In ‘Utility of Religion’, Mill argues that a wholly naturalistic religion of humanity would promote individual and social welfare better than supernatural religions like Christianity; in ‘Theism’, however, Mill defends the salutary effects of hope in an afterlife. While commentators have acknowledged this discrepancy, they have not examined the utilitarian value of what Mill terms ‘illusions’. In this essay, I explain Mill's case against the utility of supernatural religious belief and then argue that Mill cannot dismiss the utility of hope (...) in an ultimate justice since it need not pervert the intellect or morality. There are thus utilitarian grounds to support some supernatural illusions, which undermines Mill's defence of an exclusively naturalistic religion. I conclude with the suggestion that while the utility of religious belief leads Mill toward William James's view, they disagree about whether supernatural religious sentiment has any unique, intrinsic force. (shrink)

Myles Brand offered a provocative defense of Intercollegiate Athletics (IA) by arguing that it is substantively similar to traditional performing arts, such as art or music, and so should be accepted by faculty as a legitimate part of university's educational mission. Randolph Feezell characterized Brand’s analogical argument as ‘sophistic’ and defended the reasonableness of what Brand termed the ‘Standard View’ of athletics whereby it is peripheral to a liberal arts education. I contend that Brand did not bring his persuasive analogical (...) argument to its logical conclusion: IA should contribute to a new, first-of-its kind academic major in Competitive Sport. Feezell’s criticisms of Brand’s analogical argument were unpersuasive, and his conception of a liberal arts education was outdated. As a result, I defend the legitimacy of a Competitive Sport major comparable to a Music Performance major and give a detailed description of its rigorous, liberal-arts based curriculum that integrates faculty and coaching instruction through shared learning objectives and outcomes. I conclude by identifying, and responding to, several practical issues if such a major were to be implemented in a US university. (shrink)

A debate over whether God predestines to make some people reprobate broke out in the ninth century. No one taught this view, but it was presumed by several churchmen at the time to be the position of those who called themselves double predestinarians. In part, this article explains why two double predestinarians, Gottschalk of Orbais and Ratramnus of Corbie, were mistaken for proponents of this view. They had been trying to explain Augustine’s phrase, “those predestined to punishment”, which they found (...) in no fewer than ten of Augustine’s texts. Gottschalk points out Augustine used the phrase interchangeably with the term reprobate. Thus, to Gottschalk, it is not a statement about what God predestines; rather, it is a statement about the effect of predestination on certain people. Likewise, to Ratramnus, the phrase referred to the effect of God’s ordering of both the good and evil acts of persons. That Gottschalk and Ratramnus identified Augustine’s use of the phrase with a belief in double predestination was due to their reading Augustine through the lens of Isidore of Seville’s Sententiae II.6. (shrink)

Can a coach rightfully integrate a religious orientation in their coaching in a public institution? In its recent Kennedy v Bremerton School District (2022) decision, the U.S. Supreme Court defended the educational value of players’ exposure to diverse expressive activities as a part of learning how to live in a pluralistic society. I contend that religion-sport separation is the most philosophically defensible position, based primarily on the problems with supernatural theism in religions like Christianity. Nonetheless, there is a form of (...) religion-sport integration that is theoretically possible within my critique of theism which could strengthen the inner morality of sport. I describe the two necessary conditions of this potential religion-sport integration but conclude that the problems with defining the ‘religious’ might ultimately strengthen my defense of religion-sport separation. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill was one of the most important political and social thinkers of the nineteenth century, and his writings on human rights, feminism, the evils of slavery, and the environment are still widely read and influential today. Published after Mill’s death to avoid controversy, the three essays in this edition, _Nature_, _Utility of Religion_, and _Theism_, represent Mill’s considered position on religion. Mill argues that belief in a supernatural power holds us back, but that a conception of the meaning (...) and value of being human, or Religion of Humanity, could make the world a better place. Essential in understanding Mill’s views on religion and his practical philosophy, these essays are also significant contributions to the philosophy and psychology of religion. Appendices include Mill’s other writings on religion, his early influences, contemporary reviews, and other 19th century writings on religion and science. (shrink)

Bergson's legacy to literature was nothing short of transformative. His theories of duration, memory, intuition, the élan vital, and comedy inspired a wide range of vital literary innovations. Techniques essential to modern literature—stream of consciousness, imagistic precision, time-shift, plotlessness, multiple perspective—can be traced to Bergson, and Bergsonian tendencies—his focus on subjective consciousness, interest in novelty, and critique of materialism—yet determine literature written today. But what made Bergson such a powerful influence on such a diverse array of writers was his theory (...) of the artist: throughout his work, Bergson honors aesthetic insight and grants the artist authority over discoveries central to his philosophy. Writers were indeed inspired by Bergson's theories of duration, memory, and intuition, but they were truly galvanized to pursue Bersgonian ends by the power promised in his account of the artist's relationship to reality. Any account of Bergson's literary influence should recognize this distinction. Moreover, we should recognize that this will to power made a significant difference to the way writers interpreted Bergson's theories—especially the theory of time. Bergson's account of duration was transformative not just because it inspired writers to try for new approaches to the representation of time but because it encouraged them to think that they, like Bergson himself, could be time's prophets. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Sports and politics don’t mix’. This platitude has been a pervasive part of U.S. professional sport culture, but it is vague and most of the versions are untrue since politics have been, and must be, a part of professional sports. Its only plausible meaning is that professional players should not make political statements while they are on-the-job. Players have a constitutional right to make political statements outside the workplace, but this right does not apply in privately owned sport associations. I (...) argue that player political protest has ultimately been moral, not political, in nature and that players’ on-the-job political expression can be justified based on the priority of the moral-legal concept of personhood. I propose player political expression policies that U.S. professional associations should adopt. (shrink)

Schooling fish, swarms of starlings, plodding wildebeest, and musicians all display impressive synchronization. To what extent do they use acoustic cues to achieve these feats? Could the acoustic cues used in movement synchronization be relevant to the treatment of movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease in humans? In this article, we build on the emerging view in evolutionary biology that the ability to synchronize movement evolved long before language, in part due to acoustic advantages. We use this insight to explore (...) potential mechanisms that explain why music therapy has beneficial effects for PD patients. We hypothesize that rhythmic auditory cues, particularly music, can stimulate neuronal and behavioral processes that ease the symptoms and potentially the causes of PD because the neural circuits used in auditory entrainment at individual and group levels are associated with dopamine production. We summarize current treatment of PD and outline how new insights from an evolutionary perspective could improve understanding and eventual treatment of movement disorders in humans. (shrink)

Mill's analysis and philosophy of religion, expressed principally in his posthumous and neglected Three Essays on Religion, surprised his admirers and critics and are essential for a complete understanding of his views of morality, human well‐being, and social reform. As a moral and social reformer, Mill thought deeply about the value and necessity of religion since it provided ideals to guide and inspire human conduct and helped cope with suffering; however, supernatural religions, like Christianity, needed to be reformed. Contrary to (...) many commentators, Mill did not want to rid the world of religion and establish a Religion of Humanity but preserve imaginative, supernatural hope and make it compatible with a rational morality and what is known about the world. Mill's philosophy of religion can be summed up so: improve yourself and society, and if you need the motivation to do so, it is legitimate to hope in supernatural realities that are consistent with reason and moral feelings. (shrink)

An individual's health, genetic, or environmental-exposure data, placed in an online repository, creates a valuable shared resource that can accelerate biomedical research and even open opportunities for crowd-sourcing discoveries by members of the public. But these data become “immortalized” in ways that may create lasting risk as well as benefit. Once shared on the Internet, the data are difficult or impossible to redact, and identities may be revealed by a process called data linkage, in which online data sets are matched (...) to each other. Reidentification, the process of associating an individual's name with data that were considered deidentified, poses risks such as insurance or employment discrimination, social stigma, and breach of the promises often made in informed-consent documents. At the same time, re-ID poses risks to researchers and indeed to the future of science, should re-ID end up undermining the trust and participation of potential research participants. The ethical challenges of online data sharing are heightened as so-called big data becomes an increasingly important research tool and driver of new research structures. Big data is shifting research to include large numbers of researchers and institutions as well as large numbers of participants providing diverse types of data, so the participants’ consent relationship is no longer with a person or even a research institution. In addition, consent is further transformed because big data analysis often begins with descriptive inquiry and generation of a hypothesis, and the research questions cannot be clearly defined at the outset and may be unforeseeable over the long term. In this article, we consider how expanded data sharing poses new challenges, illustrated by genomics and the transition to new models of consent. We draw on the experiences of participants in an open data platform—the Personal Genome Project—to allow study participants to contribute their voices to inform ethical consent practices and protocol reviews for big-data research. (shrink)

Rockefeller (religion and philosophy, Middlebury College) combines biography and intellectual history in an introduction to the philosophy of Dewey (1859-1952) which emphasizes the evolution of the religious faith and moral vision at the heart of his thought. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Po.

My goal in this paper 1 is, first, to collect together a number of themes and observations that have usually been kept apart, locked up in their respective disciplines. When these are brought together, some general and far reaching implications become really rather clear. In particular, I want to make a case for the implicit coherence of these themes in the idea that.

As activity, science has become a large-scale cultural phenomenon. As product, it is drawn on by industry, agriculture, and medicine, thus affecting not only the scene of its activity but all the rest of the world as well. Western philosophy has always harboured a tradition which regards scientific inquiry as a paradigm for rational inquiry in general. Yet almost every philosopher in that tradition has pointed to limits of this paradigm and its scope.

The first robot homicide was committed in 1981, according to my files. I have a yellowed clipping dated 12/9/81 from the Philadelphia Inquirer--not the National Enquirer--with the headline: Robot killed repairman, Japan reports The story was an anti-climax: at the Kawasaki Heavy Industries plant in Akashi, a malfunctioning robotic arm pushed a repairman against a gearwheel-milling machine, crushing him to death. The repairman had failed to follow proper instructions for shutting down the arm before entering the workspace. Why, indeed, had (...) this industrial accident in Japan been reported in a Philadelphia newspaper? Every day somewhere in the world a human worker is killed by one machine or another. The difference, of course, was that in the public imagination at least, this was no ordinary machine; this was a robot, a machine that might have a mind, might have evil intentions, might be capable not just of homicide but of murder. (shrink)

for the Bioethics Commission, August 16, 2006.

Reflections on free choice and determinism constitute a recurring, if rarified, sphere of legal reasoning. Controversy, of course, swirls around the perennially vexing question of the propriety of punishing human persons for conduct that they are unable to avoid. Drawing upon conditions similar, if not identical, to those traditionally associated with attribution of moral fault, persons subject to such necessitating causal constraints generally are not considered responsible in the requisite sense for their conduct; and, thus, they are not held culpable (...) for its consequences. The standard argument against free choice asserts that free choice cannot exist because determinism, as a property of laws governing the cosmos, excludes such a possibility. This contingent factual claim, however, has always proven problematic. Contemporary discussions - no doubt aware of this disputed factual premise - draw upon a more novel, and arguably more devastating critique: free will must be rejected because its very conception is incoherent. Rather than assuming the existence of determinism and attempting to show its incompatibility with free will, this argument begins with consideration of the idea of free choice and concludes that, if it is to have any sense at all, it must be compatible with determinism. Obviously, no single treatment of the free will problem could address all its nuances. This Article more modestly offers one possible approach to the question. Part I elaborates in more detail the view that the traditional conception of free choice is incoherent and, thus, inevitably undermines the very responsibility it is asserted to constitute; Part II considers the resulting effort to develop a model of human freedom compatible with determinism; and Part III, drawing upon the prior discussions, describes - in terms of classical action theory - a conception of free choice justifying personal moral and legal responsibility that avoids both the incoherence of "uncaused freedom" as well as the shortcomings of determinism. (shrink)

for the Bioethics Commission, August 16th, 2006.

As cognitive science, including especially cognitive neuroscience, closes in on the first realistic models of the human mind, philosophical puzzles and problems that have been conveniently postponed or ignored for generations are beginning to haunt the efforts of the scientists, confounding their vision and leading them down hopeless paths of theory. I will illustrate this claim with a brief look at several temporal phenomena which appear anomalous only because of a cognitive illusion: an illusion about the point of view of (...) the observerix. Since there is no point in the brain where "it all comes together," several compelling oversimplifications of traditional theorizing must be abandoned. (shrink)