As algorithms have become ubiquitous in consequential domains, societal concerns about the potential for discriminatory outcomes have prompted urgent calls to address algorithmic bias. In response, a rich literature across computer science, law, and ethics is rapidly proliferating to advance approaches to designing fair algorithms. Yet computer scientists, legal scholars, and ethicists are often not speaking the same language when using the term ‘bias.’ Debates concerning whether society can or should tackle the problem of algorithmic bias are hampered by conflations (...) of various understandings of bias, ranging from neutral deviations from a standard to morally problematic instances of injustice due to prejudice, discrimination, and disparate treatment. This terminological confusion impedes efforts to address clear cases of discrimination. -/- In this paper, we examine the promises and challenges of different approaches to disambiguating bias and designing for justice. While both approaches aid in understanding and addressing clear algorithmic harms, we argue that they also risk being leveraged in ways that ultimately deflect accountability from those building and deploying these systems. Applying this analysis to recent examples of generative AI, our argument highlights unseen dangers in current methods of evaluating algorithmic bias and points to ways to redirect approaches to addressing bias in generative AI at its early stages in ways that can more robustly meet the demands of justice. (shrink)

In this position paper, we introduce a new epistemic lens for analyzing algorithmic harm. We argue that the epistemic lens we propose herein has two key contributions to help reframe and address some of the assumptions underlying inquiries into algorithmic fairness. First, we argue that using the framework of epistemic injustice helps to identify the root causes of harms currently framed as instances of representational harm. We suggest that the epistemic lens offers a theoretical foundation for expanding approaches to algorithmic (...) fairness in order to address a wider range of harms not recognized by existing technical or legal definitions. Second, we argue that the epistemic lens helps to identify the epistemic goals of inquiries into algorithmic fairness. There are two distinct contexts within which we examine algorithmic harm: at times, we seek to understand and describe the world as it is, and, at other times, we seek to build a more just future. The epistemic lens can serve to direct our attention to the epistemic frameworks that shape our interpretations of the world as it is and the ways we envision possible futures. Clarity with respect to which epistemic context is relevant in a given inquiry can further help inform choices among the different ways of measuring and addressing algorithmic harms. We introduce this framework with the goal of initiating new research directions bridging philosophical, legal, and technical approaches to understanding and mitigating algorithmic harms. (shrink)

A variety of studies show that parental absence early in life leads to deleterious effects on the developing CNS. This is thought to be largely because evolutionary-dependent stimuli are necessary for the appropriate postnatal development of the young brain, an effect sometimes termed the “experience-expectant brain,” with parents providing the necessary input for normative synaptic connections to develop and appropriate neuronal survival to occur. Principal among CNS systems affected by parental input are the monoamine systems. In the present study,N= 434 (...) rhesus monkeys (233 males, 201 females) were reared in one of two conditions: as mother-reared controls (MR;n= 269) or without adults with 24-h access to same-aged peers (PR;n= 165). When subjects were six-months-old, they underwent a separation paradigm involving 4, sequential, four-day social separations from their mothers or peers, with each separation followed by three-day reunions with their mothers or their peers. Prior to the separation paradigm, baseline cisternal CSF samples were obtained, as well as at the end of each the four social separations, and after final separation, during a recovery period. CSF was assayed for concentrations of monoamine metabolites and a blood sample was genotyped for the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) genotype. Replicating earlier landmark findings, PR subjects with thesallele exhibited lower baseline concentrations of the serotonin metabolite 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA), when compared to PR subjects homozygous for theLallele. MR subjects were undifferentiated by genotype. PR subjects exhibited lower CSF 5-HIAA concentrations during baseline, but higher CSF 5-HIAA during social separations, when compared to MR subjects. There were rearing effects for the dopamine metabolite homovanillic acid (HVA) and for the norepinephrine metabolite 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (MHPG), with PR subjects showing higher HVA and lower MHPG when compared to MR subjects. These findings indicate that there are long-term deficits in the response of monoamines following early maternal absence. The results of this study confirm and extend earlier findings that early parental absence has deleterious consequences for the development of the monoamine systems, and that these consequences are modulated by the 5-HTT genotype. (shrink)

Some names, specifically the proper names by which people are called, are considered “a mess” by at least one prominent contemporary philosopher.Although I quote from a number of Rufus’s works, there are two on which this paper is primarily based, both written when Rufus was a master of Arts in Paris, before 1238. I refer to the first as the Urmetaphysics. The second is a two-part treatise which Professor Wood has called the Contra Averroem. The Urmetaphysics is Rufus’s first commentary (...) on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, only very recently discovered by Professor Wood. It is to be distinguished from his second Metaphysics commentary which I refer to as th e Main Metaphysics Commentary. The Contra Averroem is comprised of “De ideis” and “De causa individuationis,” of which “De ideis” deserves a special mention. Discovered by Professor Timothy Noone, it w as first transcribed by Noone and Wood in 1990. Recently, Professor Noone has kindly sent me a revised transcription, for which I am very grateful. This transcription is quoted here.With the exception of “De ideis,” all quotations from Rufus are based on transcriptions made or revised by Professor Wood. Citations will indicate the relevant folio numbers of the manuscript or manuscripts on which the transcription is based. The manuscript itself, when first referred to, will be identified by the name of the city in which the library which houses it is located, the abbreviated name of the library, and its codex number.“All in all, proper names are a mess and if it weren’t for the problem of how to get the kids to come fo r dinner, I’d be inclined to just junk them” (David Kaplan, “Dhat,” Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, ed. Peter Cole; repr. in Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language, ed. P. French et al. (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1979, pp. 383–400, p. 386). Looking at the matter from the perspective of medieval philosophy, we might say that the reason such names are semantically ill-behaved is that the act of naming from which they d erive is not one of adequate naming. Moreover, supposing that all manner of beings, including people, are “things,” we might let adequate naming be governed by the following principle: an agent adequately names a thing if and only if, knowing its proper nature, she bestows a name on the thing by considering that nature. Obviously, on this principle, the acts of naming from which people in our societies derive their names are not acts of adequate naming. (shrink)

One of Chicago's great cultural achievements, the Institute of Design was among the most important schools of photography in twentieth-century America. It began as an outpost of experimental Bauhaus education and was home to an astonishing group of influential teachers and students, including Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind. To date, however, the ID's enormous contributions to the art and practice of photography have gone largely unexplored. Taken by Design is the first publication to examine thoroughly this remarkable institution (...) and its lasting impact. With nearly 300 illustrations, including many never-before published photographs, Taken by Design examines the changing nature of photography over this critical period in America's midcentury. It starts by documenting the experimental nature of Moholy's Bauhaus approach and photography's new and enhanced role in training the "complete designer." Next it traces the formal and abstract camera experiments under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, which aimed at achieving a new kind of photographic subjectivity. Finally, it highlights the ID's focus on conscious references to the processes of the photographic medium itself. In addition to photographs by Moholy, Callahan, and Siskind, the book showcases works by Barbara Crane, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Joseph Jachna, Kenneth Josephson, Gyorgy Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Ray K. Metzker, Richard Nickel, Arthur Siegel, Art Sinsabaugh, and many others. Major essays from experts in the field, biographies, a chronology, and reprints of critical essays are also included, making Taken by Design an essential work for anyone interested in the history of American photography. Contributors include: Keith Davis, Lloyd Engelbrecht, John Grimes, Nathan Lyons, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Elizabeth Siegel, David Travis, Larry Viskochil, James N. Wood. (shrink)

The landscape of the Sundarbans today is a product of two countervailing forces: conversion of wetland forests to cropland vs. sequestration of the forests in reserves to be managed for long-term sustained yield of wood products. For two centures, land-hungry peasants strove to transform the native tidal forest vegetation into an agroecosystem dominated by paddy rice and fish culture. During the colonial period, their reclamation efforts were encouraged by landlords and speculators, who were themselves encouraged by increasingly favorable state policies (...) (land grants, tax incentives, cadastral surveys, and eventually colonization projects and subsidized irrigation) designed by revenue officials to maximize the rate of transformation of wetland forest to taxable agricultural land.In the late nineteenth century, as the rate of agricultural conversion increased, the colonial Forest Department succcessfully sought to preserve large areas of the remaining Sundarbans tidal forest by giving them legal status as Reserved or Protected Forests. These forests were intensively managed to provide a sustainable supply of timber and firewood for the increasing population of southern Bengal. Institutionalization of conflicting policies by the Revenue and Forest Departments reflected the escalating needs for both food and forest products as the colony grew. Today, supplies of some economically valuable trees have been depleted, and some mammals are locally extinct (although the Bengal tiger remains), but government policy in both Bangladesh and India now favors use of the Sundarbans as forest rather than its transformation to agricultural land. Further expansion of cropland to meet the grain demands of the burgeoning Bengali population in both nations has largely taken place outside the boundaries of the Sundarbans. Overexploitation of these forests for wood products remains a possibility, but large-scale clearing for rice paddies is unlikely under present policies. (shrink)

Kant's moral philosophy is grounded on the dignity of humanity as its sole fundamental value, and involves the claim that human beings are to be regarded as the ultimate end of nature. It might be thought that a theory of this kind would be incapable of grounding any conception of our relation to other living things or to the natural world which would value nonhuman creatures or respect humanity's natural environment. This paper criticizes Kant's argumentative strategy for dealing with our (...) duties in regard to animals, but defends both his theory and most of his conclusions on these topics. (shrink)

Since the publication of Edmund Gettier's challenge to the traditional epistemological doctrine of knowledge as justified true belief, Roberts and Wood claim that epistemologists lapsed into despondency and are currently open to novel approaches. One such approach is virtue epistemology, which can be divided into virtues as proper functions or epistemic character traits. The authors propose a notion of regulative epistemology, as opposed to a strict analytic epistemology, based on intellectual virtues that function not as rules or even as skills (...) but as habits of the heart. To that end, they divide the task of clarifying and expounding their notion in the book's two parts.In the first part, Roberts and Wood examine various components that constitute their notion of regulative epistemology. The first are the epistemic goods or goals that drive the epistemic process. What is needed, claim Roberts and Wood, is an enriched notion of these goods rather than the restricted notion of justified true belief. Epistemic agents are more than calculating devices in that …. (shrink)

This is a major new study of Kant's ethics that will transform the way students and scholars approach the subject in future. Allen Wood argues that Kant's ethical vision is grounded in the idea of the dignity of the rational nature of every human being. Undergoing both natural competitiveness and social antagonism the human species, according to Kant, develops the rational capacity to struggle against its impulses towards a human community in which the ends of all are to harmonize and (...) coincide. The distinctive features of the book are twofold. First, it focuses for the first time on the central role played in Kant's ethical theory by the value of rational nature as an end itself. Second, it shows the importance of Kant's systematic theory of human nature and history, and its implications for the structure, formulation, and application of Kant's moral principles. This comprehensive study will be of critical importance to students of moral philosophy, the history of ideas, political theory, and religious studies. (shrink)

In this book, Allen Wood investigates Kant's conception of ethical theory, using it to develop a viable approach to the rights and moral duties of human beings. By remaining closer to Kant's own view of the aims of ethics, Wood's understanding of Kantian ethics differs from the received 'constructivist' interpretation, especially on such matters as the ground and function of ethical principles, the nature of ethical reasoning and autonomy as the ground of ethics. Wood does not hesitate to criticize and (...) modify Kant's conclusions when they seem inconsistent with his basic principles or fail to make the best use of the resources Kantian principles make available. Of special interest are the book's treatment of such topics as freedom of the will, the state's role in securing economic justice, sexual morality, the justification of punishment, and the prohibition on lying. (shrink)

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully annotated form. Letters already published (...) by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This is one of the most respected books on Marx's philosophical thought. Wood explains Marx's views from a philosophical standpoint and defends him against common misunderstandings and criticisms. All the major philosophical topics in Marx's work are considered: the central concept of alienation; historical materialism and Marx's account of social classes; the nature and social function of morality; philosophical materialism and Marx's atheism; and Marx's use of the Hegelian dialectical method and the Marxian theory of value.

Editors Rachel Brown and Deva Woodly bring together Mara Marin, Shatema Threadcraft, Christopher Paul Harris, Jasmine Syedullah, and Miriam Ticktin to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? The answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. The politics of care (...) is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. Instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive. (shrink)

Rachel Carson begins her revolutionary book Silent Spring with a quote from E.B. White that reads ‘we would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively’. While White's advice can account for an instrumental relationship towards nature, I believe that the more important relationship offered in his recommendation is one of appreciation or gratitude. But how are we to understand gratitude as appreciating Nature non-instrumentally when it has traditionally always been understood (...) as a response to a benefit received? My motivation is to modify our traditional conception of gratitude alongside Simon Hailwood's account of the ‘Otherness of Nature’ to see how we can truly show gratitude for Nature rather than simply reflecting on how Nature serves human interests. (shrink)

Regulation and governance of medical research is frequently criticised by researchers. In this paper, we draw on Everett Hughes’ concepts of professional licence and professional mandate, and on contemporary sociological theory on risk regulation, to explain the emergence of research governance and the kinds of criticism it receives. We offer explanations for researcher criticism of the rules and practices of research governance, suggesting that these are perceived as interference in their mandate. We argue that, in spite of their complaints, researchers (...) benefit from the institutions of governance and regulation, in particular by the ways in which regulation secures the social licence for research. While it is difficult to answer questions such as: “Is medical research over-regulated?” and “Does the regulation of medical research successfully protect patients or promote ethical conduct?”, a close analysis of the social functions of research governance and its relationship to risk, trust, and confidence permits us to pose these questions in a more illuminating way. (shrink)

This book follows hard upon Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity. Both present the author's influential version of a Kantian theory of normative ethics and metaethics. Whereas The Sources of Normativity was a systematic investigation of "normativity" written as a single unit, the present volume is a collection of previously published papers, some of them already well known and much discussed, dating between 1983 and 1993. By the nature of the case, one might expect less thematic unity in this book than (...) in the other one, but the present book is a deeper and more wide ranging presentation of the author's views. Korsgaard's historical focus in The Sources of Normativity is less on Kant and more on the British moralists. Creating the Kingdom of Ends deals quite explicitly with the interpretation of Kant's moral philosophy. The papers in this book contain, in my judgment, the heart of Korsgaard's work: a variety of fresh and illuminating insights into Kant's moral theory and its relation to contemporary ethical theory which have helped to reshape the image of Kant's ethics and to refocus the issues dealt with in current moral philosophy. Or to make claims less grand but of more immediate relevance to this review, there is no question that some of the papers in this book have helped to reshape both the present writer's image of Kant's ethics and his conception of the way questions of ethical theory should be addressed. I hope below to say something both about where I think Korsgaard has gotten these matters right, and where I find her position either unclear or dubious. (shrink)

In many facets of Western culture, including archaeology, there remains a legacy of perceiving gender divisions as natural, innate, and biological in origin. This belief follows that men are naturally pre-disposed to public, intellectual pursuits, while women are innately designed to care for the home and take care of children. In the interpretation of material culture, accepted notions of gender roles are often applied to new findings: the dichotomy between the domestic sphere of women and the public sphere of men (...) can color interpretations of new materials. In this innovative volume, the contributors focus explicitly on analyzing the materiality of historic changes in the domestic sphere around the world. Combining a global scope with great temporal depth, chapters in the volume explore how gender ideologies, identities, relationships, power dynamics, and practices were materially changed in the past, thus showing how they could be changed in the future. (shrink)

There are passages in Fallacies suggesting a skeptical attitude to the very idea of inductive arguments, hence to the existence of inductive fallacies. Although the passages are brief and few in number, it would appear that Hamblin’s resistance stems from doubts about the existence of relations of inductive consequence. This paper attempts to find a case in which such skepticism might plausibly be grounded. The case it proposes is highly conjectural, but important if true. Its greater importance lies in the (...) threat it creates for the whole class of nonmonotonic logics. (shrink)

This monograph examines truth in fiction by applying the techniques of a naturalized logic of human cognitive practices. The author structures his project around two focal questions. What would it take to write a book about truth in literary discourse with reasonable promise of getting it right? What would it take to write a book about truth in fiction as true to the facts of lived literary experience as objectivity allows? It is argued that the most semantically distinctive feature of (...) the sentences of fiction is that they are unambiguously true and false together. It is true that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street and also concurrently false that he did. A second distinctive feature of fiction is that the reader at large knows of this inconsistency and isn't in the least cognitively molested by it. Why, it is asked, would this be so? What would explain it? Two answers are developed. According to the no-contradiction thesis, the semantically tangled sentences of fiction are indeed logically inconsistent but not logically contradictory. According to the no-bother thesis, if the inconsistencies of fiction were contradictory, a properly contrived logic for the rational management of inconsistency would explain why readers at large are not thrown off cognitive stride by their embrace of those contradictions. As developed here, the account of fiction suggests the presence of an underlying three - or four-valued dialethic logic. The author shows this to be a mistaken impression. There are only two truth-values in his logic of fiction. The naturalized logic of Truth in Fiction jettisons some of the standard assumptions and analytical tools of contemporary philosophy, chiefly because the neurotypical linguistic and cognitive behaviour of humanity at large is at variance with them. Using the resources of a causal response epistemology in tandem with the naturalized logic, the theory produced here is data-driven, empirically sensitive, and open to a circumspect collaboration with the empirical sciences of language and cognition. (shrink)

I argue that certain species of belief, such as mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs, are insulated from a form of Harman-style debunking argument whereas moral beliefs, the primary target of such arguments, are not. Harman-style arguments have been misunderstood as attempts to directly undermine our moral beliefs. They are rather best given as burden-shifting arguments, concluding that we need additional reasons to maintain our moral beliefs. If we understand them this way, then we can see why moral beliefs are vulnerable (...) to such arguments while mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs are not—the very construction of Harman-style skeptical arguments requires the truth of significant fragments of our mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs, but requires no such thing of our moral beliefs. Given this property, Harman-style skeptical arguments against logical, mathematical, and normative beliefs are self-effacing; doubting these beliefs on the basis of such arguments results in the loss of our reasons for doubt. But we can cleanly doubt the truth of morality. (shrink)

Anyone seriously interested in Aristotle's moral philosophy must take full account of the Eudemian Ethics, a work which has in the past been unduly neglected in favour of the Nicomachean Ethics. The relation between the two treatises is now the subject of lively debate. This volume contains a translation of three of the eight books of the Eudemian Ethics - those that are likely to be of most interest to philosophers today - together with a philosophical commentary on these books (...) from a contemporary point of view. Like the other volumes in the series, it is intended to serve the needs of readers of Aristotle without a knowledge of Greek, and the aim in the translation has been to give as accurate an idea as possible of Aristotle's text; but for the benefit of those who are able to read the original there are notes on the Greek text used for problematic passages. In preparing this new edition Michael Woods has made use of the much improved text of the Eudemian Ethics that has recently been published as an Oxford Classical Text, and has taken into consideration recent philosophical work on Aristotle's ethics. The Clarendon Aristotle Series is designed for both students and professionals. It provides accurate translations of selected Aristotelian texts, accompanied by incisive commentaries which focus on philosophical problems and issues. The volumes in the series have been widely welcomed and favourably reviewed. Important new titles are being added to the series, and a number of well-established volumes are being reissued with revisions and/or supplementary material. (shrink)

In a rapidly changing global fashion system, new centres such as Shanghai are joining other cities such as Dubai, Moscow, and Mumbai as global fashion capitals. Street Style is a series that explores and reveals the relationship between culture, the city, and the street fashion. Books in the series use a predominantly visual approach paired with critical analysis, and are inspired by street fashion blogs, magazines, and other fashion incubators such as internet sites. Australian fashion is an up and coming (...) area, moving away from the beach look that is usually associated with Australia into more high fashion pieces. This book takes an academic look at some of the styles seen on the streets of Sydney, a city that may not officially be Australia s capital but is certainly number one in terms of style, culture and fashion. The book is beautifully put together with full colour photos of the stylish and eclectic residents of Sydney. This book would make a beautiful coffee table book or a gift for anyone fashion conscience or interested in travel. Style is predominantly an individual matter the way people put themselves together creates a sense of individual identity, but collectively there is a sense of common culture in a community, a city, or a country.". (shrink)

I distinguish two ways of developing anti-exceptionalist approaches to logical revision. The first emphasizes comparing the theoretical virtuousness of developed bodies of logical theories, such as classical and intuitionistic logic. I'll call this whole theory comparison. The second attempts local repairs to problematic bits of our logical theories, such as dropping excluded middle to deal with intuitions about vagueness. I'll call this the piecemeal approach. I then briefly discuss a problem I've developed elsewhere for comparisons of logical theories. Essentially, the (...) problem is that a pair of logics may each evaluate the alternative as superior to themselves, resulting in oscillation between logical options. The piecemeal approach offers a way out of this problem andthereby might seem a preferable to whole theory comparisons. I go on to show that reflective equilibrium, the best known piecemeal method, has deep problems of its own when applied to logic. (shrink)

In all three of its manifestations, —abusive, circumstantial and tu quoque—the role of the ad hominem is to raise a doubt about the opposite party’s casemaking bona-fides.Provided that it is both presumptive and provisional, drawing such a conclusion is not a logical mistake, hence not a fallacy on the traditional conception of it. More remarkable is the role of the ad hominem retort in seeking the reassurance of one’s opponent when, on the face of it, reassurance is precisely what he (...) would seem to be ill-placed to give. Brief concluding remarks are given over to an examination of rival approaches to the ad hominem, especially those in which it is conceived of as a dialectical error. (shrink)

The view that CSR performance can be improved most effectively through external pressures is shown to be invalid for most firms. In exploring why this is the case, the authors demonstrate that most small and medium enterprises are not exposed to the same pressures as large firms, and that this undermines many of the assumptions that underpin the externally driven business case (EDBC) for voluntary CSR practices. The analysis does this by looking at the external drivers of one of the (...) components of CSR; namely, the environmental behaviour of firms. This shows that the strength of the EDBC is largely determined by five factors. Importantly, the analysis provides the basis for the claim that -- and helps to explain why -- the EDBC for voluntary environmental behaviour is likely to remain a weak form of pressure for many small firms. (shrink)

This is an opinionated overview of the Frege-Geach problem, in both its historical and contemporary guises. Covers Higher-order Attitude approaches, Tree-tying, Gibbard-style solutions, and Schroeder's recent A-type expressivist solution.

A natural suggestion and increasingly popular account of how to revise our logical beliefs treats revision of logic analogously to the revision of scientific theories. I investigate this approach and argue that simple applications of abductive methodology to logic result in revision-cycles, developing a detailed case study of an actual dispute with this property. This is problematic if we take abductive methodology to provide justification for revising our logical framework. I then generalize the case study, pointing to similarities with more (...) recent and popular heterodox logics such as naïve logics of truth. I use this discussion to motivate a constraint—logical partisanhood—on the uses of such methodology: roughly: both the proposed alternative and our actual background logic must be able to agree that moving to the alternative logic is no worse than staying put. (shrink)

The problem of the many threatens to show that, in general, there are far more ordinary objects than you might have thought. I present and motivate a solution to this problem using many-one identity. According to this solution, the many things that seem to have what it takes to be, say, a cat, are collectively identical to that single cat.

This paper deals with the motivation behind Kant’s conception of “religion” as “the recognition of all our duties as divine commands”. It argues that in order to understand this motivation, we must grasp Kant’s conception of radical evil as social in origin, and the response to it as equally social - the creation of a voluntary, universal “ethical community”. Kant's historical model for this community is a religious community (especially the Christian church), though Kant regards traditional churches or religious communities (...) as suitable to their moral vocation only if they undergo Enlightenment reform. The paper concludes with a plea for the Enlightenment view of religion, and an indictment of the common failure to understand it correctly. (shrink)

In the following reflection Claudio Corradetti and Allen Wood engage in a controversy concerning the possibilities and the limits of textual interpretation. Should an interpreter still be authorized to call an author’s interpretation the logical stretch of text beyond its black printed letters? The authors offer two different standpoints on what can still be defined as textual interpretation. Whereas for Allen Wood a clear-cut separation must be kept between what a text shows and what an interpreter argues starting from the (...) text, for Claudio Corradetti such distinction remains internal to textual exegesis in so far as the interpreter’s conclusions follow a logical pattern of jus tification starting from evidential hints. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is about the moral purpose of business and its proper relationship to society. We map the logical structure of CSR—its canonical core—and identify the view of CSR that is most consistent with CSR as driven by moral purpose as Moral CSR (CSRM). The numerous perspectives of CSR, which we term CSR memes, are complements to CSRM. A meme is an idea or usage diffusing within communities. Moral norms and what we term normatively injunctive warrants are implicit (...) in many CSR memes but have received a relative lack of explicit and systematic attention. A norm is an accepted standard for behavior. A warrant is an authoritative or authorizing instruction for behavior. All CSR memes contain three elements—a corporate actor, a relation, and nonmoral normative warrants, which we term constructive warrants. We argue that any CSR meme should include a fourth element—moral normative (injunctive) warrants linking explicitly to moral reasoning. Through sorting key CSR memes by their epistemological and compositional characteristics, we reveal the paucity of explicit attention to injunctive warrants. We resort memes according to social gains or losses, which are the outcomes of societal demand for and business supply of CSR. This analysis yields two proposed improvements for CSR reasoning. The first is a clearer picture of variable use of the term CSR in extant research. The second is how scholars can incorporate more explicitly moral elements of CSR in future work. (shrink)

Why do promises give rise to reasons? I consider a quadruple of possibilities which I think will not work, then sketch the explanation of the normativity of promising I find more plausible—that it is constitutive of the practice of promising that promise-breaking implies liability for blame and that we take liability for blame to be a bad thing. This effects a reduction of the normativity of promising to conventionalism about liability together with instrumental normativity and desire-based reasons. This is important (...) for a number of reasons, but the most important reason is that this style of account can be extended to account for nearly all normativity—one notable exception being instrumental normativity itself. Success in the case of promises suggests a general reduction of normativity to conventions and instrumental normativity. But success in the cases of promises is already quite interesting and does not depend essentially the general claim about normativity. (shrink)

Should we hold beliefs only insofar as they are rationally supportable? According to Allen W. Wood, we're morally obliged to do so—and yet how does this apply to religious beliefs? _Unsettling Obligations_ examines these and related ethical and philosophical issues, taking and defending stances on many of them. Along with the theme of belief and evidence, other topics include a historical perspective of philosophy based on the Enlightenment rationalist tradition and a study of how our practical commitments help define truth (...) and value. (shrink)

I investigate syntactic notions of theoretical equivalence between logical theories and a recent objection thereto. I show that this recent criticism of syntactic accounts, as extensionally inadequate, is unwarranted by developing an account which is plausibly extensionally adequate and more philosophically motivated. This is important for recent anti-exceptionalist treatments of logic since syntactic accounts require less theoretical baggage than semantic accounts.

Sir John Hicks is one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1972, he has made contributions across a wide range of economic theory, writing some twenty books. Arguably the most important of these, _Value and Capital_, is seen as the roots of modern microeconomics and general equilibrium theory. Hicks possessed an unusual ability to synthesize the ideas of other economists – something that is evident in his invention of (...) the ‘IS-LM’ diagram to expound Keynes’ General Theory, and is perhaps what he is best known to present day economists for. This two volume set is the second collection on Hicks in this series and includes new assessments of his contributions, covering the last fifteen years. With a new introduction by the editor, this comprehensive and scholarly collection provides students and scholars immediate access to Sir John Hicks’ contributions. (shrink)

Kant holds that the moral principle is a priori, not empirical. But consistently with this, important parts of Kantian ethics, including his formulations of the moral principle, depend on a rich and interesting empirical theory of human nature.

Etiquette and other merely formal normative standards like legality, honor, and rules of games are taken less seriously than they should be. While these standards are not intrinsically reason-providing in the way morality is often taken to be, they also play an important role in our practical lives: we collectively treat them as important for assessing the behavior of ourselves and others and as licensing particular forms of sanction for violations. This chapter develops a novel account of the normativity of (...) formal standards where the role they play in our practical lives explains a distinctive kind of reason to obey them. We have this kind of reason to be polite because etiquette is important to us. We also have this kind of reason to be moral because morality is important to us. This parallel suggests that the importance we assign to morality is insufficient to justify it being substantive. (shrink)

Two separate regulatory regimes govern research with adults who lack capacity to consent in England and Wales: the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) 2005 and the Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Regulations 2004 (“the Regulations”). A service evaluation was conducted to investigate how research ethics committees (RECs) are interpreting the requirements. With the use of a coding scheme and qualitative software, a sample of REC decision letters where applicants indicated that their project involved adults who lacked mental capacity was analysed. (...) The analysis focuses on 45 letters about projects covered by the MCA and 12 letters about projects covered by the Regulations. The legal requirements for involving incapacitated adults in research were not consistently interpreted correctly. Letters often lacked explicitness and clarity. Neither consent nor assent from third parties is a legally valid concept for purposes of the MCA, yet they were suggested or endorsed in 10 post-MCA letters, and there was evidence of confusion about the consultee processes. The correct terms were also not consistently used in relation to clinical trials. Inappropriate use of terms such as “relative” had the potential to exclude people eligible to be consulted. Unless the correct terms and legal concepts are used in research projects, there is potential for confusion and for exclusion of people who are eligible to be consulted about involvement of adults who lack capacity. Improved clarity, explicitness and accuracy are needed when submitting and reviewing applications for ethical review of research in this area. (shrink)

This is a review essay in English of Dietrich von Engelhardt’s new 2,000-page, four-volume project: 'Medizin in Romantik und Idealismus: Gesundheit und Krankheit in Leib und Seele, Natur und Kultur' (Medicine in Romanticism and Idealism: Health and Illness in Body and Soul, Nature and Culture). (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2023), 4 Vols., LII + 1964 pp.

This chapter contains sections titled: Conclusion.

Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations, the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate methodologies to analyze a wider range of first-person accounts of AVH (...) at 3 contextual levels: cultural, social, and historical; experiential; and biographical. We go on to show that there are significant potential benefits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include informing the development and refinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientific enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences. (shrink)

Background: Homeless persons in the United States have disproportionately high rates of illness, injury, and mortality and tend to believe that the quality of their end-of-life care will be poor. No studies were found as to whether nurses or nursing students require moral courage to help homeless persons or members of any other demographic complete advance directives. Research hypothesis: We hypothesized that baccalaureate nursing students require moral courage to help homeless persons complete advance directives. Moral courage was defined as a (...) trait of a person or an action that overcomes fears or other challenges to achieve something of great moral worth. Research design: The hypothesis was investigated through a qualitative descriptive study. Aside from the pre-selection of a single variable to study (i.e. moral courage), our investigation was a naturalistic inquiry with narrative hues insofar as it attended to specific words and phrases in the data that were associated with that variable. Participants and research context: A total of 15 baccalaureate nursing students at a public university in the United States responded to questionnaires that sought to elicit fears and other challenges that they both expected to experience and actually experienced while helping homeless persons complete advance directives at a local, non-profit service agency. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Internal Review Board of the authors’ university, and each participant signed an informed consent form, which stated that the study involved no reasonably foreseeable risks and that participation was voluntary. Findings: Before meeting with homeless persons, participants reported that they expected to experience two fears and a challenge: fear of behaving in ways that a homeless person would deem inappropriate, fear of discussing a homeless person’s dying and death, and the challenge of adequately conveying the advance directive’s meaning and accurately recording a homeless person’s end-of-life wishes. In contrast, after their meetings with homeless persons, relatively few participants reported having encountered those obstacles. So, while participants required moral courage to assist homeless persons with advance directives, they required greater moral courage as they anticipated their meetings than during those meetings. Discussion: Our study breaks new ground at the intersection of nursing, moral courage, and advance directives. It might also have important implications for how to improve the training that US nursing students receive before they provide this service. Conclusion: Our results cannot be generalized, but portions of our approach are likely to be transferable to similar social contexts. For example, because homeless persons are misunderstood and marginalized throughout the United States, our design for training nursing students to provide this service is also likely to be useful across the United States. Internationally, however, it is not yet known whether our participants’ fears and the challenge they faced are also experienced by those who assist homeless persons or members of other vulnerable populations in documenting healthcare wishes. (shrink)

Although the therapeutic misconception (TM) has been well described over a period of approximately 20 years, there has been disagreement about its implications for informed consent to research. In this paper we review some of the history and debate over the ethical implications of TM but also bring a new perspective to those debates. Drawing upon our experience of working in the context of translational research for rare childhood diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, we consider the ethical and legal (...) implications of the TM for parental consent to research. In this situation, it is potentially the parent who is vulnerable to TM. In our analysis we not only consider the context of informed consent for research but also the wider environment in which the value of research is promoted, more broadly through the media but also more specifically through the communication strategies of patient organizations. All dissemination about developments in research for health runs the risk of portraying an overly optimistic view of the promise of biotechnological solutions and has the potential to encourage a ‘collective’ TM. In this paper we consider the challenge that TM presents to parents as well as explore the ethical and legal responsibilities of researchers to ensure an appropriately informed consent: compatible with a hopeful disposition of parents who consent for the their children whilst avoiding a blind and misleading optimism. (shrink)

'Evidentialism' is the conventional name (given mainly by its opponents) for the view that there is a moral duty to proportion one's beliefs to evidence, proof or other epistemic justifications for belief. This essay defends evidentialism against objections based on the alleged involuntariness of belief, on the claim that evidentialism assumes a doubtful epistemology, that epistemically unsupported beliefs can be beneficial, that there are significant classes of exceptions to the evidentialist principle, and other shabby evasions and alibis (as I take (...) them to be) for disregarding the duty to believe according to the evidence. Evidentialism is also supported by arguments based on both self-regarding and other-regarding considerations. (shrink)