In my contribution to this volume, I (BHS) comment on on the stultifying rhetoric of contemporary analytic moral theory as illustrated in Judith Jarvis Thomson's Tanner Lectures, with particular reference to Thomson's anxieties about the moral relativism exhibited by college freshman and to her efforts--quite strained, in my view, and inevitably unsuccessful--to demonstrate the existence of objective judgments in matters of morality and taste .

How should we live? What do we owe to other people? In Goodness and Advice, the eminent philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson explores how we should go about answering such fundamental questions. In doing so, she makes major advances in moral philosophy, pointing to some deep problems for influential moral theories and describing the structure of a new and much more promising theory. Thomson begins by lamenting the prevalence of the idea that there is an unbridgeable gap between fact and (...) value--that to say something is good, for example, is not to state a fact, but to do something more like expressing an attitude or feeling. She sets out to challenge this view, first by assessing the apparently powerful claims of Consequentialism. Thomson makes the striking argument that this familiar theory must ultimately fail because its basic requirement--that people should act to bring about the "most good"--is meaningless. It rests on an incoherent conception of goodness, and supplies, not mistaken advice, but no advice at all. Thomson then outlines the theory that she thinks we should opt for instead. This theory says that no acts are, simply, good: an act can at most be good in one or another way--as, for example, good for Smith or for Jones. What we ought to do is, most importantly, to avoid injustice; and whether an act is unjust is a function both of the rights of those affected, including the agent, and of how good or bad the act is for them. The book, which originated in the Tanner lectures that Thomson delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 1999, includes two chapters by Thomson ("Goodness" and "Advice"), provocative comments by four prominent scholars--Martha Nussbaum, Jerome Schneewind, Philip Fisher, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith--and replies by Thomson to those comments. (shrink)

In her article “Turning the Trolley,” the author of this comment argued that the bystander may not turn the trolley onto one to save five. Lecture I argued that this view is mistaken. This comment contends that Lecture I’s arguments do not succeed. In this response to the second Tanner Lecture, the text then argues that the Lecture II’s reasoning depends on an unacceptable view of moral theorizing. In an addendum, this comment defends the claim that if you think (...) the bystander may turn the trolley onto one to save five when the two tracks are not connected, then good sense requires you to think that he may do so when the two tracks are connected. (shrink)

THOMSON, Judith Jarvis (1929– ) Judith Jarvis Thomson received her BA from Barnard College in 1950, her MA from Cambridge University in 1956, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1959. Her first teaching position was at Barnard where she was a lecturer from 1955–9, an instructor from 1959–60, and then Assistant Professor from 1960–2. In 1963, she moved to Boston, first as an Assistant Professor at Boston University (1963–4), and then to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where (...) she has remained ever since. She became full Professor in 1969, and between 1990 and 1996 held the Laurence S. Rockefeller Chair in Philosophy at MIT. She has received a large number of awards and honours, and contributed in many ways to professional philosophy in America. In 1992, she held the Presidency of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), and in 1999, she gave the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University. She is Chair of the American Philosophical Association's Board of Officers for 2002-5, and gave the Association's Carus Lectures in 2003. She is also widely acknowledged as one of the best teachers of philosophy, and the excellence of the graduate program at MIT is due in no small measure to her influence. Thomson’s philosophical work ranges widely but her main areas of concentration are moral philosophy and metaphysics. In moral philosophy, Thomson has made seminal contributions to all three sub-fields of that discipline, applied ethics, moral theory and metaethics. (Indeed, the nature of her work makes these divisions seem somewhat artificial.) The papers gathered together in Rights, Restitution and Risk, and, since then, papers such as, ‘Self- Defence’, ‘Physician Assisted Suicide: Two Moral Arguments’ and ‘Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers Brief’ (written jointly with John RAWLS, Robert NOZICK, Ronald DWORKIN. (shrink)

A commentary on the rhetoric of contemporary analytic moral theory as illustrated in Judith Jarvis Thomson's 1999 Tanner Lectures on Human Values ("Goodness and Advice"), with particular reference to Thomson's anxieties about the rejection of claims of objective judgements by college freshman and to her effort to demonstrate the existence of such judgments in matters of morality and taste.

In the early 20th century, Marxist theory was enriched and rejuvenated by adopting the concept of reification, introduced by the Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács to identify and denounce the transformation of historical processes into ahistorical entities, human actions into things that seemed part of an immutable "second nature." For a variety of reasons, both theoretical and practical, the hopes placed in de-reification as a tool of revolutionary emancipation proved vain. In these original and imaginative essays, delivered as the Tanner (...) Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, the distinguished third-generation Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth attempts to rescue the concept of reification by recasting it in terms of the philosophy of recognition he has been developing over the past two decades. Three distinguished political and social theorists: Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear, respond with hard questions about the central anthropological premise of his argument, the assumption that prior to cognition there is a fundamental experience of intersubjective recognition that can provide a normative standard by which current social relations can be judged wanted. Honneth listens carefully to their criticism and provides a powerful defense of his position. (shrink)

A rigorous treatment of a thought experiment that has become notorious within and outside of philosophy - The Trolley Problem - by one of the most influential moral philosophers alive todaySuppose you can stop a trolley from killing five people, but only by turning it onto a side track where it will kill one. May you turn the trolley? What if the only way to rescue the five is to topple a bystander in front of the trolley so that his (...) body stops it but he dies? May you use a device to stop the trolley that will kill a bystander as a side effect? The "Trolley Problem" challenges us to explain and justify our different intuitive judgments about these and related cases and has spawned a huge literature. F.M. Kamm's 2013 Tanner Lectures present some of her views on this notorious moral conundrum. After providing a brief history of changing views of what the problem is about and attempts to solve it, she focuses on two prominent issues: Does who turns the trolley and how the harm is shifted affect the moral permissibility of acting? The answers to these questions lead to general proposals about when we may and may not harm some to help others. Three distinguished philosophers - Judith Jarvis Thomson, Thomas Hurka, and Shelly Kagan - then comment on Kamm's proposals. She responds to each comment at length, providing an exceptionally rich elaboration and defense of her views. The Trolley Problem Mysteries is an invaluable resource not only to philosophers concerned about the Trolley Problem, but to anyone worried about how we ought to act when we can lessen harm to some by harming others and how we can reach a decision about the question. (shrink)

How should we live? What do we owe to other people? In Goodness and Advice, the eminent philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson explores how we should go about answering such fundamental questions. In doing so, she makes major advances in moral philosophy, pointing to some deep problems for influential moral theories and describing the structure of a new and much more promising theory. Thomson begins by lamenting the prevalence of the idea that there is an unbridgeable gap between fact and (...) value--that to say something is good, for example, is not to state a fact, but to do something more like expressing an attitude or feeling. She sets out to challenge this view, first by assessing the apparently powerful claims of Consequentialism. Thomson makes the striking argument that this familiar theory must ultimately fail because its basic requirement--that people should act to bring about the "most good"--is meaningless. It rests on an incoherent conception of goodness, and supplies, not mistaken advice, but no advice at all. Thomson then outlines the theory that she thinks we should opt for instead. This theory says that no acts are, simply, good: an act can at most be good in one or another way--as, for example, good for Smith or for Jones. What we ought to do is, most importantly, to avoid injustice; and whether an act is unjust is a function both of the rights of those affected, including the agent, and of how good or bad the act is for them. The book, which originated in the Tanner lectures that Thomson delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 1999, includes two chapters by Thomson, provocative comments by four prominent scholars--Martha Nussbaum, Jerome Schneewind, Philip Fisher, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith--and replies by Thomson to those comments. (shrink)

En este artículo se revisan los avances, los desafíos y las particularidades de la ciencia abierta en la investigación cualitativa. En particular se analiza la apertura de datos porque tiene menor avance en comparación con la publicación en repositorios y revistas de acceso libre. Se revisan los criterios de validez en la investigación cualitativa en ciencias sociales, para identificar algunos elementos que fomenten la apertura de datos, ya que, mientras se plantee como una vía para replicar resultados de investigación, tendrá (...) poco eco en la comunidad que practica la investigación cualitativa. Sin embargo, el artículo muestra que el compartir datos puede fortalecer las estrategias de verificación cualitativa y preservar el conocimiento, las experiencias, las historias y los contextos cotidianos de las personas participantes. (shrink)

High profile breaches of data security in government and other organizations are becoming an increasing concern amongst members of the public. Academic researchers have rarely discussed data security issues as they affect research, and this is especially the case for qualitative social researchers, who are sometimes disinclined to technical solutions. This paper describes 14 guidelines developed to help qualitative researchers improve the security of their digitally-created and stored data. We developed these procedures after the theft of a laptop computer containing (...) highly sensitive data from the home of a fieldworker. This paper introduces the ‘principle of proliferation’: digitally-created and stored files (like voice recordings of interviews and text files of their transcriptions) tend to proliferate during the course of a research project by virtue of fact that they can and are copied and shared as research progresses from data collection through to analysis and archive. Our guidelines were designed as concrete strategies that researchers embarking on a project can employ, particularly researchers working in teams, to accommodate this proliferation and reduce it where possible. (shrink)

Mark Rowlands argues that, contrary to the dominant view, a Rawlsian theory of justice can legitimately be applied to animals. One of the implications of doing so, Rowlands argues, is an end to animal experimentation. I will argue, contrary to Rowlands, that under a Rawlsian theory there may be some circumstances where it is justifiable to use animals as experimental test subjects (where the individual animals are benefited by the experiments).

It is commonly thought that neo-Hobbesian contractarianism cannot yield direct moral standing for marginal humans and animals. However, it has been argued that marginal humans and animals can have a form of direct moral standing under neo-Hobbesian contractarianism: secondary moral standing. I will argue that, even if such standing is direct, this account is unsatisfactory because it is counterintuitive and fragile.

In this book Richard Foley formulates the problem of the authority of others’ testimony, and of the rationality of one’s own beliefs, in terms of trust. Part 1 discusses the appropriateness of trust in one’s own cognitive faculties and beliefs, while part 2 argues that those assessments provide a basis for trust in others’ beliefs as well as those of one’s earlier and later selves. He does not offer us an analysis of trust or what it is to speak of (...) trust as rational or reasonable. He simply uses the notion to discuss what is surely one form of the problem of the rationality of belief. Rationality, in this book as in his earlier works, The Theory of Epistemic Rationality and Working Without a Net, is understood from a strict internalist and first-person perspective. Assessments of the rationality of opinions, like assessments of decisions, are claims, from a particular perspective, about how effectively the belief or decision promotes a goal or set of goals. With respect to belief and rational belief, the goal is what Foley calls the traditional “epistemic goal” of accurate and comprehensive beliefs. On his view, the perspective from which the assessment is made is the individual’s, taken on reflection. From the start, Foley’s understanding of rationality involves the first-person perspective. Rational belief is belief that will stand up to an individual’s own self-criticism. (shrink)

Self-regarding acts are frequently classified as non-moral; even more frequently, they are assumed to have less moral weight than parallel other-regarding acts. I argue briefly against the first claim, and at greater length against the second. Our intuitions about the lesser moral weight of self-regarding acts arise from imperfectly recognized, and morally relevant, differences between acts which are ordinarily described in misleadingly parallel phrases. ‘Love of self,’ for instance, and ‘love of another’ are not symmetrical attitudes, in spite of the (...) symmetrical grammar. More obviously, one cannot steal from, lie to, nor force oneself in the same way one can do these things to others. I conclude, therefore, that difference in moral weight never stems merely from a difference in the person concerned, but rather from differences between the actions themselves; furthermore, that whatever it is wrong to do to a willing other, it is wrong to do to oneself. (shrink)

The paper presents a set of games of competition between two or three players in which reward is jointly determined by a stochastic biased mechanism and players’ choices. More specifically, a resource can be found with unequal probabilities in one of two locations. The first agent is rewarded only if it finds the resource and avoids being found by the next agent in line; the latter is rewarded only if it finds the former. Five benchmarks, based on different psychological and (...) game-theoretic assumptions are derived and their predictions compared to actual behavior of 120, 40, and 48 participants playing repeatedly. Of the five benchmarks—the unique (Nash) equilibrium, reinforcement learning, trust-based efficiency, maximum unpredictability, and regret-based (Impulse Balance) equilibrium—regret for missed opportunities best accounts for the qualitative aspect of participants’ behavior and regret attenuated by randomization best accounts for the quantitative aspect of behavior. (shrink)

This article attempts to establish and examine the context of the two remaining mythological paintings in the Macellum, the central market of Pompeii. Panels of Io and Argos and of Penelope and Odysseus grace the interior walls, and while the identification of the Penelope figure has been the subject of debate, she clearly derives from Greek prototypes of Penelope, both material and theatrical. Indeed, scholars suggest that the Io panel and perhaps the Penelope painting as well are copies of Greek (...) panel paintings created by a fourth-century B.C. artist, but it is argued here that their pairing seems to be a Roman creation and that they were part of a larger narrative program. The paintings are compositional opposites and share the narrative technique of depicting moments of quiet tension; this choice of narrative moment is one that began in the Greek world; particularly during the Hellenistic period, and was developed and enhanced by the Romans. Moreover, this interest in creating tension for the spectator, and in the relationship between viewer and image, is also demonstrated by the inclusion of a spectator figure in the Penelope painting. Although the other paintings do not survive, their subjects are known from a nineteenth-century drawing and from nineteenth-century descriptions, and these too share the same narrative technique. If the lost paintings are copies of Greek originals, then the Macellum may have served as a picture gallery for Pompeii's inhabitants. A careful reading of the Macellum paintings of Greek myths, their juxtaposition and relationship to each other, and their reception in Roman literature and society reveals that the paintings were arranged as a program, a moralizing ensemble, designed to instruct the viewer on the proper behavior of Roman matrons. (shrink)

Profondeur et temps chez Merleau-Ponty et DeleuzeDans une note en bas de page de son second livre sur le cinéma, L’imagetemps, Deleuze admet que sa compréhension de la profondeur – qui est l’une desnotions centrales du livre et donc de sa théorie du temps et de sa présentation au cinéma – remonte à Bergson et à Merleau-Ponty. La référence à Bergson n’est pas surprenante étant donné sa dette à son égard, mais celle à Merleau-Ponty mérite une attention particulière car, comme (...) on le sait, les références de Deleuze à Merleau-Ponty sont plutôt rares et généralement négatives.Dans cet article, j’examine la portée de cette référence de Deleuze à Merleau-Ponty. Comment les deux auteurs comprennent-ils la nature temporelle de la profondeur? Dans le cas de Merleau-Ponty, je tente de répondre à cette question en lisant, dans la Phénoménologie de la perception, les passages qui concernent la vision de la profondeur et ceux qui se rapportent au rappel d’un souvenir. La « théorie » deleuzienne de la profondeur, quant à elle, peut être trouvée dans son analyse de la technique cinématographique de la profondeur de champ, présente notamment dans les films d’Orson Welles. J’examine quels caractères de la profondeur de champ en font une “image-temps” et j’analyse sous cet angle Citizen Kane de Welles et Muriel ou le temps d’un retour de Resnais. Les distinctions faites entre ces deux films aident à comprendre les différences qui existent entre les conceptions de la profondeur de Merleau-Ponty etde Deleuze.Profondità e tempo in Merleau-Ponty e DeleuzeIn una nota del suo secondo libro sul cinema, L’immagine-tempo, Deleuze riconosce che la sua comprensione del fenomeno della profondità – una delle nozioni centrali del libro, dunque della sua intera teoria del tempo e della sua presenza nel cinema – può esser fatta risalire a Bergson e Merleau-Ponty. Il primo di questi riferimenti non può sorprendere, dato il debito profondo che Deleuze contrae col pensiero bergsoniano. Il secondo riferimento, quello a Merleau-Ponty, merita particolare attenzione proprio perché, com’è noto, i riferimenti di Deleuze a questo filosofo sono rari e in gran parte critici. In questo articolo mi propongo quindi di esaminare la portata di questo secondo riferimento. In che modo Deleuze e Merleau-Ponty comprendono la natura temporale della profondità? Per quanto riguarda Merleau-Ponty, cercherò di rispondere a questa domanda esaminando tutti quei passaggi di Fenomenologia della percezione in cui è questione della visione in profondità e dello sforzo necessario a richiamare alla memoria un ricordo. La “teoria” deleuziana della profondità può invece essererintracciata nell’analisi che Deleuze propone della profondità di campo nel cinema, in particolare nel cinema di Orson Welles. Cercherò di mostrare come proprio certi caratteri della profondità, facciano sì che immagini di questo genere possano essere definite immagini-tempo; e in questa prospettiva analizzerò Citizen Kane di Welles, e Muriel ou le temps d’un retour di Alain Resnais. Le differenze che sussistono tra i due film potranno d’altra parte contribuire a mettere a fuoco le differenze tra le due maniere in cui Merleau-Ponty e Deleuze rendono conto dei problemi della profondità e del tempo. (shrink)

For a century Nietzsche has been among the most controversial of modern writers. Since his death in 1900 he has been appropriated as an icon by an astonishingly diverse spectrum of people, whose interpretation of his philosophy have been equally varied. This introduction to his life and work examines the numerous ambiguities in his writings, traces his development, and explodes many misconceptions.

Torporley's ‘Congestor analyticus’, completed in 1627 in the library of the Earl of Northumberland at Petworth, was seen by Rigaud in the 1830s among the mathematical manuscript collection of the Earl of Macclesfield. Torporley's additional copy of the introductory part, preserved at Sion College, has been used for the present report. Torporley's prime objective was the presentation of some of Harriot's work. His first example concerns a classical problem in number theory. The complete solution, by an inductive process based on (...) tables of differences, is given in a few folios of the British Library collection of Harriot manuscripts. Torporley's transcription and commentary contrast forcibly today with the immediate illuminating impact of Harriot's original. (shrink)

It matters a great deal whether animals have moral status. If animals have moral status, it may be wrong for us to use them as we currently do – hunting, farming, eating, and experimenting on them. The argument from marginal cases provides us with a reason to think that some animals have moral status that is equal to that of “marginal” humans.