A theory is presented to explain how accurate, single-joint movements are controlled. The theory applies to movements across different distances, with different inertial loads, toward targets of different widths over a wide range of experimentally manipulated velocities. The theory is based on three propositions. (1) Movements are planned according to “strategies” of which there are at least two: a speed-insensitive (SI) and a speed-sensitive (SS) one. (2) These strategies can be equated with sets of rules for performing diverse movement tasks. (...) The choice between SI and SS depends on whether movement speed and/or movement time (and hence appropriate muscle forces) must be constrained to meet task requirements. (3) The electromyogram can be interpreted as a low-pass filtered version of the controlling signal to the motoneuron pools. This controlling signal can be modelled as a rectangular excitation pulse in which modulation occurs in either pulse amplitude or pulse width. Movements to different distances and with loads are controlled by the SI strategy, which modulates pulse width. Movements in which speed must be explicitly regulated are controlled by the SS strategy, which modulates pulse amplitude. The distinction between the two movement strategies reconciles many apparent conflicts in the motor control literature. (shrink)

This important new book takes as its points of departure two questions: What is the nature of valuing? and What morality can be justified in a society that deeply disagrees on what is truly valuable? In Part One, the author develops a theory of value that attempts to reconcile reason with passions. Part Two explores how this theory of value grounds our commitment to moral action. The author argues that rational moral action can neither be seen as a way of (...) simply maximising one's own values, nor derived from reason independent of one's values. Rather, our commitment to the moral point of view is presupposed by our value systems. The book concludes with a defense of liberal political morality. (shrink)

This essay responds to David Enoch’s “The Disorder of Public Reason,” published in a previous issue of Ethics. I seek to set the record straight on several of the many charges Enoch makes. More importantly, having clarified some of the more basic points, I make some preliminary efforts at identifying when his brand of moral realism and my version of public reason differ—and, perhaps, where they are more compatible than one might think.

In the few decades a new conception of liberalism has arisen—the “public reason view” — which developed out of contractualist approaches to justifying liberalism. The social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all stressed that the justification of the state depended on showing that everyone would, in some way, consent to it. By relying on consent, social contract theory seemed to suppose a voluntarist conception of political justice: what is just depends on what people choose to agree to — (...) what they will. As Hume famously pointed out, such accounts seem to imply that ultimately political justice derives from promissory obligations, which the social contract theory leaves unexplained.1 Only in Kant, I think, does it become clear that consent is not fundamental to a social contract view: we have a duty to agree to act according to the idea of the “original contract.”2 Rawls’s revival of social contract theory in A Theory of Justice also made no important appeal to consent, though the apparatus of an “original agreement” of sorts persisted. The aim of the original position, Rawls announced, is to settle “the question of justification…by working out a problem of deliberation.”3 As the question of public justification takes center stage (we might say as contractualist liberalism becomes justificatory liberalism), it becomes clear that posing the problem of justification in terms of a deliberative or a bargaining problem is simply a heuristic: the real issue.. (shrink)

Public reason liberalism is a family of theories according to which liberal political institutions, social structures, and/or basic social rules are politically or morally justified if and only if they can be endorsed from the perspective of each and every free and equal "reasonable and rational" person. Let us call these persons "the members of the justificatory public." Public reason liberalism idealizes the members of the justificatory public in three senses. First, the members of the justificatory public are assumed to (...) be free from at least some of the cognitive distortions and biases that often characterize actual people; we suppose that they generally reason in a sound way on the basis of relevant information. Different versions of public reason liberalism press this idealization quite far, while others insist on a "moderate idealization." Secondly, the members of the justificatory public are idealized insofar as it is assumed that each is a good-willed person, concerned with living with others on terms that are mutually acceptable. In Rawls's language, we suppose that they are not simply rational, but "reasonable": they have a form of "moral sensibility" according to which they are ready to propose fair terms of cooperation, and are willing to abide by them "provided others can be relied on to do likewise." The members of the justificatory public are thus idealized insofar as they are assumed to be moved by their sense of justice, or their aim to respect others as free and equal persons. This leads to a third idealization: by assuming that the members of the justificatory public are moved by this moral sensibility, it is supposed that they do not pay attention to their reasons to ignore their sense of justice . More generally, any specific version of public reason liberalism will hold that some reasons of actual people are not relevant to the justificatory question: the members of the justificatory public "bracket" these reasons in their deliberations. (shrink)

Michael Moehler’s Minimal Morality is a wonderful and important book, from which I have learned a great deal. It reinvigorates rational choice moral theory in the process of confronting what I see as the most important issue in social and moral philosophy today: can those in a deeply morally divided society endorse a common moral framework to structure social cooperation? Is a rational moral order possible under conditions of deep and wide moral diversity? Minimal Morality’s answers are thoughtful and innovative. (...) I am not, however, entirely persuaded that Minimal Morality can fulfil its promise of grounding a cooperative order when ‘traditional’ modes moral justification cannot. (shrink)

With the economy deindustrialized and the working class decentralized, a call for alternative horizons for resistance: the university and the art world. What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads and the working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to be sought in what may be the last places where they are possible: the university and the art world. Gerald Raunig's new book analyzes the potential that cognitive and creative (...) labor has in these two arenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of “modulation” as the market-driven imperative for the constant transformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance. Looking at recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democracia real YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessment of the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, he asserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience. (shrink)

Liberal political theory is all too familiar with the divide between classical and welfare-state liberals. Classical liberals, as we all know, insist on the importance of small government, negative liberty, and private property. Welfare-state liberals, on the other hand, although they too stress civil rights, tend to be sympathetic to “positive liberty,” are for a much more expansive government, and are often ambivalent about private property. Although I do not go so far as to entirely deny the usefulness of this (...) familiar distinction, I think in many ways it is misleading. In an important sense, most free-market liberals are also “welfare-state” liberals. I say this because the overwhelming number of liberals, of both the pro-market and the pro-government variety, entertain a welfarist conception of political economy. On this dominant welfarist view, the ultimate justification of the politico-economic order is that it promotes human welfare. Traditional “welfare-state liberals” such as Robert E. Goodin manifestly adopt this welfarist conception. But it is certainly not only interventionists such as Goodin who insist that advancing welfare is the overriding goal of normative political economy. J. R. McCulloch, one of the great nineteenth-century laissez-faire political economists, was adamant that “freedom is not, as some appear to think, the end of government: the advancement of public prosperity and happiness is its end.” To be sure, McCulloch would have disagreed with Goodin about the optimal welfare-maximizing economic policy: the welfarist ideal, he and his fellow classical political economists believed, would best be advanced by provision of a legal and institutional framework — most importantly, the laws of property, contract, and the criminal code — that allows individuals to pursue their own interests in the market and, by so doing, promote public welfare. In general, what might be called the “classical-liberal welfare state” claims to advance welfare by providing the framework for individuals to seek wealth for themselves, while welfarists such as Goodin insist that a market order is seriously flawed as a mechanism for advancing human welfare and, in addition, that government has the competency to “correct market failures” in the provision of welfare. (shrink)

A central theme in F. A. Hayek’s work is the contrast between principles and expediency, and the insistence that governments follow abstract general principles rather than pursue apparently expedient social and economic policies that seek to make us better off.2 This is a radical and striking thesis, especially from an economist: governments should abjure the pursuit of social and economic policies that aim to improve welfare and, instead, adhere to moral principles. In this chapter I defend this radical claim. I (...) begin by explicating and defending Hayek’s argument against the pursuit of expediency based on his analysis of economic and social complexity. I then turn to a rather more critical examination of his evolutionary account of moral principles. (shrink)

"Distributed in the U.S.A. by Barnes & Noble, inc." Bibliography: p. [251]-257.

Corporations have not sufficiently yielded to social pressures for humanitarian reforms. To make such reforms requires that management give up some control. Giving up control contradicts traditional managerial philosophy. The bureaucratic structure of corporations gives management the power to virtually eliminate most social influences. An alternative to the bureaucratic corporation is a shared ownership corporation where investors, management, and low ranking employees all own the corporation. This alternative balances the power by giving all participants in the corporation power to influence (...) policy. Without this redistribution of power, or something like it, any hope for significant humanitarian reforms is vain. (shrink)

November 28-December 1, 1994, Denver, Colorado NIPS is the longest running annual meeting devoted to Neural Information Processing Systems.

Many years ago, Pope Pius XII defined health as that which “encompasses the positive spiritual and social well-being of humanity and, on this ground, is one of the conditions required for universal peace and common security.” As we enter more deeply into the Third Millennium, the very survival and security of humanity hinge on getting these issues right.

A broad, though not unanimous, consensus among commentators is that the later Wittgenstein subscribes to a redundancy conception of truth. I reject that interpretation. No doubt much depends on what is meant by a redundancy theory. But once even mildly plausible versions of that view are isolated a review of the relevant texts shows that the evidence for that interpretation collapses. Moreover, the redundancy interpretation is at odds with guiding prescriptions in the post‐1932 corpus. Wittgenstein doesn’t hold that truth can (...) be defined or characterized thinly, as redundancy theorists propose, but that it isn’t susceptible to any such generic treatment. (shrink)

Bonaventure distinguishes two modes of beatitudo: the objective, which he defines as the ultimate end of all rational operations; and the subjective, which he considers present in the soul by inherency. In its divine influence, the beatitudo directly updates the mens, that is the potency of the soul and not its substance. This understanding of the unity of order of the potencies in the soul, understood as the express likeness to God, incorporates the concept of fruitio in a spiritual activity (...) that exceeds the dichotomy intelligence-will and is located well beyond the opposition between thomistic intellectualism and the voluntarism of Scotus, integrating them into a spiritualistic synthesis: the sapiential contemplation. This paper analyzes the deductive moments of the acts of the inner potencies of the soul as constituents of the created beatitude. The guideline are the transcendental concepts of being in consonance with the contemplative activity. (shrink)

Cette analyse des textes de Leo Strauss sur « l ' art d ' écrire » en situation de persécution cherche à en faire ressortir la cohérence et l ' intérêt. Sont examinés successivement la question du contexte, les modalités de la preuve, le caractère crypté de la vérité, la position d ' infériorité du censeur, la nécessité de mettre plusieurs textes en relation, les rapports de la philosophie et de la foi. L ' analyse freudienne du Moïse de Michel (...) - Ange fournit enfin un contre - exemple de la méthode straussienne. This analysis of Leo Strauss ' texts about « the art of writing » in a situation of persecution aims at stressing out their coherence and interest. One after the other, the author studies in depth the concept of context, the modalities of evidence, the encrypted character of truth, the inferiority position of the censor, the need to relate several texts one to another, the relationship between philosophy and faith. The freudian analysis of the Moses by Michaelangelo shows a counter - example of the Straussian method. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that vanity is a Janus-faced feature of social cooperation: as Hobbes stresses, it certainly can lead to conflict, yet it can also motivate enforcing norms of fairness. What Hobbes call “vain glorious” individuals will walk away from “vile and contemptible” Pareto gains. A society composed of both egoists and glory-seekers is thus more likely to stabilize fair terms of cooperation than even the most enlightened society of self-interested agents. Rather than, as in many economically-inspired analyses (...) of social order such as James Buchanan’s in The Limits of Liberty, modeling a society of self-interested agents, we would do better to model polymorphic populations, containing multiple agent types. (shrink)

As it happens, we are quite well aware of the origin of a group belief. For instance, the history of baseball in the USA is a kind of contemporary myth whose origin, however, is not mysterious. In the US there is a place called the Hall of Fame dedicated to the great figures in baseball history. The spot can be found in Cooperstown, a small American town in the middle of New York state, that is otherwise totally unremarkable. Why was (...) a building put up there to celebrate the sport that is so emblematic of the United States? Simply because the famous baseball is supposed to have been invented there by one Abner Doubleday in 1839. The date is precise but the myth of origins associated with it is no less so. In the early 19th century Doubleday is alleged to have interrupted some children playing marbles behind the shop belonging to the town's tailor. Then he is supposed to have started to teach them the rules of a new, more exciting game which he had just invented (if we adhere to this myth of origins) and which he proposed to call ‘baseball’. So he marked out a small-scale field on the ground: the first game of this typically American sport could now begin. (shrink)

In this essay I address three ways in which Edwards can inform Christian understanding of public life. First I show how Edwards provides both philosophical and theological rationales for social engagement and thereby resists the separation of religion from public life, and use his consideration of poverty as an illustration. Part II examines Edwards's dialectical treatment of patriotism, demonstrating both its importance to the Christian life and its susceptibility to deceptive accommodation to culture. Finally, in Part III I discuss Edwards's (...) use of "national covenant," which despite its temptation to chauvinism Edwards used to undermine national pride. In the conclusion I assess what we can use from Edwards for contemporary Christian understandings of public life. (shrink)