Can we make mistakes about what rationality requires? A natural answer is that we can, since it is a platitude that rational belief does not require truth; it is possible for a belief to be rational and mistaken, and this holds for any subject matter at all. However, the platitude causes trouble when applied to rationality itself. The possibility of rational mistakes about what rationality requires generates a puzzle. When combined with two further plausible claims – the enkratic principle, and (...) the claim that rational requirements apply universally – we get the result that rationality generates inconsistent requirements. One popular and attractive solution to the puzzle denies that it is possible to make rational mistakes about what rationality requires. I show why (contra Titelbaum (2015b), and Littlejohn (2015)) this solution is doomed to fail. (shrink)

I argue that there are some situations in which it is praiseworthy to be motivated only by moral rightness de dicto, even if this results in wrongdoing. I consider a set of cases that are challenging for views that dispute this, prioritising concern for what is morally important in moral evaluation. In these cases, the agent is not concerned about what is morally important, does the wrong thing, but nevertheless seems praiseworthy rather than blameworthy. I argue that the views under (...) discussion cannot accommodate this, and should be amended to recognise that it is often praiseworthy to be motivated to do what is right. (shrink)

Is normative uncertainty like factual uncertainty? Should it have the same effects on our actions? Some have thought not. Those who defend an asymmetry between normative and factual uncertainty typically do so as part of the claim that our moral beliefs in general are irrelevant to both the moral value and the moral worth of our actions. Here I use the consideration of Jackson cases to challenge this view, arguing that we can explain away the apparent asymmetries between normative and (...) factual uncertainty by considering the particular features of the cases in greater detail. Such consideration shows that, in fact, normative and factual uncertainty are equally relevant to moral assessment. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Whiting’s (2021) account of rational belief and discuss some unresolved issues arising from its reliance on epistemic possibility and, by extension, perspective-relative aprioricity.

The Enkratic Principle enjoys something of a protected status as a requirement of rationality. I argue that this status is undeserved, at least in the epistemic domain. Compliance with the principle should not be thought of as a requirement of epistemic rationality, but rather as defeasible indication of epistemic blamelessness. To show this, I present the Puzzle of Inconsistent Requirements, and argue that the best way to solve it is to distinguish two kinds of epistemic evaluation – requirement evaluations and (...) appraisal evaluations. This allows us to solve the puzzle while accommodating traditional motivations for thinking of the Enkratic Principle as a requirement of rationality. (shrink)

Is logic normative for belief? A standard approach to answering this question has been to investigate bridge principles relating claims of logical consequence to norms for belief. Although the question is naturally an epistemic one, bridge principles have typically been investigated in isolation from epistemic debates over the correct norms for belief. In this paper we tackle the question of whether logic is normative for belief by proposing a Kripkean model theory accounting for the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and (...) deontic notions and using this model theory to show which bridge principles are implied by epistemic norms that we have independent reason to accept, for example, the knowledge norm and the truth norm. We propose a preliminary theory of the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions that has among its commitments bridge principles expressing how logic is normative for belief. We also show how our framework suggests that logic is exceptionally normative. (shrink)

De Re Significance accounts of moral appraisal consider an agent’s responsiveness to a particular kind of reason, normative moral reasons de re, to be of central significance for moral appraisal. Here, I argue that such accounts find it difficult to accommodate some neuroatypical agents. I offer an alternative account of how an agent’s responsiveness to normative moral reasons affects moral appraisal – the Reasonable Expectations Account. According to this account, what is significant for appraisal is not the content of the (...) reasons an agent is responsive to, but rather whether she is responsive to the reasons it is reasonable to expect her to be responsive to, irrespective of their content. I argue that this account does a better job of dealing with neuroatypical agents, while agreeing with the De Re Significance accounts on more ordinary cases. (shrink)

I argue for the unexceptionality of evidence about what rationality requires. Specifically, I argue that, as for other topics, one’s total evidence can sometimes support false beliefs about this. Despite being prima facie innocuous, a number of philosophers have recently denied this. Some have argued that the facts about what rationality requires are highly dependent on the agent’s situation and change depending on what that situation is like. (Bradley 2019). Others have argued that a particular subset of normative truths, those (...) concerning what epistemic rationality requires, have the special property of being ‘fixed points’—it is impossible to have total evidence that supports false belief about them. (Smithies 2012; Titelbaum 2015). Each of these kinds of exceptionality permits a solution to downstream theoretical problems that arise from the possibility of evidence supporting false belief about requirements of rationality. However, as I argue here, they incur heavy explanatory burdens that we should avoid. (shrink)

:In his famous book Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer articulates a thesis he calls the “Moral Equality of Soldiers,” namely, the principle that combatants have an equal right to kill other combatants in war, regardless of the justice of the cause for which they are fighting. The Moral Equality Thesis, as I shall call it, is an essential component of traditional Just War Theory, in that it provides the basis for distinguishing the jus in bello from the jus ad (...) bellum. It also plays a crucial role in identifying the nature of the difference between combatants and civilians. The Moral Equality Thesis has recently come under attack by scholars of Just War Theory, notably philosopher Jeff McMahan, on the grounds that killing for immoral purposes cannot be justified, and so it cannot be true that combatants all have an equal right to kill, regardless of the justice of their cause. In this essay, I defend the Moral Equality Thesis in its traditional formulation. Without it, I argue, the rule of law would not apply in war. The failure to recognize the equal right of combatants to kill in war, I suggest, creates an inconsistency between the rules of war and basic concepts in the law and morality of self-defense, an inconsistency that McMahan himself would think undesirable. I argue that McMahan’s argument applies more compellingly to armed conflict in asymmetrical warfare. Arguably, the Moral Equality Thesis does not apply in an armed conflict between combatants and unlawful combatants. In that context, the divergence from the law and morality of self-defense is less of a concern. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.KILLING IN WAR AND THE MORAL EQUALITY THESISVolume 32, Issue 2Claire Finkelstein DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000169Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle email.@free.kindle.com@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. KILLING IN WAR AND THE MORAL EQUALITY THESISVolume 32, Issue 2Claire Finkelstein DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000169Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. KILLING IN WAR AND THE MORAL EQUALITY THESISVolume 32, Issue 2Claire Finkelstein DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000169Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Political deepfakes have prompted outcry about the diminishing trustworthiness of visual depictions, and the epistemic and political threat this poses. Yet this new technique is being used overwhelmingly to create pornography, raising the question of what, if anything, is wrong with the creation of deepfake pornography. Traditional objections focusing on the sexual abuse of those depicted fail to apply to deepfakes. Other objections—that the use and consumption of pornography harms the viewer or other (non-depicted) individuals—fail to explain the objection that (...) a depicted person might have to the creation of deepfake pornography that utilises images of them. My argument offers such an explanation. It begins by noting that the creation of sexual images requires an act of consent, separate from any consent needed for the acts depicted. Once we have separated these out, we can see that a demand for consent can arise when a sexual image is of us, even when no sexual activity was actually engaged in, as in the case of deepfake pornography. I then demonstrate that there are two ways in which an image can be ‘of us’, both of which can exist in the case of deepfakes. Thus, I argue: if a person, their likeness, or their photograph is used to create pornography, their consent is required. Whenever the person depicted does not consent (or in the case of children, can’t consent), that person is wronged by the creation of deepfake pornography and has a claim against its production. (shrink)

Wright, Claire Louise If the sacraments are, as Louis-Marie Chauvet argues, the major symbolic expressions of 'the body as the point where God writes God's self in us', few concepts could be more central to sacramental theology than time, the medium in which human, ecclesial, cultural and cosmic 'bodies' have their being and expression. Christian narratives, traditions and rituals are founded in history and the shared memory of culture. As Miroslav Volf notes, the 'sacred memory' of the death and (...) resurrection of Christ defines the identity of Christians as 'the pulsating heart that energizes and directs their actions and forms their hopes '. Indeed, all human experience, identity and meaning-making are mediated by an awareness of time, the flow and relativity of chronos and the moment of kairos. As Chauvet puts it, the 'sensible mediation' of history comprises 'the very milieu within which human beings attain their truth and thus correspond to the Truth which calls them'. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans le catalogue E-Cité/Europe, Strasbourg, Apollonia, 2015, p. 26-30. Nous remercions Claire Dehove et WOS-Agences des hypothèses de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. WORKSHOP EN PARTENARIAT AVEC LA HEAR ET LA FACULTÉ DES ARTS DE STRASBOURG – Wos agence des hypothèses/Claire Dehove avec François Duconseille, et avec les étudiants de scénographie HEAR et du Master Critique-essais de Strasbourg, Inès Sassi, Raimonda Tamuleviciute, Ikhyong Park, Laura Perrone, Loue Aveline – - Arts plastiques (...) et autres – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

This paper describes a method for analyzing a corpus of descriptions collected through micro-phenomenological interviews. This analysis aims at identifying the structure of the singular experiences which have been described, and in particular their diachronic structure, while unfolding generic experiential structures through an iterative approach. After summarizing the principles of the micro-phenomenological interview, and then describing the process of preparation of the verbatim, the article presents on the one hand, the principles and conceptual devices of the analysis method and on (...) the other hand several dimensions of the analysis process: the modes of structural unfolding of generic structures, the mutual guidance of the processes of structural and experiential unfolding, the tracking of analysis processes, and finally the assessment of analysis results. (shrink)

In this book, Claire Horisk argues that the real problem with so-called offensive jokes-such as racist, sexist, and ethnic jokes-is not that they are offensive but that they are harmful, because they transmit and reinforce stereotypes and ideas that contribute to a network of unjust disadvantage for the derogated group. She distinguishes between belittling jokes, which shore up unjust disadvantage for social groups, and disparaging jokes, which derogate powerful groups such as doctors but do not contribute to unjust disadvantage. (...) She uses philosophy of language and linguistics to argue that both belittling and disparaging jokes communicate ideas by generalized conversational implicature, and to argue that defenses of derogatory remarks as 'just a joke' are inadequate, because jokes can be used to convey what people believe to be true. She focuses on jokes in ordinary conversation, showing that canonical accounts of cooperative conversation need to be enriched: Some people have greater power to shift the common ground of a conversation, and to introduce new presuppositions, than others, and there are alliances that exclude some parties to the conversation, and yet are powerful in setting the future course of the conversation. She also gives a new account of the morality of listening, arguing that sometimes people who listen to derogatory speech may be culpable for doing so. Throughout, she draws on a wealth of interdisciplinary evidence to support the book's claims and to explain why humor is an especially effective means of unjust discrimination. (shrink)

Increasingly, artists describe the feeling of creating images with generative AI systems as like working with a “collaborator”—a term that is also common in the scholarly literature on AI image-generation. If it is appropriate to describe these dynamics in terms of collaboration, as I demonstrate, it is important to determine the form and nature of these joint efforts, given the appreciative relevance of different types of contribution to the production of an artwork. Accordingly, I examine three kinds of collaboration that (...) can be found in the philosophical literature on artistic authorship—collective authorship, co-creatorship, and co-production—to determine whether human-AI interactions comprise joint efforts as per such kinds. As I find, collaboration is a concept that invokes rich psychological terms and so one to used be with care in relation to generative AI, which does not yet meet the conditions to count as an artistic collaborator in the senses derived from the literature. To progress discussions on ethical and legal issues that are raised by image-making practices involving generative AI, and further research into the distinctive qualities afforded by interactions with these systems, I argue that we ought to frame their contributions to the production of visual artworks in terms of a “generative” contribution and describe the interactions between humans and generative AI systems as “AI-assisted production”. (shrink)

Challenging previous interpretations of Levinas that gloss over his use of the feminine or show how he overlooks questions raised by feminists, Claire Elise Katz explores the powerful and productive links between the feminine and religion in Levinas’s work. Rather than viewing the feminine as a metaphor with no significance for women or as a means to reinforce traditional stereotypes, Katz goes beyond questions of sexual difference to reach a more profound understanding of the role of the feminine in (...) Levinas’s conception of ethical responsibility. She combines feminist interpretations of Levinas with interpretations that focus on his Jewish writings to reveal that the feminine provides an important bridge between his philosophy and his Judaism. Katz’s reading of Levinas’s conception of the feminine against the backdrop of discussions of women of the Hebrew bible points to important shifts in contemporary philosophy toward the creation of life and care for the other. (shrink)

Chez Hegel, la liberté ne dépend pas seulement de conditions historiques, politiques ou géographiques, mais aussi de conditions anthropologiques comme celle de l'âge : le degré de liberté dépend de l'âge qu'on a, la liberté ne vient pas avant l'âge ou le bon âge. Hegel développe une analyse parallèle des âges des peuples. Pourquoi la liberté a-t-elle pour condition l'âge de l'homme fait ? Est-ce la liberté du puissant face au jeune homme qui n'a pas le pouvoir et au vieillard (...) qui est affaibli ? Foucault, en commentant l'Alcibiade de Platon, a pu soutenir lui aussi l'idée d'un âge de la liberté : l'accès à soi permis par un âge critique de la vie conditionne surtout, dans le dialogue et pour Foucault, l'action et la pensée politiques. Revenant à Hegel, nous pouvons alors mieux comprendre que sa thèse de la plus grande liberté de l'homme fait ne dépend pas de sa puissance mais de l'exigence pratique et politique qui caractérise l'âge qui est le sien. In Hegelian philosophy, freedom is dependent not only on historical, political and geographical conditions, but also on anthropological conditions such as age. Our degree of freedom depends on how old we are, as freedom does not come before the right age. Hegel develops a parallel analysis of the ages of peoples. Why does freedom require the age of maturity as a necessary condition? Is it the consecration of the freedom of the powerful man against the young man, who has no power, and the old man, whose strength has waned? Commenting on Plato's Akibiades, Foucault also supports the idea of an age of freedom. In the dialogue and for Foucault, the access to oneself permitted by that critical age of life is notably the condition for political action and thought. Returning to Hegel, we can then better understand his thesis that greater freedom is that of maturity: it does not come from man's power but from the practical and political necessity that characterizes that particular age. (shrink)

Abstract:Geodiversity is defined as “the natural range (diversity) of geological (rocks, minerals, fossils), geomorphological (land form, processes) and soil features. It includes their assemblages, relationships, properties, interpretations and systems.” This very physical definition is enlarged by a holistic point of view associated to cultural geomorphology which embraces social and artistic representations of landforms, sometimes considered as a geo-heritage. In this point of view, coal mining memory is symbolized by heap and mine's galleries which are anthropogenic landforms. With abandonment, their appearance (...) has changed through time and in the North of France, the “black gold” became “green gold.” This paper aims to reconstitute the landscape trajectories of these recently rediscovered “coalscapes” and focuses on European coal landscapes, particularly on the Atlantic Front. The studies of the iconography of the National Work Archives compared to present landscapes shows that new heritage statuses focus on picturesque landscape but also reveal an evolution of this model: after having included ecology, (geo)heritage coalscapes make the picturesque model change by taking into account environmental changes, new touristic practices (eco and geo-tourism) and new perceptions of industrial and mining landscapes. In a broader sense, this perception of landscapes refers to the anthropocene times, where human artifacts such as mining features represent human prints on the environment. This paper questions European coal landscape as symbols of migrating landscapes that linked, scientifically and aesthetically, old and modern Europe. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how digital technologies have changed the conceptual landscape by forcing us to reconsider three core concepts at the heart of the category of child pornography: (i) what it means to be an image; (ii) what it means to be an image of a child; and (iii) what it means to be a sexual image of a child. I demonstrate that we might need to radically reconceive these concepts and I point to some policy implications of (...) doing so. (shrink)

Metaethical realists and anti‐realists alike have typically assumed that deliberation about what to do is, at least sometimes, properly settled by the agent's evaluative attitudes—what she wants, likes, or values—rather than by any objective source of value out in the world. I argue that this picture of deliberation is not one that the deliberating agent herself can accept. Seen from within the first‐person perspective, the agent's own evaluative attitudes are not encountered as descriptive psychological facts, but are rather “transparent” to (...) the external world, conceived as a place already suffused with normative significance: they are her finding the relevant parts of the world to be desirable, valuable, and so on. And from the agent's own point of view, these attitudes can do the normative work involved in settling deliberation only because and insofar as they are understood as in this way a warranted response to this desirability or value. Attitudes that the agent does not experience as transparent in this way are attitudes from which she is alienated, and as such she cannot understand them as authoritative over her deliberation. What this means, I argue, is that deliberation about what to do involves a commitment to a particularly substantive form of metaethical realism. (shrink)

Our research addressed an increase of unethical practices in professional settings identified in the literature, and this increase coincides with a shift in U.S. culture from principle-based ethics to one trending toward moral relativism. We discovered many programs lack comprehensiveness to deal with the complexities of culture in graduate education. The purpose of this instrumental case study was to explore and develop a conceptual framework for a comprehensive teaching model targeting graduate-level educators, administrators, and educational boards across disciplines. Data were (...) collected over 13 years from a doctoral professional ethics course at a private, faith-based university in South Texas. Using a Design Based Research process following Reeves’ (2006) guidelines, we developed a multi-disciplinary graduate theoretical teaching model for ethics: Comprehensive Professional Ethics Teaching Model (CPET model), grounded in our data analysis and findings. Recommendations include implementing and testing the efficacy of the CPET model in subsequent studies. (shrink)

Visual artists and scientists frequently employ the labour of assistants and technicians, however these workers generally receive little recognition for their contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. They are effectively “invisible”. This invisible status however, comes at the cost of a better understanding of artistic and scientific work, and improvements in artistic and scientific practice. To enhance understanding of artistic and scientific work, and these practices more broadly, it is vital to discern the nature of an assistant (...) or technician’s contribution to the production of a work, which is difficult as it is uncommon to discuss these workers. To address this, I investigate how different kinds of parallel working arrangements in collective artistic and scientific practices affect the creative potential of individuals involved. Different working arrangements permit different degrees of autonomy for individuals involved in these practices. Significantly, a lack of autonomy precludes the opportunity to act spontaneously and so exercise, what I term, “creative agency”. Evaluating the contribution of an assistant or technician based on the degree of autonomy that they are granted in the production of a work is an approach that I show can be used to precisely determine the nature of their contribution to the production of a work and accordingly, what kind of recognition an agent should receive for this. Importantly, this approach has the advantage of explaining the artistic and epistemic significance of different kinds of contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. (shrink)

Reexamining Emmanuel Levinas’s essays on Jewish education, Claire Elise Katz provides new insights into the importance of education and its potential to transform a democratic society, for Levinas’s larger philosophical project.

Alors que l’analogie (qu’elle soit entendue au sens propre comme égalité de rapports ou au sens faible comme métaphore ou comparaison) est largement répandue dans la philosophie ancienne (chose évidente quand on lit les autres présocratiques, Platon et Aristote), Anaxagore ne fait usage d’aucun type d’analogie. Il met en revanche l’accent sur un autre type de relation que nous appellerons l’« homologie », terme par lequel nous entendons une relation d’identité entre deux choses. De plus, alors que l’analogie était habituellement (...) utilisée dans un but heuristique, nous verrons que l’homologie est à chaque fois révélée au moyen d’une inférence. Le but de cet article est d’essayer de montrer que ces deux faits sont liés et qu’Anaxagore a délibérément choisi de remplacer l’analogie par l’homologie afin de rendre manifeste, grâce à l’écriture, une loi universelle sous‑jacente aux phénomènes sensibles, à savoir l’irréductibilité du mélange universel, qui s’avère être un obstacle à l’activité de l’Intellect cosmique autant que sa condition de possibilité. (shrink)

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing (...) to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

Les écrits des élèves suscitent un intérêt grandissant chez de nombreux chercheurs dont les travaux s’inscrivent dans des domaines aussi variés que la linguistique, la psycholinguistique, la sociolinguistique et la didactique du français. Cet intérêt s’explique à la fois par la singularité de l’objet discursif qu’ils constituent et par la rareté des études empiriques appuyées sur des ensembles des textes de grande envergure (voir cependant Garcia-Debanc, 1990). Si des corpus importants ont pu...

Most areas of philosopher Edmund Husserl’s thought have been explored, but his views on logic, mathematics, and semantics have been largely ignored. These essays offer an alternative to discussions of the philosophy of contemporary mathematics. The book covers areas of disagreement between Husserl and Gottlob Frege, the father of analytical philosophy, and explores new perspectives seen in their work.

A recent article argued for the immorality of abortion regardless of personhood status by comparing the impairment caused by fetal alcohol syndrome to the impairment caused by abortion. I argue that two of the premises in this argument fail and that, as such, one cannot reasonably attribute moral harms to abortion on the basis of the moral harms caused by fetal alcohol syndrome. The impairment argument relies on an inconsistent instantiation, which undermines the claim that personhood is irrelevant, and it (...) does not fulfill its own ceteris paribus clause, which demands that no additional benefit be gained from abortion that would not be gained from causing fetal alcohol syndrome. (shrink)

Automated Influence is the use of Artificial Intelligence to collect, integrate, and analyse people’s data in order to deliver targeted interventions that shape their behaviour. We consider three central objections against Automated Influence, focusing on privacy, exploitation, and manipulation, showing in each case how a structural version of that objection has more purchase than its interactional counterpart. By rejecting the interactional focus of “AI Ethics” in favour of a more structural, political philosophy of AI, we show that the real problem (...) with Automated Influence is the crisis of legitimacy that it precipitates. (shrink)