The life of medieval peasants was dominated by the Church and local society. Both institutions were hierarchical and dependent upon inequality. The Church sought to teach the laity about Christian...

Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering (...) the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)

Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [2004; forthcoming] use experimental methods to raise a spectre of doubt about reliance on intuitions in developing theories of reference which are then deployed in philosophical arguments outside the philosophy of language. Machery et al. ran a cross-cultural survey asking Western and East Asian participants about a famous case from the philosophical literature on reference (Kripke's G del example). They interpret their results as indicating that there is significant variation in participants' intuitions about semantic reference (...) for that case. We argue that this interpretation is mistaken. We detail a type of ambiguity found in Machery et al.'s probe but not yet noted in the response literature. We argue that this epistemic ambiguity could have affected their results. We do not stop there, however: Rather than rest content with a possibility claim, we ran four studies to test the impact of this ambiguity on participants' responses. We found that this accounts for much of the variation in Machery et al.'s original experiment. We conclude that in the light of our new data, their argument is no longer convincing. (shrink)

People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference charts the evolution of the modern concept of race and shows that natural philosophy, particularly efforts to taxonomize and to order nature, played a crucial role. Smith demonstrates (...) how the denial of moral equality between Europeans and non-Europeans resulted from converging philosophical and scientific developments, including a declining belief in human nature's universality and the rise of biological classification. The racial typing of human beings grew from the need to understand humanity within an all-encompassing system of nature, alongside plants, minerals, primates, and other animals. While racial difference as seen through science did not arise in order to justify the enslavement of people, it became a rationalization and buttress for the practices of trans-Atlantic slavery. From the work of François Bernier to G. W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and others, Smith delves into philosophy's part in the legacy and damages of modern racism. With a broad narrative stretching over two centuries, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference takes a critical historical look at how the racial categories that we divide ourselves into came into being. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One simple but relatively neglected solution to the notorious coincidence puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay claims that the property of being a statue is a phase sortal property that the piece of clay instantiates temporarily. I defend this view against some standard objections, by reinforcing it with a novel counterpart-theoretic account of identity under a sortal. This proposal does not require colocation, four-dimensionalism, eliminativism, deflationism, or unorthodox theses about classical identity.

A promising but underexplored view about normative reasons is contrastivism, which holds that considerations are fundamentally reasons for things only relative to sets of alternatives. Contrastivism gains an advantage over non-contrastive theories by holding that reasons relative to different sets of alternatives can be independent of one another. But this feature also raises a serious problem: we need some way of constraining this independence. I develop a version of contrastivism that provides the needed constraints, and that is independently motivated by (...) the widespread idea that reasons involve the promotion of various kinds of objectives. (shrink)

The Ramseyan thesis that the probability of an indicative conditional is equal to the corresponding conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent is both widely confirmed and subject to attested counterexamples (e.g., McGee 2000, Kaufmann 2004). This raises several puzzling questions. For instance, why are there interpretations of conditionals that violate this Ramseyan thesis in certain contexts, and why are they otherwise very rare? In this paper, I raise some challenges to Stefan Kaufmann's account of why the Ramseyan thesis (...) sometimes fails, and motivate my own theory. On my theory, the proposition expressed by an indicative conditional is partially determined by a background partition, and hence its probability depends on the choice of such a partition. I hold that this background partition is contextually determined, and in certain conditions is set by a salient question under discussion in the context. I show how the resulting theory offers compelling answers to the puzzling questions raised by failures of the Ramseyan thesis. (shrink)

Empirical work on the use of causal language by ordinary people indicates that their causal attributions tend to be sensitive not only to purely descriptive considerations, but also to broadly moral considerations. For example, ordinary causal attributions appear to be highly sensitive to whether a behavior is permissible or impermissible. Recently, however, a consensus view has emerged that situates the role of permissibility information within a broader framework: According to the consensus, ordinary causal attributions are sensitive to whether or not (...) a behavior is generally out of the norm, where being out of the norm might indicate deviation from a prescriptive norm (a broadly moral consideration) or deviation from a statistical norm (a purely descriptive consideration). In contrast, we conjecture that ordinary causal attributions are more directly connected to broadly moral judgments about normative responsibility (the responsibility view). We present the results of a series of new experimental studies that are consistent with the responsibility view, while indicating that the consensus position is seriously mistaken. (shrink)

A standard methodology in philosophy of language is to use intuitions as evidence. Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich challenged this methodology with respect to theories of reference by presenting empirical evidence that intuitions about one prominent example from the literature on the reference of proper names vary between Westerners and East Asians. In response, Sytsma and Livengood conducted experiments to show that the questions Machery and colleagues asked participants in their study were ambiguous, and that this ambiguity affected the responses (...) given by Westerners. Sytsma and Livengood took their results to cast doubt on the claim that the current evidence indicates that there is cross-cultural variation in intuitions about the Gödel case. In this paper we report on a new cross-cultural study showing that variation in intuitions remains even after controlling for the ambiguity noted by Sytsma and Livengood. (shrink)

The assumption that the concept of phenomenal consciousness is pretheoretical is often found in the philosophical debates on consciousness. Unfortunately, this assumption has not received the kind of empirical attention that it deserves. We suspect that this is in part due to difficulties that arise in attempting to test folk intuitions about consciousness. In this article we elucidate and defend a key methodological principle for this work. We draw this principle out by considering recent experimental work on the topic by (...) Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz (2008). We charge that their studies do not establish that the folk have a concept of phenomenal consciousness in part because they compare group agents to individuals . The problem is that group agents and individuals differ in some significant ways in terms of functional organization and behavior. We propose that future experiments should establish that ordinary people are disposed to ascribe different mental states to entities that are given behaviorally and functionally equivalent descriptions. (shrink)

Governments are subject to the requirements of justice, yet often seem to go above and beyond what justice requires in order to act in ways many people think are good. These kinds of acts – examples of which include putting on celebrations, providing grants to poets, and preserving historic architecture – appear to be acts of government supererogation. In this paper, I argue that a common view about the relationship between government, coercion, and justice implies that most such acts are (...) not supererogatory, but wrong. Many will find that conclusion unattractive, but rejecting the common view that implies it raises problems, too. (shrink)

Suppose the only difference between the effects of two actions is to whom they apply: either to parties who would -- or would not -- exist if the actions were not performed. Is this a morally significant difference? This is one of the central questions raised by the Non-Identity Problem. Derek Parfit answers no, defending what he calls the ‘No-Difference View’. I argue that Parfit is mistaken and that sometimes this difference is morally significant. I do this by formulating a (...) familiar kind of example in a new way. I make use of some findings in social psychology to help deflect counterexamples to my view. I then show how my view withstands Parfit's latest argument in favour of the No-Difference View. I conclude with a brief discussion of some questions my argument raises for consequentialist moral theory. (shrink)

The standard view in philosophy is that responsibility entails causation. Most philosophers treat this entailment claim as an evident insight into the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Further, it is taken to be equally obvious that the reversal of this claim does not hold: causation does not entail responsibility. In contrast, Sytsma and Livengood have put forward an account of the use of ordinary causal attributions (statements like “X caused Y”) that contends that they are typically used interchangeably with (...) responsibility attributions (statements like “X is responsible for Y”). Put in terms of the concepts at play in these attributions, this account suggests that the reversal of the entailment claim may also hold, and, a fortiori, there would be mutual entailment between the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Using the cancellability test, we report the results of three pre-registered studies providing empirical evidence that causation and responsibility are mutually entailed by each other. (shrink)

I discuss three observations about backtracking counterfactuals not predicted by existing theories, and then motivate a theory of counterfactuals that does predict them. On my theory, counterfactuals quantify over a suitably restricted set of historical possibilities from some contextually relevant past time. I motivate each feature of the theory relevant to predicting our three observations about backtracking counterfactuals. The paper concludes with replies to three potential objections.

This chapter investigates different ways that pro tanto reasons bearing on our options can compete with one another in order to determine the overall normative status of those options. It argues for two key claims: (i) any theory of this competition must include a distinct role for reasons against, in addition to reasons for, and (ii) any theory must allow for comparative verdicts about how strongly supported the options are by the reasons, rather than simply which options are permissible or (...) required. A simple balancing account and an account based on a distinction between requiring and justifying reasons are rejected, and a new account giving a distinct role for reasons against is introduced. (shrink)

As recorded in the Analects, Kongzi (Confucius) held that using punishment to influence ordinary citizens will do little to develop a sense of shame (chi 恥) in them. This term is usually taken to refer to a sense of shame described here as “ autonomous,” understood as a predisposition to feel ashamed when one does something wrong because it seems wrong to oneself, and not because others regard it as wrong or shameful. Historically, Confucian philosophers have thought a great deal (...) about the habits and character traits necessary for someone to have a sense of shame that is truly autonomous. The article looks at their views on this matter and shows how they help to articulate the hypothesis that coercive punishments undermine or work at cross-purposes with the cultivation of an autonomous sense of shame. It then uses this analysis to explicate the proposal that governing people by cultivating a sense of shame is to be preferred to governing by threat of punishment. It concludes by weighing its merits as a view about effective governance, observing that its strength and plausibility depends on whether we take the threat of punishment to be direct or indirect. (shrink)

I articulate the challenge disagreement poses for epistemic contextualism, and then discuss several possible replies on behalf of the contextualist.

This paper argues for contrastivism about the deontic modals, 'ought', 'must', and 'may'. A simple contrastivist semantics that predicts the desired entailment relations among these modals is offered.

In a recent article Humphreys has developed an intriguing proposal for making sense of emergence. The crucial notion for this purpose is what he calls "fusion" and his paradigm for it is quantum nonseparability. In what follows, we will develop this position in more detail, and then discuss its ramifications and limitations. Its ramifications are quite radical; its limitations are substantial. An alternative approach to emergence that involves quantum physics is then proposed.

This essay extends my “invisible disagreement” argument for Color Realism (2017) to formulate an argument for Direct Realism. It uses a variation of an “inverted qualia” thought experiment to show that successes in intersubjectively validating empirical claims about colors is proof that a nuanced version of Direct Realism is correct.

In previous work, we presented evidence suggesting that ordinary people do not conceive of subjective experiences as having phenomenal qualities. We then argued that these findings undermine a common justification given for the reality of the hard problem of consciousness. In a thought-provoking article, Talbot has challenged our argument. In this article, we respond to his criticism.

The existence of phenomenally conscious mental states is often taken to be obvious from first-person experience. Sytsma and Machery (2010) argued that if that is the case, then laypeople should classify mental states in the same way that philosophers typically do, treating states like seeing red and feeling pain similarly. We then presented evidence that they do not. This finding is interesting in its own right, however, outside of any implications for the philosophical debates concerning phenomenal consciousness. As such, we (...) attempted to explain our finding, presenting evidence that lay mental state ascriptions depend on valence judgments (that the mental states have a hedonic value for the subject). In this paper, I present new evidence that suggests against this valence account. I then provide evidence for a new explanation based on previous findings that laypeople tend to view both colors and pains as mind-independent qualitiesof objects outside the mind/brain. (shrink)

Is phenomenal consciousness a problem for the brain sciences? An increasing number of researchers hold not only that it is but that its very existence is a deep mystery. That this problematic phenomenon exists is generally taken for granted: It is asserted that phenomenal consciousness is just phenomenologically obvious. In contrast, I hold that there is no such phenomenon and, thus, that it does not pose a problem for the brain sciences. For this denial to be plausible, however, I need (...) to show that phenomenal consciousness is not phenomenologically obvious. That is the goal of this article. †To contact the author, please write to: 1414 Simona Drive, Pittsburgh, PA 15201; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Functionalist theories have been proposed for just about everything: mental states, dispositions, moral properties, truth, causation, and much else. The time has come for a functionalist theory of nothing. Or, more accurately, a role functionalist theory of those absences that are causes and effects.

Contrastivism about ‘ought’ holds that ‘ought’ claims are relativized, at least implicitly, to sets of mutually exclusive but not necessarily jointly exhaustive alternatives. This kind of theory can solve puzzles that face other linguistic theories of ‘ought’, via the rejection or severe restriction of principles that let us make inferences between ‘ought’ claims. By rejecting or restricting these principles, however, the contrastivist takes on a burden of recapturing acceptable inferences that these principles let us make. This paper investigates the extent (...) to which a contrastivist can do this. (shrink)

Over the course of human life, health care decision‐making is often interdependent. In this article, we use “interdependence” to refer to patients’ engagement of nonclinicians—for example, family members or trusted friends—to reach health care decisions. Interdependence, we suggest, is common for patients in all stages of life, from early childhood to late adulthood. This view contrasts with the common bioethical assumption that medical decisions are either wholly independent or dependent and that independence or dependence is tightly coupled with a person's (...) decision‐making capacity. In this article, we array various approaches to decision‐making along a continuum of interdependence. An appreciation of this continuum can empower patients and elucidate ethical challenges that arise when people transition between different kinds of interdependence across the life span. (shrink)

With the expansion of multinational corporations (MNCs), the alarming upsurge in widely publicized and notable corporate scandals involving MNCs in emerging markets has begun to draw both academic and managerial attention to look beyond home market practices to the pressing concern of CSR in emerging markets. Previous studies on CSR have focused primarily on Western markets, reserving limited discussions in addressing the issue of MNC attitudes and CSR practices in their emerging host markets abroad. Despite this incongruity in academic response (...) to CSR in emerging markets, managers of multinational companies continue to face mounting and most often conflicting pressures to weigh among multiple strategic CSR responses in emerging markets. Such a task is often further complicated by the complexity of varying business norms and standards, regulatory environments, and stakeholder demands for CSR across national boundaries. With such a challenge in mind, I attempt to examine the explanatory factors in leading MNCs, otherwise recognized for accountability and integrity in their home markets, to employ inconsistent or negligent practices under CSR pressure in Chinese emerging economy. Preliminary findings reveal that discrepancies exist in how MNCs perform in CSR in home countries versus in host countries. While MNCs do have much to improve, the institutional environment in the emerging market, including the legal framework and the ethical culture, also needs to be improved by the host country governments, the industry associations, and local firms. Meanwhile, media interest and journalists, NGOs, third party monitors, industry stakeholders as well as consumer advocacy groups can raise the visibility of MNC's contradictory practices between their origin nations and countries with emerging economies and offer the pressures and incentives for MNCs to amend their ethical short-comings. This article also suggests implications for both theory and practice. (shrink)

John Martin Fischer has argued that Molinism does not constitute a response to the argument that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. I argue that T. Ryan Byerly’s recent work on the mechanics of foreknowledge sheds light on this issue. It shows that Fischer’s claim is ambiguous, and that it may turn out to be false on at least one reading, but only if the Molinist can explain how God knows true counterfactuals of freedom.

The downsides of monogamy are felt by most people engaged in long-term relationships, including restrictions on self-discovery, limits on friendship, sexual boredom, and a circumscribed understanding of intimacy. Yet, a "happily ever after" monogamy is assumed to be the ideal form of romantic love in many modern societies: a relationship that is morally ideal and will bring the most happiness to its two partners. -/- In Why It’s OK to Not Be Monogamous, Justin L. Clardy deeply questions these assumptions. (...) He rejects the claim that non-monogamy among honest, informed and consenting adults is morally impermissible. He shows instead how polyamorous relationships can actually be exemplars of moral virtue. The book discusses how social and political forces sustain and reward monogamous relationships. The book defines non-monogamy as a privative concept; a negation of monogamy. Looking at its prevalence in the United States, the book explains how common criticisms of non-monogamy come up short. Clardy argues, as some researchers have recently shown―monogamy relies on continually demonizing non-monogamy to sustain its moral status. Finally, the book concludes with a focus on equality, asking what justice for polyamorous individuals might look like. (shrink)

An overview of Dai's ethics, highlighting some overlooked or misunderstood theses on moral deliberation and motivation.

In studying folk psychology, cognitive and developmental psychologists have mainly focused on how people conceive of non-experiential states such as beliefs and desires. As a result, we know very little about how non-philosophers (or the folk) understand the mental states that philosophers typically classify as being phenomenally conscious. In particular, it is not known whether the folk even tend to classify mental states in terms of their being or not being phenomenally conscious in the first place. Things have changed dramatically (...) in the last few years, however, with a flurry of ground-breaking research by psychologists and experimental philosophers. In this article I will review this work, carefully distinguishing between two questions: First, are the ascriptions that the folk make with regard to the mental states that philosophers classify as phenomenally conscious related to their decisions about whether morally right or wrong action has been done to an entity? Second, do the folk tend to classify mental states in the way that philosophers do, distinguishing between mental states that are phenomenally conscious and mental states that are not phenomenally conscious? (shrink)

his paper is an excerpt from a larger project that aims to open a new pathway into Spinoza's Ethics by formally reconstructing an initial fragment of this text. The semantic backbone of the project is a custom-made Spinozian model theory that lays out some of the formal prerequisites for more ne-grained investigations into Spinoza's fundamental ontology and modal metaphysics. We implement Spinoza's theory of attributes using many-sorted models with a rich system of identity that allows us to clarify the puzzling (...) status of such logical principles as the Substitution of Identicals and Transitivity of Identity in Spinoza's thought. The intensional structure of our Spinozian models also captures his proposal that states of a airs can be necessitated or excluded by the essences of particular things, an essence-relative modality that should be of interest to philosophers who have sought to rehabilitate the concept of essence in contemporary analytic metaphysics. (shrink)

According to long-standing orthodoxy in contemporary analytic philosophy of language, the content of a sentence (that is, the information it encodes and what on.

One popular theodicy says that good can’t exist without evil, and so God must allow evil in order to allow good. Call this the counterpart theodicy. The counterpart theodicy relies on a metaphysical claim about existence—good cannot exist without evil. A second popular theodicy says that we would be unable to know/recognize/appreciate the good without evil, and so God is forced to allow evil in order to allow for such appreciation. Call this the appreciation theodicy. The appreciation theodicy relies on (...) an epistemological claim about recognition or appreciation—we are unable to know/recognize/appreciate good without evil (even if it is possible for good to exist without evil). Determining whether either of these theodicies is a success requires a careful discussion of whether either meets the conditions on a successful theodicy. I argue that both fail. (shrink)

Does the fact that other people believe something give me a reason to believe it, too? Yes, and this epistemic fact is explained by the principle of common consent. PCC says that if S knows that others believe that P, then this fact gives S a reason to believe that P. Despite the fact that most logic texts file the appeal to the majority under the category of a fallacy, the principle of common consent is true. The principle can be (...) defended by an appeal to the interpretive dilemma, a lesson from the epistemology of disagreement, an analogy to epistemic self-trust, and an inference to the best explanation for a wide range of epistemic data. Typical objections to the principle are unpersuasive and rest on either an infallibilist epistemology or an interpretive mistake. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to explicating Dai Zhen’s defense of self-interested desires, over and against a tradition that sets strict limits to their range and function in moral agency. I begin by setting the terms of the debate between Dai and his opponents, noting that the dispute turns largely on the moral status of directly self-interested desires, or desires for one’s own good as such. I then consider three of Dai’s arguments against views that miscategorize or undervalue directly self-interested desires. (...) I begin with the most widely recognized line of defense, which holds that the suppression of such desires makes those in positions of authority less sensitive to the mistreatment of those with whose interests they are entrusted. I call this the “Pity for the Powerless” argument. I then explore an argument that Dai offers in the form of a multi-faceted metaphor, which likens the suppression of desires to attempts to block or dam natural waterways. I call this is the “Damming the Desires” argument. I conclude with a brief summary of a third and fundamental defense implied by structural features of ethics as Dai understands them. On my reading, Dai thinks ethics is concerned first and foremost with the character traits and resultant behavior that allow us to participate in relationships, and the relationships in question are mutually beneficial, not one-sided or reciprocal. I call this the “Argument from Mutual Fulfillment.” On the view spelled out here, directly self-interested desires are not just morally tolerable, nor is the possession of them merely a necessary condition for the possession of moral virtue; instead, moral virtue is constituted in part by self-interested desires. This is the strong position that Dai endorses when he characterizes the Confucian path as the “way of mutual fulfillment.”. (shrink)

This article spells out a forgotten debate in Confucian ethics that concerns the finer points of empathy, sympathy, and perspective-taking (sometimes called ‘role-taking’). The debate’s central question is whether sympathy is more virtuous when it is automatic and other-focused – that is, when we engage in perspective-taking without conscious effort and sympathize without significant reference to our selves or our own feelings.

This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors. Its 24 chapters were written exclusively for this volume by an international team of leading researchers, and together they provide a broad expert introduction to the major issues currently under discussion in this area. The volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Methodological and Foundational Issues Part II: Non-ideal Semantics and Pragmatics Part III: Linguistic Harms Part IV: Applications The parts, and (...) chapters in each part, are introduced in the volume's General Introduction. A list of Works Cited concludes each chapter, pointing readers to further areas of study. The Handbook is the first major, multi-authored reference work in this growing area and essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of language and its relationship to social and political reality. (shrink)

The study of alternatives to conventional industrial agricultural production has intensified in recent years. While many types of alternative production systems, and the motivations of individuals to participate in them, have been studied, there are significant gaps in the literature. One such dearth is research on those participating in self-provisioning activities. This study begins to fill the gap by looking at the self-provisioning activity of home gardening using data from the 2008 Ohio Survey of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Issues. Discerning (...) who household gardeners are is important given the recent economic, cultural, and political climate of the United States. The results show that home gardening occurs throughout the state of Ohio at surprisingly high levels. Bivariate and multivariate analyses reveal several noteworthy associations between gardening and household characteristics, including spatial location, pro-environmental and economic hardship behaviors, and level of participation in localized food systems. (shrink)

In this article I critique Kathleen Slaney and Michael Maraun’s (2005) addition to the ongoing philosophical charge that neuroscientific writing often transgresses the bounds of sense. While they sometimes suggest a minimal, cautious thesis–that certain usage can generate confusion and in some cases has–they also bandy about charges of meaninglessness, conceptual confusion, and nonsense freely. These charges rest on the premise that terms have specific correct usages that correspond with Slaney and Maraun’s sense of everyday linguistic practice. I challenge this (...) premise. I argue that they have not shown that there are such specific correct usages; and, further, that even if they had, they fail to justify that their definitions are the correct ones. (shrink)

Encyclopedia entry on the Confucian philosopher Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724-1777).