Angelaki, Volume 18, Issue 4, Page 179-194, December 2013.

Technical results about the time dependence of eigenvectors of reduced density operators are considered, and the relevance of these results is discussed for modal interpretations of quantum mechanics which take the corresponding eigenprojections to represent definite properties. Continuous eigenvectors can be found if degeneracies are avoided. We show that, in finite dimensions, the space of degenerate operators has co-dimension 3 in the space of all reduced operators, suggesting that continuous eigenvectors almost surely exist. In any dimension, even when degeneracies are (...) hit, we find conditions under which a theorem due to Rellich can provide continuous eigenvectors. We use this result to formulate an extended version of the modal interpretation. We also discuss eigenvector instability which we argue poses a serious problem for the modal interpretation, even in our extended version. Many examples are given to illustrate the mathematics. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett is one of the most influential thinkers at the interface between philosophy and science. This book is the first comprehensive examination of Dennett ’s ideas on the nature of thought, consciousness, free will, and the significance of Darwinism. A highly original introduction to contemporary thinking about the relationship between mind and science. This is the first comprehensive examination of Dennett ’s ideas on the nature of thought, consciousness, free will, and the significance of Darwinism. Examines Dennett ’s unique (...) response to the question of when and how science should affect the conception that we have of ourselves. Casts new light on specific controversies: Could robots ever think, feel, and enjoy freedom? Does Dennett really explain consciousness? Are mental states real or merely ‘useful fictions’? Do we have free will? Is the self a ‘centre of narrative gravity’? (shrink)

This chapter presents an overview and discussion of the primary Buddhist virtues within the context of the Buddhist path of moral and spiritual development. Buddhist ethics counsels practitioners to overcome the three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance and to cultivate those states and traits of mind (and the actions they motivate) that conduce to the genuine happiness and spiritual freedom of oneself and others. The chapter will discuss the four immeasurable states of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. It (...) will then discuss the six perfections of generosity, moral discipline, forbearance, vigor, meditation, and wisdom. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the prospects of a Buddhist virtue ethics. (shrink)

This paper concerns virtue-based ethical principles that bear upon agricultural uses of technologies, such as GM crops and CRISPR crops. It does three things. First, it argues for a new type of virtue ethics approach to such cases. Typical virtue ethics principles are vague and unspecific. These are sometimes useful, but we show how to supplement them with more specific virtue ethics principles that are useful to people working in specific applied domains, where morally relevant domain-specific conditions recur. We do (...) this while still fulfilling the need for principles and associated practical reasoning to flexibly respect variation between cases. Second, with our more detailed approach we criticize and improve upon a commonly discussed principle about ecosystemic external goods that are crucial for human flourishing. We show this principle is far more conservative than appreciated, as it would prohibit many technology uses that are uncontroversially acceptable. We then replace this principle with two more specific ones. One identifies specific conditions in which ecosystem considerations are against a technology use, the other identifies favorable conditions. Third, we uncover a humility-based principle that operates within an influential “hubris argument” against uses of several biotechnologies in agriculture. These arguments lack a substantive theory of the nature of humility. We clarify such a theory, and then use it to replace the uncovered humility-based principle with our own more specific one that shifts focus from past moral failings, to current epistemic limits when deciding whether to support new technologies. (shrink)

According to cognitive non-naturalism, normative judgments are standard beliefs that purport to be about non-natural properties. An influential plurality of normative theorists, including non-naturalist realists, error theorists and skeptics, share this view. But it is mistaken. For it predicts an epistemic profile for normative judgments that they do not have. In particular, they are not disposed to extinguish in light of accepted evidence that the any non-natural properties are absent, and they are not disposed to come into existence in light (...) of accepted evidence for any non-natural property. So normative judgments might be beliefs, and there might be non-natural properties, but normative judgments are not beliefs about non-natural properties. (shrink)

We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer’s recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in the sense of Pollack [18]. We argue that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the representation and reasoning used (...) in generating sentences. The representation must support the generator’s simultaneous consideration of syntax and semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its (incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and realization. (shrink)

In the Ethics, Spinoza famously wrote, “we do not seek or desire anything, because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor it, will it, seek it and desire it.” This passage is widely recognized as asserting some of Spinoza's most important claims about the good, but the precise meaning of the passage is unclear, as interpreters have offered a wide variety of interpretations, often without noting (or even noticing) (...) their disagreements. The central interpretive question is what the key passage has to say about the relationship between desires and judgments of the good. At stake in this question is not just how we understand Spinoza's theory of the good—and by extension, much of his ethical theory – but also how we understand the reception of the scholastic Aristotelian notion that desiring something involves perceiving or thinking it to be good, the “guise of the good thesis”. This paper offers an interpretation of the passage that emphasizes differences between Spinoza and a Hobbesian view of judging the good. Rather, I show – perhaps surprisingly – that Spinoza is closer to the scholastic-Aristotelian tradition. (shrink)

Abstract:The island of Grosse Île lies 30 miles downstream of Quebec City in the St. Lawrence River. Once a quarantine station for ships bringing immigrants to the Canadas from Europe, mid-nineteenth-century outbreaks of cholera and typhus led to several thousand Irish deaths aboard ships in quarantine and on Grosse Île itself. This trauma has lived on in the Irish diaspora's memorialization of the island as a place of anguish and death that ultimately symbolized the Irish diaspora's flight to North America. (...) As a liminal space between the Old World and New, life and death, and hope and despair, Grosse Île has also been a contested site between the memory of Irish diaspora and the Canadian state. As such, it may be newly conceived as an “emotional borderland” by scholars of transnational space and immigration. (shrink)

Executive speechwriting is a common practice in most large organizations. This activity, however, raises a number of ethical questions about responsibility and about audience deception. This essay explores the ethics of speechwriting from three perspectives and offers some general guidelines for maintaining ethical standards when using speechwriters.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders? And even if one were to suddenly take me to its heart, I would vanish into its stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us...."So what are you telling me, there's no God, but there's you?"Peter Weir's film Fearless appeared in 1993 to critical acclaim and middling (...) box office fortune. The film draws on all of Weir's considerable art, a stunning sound track, and powerful performances by Jeff Bridges, Rosie Perez, and Isabella Rossellini. Based on the... (shrink)

This thesis argues that the strongest account of moral rights entails that animals and other marginal cases hold rights. The thesis contends that mutual advantage social contract theories offer the strongest account of rights from a security perspective, and that such theories entail rights for animals and marginal cases. Both of these claims are widely contested. Chapter 1 examines the fundamental elements of a social contract theory as developed by Hobbes and Hume. Chapter 2 revises the fundamental elements of contract (...) theory to make them more persuasive, and derives from them an account of rights for animals and marginal cases. Chapter 3 examines the most plausible competing accounts of rights for animals and marginal cases: utilitarianism, neo-Kantianism, and capability theory. Chapter 4 argues that the mutual advantage account of rights is better than the leading competitors from a security perspective. (shrink)

In a series of papers, a many-minds interpretation of quantum theory has been developed. The aim in these papers is to present an explicit mathematical formalism which constitutes a complete theory compatible with relativistic quantum field theory. In this paper, which could also serve as an introduction to the earlier papers, three issues are discussed. First, a significant, but fairly straightforward, revision in some of the technical details is proposed. This is used as an opportunity to introduce the formalism. Then (...) the probabilistic structure of the theory is revised, and it is proposed that the experience of an individual observer can be modelled as the experience of observing a particular, identified, discrete stochastic process. Finally, it is argued that the formalism can be modified to give a physics in which no constants are required. Instead, “constants” have to be determined by observation, and are fixed only to the extent to which they have been observed. (shrink)

This monograph surveys the history of the Army's professional ethic, focusing primarily on the Army officer corps. It assesses today's strategic, professional, and ethical environment. Then it argues that a clear statement of the Army officers' professional ethic is especially necessary in a time when the Army is stretched and stressed as an institution. The Army officer corps has both a need and an opportunity to better define itself as a profession, forthrightly to articulate its professional ethic, and clearly to (...) codify what it means to be a military professional."--Summary. (shrink)

This paper stages an argument in five premises:1. That the insight to which post-structuralist ethics responds—which is that there is an 'unmistakableparticularity of concrete persons or social groups'—leads theorists who base their moral theory upon itinto a problematic parallel to that charted by Kant in his analysis of the sublime.2. That Kant's analysis of the sublime divides its experience into what I call two 'moments', the secondof which involves a reflexive move which the post-structuralists are unwilling to sanction in theontological (...) and/or ethical realm, even if they are performatively committed to doing it.3. That, drawing on the parallel established in 1, it could be argued that the same reflexive move asKant describes in the second 'moment' of the sublime is also at the heart of our moral experience,wherein we are faced by the Otherness of concrete Others. This amounts to the argument that askingOthers to follow an impersonal or 'dumb' law which fails to do justice to their noumenal Otherness is atthe same time the only possible way to respect this Otherness.4. That what game theory shows us is that, at thelimits of our ability to calculatively predict the conduct of other subjects, the only 'rational' thing to dois precisely to presume the pre-existence of impersonal social norms regulating our own conduct andthat of others.5. That, accordingly, to borrow a formulation from Slavoj Zizek, respect for theOther is always respect for their ‘castration’—that is, respect for their capacity to follow norms that do not directly do justice to their concrete particularity but which, in this very 'dumbness', let this Otherness indirectly show itself.In the conclusion, I reflect on what this argument does, and upon its limits—that is, what it does not. (shrink)

Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, this article analyzes the ways that male residents in a drug treatment program signified a masculine self through compensatory manhood acts. I analyze four strategies of identity work that men used during group accountability sessions called “games”: signifying masculinity through aggression; subordinating women and nonconventional men; calling others to account as men; and “keeping your head”: managing emotions to assert control. This article adds to our understanding of the ways that compensatory manhood acts (...) are structured locally through interaction, highlighting ways that men’s interactions may be self-defeating and also reproduce inequality by reinforcing dominant ideologies of misogyny and homophobia. In addition, it speaks to the ways that masculine subjectivity is constructed against and through dominant narratives of addiction and treatment. (shrink)

TRAGICALLY, ETHNIC CONFLICTS HAVE BECOME ONE OF THE HALLMARKS of the post-Cold War era. In response to this, two distinct traditions appear to be emerging.The first continues the classical just war tradition while the second represents a new "reconciliation tradition," built largely around questions of restorative justice in areas of social division. Our goal in this essay is to begin a rapprochement of these divergent traditions by asking the question, what does a restorative justice perspective offer to the just war (...) tradition? We proceed in three stages: first, we survey the current state of the just war tradition; second, we introduce the reconciliation tradition, drawing on both reconciliation thinkers and the practical experience of experiments in social reconciliation in South Africa and Rwanda; and third, we draw these two traditions together with a series of constructive proposals for how the reconciliation tradition can enrich the just war tradition. (shrink)

This thesis examines the function of art in Nietzsche's philosophy. Its primary concern is with Nietzsche's turn to art as the means to counter what he terms metaphysics. Metaphysics is a metonym for the system of beliefs sustaining our culture whereby human judgements about the world are perceived as uncovering an objective truth antecedent to those judgements, with an implicit faith in the possibility of exhausting the totality of these antecedent truths. This thesis consequently has two principal strands. The first (...) is to analyse Nietzsche's criticism of metaphysics. The second is to explore the way in which, using a specific understanding of art, Nietzsche attempts to reconcile extreme scepticism towards all forms of human knowledge with a continued belief in their necessity. The thesis argues that Nietzsche lays an importance on art as providing an aesthetic education to replace the misguided theoretical orientation of metaphysics. Nietzsche criticises metaphysics for its inability to recognise that its interpretations are mere interpretations, that logic and the rational serve as means to make the world meaningful from the human perspective. My thesis explores how he sees art, and in particular the tragic, as constituting a mode of world interpretation which declares its status as such. I argue that for Nietzsche this is crucial inasmuch as a failure to recognise the contingency of our interpretations results in a refusal to give value in any interpretations. For Nietzsche the advent of the Modern age heralds the danger of such refusal, and hence I argue that his turn to art is a response to the specifically Modern temptation to descend into mere cynical Nihilism. (shrink)