Should you care less about your distant future? What about events in your life that have already happened? How should the passage of time affect your planning and assessment of your life? Most of us think it is irrational to ignore the future but harmless to dismiss the past. But this book argues that rationality requires temporal neutrality.

Rare genetic diseases collectively impact millions of individuals in the United States. These patients and their families share many challenges including delayed diagnosis, lack of knowledgeable providers, and limited economic incentives to develop new therapies for small patient groups. As such, rare disease patients and families often must rely on advocacy, including both self-advocacy to access clinical care and public advocacy to advance research. However, these demands raise serious concerns for equity, as both care and research for a given disease (...) can depend on the education, financial resources, and social capital available to the patients in a given community. In this article, we utilize three case examples to illustrate ethical challenges at the intersection of rare diseases, advocacy and justice, including how reliance on advocacy in rare disease may drive unintended consequences for equity. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities for diverse stakeholders to begin to address these challenges. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson thinks that every object is a necessary, eternal existent. In defense of his view, Williamson appeals primarily to considerations from modal and tense logic. While I am uncertain about his modal claims, I think there are good metaphysical reasons to believe permanentism: the principle that everything always exists. B-theorists of time and change have long denied that objects change with respect to unqualified existence. But aside from Williamson, nearly all A-theorists defend temporaryism: the principle that there are temporary (...) existents. I think A-theorists are better off without this added commitment, but I will not argue for that in any great detail here. Instead, I will contend that a very tempting A-theoretic argument for temporaryism is unsound. In the first half of the paper, I will develop the Moorean “common sense” argument for temporaryism and dispute its central premise, namely that temporaryism is a valid generalization from highly plausible beliefs about change. I will argue that given the pervasive vagueness in our ordinary beliefs about change and the background commitments of all A-theories, no party can claim to be the common sense view because no party can accommodate most of our common sense beliefs about change in existence. In the second half of the paper, I will propose a permanentist A-theory that explains all change over time as a species of property change. I call it the minimal A-theory, since it dispenses with the change in existence assumption. As we'll see, the permanentist alternative performs well enough in explaining our ordinary beliefs about change, and it has better prospects for answering some objections commonly levied against A-theories. (shrink)

This article examines the role of historical science in clarifying the causal structure of complex natural processes. I reject the pervasive view that historical science does not uncover natural regularities. To show why, I consider an important methodological distinction in geology between uniformitarianism and actualism; methodological actualism, the preferred method of geologists, often relies on historical reconstructions to test the stability of currently observed processes. I provide several case studies that illustrate this, including one that highlights how historical narratives can (...) improve predictive models. (shrink)

Philosophers like to worry about luck. And well they should. Luck poses potential difficulties for knowledge, moral appraisal, and freedom. The primary target of this paper will be the last of these concerns . Recent arguments from luck have been levied against libertarian accounts of free will, including agent-causal ones. One general goal of this paper will be to demonstrate the truth of an often overlooked claim about responsibility-undermining luck. Part of this task will include illustrating what is genuinely worrisome (...) about luck in the context of free will. It will turn out that the problem is not fundamentally a problem of explanation. Another aim will be to argue that the truth of this claim about luck reveals a problem for event-causal libertarianism but has yet to reveal a problem for the agent-causal view. For the purposes of this paper, it will be assumed that luck does indeed undermine free action and moral responsibility. But it will be argued that agent-caused actions have not been shown to be "lucky.". (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue, contra Prinz, that empathy is a crucial component of our moral lives. In particular, I argue that empathy is sometimes epistemologically necessary for identifying the right action; that empathy is sometimes psychologically necessary for motivating the agent to perform the right action; and that empathy is sometimes necessary for the agent to be most morally praiseworthy for an action. I begin by explaining what I take empathy to be. I then discuss some alleged problems (...) for empathy and explain why some argue that empathy is unnecessary and sometimes even problematic in the moral domain. Next, I criticize a prominent alternative to an empathy-based morality. Finally, I argue that that empathy is sometimes epistemologically and psychologically necessary for doing the right thing and is sometimes necessary for moral worth. I conclude with a discussion of the important role of empathy in our everyday lives. (shrink)

Various authors have attempted to understand knowledge-wh—or knowledge ascriptions that include an interrogative complement. I present and explain some of the analyses offered so far and argue that each view faces some problems. I then present and explain a newanalysis of knowledge-wh that avoids these problems and that offers several other advantages. Finally I raise some problems for invariantism about knowledge-wh and I argue thatcontextualism about knowledge-wh fits nicely with a very natural understanding of the nature of questions.

In this paper, I argue against Peter van Inwagen’s claim (in “Free Will Remains a Mystery”), that agent-causal views of free will could do nothing to solve the problem of free will (specifically, the problem of chanciness). After explaining van Inwagen’s argument, I argue that he does not consider all possible manifestations of the agent-causal position. More importantly, I claim that, in any case, van Inwagen appears to have mischaracterized the problem in some crucial ways. Once we are clear on (...) the true nature of the problem of chanciness, agent-causal views do much to eradicate it. (shrink)

Artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers her first-person perspective of entanglements of light and air during the 2020–21 pandemic from her position in academia and Florida.

The work of Sankary et al. (2022) provides valuable insights into the experiences of participants exiting brain device research. Empirical bioethics research such as this is critical to understandi...

In this issue, Lynch and colleagues discuss lessons learned from the “Operation Warp Speed” response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States—both about what to do and what not to do fo...

Pulling from theories of social exchange, deonance, and fairness heuristics, this study focuses on the relationship between overall justice climate and both the prosocial and deviant behaviors of groups. Specifically, it considers two contextual boundary conditions on this effect—corporate social responsibility and group moral identity. Results from a laboratory experiment are presented, which show a significant effect for overall justice climate and a two-way interaction between overall justice climate and CSR on group-level prosocial and deviant behaviors, and a marginally significant (...) interaction of group moral identity with overall justice climate on group deviance. The implications of contextual influences on workplace ethics and justice are discussed. (shrink)

The rapid advances in genomics over the last decade have come to fruition amid intense public discussions of justice in medicine and health care. While much emphasis has been placed on increasing diversity in genomics research participation, an overly narrow focus on recruitment eschews recognition of the disparities in health care that will ultimately shape access to the benefits of genomic medicine. In this essay, we suggest that achieving a just genomics, both now and in the future, requires an explicit (...) ELSI of translation—normative and pragmatic scholarship that embraces the interconnectedness of research and clinical care and centers the obligations of researchers, institutions, and funders to mitigate inequities throughout the translational pipeline. We propose core principles to guide an ELSI of translation and to ensure that this work balances the value of the generalizable knowledge that genomics research generates and the value of the individuals and communities who make this research possible. (shrink)

Although a great deal of research addresses the neural basis of deliberate and intentional emotion-regulation strategies, less attention has been paid to the neural mechanisms involved in implicit forms of emotion regulation. Behavioural research suggests that romantically involved participants implicitly derogate the attractiveness of alternative partners, and the present study sought to examine the neural basis of this effect. Romantically committed participants in the present study were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while indicating whether they would consider each (...) of a series of attractive (or unattractive) opposite-sex others as a hypothetical dating partner both while under cognitive load and no cognitive load. Successful derogation of attractive others during the no cognitive load compared to the cognitive load trials corresponded with increased activation in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) and posterior dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (pDMPFC), and decreased activation in the ventral striatum, a pattern similar to those reported in deliberate emotion-regulation studies. Activation in the VLPFC and pDMPFC was not significant in the cognitive load condition, indicating that while the derogation effect may be implicit, it nonetheless requires cognitive resources. Additionally, activation in the right VLPFC correlated with participants' level of relationship investment. These findings suggest that the RVLPFC may play a particularly important role in implicitly regulating the emotions that threaten the stability of a romantic relationship. (shrink)

The question of whether humans are free to make their own decisions has long been debated and it continues to be a controversial topic today. In _Free Will: The Basics_ readers are provided with a clear and accessible introduction to this central but challenging philosophical problem. The questions which are discussed include: Does free will exist? Or is it illusory? Can we be free even if everything is determined by a chain of causes? If our actions are not determined, does (...) this mean they are just random or a matter of luck? In order to have the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility, must we have alternatives? What can recent developments in science tell us about the existence of free will? Because these questions are discussed without prejudicing one view over others and all technical terminology is clearly explained, this book is an ideal introduction to free will for the uninitiated._ _. (shrink)

A‐theorists of time postulate a deep distinction between the present, past and future. Settling on an appropriate logic for such a view is no easy matter. This Philosophy Compass article describes one of the most vexing formal problems facing A‐theorists. It is commonly thought that A‐theories can only be formally expressed in a tense logic: a logic with operators like P and F . And it seems natural to think that we live in a world where objects come to exist (...) and cease to exist as time passes. Indeed, this is typically a key component of the most prominent kind of A‐theory, presentism. But the temporary existence assumption cannot be upheld in any tense logic with a standard quantification theory. I will explain the problem and outline the philosophical and logical considerations that generate it. I will then consider two possible solutions to the problem – one that targets our logic of quantification and one that targets our assumptions about change. I survey the costs of each solution. (shrink)

A-theorists think there is a fundamental difference between the present and other times. This concern shows up in what kinds of properties they take to be instantiated, what objects they think exist and how they formalize their views. Nearly every contemporary A-theorist assumes that her metaphysics requires a tense logic – a logic with operators like and. In this paper, I show that there is at least one viable A-theory that does not require a logic with tense operators. And I (...) will argue that three common indispensability arguments for tense operators are unsound. (shrink)

The debate between legal constitutionalists and critics of constitutional rights and judicial review is an old and lively one. While the protection of minorities is a pivotal aspect of this debate, the protection of disenfranchised minorities has received little attention. Policy-focused discussion—of the merits of the Human Rights Act in Britain for example—often cites protection of non-citizen migrants, but the philosophical debate does not. Non-citizen residents or ‘denizens’ therefore provide an interesting test case for the theory of rights as trumps (...) on ordinary representative politics. Are they the ultimate success story of the human rights framework? Or was Michael Walzer correct to describe government of denizens by citizens as a modern form of ‘tyranny’? This paper argues that neither liberal rights theorists nor democratic republicans provide a coherent response to the existence of denizens. Liberal rights theorists overstate the extent to which a politically powerless status can secure individual rights, while democratic republicans idealise the political process and wrongly assume that all those affected by laws are eligible for political participation. The paper outlines an alternative model for assessing the accountability of states to their non-citizen population, informed by the republican ideal of non-domination. It identifies gaps in state accountability to denizens–such as where there is inadequate diplomatic protection—and argues that these gaps are particularly troubling if their exit costs of leaving the state are high. (shrink)

A-theories of time postulate a fundamental distinction between the present and other times. This distinction manifests in what A-theorists take to exist, their accounts of property change, and their views about the appropriate temporal logic. In this dissertation, I argue for a particular formulation of the A-theory that dispenses with change in existence and makes tense operators an optional formal tool for expressing the key theses. I call my view the minimal A-theory. The first chapter introduces the debate. The second (...) chapter offers an extended, logic-based argument against more traditional A-theories. The third and fourth chapters develop my alternative proposal. The final chapter considers a problem for A-theorists who think the contents of our attitudes reflect changes in the world. (shrink)

High-profile failures in financial trading have led to interest in how the culture of the industry produces risky and unethical behaviours among traders. Yet, there is no established theoretical framework for studying this: we apply safety culture theory to examine ten recent high-profile trading mishaps investigated by the UK financial regulator. The results show that the dimensions of safety culture used to understand organisational accidents in domains such as aviation also explain failures in Risk Management within financial trading organisations. This (...) counters narratives focusing on traders who are unethical ‘rule breakers’, and emphasises the value of a systemic approach, whereby safety culture theory is used to explain why risky behaviours in financial trading occur. Safety culture therefore provides a conceptual basis for further research on risky and unethical behaviours in financial trading, alongside providing insights for possible intervention. (shrink)

Notre Dame Philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have gone deep with that work in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course GOD AND THE GOOD LIFE, in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful. Now they invite us into the classroom to tackle such issues as what justifies your beliefs, whether you should practice a religion, and what sacrifices you should make for others--as well as to investigate what (...) Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Murdoch have to say about how to live well. Sullivan and Blaschko teach us how to reason through real-world case studies by doing the timeless work of philosophy like escaping our own caves, learning to doubt everything, asking strong questions, grasping our own purpose, and wrestling with the problem of evil and the existence of God. For at least the past 2500 years philosophers have taught that goal-seeking is an essential part of what it is to be human--and crucially that we could find our own good life by asking better questions. Their virtue ethics approach resonates profoundly in our own moment. Philosophers know that our "good life plan" is one that we as individuals need to be constantly and actively writing. In that work, we can achieve some meaningful control even if the world keeps throwing surprises our way. THE GOOD LIFE is a winning guide to tackling the big questions of being human with the wisdom of the ages. (shrink)

Use of divine names is strictly regulated in the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Unlike most ordinary names, “God,” “Jesus,” and “Allah,” have a particular moral significance for the faithful. Misuse of the names constitutes a form of blasphemy—a sin. Tomes have been written about the origin of holy names in these traditions and the role that they play in devotional practices. I have no such grand theological ambitions here. Instead, in this short essay I will raise a (...) few more narrow questions about the sin of blasphemy from the standpoint of contemporary philosophy of language. Until we have good reason to think otherwise, we should assume that the best semantic theory for ordinary proper names like “Obama” and “Aristotle” extends to names for God. In particular, I think we have reason to assume some causal theory of reference is true of divine names, since some version of it seems true of most every other name. From this assumption I will argue (i) that there are some puzzles for the sin of blasphemy as it is traditionally conceived, and (ii) that we can make progress toward answering the puzzles by acknowledging that divine names are vulnerable to a special kind of reference drift. (shrink)

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience is a transcript of a video, a chapter in an interdisciplinary research project. Artist Meghan Moe Beitiks interviewed people with personal or pro...

This chapter presents Peter van Inwagen's defense to the local argument from evil. According to van Inwagen, God may have been required to allow at least some contingent pointless evils because he faced a kind of sorites problem in deciding which world to create. This response stands in contrast to the more common strategy – skepticism about our ability to detect contingent pointless evils. The chapter unpacks van Inwagen's proposed explanation of pointless evils, surveys and responds to three objections, and (...) proposes two extensions of his defense. (shrink)

Pierre Duhem’s philosophy of science was criticized by several of his contemporaries for being surreptitiously influenced by his Catholic faith. In his essay “Physics of a Believer,” Duhem defends himself against this appraisal. In this paper, I detail Duhem’s argument and reconstruct his view concerning the relationship between theoretical science and religious belief. Ultimately, Duhem claims that the propositions of physical theory cannot contradict the propositions of religious belief because they do not share a domain of reference. To clarify why (...) Duhem holds this view, I present a case study: the discovery of entropy. By examining how the term “entropy” was introduced into thermo-dynamic theory, a story with which Duhem was intimately familiar, much of the apparent conflict in Duhem’s philosophy of science is resolved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History: From Hobbes to Marx by David JamesMeghan RobisonDavid James. Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History: From Hobbes to Marx. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 256. Hardback, $70.00.In his newest monograph, David James offers an elaborate, well-wrought reflection on human freedom and its limits by considering five canonical modern philosophers: Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Judging from the table of contents, the book (...) appears to be a work in the history of philosophy: each of the chronologically organized chapters examines a different aspect of necessity, history, and freedom in one of the five philosophers just mentioned. By focusing on those thinkers, James tracks a progression in the modern reflection on the nature of freedom and its relation to constraint. Specifically, he argues that such a progression culminates, with Marx, in finally getting the right understanding of the relation between freedom and two kinds of necessity—one practical, the other historical. This is an extremely ambitious book, and its scope is extensive: by its end, James has considered more than thirty philosophical works spanning nearly two hundred years. Yet, even though it makes several contributions to various longstanding scholarly debates, Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History is not a work of intellectual history. Its main seven chapters—each of which offers a richly complex interpretative analysis that is sure to challenge any reader, even a specialist—are preceded by an introduction that explains that the book's aim is to contribute to a vision of society where necessity and freedom are reconciled. This aim is not a mere framing device but structures the book's contents as well its interpretive method.On James's account, the project of reconciling freedom with necessity—which was initiated by Rousseau in the eighteenth century and then developed by each of the modern philosophers examined in this book (with the exception of Hobbes [9])—remains incomplete. James explains this incompleteness as in part due to the success of the "two-liberties" conception of freedom outlined by Isaiah Berlin which he understands as the "liberal" idea according to which liberty begins and ends where others are prohibited from interfering in one's freedom and the "neo-republican" idea according to which the mere threat of domination is a constraint on freedom. Both views of liberty are essentially negative, James argues, and also deficient because they entail an impoverished and incorrect idea of constraint. To get beyond this viewpoint, James proposes to augment the idea of constraint that such a viewpoint entails by including both additional forms of practical constraint and a positive idea of freedom as self-determination (1). James explains the importance of the concept of self-determination by stressing the role it played in "gaining control over social and historical conditions and forces that generate avoidable practical constraints on human agency that may or may not interfere in people's lives" (2). To this end, he locates a productive tension between freedom as self-determination and practical constraint: the former is limited by the latter which, at the same time, it seeks to abolish. The "two-liberties" view cannot grasp this tension, James argues, because, in tying agency back to a "clearly identifiable agent," it overlooks the plural nature of freedom (2). In short, freedom and necessity remain unreconciled because we have not understood the nature of constraint and its relation to freedom as self-determination.James seeks to fill this "knowledge gap" by returning to what Kant, Hegel, and Marx said on freedom and necessity (both practical and historical) when they reflected on the transition to a society in which freedom and necessity are eventually reconciled. Specifically, James tries to identify new possibilities implicit in those three thinkers' accounts and to "kick the tires," so to speak, by looking for holes in their understanding of practical necessity. In particular, he focuses on what Kant's, Hegel's, and Marx's understanding of freedom and necessity might entail about the role of suffering in the transition toward a society in which freedom and necessity are reconciled. In combing through those three thinkers' arguments for inconsistencies, contradictions, and pregnant loose threads, James strives to... (shrink)

This contribution to a symposium on Samantha Frost’s Lessons from a Materialist Thinker considers Frost’s interpretation of Hobbesian Man and the connection between man and the Commonwealth. Particular attention is paid to Frost’s interpretation of man as an interdependent and intersubjective living creature and the relationship between living embodiment and agency. Through this focused examination, this contribution aims to elucidate the critical questions raised by Lessons and identify promising avenues for future Hobbes scholarship by highlighting the key insights that reshape (...) our understanding of his enduring influence on modern political thought. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between gender and space through a consideration of women's ritual performances in the Regia, an ancient and sacred building at the edge of the Roman Forum. In this space, the regina sacrorum, the flaminica Dialis, the saliae virgines, and the Vestal Virgins performed a range of public rituals on behalf the Roman people. The paper examines how the material setting of the Regia and traditions associating it with the regal period shaped the experiences of the (...) priestesses as they carried out their ritual obligations. It also considers how their ritual performances contributed to the perception that the Regia and many of the city's most important rituals were rooted in the regal period. (shrink)

In their article, Nelson et al. (2023) raise concerns regarding the “paradox of experience” as it relates to the practice of bioethics. They argue that while experience provides individuals with in...

This essay examines Arendt’s interpretation of Hobbes as it develops from “Expansion and the Philosophy of Power” (1946) and The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Human Condition (1958) by focusing on the role of the concept of process, and the reductive concept of life as “the life-process” in order to highlight an important way in which Arendt sees Hobbes as contributing to the valorization of the life-process in modernity. By reconstructing Arendt’s interpretation of Hobbes as it develops in these (...) texts, I aim to expand our understanding of Hobbes’s importance for Arendt’s analysis of modernity by showing that Hobbes is not only the philosopher of an original “expansionist” concept of power and a political-economic imperialist state but also, on account of the centrality of the notion of process within it, key to the elevation of life as the highest value in the modern vita activa. (shrink)

Boring ontological realists hold that objects exist at times and persist over time without having substantive essences. Boring realism is a consequence of the minimal A-theory of time and the most sensible formulations of necessitism. This kind of realism is at odds with a ubiquitous realist thesis, which I call the persistenceessence link. This essay surveys some examples of the persistence-essence link and argues that it is best understood as a thesis about grounding. If we understand the link in terms (...) of grounding, there are new options for denying it—and for better understanding boring realism. (shrink)

This article engages Kojonen's discussion of scientific explanation. Kojonen claims the best way to conceptualize the relationship between evolutionary explanations and explanation by design is through the proximate-ultimate distinction and the levels metaphor. However, these are not robust explanatory models but examples of how one might differentiate ambiguous explananda contained in why-questions. Disambiguating explananda is a helpful tool for determining when a situation calls for further explanation; however, on this picture, that some further explanation is needed does not, as proponents (...) of design arguments assume, specify design. The question of whether design is a good explanation at all hinges on what precisely we want explained. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a novel account of knowledge ascriptions with concealed questions as complements. I begin by discussing various theories of knowledge-the proposed in the literature and raising some problems for each. I then present and explain my positive proposal, arguing that knowledge ascriptions with concealed questions as complements say that the subject stands in the knowledge relation to a question. I claim that this view avoids the problems facing other accounts and offers a unified account of knowledge-the, (...) knowledge-wh, and, importantly, other attitudes with interrogative complements. On this account, when we utter any attitude ascription that contains an explicit question, an indirect question, or a concealed question, we say that some subject stands in the relevant relation to a question. (shrink)

Jc Beall offers a novel resolution to worries about Christ’s contradictory nature by introducing an account of logical consequence that allows for true contradictions. However, to prevent his view from exploding into heresy, Beall must deny that conditionals detach. But without detachment, the language fails to capture other true entailments which must be included in a complete account of Christ. Beall faces a dilemma, then, between heresy and inadequacy.