Barristers in England are obliged to follow the ‘cab rank rule’, according to which they must take any case offered to them, as long as they have time in their.

This book offers a broad reconstruction of the modern notion of sovereignty, a comprehensive critique of state-inflicted violence, and a concept of non-coercive law for our contemporary world society.

Artificial intelligence and robotic technologies have become nearly ubiquitous. In some ways, the developments have likely helped us, but in other ways sophisticated technologies set back our interests. Among the latter sort is what has been dubbed the ‘severance problem’—the idea that technologies sever our connection to the world, a connection which is necessary for us to flourish and live meaningful lives. I grant that the severance problem is a threat we should mitigate and I ask: how can we stave (...) it off? In particular, the fact that some technologies exhibit behavior that is unclear to us seems to constitute a kind of severance. Building upon contemporary work on moral responsibility, I argue for a mechanism I refer to as ‘technological answerability’, namely the capacity to recognize human demands for answers and to respond accordingly. By designing select devices—such as robotic assistants and personal AI programs—for increased answerability, we see at least one way of satisfying our demands for answers and thereby retaining our connection to a world increasingly occupied by technology. (shrink)

This essay criticizes the proposal recently defended by a number of prominent economists that welfare economics be redirected away from the satisfaction of people's preferences and toward making people happy instead. Although information about happiness may sometimes be of use, the notion of happiness is sufficiently ambiguous and the objections to identifying welfare with happiness are sufficiently serious that welfare economists are better off using preference satisfaction as a measure of welfare. The essay also examines and criticizes the position associated (...) with Daniel Kahneman and a number of co-authors that takes welfare to be ‘objective happiness’ – that is, the sum of momentary pleasures. (shrink)

The harvesting of data about people, organizations, and things and their transformation into a form of capital is often described as a process of “accumulation by dispossession,” a pervasive loss of rights buttressed by predatory practices and legal violence. Yet this argument does not square well with the fact that enrollment into digital systems is often experienced as a much more benign process: signing up for a “free” service, responding to a “friend’s” invitation, or being encouraged to “share” content. In (...) this paper, we focus on the centrality of gifting and reciprocity to the business model and cultural imagination of digital capitalism. Relying on historical narratives and in-depth interviews with the designers and critics of digital systems, we explain the cultural genesis of these “give-to-get” relationships and analyze the socio-technical channels that structure them in practice. We suggest that the economic relation that develops as a result of a digital gift offering not only masks the structural asymmetry between giver and gifted but also permits the creation of the new commodity of personal data, obfuscates its true value, and naturalizes its private appropriation. We call this unique regime “accumulation by gift.”. (shrink)

There is a broad consensus in the literature that in the section on ‘The Genus’ in theScience of Logic, Hegel argues that any living being must exist among other instances of its kind, with which it reproduces to create future generations, and out of which it was itself produced. This view is not only hard to motivate philosophically, it also seems to contradict many things Hegel says elsewhere in his system about the details of living nature, especially concerning the reality (...) of spontaneous generation. After an examination of the secondary literature on ‘The Genus’, I offer an alternative view of this section, which I call ‘the Modal Reading’. The Modal Reading sees the language of pluralities in ‘The Genus’ as really Hegel's peculiar way of articulating certain modal features of thoughts about the living: to grasp a living individual as living, we need to distinguish not only between this individual and its environment, but also between the things this individual actually does and other possibilities which it does not actualize. The Modal Reading has a logical motivation insofar as it articulates what is needed to think of a living being as living, but it also avoids saddling Hegel with the problematic entailments he is usually read as taking on in this section. A further upshot of the Modal Reading is that approaching Hegel in this way provides us with a way to see Hegel as defending a non-nominalistic alternative to essentialist accounts of living kinds. Finding a way to read ‘The Genus’ which coheres with Hegel's views elsewhere in his system thus shows Hegel to have been an especially subtle and penetrating thinker, with continuing relevance for the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

This book examines the divine nature in terms of maximal greatness. It investigates each attribute associated with maximal greatness - omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, eternity, and beauty, arguing that maximal greatness is necessary and sufficient for divinity.

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 731-745, December 2021.

A downward-entailing context has the property that the replacement of the predicate in the context by a stronger predicate preserves truth. So, for instance, presuppositions aside, the context after “every” in (1) where the NPI “ever” appears is downward entailing.

Western representation of countries from the Global South implies a dichotomist view of business ethics: on the one hand, universal ethics largely reproduces commonsensical views of the South as ‘less ethical’, and on the other hand, voices from the South are often conditioned to present themselves as substantially indigenous and unambiguous to be accepted as legitimate ethical subjects. We join the growing interest in bridging this gap by drawing on studies from human geography, and ask to what extent the materiality (...) of moral dilemmas bespeaks the disputed underpinning ethical values of a given space. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s perspective of the production of social space, we outline and apply the idea of ‘spatial ethics’ to organizations, in order to approach the entanglement between center and periphery. We analyze organizations in favelas, which are, for many authors, territories where experiences are extreme, and poverty and violence mix with vibrant culture and ingenuity. We critically approach the field of business ethics and suggest that one way of moving beyond the North–South debate is to consider that ethics cannot be transmitted or represented in empty milieus. (shrink)

Talk of harm reduction has expanded horizontally, to apply to an ever-widening range of policy domains, and vertically, becoming part of official legal and political discourse. This expansion calls for philosophical theorization. What is the best way in which to characterize harm reduction? Does it represent a distinctive ethical position? How is it best morally justified, and what are its moral limits? I distinguish two varieties of harm reduction. One of them, technocratic harm reduction, is premised on the fact of (...) non-enforceability of prohibitionist policies. The second, deliberative harm reduction, is premised on the fact of reasonable disagreement, grounded in the fact that reasonable persons disagree about a range of controversial behaviours. I argue that deliberative harm reduction better accounts for some of harm reduction’s most attractive features, and provides a plausible way of accounting for harm reductions’s justificatory grounds and limits. (shrink)

Cognitive science has much to contribute to the general scientific body of knowledge, but it is also a field rife with possibilities for providing background research that can be leveraged by artificial intelligence (AI) developers. In this introduction, we briefly explore the history of AI. We particularly focus on the relationship between AI and cognitive science and introduce this special issue that promotes the method of inspiring AI development with the results of cognitive science research.

RésuméEn raison de la méfiance épistémique généralisée que ressentent les membres des chambres d’écho envers les étrangers, il est peu probable que de répondre à ce phénomène par un débat civil conduise à un accord ou à un compromis. De plus, une réponse civile peut contribuer au sentiment exagéré, dans la chambre d’écho, de jouir d'un haut statut épistémique, qui est précisément ce qui doit être démantelé ou diminué si un accord ou un compromis doit être rendu possible. En réponse (...) à des chambres d’écho particulièrement dangereuses et résistantes, une réponse modérément incivile peut être justifiée. (shrink)

The Anthropocene debate is one of the most ambitious scientific programmes of the past 15 or 20 years. Its main argument is that, from a geological point of view, humans are considered a major force of nature, thus implying that our current geological epoch is dominated by human activity. The Anthropocene has slowly become a contemporary meta-narrative that seeks to make sense of the ‘earth-system’ as a whole, and one whose vision of the future is dystopian rather than progressive: as (...) the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources reaches tipping point, the very prospects of the continuity of human life are being questioned. This article aims to explore the implicit notions of the human – indeed of the anthropos – that are being mobilized in the Anthropocene debate. It will proceed in two stages: first, the article will spell out the main arguments of the Anthropocene debate with a particular focus on trying to unpack its implicit ideas of the human. Second, it will use my approach to philosophical sociology to highlight some of the limitations and contradictions of the ideas of agency, reflexivity and responsibility that underpin the Anthropocene debate. (shrink)

Our use of artefacts has at different moments been characterised as either replacing or impoverishing our natural human capacities, or a key part of our humanity. This article critically evaluates the conception of the natural invoked by both accounts, and highlights the degree to which engagement with material features of the environment is fundamental to all living things, the closeness of this engagement making any account that seeks to draw a clear boundary between body and artefact problematic. By doing this (...) I seek to clarify the nature of our embodied relationship with various kinds of artefacts; moving from tools to machines to digital interfaces, I consider their differing potentials to be gathered into the body schema, and thus change our embodied horizons of perception and action. While much research currently seeks to facilitate a more ‘natural’ mode of interacting with technology, I argue that such a mode of interaction does not exist outside the particularity of our relationships with specific objects. As a result, rather than trying to cater to supposedly more natural modes of action and perception, future technologies should aim to enrich our experience with new modes, inviting novel relationships that produce new kinds of sensory and other experience. (shrink)

Medical quarantines often threaten the civil rights of the persons whom they confine. This might happen in two ways. First, quarantines might inflict harsh conditions on their occupants; and, second, quarantines might be imposed in an arbitrary or indeed discriminatory manner. These concerns, moreover, are anything but fantastic. Infectious diseases, particularly in epidemic forms, commonly trigger retributive and discriminatory instincts, so that actual quarantines often impose inhumane, stigmatizing, or even penal treatment upon persons who are confined based on caprice or (...) even prejudice.But quarantines that impose no gratuitous hardships and that are applied pursuant to orderly and non-discriminatory procedures are theoretically possible and also practically available. And such well-run quarantines, especially when they are employed to combat epidemic diseases, cannot plausibly be said to violate the civil rights of the quarantined. Even the staunchest civil libertarian must accept that one person's liberty may be restricted when this is necessary for preventing harm to another. (shrink)

Within a variety of contemplative traditions, non-dual-oriented practices were developed to evoke an experiential shift into a mode of experiencing in which the cognitive structures of self-other and subject–object subside. These practices serve to de-reify the enactment of an observing witness which is usually experienced as separate from the objects of awareness. While several contemplative traditions, such as Zen, Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta emphasize the importance of such a non-dual insight for the cultivation of genuine wellbeing, only very few (...) attempts in contemplative science have turned toward the study of non-dual-oriented practices. This article starts from a recently developed theoretical cognitive science framework that models the requirements of a temporary experiential shift into a mode of experiencing free from cognitive subject–object structure. This model inspired by the enactive approach contributes theoretically grounded hypotheses for the much-needed rigorous study of non-dual practices and non-dual experiences. To do so, three steps are taken: first, common elements of non-dual-oriented practices are outlined. Second, the main ideas of enactive cognitive science are presented including a principled theoretical model of what is required for a shift to a pure non-dual experience, that is, an experiential mode that is unbound by subject–object duality. Third, this synthesized theoretical model of the requirements for the recognition of the non-dual is then compared with a specific non-dual style of meditation practice, namely,Mahāmudrāpractice from Tibetan Buddhism. This third step represents a heuristic for evaluating the external coherence of the presented model. With this, the aim is to point toward a principled enactive view of non-dual meditative practice. In drawing the implications of the presented model, this article ends with an outlook toward next steps for further developing a research agenda that may fully address the concrete elements of non-dual practices. (shrink)

Actor-network theory has contributed greatly to the development of science and technology studies. However, recent critiques appear to have left ANT in a gloomy theoretical black box. What is the likelihood of ANT exiting its current theoretical discontent? Is ANT worthy of salvation and on what grounds? Law argues that recent critiques stem from ANT’s development into a particular theoretical strategy. However, this article will argue that by focusing on strategy as messy and impure, ANT can be afforded the opportunity (...) to shift from a fixed approach to an ambiguous and contingent strategy, well placed to carry on. The article achieves such an argument by first highlighting how ANT has contributed to a recent study of strategy in action; second, by outlining the strategic aspects of ANT; and third, by using the study of strategy in action as a means of engaging with ANT’s current theoretical discontent. (shrink)

Asha Bhandary’s Freedom to Care represents an important challenge to the idea that care ethics and liberalism necessarily stand in tension, arguing instead that most of the commitments of care ethics can be integrated within a recognizably mainstream liberal contract theory. Although I am sympathetic to Bhandary’s project, I identify three ways in which it falls short: Bhandary’s thin moral premises fail to support decent care for all; her survival baseline principle of care does not support some important forms of (...) care; and her proceduralist approach offers little alternative other than coercion for assuring sufficient care for all. I argue a thicker set of moral assumptions based on the importance of decent care for all are necessary for reconciling liberalism and care ethics on more equal terms. (shrink)

Rights of nature is an idea that has come of age. In recent years, a diverse range of countries and jurisdictions have adopted these norms, which involve granting legal rights to nature or natural objects, such as rivers, forests, or ecosystems. This book critically examines the idea of natural objects as right-holders, and analyses legal cases, policies, and philosophical issues relating to this development. -/- Drawing on contributions from a range of experts in the field, Rights of Nature: A Re-examination (...) investigates the potential for this innovative idea to revolutionize the concepts of rights, standing, and recognition as traditionally understood in many legal systems. Taking as its starting point Stone’s influential 1972 article ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’, the book examines the progress rights of nature have made since that time, by identifying central themes, unifying principles, and key distinctions in how rights of nature discourse has been operationalized in the disciplines of law, philosophy, and the social sciences. These themes and principles are illustrated through a wide variety of examples, including ecosystem services, indigenous thinking, and ecological restoration, demonstrating how the relationship between humanity and the natural world may be transforming. -/- Taking a philosophical, political, and legal perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental law and policy, environmental ethics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Developments in genetics, cyber-technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other areas hold the promise – and the peril – of redefining what it means to be human. In addition to hedonism or a desire for self-improvement, the possibilities of these technologies plus the rational concern of falling behind a potential adversary produce a classic security dilemma. These competitive pressures among states, firms, and emerging “super-empowered individuals” encourage the development and dissemination of these technologies, and already the possibilities are being explored (...) by actors in conflict. This security dilemma, plus the nature of the technologies themselves, makes it virtually certain that attempts at regulation will fail. Instead, we should expect “arms races” of quantity and quality of improvements, complicated by differing conceptions of what improvement means. This paper explores these pressures and outcomes, as well as general consequences of the potential modification of “human nature” for global and human security. It finds that whatever forms or enhancements we possess, in a transhuman or posthuman future politics will not be transcended. Critical problems of security will continue to challenge ourselves and our descendants. (shrink)

This article examines two interrelated aspects of Mexican regional music response to the coronavirus crisis in the música huasteca community: the growth of interactive huapango livestreams as a preexisting but newly significant space for informal community gathering and cultural participation at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, and the composition of original verses by son huasteco performers addressing the pandemic. Both the livestreams and the newly created coronavirus disease verses reflect critical improvisatory approaches to the pandemic in música huasteca. The (...) interactive livestreams signaled an ad hoc community infrastructure facilitated by social media and an emerging community space fostered by Do-It-Yourself activists. Improvised COVID-related verses presented resonant local and regional themes as a community response to a global crisis. Digital ethnography conducted since March 2020 revealed a regional burst of musical creativity coupled with DIY intentionality, a leveling of access to virtual community spaces, and enhanced digital intimacies established across a wide cultural diaspora in Mexico and the USA. These responses were musically, poetically, and organizationally improvisational, as was the overall outpouring of the son huasteco music inspired by the coronavirus outbreak. Son huasteco is a folk music tradition from the Huasteca, a geo-cultural region spanning the intersection of six states in central Mexico. This study examines a selection of musical responses by discussing improvisational examples in both Spanish and the indigenous language Nahuatl, and in the virtual musical communities of the Huasteca migrant diaspora in digital events such as “Encuentro Virtual de Tríos Huastecos,” the “Huapangos Sin Fronteras” festival and competition, and in the nightly gatherings on social media platforms developed during the pandemic to sustain the Huastecan cultural expression. These phenomena have served as vibrant points of transnational connection and identity in a time where physical gatherings were untenable. (shrink)

Evidence about whether reflective thinking may be induced and whether it affects utilitarian choices is inconclusive. Research suggests that answering items correctly in the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) before responding to dilemmas may lead to more utilitarian decisions. However, it is unclear to what extent this effect is driven by the inhibition of intuitive wrong responses (reflection) versus the requirement to engage in deliberative processing. To clarify this issue, participants completed either the CRT or the Berlin Numeracy Test (BNT) – (...) which does not require reflection – before responding to moral dilemmas. To distinguish between the potential effect of participants’ previous reflective traits and that of performing a task that can increase reflectivity, we manipulated whether participants received feedback for incorrect items. Findings revealed that both CRT and BNT scores predicted utilitarian decisions when feedback was not provided. Additionally, feedback enhanced performance for both tasks, although it only increased utilitarian decisions when it was linked to the BNT. Taken together, these results suggest that performance in a numeric task that requires deliberative thinking may predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. The finding that feedback increased utilitarian decisions only in the case of BNT casts doubt upon the reflective-utilitarian link. (shrink)

The topic of my dissertation is satire. This seems to excite many people, and over the past four years I have heard many variations of a similar refrain: “Oh, wow. You’re studying satire? That’s very topical. You must have a lot of material to work with.” There is a way in which this is true, though I suspect in a way that diverges from the way that most of my interlocutors believed. I suspect that the material they imagined me to (...) be working with was the output of Donald Trump, first a candidate for and now holder of the office of President of the United States. That is not the material I find interesting. More interesting to me is their statement. It evinces a number of beliefs that I find interesting, chief among them that Trump makes the current period particularly apt for satire, as if a doddery and incompetent ruling class is somehow a recent phenomenon. And I suspect that underneath this belief in the aptness of satire is a belief in the power of satire. Satire is somehow how people are going to strike back at the vice-governed fools who rule us. Those beliefs are the material I want to work with. This is my interest in satire, then: not so much what it is about satire that makes it powerful, but what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful? And what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful when there is pretty powerful evidence that it is not? Unfortunately, here is where I run into the problem that in a very important way I do not have a lot of material to work with. There is not an awful lot on satire within the analytic tradition: outside of a few references to satire, analytic discussions of satire are limited to two short articles. Accordingly, I have taken the task of my dissertation to be to create an account of satire that helps to bring forward why satire is a thing that people can imagine to be powerful, that they can imagine to be politically effective. My dissertation will effectively have two halves, one where I build my account and one where I begin to apply it. The purpose of applying my account, which will comprise the final two chapters, will not be to show its implications so much as how it can be used. My goal will not so much be to give definitive answers about the nature of satire, but rather to give a demonstration of how my account facilitates engaging questions about the role of satire in social and political context. (shrink)

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of the input (...) language, and the child's ability to learn predictive relations between linguistic elements that are separated within a sentence. We apply a simple associative learning model to sequential English and Spanish stimuli and show how the model's ability to associate cues occurring earlier in time with later outcomes affects the acquisition of verb inflection in English more than in Spanish. We relate this to the high frequency of the English bare form (which acts as a default) and the English process of question formation, which means that (unlike in Spanish) bare forms frequently occur in third‐person singular contexts. Finally, we hypothesize that the pro‐drop nature of Spanish makes it easier to associate person and number cues with the verb inflection than in English. Since the factors that conspire to make English verb inflection particularly challenging for learners with weak sequential learning abilities are much reduced or absent in Spanish, this provides an explanation for why learning Spanish verb inflection is relatively unaffected in children with DLD. (shrink)

The original version of this article unfortunately contained mistakes.

Is moral responsibility compatible with determinism? Peter Strawson’s first answer is: I do not know what the thesis of determinism is. His second answer seems to be: Yes, it is, and we can see this by looking to relevant pockets of our ordinary practices and attitudes, especially our responses (resentment, anger, love, forgiveness) to quality of will. His second answer has shaped subsequent discussions of moral responsibility. But what exactly is Strawson’s compatibilism? And is it a plausible view? By attending (...) to Strawson’s account of parenting and the development of moral agents from children to adults, I’ll clarify and defend the following account: For Strawson, the appropriateness conditions for holding responsible change by degrees, over time, based on an agent’s susceptibility to empathy and quality of will, and this shows us that determinism is irrelevant to responsibility. (shrink)

Health care has increasingly come to be understood as a commodity. The ethical implications of such an understanding are significant. The author argues that health care is not a commodity because health care (1) is non-proprietary, (2) serves the needs of persons who, as patients, are uniquely vulnerable, (3) essentially involves a special human relationship which ought not be bought or sold, (4) helps to define what is meant by necessity and cannot be considered a commodity when subjected to rigorous (...) conceptual analysis. The Oslerian conception that medicine is a calling and not a business ought to be reaffirmed by both the profession and the public. Such a conception would have significant ramifications for patient care and health care policy. (shrink)

How do people adapt to technology? This study examines one mechanism people may be using to personalize technology—talking to machines. Communicating to machines is similar to other forms of personalization and can be explained using attribution theory. Characteristics of machines (such as relationship to emotions, predictability, and familiarity) may affect people's willingness to communicate. A survey study that examined people's communication to machines showed that people do communicate to some machines, and hypotheses about the characteristics of machines were supported. A (...) second survey study examined the differences between communicating with cars and computers, comparing issues such as frequency, emotionality, and the perceived gender of the machines. Overall, these studies show some of the ways people are adapting to their increasingly computerized, technological environment. (shrink)

Qui a écrit la première histoire du christianisme ? La recherche historienne moderne a rarement hésité à pointer le doigt vers Eusèbe de Césarée, ainsi que le rappellent dans ce dossier les contributions de M. Fédou et de M. Heinzelmann. Une telle reconnaissance devait amener une dégradation de la qualité historienne de l’œuvre lucanienne, évangile et Actes des Apôtres, reconnue jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle. Ainsi, jusque dans les années 60 du XXe siècle, la recherche sur cette œuvre devait être dominée par (...) cette tonalité lourde. Une révision de ces attitudes, dont certaines se sont manifestées dès le début de ce même siècle, s’est depuis engagée, grâce notamment à une meilleure connaissance et acceptation des caractéristiques de l’historiographie ancienne. C’est donc un véritable historien qui se révèle désormais dans l’œuvre lucanienne, légitimant du même coup le concept d’histoire théologique, et rendant à Luc sa place, la première, bien avant Eusèbe de Césarée.Who wrote the first history of Christianity? Modern historical research has rarely hesitated to designate Eusebius of Caesarea, as the contributions of M. Fédou and M. Heizelmann recall here. Such recognition led to downgrading the historical quality of Luke’s writings, the Gospel and Acts of the Apostles, which had been accepted until the 18th century. Thus, up until the 1960’s, research on these writings was dominated by this overriding approach. A revision of these attitudes, some of which arose in the early 20th century, has since emerged, especially due to a better understanding and acceptance of the characteristics of ancient historiography. Hence, Luke now appears as a true historian, thereby legitimizing the concept of theological history and once again acknowledging Luke’s place as the first historian of Christianity, well before Eusebius of Caesarea. (shrink)