Four principal papers and a total of 43 peer commentaries on the evolutionary origins of morality. To what extent is human morality the outcome of a continuous development from motives, emotions and social behaviour found in nonhuman animals? Jerome Kagan, Hans Kummer, Peter Railton and others discuss the first principal paper by primatologists Jessica Flack and Frans de Waal. The second paper, by cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm, synthesizes social science and biological evidence to support his theory of how our hominid (...) ancestors became moral. In the third paper philosopher Elliott Sober and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argue that an evolutionary understanding of human nature allows sacrifice for others and ultimate desires for another's good. Finally Brian Skyrms argues that game theory based on adaptive dynamics must join the social scientist's use of rational choice and classical game theory to explain cooperation. (shrink)

According to one of the more popular endurantist packages on the market, a package I will call multilocational endurantism, enduring objects are exactly located at multiple instantaneous regions of spacetime. However, for all we know, the world might turn out to be spatiotemporally gunky and spatiotemporal gunk entails that this package is false. The goal of this paper is to sketch a view which retains the spirit of multilocational endurantism while also recognizing the possibility of certain types of objects which (...) endure through gunk. (shrink)

Dr Brandwood's book presents a factual and critical account of the more important of the various attempts that have been made to establish the order of composition of Plato's dialogues by analysing his diction and prose style. Plato's literary activity covered fifty years and there is almost no direct evidence, either external or internal, to help in establishing the relative order of his writings. Until the middle of the nineteenth century people were dependent on personal interpretation of the probable line (...) of development of Plato's thought and doctrines, but then a less subjective method was discovered, which relied instead on the observation of changes in Plato's prose style. Dr Brandwood examines the investigations of each scholar individually, checking the correctness of the methodology and the accuracy of the statistics, before arriving at fairly definite conclusions of his own, at least as far as the works of Plato's middle and old age are concerned. (shrink)

Pleasure, in the inclusive usages most important in moral psychology, ethical theory, and the studies of mind, includes all joy and gladness — all our feeling good, or happy. It is often contrasted with similarly inclusive pain, or suffering, which is similarly thought of as including all our feeling bad. Contemporary psychology similarly distinguishes between positive affect and negative affect.[1..

I agree with Jecker et al that “the headline-grabbing nature of existential risk (X-risk) diverts attention away from immediate artificial intelligence (AI) threats…”1 Focusing on very long-term speculative risks associated with AI is both ethically distracting and ethically dangerous, especially in a healthcare context. More specifically, AI in healthcare is generating healthcare justice challenges that are real, imminent and pervasive. These are challenges generated by AI that deserve immediate ethical attention, more than any X-risk issues in the distant future. Almost (...) 50 years ago, John Knowles edited a volume titled Doing Better and Feeling Worse: Health in the United States. We are ‘doing better’ because numerous advances in medical technologies are saving more lives and improving the quality of our lives. But we are ‘feeling worse’ because the additional costs are unsustainable, are threatening funding for other social goods and are increasing injustices regarding the allocation of those resources. This is precisely the situation we are faced with regarding AI in medicine today. Exploding healthcare costs have generated increasing pressure to control those costs, often with unjust consequences. AI is touted as a critical mechanism for controlling healthcare costs, often with little thought given to justice-relevant consequences. Consider, for example, …. (shrink)

Can Rawlsian public reason sufficiently justify public policies that regulate or restrain controversial medical and technological interventions in bioethics (and the broader social world), such as abortion, physician aid-in-dying, CRISPER-cas9 gene editing of embryos, surrogate mothers, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of eight-cell embryos, and so on? The first part of this essay briefly explicates the central concepts that define Rawlsian political liberalism. The latter half of this essay then demonstrates how a commitment to Rawlsian public reason can ameliorate (not completely resolve) (...) many of the policy disagreements related to bioethically controversial medical interventions today. The goal of public reason is to reduce the size of the disagreement by eliminating features of the disagreement that violate the norms of public reason. The norms of public reason are those norms that are politically necessary to preserve the liberal, pluralistic, democratic character of this society. What remains is reasonable disagreement to be addressed through normal democratic deliberative processes. Specific issues addressed from a public reason perspective include personal responsibility for excessive health costs, the utility of a metaphysical definition of death for organ transplantation, and the moral status of excess embryos generated through IVF and/or their use in medical research. (shrink)

One well-known objection to supersubstantivalism is that it is inconsistent with the contingency of location. This paper presents a new objection to supersubstantivalism: it is inconsistent with the vagueness of location. Though contingency and vagueness are formally similar, there are important philosophical differences between the two. As a result, the objection from vague location will be structurally different than the objection from contingent location. The paper explores these differences and then defends the argument that supersubstantivalism is inconsistent with the plausible (...) thesis that it is vague where I am located. (shrink)

Park and Davies (2024) address the question of whether vaccine status can be an ethically legitimate criterion for the allocation of scarce medical resources, such as access to an ICU bed and venti...

De Bie et al. (2023) call attention at the conclusion of their essay to the “novel questions” generated by complete ectogenesis. The question I explore is how complete ectogenesis from conception t...

The phrase "personalized medicine" has a built-in positive spin. Simple genetic tests can sometimes predict whether a particular individual will have a positive response to a particular drug or, alternatively, suffer costly and debilitating side effects. But little attention has been given to some challenging issues of justice raised by personalized medicine. How should we determine who would have a just claim to access particular treatments, especially very expensive ones? How effective do those treatments need to be?If there were a (...) thick, bright line separating minimal responders from maximal responders, then we could allocate these treatments in a fair and cost-effective way. But there is no bright line. The .. (shrink)

John Rawls has held up as a model of public reason the U.S. Supreme Court. I argue that the Dobbs Court is justifiably criticized for failing to respect public reason. First, the entire opinion is governed by an originalist ideological logic almost entirely incongruent with public reason in a liberal, pluralistic, democratic society. Second, Alito’s emphasis on “ordered liberty” seems completely at odds with the “disordered liberty” regarding abortion already evident among the states. Third, describing the embryo/fetus from conception until (...) birth as an “unborn human being” begs the question of the legal status of the embryo/fetus, as if an obiter dictum settled the matter. Fourth, Alito accuses the Roe court of failing to exercise judicial restraint, although Alito argued to overturn Roe in its entirety. In brief, the Dobbs opinion is an illiberal, disingenuous, ideological swamp that swallows up public reason and the reproductive rights of women. (shrink)

I fundamentally agree with Childress et al. (2023) in the scenario they have constructed with Mr. J. None of the arguments they critically assess are ethically persuasive enough to justify removing...

Rule consequentialism (RC) holds that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined by an ideal moral code, i.e., the set of rules whose internalization would have the best consequences. But just how many moral codes are there supposed to be? Absolute RC holds that there is a single morally ideal code for everyone, while Relative RC holds that there are different codes for different groups or individuals. I argue that Relative RC better meets the test of reflective equilibrium than (...) Absolute RC. In particular, I contend that Relative RC is superior because it accommodates our convictions about costless benefits. Some have charged that Relative RC threatens our convictions about the generality of moral codes and that it leads inevitably to what Brad Hooker calls “runaway relativism.” I argue that Relative RC has principled reasons for stopping this imagined slide down the slippery slope. (shrink)

This article reviews the research of “top rebirth scientist” Ian Stevenson on spontaneous past-life memory cases, focusing on three key problems with Stevenson’s work. First, his research of entirely anecdotal case reports contains a number of errors and omissions. Second, like other reincarnation researchers, Stevenson has done no controlled experimental work on such cases; yet only such research could ever resolve whether the correspondences found between a child’s statements and a deceased person’s life exceed what we might find by chance. (...) Finally, the best reincarnation research should at least meet the standards met by typical empirical research, but Stevenson’s methodology does not even meet the standards expected of third- or fourth-year college students. -/- 1. How Controlled Experimental Work is Possible -- 2. The Anecdotal Record - 2.1 Reincarnation and Biology - 2.2 The Imad Elawar Case -- 3. Conclusion. (shrink)

In The Healer's Power, Howard Brody placed the concept of power at the heart of medicine's moral discourse. Struck by the absence of “power” in the prevailing vocabulary of medical ethics, yet aware of peripheral allusions to power in the writings of some medical ethicists, he intuited the importance of power from the silence surrounding it. He formulated the problem of the healer's power and its responsible use as “the central ethical problem in medicine.” Through the prism of power he (...) refracted a wide range of ethical problems, from informed consent to truth-telling, from confidentiality to futility, from the physician's fantasies to the physician's virtues. At times this prism shed new light on old problems, enabling us to see from an unexpected angle the elements of which the problem was composed. At other times it exposed issues of ethical significance that had been neglected in the bioethics literature. (shrink)

A model of Zeno's dichotomy paradox is presented in Newtonian collision mechanics. One of several resolutions of the paradox illustrates the point that even in Newtonian ontology there is a spacetime weave. In a Newtonian system in which the base rules permit only spatial contact interactions, we find the mechanical emergence of action-at-a-distance effects.

Rule consequentialism (RC) is the view that it is right for A to do F in C if and only if A's doing F in C is in accordance with the the set of rules which, if accepted by all, would have consequences which are better than any alternative set of rules (i.e., the ideal code). I defend RC from two related objections. The first objection claims that RC requires obedience to the ideal code even if doing so has disastrous (...) results. Though some rule consequentialists embrace a disaster-clause which permits agents to disregard some of the rules in the ideal code as a necessary means of avoiding disasters, they have not adequately explained how this clause works. I offer such an explanation and show how it fits naturally with the rest of RC. The second disaster objection asserts that even if RC can legitimately invoke a disaster-clause, it lacks principled grounds from distinguishing disasters from non-disasters. In response, I explore Hooker's suggestion that “disaster” is vague. I contend that every plausible ethical theory must invoke something similar to a disaster clause. So if “disaster” is vague, then every plausible ethical theory faces a difficulty with it. As a result, this vagueness is not a reason to prefer other theories to RC. However, I argue, contra Hooker, that the sense of “disaster” relevant to RC is not vague, and RC does indeed have principled grounds to distinguish disasters from nondisasters. (shrink)

I develop and defend a hedonistic view of the constitution of human subjectivity, agency and value, while disassociating it from utilitarian accounts of morality and from the view that only pleasure is desired. Chapter One motivates the general question, "What really is of value in human living?", and introduces evaluative hedonism as an answer to this question. Chapter Two argues against preference satisfaction accounts of pleasure and of welfare, and begins the explication and defense of the hedonist's conception of pleasure (...) as immediate experiencing liked for its own sake in its experiential moment, and which obtains or not in an experiential moment regardless of what obtains at other times. Chapter Three begins the task of finding a motivational theory that will support, or at least cohere with, evaluative hedonism. I here work toward my own position by discussing, criticizing and distinguishing some aspects of the views of earlier hedonistic writers, both ancient and modern. Chapter Four further explains the hedonist's conception of pleasure, and treats some contextualist objections to its tenability suggested by Plato, Moore and Anscombe. In the course of answering these objections, the view of consciousness belonging to the hedonist's view of mind is contrasted with that which the objections presuppose. Chapter Five first outlines the general kind of hedonistic view resulting from the work of the earlier sections, and then develops a specific view of this kind, drawing on contemporary work in philosophy, psychology and psychobiology. The result is an account of action, and of the kind of attention and consciousness connected with it, in which pleasure has a central organizing role. Such an account, if sustained and filled out by ongoing scientific work, would further motivate, and cohere with, evaluative hedonism and the related contention that the dimension of subjectivity in which human value consists is in the lives of human beings and other higher vertebrates much the same. (shrink)

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination. European expansionism in its various (...) forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention. Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape. His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed. (shrink)

Whether or not there is a natural inclination to want freedom, and whether or not slaves (modern or ancient) are living in violation of such a natural inclination has been debated by scholars for centuries. David Walker’s APPEAL provides a starting point for an argument that settles the issue: given my interpretation of Walker’s naturalism and his approach to existential agency, slaves have a duty to insurrect even if there is no empirical evidence that a natural inclination exists. And they (...) have this duty even if they are likely to fail. Neither instrumentalist nor consequentialist reasoning provide a slave compelling reasons to rebel; all consequences of rebellion are almost certain to be deleterious and it is not unreasonable for persons to be subservient under conditions of slavery. I depict, and use Walker’s depiction of, slavery to defend his approach to naturalism and liberation; an approach arguably beneficial to how we should see contemporary slavery. (shrink)

This paper compares the views of Hegel and Schelling regarding the problem of individuation, i.e. the question of what makes an individual (a) numerically distinct from others and (b) the very individual it is. My focus is on how Hegel approaches this problem in his metaphysics and how that relates to Schelling’s views as articulated in his ‘negative philosophy’. While Hegelians like Robert Stern and Karen Ng are optimistic that Hegel can solve the problem of individuation, I argue that Schelling (...) puts forward an objection that both challenges Hegel’s account and provides a rationale for taking seriously Schelling’s own insistence on a pre-logical dimension of being. (shrink)

Contrary to what seems to be predicted by a Strawson-inspired view, in presupposition denials the presupposition triggered by, e.g., ‘the king of France’ seems to be cancelled. To explain this puzzling instance of the projection problem, defenders of a Strawson-inspired view have proposed various ad hoc ambiguities. I develop a version of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory that explains the puzzling presupposition-cancelling phenomenon relying only on independently motivated pragmatic processes. Appealing to Kripke’s “test” for the adequacy of ambiguity motivating counterexamples, I (...) argue that my analysis is to be preferred over proposals that posit ad hoc ambiguities. Two key insights of my analysis are, first, that the “cancellation” of presuppositions in presupposition denials depends upon the illocutionary effects of rejection and correction, and, second, that the process of presupposition accommodation often involves the speaker performing an ancillary sort of speech act, viz. the speech act of presupposing. (shrink)

can prevent non-contact interactions in Newtonian collision mechanics. The proposal is weakened by the apparent arbitrariness of what will be shown as the requirement of only an odd number of sets of some ex nihilo-created self-exciting particles. There is, however, an initial condition such that, without the ex nihilo self-exciting particles, either there is a contradictory outcome, or there is a non-contact configuration law, or there are odds versus evens indeterminacies. With the various odds versus evens arbitrarinesses and other such (...) difficulties, there seems to be an ontological unsatisfactoriness in the speed-unbounded Newtonian collision system. Introduction Taking self-excitations very seriously A problematic initial condition Another alternative. (shrink)

I agree with Professor ter Meulen that there is no need to make a forced choice between “justice” and “solidarity” when it comes to determining what should count as fair access to needed health care. But he also asserts that solidarity is more fundamental than justice. That claim needs critical assessment. Ter Meulen recognizes that the concept of solidarity has been criticized for being excessively vague. He addresses this criticism by introducing the more precise notion of “humanitarian solidarity.” However, I (...) argue that these notions are still not precise enough and are in need of behavioral translation, especially in relation to the problem of fair health care rationing. More specifically, I argue that translation ought to take the form of a well-ordered process of rational democratic deliberation, which I describe and defend in this essay. Such a process is what is required to construct a working model of just solidarity as opposed to a merely abstract idealization of just solidarity. (shrink)

My task is to provide some critical commentary on the preceding essays. My unfortunate conclusion will be that the issues that are their primary focus are more likely to become more ethically intractable over the next several years as medicine progresses. I do not see any easy or obvious way to avoid this conclusion.

Building on recent formal work by Aleks Knoks, we explore how the idea that certain epistemic norms may be indeterminate could be implemented in a default logic.

Developments in genetic engineering may soon allow biologists to clone organisms from extinct species. The process, dubbed “de-extinction,” has been publicized as a means to bring extinct species back to life. For theorists and philosophers of biology, the process also suggests a thought experiment for the ongoing “species problem”: given a species concept, would a clone be classified in the extinct species? Previous analyses have answered this question in the context of specific de-extinction technologies or particular species concepts. The thought (...) experiment is given more comprehensive treatment here. Given the products of three de-extinction technologies, twenty-two species concepts are “tested” to see which are consistent with the idea that species may be resurrected. The ensuing discussion considers whether or not de-extinction is a conceptually coherent research program and, if so, whether or not its development may contribute to a resolution of the species problem. Ultimately, theorists must face a choice: they may revise their commitments to species concepts or they may recognize de-extinction as a means to make progress in the species problem. (shrink)