Since Horn (1972) the notion of conversational implicature proposed by Grice has been put to use to explain certain interpretive differences between expressions in natural language and their counterparts in formal logic. For example, the sentences in (1) seem to convey more than they would be expected to if the natural language disjunction or had the same meaning as the logical disjunction ∨, or if the quantificational determiner some was interpreted as the existential quantifier ∃.

This paper develops twenty hypotheses concerning the relationships among selected individual differences variables (locus of control, delay of gratification, gender, and race) and five different ethical beliefs. The results of a study of collegians provide support for seventeen out of twenty research hypotheses. As predicted, locus of control, delay of gratification, and race are related to ethical beliefs. Also as predicted, gender is not related to ethical beliefs.

Chomsky, meanwhile, has long expressed great reluctance even to recommend reading material to his audiences, let alone how they ought to vote, on the basis that they shouldn’t be substituting his judgment for their own. At the same time he has equally consistently maintained that elections are an elaborate PR charade unworthy of more than the briefest attention, a stance he somehow considers consistent with the petition’s call to put the presidential elections at the top of our list of concerns (...) this year. Fortunately, these two fine dissidents haven’t joined in the vilification of Nader that has become all the rage among Democrats and all-too-many progressives, at least not yet. (shrink)

Images of Native Americans and of aspects of Native American culture are common in advertisements in the United States. Three such images can be distinguished — the Noble Savage, the Civilizable Savage and the Bloodthirsty Savage images. The aim of this paper is to argue that the use of such images is not morally acceptable because these images depend upon an underlying conception of Native Americans that denies that they are human beings. By so doing, it also denies to them (...) any moral standing and thus any claim to moral consideration and treatment. I begin by arguing that the traits which are distinctively human are fostered only within a cultural framework consisting of the accumulated knowledge and activities of a group of human beings. I then argue that savages are conceptualized as natural and cultureless beings. Furthermore, within the traditional Western conceptualization of the world mere natural objects have no moral standing. Thus, it follows that Native Americans insofar as they are also merely natural objects would have no standing or status as moral beings. The conception of Native Americans as savages undercuts the very conditions for the possibility of moral respect. I then turn to an application of these principles to some current commercial uses of images of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. (shrink)

I present an original model in judgment aggregation theory that demonstrates the general impossibility of consistently describing decision-making purely at the group level. Only a type of unanimity rule can guarantee a group decision is consistent with supporting reasons, and even this possibility is limited to a small class of reasoning methods. The key innovation is that this result holds when individuals can reason in different ways, an allowance not previously considered in the literature. This generalizes judgment aggregation to subjective (...) decision situations, implying that the discursive dilemma persists without individual agreement on the logical constraints. Notably, the model mirrors the typical method of choosing political representatives, and thus suggests that no voting procedure other than unanimity rule can guarantee representation that reflects electorate opinion. Finally, I apply the results to a normative argument for unanimity rule in contract theory and juries, as well as to problems posed for deliberative democratic theory and the concept of representation. (shrink)

Based in a global array of case studies - Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Islamic education in the United States - this volume shows how the discourse concerning educational technology in the Islamic world has emphasized neoliberal and neofundamentalist themes, and argues that the design and implementation of educational technologies in schools would be better accomplished by taking a culturally grounded approach. This approach would be rooted in the context and local needs of learners, with implications and possible application (...) in the Muslim world and beyond. (shrink)

This introduction to nonviolent movements analyzes fourteen classic and contemporary cases to show how nonviolent strategies can work where violent warfare has failed. Drawing on practitioner knowledge and diverse philosophical and religious texts, Michael K. Duffey offers a multifaceted argument for embracing nonviolent resolutions to conflict.

Some philosophers have recently complained that moral theories almost always portray the distresses of ordinary people in moral predicaments as irrational. In the name of having a minimally realistic picture of ethical thought, these philosophers argue that accounts of morality must allow for strong moral dilemmas, choices involving mutually exclusive all-things-considered requirements or jointly exhaustive all-things-considered prohibitions. In this dissertation I clarify and reject several versions of this argument, which I call the argument from experience. ;In chapters one and two (...) I define strong moral dilemmas as essentially involving conflicts of moral reasons, and reject as premature attempts to reduce questions about strong dilemmas to questions about deontic logic. I accept the goal of representing ordinary experience faithfully, and ask whether a theory will necessarily distort that experience if it employs interpretations of 'ought' and 'prohibited' in ways guaranteeing a priori that there are no strong dilemmas. ;The argument from experience claims that people can have a justifiably high degree of confidence that they are in strong moral dilemmas, and in chapter three I question whether people ever have the needed sorts of confidence about the limits of their abilities, the precise location of their wrongdoing, or the futility of continued moral deliberation. ;In chapter four I reject specific arguments based on regret and guilt. The tendency to feel unavoidable agent-regret or guilt allegedly shows that the agent sees the choice as a strong dilemma, and the appropriateness of such distresses allegedly shows that the agent's way of seeing things is rational. I reply that someone can feel agent-regret without endorsing any moral judgment involving 'ought' or 'prohibited', and that guilt is never unavoidably appropriate. ;In chapter five I trace the failure of the argument from experience to the presence in ordinary thought of a notion of blame which is both conceptually guaranteed always to be avoidable and regarded as an infallible indicator of moral requirement and prohibition. I am led to wonder, finally, why this notion of blame should play a privileged role in philosophical pictures of morality. (shrink)

Homer and the heroic ideal -- Hesiod, poet of everyday life -- Aeschylus and the institution of justice -- Sophocles, the Theban plays -- Euripides and the twilight of the gods -- The inquiries of Herodotus of Halicarnassus -- Thucydides, power and pathos -- Aristophanes and the serious business of comedy -- Plato, philosophy, and poetry -- Aristotle and the invention of political science.

The need to choose between good things in conflict lies at the heart of politics. Only citizens deliberating together can authoritatively form the democratic public judgment necessary to resolve such conflicts. The key step to arriving at a sound widely supported public judgment is getting all members of the public to “comprehend”---to understand and appreciate---the goods in conflict. Mutual comprehension enables us to combine our individual perspectives without loss, thereby providing the basis for collective deliberation. Such comprehension is essential because (...) the mutual respect between citizens upon which democratic politics depends is impossible without it. Mutual comprehension is possible because we share a common human nature that, despite our manifest and irreducible differences is built around a limited and universal set of human needs and dispositions. (shrink)

This essay introduces a special report from The Hastings Center entitled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose, which grew out of a project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This multiauthored report offers wide‐ranging assessments of increasing polarization and partisanship in American government and politics, and it proposes constructive responses to this in the provision of objective information, institutional reforms in government and the electoral system, and a reexamination of cultural and (...) political values needed if democracy is to function well in a pluralistic and diverse society. The essays in the special report explore the norms of civic learning and institutions, social movements, and communal innovations that can revitalize civic learning in practice. This introductory essay defines and explains the notion of civic learning, which is a lynchpin connecting many of the essays in the report. Civic learning pertains to the ways in which citizens learn about collective social problems and make decisions about them that reflect the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. Such learning can occur in many social settings in everyday life, and it can also be facilitated through participation in the processes of democratic governance on many levels. Civic learning is not doctrinaire and is compatible with a range of public goals and policies. It is an activity that increases what might be called the democratic capability of a people. (shrink)

Many older people need external support for their daily living. A large minority of older adults with low or modest pension incomes face financial strains from the high cost of illness, and many older people in urban areas live in social isolation. Indeed, population aging has become a policy topic of concern. The policy debate since the end of the twentieth century about the future of public pensions and health and long‐term care programs has increasingly framed the growing numbers of (...) older people in alarmist terms. Unfounded claims about the unaffordability and unsustainability of social policies supporting older people have become common currency, often disguised as concerns about intergenerational justice. Such claims and concerns hinder clear thinking about proper social and fiscal policies, housing, health care, and labor markets to safeguard the well‐being of older people in aging societies. (shrink)

The release of genetically engineered organisms into the shared environment raises scientific, ethical, and societal issues. Using some form of democratic deliberation to provide the public with a voice on the policies that govern these technologies is important, but there has not been enough attention to how we should connect public deliberation to the existing regulatory process. Drawing on lessons from previous public deliberative efforts by U.S. federal agencies, we identify several practical issues that will need to be addressed if (...) relevant federal agencies are to undertake public deliberative activities to inform decision‐making about gene editing in the wild. We argue that, while agencies may have institutional capacity to undertake public deliberative activities, there may not be sufficient political support for them to do so. Advocates of public deliberation need to make a stronger case to Congress about why federal agencies should be encouraged and supported to conduct public deliberations. (shrink)

In this dissertation I argue for a wider and more robust notion of the modularity of mind thesis. The developmental disorder of autism is the prime analytic tool for developing this approach. I argue that a variety of other approaches are deeply flawed in that they cannot account for the autistic spectrum disorder. I mean by this the autistic profile of deficits such as the lack of social interaction and the avoidance of social contact. I begin with Fodorian modularity. I (...) argue that autism presents us with a case that threatens the division Fodor has between modules and central systems. The autistic disorder exemplifies an area of higher cognition that has many of the properties commonly associated with modular processing. Since Fodor cannot opt for a modular account of theory of mind it must be that his account of central systems is incorrect. I next argue that Baron-Cohen's amended modular architecture cannot explain autism since the autistic deficit cannot be due to a defective module for processing intentional action. Furthermore, his use of modularity threatens to make his view of cognition incoherent. Finally I take up Gopnik and Meltzoff's approach that eschews any type of modularity and instead posits a general learning mechanism. If autism, as they claim, were a general theory-building problem, then one should expect to see other behavioral deficits in other areas of autistic cognition. We do not. I then offer an alternative version of modularity inspired by Karmiloff-Smith . It gives us advantages. On Karmiloff-Smith's account we would expect the autistic deficit to have more perceptually basic components and recent research is bearing this out. Progressive modularity also provides us with a framework in which to understand the ways autistic persons understand the social world. This approach also seeks to unify the cognitive work being done on development with burgeoning work on development in neuroscience. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the cognitive system is best viewed as a continuum of cognitive processing from modules to central systems rather than having these as discrete and wholly different modes of cognitive processing. I rely on recent evidence on the development of theory of mind (ToM) abilities and the developmental disorder of autism. I then turn to the phenomenology of modular processes. I show that modular outputs have a stronger force than non-modular or central system outputs. I (...) then evaluate social cognitions and show them to occupy a middle ground with respect to phenomenal strength between modular and non-modular outputs. The evidence presented then seems to indicate a continuum of cognitive processing rather than the traditional division between modules and central systems. (shrink)

A Kantian evaluation of Taylorism in the workplace requires a consideration of four problems; (1) the conditions of agency, (2) the relation of Taylorism to these conditions, (3) an explanation of the method given by the Typic for applying the Categorical Imperative, and (4) the actual application of the Categorical Imperative to Taylorism. An agent who views himself as a performer is distinguished from an agent who is a mere observer of his own actions, and it is argued that Taylorism (...) in effect attempts to remove the purposiveness of action from the workmen and to reduce them to the state of being mere observers of their own actions. Then it is argued that in order for one to attempt to think of a maxim as a universal law, one must posit a universal and necessary connection between the circumstances and the performances and then another such connection between the action and the purpose to be achieved. A model is constructed using heat-seeking machines, and it is argued that a principle analogous to Taylorism could not hold as a universal law for such machines. Thus, Taylorism is not an acceptable solution to the problem of coordinating the activities of self-directed agents within the workplace. (shrink)

An agent is one who regulates his/her own actions through positive and negative feedback. It is painful for a rational being to set himself a task and then find himself unable to complete it entirely as he/she conceives it. To escape this pain, a person may use self-deception to avoid such negative feedback. When this denial becomes universalized, an agent can no longer function as a self-regulating, cybernetic system, i.e., as an agent who directs his/her own actions. Ten types of (...) moral self-deception are distinguished, and the duty of moral self-knowledge is clarified. (shrink)

The original evidence advanced to support the Tensed S Condition (TSC) and the Specified Subject Condition (SSC) in Chomsky's Conditions on Transformations is reconsidered and viable alternatives to these constraints are provided. It is shown that TSC and SSC, in some instances, lead to a loss of linguistically significant generalization. Satisfactory alternatives can account for the relevant range of data and provide a more general account of additional data. Finally, counterevidence to Subjacency and Superiority is adduced, but explicit alternatives to (...) these conditions are not offered. (shrink)

Introduction : saving liberal democracy from itself -- Individualism versus individuality -- Interference, independence, and what's worth doing -- Autonomy -- Freedom, rights, and conflicts between values -- Ethics and rules -- Exploring consequences -- The ethical point of view -- Objective ethics : the good -- Objective ethics : the right -- Negotiating ethically -- Why think ethically? -- Ethical heroism -- Afterword.

Recently, a number of epistemologists have argued that there are no non-conceptual elements in representational content. On their view, the only sort of non-conceptual elements are components of sub-personal organic hardware that, because they enjoy no veridical role, must be construed epistemologically irrelevant. By reviewing a 35-year-old debate initiated by Dagfinn F.

Many biologists assume, as Darwin did, that natural selection acts mainly on late embryonic or postnatal development. This view is consistent with von Baer's observations of morphological divergence at late stages. It is also suggested by the conserved morphology and common molecular genetic mechanisms of pattern formation seen in embryos. I argue here, however, that differences in adult morphology may be generated at a variety of stages. Natural selection may have a major action on developmental mechanisms during the organogenetic period, (...) because this is when many adult traits are specified. Evolutionary changes in these early developmental mechanisms probably include subtle shifts in the timing of gene expression. Changes of this kind have little or no gross effect on the anatomy of the embryo; they are only phenotypically expressed, or readily detected, when amplified at later stages. The phylotypic stage, the developmental hourglass, modularity, and von Baerian divergence are reassessed in terms of these arguments. BioEssays 21:604–613, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Motivated by the disproportionately high incidence of fraudulent financial reporting in the IT sector where technological capability is a major source of competitive advantage, this study investigates the possible relationship between technological capability and fraud probability in the IT sector. Technological capability is measured by a firm’s technical efficiency relative to peers in transforming cumulative R&D resources into innovative output, which is a source of competitive advantage, according to the resource-based view of the firm. Technical efficiency is estimated via data (...) envelopment analysis. A sample of fraud firms taken from Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases is matched with control samples of non-fraud firms. Consistent with the RBV, technological capability is found to have a negative and economically significant effect on fraud probability. Moreover, fraud probability is insignificantly associated with the scale efficiency of innovative activities, as investment in R&D resources per se is not a source of sustainable competitive advantage. (shrink)

We adopt the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm to test the hypothesis that scalar implicatures are integrated very locally to the utterance of scalar terms. Focusing on the and,or scale, we show that early point-of-disambiguation effects similar to those triggered by the integration of the lexical meaning of and can be triggered by the integration of the exhaustive meaning of or. Some design issues and an independent interpretive asymmetry holding between and and or are discussed as possible explanations for remaining differences between (...) the effects found in the two cases. We conclude that the exclusivity implicature that is associated to sentences containing or seems to be calculated online, rather locally to the utterance of the disjunction. (shrink)

A number of scholars have argued that we should pay closer attention to the role that philanthropy plays in shaping our societies. Philanthropic foundations are inherently political. They use private money for public purposes, and they receive tax advantages for the donations they make, but they typically lack transparency and public accountability. In this article, I argue that elite philanthropy may also violate three other democratic principles: the all-affected principle; the principle of non-arbitrary power; and the provisionality principle. In response, (...) I argue that we should consider using innovative democratic institutions — such as participatory budgeting processes — to decide how philanthropic funds should be used and distributed. Taking measures to democratize philanthropy would help mitigate some of the democratic concerns with elite philanthropy while acknowledging the important role that philanthropy plays in shaping our present, unequal societies. (shrink)

Natural selection of asymmetric traits operates at multiple levels. Some asymmetric traits (like having a dominant eye) are tied to more universal aspects of the environment and are coded genetically, while others (like pedestrian turning biases) are tied to more ephemeral patterns and are largely learned. Species-wide trends of asymmetry can be better modeled when different levels of natural selection are specified.

Recent history is replete with scandalous acts and charitable acts within the business community. Unfortunately, scandalous acts seem to occur with greater frequency than charitable acts – at least as reported in the broadcast and print media. An interesting corollary to the incidence of scandalous and charitable acts is the apparent differential involvement of men and women, particularly in scandals. This article explores a possible explanation for the apparent gender differential in involvement in scandals and acts of charity. Drawing on (...) a conceptual framework of three Fundamental Moral Orientations (FMOs) – selfishness, self-fullness, and selflessness – and relevant literature on gender effects, this article explores whether men and women are perceived as differing fundamentally in how they approach moral dilemmas. This phenomenon is examined with a sample of personnel (n = 682) from the hotel industry in Turkey. Results of the study indicate that gender has some effect on the perceived adoption of FMOs, and that these gender effects are generally consistent across age, educational level, and organizational rank categories. Implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

The breadth of themes addressed in this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy is striking. These articles brim with some of the most foundational questions one can ask in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine: Under what circumstances might we risk some harm in pursuit of a greater good? In the setting of experimental therapies, how should we weigh the potential risk and benefit for an individual patient against the broader potential benefit realized for society as a whole? (...) How might we consistently differentiate health from pathology? Under what circumstances might we say that a human being has died? Does acknowledging particular things as good generate duties? Duties for whom and enforced by whom? These articles share a preoccupation with foundational questions that must be addressed in any sound bioethics curriculum, and they make clear that our answers to these questions are not simply theoretical but manifest in policy and in practice. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 5, Page 42-43, September–October 2022.