Contract cheating, or plagiarism via paid ghostwriting, is a significant academic ethical issue, especially as reliable methods for its prevention and detection in students’ assignments remain elusive. Contract cheating in academic assessment has been the subject of much recent debate and concern. Although some scandals have attracted substantial media attention, little is known about the likely prevalence of contract cheating by students for their university assignments. Although rates of contract cheating tend to be low, criminological theories suggest that people who (...) employ ghostwriters for their assignments are likely to re-offend, and little is known about re-offence rates in this form of academic misconduct. We combined previously-collected datasets and conducted additional, and previously-unreported, analyses on self-report measures of contract cheating prevalence. We found that few students, on aggregate, ever engaged in contract cheating but this varied substantially among samples. Of those who ever engaged in contract cheating, 62.5% did so more than once. The data also suggested that engagement in contract cheating is influenced by opportunity. These figures may help policy makers, and researchers who are creating contract cheating detection methods, to estimate base rates of contract cheating and the likelihood of re-offence. (shrink)

Starting with Dienes and Perner’s distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge and the traditional philosophical distinction between COS as an object and COS as a subject, we suggest a triple classification of COS experience into three modes, each corresponding to a different state of consciousness. When one acts automatically COS is totally embedded within the representation of the environment. When one monitors or attends to one’s experience, the self is implied by an explicit representation of one’s attitudes, consistent with Descartes’ (...) cogito insight ‘I think therefore I am’ . However, a reflexive thought, e.g., ‘I know fact x,’ requires an explicit representation of the self. This analysis highlights the existence of an intermediate mode of COS as a subject and suggests its possible connection to monitoring one’s behavior. (shrink)

Contract cheating refers to students paying a third party to complete university assessments for them. Although opportunities for comercial contract cheating are widely available in the form of essay mills, only about 3% of students engage in this behaviour. This study examined the reasons why most students do not engage in contract cheating. Students (n = 1291) completed a survey on why they do not engage in contract cheating as well as measures of several individual differences, including self-control, grit and (...) the Dark Triad traits. Motivation for learning and morality received the greatest endorsement for why students do not engage in contract cheating. Controlling for gender, individual differences predicted students’ reasons for not contract cheating. This study supports the use of criminological theories relating to self-control and opportunity to explain why students do not engage in contract cheating. Practically, this study may inform academic policies and assessment design that may reduce contract cheating. (shrink)

Concerns over students engaging in various forms of academic misconduct persist, especially with the post-COVID19 rise in online learning and assessment. Research has demonstrated a clear role of the personality trait psychopathy in cheating, yet little is known about why this relationship exists. Building on the research by Curtis et al. (Personality and Individual Differences, 185, 111277, 2022a), this study tested an extended Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) model, including psychopathy as a precursor to attitudes and subjective norms, and measures (...) of anticipated moral emotions (shame and guilt), to predict cheating intentions and cheating behaviours. A cross-sectional survey was administered online to university students from around the globe (n = 257). Results from a serial mediation analysis revealed that psychopathy predicted academic misconduct behaviours indirectly through attitudes, subjective norms, anticipated guilt (but not anticipated shame), and intentions. These findings indicate that cheating may be reduced by modifying attitudes to cheating, subjective norms regarding cheating, and anticipated feelings of guilt related to engaging in academic misconduct. In addition, the results revealed high rates of several forms of cheating, particularly in unsupervised online tests, which have been used more widely since the COVID-19 pandemic. This finding raises concerns regarding the poor security of such assessments. (shrink)

This book introduces Robert Corrington’s “ecstatic naturalism,” a new perspective in understanding “sacred” nature and naturalism, and explores what can be done with this philosophical thought. This is an excellent resource for scholars of Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and American pragmatism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:QUASI-FORMAL CAUSALITY AND ' CHANGE IN THE OTHER': A NOTE ON KARL RAHNER'S CHRISTOLOGY characteristic and prominent of the claims made by Karl Rahner about the incarnation are the following three. (1) Only the Logos, the second Person of the Trinity, and not the Father or the Holy Spirit, can be incarnated.1 (~) Granted there is to be a mission ad extra of the Logos, what comes to be (...) is the hypostatic union of the Logos with some created nature, and indeed, with a human nature and a human nature alone.2 (8) The Logos, immutable in himself because identical with the divine nature, is mutable in the " other" of the human nature which he assmnes hypostatically.3 I am concerned in this article with how these three claims are related to a fourth, more generally theological, claim of Fr. Rah...ner's, namely: (4) The supernatural self-communication of God to what is not God must be understood as a kind of quasi-formal causality exercised by God on the creature.4 1" Current Problems in Christology," Theological Investigations I, trans. Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), p. 183; "On the Theology of the Incarnation," TI IV, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), pp. 106, 115; "Nature and Grace," TI IV, p. 176 "The Theology of the Symbol," TI IV, p. 236; The Trilnity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), pp. 29, 84, 86. 2" Current Problems," p. 197; "Theology of the Incarnation," p. 116; "Theology of the Symbol," pp. 237-238; 'Prinity, pp. 27, 32-33, 89-90. 3" Current Problems," pp. 175-182, esp. p. 181, note 3; "Theology of the Incarnation," pp. 112-115. 4 "Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace," TI I, pp. 329-333, 334ff.; "Nature and Grace," p. 175; Trinity, p. 36. 293 ~94 GUY MANSINI, O.S.B. In Christology, this fourth claim means that the Logos is quasiformally related to the humanity of Jesus. More particularly, just as uncreated grace is qua~si-formally related to the just so that created sanctifying grace is its dispositive formal effect, really distinct from it 5, and just as the divine essence is quasiformally :related to the created and beatified intellect so that the lumen gloriae is its dispositive formal effect, :really distinct from it 6, so the divine esse of the Logos is quasi-formally related to the humanity of Jesus so that the esse secondarium of Christ spoken of by St. Thomas is its dispositive formal effect, really distinct from it.7 In all three cases, and in Maurice de la Taille's words, some created reality, though not informed by Uncreated Act, is actuated by it. In each case, some created actuation-sanctifying grace, the light of glory, the esse secondariumr -disposes created reality to quasi-formal union with Uncreated Act.8 Indeed, I am assuming the substantial identity of the positions of Fr. Rahner and Fr. de la Taille on the supernatural. This assumption is justified on two grounds, beyond Fr. Rahner's own recognition of the identity of his position with Fr. de la Taille's.9 First, like Fr. de la Taille, Fr. Rahner expressly distinguishes between a form and its actuation.10 Sec5 "Uncreated Grace," p. 341. s fbid., pp. 332-333. 1 Cf. Fr. Rahner's remarks as reported in the "Rapport Patfoort," in Problemes aotuels de ohristologie, edited by H. Bouesse and J.-J. Latour (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1965), pp. 414-415. For St. Thomas, cf. his disputed question De unione Ve1·bi inoai·nati, a. 4. s Cf. Maurice de la, Taille, S.J., The llypostatio Un·imi and Created Aotuation by Uncreated Aot ('West Baden, Indiana: West Baden College, 1952), esp. pp. 30, 32-35. This booklet contains a translation of de la Taille's "Actuation cree par acte incree_," which first appeared in 1928 in Recherches de science religieuse. 9 Rahner, "Uncreated Grace," p. 340. io Ibid., p. 331, note 1: "It is usual today to distinguish two senses of ' forma' by speaking of 'actus informans' and ' actus terminans ': thus, 'forma' (the determination) in the first sense is that which in itself arrives at reality and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Review Essay:Aquinas, Modern Theology, and the TrinityGuy Mansini O.S.B.As one would expect from his Incarnate Lord, Thomas Joseph White's Trinity is no exercise in historical theology, although of course it calls on history, but aims to give us St. Thomas's theology as an enduring and so contemporary theology that both respects the creedal commitments of the Catholic Church and offers a more satisfying understanding of the Trinity than (...) anything proposed by the great theologians, Catholic and Protestant, of the past hundred years.1 The Trinity, however, gives a more complete and satisfying view of its subject than does The Incarnate Lord.Can St. Thomas really be fruitfully located within the dialectic of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Trinitarian speculation? Yes, and it is one of White's principal contributions to show how St. Thomas's medieval contemporaries, the early Franciscans on the one hand and William of Ockham on the other, remotely but really adumbrate nineteenth- and twentieth-century theological positions, once due attention is paid to the key issues of the analogical naming of God and his knowability. The reader is thus assured that Aquinas's original project was composed with some awareness of temptations and alternatives repeated (though not exactly, of course) in modern thought. It should be added that St. Thomas is by no means treated as the only systematic theological authority for Trinitarian theology, but White recognizes his paradigmatic place in the Catholic theological tradition. [End Page 1415]The most important issue for assessing the enduring value of Thomas's Trinitarian theology, then, whether in the thirteenth century or twentieth century, turns out to be the applicability and centrality of the psychological analogy for an understanding of the immanent intelligibility of the Trinity, an analogy suggested by Scripture, and developed by the Cappadocians, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and other medieval writers, not to mention John Henry Newman and Matthias J. Scheeben.What is the status of this analogy? Olivier-Thomas Venard laconically describes it as "revealed"—too hot. Michael Maria Waldstein has recently argued vigorously and at length that it is not revealed at all—too cold. White does not discuss this in detail but is satisfied with saying that it is "derived" from Scripture—just right. However one thinks this question is to be resolved, White robustly defends the psychological analogy as a proper analogy and as the only systematic theological instrument ever offered by the theological tradition that succeeds in providing real understanding of the immanent life of the Trinity, one that preserves the transcendence of God and honors the dogmatic tradition of the Church bearing on the nature of God and the Trinity of persons—Nicaea, Lateran IV, and Vatican I, especially. This is how he does it in chapter 22.1. We know the mystery of interior Trinitarian life based on God's manifestation of it to us in the economy of salvation via the missions of Word and Spirit, which disclose to us distinct personal processions.2. Such processions are either immanent or transitive.3. But transitive processions terminate in some substance distinct from whence they emanate.4. God, however, is one in nature (essence, substance) both specifically and numerically.5. Therefore, the processions are immanent to the godhead.6. However, there are only two immanent immaterial activities known to us, that of knowing and that of loving.7. Therefore, we cannot have some understanding of the mystery of interior Trinitarian life except by analogy with these two [End Page 1416] activities. That is to say, we know the mystery of the Trinitarian life according to the "psychological model" or not at all.This argument can be re-phrased with more pointed reference to modern theologies of the Trinity.1. If we wish to understand the mystery of the immanent Trinitarian life of distinct persons, but not by way of immanent activities and processions, then we must appeal to transitive activity to account for the distinction of persons.2. Transitive divine activity can be conceived of (1) as creative, (2) as within creation relative to its history (the continental way), or (3) as taking place between three already constituted divine individuals, relating transitively to one... (shrink)

Quand tu es seul, debout au milieu de la haute plaine d'Asie,sous la coupole insondable où parfois un piloteou un ange sème dans l'azur une coulée d'amidon;quand tu tressailles sentant ta petitesse,apprends-le: l'espace auquel semble-t-il il ne fautrien, a grandement besoin en réalitéd'un regard extérieur, de distance, de vide.Tu es seid à pouvoir lui rendre ce service.Joseph BrodskyIn the course of this century, a number of authors have asserted that geographic knowledge is useful for the development of programs to (...) parcel out land. Hoping to foster this link between insight and action, applied geography saw the light of day. In order to be genuinely effective, the practice of this kind of planning, so it was thought, needed to rely on the expertise of the geographer who studied forms of human settlement. More fundamentally, the utilitarian claim of applied geography rested on the conviction according to which the spatial organization of human societies brought into play the question of justice and commonweal. As Jean Gottmann wrote, our epoch is particularly sensitive to the fact that everyone, whoever or from wherever they may be, consider themselves “to be entitled to live just as well as all others.” In this way a “popular will” was affirmed “that the necessary measures be taken to envisage, prepare, and provide for an improvement of life's comforts …, for a better life.” Inspired by the “modern idea of planning,” applied geography set itself the goal of “establishing justice […] by a more even distribution of people, of their means of subsistence, [and] of their living standard.”. (shrink)

I am honored to pay tribute to Dr. Pellegrino and a bit humbled as there are so many others who would want to have this opportunity and who knew Dr. Pellegrino better than I. Tom Beauchamp suggested that I might place Dr. Pellegrino into the broader context of the history of medicine. He wrote Thaddeus Pope:Without being disrespectful of the many celebrated figures from Hippocrates to Percival, my view is that no physician has been more productive in the field or (...) made a greater contribution than Ed. I would like to see someone address this question.1And then he suggested my name. So here I am, an improbable choice because I wasn’t from the Kennedy Institute. I am a Hastings Center guy, two perennial teams, always .. (shrink)

We present an inventory of business ethics-related content to supplement and reinforce classroom education. The 23 films and documentaries introduced here allow the instructor to illustrate ethical issues in a manner which resonates with students. While sixteen of these selections involve fictitious plots, three selections (The Corporation, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Inside Job) are documentaries, and four selections (Barbarians at the Gate, Rogue Trader, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Too Big to Fail) are based on a (...) dramatization of actual events. For each selection, we present a contextual synopsis and leading questions to help instructors demonstrate the existence of ethical issues so that students may gain a better understanding of the need for ethical behavior and practices in business. We also categorize various ethical breaches by functional business areas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Catullus: The Shorter PoemsJoseph B. SolodowJohn Godwin, ed. Catullus: The Shorter Poems. Ed. with intro., trans., and comm. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1999. xii + 223 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $28.Godwin's volume joins two other recent ones that also offer a text and English translation of the poet, along with introduction and notes: G. P. Goold, Catullus: Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes, 2d ed. (London 1989; 1st (...) ed., 1983), and Guy Lee, Catullus: Edited with a Translation and Brief Notes (Oxford 1990). The proportion of commentary varies considerably among the three editions. Goold's notes are very brief, occupying less than one-sixth the number of the pages of the text plus translation; they identify references mostly, or sketch a background, either historical or personal. Lee's notes, somewhat more devoted to language and interpretation, amount to one-fourth. In Godwin's book the commentary equals the text and translation. This, clearly, is intended to be the author's chief contribution, and indeed it is easily the most valuable part. (In the same format he dealt with the longer poems, 61-68, in a volume published in 1995.) Rather than an editor or translator, Godwin is an interpreter of literature.Most parts of the introduction are reliable. "Catullus' Life and Times" balances familiar scholarly positions with criticism. Against Ross's view (originating with Reitzenstein, actually) that the poet applied the language of politics to love, he cites Lyne's, that poet and politician alike used the language of the governing class. He is skeptical of identifying Lesbia with Clodia Metelli. The next section describes the performance of poetry, an important subject, if less obvious. The discussion of poets' financial rewards here would be less neat had the instructive researches of Peter White been taken into account (JRS 64 [1974]: 40-61; HSCP 79 [1975]: 265-300; JRS 68 [1978]: 74-92). Godwin afterward sets forth well first the poetic standards and strivings of Catullus and his fellow-neoterics, then the major interpretative strategies practiced by literary critics: biography, New Criticism, New Historicism, and attention to intertextuality, to the arrangement of poems, to their closure (but not structuralism or deconstruction). His own stance is characterized by a keen awareness of the literary artifact, and this will make for some fine, persuasive interpretations.The section on meter, however, is seriously defective. Addressed to the rank beginner, who is taught when syllables are long, when short, what elision is, and which patterns of longs and shorts constitute the various meters, it is bound to mislead in important ways. It ignores prodelision (which Goold, for the sake of correct reading, represents in his text: gratumst, for example). Nowhere does it say that the fifth foot of a hexameter is regularly a dactyl, much less that the substitution of a spondee there is a neoteric affectation (see Cic. Att. 7.2.1). It claims that "the second half of the pentameter is in the overwhelming majority of cases dactylic" (17, my emphasis). For iambic senarii and choliambics it fails to mention the caesura. Lack of attention to meter probably explains why Godwin prints vehemens (rather than vemens) at 50.21 and vastasque paludesque at 115.5 (no other verse among the elegiacs is hypermetric, though 64.298 is), and also why in the commentary on poem 4 he does not draw attention to Catullus' tour [End Page 283] de force in writing pure iambics; this would have strengthened his point that the verse gives "the movement of the poem a swift impetus appropriate to the movement of the yacht" (117). The last part of the introduction is a concise statement of how the text has been transmitted.The text here printed is Godwin's own. Let it be compared with Goold's, which is, in my opinion, the truest ever produced--comprehensive in understanding the sources, fearless in replacing manuscript nonsensicalities with Catullan sense and elegance, from start to finish marked by sound judgment. As a sample I chose 49 poems, the verses of which represent 57 percent of the total number in Godwin's volume. Of the divergences from Goold's text in the sample, about two... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue ed. by Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph WhiteFrederick Christian BauerschmidtThomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue. Edited by Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, O.P. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2013. Pp. viii + 304. $36.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-6976-0.The essays collected in Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue are the fruit (...) of a conference held at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2011. As presented in this volume, they form five pairs, one each by a Catholic and a Protestant theologian, focused on the topics of (1) the being of God, (2) the Trinity, (3) Christology, (4) grace and justification, and (5) election, providence, and natural law. Thomas Joseph White provides a lengthy introduction, and Bruce McCormack concludes with a brief epilogue. All of the essays at least touch on both Barth and Thomas, though in varying degrees. It must be noted that, with the exception of the essays by White and Wawrykow, the Catholic interlocutors generally engage Barth less deeply than the Protestant interlocutors engage Thomas. Why this might be the case is a point to which I will return.Under the topic of the being of God, Robert Jenson begins with a brief, reflective essay focusing on the radical implications of Barth’s account of God’s “being” or “reality” as “event,” “I,” and “decision” (Ereignis, ich, Entscheidung), and on the content of God’s essence as “the loving One.” Jenson argues that if we follow Barth’s trajectory, we arrive at the paradoxical view that “God’s being is an implosion of freedom, so sheerly contingent that it is not contingent on anything and so is the one necessity. And it is an explosion of love, so sheerly a commitment to the other that it is freedom” (51). Thomas gets only a brief mention, though presumably he stands as the conventional account of God’s being that provides the background against which the true radicalism of Barth’s account can appear. Richard Schenk offers a Catholic counterpoint, engaging not so much with Barth himself as with Jenson and other post-Barthian thinkers such as Ebeling. His essay responds to Jenson’s paradoxes of imploding freedom and exploding love by educing from Thomas’s writings “a theodicy-capable theology of the cross” (57) that operates within a commitment to God’s impassibility as traditionally understood. Implicit in Schenk’s argument is the wager that a God who is, qua [End Page 301] God, beyond all suffering is a richer resource of hope for suffering humanity than is a God who suffers with us in his divinity.Under the topic of the Trinity, Guy Mansini’s essay launches something of a preemptive strike on Bruce McCormack, who, in a widely discussed essay (“Grace and Being,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 92-110) and in subsequent writings, has developed Barth’s notion of Christ’s obedience on the Cross as the manifestation in time of his “intra-trinitarian obedience” to the Father in order to argue against traditional notions of divine being and in favor of something like the view Jenson sketches in his essay. Mansini draws on the patristic and monastic traditions as well as Thomas to explore the humility and obedience of Christ, arguing that obedience can only be a virtue of a created will: “’To obey,’ like ‘to be caused’ or ‘to be moved,’ belongs exclusively to the created order” (82). Thus, Christ is humble and obedient qua human, not qua divine, and therefore one cannot sensibly speak of an intra-trinitarian obedience but only of the obedience of Christ’s human will to the one divine will that is common to the Father, Son, and Spirit. McCormack’s essay, which follows, seeks to show that the position he has developed by way of Barth’s theology can also be grounded in Thomas’s theology of the relation of divine processions and missions, at least as this has been interpreted by Matthew Levering. McCormack reads Thomas with notable ecumenical generosity, seeing in Thomas’s view that the... (shrink)

Thinking with Whitehead and the American Pragmatists is a volume whose topic is so obvious and fertile that I was sure someone must have already collected essays illustrating the many ways these two lines of inquiry challenge and reinforce one another. And, indeed, there exists the 1994 collection Process Pragmatism: Essays on a Quiet Philosophical Revolution, which was edited by Guy Debrock and contains essays by Sandra Rosenthal, Carl Hausman, and others. The revolution cited in that title must have been (...) exceedingly quiet, since twenty-one years later the timely and well-executed Thinking with Whitehead and the American Pragmatists finds it necessary, once again, to knock down ill-conceived barriers separating... (shrink)

This chapter is divided into three parts. First I outline what makes something an objective list theory of well-being. I then go on to look at the motivations for holding such a view before turning to objections to these theories of well-being.

The concept of well-being is one of the oldest and most important topics in philosophy and ethics, going back to ancient Greek philosophy and Aristotle. Following the boom in happiness studies in the last few years it has moved to centre stage, grabbing media headlines and the attention of scientists, psychologists and economists. Yet little is actually known about well-being and it is an idea often poorly articulated. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being provides a comprehensive, outstanding guide and (...) reference source to the key topics and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising over forty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six parts: well-being in the history of philosophy current theories of well-being, including hedonism, and perfectionism examples of well-being and its opposites, including friendship and virtue and pain and death theoretical issues such as well-being and value, harm, identity and well-being and children well-being in moral and political philosophy well-being and related subjects including law, economics, and medicine. Essential reading for students and researchers in ethics and political philosophy, it will also be an invaluable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology, politics and sociology. (shrink)

It is commonly claimed that reliance upon moral testimony is problematic in a way not common to reliance upon non-moral testimony. This chapter provides a new explanation of what the problem consists in—one that enjoys advantages over the most widely accepted explanation in the extant literature. The main theses of the chapter are as follows: that many forms of normative deference beyond the moral are problematic, that there is a common explanation of the problem with all of these forms of (...) deference—an explanation that is based on the connection between the relevant judgments and desire-like attitudes, and that this explanation is compatible with moral realism. (shrink)

Philosophers have long theorized about which things make people’s lives go well, and why, and the extent to which morality and self-interest can be reconciled. Yet little time has been spent on meta-prudential questions, questions about prudential discourse. This is surprising given that prudence is, prima facie, a normative form of discourse and, as such, cries out for further investigation. Chapter 4 takes up two major meta-prudential questions. It first examines whether there is a set of prudential reasons, generated by (...) evaluative prudential properties, and defends the view that evaluative well-being facts generate agent-relative reasons for the relevant agent. It also investigates whether prudential discourse is normative. It is proposed that prudential discourse is normative by arguing that prudential judgements are normative judgements. The case for this is presented by analogy with moral discourse by showing that the features of moral judgements that metaethicists appeal to when articulating, explaining, and justifying the claim that moral judgements are normative are also possessed by prudential judgements. Various objections to the analogy are also considered. (shrink)

THE STRUCTURE OF THIS PAPER IS AS FOLLOWS. I begin §1 by dealing with preliminary issues such as the different relations expressed by the “good for” locution. I then (§2) outline the Locative Analysis of good for and explain its main elements before moving on to (§3) outlining and discussing the positive features of the view. In the subsequent sections I show how the Locative Analysis can respond to objections from, or inspired by, Sumner (§4-5), Regan (§6), and Schroeder and (...) Feldman (§7). I then (§8) reply to an imagined objector who claims that the Locative Analysis generates implausible results with respect to punishment, virtue and agent-centered duties. (shrink)

On the most prominent account, understanding what was said is always propositional knowledge of what was said. I develop a more minimal alternative, according to which understanding is sometimes a distinctive attitude towards what was said—to a first approximation, entertaining what was said. The propositional knowledge account has been supported on the basis of its capacity to explain testimonial knowledge transmission. I argue that it is not so supported.

The evolutionary process involved the suffering of quadrillions of sentient beings over millions of years. I argue that when we take this into account, then it is likely that when the first humans appeared, the world was already at an enormous axiological deficit, and that even on favorable assumptions about humanity, it is doubtful that we have overturned this deficit or ever will. Even if there’s no such deficit or we can overturn it, it remains the case that everything of (...) value associated with humanity was made possible by our evolutionary history and all that animal suffering. It can seem indecent to regard all that past suffering as having been worth it simply because it was a causal precondition for our existence. But when we consider the realistic alternatives to the way evolution in fact unfolded, there is nevertheless a conditional case for regarding past sentient suffering as a kind of necessary evil. (shrink)

The moral error theorist claims that moral discourse is irredeemably in error because it is committed to the existence of properties that do not exist. A common response has been to postulate ‘companions in guilt’—forms of discourse that seem safe from error despite sharing the putatively problematic features of moral discourse. The most developed instance of this pairs moral discourse with epistemic discourse. In this paper, I present a new, prudential, companions-in-guilt argument and argue for its superiority over the epistemic (...) alternative. (shrink)

This paper examines implicaturist hybrid theories by examining how closely attitude expression by moral utterances fits with the varieties of implicature (conventional, particular conversational, generalized conversational) using five standard criteria for implicature: indeterminacy (§3), reinforceability (§4), non-detachability (§5), cancellability (§6), and calculability (§7). I argue (1) that conventional implicature is a clear non-starter as a model of attitude expression by moral utterances (2) that generalised conversational implicature yields the most plausible implicaturist hybrid but (3) that a non-implicaturist, and non-hybrid, alternative (...) might in fact be superior. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe new paradigm in the psychology of reasoning redirects the investigation of deduction conceptually and methodologically because the premises and the conclusion of the inferences are assumed to be uncertain. A probabilistic counterpart of the concept of logical validity and a method to assess whether individuals comply with it must be defined. Conceptually, we used de Finetti's coherence as a normative framework to assess individuals' performance. Methodologically, we presented inference schemas whose premises had various levels of probability that contained non-numerical (...) expressions and, as a control, sure levels. Depending on the inference schemas, from 60% to 80% of the participants produced coherent conclusions when the premises were uncertain. The data also show that except for schemas involving conjunction, performance was consistently lower with certain than uncertain premises, the rate of conjunction fallacy was consistently low (not exceeding 20%,.. (shrink)

Claims about needs are a ubiquitous feature of everyday practical discourse. It is therefore unsurprising that needs have long been a topic of interest in moral philosophy, applied ethics, and political philosophy. Philosophers have devoted much time and energy to developing theories of the nature of human needs and the like. -/- Philosophers working on needs are typically committed to the idea that there are different kinds of needs and that within the different kinds of needs is a privileged class (...) of needs that is especially normatively significant. -/- Some philosophers go further and make rather grand claims about needs. They claim that needs are central or fundamental to moral thinking and that we must have a needs-centred moral theory or a general reorientation of moral philosophy around needs. -/- In this paper I aim to do two things. First, to show how applying recent work on modal terms can help us to understand thought and talk about needs. This is the positive part. I then use these ideas to cast doubt on the more ambitious claims about needs. Put briefly, a proper understanding of claims about needs undermines the idea that the concept of needs is fundamental in moral thought or in moral philosophy. Ambitious needs theory fails. (shrink)

This paper aims to cast doubt upon a certain way of analysing prudential value (or good for ), namely in the manner of a ‘buck-passing’ analysis. It begins by explaining why we should be interested in analyses of good for and the nature of buck-passing analyses generally (§I). It moves on to considering and rejecting two sets of buck-passing analyses. The first are analyses that are likely to be suggested by those attracted to the idea of analysing good for in (...) a buck-passing fashion (§II). The second are the buck-passing analyses of good for proposed by John Skorupski (§III), Henry Sidgwick (§IV), and Stephen Darwall (§V). Along the way the paper shows that Michael Smith’s and Peter Railton’s analyses of other concepts—analyses that could be (and have been) taken to be analyses of good for —are similarly unsuitable as analyses of it. The paper concludes by suggesting that the fact that none of the buck-passing accounts of good for considered here is satisfactory, coupled with an appreciation of the various problems that a buck-passing analysis of good for would have to avoid, suggests that we should be sceptical about the prospects of finding such an analysis and should look for one of a different type. (shrink)

This paper reviews the psychological investigation of reasoning with conditionals, putting an emphasis on recent work. In the first part, a few methodological remarks are presented. In the second part, the main theories of deductive reasoning (mental rules, mental models, and the probabilistic approach) are considered in turn; their content is summarised and the semantics they assume for if and the way they explain formal conditional reasoning are discussed, in particular in the light of experimental work on the probability of (...) conditionals. The last part presents the recent shift of interest towards the study of conditional reasoning in context, that is, with large knowledge bases and uncertain premises. (shrink)

The explanation of the suppression of Modus Ponens inferences within the framework of linguistic pragmatics and of plausible reasoning (i.e., deduction from uncertain premises) is defended. First, this approach is expounded, and then it is shown that the results of the first experiment of Byrne, Espino, and Santamar a (1999) support the uncertainty explanation but fail to support their counterexample explanation. Second, two experiments are presented. In the first one, aimed to refute one objection regarding the conclusions observed, the additional (...) conditional premise ( if N, C ) was replaced with a statement of uncertainty ( it is not certain that N ); the answers produced by the participants remained qualitatively and quantitatively similar in both conditions. In the second experiment, a fine-grained analysis of the responses to and justifications for an evaluation task was performed. The results of both experiments strongly supported the uncertainty explanation. (shrink)

The first part of this paper asks why we need, or what would motivate, ameaningful expansion of epistemology. It answers with three critical arguments found in the recent literature, which each purport to move us some distance beyond the preoccupations of ‘post-Gettier era’ analytic epistemology. These three—the ‘epistemic luck,’ ‘epistemic value’ and ‘epistemic reconciliation’ arguments associated with D. Pritchard, J. Kvanvig, and M. Williams, respectively—each carry this implication of needed expansion by functioning as forceful ‘internal critiques’ of the tradition. The (...) second part of the paper asks what specific directions an expanded field of epistemology should take. While this is taken as an open question for debate, the expansion suggested here remains continuous with the analytic tradition, while also underlining the centrality of the acquired or ‘reflective’ intellectual virtues in meeting the burdens of the three arguments. Responsibilism, as here understood, is not a philosophical thesis so much as an orientation of commitment to clearing away philosophical assumptions that systematically obstruct recognition of the importance of empirically-informed research programs into the reflective virtues. (shrink)

A common starting point for ‘going hybrid’ is the thought that moral discourse somehow combines belief and desire-like aspects, or is both descriptive and expressive. Hybrid meta-ethical theories aim to give an account of moral discourse that is sufficiently sensitive to both its cognitive and its affective, or descriptive and expressive, dimensions. They hold at least one of the following: moral thought: moral judgements have belief and desire-like aspects or elements; moral language: moral utterances both ascribe properties and express desire-like (...) attitudes. This entry concerns hybrid theories of moral language. The main division within such theories is between those treating the expression of desire-like attitudes as semantic and those treating it as pragmatic. This entry exclusively focuses on pragmatic forms of and examines the prospects for treating moral attitude expression as working via certain standard pragmatic mechanisms. I explain these mechanisms, outline the properties that standardly define them, and test to see whether moral attitude expression matches them. At the end, I briefly explain a more minimal pragmatic alternative. The main conclusions are that we should disregard presupposition and conventional implicature views and that the most plausible options for a pragmatic hybrid view are a generalised conversational implicature view and a more minimal pragmatic view. (shrink)

Debates about new technologies, such as crop and food genetic modification, raise pressing questions about the ways ‘experts’ and ‘ nonexperts’ communicate. These debates are dynamic, characterized by many voices contesting numerous storylines. The discoursal features, including language choices and communication strategies, of the GM debate are in some ways taken for granted and in others actively manipulated by participants. Although there are many voices, some have more influence than others. This study makes use of 50 hours of in-depth interviews (...) with GM scientists, nonexperts, and other stakeholders in the GM debate to examine this phenomenon. We uncover rhetorical devices used by scientists to characterize and ultimately undermine participation by non-experts in areas including rationality, knowledge, understanding and objectivity. Scientists engage with ‘the public’ from their own linguistic and social domain, without reflexive confirmation of their own status as part of the public and the citizenry. This raises a number of interesting ironies and contradictions, which are explored in the article. As such, it provides valuable insights into an increasingly important type of discourse. (shrink)

We read with interest the extended essay published from Riisfeldt and are encouraged by an empirical ethics article which attempts to ground theory and its claims in the real world. However, such attempts also have real-world consequences. We are concerned to read the paper’s conclusion that clinical evidence weakens the distinction between euthanasia and normal palliative care prescribing. This is important. Globally, the most significant barrier to adequate symptom control in people with life-limiting illness is poor access to opioid analgesia. (...) Opiophobia makes clinicians reluctant to prescribe and their patients reluctant to take opioids that might provide significant improvements in quality of life. We argue that the evidence base for the safety of opioid prescribing is broader than that presented, restricting the search to palliative care literature produces significant bias as safety experience and literature for opioids and sedatives exists in many fields. This is not acknowledged in the synthesis presented. By considering additional evidence, we reject the need for agnosticism and reaffirm that palliative opioid prescribing is safe. Second, palliative sedation in a clinical context is a poorly defined concept covering multiple interventions and treatment intentions. We detail these and show that continuous deep palliative sedation (CDPS) is a specific practice that remains controversial globally and is not considered routine practice. Rejecting agnosticism towards opioids and excluding CDPS from the definition of routine care allows the rejection of Riisfeldt’s headline conclusion. On these grounds, we reaffirm the important distinction between palliative care prescribing and euthanasia in practice. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine how philosophers before and after G. E. Moore understood intrinsic value. The main idea I wish to bring out and defend is that Moore was insufficiently attentive to how distinctive his conception of intrinsic value was, as compared with those of the writers he discussed, and that such inattentiveness skewed his understanding of the positions of others that he discussed and dismissed. My way into this issue is by examining the charge of inconsistency that Moore (...) levels at the qualitative hedonism outlined by J. S. Mill in Utilitarianism. Along the way I suggest that there are a number of ways in which Moore was unfair in rejecting qualitative hedonism as inconsistent. I close by relating the issues that arise in discussion of Moore to contemporary debates on value and reasons. (shrink)

A critical notice of Terence Cuneo's The Normative Web and Hallvard Lillehammer's Companions in Guilt: Arguments for Ethical Objectivity.

This chapter introduces some central issues in Epistemology, and, like others in the open textbook series Introduction to Philosophy, is set up for rewarding college classroom use, with discussion/reflection questions matched to clearly-stated learning objectives,, a brief glossary of the introduced/bolded terms/concepts, links to further open source readings as a next step, and a readily-accessible outline of the classic between William Clifford and William James over the "ethics of belief." The chapter introduces questions of epistemic value through Plato's famous example (...) of the 'road to Larissa,' and goes on to explain work on doxastic responsibility, on intellectual “virtue”/“vice,” and on epistemic value monism vs. pluralism. Section 1; Epistemic Value and the Value Problem; Section 2: The Ethics of Belief; Section 3: Virtue & Vice Epistemologies; Section 4: Epistemic Paternalism. (shrink)

This book discusses Process Pragmatism, the view that whatever is, derives from interactions. The contributors examine and defend its merits by focusing on major topics, including truth, the existence of unobservables, the origin of knowledge, scientific activity, mathematical functions, laws of nature, and moral agency.

Chapter 3 surveys objectivity in the natural sciences. Thomas Kuhn problematized the logicist understanding of the objectivity or rationality of scientific change, providing a very different picture than that of the cumulative or step-wise progress of theoretical science. Theories often compete, and when consensus builds around one competitor it may be for a variety of reasons other than just the direct logical implications of experimental successes and failures. Kuhn pitted the study of the actual history of science against what Hans (...) Reichenbach referred to as the “logical substitutes” logicists used to reconstruct the rationality of theory change. Such substitutes were promoted to show that theory confirmation is a purely epistemic affair, where purely epistemic implies purely inferential. But where the positivists saw logical compulsion as the reason for theory change, Kuhn saw psychology in values as relevant to how theories are actually confirmed or accepted by the scientific community. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Michal Masny put forward a novel, interesting, theory of the goodness of a life: the Dual Theory. As Masny’s discussion demonstrates, the Dual Theory, if true, would have very significant implications for various issues related to the goodness of lives and for normative ethics. It is thus worthy of serious attention. In this paper, I first explain the Dual Theory and the motivation Masny provides for it. I then aim to show three general problems for the (...) view. (shrink)

Two notions from philosophical logic and linguistics are brought together and applied to the psychological study of defeasible conditional reasoning. The distinction between disabling conditions and alternative causes is shown to be a special case of Pollock’s (1987) distinction between ‘rebutting’ and ‘undercutting’ defeaters. ‘Inferential’ conditionals are shown to come in two varieties, one that is sensitive to rebutters, the other to undercutters. It is thus predicted and demonstrated in two experiments that the type of inferential conditional used as the (...) major premise of conditional arguments can reverse the heretofore classic, distinctive effects of defeaters. (shrink)