In this article we focus on three key precepts shared by Confucianism and the African ethic of Ubuntu: the central value of community, the desirability of ethical partiality, and the idea that we tend to become morally better as we grow older. For each of these broad similarities, there are key differences underlying them, and we discuss those as well as speculate about the reasons for them. Our aim is not to take sides, but we do suggest ways that Ubuntu (...) and Confucianism might have something to learn from each other and perhaps come closer. We hope that our preliminary reflections can inspire further debate and thinking on a theme – dialogues between long-standing and large-scale non-Western traditions – that is bound to increase in importance as non-Western societies play a greater role in the global system and as the search continues for a 'global ethic'. (shrink)

Reprint of an article appearing in the Journal of Chinese Philosophy (2011).

Migration was one of the most important issues in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While Hillary Clinton promised an immigration reform that would create a path to citizenship, Donald Trump said he would deport illegal aliens, build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and suspend immigration from countries with a history of terrorism, capitalizing on some of the public’s fears through his rhetoric. We examine the ways mainstream national and regional press covered this issue from the Republican National (...) Convention through Election Day. This content analysis of 12 news outlets finds that political themes drove the coverage more than anything else, with Donald Trump or a member of his team most often serving as theme sponsor. Though about half of the stories were neutral or balanced in tone, negative stories were sponsored either by the Trump team or other actors. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 2 Seiten: 532-580.

Personality and prayer are both conceptualized as focusing on issues of connectivity with the self and beyond. Individual participants each recruited a peer to join the study . Participants rated themselves according to multi-item scales that detail five personality factors . They also responded to an instrument specifying eight foci of the inward, outward, and upward cognitive content of prayer ; these eight foci were reduced to three prayer themes: internal concerns, embracing paradox, and bold assertion. Finally, respondents reported the (...) strength of six "basic" emotions that may be experienced during their typical prayer. Using the same instruments, each peer rated her or his matched participant. Results reveal discrete patterns between self and peer ratings, with respect to links among prayer and personality variables. Both self and peer ratings emphasize a relation between prayer and the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness . Several concluding points highlight the value of the present conceptualization of personality and prayer with relation to connectivity, potential differences between personal and corporate prayers, and the potential role of sex differences in the disclosure of prayer's content and emotional influence. (shrink)

Personality and prayer are both conceptualized as focusing on issues of connectivity with the self and beyond. Individual participants each recruited a peer to join the study . Participants rated themselves according to multi-item scales that detail five personality factors . They also responded to an instrument specifying eight foci of the inward, outward, and upward cognitive content of prayer ; these eight foci were reduced to three prayer themes: internal concerns, embracing paradox, and bold assertion. Finally, respondents reported the (...) strength of six "basic" emotions that may be experienced during their typical prayer. Using the same instruments, each peer rated her or his matched participant. Results reveal discrete patterns between self and peer ratings, with respect to links among prayer and personality variables. Both self and peer ratings emphasize a relation between prayer and the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness . Several concluding points highlight the value of the present conceptualization of personality and prayer with relation to connectivity, potential differences between personal and corporate prayers, and the potential role of sex differences in the disclosure of prayer's content and emotional influence. (shrink)

In my 2002 piece ‘The Meaning of Life’ I argued that Life, meaning the sum of the lives of all living things, had a meaning if and only if it had been purposefully brought about by a designer or creator. Michael Hauskeller has recently criticized this argument, responding that this sense of ‘meaning’ is not the one in view when we are discussing ‘the meaning of life’. In this piece I respond to Hauskeller's argument, and, while I stand by my (...) 2002 argument in terms of one meaning of ‘meaning’, I admit that it does not apply to the different question of what makes a life meaningful. I assert that glorifying God is the activity that contributes the most meaningfulness to a life, though I deny that this is the only activity that can contribute meaningfulness to a life. This makes me, in terms due to Thaddeus Metz, a moderate supernaturalist rather than an extreme supernaturalist. Despite this distinction, Metz has argued in this volume that moderate supernaturalism is vulnerable to the same objection as in his view defeats extreme supernaturalism, and I close by responding to this argument. (shrink)

_Film Worlds_ unpacks the significance of the "worlds" that narrative films create, offering an innovative perspective on cinema as art. Drawing on aesthetics and the philosophy of art in both the continental and analytic traditions, as well as classical and contemporary film theory, it weaves together multiple strands of thought and analysis to provide new understandings of filmic representation, fictionality, expression, self-reflexivity, style, and the full range of cinema's affective and symbolic dimensions. Always more than "fictional worlds" and "storyworlds" on (...) account of cinema's perceptual, cognitive, and affective nature, film worlds are theorized as immersive and transformative artistic realities. As such, they are capable of fostering novel ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding experience. Engaging with the writings of Jean Mitry, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, Gilles Deleuze, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among other thinkers, _Film Worlds_ extends Nelson Goodman's analytic account of symbolic and artistic "worldmaking" to cinema, expands on French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne's phenomenology of aesthetic experience in relation to films and their worlds, and addresses the hermeneutic dimensions of cinematic art. It emphasizes what both celluloid and digital filmmaking and viewing share with the creation and experience of all art, while at the same time recognizing what is unique to the moving image in aesthetic terms. The resulting framework reconciles central aspects of realist and formalist/neo-formalist positions in film theory while also moving beyond them and seeks to open new avenues of exploration in film studies and the philosophy of film. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article studies multi-stakeholder initiatives as spaces for both deliberation and contestation between constituencies with competing discourses and disputed values, beliefs, and preferences. We review different theoretical perspectives on MSIs, which see them mainly as spaces to find solutions to market problems, as spaces of conflict and bargaining, or as spaces of consensus. In contrast, we build on a contestatory deliberative perspective, which gives equal value to both contestation and consensus. We identify four types of internal contestation which can be (...) present in MSIs—procedural, inclusiveness, epistemic, and ultimate-goal—and argue that embracing contestation and engaging in ongoing revision of provisional agreements, criteria, and goals can enhance the democratic quality of MSIs. Finally, we explore the implications of this perspective for theorizing about the democratic quality in MSIs and about the role of corporations in transnational governance. (shrink)

Many philosophers of the last century thought all moral judgments can be expressed using a few basic concepts — what are today called ‘thin’ moral concepts such as ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘right,’ and ‘wrong.’ This was the view, fi rst, of the non-naturalists whose work dominated the early part of the century, including Henry Sidgwick, G.E. Moore, W.D. Ross, and C.D. Broad. Some of them recognized only one basic concept, usually either ‘ought’ or ‘good’; others thought there were two. But they (...) all assumed that other moral concepts, including such ‘thick’ ones as the virtue-concepts ‘courageous’ and ‘kindly,’ can be reductively analyzed using one or more thin concepts and some more or less determinate.. (shrink)

Epistemic consequentialists think that epistemic norms are about believing the truth and avoiding error. Recently, a number of authors have rejected epistemic consequentialism on the basis that it incorrectly sanctions tradeoffs of epistemic goodness. Here, I argue that epistemic consequentialists should borrow two lessons from ethical consequentialists to respond to these worries. Epistemic consequentialists should construe their view as an account of right belief, which they distinguish from other notions like rational and justified belief. Epistemic consequentialists should also make their (...) view ‘sophisticated,’ in the sense of Railton. Epistemic consequentialism, I conclude, is best construed as sharing much of its structure with prominent act-consequentialist views in ethics. Epistemic consequentialism has an advantage over its ethical counterpart though: the key claim of the view is practically universally accepted, which gives us an additional reason to think it’s true. (shrink)

Recent medical and bioethics literature shows a growing concern for practitioners’ emotional experience and the ethical environment in the workplace. Moral distress, in particular, is often said to result from the difficult decisions made and the troubling situations regularly encountered in health care contexts. It has been identified as a leading cause of professional dissatisfaction and burnout, which, in turn, contribute to inadequate attention and increased pain for patients. Given the natural desire to avoid these negative effects, it seems to (...) most authors that systematic efforts should be made to drastically reduce moral distress, if not altogether eliminate it from the lives of vulnerable practitioners. Such efforts, however, may be problematic, as moral distress is not adequately understood, nor is there agreement among the leading accounts regarding how to conceptualize the experience. With this article I make clear what a robust account of moral distress should be able to explain and how the most common notions in the existing literature leave significant explanatory gaps. I present several cases of interest and, with careful reflection upon their distinguishing features, I establish important desiderata for an explanatorily satisfying account. With these fundamental demands left unsatisfied by the leading accounts, we see the persisting need for a conception of moral distress that can capture and delimit the range of cases of interest. (shrink)

The primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of language are speech acts of the type called illocutionary acts. In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic John Searle and Daniel Vanderveken presented the first formalized logic of a general theory of speech acts. In Meaning and Speech Acts Daniel Vanderveken further develops the logic of speech acts and the logic of propositions to construct a general semantic theory of natural languages. Volume I, Principles of Language Use, explains the (...) general principles that connect meaning, reason, thought and speech acts in the semantic structure of language. It presupposes no detailed knowledge of logical formalism, and will be accessible to a large readership of students and scholars from philosophy, lingustics, cognitive psychology and computer science. Volume II, Formal Semantics of Success and Satisfaction uses the resources of philosophical and mathematical logics to develop a formalization of the laws of the semantic theory advanced in Volume I. It will be of interest to theoretical linguists and those involved in mathematical logic and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A trivalent theory of indicative conditionals automatically enforces Stalnaker's thesis – the equation between probabilities of conditionals and conditional probabilities. This result holds because the trivalent semantics requires, for principled reasons, a modification of the ratio definition of conditional probability in order to accommodate the possibility of undefinedness. I explain how this modification is motivated and how it allows the trivalent semantics to avoid a number of well-known triviality results, in the process clarifying why these results hold for many (...) bivalent theories. In short, the slew of triviality results published in the last 40-odd years need not be viewed as an argument against Stalnaker's thesis: it can be construed instead as an argument for abandoning the bivalent requirement that indicative conditionals somehow be assigned a truth-value in worlds in which their antecedents are false. (shrink)

In slapstick comedy, the worst thing that could happen usually does: The person with a sore toe manages to stub it, sometimes twice. Such errors also arise in daily life, and research traces the tendency to do precisely the worst thing to ironic processes of mental control. These monitoring processes keep us watchful for errors of thought, speech, and action and enable us to avoid the worst thing in most situations, but they also increase the likelihood of such errors when (...) we attempt to exert control under mental load (stress, time pressure, or distraction). Ironic errors in attention and memory occur with identifiable brain activity and prompt recurrent unwanted thoughts; attraction to forbidden desires; expression of objectionable social prejudices; production of movement errors; and rebounds of negative experiences such as anxiety, pain, and depression. Such ironies can be overcome when effective control strategies are deployed and mental load is minimized. (shrink)

Classic serotonergic psychedelics are experiencing a clinical revival, which has also revived ethical debates about psychedelic-assisted therapy. A particular issue here is how to prepare and protect patients from the vulnerability that the psychedelic state creates. This article first examines how this vulnerability manifests itself, revealing that it results from an impairment of autonomy: psychedelics diminish decision-making capacity, reduce controllability, and limit resistance to external influences. It then analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of five safety measures proposed in the literature, (...) what aspect of the patient’s vulnerability they seek to reduce, and how they can be optimized. The analysis shows that while preparatory sessions, advance directives, and specific training and oversight are useful, starting with a lower dosage and no therapy is less so. Finally, the article presents a safety measure that has been overlooked in the literature but could be highly effective and feasible: bringing a close person to the psychedelic session. (shrink)

Scientific psychology and neuroscience are taking increasingly precise and comprehensive pictures of the human mind, both in its physi- cal architecture and its functional processes. Meanwhile, each human mind has an abbreviated view of itself, a self-portrait that captures how it thinks it operates, and that therefore has been remarkably influential. The mind’s self-portrait has as a central feature the idea that thoughts cause actions, and that the self is thus an origin of the body’s actions. This self- portrait is (...) reached through a process of inference of apparent mental cau- sation, and it gives rise to the experience that we are consciously willing what we do. Evidence from several sources suggests that this self-portrait may often be a humble and misleading caricature of the mind’s opera- tion—but one that underlies the feeling of authorship and the acceptance of responsibility for action. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Je maintiens dans cet essai que l'argument développé par Thomas Hurka sur la base de son perfectionnisme aristotélicien en faveur d'une forme modérée de perfectionnisme d'État échoue. Je tente de démontrer que son perfectionnisme sousdétermine les types d'activités que l'État aurait à promouvoir afin de réaliser les valeurs perfectionnistes qu'il défend. Je soutiens également que Hurka opère avec une conception caricaturale de la doctrine de la neutralité libérale. Selon lui, l'État libéral serait réduit à l'inaction par cette notion. Je (...) démontre que l'État libéral peut promouvoir les biens et les activités qui font partie d'une «conception libérale du bien» tout en respectant l'exigence de neutralité. Ces biens et ces activités sont ceux que recoupent déjà les conceptions raisonnables de la vie bonne, ainsi que ceux qui sont présupposés, que cela soit pour des raisons empiriques ou conceptuelles, par de telles conceptions raisonnables. (shrink)

In her work Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, Marilyn McCord Adams offers an account of the problem of evil that deals with the interaction between certain types of evil and the human capacity for meaning production. This paper attempts to consider certain implications of her presuppositions and, in so doing, to uncover several challenges to her broader project entailed by said implications. More specifically, this paper considers, within the context of Adams’ broader project, the status of perpetrators of (...) horrendous evils with respect to their ability to conceive of said evils, evils that destroy meaning-making capacities in their victims and evils that twist and subvert the meaning-making processes of their victims or observers. (shrink)

If there are true contradictions, where are they? In language or in the world? According to one important view, best represented by Jc Beall (2009), only the former. In this paper, we raise a problem for this view. In order to defend a “merely semantic” version of dialetheism (aka ‘glut theory’), Beall adopts transparent accounts of truth and falsity, which gives rise to “dialethic ascent” on which true contradictions are also, contradictorily, untrue contradictions. This is a consequence of trying to (...) restrict contradictions to language and keep them out of the world. However, in this paper, we show that this ascent carries over intensional contexts, so that, on this version of dialetheism, even if there are true contradictions, no one knows a true contradiction. This shows that contradictions have not been kept out of the world. We end by connecting this issue with the infamous ‘just true’ problem. (shrink)

On a Dreyfusian account performers choke when they reflect upon and interfere with established routines of purely embodied expertise. This basic explanation of choking remains popular even today and apparently enjoys empirical support. Its driving insight can be understood through the lens of diverse philosophical visions of the embodied basis of expertise. These range from accounts of embodied cognition that are ultra conservative with respect to representational theories of cognition to those that are more radically embodied. This paper provides an (...) account of the acquisition of embodied expertise, and explanation of the choking effect, from the most radically enactive, embodied perspective, spelling out some of its practical implications and addressing some possible philosophical challenges. Specifically, we propose: an explanation of how skills can be acquired on the basis of ecological dynamics; and a non-linear pedagogy that takes into account how contentful representations might scaffold skill acquisition from a radically enactive perspective. (shrink)

Disputes between advocates of Bayesians and more orthodox approaches to statistical inference presuppose that Bayesians must regard must regard stopping rules, which play an important role in orthodox statistical methods, as evidentially irrelevant.In this essay, I show that this is not the case and that the stopping rule is evidentially relevant given some Bayesian confirmation measures that have been seriously proposed. However, I show that accepting a confirmation measure of this sort comes at the cost of rejecting two useful ancillaryBayesian (...) principles. (shrink)

Sauquillo González, Julián. La reforma constitucional. Sujetos y límites del poder constituyente. Tecnos, Madrid, 2018, 406 páginas.

The recent publication of the stenographer's transcript of Whitehead's guest lecture on “social ethics” has shed new light on the relation between his metaphysics and ethics. Instead of including ethics in his philosophy, Whitehead treats it as a distinct, specialized science that does not share in the universality of metaphysics. The present article argues that an analysis of his lecture shows that a nonindividualist Whiteheadian ethics is possible without rupturing the coherence of Whitehead's system or contradicting the ontological or subjectivist (...) principle. As part of a larger transition in Whitehead's thinking during the years 1925–1927, he reformulates the notion of the environment as inheritance and is therefore able to pose the question of the endurance of values at the level of society, which is the purview of ethics. Reconstructing the metaphysical background may provide a “stimulus to the imagination” for ethical debates today, especially in the field of environmental ethics. (shrink)

There is an underappreciated disconnect between the ultimate values that lie at the heart of contemporary theories of distributive justice, and the practice of state institutions. State institutions deliver “intermediate goods” – goods such as health-care, education, housing, transportation, and the like – that are instrumental to a society being distributively just, but that do not in an of themselves constitute criteria of justice. Researchers who have emphasized the “social determinants of health” provide an insight that, when generalized, point us (...) in a direction that theorists of distributive justice should follow, that of attending not just to the instrinsic value of intermediate goods, but also to their causal contributions to realizing the values that theories of distributive justice make central. “Platforms”, which represent principle-driven attempts at designing compossible policies that attend both to the causal and to the intrinsic value of intermediate goods, should be given more importance within theories of distributive justice if such theories are to be policy-relevant, for they connect the ultimate values of these theories to the practices of state institutions. (shrink)

During the early nineteenth century the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, significantly increased the number of individuals it employed. One of the new roles created was the position of First Assistant, who oversaw the management of astronomical labor at the observatory. This article examines the contribution of Robert Main, who was the first person employed in this role. It shows that, through Robert Main’s duties and tasks, the observatory appears as a hybrid site embodying aspects of the other institutions that formed part (...) of its operational network. Moreover, it demonstrates that the transformation of the observatory during the nineteenth century was driven by his rigorous maintenance of discipline in relation to the daily operations of the site. (shrink)

A brief critical notice of _What Is a Person?_ by Nancy Jecker and Caesar Atuire focusing on their relational account of what gives human beings a dignity.