Metaethics, understood as a distinct branch of ethics, is often traced to G. E. Moore's 1903 classic, Principia Ethica. Whereas normative ethics is concerned to answer first order moral questions about what is good and bad, right and wrong, metaethics is concerned to answer second order non-moral questions about the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of moral thought and discourse. Moore has continued to exert a powerful influence, and the sixteen essays here represent the most up-to-date work (...) in metaethics after, and in some cases directly inspired by, the work of Moore. (shrink)

G.E. Moore’s open question arguments (OQAs) have been targeted by unsympathetic philosophers for close to a century. Perhaps the most serious criticism directed towards Moore’s OQAs is that they beg the question against targeted theories. After presenting an OQA extracted from §13 of Principia Ethica, I lodge this question-begging objection before articulating Moore’s autobiographical efforts to mitigate its force. I then suggest that Moore’s OQAs are incomplete, awaiting the final stage of construction, an explanation of (...) the ‘open question’ phenomenon—the inclination of many philosophers to endorse the central premises of Moore’s OQAs. After a brief investigation of noncognitivist attempts to explain the phenomenon, I propose a semantic explanation, a cognitivist explanation that commits its proponents neither to mysterious nonnatural properties nor to perilous positions regarding the paradox of analysis. I conclude by arguing that Moore’s completed OQAs are successful, but his deployment of them in efforts to refute metaethical naturalism, even analytic or semantic versions, is not. (shrink)

This chapter -- the first in the edited collection "The Naturalistic Fallacy" (Cambridge University Press 2019) -- locates the naturalistic fallacy within the context of the other claims Moore defends in Principia Ethica. I explore the notions of “definition” and “analysis” as Moore understood them and set out in detail the multiple interpretations of the fallacy and open question argument. I then take a broad view of the influence of the fallacy on the Century of metaethics that (...) came after Moore, covering topics such as the non-cognitivist appropriation of the open question argument, the mid-Century Humean turn in which the inferential form of the fallacy was dominant, and the fallacy’s role – at the end of the Century – in framing new forms of naturalism. Finally, I argue that these multiple strands of influence demonstrate that, to a large extent, contemporary ethics – and metaethics in particular – can be understood through the framing lens of the naturalistic fallacy. (shrink)

This chapter offers an introduction to naturalist views in contemporary metaethics. Such views attempt to find a place for normative properties (such as goodness and rightness) in the concrete physical world as it is understood by both science and common sense. The chapter begins by introducing simple naturalist conceptual analyses of normative terms. It then explains how these analyses were rejected in the beginning of the 20th Century due to G.E. Moore’s influential Open Question Argument. After this, (...) the chapter considers what good general reasons there are for defending naturalism in metaethics. The bulk of the chapter will then survey new semantic and metaphysical forms of naturalism which in different ways attempt to address Moore’s objection to naturalism. These more recent versions of naturalism—using new resources from philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of science and epistemology—attempt to explain why the Open Question Argument fails. (shrink)

For both G. E. Moore and Bernard Lonergan, the question of the good provides a fundamental heuristic indicating its irreducible and thus transcending nature. In Lonergan’s later work, the focus is primarily on the good as manifest in intentional responses to values. But the fundamental metaphysics of the good is never absent from this perspective, and it re-appears explicitly in some later writing. Moore’s anti-reductionist metaethics played a central role in the debates to follow in analytical philosophy (...) in the decades after the appearance of Principia Ethica. In this article, I explore possible convergences between these two avenues of speculation, which in their way both witness to the abiding significance of the scholastic notion of the good as a transcendental. It is argued that the wider purview offered by Lonergan’s analysis of the good, sought in questions as implying metaphysical and theological dimensions, assists in rendering cogent the objectives to which Moore’s question of the good points. (shrink)

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed task (...) was that of describing the human condition as consisting of choices, as unavoidable as arbitrary, without any attempt at providing criteria for making such choices. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the heir of ethics was a philosophy of morality, that is, an analysis of the language of morality that intended to clarify valuations without trying to justify them. 1958 was the year of the normative turn that led to the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy, a turn followed by decades of controversies between distinct kinds of normative ethics: utilitarian, Kantian, virtue ethics. While the controversy was raging, a quiet revolution took place, that of applied ethics which surprisingly dissolved the controversy's very subject matter by providing methods for making convergence possible on intermediate principles even when no agreement was available about first principles. The normative turn and the revolution of applied ethics have led us, at the turn of the century, to a goal that was quite far from the starting point. Instead of scepticism and relativism that was the fashion at the beginning of the century, at the beginning of the third millennium impartial and universal moral arguments seem to hold the spot being supported, if not by a final rational foundation, at least by reasonableness, the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment. -/- ● TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- ● I Anglo-Saxon philosophy: naturalism 1. Dewey beyond evolutionism and utilitarianism 2. Dewey and anti-essentialist moral epistemology 3. Dewey and naturalist moral ontology 4. Dewey and normative ethics of conduct and function 5. Perry and semantic naturalism -/- ● II Anglo-Saxon philosophy: ideal utilitarianism and neo-intuitionism 1. Moore's critique of utilitarian empiricism 2. Moore on the naturalistic fallacy 3. Moore on the nature of intrinsic value 4. Moore on ideal utilitarianism 5. Prichard on the priority of the right over the good 6. Ross's coherentist moral epistemology 7. Ross's moral ontology: realism, pluralism, and non-naturalism 8. Ross's normative ethics of prima facie duties -/- The chapter reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore's early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. It argues that PE is more a patchwork of somewhat diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. -/- ●III Anglo-Saxon philosophy: non-cognitivism 1. The Scandinavian School, the Vienna circle and proto-emotivism 2. Wittgenstein and the ineffability of ethics 3. Russell's and Ayer's radical emotivism 4. Stevenson and moderate emotivism 5. Stevenson and the pragmatics of moral language 6. Stevenson and the methods for solving ethical disagreement 7. Hare and prescriptivism The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of 'good', its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with 'emotive' meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell's ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson's theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. A section reconstructs the discussion from the Forties about Hume's law, mentioning Karl Popper's argument and Richard Hare's early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- ●IV Anglo-Saxon philosophy: critics of non-cognitivism 1. Neo-naturalism and its objections to the naturalistic fallacy argument 2. Objections to Hume's law 3. Clarence Lewis and the pragmatic contradiction 4. Toulmin and the good reasons approach 5. Baier and moral reasons 5. Baier, social moralities and the absolute morality 6. Baier and the moral point of view 7. Baier and the contents of absolute ethics -/- ● V Continental philosophy: the philosophy of values 1. Max Weber and the polytheism of values 2. Phenomenology against psychologism and rationalism 3. Reinach and the theory of social acts 4. Scheler and the material ethics of values 5. Hartmann and the ontology of values 6. Plessner, Gehlen and the Philosophische Anthropologie -/- The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl's project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the apriori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy conducted in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach's theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that sketches the ideas 'discovered' later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section discusses Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of 'values' – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler, who claimed to be Husserl's legitimate heirs. -/- ● VI Continental philosophy: the critics of the philosophy of values 1. Freud, the Superego and Civilization 2. Heidegger on original ethos against ethics 3. Sartre and de Beauvoir on authenticity and ambiguity 4. Adorno and Horkheimer on emancipation and immoralism -/- ●VII Post-liberal theologians and religious thinkers 1. Barth on the autonomy of faith from ethics 2. Developments of Reformed moral theology after Barth 3. Bonhoeffer on the concrete divine command and ethics of penultimate realities 4. Developments of Reformed and Catholic moral theology after world war II 5. Baeck and the transformation of liberal Judaism 6. Rosenzweig against liberal Judaism 7. Buber and religion as the vital lymph of morality 8. Heschel and Judaism as a science of actions -/- The chapter examines the main protagonists of Christian theology and Jewish religious thinking in the twentieth century. It stresses how the main dilemmas of contemporary philosophical ethics lie at the root of the various path of inquiry taken by these thinkers. -/- ● VIII Normative ethics: neo-Utilitarianism 1. The discussion on act and rule utilitarianism 2. Hare on two-tiered preference utilitarianism 3. Harsanyi, Gauthier and rational choice ethics 4. Parfit, utilitarianism and the idea of a person 5. Brandt and indirect conscience utilitarianism -/- The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick's and Moore's fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine refuted. Two examples give the reader a glimpse at this uproarious process. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This transformation results in preference utilitarianism combined with a 'Kantian' version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare's two-level preference utilitarianism, where act utilitarianism plays the function of the eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of an action-guiding practical device. -/- ● IX Normative ethics: neo-Aristotelianism and virtue ethics 1. Hannah Arendt, action and judgement 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer and phronesis 3. Alasdair MacIntyre on practices, virtues, and traditions 5. Stuart Hampshire on deliberation 6. Bernard Williams and moral complexity 7. Feminist ethics -/- Sect 1 reconstructs the post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named 'Rehabilitation of practical philosophy' is described. Heidegger's most brilliant disciples were the promoters of this Rehabilitation. Hans-Georg Gadamer is a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle's lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger's lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the significant role of the notion of phronesis. Sect 3 discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. It argues that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. The chapter gives a short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot's and Peter Geach's critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre's grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- ● X Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based ethics 1. Dialogical constructivism 2. Apel, Habermas and discourse ethics 3. Gewirth and rights-based ethics 4. Nagel on agent-relative reasons 5. Donagan and persons as ends in themselves Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This current started with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. The chapter offers an examination of his argument in some detail, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas's elaboration on Apel's theory. -/- ● XI The applied ethics renaissance 1. Elisabeth Anscombe on the atom bomb 2. From medical ethics to bioethics 3. Rawls and public ethics 3. Nozick, Dworkin and further developments of public ethics 5. Sen and the revival of economic ethics -/- The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin's new casuistry. The chapter argues that Rawls's distinction between a "political" and a "metaphysical" approach to the theory of justice, one central part of ethical theory, is a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and the new casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter. The idea is that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls' view never will be close – on the essential criteria for judgment. -/- ● XII Fin-de-siècle metaethics 1. Deontic logics 2. Anti-realism 3. External realism 4. Internal realism 5. Kantian constructivism -/- The chapter illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism. (shrink)

After John Dewey, Addison W. Moore was recognized as the chief spokesman for the instrumentalist version of pragmatism. Never before available, this complete collection of Moore's work contains dozens of philosophical articles, essays, book reviews, writings by other philosophers, and reviews of his work, together with his book, Pragmatism and its Critics (1910).

The impact of Gilles Deleuze on critical thought in the opening decades of the twenty-first century rivals that of Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault on critical thought in the closing decades of the twentieth. The "Deleuze and..." industry is in overdrive in the humanities, the social sciences, and beyond, busily connecting Deleuzian philosophy to everything from literature to architecture, metaphysics to mathematics, ethics to physics, sexuality to technology, and ecology to theology. What of Deleuze and the Bible? What does the (...) Bible become when it is plugged into the Deleuzian corpus? An immense affective assemblage, among other things. And what does biblical criticism become in the process? A practice of close reading that is other than interpretation and renounces the concept of representation. The book begins with an extended exposition of Deleuzian thought, and proceeds to unexegetical explorations of five successive themes: Text (how to make yourself a Bible without Organs, and why); Body (why there are no bodies in the Bible, and how to read them anyway); Sex (a thousand tiny sexes, a trillion tiny Jesuses); Race (Jesus and the white faciality machine); and Politics (democracy, despots, pandemics, ancient prophets). Cumulatively, these explorations limn the fluid contours of a Bible after Deleuze. (shrink)

The Breivik case in Norway has motivated a reassessment of Norwegian insanity law by the Norwegian government. Because Norway since 2002 has utilized a “medical model” for legal insanity—a model according to which the legal excuse of insanity is identified with some medical concept such as psychosis—the Norwegian reexamination of its law is not without interest throughout the world. In this paper, I utilize the Anglo-American experience with different medical models for insanity to assess the current Norwegian law on insanity. (...) I defend a strong version of the medical model against standard criticisms advanced against it in the Anglo-American literature, and venture some suggested improvements in how that model was applied in the Breivik case. (shrink)

After exploring MacIntyre’s (1985) practice—institution distinction, the article demonstrates its applicability to business-as-practice and to corporations as institutions. It then considers the implications of MacIntyre’s schema to ethical schizophrenia, to the claim that themarket is a source of the virtues and to the opposite claim that capitalism corrodes character. A fully worked out modern virtue ethics, based on MacIntyre’s work, is then established and the claim is made and substantiated that such an understanding of MacIntrye’s work revitalises it and (...) makes it directly applicable to business and to corporations. (shrink)

The article examines what has come to be known as "the risk analysis" in Anglo-American tort law and contract law. The risk analysis essentially consists of: viewing negligence as a relational concept, so that a defendant is never simply negligent tout cour, but is negligent only with respect to certain persons and certain harms — other harms suffered by other persons are said not to be "within the risk" that makes the defendant negligent; and the supplanting of proximate cause doctrine (...) with doctrines of duty, the duty question being determined by the question of whether a certain person and a certain harm are within the risk that makes a defendant negligent. The article aims to explode entirely the risk analysis. After beginning with an examination of the historical roots of the risk analysis, we then seek to show that the risk analysis is: conceptually incoherent because it seeks to isolate a risk that makes someone negligent; normatively undesirable because it allows quite blameworthy actors not to pay for the harms they culpably cause; and descriptively inaccurate of the cases decided on the more traditional, proximate cause bases. (shrink)

In this paper the problematic nature of the morality of management, in particular related to business organisations operating under Anglo-American capitalism, is explored. MacIntyre’s critique of managers in After Virtue serves as the starting point but this critique is itself subjected to analysis leading to a more balanced and contemporary view of the morality of management than MacIntyre provides. Paradoxically perhaps, MacIntyre’s own virtues-goods-practice-institution schema is shown to provide a way of re-imagining business organisations and management and thereby holds (...) out the possibility of resolving the issue of the morality of management within such organisations. Implications for management practice are drawn out. (shrink)

Georges Florovsky’s essay ‘On the Grounding of Logical Relativism’ has attracted attention from various theologians and students of Russian thought but has until now avoided a serious philosophical analysis and critique. The complex but thought-provoking essay presents Florovsky’s so-called logical relativism, a position which he seemed to maintain for the rest of his career. This paper will show that by conflating ‘scientific’ with ‘alethic’ relativism, Florovsky exposed himself to detrimental philosophical and theological critique. After some methodological remarks, the first (...) part of the paper will introduce Florovsky’s article, and present its central argument as a scientific relativism which is then conflated with a truly logical or alethic relativism. The second and third parts will highlight the philosophical and theological problems with Florovsky’s position. (shrink)

The first important question which confronts the teacher of an introductory course in philosophy is likely to be the question as to how he may best approach the subject of what philosophy is, how to approach it in such a way as to pique the curiosity and excite the interest of the student from the beginning. After considering this question many times, it has recently occurred to the present writer that it might be helpful to make this approach by (...) way of a parable, an allegorical account of what seem to be the three basic human desires—the desire to live, the desire to enjoy life, and the desire to understand life. He accordingly offers this suggestion for whatever it may be worth, and presents the following little tale as at least one possible working-out of that suggestion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Putting It on the LineMichael Moore (bio)IAmong the many ways to teach aesthetic education, a compelling one is to organize pedagogy around specific works of art, music, drama, and dance. This has been the central tenet of the Lincoln Center Institute and its sister institutes around the world. They concentrate on specific works because it allows participants to focus their minds, emotions, and energies on one set of (...) images and experiences. Excited by such an approach, many teachers return year after year, eager to tackle a new and varied repertory.But they cannot repeat the summer institute forever. They may need to take other workshops to satisfy professional (re)certification requirements. The school district may no longer reimburse them for the cost of the workshop. Their team may develop other interests. Often they find that the school has displaced the arts with other priorities, particularly in the light of so-called proficiency exams mandated by state boards of education.Whatever the reason, if teachers want to continue to do something meaningful in the arts, they may well have to become their own summer institute, lesson planner, and teaching artist rolled into one. The question then becomes, "How well did you learn the lessons of the institute?" The first lesson requirement is, "Do you know how to choose an appropriate work of art around which to develop aesthetic experiences and reflection for your students?" Behind that question, however, lies another: "What is your definition of art?" This is no idle philosophical exercise because one's answer underlies everything else done in the classroom in the name of aesthetic education. [End Page 62]Several years ago, Marcia Mulder Eaton of the University of Minnesota developed an exercise that enables teachers to examine their definitions of art in a practical way. She asked teachers to complete the following sentence: "Something is a work of art if and only if _________." She then showed them several objects, with the request that they write on a piece of paper if each object was a work of art, according to the definitions that they had written down.When I ran the exercise at a summer teachers institute in Pittsburgh, I displayed in order (1) a small flag; (2) an original painting; (3) a cheap cup from Wal-Mart; (4) a piece of fruit; (5) some driftwood; (6) and a basin wrench.1 Teachers voted on each piece as it was shown. Once the voting was completed, I asked them how they voted and how they justified their vote in the light of their definitions. When I have run this exercise elsewhere, the definitions and resultant criteria have broken down into four groups: (1) it was created, therefore, it is art; (2) an expert, such as an art museum or a critic, may have decreed it to be art; (3) "it touched me in some way and I cannot describe that feeling other than to call it art"; and (4) "I'm no connoisseur but I know what I like." There are strengths and weaknesses in each position:1. Anything that humans make is art because it is an artifact. Weakness: The definition is too general2. We should respect the opinions of experts. After all, they studied the matter much longer and more deeply than we have. They know what they are talking about. Weakness: What if I think they are off base? What if there is something in the work that appeals to me?3. "It somehow has touched me and I want to cherish it." "There is something in there that causes me to respond. It, therefore, has some kind of power." Weakness: This position does not lend itself very well to public discussion, unless you have something you can point to or explain in a way that gets through to others.4. "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." (Well, let's hear it for rugged individualism!) Weakness: It suggests a closed mind and an unwillingness to listen to others' opinions. Again, there is no opportunity for shared insights.The discussion in Pittsburgh dealt with, more or less, each of the above positions, but... (shrink)

Interpretations of Euripides’Heraclesoften focus on Theseus’ and Heracles’ cooperative social values in the final scene as a culmination of themes ofphilia. I argue that the relationship Theseus forges competes with Heracles’ attachment to his household,oikos, which is the central social relationship Euripides describes. The drama consistently develops Heracles as his household's leader by inviting the audience to compare Heracles with interim caretakers Megara and Amphitryon, and later through the protagonist's performance of emotional attachment before and after his madness. The (...) closing scene continues to reveal the value and vulnerability of household attachment by accentuating Heracles’ exclusion from the identity of human family member. This trajectory suggests a painful misalignment between Heracles’ experience in theoikosand the public position Theseus offers at Athens: of a semi-divine hero receiving public cult and honours. Euripides emphasizes this tension to distinguish the experience ofoikos-membership. (shrink)

Humans alone acquire language. According to one influen- tial school of thought, we do this because we possess a uniquely human ability to act with and attribute “Gricean” communicative intentions. A challenge for this view is that attributing communicative intent seems to require cognitive abilities that infant language learners lack. After considering a range of responses to this challenge, I argue that infant language development can be explained, because Gricean communication is cognitively less demanding than many suppose. However, a (...) consequence of this is that abilities for Gricean communication are unlikely to be uniquely human. (shrink)

In the twenty-first century, 70.6 percent of Americans self-identify as Christians,1 58 percent of them still segregate themselves by race on Sunday mornings, and white Protestants make up the majority of this 58 percent.2 These facts belie the claim, popularized after Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election, that America is living in a postracial society3 And yet, the role played by religion in white people's lived experiences of race, racism, and white class privilege in the United States tends to be (...) neglected by philosophers and religious studies scholars, except perhaps when considering white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.4 Contemporary philosophy is secular in a way that generally excludes and... (shrink)

This study investigates whether the conscious awareness of action is based on predictive motor control processes, or on inferential “sense-making” process that occur after the action itself. We investigated whether the temporal binding between perceptual estimates of operant actions and their effects depends on the occurrence of the effect (inferential processes) or on the prediction that the effect will occur (predictive processes). By varying the probability with which a simple manual action produced an auditory effect, we showed that both (...) the actual and the predicted occurrence of the effect played a role. When predictability of the effect of action was low, temporal binding was found only on those trials where the auditory effect occurred. In contrast, when predictability of the effect of action was high, temporal binding occurred even on trials where the action produced no effect. Further analysis showed that the predictive process is modulated by recent experience of the action-effect relation. We conclude that the experience of action depends on a dynamic combination of predictive and inferential processes. (shrink)

Gives practical advice on getting accepted at graduate school, obtaining financing, evaluating faculties, writing an effective dissertation, and finding a job after graduation.

Kant once wrote, “Many historians of philosophy... let the philosophers speak mere nonsense.... They cannot see beyond what the philosophers actually said to what they really meant to say.’ Rae Langton begins her book with this quotation. She concludes it, after a final pithy summary of the position that she attributes to Kant, with the comment, “That, it seems to me, is what Kant said, and meant to say”. In between are some two hundred pages of admirably clear, tightly (...) argued exegesis, supplemented by detailed references, in which she offers what the dust jacket blurb fairly describes as “a new interpretation and defence of Kant’s doctrine of things in themselves.” This is an extremely engaging and thought-provoking book. I am pleased to recommend it. (shrink)

The Greek identification of certain Indian people asphilosophoiat the end of the fourth centurybceprovides unique information about the meaning of the termphilosophia, especially with respect to its reference to a certain kind of “way of life” (bios), at the time of its greatest maturity (at the start of the Hellenistic period). TheIndicaof Megasthenes, an ambassador to northern India after the death of Alexander, is our most important evidence; fragments from earlier works by Nearchus and Onesicritus, intellectuals in Alexander’s cortege, (...) provide corroboration. This essay argues that late classical Greeks did largely think ofphilosophiaas a way of life. (shrink)

Aside from making a few weak, and hopefully widely shared claims about the value of privacy, transparency, and accountability, we will offer an argument for the protection of privacy based on individual self-interest and prudence. In large part, this argument will parallel considerations that arise in a prisoner’s dilemma game. After briefly sketching an account of the value of privacy, transparency, and accountability, along with the salient features of a prisoner’s dilemma games, a game-theory analysis will be offered. In (...) a game where both players want privacy and to avoid transparency and the associated accountability, the dominant action will be to foist accountability and transparency on the other player while attempting to retain one’s own privacy. Simply put, if both players have the ability or power to make the other more accountable and transparent, they will do so for the same reasons that player’s defect in a prisoner’s dilemma game. Ultimately this will lead to a sub-optimal outcome of too much accountability and transparency. While there are several plausible solutions to prisoner dilemma games, we will offer both technical, as well as, law and policy solutions. We need to change the payoffs of the game so that is it in everyone’s interest to balance privacy and accountability rather than foisting transparency on others. (shrink)

G. E. Moore was a central figure in twentieth-century philosophy. Along with Russell and Wittgenstein, he pioneered analytic philosophy, and his Principia Ethica shaped the contours of twentieth-century ethics. Indeed, until the publication of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, no single book in moral philosophy was to equal Principia's influence. Unfortunately, however, Principia Ethica has so dominated critical discussions of Moore's work that even experts on his moral philosophy have tended to ignore his Ethics, which he published eight (...) years later. But Ethics is Moore's only other book on moral philosophy, and one of only a handful of post-Principia publications dealing with ethics. Its detailed discussions of utilitarianism, free will, and the objectivity of moral judgements find no real counterpart in Principia while its account of right and wrong and of the nature of intrinsic value deepen our understanding of his moral philosophy. The republication of Ethics thus rounds out our understanding of Moore's ethical thought. But the book's value goes beyond its historical or scholarly interest. A short but philosophically rich text, Ethics stands independent of Principia and repays careful study in its own right. By raising a number of fundamental questions in ethics, questions that remain live today, by proffering clear, credible, and often innovative answers to them, and by doing so with a philosophical skill that is still impressive, Moore's short book is a minor classic. Almost a century after its original publication, it still amply rewards those who read it.This new edition of Moore's Ethics includes his essay 'The Nature of Moral Philosophy' as well as editorial notes, an introduction, and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

The type-type reductive identity of the mental to the physical was once the dominant position in the mental causation debate. In time this consensus was overturned, largely due to its inability to handle the problem of multiple realizability. In its place a nonreductive position emerged which often included an adherence to functionalism. Functionalism construes mental properties as functional states of an organism, which in turn have specific physical realizers. This nonreductive form of functionalism, henceforth called role functionalism, has faced a (...) number of criticisms itself. Chief among these is the concern that the realizer of the functional role is causally sufficient, so the role property does not make a contribution of its own. In this paper I argue that there is a way for unreduced functional properties to play a role after all. This is done by conceiving of functional properties as higher level functional properties of a macro system which determine that its realizers will play the roles that they play. (shrink)

In the United States the ascendancy of speech protection is due to an expansive and unjustified view of the value or primacy of free expression and access to information. This is perhaps understandable, given that privacy has been understood as a mere interest, whereas speech rights have been seen as more fundamental. I have argued elsewhere that the “mere interest” view of privacy is false. Privacy, properly defined, is a necessary condition for human well-being or flourishing. The opening section of (...) this article will provide an overview of this theory. Next, after a few remarks on speech absolutism, privacy absolutism, and balancing theories, I will sketch several of the dominant argument strands that have been offered in support of presumptively weighty speech rights. While these arguments, taken together, establish that free speech is important, they do not support the view that speech should nearly always trump privacy. In final section I will present and defend a way to balance free speech and privacy claims. (shrink)

What can--and what can't--philosophy do? What are its ethical risks--and its possible rewards? How does it differ from science? In Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Bernard Williams addresses these questions and presents a striking vision of philosophy as fundamentally different from science in its aims and methods even though there is still in philosophy "something that counts as getting it right." Written with his distinctive combination of rigor, imagination, depth, and humanism, the book amply demonstrates why Williams was one of (...) the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Spanning his career from his first publication to one of his last lectures, the book's previously unpublished or uncollected essays address metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as well as the scope and limits of philosophy itself. The essays are unified by Williams's constant concern that philosophy maintain contact with the human problems that animate it in the first place. As the book's editor, A. W. Moore, writes in his introduction, the title essay is "a kind of manifesto for Williams's conception of his own life's work." It is where he most directly asks "what philosophy can and cannot contribute to the project of making sense of things"--answering that what philosophy can best help make sense of is "being human." Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline is one of three posthumous books by Williams to be published by Princeton University Press. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument was published in the fall of 2005. The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy is being published shortly after the present volume. (shrink)

Setting aside various foundational moral entanglements, I will offer an argument for the protection of intellectual property based on individual self-interest and prudence. In large part, this argument will parallel considerations that arise in a prisoner’s dilemma game. After sketching the salient features of a prisoner’s dilemma, I will briefly examine the nature of intellectual property and how one can view content creation, exclusion, and access as a prisoner’s dilemma. In brief, allowing content to be unprotected in terms of (...) free access leads to a sub-optimal outcome where creation and innovation are suppressed. Finally, I will argue that adopting the institutions of copyright, patent, and trade secret is one way we can avoid these sub-optimal results. (shrink)

The Archimedean Axiom is often held to be an intuitively obvious truth about the geometry of physical space. After a general discussion of the varieties of geometrical intuition that have been proposed, I single out one variety which we can plausibly be held to have and then argue that it does not underwrite the intuitive obviousness of the Archimedean Axiom. Generalizing that result, I conclude that the Axiom is not intuitively obvious.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Painting in Tongues:Faith-Based Languages of Formalist ArtKevin Z. Moore (bio)A philosophical problem is created by the incoherence between the earlier state and the later one.—Ian Hacking, Historical OntologyWhatever is happening to evidence-based treatment? When the facts contravene conventional wisdom, go with the anecdotes?—New York Times, "Science Times," February 14, 2006Cephalopods have a visual language that may be considered artful; humans have written and vocalized languages that are sometimes (...) artful; but it is doubtful that there is such a thing as a "language of art," particularly in the sense that twentieth-century formalists and their critics carelessly speak of one or many. Cephalopods flash color-forms on their hides to communicate intents and emotions, maybe even to project plans. They speak in tattooed tongues through neurologically embossed patterns and color field designs displayed on the skin. The large-eyed sea creatures communicate voicelessly in a visual language of pure color-forms, each species perhaps having its own dialect. Though not a full or official language by any means, their color-forms display the ideal that twentieth-century formalist artists sought to graphically realize (referential and conceptual immediacy, emotional coloring, communication via pure, that is, nonpictorial, form). Formalist inspired artists and their critic-expositors describe abstract pattern-painting as though it were a visual language equal to that of the cephalopod. Yet [End Page 40] although we can reasonably imagine cephalopods getting the correct message by observation, we cannot reasonably imagine observers getting any message at all, let alone the intended message, from abstractionist painting. This casts suspicion on the formalists' claims about visual language. Observers cannot and famously do not get anything "out" of formalist pattern paintings, though they do project quite a lot "into" them. The telling difference between octopus and artist? Cephalopods communicate visually—their survival depends on it. Formalists do not, though the survival and flourishing of their art depends upon the belief that they do.Notably, explanations of what exactly a formalist language of art is goes missing from accounts of sense and reference in the relevant literature, where we learn that this or that painting exhibits this or that language of art but never how this or that painting functions as a language of any sort. The "language of art" phrase, it seems, has the same force as mentioning truth or existence: it explains nothing. Talk of a language of art suggests merely that a painting exhibits a communicative intent; it does not explain how that intent is linguistically mediated. The phrase is ostensive and nominal, not descriptive and expository.Prior to the twentieth century there may have been some justification for this language since art was shaped by objective reference, identifiable codes (sign and symbol systems), and recognizable scenes (compositions) that made painting a language-like public media. Observers could see immediately or "read" paintings by observation as though they were reading a language. Images were shaped by observation; reference was fixed by convention. The formalist revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dismantled the public character of representation in painting. After the revolution, the new art that appeared was a sort of visual humpty-dumptyism, to invoke a language metaphor. Formalist imagery functioned the way words did for Mr. Carroll's Mr. Dumpty: they meant what the artist intended them to mean and not what observation or convention constrained them to mean. Reference and meaning were as arbitrary as the visual forms chosen to bear them. Once a communicative medium, painting became an expressive medium, the values of the latter superseding those of the former wholly or in part. Even when a formalist painting alluded to a conventional arrangement (a landscape or portrait, for example), the composition was as visually parodic of genre as Mr. Carroll's Jabberwocky was verbally parodic of narrative poetry, preserving syntax (form) but not the integrity of the formal agents of communication. Both are forms of nonsense, yet only one intentionally so.Styles of formalism do not facilitate the observation of intended reference; they are not effective forms of communication because they are not languages. If the basic function of a visual art is to communicate a specific... (shrink)

The communicative interactions of very young children almost always involve language, gesture and directed gaze. In this study, ninety-six children were asked to determine the location of a hidden toy by understanding a communicative act that contained none of these familiar means. A light-and-sound mechanism placed behind the hiding place and illuminated by a centrally placed switch was used to indicate the location of the toy. After a communicative training session, an experimenter pressed the switch either deliberately or accidentally, (...) and with or without ostension. In no condition did she orient towards the hiding place. When the switch was pressed intentionally, children used the light-and-sound cue to find the toy – and tended to do so even in the absence of ostensive eye contact. When the experimenter pressed the switch accidentally, children searched randomly – demonstrating that they were tracking her communicative intent, and not merely choosing on the basis of salience. The absence of an effect of ostension contradicts research that ostension helps children to interpret the communicative intentions underlying unfamiliar signs. We explain this by concluding that while it may play a role in establishing a communicative interaction, it is not necessary for sustaining one; and that even with a highly novel communicative act – involving none of the means of communication on which children typically rely – three-year-olds can comprehend the communicative intentions behind an intentionally produced act. (shrink)

Libertarian free will is, roughly, the view that agents cause actions to occur or not occur: Maddy’s decision to get a beer causes her to get up off her comfortable couch to get a beer, though she almost chose not to get up. Libertarian free will notoriously faces the luck objection, according to which agential states do not determine whether an action occurs or not, so it is beyond the control of the agent, hence lucky, whether an action occurs or (...) not: Maddy’s reasons for getting beer in equipoise with her reasons to remain in her comfortable seat do not determine that she will get up or stay seated, so it seems beyond her control, hence lucky, that she gets up. In this paper I consider a sub-set of the luck objection called the Physical Indeterminism Luck Objection, according to which indeterministic physical processes cause actions to occur or not, and agent’s lack control over these indeterministic physical processes, so agent’s lack control over, hence it is lucky, whether action occurs or not. After motivating the physical indeterminism luck objection, I consider responses from three recent event-causal libertarian models, and conclude that they fail to overcome the problem, though one promising avenue is opened up. (shrink)

This chapter offers a conceptual analysis of territory, distinguishes it from property accounts, and discusses different versions of property accounts, all derived from Locke’s ‘Second Treatise of Government’. It offers a conceptual analysis of territory and the various rights associated with territory. According to Locke, territorial right is established through the subjection, by free consent, of persons and their land to state authority. This theory is found to rest on a number of flawed assumptions, among them claims to natural rights (...) of property and an obvious link between private property and territorial jurisdiction. Cara Nine draws on Lockean principles to claim that a state is a collective that, like individuals, owns property, namely the territory of the state. After examining the historical antecedents of such ideas, the chapter points away from them and towards accounts of territory based on individual and collective claims of rights. (shrink)

According to the socio-cognitive revolution hypothesis, humans but not other great apes acquire language because only we possess the socio-cognitive abilities required for Gricean communication, which is a pre-requisite of language development. On this view, language emerged only following a socio-cognitive revolution in the hominin lineage that took place after the split of the Pan-Homo clade. In this paper, I argue that the SCR hypothesis is wrong. The driving forces in language evolution were not sweeping biologically driven changes to (...) hominin social cognition. Our LCA with non-human great apes was likely already a Gricean communicator, and what came with evolution was not a raft of new socio-cognitive abilities, but subtle tweaks to existing ones. It was these tweaks, operating in conjunction with more dramatic ecological changes and a significant increase in general processing power, that set our ancestors on the road to language. (shrink)

In this article I address the tension between evaluative surveillance and privacy against the backdrop of the current explosion of information technology. More specifically, and after a brief analysis of privacy rights, I argue that knowledge of the different kinds ofsurveillance used at any given company should be made explicit to the employees. Moreover, there will be certain kinds of evaluativemonitoring that violate privacy rights and should not be used in most cases.

I argue that both Kant and, in his later work, Wittgenstein indicate the possibility of just such a transcendental‐idealist response to the Basic Argument. I also argue, however, that transcendental idealism, for all its appeal, is incoherent. This is because its attempt to invoke the ‘transcendent’ is an attempt to invoke that which, by definition, cannot be invoked. So, it does not provide an alternative to unregenerate endorsement of the Basic Argument after all.

We propose that doping be legalized under medical supervision. First, we discuss two motivations for allowing medically supervised doping. We reject the ‘compromised choice/harm minimization’ motivation as unlikely to win the support of athletes. We agree that it could lead to an arms race. Instead, we favor full acceptance of doping under medical supervision and answer Reid’s spirit of sport objection to medical manipulation. After presenting a set of guiding principles, we use them to answer the arms race objection (...) and rebut one of the most prominent objections in the literature about the safety of medically supervised doping, the game-theoretic objection. (shrink)

This chapter considers the problems of adjudicating between rival claims to territory, drawing boundaries around jurisdictional units, and creating institutional arrangements that embody the principles developed thus far. It explores the implications of the collective moral right of occupancy in establishing heartlands of groups and argues that these heartlands are useful to demarcate boundaries between self-determining peoples and territories. It suggests that neither democratic theory nor justice theory can be usefully applied to the issue of drawing boundaries. After considering (...) questions of occupancy—its meaning, scope, and implications for territorial claims—the chapter concludes that the moral occupancy principle can identify ‘heartlands’ of groups but is indeterminate in certain cases. It also considers the implications of this argument for secessionist claims and for rival claims to the same territory, looking specifically at the historically contested areas of Northern Ireland, Kashmir, and Kurdish northern Iraq. (shrink)