European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Reason and Value collects fifteen brand-new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics - including especially his explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value - make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. The volume honours Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and will contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the significance of (...) his work for the subject. (shrink)

This paper addresses some connections between conceptions of the will and the theory of practical reason. The first two sections argue against the idea that volitional commitments should be understood along the lines of endorsement of normative principles. A normative account of volition cannot make sense of akrasia, and it obscures an important difference between belief and intention. Sections three and four draw on the non-normative conception of the will in an account of instrumental rationality. The central problem is to (...) explain the grip of instrumental requirements even in cases in which agents do not fully endorse the ends they are pursuing. The solution I propose appeals to coherence constraints on the beliefs that condition the distinctive volitional stance of intention. (shrink)

A common strategy unites much that philosophers have written about the virtues. The strategy can be traced back at least to Aristotle, who suggested that human beings have a characteristic function or activity, and that the virtues are traits of character which enable humans to perform this kind of activity excellently or well. The defining feature of this approach is that it treats the virtues as functional concepts, to be both identified and justified by reference to some independent goal or (...) end which they enable people to attain. Some recent philosophers seem to have hoped that by following this perfectionist strategy, we might attain a more convincing account of our moral practices than rule-based theories of ethics have been able to provide. (shrink)

First published in 1981, this collection of essays was taken from Peters' larger work, Psychology and Ethical Development in order to provide a more focused volume on moral education for students. Peters' background in both psychology and philosophy makes the work distinctive, which is evident from the first two essays alone: 'Freud's theory of Moral Development in Relation to that of Piaget' and 'Moral Education and the Psychology of Character'. He also displays balance in his acceptance that reason and feeling (...) are both of great importance where the subject of moral education is concerned. Although written some time ago, the book discusses issues which are still of considerable interest and importance today. (shrink)

BLWith new text and full apparatus criticus The Eudemian Ethics was one of two ethical treatises which Aristotle wrote on the subject of ethica or `matters to do with character'. Although the two works cover much the same ground, the Nicomachean Ethics is better known; the poor manuscript tradition of the Eudemian Ethics has made correct translation and interpretation of the text extremely difficult. The subject of the work is the choice of a certain means of conduct, made by a (...) `man of practical wisdom', between two extremes of behaviour: asceticism and yielding to uncontrolled impulses. Aristotle also stresses the notion of moral intention and the importance of virtue of character. This new Oxford Classical Text of the Eudemian Ethics is the result of many years of work. After Sir David Ross's death, his original text was substantially reworked and revised by his friend and colleague R. R. Walzer, who was aided in the revision by his former pupil Mrs Jean Mingay, who continued his work after his death in 1974. Mrs Mingay was fortunate in being able to make use of previously unpublished contributions from D. J. Allan after his death in the late seventies, and more recently has been helped in her work by the suggestions of Professor D. A. Russell, David Robinson, and Christopher Rowe. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive discussion of complexity as it arises in physical, chemical, and biological systems, as well as in mathematical models of nature. Common features of these apparently unrelated fields are emphasised and incorporated into a uniform mathematical description, with the support of a large number of detailed examples and illustrations. The quantitative study of complexity is a rapidly developing subject with special impact in the fields of physics, mathematics, information science, and biology. Because of the variety of the (...) approaches, no comprehensive discussion has previously been attempted. This book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in physics (nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics, solid-state, cellular automata, stochastic processes, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics), mathematics (dynamical systems, ergodic and probability theory), information and computer science (coding, information theory and algorithmic complexity), electrical engineering and theoretical biology. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

In this article, we critically scrutinize the principle of proportionality when used in the context of security and government surveillance. We argue that McMahan’s distinction from just warfare between narrow proportionality and wide proportionality can generally apply to the context of surveillance. We argue that narrow proportionality applies more or less directly to cases in which the surveilled is liable and that the wide proportionality principle applies to cases characterized by ‘collateral intrusion’. We argue, however, that a more demanding criterion (...) than the lesser-evil justification that wide proportionality frequently entails is necessary in cases characterized by intentional intrusion upon non-liable individuals. The distinction between foreseeing and intending intrusion into the lives of individuals who are not liable has not previously been specifically addressed in discussions concerning surveillance ethics. This specification is thus increasingly important due to the general growing tendency for adherence to the precautionary principle and policies aimed at anticipating criminal acts before they are committed. Preventive surveillance of non-liable actors is considered an important instrument for obtaining this aim and thus calls for moral scrutiny in terms of permissibility and proportionality. We suggest the concept ‘wide proportionality +’ which applies to cases of intentional intrusion of non-liable individuals. (shrink)

Cost conversations are essential to informed consent because patients have a right to information that they think is relevant, and patients overwhelmingly report that cost information is relevant to their medical decisions. Providers have an ethical responsibility to provide necessary information for informed consent, and therefore must discuss costs. The Shared Decision Making model is ideal for enabling this exchange of information, and decision aids are also helpful. Although barriers exist, many useful tools can help providers fulfill this obligation, and (...) encouraging progress is being made to improve cost transparency from insurers and facilities. (shrink)

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s recent restrictive recommendations on sex selection have highlighted the need for consideration of the plausibility of ethical arguments against sex selection. In this paper, the author suggests a parental virtues approach to some questions of reproductive ethics as a superior alternative to an exclusively harm focused approach such as the procreative liberty framework. The author formulates a virtue ethics argument against sex selection based on the idea that acceptance is a character trait of the (...) good parent. It is concluded that, because the argument presented posits a wrong in the sex selecting agent’s action that is not a harm, the argument could not function as a justification of the HFEA’s restrictive position in light of their explicit commitment to procreative liberty; it does, however, suggest that ethical approaches focused exclusively on harm fail to capture all the relevant moral considerations and thus that we should look beyond such approaches. (shrink)

Sorites arguments employ an induction step such as ‘Small numbers have small successors’. People deduce that there must be an exception to the generalization but are reluctant to conclude that the generalization is false. My hypothesis is that the reluctance is due to the "Generic Overgeneralization Effect". Although the propounder of the sorites paradox intends the induction step to be a universal generalization, hearers assimilate universal generalizations to generic generalizations (for instance, ‘All birds fly’ tends to be remembered as ‘Birds (...) fly’). Most generic generalizations tolerate exceptions – especially when those exceptions are rare, abnormal, or difficult to imagine. Any counterexample to the induction step will have all of these features. (shrink)

Scholars and practitioners across domains are increasingly concerned with algorithmic transparency and opacity, interrogating the values and assumptions embedded in automated, black-boxed systems, particularly in user-generated content platforms. I report from an ethnography of infrastructure in Wikipedia to discuss an often understudied aspect of this topic: the local, contextual, learned expertise involved in participating in a highly automated social–technical environment. Today, the organizational culture of Wikipedia is deeply intertwined with various data-driven algorithmic systems, which Wikipedians rely on to help manage (...) and govern the “anyone can edit” encyclopedia at a massive scale. These bots, scripts, tools, plugins, and dashboards make Wikipedia more efficient for those who know how to work with them, but like all organizational culture, newcomers must learn them if they want to fully participate. I illustrate how cultural and organizational expertise is enacted around algorithmic agents by discussing two autoethnographic vignettes, which relate my personal experience as a veteran in Wikipedia. I present thick descriptions of how governance and gatekeeping practices are articulated through and in alignment with these automated infrastructures. Over the past 15 years, Wikipedian veterans and administrators have made specific decisions to support administrative and editorial workflows with automation in particular ways and not others. I use these cases of Wikipedia’s bot-supported bureaucracy to discuss several issues in the fields of critical algorithms studies; critical data studies; and fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning—most principally arguing that scholarship and practice must go beyond trying to “open up the black box” of such systems and also examine sociocultural processes like newcomer socialization. (shrink)

The dominance of capitalism, through the hegemony of neoliberal ideology, is maintained as an illusion through the use of four main strategies. In order to obtain the consent of the population, mass schooling tends to produce graduates who accept this illusion because they are vulnerable to these strategies and cannot imagine a post-capitalist world. However, through education, people can better appreciate the problematic reality of unbridled capitalism, such as the degradation of the global ecosystem. It is argued here that programs (...) which are designed to address these problems, such as Education for Sustainable Development, are dependent upon citizens developing a critical consciousness. This consciousness is firstly able to confront the four strategies maintaining capitalism’s dominance. It is argued that an education which engages with spiritual ideals and values regarding how a good life is understood in an aspirational sense, enables people to engage with the dominance of capitalism and to envision other possibilities for society in which capitalism is harnessed to serve the greater public good. This requires education’s ontology – as the character of students – to critically read the world, imagine possibilities which can constitute a good life, and are courageous to enact the social actions required to make these ideals a reality. This is made possible by an education which returns to the spiritual roots of ideals. (shrink)

The problem of the peculiarcharacter of chemical laws and theories is a central topic in philosophy of chemistry. Oneof the most characteristic and, at the sametime, most puzzling examples in discussions onchemical laws and theories is Mendeleev''speriodic law. This law seems to be essentiallydifferent in its nature from the exact laws ofclassical physics, the latter being usuallyregarded as a paradigm of science byphilosophers. In this paper the main argumentsconcerning the peculiar character of chemicallaws and theories are examined. The laws ofchemistry (...) are natural laws to the same extentas are the laws of physics. The law discoveredby Mendeleev is a normal law of nature. It isnot a law of physics, nevertheless, it is exactin the same philosophical sense as are the lawsof physics. The periodic system of chemicalelements was established by constructing anidealized system of idealized elements. Thefundamental idealization substantiated byexperimental chemistry was the chemicalelement as a place in the periodicsystem. (shrink)

We just lived through a global pandemic, and we are entering a period in which the alarming impacts of anthropogenic climate change are becoming increasingly ha.

ABSTRACT The Scottish judge and ‘eccentric’ philosopher James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s (1714–1799) significance within Enlightenment thought is usually seen as stemming from his Origin and Progress of Language (6 vols., 1773–1792). The OPL was a major contribution to the Enlightenment’s debate over the philosophy of language, and established Monboddo’s reputation as an innovative and influential, yet controversial and credulous proto-anthropologist. In the following I explore Monboddo’s Egyptomania and the role it plays in his account of the origins and development of (...) religion within his larger ‘History of Man’. Monboddo’s idiosyncratic and untimely fusion of conjectural history, Buffon-inspired natural history, Christian theology, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and credulous interest in Egyptology, especially in Antient Metaphysics (6 vols., 1779–1799), make him extremely difficult to place within the Scottish Enlightenment. I want to bring Monboddo back into our conversation about the Scottish Enlightenment, shed light in the process on his highly idiosyncratic combination of enlightened and unenlightened thought and, using Monboddo’s example, emphasize some interesting if unexpected aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment’s application of the ‘science of human nature’ to the study of religion. For Monboddo, human civilization and religious knowledge owes their existence to Egyptian daemon-kings. (shrink)

Against the background of a recent exchange between Cristina Lafont and Hubert Dreyfus, I argue that Heidegger's method of ?formal indication? is at the heart of his attempt in Sein und Zeit to answer ?the ontological question of the being of the ?sum?? (SZ, p. 46). This method works reflexively, by picking out certain essential features of one's first-person singular being at the outset of its investigation that are implicit in the question ?what is it to be the entity I (...) am?? On the basis of these features, various further a priori, ontological structures (care and temporality) that constitute one as a first-person singular entity then become accessible. Formal indication is thus formal in two senses: it officially designates or signals certain first-person singular phenomena as the topic of investigation, and it picks out features which define the ontological form of the entity in question. It is thereby the method by which a legitimately transcendental account of our being may be begun to be generated by each of us from out of our factical, immanent existence. (shrink)

In their 2008 paper, Persson and Savulescu suggest that for moral bioenhancement (MBE) to be effective at eliminating the danger of ‘ultimate harm’ the intervention would need to be compulsory. This is because those most in need of MBE would be least likely to undergo the intervention voluntarily. By drawing on concepts and theories from epidemiology, this paper will suggest that MBE may not need to be universal and compulsory to be effective at significantly improving the collective moral standing of (...) a human populace and reducing the threat of ultimate harm. It will identify similarities between the mechanisms that allow biological contagions (such as a virus) and behaviours (such as those concerned with ethical and unethical actions) to develop, spread, and be reinforced within a population. It will then go onto suggest that, just as with the epidemiological principle of herd immunity, if enough people underwent MBE to reach a minimum threshold then the incidence and spread of immoral behaviours could be significantly reduced, even in those who have not received MBE. (shrink)

A simple model accounting for semantic properties of propositional attitude operators in negative contexts with no reference to possible worlds is proposed. Verbs occurring in such operators denote relations between individuals and specific sets of sentences (of a given natural language) and their negation is defined as the complement within a specific set of cognitively determined sentences. This approach avoids in particular the problem of intensionality of propositional attitude operators and allows to use many tools from the generalised quantifier theory. (...) In that way the negation giving rise to factive presuppositions and to the neg-raising is defined in a natural way. (shrink)

Proclus (c.412-485) once offered an argument that Christians took to stand against the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo based on the eternity of the world and God’s perfection. John Philoponus (c.490-570) objected to this on various grounds. Part of this discussion can shed light on contemporary issues in philosophical theology on divine perfection and creation. First I will examine Proclus’ dilemma and John Philoponus’ response. I will argue that Philoponus’ fails to rebut Proclus’ dilemma. The problem is that presentism (...) is incompatible with divine simplicity, timelessness, and a strong doctrine of immutability. From there I will look at how this discussion bears on contemporary understandings of divine perfection and creation, and argue that there are at least two possible ways contemporary philosophical theologians can try to get around the dilemma. One option is to adopt four-dimensional eternalism and maintain the traditional account of the divine perfections. I argue that this option suffers from difficulties that are not compatible with Christian belief. The other option is to keep presentism and modify the divine perfections. I argue that this option is possible and preferable since our understanding of the divine perfections must be modified in light of divine revelation and the incarnation. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer some brief reflections on Jordan Wessling’s book, Love Divine: A Systematic Account of God’s Love for Humanity. I explain what I take to be its strengths in articulating an account of divine love that solves a variety of problems that classical theism cannot solve. Then I articulate a potential problem for Wessling’s account of divine love and hell.

Despite All Critique (2014) -- World Politics and Western Reason (1980) -- The Doubled Outsides of the Modern International (2005) -- The Subject of Security (1995) -- The Protection of Nature and the Nature of Protection (2005) -- Social Movements/World Politics (1994) -- Europe is Not Where It is Supposed to Be (2000) -- They Seek it Here, They Seek it There : Looking for Politics in Clayoquot Sound (2003) -- Violence, Modernity, Silence : From Weber to International Relations (1993) (...) -- Hobbes, Origins, Limits (2011) -- War, Terror, Judgement (2002) -- International, Imperial, Exceptional (2005) -- Which Democracy for Which Demos? (2013) -- The Political Theory of Boundaries and the Boundaries of Political Theory : Interview With Raia Prokhovnik (2012). (shrink)

The notion of anaphoric conservativity, that is a property of specific functions taking sets and binary relations as arguments is studied. Such functions are denotations of anaphoric determiners forming nominal anaphors. It is shown that anaphoric conservativity is strictly stronger that ordinary conservativity of this type of functions. In consequence some novel semantic descriptions of reflexive and reciprocal pronouns are provided and a semantic universal stating that reflexive and reciprocal non-possessive determiners denote anaphorically conservative functions is proposed.

In the article, “Basic Issues of Christian Eschatology Interpreted by Berdyaev”, Richard Gorban covers some eschatological aspects of Mykola Berdyaev. He considers the kernel of the basic issues of Christian eschatological doctrine the way the thinker understands them, determining his own conception of paradox of time. The researcher emphasizes the following issues in the system of religious and philosophical views of Berdyaev: connection of the fate of an individual soul with the fate of the world, death and eternity, end of (...) history, Hell ontology; eschatological prospects of evil pathways and its ontological extermination; growth of the God’s Realm and growth of Antichrist kingdom; personal apocalypses and the world apocalypses. (shrink)

The emotion–cognition integration in Mather et al. can be extended by specifying the relationship between competition and arousal in the reverse direction. According to affective monitoring, competition raises arousal, which, when sustained, results in negative affect, evoking theta oscillations, and when resolved, in positive affect, evoking gamma oscillations. Competition should be considered a core process in both cognition and emotion.

Char et al. describe an interesting and useful approach in their paper, “Identifying ethical considerations for machine learning healthcare applications.” Their proposed framework, which see...

Clinical biobanks processing data of participants in the European Union fall under the scope of the General Data Protection Regulation, which among others includes requirements for consent. These requirements are further specified by the Article 29 Working Party —an EU advisory body currently known as the European Data Protection Board. Unfortunately, their guidance is cause for some confusion. While the GDPR allows participants to give broad consent for research when specific research purposes are still unknown, the WP29 guidelines suggest that (...) additional consent for specific uses should be obtained in addition to broad consent when this becomes applicable. This discrepancy elicits the question whether clinical biobanks can fail the requirement of consent if they obtain broad consent, but not a specific consent for each biomedical study. We analysed this discrepancy within the framework of contextual integrity, in order to describe the context-relative informational norms that govern information flows in clinical biobanks. However, our analysis demonstrates that there is no uniform set of norms that can be applied to all clinical biobanks. As such, neither the GDPR nor the WP29 guidance can act as a “one size fits all” approach to all clinical biobanks. Rather, differences between clinical biobanks—especially regarding the scientific aims and patient populations—make the case for context-relative norms that determine the appropriate type of consent. (shrink)