This work is comprised of personal essays by some of the most noted Holocaust educators working in or with Holocaust museums, resource centers, or educational organizations across the globe.

Brings together in a single volume a study of political ethics in the modern age. Focuses on the nine major political philosophers who contributed to the secularization of politics: Machiavelli, Luther, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Burke, Marx, and Niebuhr. Useful for all students of political science, particularly political theory.

The magnitude of South Africa’s diet-related non-communicable disease burden calls for scrutiny of sugar-sweetened beverage manufacturers’ business ethics in terms of the commercial determinants of health. We gathered and analysed relevant literature from five electronic databases to determine whether a communitarian ethic can strengthen corporate governance in support of public health. Twenty-nine of 648 results were selected for data extraction and analysis. Six thematic categories were identified: the reciprocal nature of the corporation in society; perspectives on ‘corporate citizenship’; integrative approaches (...) to corporate sustainability; critiques of Corporate Social Responsibility; legal regulation to engender communitarian consciousness; and the social contract perspective. We found that in tackling the human and economic toll of South Africa’s obesogenic environment, a diverse range of theoretical and practical perspectives supports the concept that a communitarian ethic for corporate governance can normalise accountability for population health as a human right. (shrink)

Précis for a book symposium, with contributions from Meg Wallace, Louis deRosset, and Chris Tillman and Joshua Spencer.

The controversy over the old ideal of “value-free science” has cooled significantly over the past decade. Many philosophers of science now agree that even ethical and political values may play a substantial role in all aspects of scientific inquiry. Consequently, in the last few years, work in science and values has become more specific: Which values may influence science, and in which ways? Or, how do we distinguish illegitimate from illegitimate kinds of influence? In this paper, I argue that this (...) problem requires philosophers of science to take a new direction. I present two case studies in the influence of values on scientific inquiry: feminist values in archaeology and commercial values in pharmaceutical research. I offer a preliminary assessment of these cases, that the influence of values was legitimate in the feminist case, but not in the pharmaceutical case. I then turn to three major approaches to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate influences of values, including the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values and Heather Douglas’ distinction between direct and indirect roles for values. I argue that none of these three approaches gives an adequate analysis of the two cases. In the concluding section, I briefly sketch my own approach, which draws more heavily on ethics than the others, and is more promising as a solution to the current problem. This is the new direction in which I think science and values should move. (shrink)

CHAPTER 1. INTENSIONAL LOGIC §1. Natural Language and Intensional Logic When we speak of a theory of meaning for a natural language such as English, ...

Our ability to locate moral responsibility is often thought to be a necessary condition for conducting morally permissible medical practice, engaging in a just war, and other high-stakes endeavors. Yet, with increasing reliance upon artificially intelligent systems, we may be facing a wideningresponsibility gap, which, some argue, cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility. How then, if at all, can we make use of crucial emerging technologies? According to Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach, the advent of so-called ‘artificial moral (...) agents’ (AMAs) is inevitable. Still, this notion may seem to push back the problem, leaving those who have an interest in developing autonomous technology with a dilemma. We may need to scale-back our efforts at deploying AMAs (or at least maintain human oversight); otherwise, we must rapidly and drastically update our moral and legal norms in a way that ensures responsibility for potentially avoidable harms. This paper invokes contemporary accounts of responsibility in order to show how artificially intelligent systems might be held responsible. Although many theorists are concerned enough to develop artificial conceptions ofagencyor to exploit our present inability to regulate valuable innovations, the proposal here highlights the importance of—and outlines a plausible foundation for—a workable notion ofartificial moral responsibility. (shrink)

Evidence is often taken to be “normative” for doxastic agents. What accounts for the normativity of evidence? According to the view that I'll call “evidential minimalism”, there is a close connection between strong evidence for the truth of p and a normative reason to believe p: evidence is either itself a normative reason for belief, or evidence gives rise to such a reason when certain other minimal conditions are met. In this paper, I argue against evidential minimalism. I will argue (...) that there are cases where: (i) an individual S possesses strong evidence E for the truth of p at time t, (ii) all other minimal conditions for the normativity of E are met at t, (iii) S doesn't believe p at t, yet (iv) S isn't open to any form of criticism on account of (i)–(iii) at t. I will then formulate a plausible linking claim connecting openness to criticism and the existence of normative reasons for belief. The minimalist can either accept or reject this linking claim. I will argue that, either way, the minimalist view falters. (shrink)

Consequentialists say we may always promote the good. Deontologists object: not if that means killing one to save five. “Consequentializers” reply: this act is wrong, but it is not for the best, since killing is worse than letting die. I argue that this reply undercuts the “compellingness” of consequentialism, which comes from an outcome-based view of action that collapses the distinction between killing and letting die.

Three studies test eight hypotheses about (1) how judgment differs between people who ascribe greater vs. less moral relevance to choices, (2) how moral judgment is subject to task constraints that shift evaluative focus (to moral rules vs. to consequences), and (3) how differences in the propensity to rely on intuitive reactions affect judgment. In Study 1, judgments were affected by rated agreement with moral rules proscribing harm, whether the dilemma under consideration made moral rules versus consequences of choice salient, (...) and by thinking styles (intuitive vs. deliberative). In Studies 2 and 3, participants evaluated policy decisions to knowingly do harm to a resource to mitigate greater harm or to merely allow the greater harm to happen. When evaluated in isolation, approval for decisions to harm was affected by endorsement of moral rules and by thinking style. When both choices were evaluated simultaneously, total harm -- but not the do/allow distinction -- influenced rated approval. These studies suggest that moral rules play an important, but context-sensitive role in moral cognition, and offer an account of when emotional reactions to perceived moral violations receive less weight than consideration of costs and benefits in moral judgment and decision making. (shrink)

Conditionals frequently convey that the antecedent is relevant to the consequent. Recently many authors have argued that this relevance is part of the conventional meaning of conditionals, but this approach fails to account for many examples where a conditional is used to conveyirrelevance of antecedent to consequent. Both types of conditionals are best explained by a conventional meaning with no relevance requirement, and a separate process of coherence establishment among successive clauses in discourse. This account is supported by the distribution (...) of discourse particles and is able to account for experimental studies used to support the conventionalist position. (shrink)

Champions of virtue ethics frequently appeal to moral perception: the notion that virtuous people can “see” what to do. According to a traditional account of virtue, the cultivation of proper feeling through imitation and habituation issues in a sensitivity to reasons to act. Thus, we learn to see what to do by coming to feel the demands of courage, kindness, and the like. But virtue ethics also claims superiority over other theories that adopt a perceptual moral epistemology, such as intuitionism (...) – which John McDowell criticizes for illicitly “borrow[ing] the epistemological credentials” of perception. In this paper, I suggest that the most promising way for virtue ethics to use perceptual metaphors innocuously is by adopting a skill model of virtue, on which the virtues are modeled on forms of practical know-how. Yet I contend that this model is double-edged for virtue ethics. The skill model belies some central ambitions and dogmas of the traditional view, especially its most idealized claims about virtue and the virtuous. While this may be a cost that its champions are unprepared to pay, I suggest that virtue ethics would do well to embrace a more realistic moral psychology and a correspondingly less sublime conception of virtue. (shrink)

A symposium on my *Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary* (2015). In response to Wallace, I attempt to clarify the dialectical and epistemic role that my arguments from counterexamples were meant to play, I provide a limited defense of the comparison to the Gettier examples, and I embrace the comparison to Moorean anti-skeptical arguments. In response to deRosset, I provide a clearer formulation of conservatism, explain how a conservative should think about the interaction between intuition and science, and discuss what (...) conservatives should say about scattered territories, clonal colonies, and arbitrary systems. In response to Tillman and Spencer, I fortify my original presentation of the debunking arguments by clarifying why, even while trees (if they exist) are paradigmatically causal, conservatives are meant to be rationally obstructed from believing that it is trees that are causing our tree beliefs. (shrink)

Cryonics is the practice of cryopreserving the bodies or brains of legally dead individuals with the hope that these individuals will be reanimated in the future. A standard argument for cryonics says that cryonics is prudentially justified despite uncertainty about its success because at worst it will leave you no worse off than you otherwise would have been had you not chosen cryonics, and at best it will leave you much better off than you otherwise would have been. Thus, it (...) is a good, no-risk bet; in game-theoretic terms, cryonics is a weakly dominant strategy relative to refraining from utilizing cryonics. I object to this argument for two reasons. First, I argue that there is a practically relevant chance that cryonics will put you into an inescapable and very bad situation. Hence, cryonics is neither a no-risk bet nor a weakly dominant strategy. Second, I argue that the experience of being reanimated and living in the distant future would likely be transformative, and this likelihood undermines your justification for thinking that reanimation would be beneficial to you. I conclude that the standard argument does not show that cryonics is prudentially justified. (shrink)

One very popular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals is aclosest-worlds account along the lines of theories given by David Lewisand Robert Stalnaker. If we could give the same sort of semantics forindicative conditionals, we would have a more unified account of themeaning of ``if ... then ...'' statements, one with manyadvantages for explaining the behaviour of conditional sentences. Such atreatment of indicative conditionals, however, has faced a battery ofobjections. This paper outlines a closest-worlds account of indicativeconditionals that does better (...) than some of its cousins in explaining thebehaviour of such conditionals. The paper then discusses objectionsoffered by Dorothy Edgington and Frank Jackson to closest-worldsaccounts of indicative conditionals, and shows that these objections canbe met by the account outlined. (shrink)

The writings of Joseph Henry Woodger (1894–1981) are often taken to exemplify everything that was wrongheaded, misguided, and just plain wrong with early twentieth-century philosophy of biology. Over the years, commentators have said of Woodger: (a) that he was a fervent logical empiricist who tried to impose the explanatory gold standards of physics onto biology, (b) that his philosophical work was completely disconnected from biological science, (c) that he possessed no scientific or philosophical credentials, and (d) that his work was (...) disparaged – if not altogether ignored – by the biologists and philosophers of his era. In this paper, we provide the first systematic examination of Woodger’s oeuvre, and use it to demonstrate that the four preceding claims are false. We argue that Woodger’s ideas have exerted an important influence on biology and philosophy, and submit that the current consensus on his legacy stems from a highly selective reading of his works. By rehabilitating Woodger, we hope to show that there is no good reason to continue to disregard the numerous contributions to the philosophy of biology produced in the decades prior to the professionalization of the discipline. (shrink)

Realists about possible worlds typically identify possible worlds with abstract objects, such as propositions or properties. However, they face a significant objection due to Lewis (1986), to the effect that there is no way to explain how possible worlds-as-abstract objects represent possibilities. In this paper, I describe a response to this objection on behalf of realists. The response is to identify possible worlds with propositions, but to deny that propositions are abstract objects, or indeed objects at all. Instead, I argue (...) that realists should follow Prior (1971) and others in treating higher-order quantification (e.g. quantification into predicate or sentence position) as a genuine form of quantification in its own right, and so in particular, not to be analysed in terms of first-order quantification over abstract objects. I argue that from this ‘higher-orderist’ perspective, there is a relatively straightforward answer to the question of how possible worlds-as-propositions succeed in representing possibilities. (shrink)

David Chalmers underestimates the possibility that actually answering the 'hard question' will make both the hard problem and the meta-problem of consciousness evaporate.

In a recent article, Elliot Sober responds to challenges to a counter-example that he posed some years earlier to the Principle of the Common Cause (PCC). I agree that Sober has indeed produced a genuine counter-example to the PCC, but argue against the methodological moral that Sober wishes to draw from it. Contrary to Sober, I argue that the possibility of exceptions to the PCC does not undermine its status as a central assumption for methods that endeavor to draw causal (...) conclusions from statistical data. 1 The PCC and the counter-example 2 Making non-stationary time series stand still 3 Sober's alternative. (shrink)

The rise of China, along with problems of governance in democratic countries, has reinvigorated the theory of political meritocracy. But what is the theory of political meritocracy and how can it set standards for evaluating political progress? To help answer these questions, this volume gathers a series of commissioned research papers from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, historians and social scientists. The result is the first book in decades to examine the rise of political meritocracy and what it will (...) mean for political developments in China and the rest of the world. Despite its limitations, meritocracy has contributed much to human flourishing in East Asia and beyond and will continue to do so in the future. This book is essential reading for those who wish to further the debate and perhaps even help to implement desirable forms of political change. (shrink)

The global spread of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices is widely explained in institutional-isomorphic terms: Corporations worldwide adopt CSR in reaction to isomorphic pressures exerted on them by a pro-CSR global environment, including normative calls for CSR, activist targeting, civil regulation frameworks, and educational activities. By contrast, this article considers the proactive agency of corporations in CSR diffusion, which is informed by nonmarket strategies that seek to instrumentally reshape the political and social environment of corporations. Applying a “channels-of-diffusion” perspective, we (...) show that in the initial phase of CSR’s transnational diffusion—as exemplified by the cases of Venezuela (1962-1967) and Britain (1977-1981)—CSR traveled through learning exchanges between business elite “exporters” and “importers” whose engagement in diffusion addressed crisis-enhanced political threats and opportunities in the receiving country. The focal agents established national CSR business associations, which disseminated among local corporations CSR practices adapted to confront the challenges at hand. We identify the features of such “business-led cross-national diffusions of CSR”; formulate propositions regarding their conditions, dynamics, and effects; and suggest that further research of this mode of diffusion would advance a more nuanced and balanced understanding of CSR’s globalization. (shrink)

This paper brings out an inconsistency between David Chalmers's dualism, which is the main element of his philosophy of mind, and his structuralism, which is the main element of his epistemology. The point is ad hominem , but the inconsistency if it can be established is of considerable independent interest. For the best response to the inconsistency, I argue, is to adopt what Chalmers calls ‘type‐C Materialism’, a version of materialism that has been much discussed in recent times because of (...) its promise to move us beyond the stand‐off between standard versions of materialism and dualism. In turn, if that version of materialism is true, both dualism and structuralism should be rejected. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent rejections of epistemic consequentialism, like those from Firth, Jenkins, Berker, and Greaves, have argued that consequentialism is committed to objectionable trade-offs and suggest...

This volume presents new essays by leading figures in speech-act theory, the interdisciplinary study of things we do with words. They range over formal semantics and pragmatics, foundational issues about the nature of linguistic representation, and issues at the intersection of the philosophy of language, ethics, and political philosophy.

Creationism about fictional entities requires a principle connecting what fictions say exist with which fictional entities really exist. The most natural way of spelling out such a principle yields inconsistent verdicts about how many fictional entities are generated by certain inconsistent fictions. Avoiding inconsistency without compromising the attractions of creationism will not be easy.

Situation semantics as conceived in Kratzer (1989) has been shown to be a valuable companion to the e-type pronoun analysis of donkey sentences (Heim 1990, and recently refined in Elbourne 2001b), and more generally binding out of DP (BOOD; Tomioka 1999; Büring 2001). The present paper proposes a fully compositional version of such a theory, which is designed to capture instances of crossover in BOOD.

I argue that an act can be wrong _because_ it wrongs a particular person. I then show how this thesis serves as a constraint on moral theories, using Kantian ethics as a case study.

So you want to publish some philosophy—preferably, good philosophy in a nice journal. -/- How do you do it?

The first part of the final section of Hegel's Science of Logic, the section on "The Idea", is titled "Life". Logic being the science of thought for Hegel, this section presents Hegel's account of the form of thought peculiar to thinking about living beings as living. Hegel's full account of this form of thought holds that a living being is (1) a functionally organized totality of members (2) that maintains itself in and through its environment (3) in the manner of (...) some particular species. I develop Hegel's account in critical conversation with Kant's more limited principle, in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, for judging about internally purposive "natural ends" as beings in which every part is both means and end to every other. I argue that Hegel's view rationally develops from attempting to think through Kant's principle, retaining what is valuable in Kant's insights without treating the life sciences with skepticism. (shrink)

Popular sovereignty - the doctrine that the public powers of state originate in a concessive grant of power from 'the people' - is perhaps the cardinal doctrine of modern constitutional theory, placing full constitutional authority in the people at large, rather than in the hands of judges, kings, or a political elite. Although its classic formulation is to be found in the major theoretical treatments of the modern state, such as in the treatises of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, this book (...) explores the intellectual origins of this doctrine and investigates its chief source in late medieval and early modern thought. Long regarded the principal source for modern legal reasoning, Roman law had a profound impact on the major architects of popular sovereignty such as François Hotman, Jean Bodin, and Hugo Grotius. Adopting the juridical language of obligations, property, and personality as well as the model of the Roman constitution, these jurists crafted a uniform theory that located the right of sovereignty in the people at large as the legal owners of state authority. In recovering the origins of popular sovereignty, the book demonstrates the importance of the Roman law as a chief source of modern constitutional thought. (shrink)

Paul Feyerabend once made a remark to the effect that his pragmatic theory of observation can be traced back to proposals put forward by leading Logical Empiricists during the height of the protocol sentence debate. In this paper I want to vindicate the systematic side of Feyerabend’s remark and show that a pragmatic theory of observation can in fact be found in Rudolf Carnap’s writings of 1932. I first proceed to dispel a misunderstanding concerning the term “pragmatic” raised by Thomas (...) Oberdan. Following Morris’ and Carnap’s documented usage, I show that the intended meaning of “pragmatic” refers to a specific semiotic relation between users of a language and their environment describable by empirical means. I reconstruct such a pragmatic theory in terms of a detector model that interprets observation sentences as bodily dispositions indicating physical events in the surroundings of the detector. I then proceed to show how Feyerabend’s later theory of observation picks up central features of Carnap’s account and also shares some of the motivations. I conclude by noting how an empirical theory of observation sentences offers a bootstrapping solution to the “basis problem”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Moral hazards are ubiquitous. Green ones typically involve technological fixes: Environmentalists often see ‘technofixes’ as morally fraught because they absolve actors from taking more difficult steps toward systemic solutions. Carbon removal and especially solar geoengineering are only the latest example of such technologies. We here explore green moral hazards throughout American history. We argue that dismissing (solar) geoengineering on moral hazard grounds is often unproductive. Instead, especially those vehemently opposed to the technology should use it as an opportunity to (...) expand the attention paid to the underlying environmental problem in the first place, actively invoking its opposite: ‘inverse moral hazards’. (shrink)

Gareth Evans famously observed that he can answer the question ‘Do you think there is going to be a third world war?’ by attending to “precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question ‘Will there be a third world war?’”. I argue that this observation follows from two independently plausible ideas in philosophy of mind. The first is about rationality and consciousness: it is that to be rational is in part to be (...) required to believe that you are in a conscious state if you are in one, at least if various background conditions are met. The second is about consciousness and attention: it is that consciousness in a belief state consists in its subject engaging, to a sufficient extent, in a certain sort of world-directed attention. I also argue that this suggestion is superior to others that have been made in the literature regarding Evan’s observation. (shrink)

Attentional capture by schematic emotional faces was investigated in two experiments using the flanker task devised by Eriksen and Eriksen (1974). In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a central target (a schematic face that was either positive or negative) flanked by two identical distractors, one on either side (schematic faces that were positive, negative, or neutral). The objective was to identify the central target as quickly as possible. The impact of the flankers depended on their emotional expression. Consistent with (...) a threat advantage hypothesis (negative faces are processed faster and attract more processing resources), responses to positive faces were slower when these were flanked by (response incompatible) negative faces as compared with positive or neutral faces, whereas responses to negative faces were unaffected by the identity of the flankers. Experiment 2 was a standard flanker task with letter stimuli except that the task-neutral flankers were schematic faces that were either positive, negative, or emotionally neutral. In this case, in which faces and emotional expressions were to be ignored, performance seemed entirely unaffected by the faces. This result suggests that attentional capture by emotional faces is contingent on attentional control settings. (shrink)

The dilemma objection charges that ‘weak’ versions of the precautionary principle (PP) are vacuous while ‘strong’ ones are incoherent. I respond that the ‘weak’ versus ‘strong’ distinction is misleading and should be replaced with a contrast between PP as a meta-rule and PP proper. Meta versions of PP require that the decision-making procedures used for environmental policy not be susceptible to paralysis by scientific uncertainty. Such claims are substantive because they often recommend against basing environmental policy decisions on cost–benefit analysis. (...) I argue that the second horn of the dilemma fails as a result of disregarding the role of proportionality in applications of PP. (shrink)

The post-confinement phase of the COVID-19 pandemic will require that governments navigate more complex ethical questions than had occurred in the initial, ‘curve-flattening’ phase, and that will occur when the pandemic is in the past. By looking at the unavoidable harms involved in the confinement and quarantine methods employed during the initial phase of the pandemic, we can develop a harm reduction approach to managing the phase during which society will be gradually reopened in a context of managed risk. The (...) principles that are at the heart of such an approach include a reckoning with all of the harms involved in policy choice, including harms that might be given rise to by policy implementation itself; a focus on the harms to which already vulnerable populations are susceptible; and a strong preference for policies that economize on the use of prohibitions and of coercive state enforcement, and that instead emphasize the agency of citizens in realizing health-promoting behavior change. This framework is applied to a policy proposal that has been discussed in policy circles in a number of countries, that of immunity ‘passports’, and to policies that emphasize the creative use of space and time to achieve physical distancing goals. (shrink)

Measuring an individual’s health states presupposes the ability to compare them. I maintain that our ability to compare quantities or magnitudes of health are severely limited. It is easier to compare values of health states, but those values are context dependent and often unreliable.

: Fodor’s view of the mind is thoroughly computational. This means that the basic kind of mental entity is a “discursive” mental representation and operations over this kind of mental representation have broad architectural scope, extending out to the edges of perception and the motor system. However, in multiple epochs of his work, Fodor attempted to define a functional role for non-discursive, imagistic representation. I describe and critique his two considered proposals. The first view says that images play a particular (...) kind of functional role in certain types of deliberative tasks. The second says that images are solely restricted to the borders of perception, and act as a sort of medium for the fixing of conceptual reference. I argue, against the first proposal, that a broad-scope computationalism such as Fodor’s renders images in principle functionally redundant. I argue, against the second proposal, that empirical evidence suggests that non-discursive representations are learned through perceptual learning, and directly inform category judgments. In each case, I point out extant debates for which the arguments are relevant. The upshot is that there is motivation for limited scope computationalism, in which some, but not all, mental processes operate on discursive mental representations. Keywords: Computational Theory of Mind; Mental Representation; Perception; Mental Image; Jerry Fodor Fodor e le rappresentazioni mentali come immagini Riassunto: La concezione della mente di Fodor è rigorosamente computazionale, ossia le entità mentali di base sono rappresentazioni mentali “discorsive”. Le operazioni su queste rappresentazioni hanno un fine architettonico ampio, che va fino ai confini della percezione e del sistema motorio. In periodi diversi del suo lavoro, Fodor ha proposto due modi per definire un ruolo funzionale per la rappresentazione non-discorsiva come immagine. Tratterò criticamente entrambi. Per il primo, le immagini giocano un particolare tipo di ruolo funzionale in certi tipi di compiti deliberativi, mentre, per il secondo, sono relegate unicamente ai confini della percezione, agendo come medium per fissare il riferimento concettuale. Contro il primo sosterrò che un computazionalismo così ampio come quello di Fodor rende le immagini in principio funzionalmente ridondanti. Contro il secondo sosterrò che l’evidenza empirica suggerisce che le rappresentazioni non-discorsive vengono apprese percettivamente, agendo direttamente sui giudizi di categorizzazione. In entrambi i casi considererò gli argomenti più rilevanti nel dibattito corrente. Si vedrà che ci sono buone ragioni in favore di un computazionalismo più limitato, in cui alcuni processi mentali operano su rappresentazioni mentali discorsive. Parole chiave: Teoria computazionale della mente; Rappresentazione mentale; Percezione; Immagine mentale; Jerry Fodor. (shrink)

This article examines methodological individualism in terms of the theory that invariance under intervention is the signal feature of generalizations that serve as a basis for causal explanation. This theory supports the holist contention that macro-level generalizations can explain, but it also suggests a defense of methodological individualism on the grounds that greater range of invariance under intervention entails deeper explanation. Although this individualist position is not threatened by multiple-realizability, an argument for it based on rational choice theory is called (...) into question by experimental results concerning preference reversals. Key Words: methodological individualism • mechanisms • explanation • invariance • preference reversal. (shrink)

Advances in neuroscience are changing how mental health issues such as addiction are understood and addressed as a brain disease. Although a brain disease model legitimizes addiction as a medical condition, it promotes neuro-essentialist thinking and categorical ideas of responsibility and free choice, and undermines the complexity involved in its emergence. We propose a “biopsychosocial systems” model where psychosocial factors complement and interact with neurogenetics. A systems approach addresses the complexity of addiction and approaches free choice and moral responsibility within (...) the biological, lived experience and sociohistorical context of the individual. We examine heroin-assisted treatment as an applied case example within our framework. We conclude with a discussion of the model and its implications for drug policy, research, addiction health care systems and delivery, and treatment of substance use problems. (shrink)