibility and the identification of ways in which people can ‘take responsibility’ for their health by avoiding risk factors such as smoking and over-eating. We argue that the extent to which agents can be considered responsible for their health-related behaviour is limited, and as such, state health promotion which assumes certain forms (...) of moral responsibility should be avoided. This indicates that some approaches to health promotion ought not to be employed. We suggest, however, that another form of responsibility might be more appropriately identified. This is based on the claim that agents have prudential reasons to maintain their health, in order to pursue those things which make their lives go well—i.e. that maintenance of a certain level of health is rational for many agents, given their pleasures and plans. On this basis, we propose that agents have a self-regarding prudential responsibility to maintain their health. We outline the implications of a prudential responsibility approach to health promotion. (shrink)

In a recent contribution to conceptual ethics, Joshua Habgood-Coote argues that philosophers should refrain from using the term “fake news,” which is commonly employed in public discussions focusing on the epistemic health of democracies. In this short discussion note, I take issue with this claim, discussing each of the three arguments advanced by Coote to support the conclusion that we should abandon this concept. First, I contend that although “fake news” is a contested concept, there is significant agreement among contemporary (...) philosophers about its key feature. Second, I argue against the claim that “fake news” is an unnecessary concept by underlying that it is not reducible to other terms we customarily use to describe the epistemic dysfunctions of democracies. Lastly, I suggest that using the term “fake news” need not serve propagandistic aims, and that philosophers can use this concept without engaging in epistemic policing, that is, commanding their interlocutors not to believe specific news stories or sources. (shrink)

Should we allow grave harm to befall one individual so as to prevent minor harms befalling sufficiently many other individuals? This is a question of aggregation. Can many small harms ‘add up’, so that, collectively, they morally outweigh a greater harm? The ‘Close Enough View’ supports a moderate position: aggregation is permissible when, and only when, the conflicting harms are sufficiently similar, or ‘close enough’, to each other. This paper surveys a range of formally precise interpretations of this view, and (...) reveals some of the problems they face. It also proposes a novel interpretation which avoids these problems. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a new account of rigorous mathematical proof and its epistemology. One novel feature is a focus on how the skill of reading and writing valid proofs is learnt, as a way of understanding what validity itself amounts to. The account is used to address two current questions in the literature: that of how mathematicians are so good at resolving disputes about validity, and that of whether rigorous proofs are necessarily formalizable.

This paper examines the prospects for an expressivist theory of prudential thought and discussion, or thought and discussion about what is good for us or what makes our lives go well. It is becoming increasingly common to view prudential thought and discussion as a kind of normative thought and discussion. If this is right, then expressivism, like any other meta-normative view, must be able to explain prudential thought and discussion. However, existing expressivist theories offer no such explanation and lack the (...) resources to construct one. I argue that the best strategy for expressivists is to adopt a fitting attitudes account of prudential concepts. More specifically, I propose that expressivists adopt the rational care theory of well-being, according to which claims about what is good for a person are equivalent to claims about what it is rational to want for that person insofar as one cares for them. In doing so, I defend the rational care theory against its most pressing objection and argue that the view provides an independently attractive account of prudential thought and discussion that fits well with the expressivist’s aim to explain normative thought and discussion in terms of its distinctive practical function. (shrink)

In an influential paper, James Lenman argues that consequentialism can provide no basis for ethical guidance, because we are irredeemably ignorant of most of the consequences of our actions. If our ignorance of distant consequences is great, he says, we can have little reason to recommend one action over another on consequentialist grounds. In this article, I show that for reasons to do with statistical theory, the cluelessness objection is too pessimistic. We have good reason to believe that certain patterns (...) of action will tend to have better consequences, and we have good reason to recommend acting in accordance with strategies based on those advantageous patterns. I close by saying something about the strategies that this argument should lead us to favour. (shrink)

I critically analyze Kevin Elliott’s A Tapestry of Values in order to tease out his views on the nature and status of values or value judgments in the text. I show there is a tension in Elliott’s view that is closely connected to a major lacuna in the philosophical literature on values in science: the need for a better theory of values.

This essay argues that Plato in the Republic needs an account of why and how the three distinct parts of the soul are parts of one soul, and it draws on the Phaedrus and Gorgias to develop an account of compositional unity that fits what is said in the Republic.

This volume is about the notion of 'defeat' in philosophy. The idea is that someone who has some knowledge, or a justified belief, can lose this knowledge or justified belief if they acquire a 'defeater' - evidence that undermines it. The contributors examine the role of defeat not just in epistemology but in practical reasoning and ethics.

As Jan Christoph Bublitz (2024) rightly notes, the first international declaration on neurotechnologies and human rights would set the tone for further international and domestic regulations. For t...

Ethical descriptivism is the view that all ethical properties are descriptive properties. Frank Jackson has proposed an argument for this view which begins with the premise that the ethical supervenes on the descriptive, any worlds that differ ethically must differ also descriptively. This paper observes that Jackson's argument has a curious structure, taking a linguistic detour between metaphysical starting and ending points, and raises some worries stemming from this. It then proposes an improved version of the argument, which avoids these (...) worries, and responds to some potential objections to this version of the argument. (shrink)

Regardless of whatever else physicalism requires, nearly all philosophers agree that physicalism cannot be true in a world which contains fundamental mentality. I challenge this widely held attitude, and describe a world which is plausibly all-physical, yet which may contain fundamental mentality. This is a world in which priority monism is true—which is the view that the whole of the cosmos is fundamental, with dependence relations directed from the whole to the parts—and which contains only a single mental system, like (...) a brain or computer. Because some properties of the whole are fundamental under priority monism, it follows that that the mental properties of a cosmos-encompassing brain or computer system may be fundamental in a priority monist world. Yet such a world need not contain anything physically unacceptable: the mental properties of the cosmos-encompassing brain or computer can be characterized in a physicalism-friendly functionalist or identity-theoretic way. Thus, as I see it, physicalism need not be false in such a world. This constitutes a challenge to those who hold the view that physicalism is inconsistent with the existence of fundamental mentality. (shrink)

Deep Brain Stimulation is an FDA-approved treatment for the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, essential tremor, dystonia, and epilepsy—with experimental use for mood disorders. DBS systems consist of a signal generator, typically implanted in the user's chest, that sends impulses to electrodes implanted in select areas of the user's brain. These signals change the activity of areas of the brain associated with unwanted symptoms. Several research groups have begun trials to use DBS as a treatment for psychiatric disorders. DBS, however, comes (...) with a... (shrink)

Considers four apparent problems of eternal life--is heaven a mystical or social reality, is it other-worldly or this-worldly, is it static or dynamic, is it boring?--and shows how the teachings of Thomas Aquinas support more satisfying solutions than many contemporary philosophical and theological approaches.

This chapter surveys the origins and development in Greek philosophy of the thought that living well requires living as a citizen of the world.

People with disabilities suffer from pervasive inequalities in employment, education, transportation, housing, and health care compared to those who are not disabled. Moreover, people with disabilities are often subject to unjustified stigma and pity. In this paper, I will explain why these disadvantages violate relational egalitarian principles of justice. As I will show, my argument can account for both kinds of inequality that disabled people face.

The somatic integration definition of life is familiar from the debate on the determination of death, with some bioethicists arguing that it supports brain death while others argue that some brain‐dead bodies exhibit sufficient somatic integration for biological life. I argue that on either interpretation, the somatic integration definition of life implies that neither the preimplantation embryo nor the postimplantation embryo meet the somatic integration threshold condition for organismal human life. The earliest point at which a somatic integration determination of (...) life could be made would be the beginning of the fetal stage, 9 weeks postfertilization. Bioethical implications are considered, specifically with respect to the moral status of the postimplantation embryo in embryo research and abortion. (shrink)

What is the ontological significance of sustainability crises – and the struggles to overcome them? Drawing on Heideggerian perspectives – in dialogue with Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theories – I argue sustainability crises become meaningful at the level of everyday experience when they disrupt the flow of ordinary skilled practices and their orientations towards the future. Such disruptions trigger what Heidegger termed ‘anxiety’, which implies an erosion of life's coherence, meaning and purpose. Developing skills to ‘cope’ with sustainability crises may (...) enact alternative ontologies that restore what anxiety threatens; ‘skills for sustainability’ potentially disclose new worlds, meanings, values and goals. I illustrate this through vignettes of individuals transitioning to organic farming in India. I show how disruptions to farmers’ skilled practices triggered anxiety while also prompting the development of skills for alternative agricultural practice. These skills enabled new ways of experiencing worlds, non-human entities and the telos of everyday activity. (shrink)

The orthodox reading of Sententia Vaticana (SV) 23 emends the sentence and attributes to Epicurus the view that every friendship is choiceworthy for its own sake. I argue that this reading should be rejected, because it singularly contradicts all our evidence about Epicurus' view, according to which only pleasure is choiceworthy for its own sake. I defend the manuscript reading, that every friendship is in itself a virtue, and I argue that anyone who rejects the manuscript reading should attribute the (...) emended sentence not to Epicurus but to one of his followers who altered the Epicurean account of the value of friendship in response to Academic criticism. (shrink)

This article draws upon the work of Sylvia Wynter and W.E.B. Du Bois in order to propose that film-philosophy has historically not paid due attention to race. Drawing upon the former’s concept of “the sociogenic principle”, as well as the latter’s theories of “the colour line” and “double-consciousness”, the article argues that modernity has been constructed coterminously with whiteness, as well as a “photographic/cinematographic” logic whereby Blackness is cast into a “negative” realm. That is, while modernity might be white, more (...) specifically it is antiblack. For film-philosophy ethically to evolve, then, it must not just pursue a dewesternising turn to the global, as suggested by various scholars, but it must also reckon with antiblackness and the role that cinema has played in constructing and reaffirming a white (and therefore antiblack) world. By this token, recent engagements with objects and animals similarly do not often consider race as a structuring concept of and for the human, in distinction to which both objects and animals supposedly exist. Indeed, one might even construe the contemporary emphasis on objects and animals among primarily white western scholars as a refusal to consider race with the critical rigour that it merits. This article goes some way towards introducing such critical rigour as developed among scholars in critical race theory, in particular Black Studies, especially Du Bois and Wynter; and it proposes that the application of such work to film will radically alter how we consider the medium. In this way, the article draws out the (white) colour of film-philosophy, and argues for a racially conscious/conscientious film-philosophy that will thus be worthy of the name. (shrink)

Polus admires orators for the tyrannical power they have. However, Socrates argues that orators and tyrants lack power worth having: the ability to satisfy one's wishes or wants (boulēseis). He distinguishes wanting from thinking best, and grants that orators and tyrants do what they think best while denying that they do what they want. His account is often thought to involve two conflicting requirements: wants must be attributable to the wanter from their own perspective (to count as their desires), but (...) wants must also be directed at objects that are genuinely good (in order for failure to satisfy them to matter). We offer an account of wanting as reflective, coherent desire, which allows Socrates to satisfy both desiderata. We then explain why he thinks that orators and tyrants want to act justly, though they do greater injustices than anyone else and so frustrate their own wants more than anyone else. (shrink)

This paper investigates the semantic treatment of conditional obligation, explicit permission (often called positive permission), and prohibition based on models with agents and branched time. In such models branches (rather than moments) are taken as basic, and the branching provides a way to represent the indeterminism which is normally presupposed by talk of free will, responsibility, action and ability. Careful treatment of the relation between ability and responsibility avoids many common problems with accounts of conditional obligation. Recognition of the generality (...) often involved in conditional obligations makes possible a sensitive way of expressing some kinds of general prohibitions, which in turn makes it possible to account for the special role of explicit permission. (shrink)

The growth in demand for corporate social responsibility information raises the question of how various CSR disclosure items are used by investors, an important stakeholder group driven by instrumental, moral, and relational motives. Prior research examines the instrumental motive to maximize individual shareholder wealth and the moral motive to actualize personal stewardship interests. We contribute to the literature by examining investors’ relational motive to realize positive stakeholder relationships within and between organizations and communities. The relational motive arises when investors look (...) at a company’s treatment of other stakeholder groups as a heuristic to form a perception of how fairly they will also be treated by that company in the future, and thus invest in the company they perceive as fair. Fair treatment in the future matters to the investor who purchases stock from the company or via the capital markets in exchange for becoming a shareholder and thus a residual claimant of the company. As such, the investor expects future cash flows from holding and/or reselling the stock and expects to be treated fairly by the company in the future. We propose that investors, use as a fairness heuristic, CSR disclosure items—CSR investment level or CSR assurance—that represent the company’s commitment to its stakeholders, and that the resulting fairness perception affects the extent to which the CSR disclosure items influence their investment decision. Using responses from 113 investors in an online experiment, we find that fairness perceptions are higher when CSR investment is above the industry average, and that fairness perceptions partially mediate the impact of the CSR investment level on investment amount allocations. We do not find that the presence of CSR assurance is used by investors as a fairness heuristic. Our results are robust to controlling for preferences for financial performance and hence investors’ instrumental motive, and to controlling for individual environmental attitudes, and hence investors’ moral motive. Implications for future research and public policy are discussed. (shrink)

Ratio, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 16-24, March 2022.

The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 represents a significant development in UK law. It extends the offence of incitement to racial hatred set out in the Public Order Act 1986 to make it also an offence to stir up hatred against persons on religious grounds. As the most celebrated liberal thinker of the nineteenth century, J.S. Mill might be expected to offer some lessons about the possible dangers of this sort of legislation. A Millian response to the 2006 Act (...) is developed here by first applying Mill’s famous defence of free speech to the Lords amendments to the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill 2005 and then by looking at potential cases in which even freedom of expression loses its immunity when this is necessary to prevent harm to others. Three versions of the harm‐prevention justification for liberty‐limiting restrictions are assessed and it is argued that the most promising version is the claim that it may be permissible to punish incitement to racial and religious hatred not so much because it is itself a kind of harm but by virtue of the acts of discrimination, violence and injustice that are more likely to occur within a climate of hatred. Ultimately, however, this rationale must be weighed against what is, for Mill, the special value of free speech and may in the end justify intervention in only the most acute cases. (shrink)

I show how the familiar Stoic paradoxes were developed by reflecting on Socrates.

This overview attempts to explain how we can come to an account of Cynicism and what that account should look like. My account suggests that Cynics are identified by living like Diogenes of Sinope, and that Diogenes' way of life is characterized by distinctive twists on three Socratic commitments. The three Socratic commitments are that success in life depends on excellence of the soul; that this excellence and success are a special achievement, requiring hard work; and that this work requires (...) deprecating mainstream values such as wealth, fame, and ordinary political power. Diogenes' construal of success emphasizes freedom and independence, and his construal of excellence emphasizes endurance and self-mastery. On his account, the work required to achieve these is strikingly unintellectual but difficult, and the deprecation of ordinary values is especially extreme. A few interpretive puzzles about Cynicism are tackled along the way, including whether Cynicism really counts as philosophy and whether Cynics are anti-social. (shrink)

Over the last few years, policies have been introduced in the UK that identify and treat patients as potential organ donors before death. Patients incapacitated due to catastrophic brain injury may now undergo intensive ante-mortem interventions to improve the chances of successfully transplanting their organs into third parties after death. The most significant ethical and legal problem with these policies is that they are not based on the individual’s specific wishes in the circumstances. Policy-makers appear reluctant to inform potential registrants (...) on the Organ Donor Register about ante-mortem donor optimisation procedures and to provide an opportunity to record specific wishes in advance. They are reliant on blind trust in the organ donation programme, which as I argue in this paper, presents significant risks for the achievement of its aim of securing an adequate supply of organs for transplantation. I argue that informed trust, based on accurate information about the future consequences of registra... (shrink)

Моя философская концепция основана на принципах абсолютной неопределенности и молчания, рассматривающих бытие как процесс, не поддающийся никакому рациональному объяснению или конвенциональным рамкам. Эта концепция отвергает традиционные философские модели и утверждает, что истинное познание возможно лишь через молчаливое восприятие. Я утверждаю, что наше существование не имеет начала или конца, и что сама природа реальности лежит за пределами человеческого понимания, существуя в бесконечном потоке неопределенности, где философия и наука теряют свою значимость. Я описываю данную философию как концепцию, которая не требует признания, но (...) тем не менее задает новые ориентиры для понимания того, что мы называем реальностью. Эта философская концепция подрывает основы рационализма, эпистемологии и традиционной метафизики, отвергая идею логического познания и поиска смысла. Она отрицает как научные, так и философские подходы, предполагая, что реальность выходит за пределы человеческого восприятия и не может быть объяснена через конвенциональные структуры. Истинное познание, по моей концепции, невозможно через традиционные методы, такие как эмпиризм или рационализм, и существует в области абсолютной неопределенности, где понятия времени, существования и смысла теряют свою значимость. (shrink)

The phrase, “Without Authority,” is used so frequently by Kierkegaard that it becomes a kind of signature; yet it remains little understood. I argue that the phrase works to resist patriarchal, top-down, institutionally sanctioned authority: the authority of “direct” communication. Kierkegaard is not alone in contesting the tyranny of patriarchy: another tyranny—of anonymity, of the crowd—threatens to do away with patriarchal authority too, and with it all authority, all communication. Kierkegaard’s “without authority” defies patriarchy and does so at the risk (...) of this wild-fire destruction, for the sake of a different communication that might yet be possible. (shrink)

Plato’s Republic is governed by an analogy drawn between the structures of cities and souls. Because the inner workings of souls are difficult to discern, we might better find the soul’s nature and virtues by looking at the city’s nature and virtues. Despite successfully using the analogy to discern the nature of the soul, its virtues, and its proper ordering, the Republic frequently obscures the very analogy that functions as its guiding thread, and it is not at all obvious whether (...) the political material in Books V–VII has a psychological correlate. This essay develops a psychological reading of key moments in the dialogue where the city-soul analogy fades in favor of more apparently political content. Focusing on the Allegory of the Cave, it argues that when the Cave is read as a “psychic drama,” it discloses reason’s drama within the soul. Like the freed prisoner, reason must be liberated from imprisonment alongside the sub-rational elements of the soul so that it may see the truth by which it can be nourished. However, reason must also descend, like the prisoner, to the sub-rational elements of the soul in order to care for them, for its own sake and for theirs. Read this way, the Republic presents an account of reason which rules the passions in the “precise sense” of Book I, that is, for their sake, and not simply for its own liberation and well-being. (shrink)

Meet Tega. Blue, fluffy, and AI-enabled, Tega is a relational robot: a robot designed to form relationships with humans. Created to aid in early childhood education, Tega talks with children, plays educational games with them, solves puzzles, and helps in creative activities like making up stories and drawing. Children are drawn to Tega, describing him as a friend, and attributing thoughts and feelings to him ("he's kind," "if you just left him here and nobody came to play with him, he (...) might be sad"). Scholars and members of the public alike have raised the alarm about relational robots, worrying that the relationships that people, and especially children, form with such robots are objectionably inauthentic. We, members of an interdisciplinary team that developed and studies Tega, make this inauthenticity worry precise and offer practical recommendations for addressing it. We distinguish two kinds of (in)authenticity -- inauthenticity as unreality, and inauthenticity as deception -- arguing that neither is just what others have thought it is. With our distinction in hand, we argue that the authenticity concern can be met only through co-design methods -- methods that give stakeholders of all kinds (e.g. parents, educators, and children themselves) a genuine say in how relational robots are built. (shrink)

Suppose \ is a computable real. We extend previous work of Clanin, Stull, and McNicholl by determining the degrees of categoricity of the separable \ spaces whose underlying measure spaces are atomic but not purely atomic. In addition, we ascertain the complexity of associated projection maps.

This essay considers how an “intimacy contract,” as a conceptual tool and a political reality, extends existing critiques of the social contract tradition by accounting for the privatized nature of the post-9/11 US empire. Examining critiques by Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, I argue that an intimacy contract uncovers the coercive power relations underlying neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurial freedom. Focusing on migrant labor on US military bases, I provide an overview of the racial, sexual, and settler contracts and the need (...) to extend Mills’s and Pateman’s critiques of embodiment and spatiality. Next, I suggest how the intimacy contract generates a transnational, embodied account of the labors upholding US empire; a lens into the shifting significance of these labors under neoliberal imperialism; and a chronicling of desire and workers’ interests. In conclusion, I suggest how the intimacy contract exposes multiple resistances to US empire and neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

It is often assumed that the first stage of many classical arguments for theism depends upon some version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason being true. Unfortunately for classical theists, PSR is a controversial thesis that has come under rather severe criticism in the contemporary literature. In this article, I grant for the sake of argument that every version of PSR is false. Thus, I concede with the critics of PSR, that it is possible that there is, at least, one (...) fact that is ontologically brute. I then proffer an epistemological challenge to ontological bruteness. Specifically, I argue that whenever a knowledge seeker, S, perceives some unexplained fact, F, it is never reasonable for S to believe F is ontologically brute. I conclude that, even if PSR is false, it is more reasonable to believe that the key premise in the first stage of classical arguments for theism is true. (shrink)