First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this book Tom Sorell argues that emergencies can justify types of action that would normally be regarded as wrong. Beginning with the ethics of emergencies facing individuals, he explores the range of effective and legitimate private emergency response and its relation to public institutions, such as national governments. He develops a theory of the response of governments to public emergencies which indicates the possibility of a democratic politics that is liberal but that takes seriously threats to life and (...) limb from public disorder, crime or terrorism. Informed by Hobbes, Schmitt and Walzer, but substantially different from them, the book widens the justification for recourse to normally forbidden measures, without resorting to illiberal politics. This book will interest students of politics, philosophy, international relations and law. (shrink)

“In the UK a so‐called internal market has been operating within the government‐run National Health Service since 1991.” Analysing the ethical tensions to which this gives rise is Tom Sorell, Editor of this FOCUS, author with John Hendry of Business Ethics , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex and Fellow in the Ethics and the Professions Program at Harvard for 1996/97.

In this study, Tom Sorell seeks to rehabilitate views that are often instantly dismissed in analytic philosophy. His book serves as a reinterpretation of Cartesianism and responds directly to the dislike of Descartes in contemporary philosophy. To identify what is defensible in Cartesianism, Sorell starts with a picture of unreconstructed Cartesianism, which is characterized as realistic, antisceptical but respectful of scepticism, rationalist, centered on the first person, dualist, and dubious of the comprehensiveness of natural science and its supposed (...) independence of metaphysics. Bridging the gap between history of philosophy and analytic philosophy, Sorell also shows for the first time how some contemporary analytic philosophy is deeply Cartesian, despite its outward hostility to Cartesianism. (shrink)

Philosophy written in English is overwhelmingly analytic philosophy, and the techniques and predilections of analytic philosophy are not only unhistorical but anti-historical, and hostile to textual commentary. Analytic usually aspires to a very high degree of clarity and precision of formulation and argument, and it often seeks to be informed by, and consistent with, current natural science. In an earlier era, analytic philosophy aimed at agreement with ordinary linguistic intuitions or common sense beliefs, or both. All of these aspects of (...) the subject sit uneasily with the use of historical texts for philosophical illumination. In this book, ten distinguished philosophers explore the tensions between, and the possibilities of reconciling, analytic philosophy and history of philosophy. Contributors: M. R. Ayers, John Cottingham, Daniel Garber, Gary Hatfield, Anthony Kenny, Steven Nadler, G. A. J. Rogers, Tom Sorell, Catherine Wilson, Yves Charles Zarka. (shrink)

This paper explores ethical issues raised by whole slide image-based computational pathology. After briefly giving examples drawn from some recent literature of advances in this field, we consider some ethical problems it might be thought to pose. These arise from the tension between artificial intelligence research—with its hunger for more and more data—and the default preference in data ethics and data protection law for the minimisation of personal data collection and processing; the fact that computational pathology lends itself to kinds (...) of data fusion that go against data ethics norms and some norms of biobanking; the fact that AI methods are esoteric and produce results that are sometimes unexplainable and the fact that computational pathology is particularly dependent on scanning technology manufacturers with interests of their own in profit-making from data collection. We shall suggest that most of these issues are resolvable. (shrink)

`Modern' philosophy in the West is said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes. Their methodological and metaphysical writings, in conjunction with the discoveries that marked the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, are supposed to have interred both Aristotelian and scholastic science and the philosophy that supported it. But did the new or `modern' philosophy effect a complete break with what preceded it? Were Bacon and Descartes untainted by scholastic influences? The theme of this book is that the new and traditional philosophies (...) have more in common than the orthodox account suggests. In two survey articles and thirteen essays on individual philosophers, the contributors show that the rise of modern philosophy was much more complicated and much more interesting than is usually thought. They consider not only metaphysics and the sciences but also claims of Machievelli, Hobbes and Spinoza to have invented `modern' ethics and politics. These two aspects of `modernity' in philosophy are connected for the first time. The book offers a broad view of the early modern philosophers, covering not only the much-studied major figures but also relatively neglected writers: Mersenne, Gassendi, White, and Sergeant. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

In Europe, telecare is the use of remote monitoring technology to enable vulnerable people to live independently in their own homes. The technology includes electronic tags and sensors that transmit information about the user's location and patterns of behavior in the user's home to an external hub, where it can trigger an intervention in an emergency. Telecare users in the United Kingdom sometimes report their unease about being monitored by a ?Big Brother,? and the same kind of electronic tags that (...) alert telecare hubs to the movements of someone with dementia who is ?wandering? are worn by terrorist suspects who have been placed under house arrest. For these and other reasons, such as ordinary privacy concerns, telecare is sometimes regarded as an objectionable extension of a ?surveillance state.? In this article, we defend the use of telecare against the charge that it is Orwellian. In the United States, the conception of telecare primarily as telemedicine, and the fact that it is not typically a government responsibility, make a supposed connection with a surveillance state even more doubtful than in Europe. The main objection, we argue, to telecare is not its intrusiveness, but the danger of its deepening the isolation of those who use it. There are ways of organizing telecare so that the independence and privacy of users are enhanced, but personal isolation may be harder to address. As telecare is a means of reducing the cost of publicly provided social and health care, and the need to reduce public spending is growing, the correlative problem of isolation must be addressed alongside the goal of promoting independence. (shrink)

This paper discusses the disanalogies between Schmitt and Hobbes on responses to emergencies, such as civil disorder. (The paper engages with literature that claims a greater common ground between the two figures than there actually is.).

History of philosophy can be useful and relevant as philosophy even when philosophy is thought to be the solution of ahistorically formulated problems.

It is possible to defend the death penalty for aggravated murder in more than one way, and not every defence is equally compelling. The paper takes up arguments put forward by two very distinguished advocates of the death penalty, Mill and Kant. After reviewing Mill's argument and some weaknesses in it, I shall sketch another line of reasoning that combines his conclusion with premisses to be found in Kant. The hybrid argument provides at least the basis for a sound defence (...) of execution for the most serious murders. (shrink)

More than once in his writings, Hobbes pronounced on the scope and organization of science. He had provocative views about the subjects that could be termed “scientific” about the scientific subjects that were basic, and about the relative benefits of the various sciences. Some of these views reflect his allegiance to the new mechanical philosophy and his opposition to Aristotelianism; others show the influence of Bacon, who was a virtuoso deviser of blueprints for science. Still others belong to a program (...) of self-advertisement: Hobbes wished to be seen as an important scientist himself - an important worker in the field of optics and no less than the inventor of the science of politics. After expounding Hobbes's views about the organization of science and considering some of the problems they raise, I shall suggest that they throw light on old questions about what has been called “Hobbes's system”. (shrink)

Contemporary experimental philosophers sometimes use versions of an argument from the history of philosophy to defend the claim that what they do is philosophy. Although experimental philosophers conduct surveys and carry out what appear to be experiments in psychology, making them methodologically different from most analytic philosophers working today, techniques like theirs were not out of the ordinary in the philosophy of the past, early modern philosophy in particular. Or so some of them argue. This paper disputes the argument, citing (...) important differences between early modern philosopher-scientists – Descartes, Hobbes and Boyle – and their supposed modern counterparts. Although there is some continuity between early modern philosopher-scientists and the contemporary experimentalists, it is mostly a continuity of interest in empirically informed philosophy, not a distinctively experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Should credit consumers always be deferred to? Dr Tom Sorell contributed to the British Open University Business School MBA programme, and is Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Essex.

René Descartes had a remarkably short working life, and his output was small, yet his contributions to philosophy and science have endured to the present day. In this book Tom Sorell shows that Descartes was, above all, an advocate and practitioner of a new mathematical approach to physics, and that he developed his metaphysics to support his programme in the sciences.

This paper offers an ethical framework for the development of robots as home companions that are intended to address the isolation and reduced physical functioning of frail older people with capacity, especially those living alone in a noninstitutional setting. Our ethical framework gives autonomy priority in a list of purposes served by assistive technology in general, and carebots in particular. It first introduces the notion of “presence” and draws a distinction between humanoid multi-function robots and non-humanoid robots to suggest that (...) the former provide a more sophisticated presence than the latter. It then looks at the difference between lower-tech assistive technological support for older people and its benefits, and contrasts these with what robots can offer. This provides some context for the ethical assessment of robotic assistive technology. We then consider what might need to be added to presence to produce care from a companion robot that deals with older people’s reduced functioning and isolation. Finally, we outline and explain our ethical framework. We discuss how it combines sometimes conflicting values that the design of a carebot might incorporate, if informed by an analysis of the different roles that can be served by a companion robot. (shrink)

Consumers can sustain markets that are morally questionable. They can make immoral or morally suspect demands of individual businesses, especially small businesses. Even when they do not, the costs to firms of consumer protection can sometimes drive them to ruin. This paper presents cases where deference to the consumer is variously unwarranted, cases that may prompt second thoughts about some kinds of consumerism.

Bulk collection involves the mining of large data sets containing personal data, often for a security purpose. In 2013, Edward Snowden exposed large scale bulk collection on the part of the US National Security Agency as part of a secret counter-terrorism effort. This effort has mainly been criticised for its invasion of privacy. I argue that the right moral argument against it is not so much to do with intrusion, as ineffectiveness for its official purpose and the lack of oversight (...) by security cleared legislators. It also lends itself to government "domination" (in Pettit's sense) of those who are subject to it. (shrink)

Business Ethics is intended for business practitioners and students of business at all levels and is written in a lively and accessible style. It redresses the balance of buisness ethics writing which, up to now, has been weighted heavily in favour of American cases. There are numerous references to real businesses - from multi-national chains to French restaurants, from manufacturing giants to driving schools. Ethically 'hot' topics such as the social chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, the new EC directives, entry (...) of the countries of the former Soviet Union into the world market economy, privatization and the 'green' environment are just some of the more general issues discussed. Companies covered in the book are: Allied Lyons, Apple Corporation, Avon, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Barlow Clowes, Benetton, Body Shop, British Airways, British Rail, Cadbury-Schweppes, Ecology Building Society, Fiat, Gateway Foodmarkets, Grand Metropolitan, Guinness, ICI, John Lewis, Kingfisher, Ladbrokes, Lloyds Bank, Management Week, Marks & Spencer, Mirror Group Newspapers, Nestle, Polly Peck, Price Waterhouse, Scott Bader, Securicor, Traidcraft, United Biscuits, Virgin, Worldwide Fund for Nature...and many more. Packed with excellent examples from many international companies Written in a lively and accessible style. (shrink)

Jecker’s paper focuses on the value of sex and sexuality in the lives of older people, and she argues that there is nothing wrong with the use of sex robots to realise that value. She concedes that sex robots marketed today are overwhelmingly designed for heterosexual males, and that their appearance corresponds to certain objectionable stereotypes of sexually attractive women, and of exciting sexual practices. Still, she says, sex robots do not have to be like that, and a less stereotype-ridden (...) design could take away the sexism, heterosexualism and ageism of current ones. I am sympathetic to these conclusions. But I believe that they are not general enough, and I want to take issue with the argumentative strategy that leads to them. The conclusions are not general enough, because disability or bad circumstantial luck can lead to the damaging absence of sex in the lives of people from many adult age groups, not just people in their 70s and 80s. Jecker’s paper starts with the case of couples whose sex life deteriorates with old age. But there are also many people, whether disabled or not, who fail to acquire a sex life, and who want one, sometimes desperately. They, too, have a problem that a suitable sex robot might help …. (shrink)

`Modern' philosophy in the West is said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes. Their methodological and metaphysical writings, in conjunction with the discoveries that marked the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, are supposed to have interred both Aristotelian and scholastic science and the philosophy that supported it. But did the new or `modern' philosophy effect a complete break with what preceded it? Were Bacon and Descartes untainted by scholastic influences? The theme of this book is that the new and traditional philosophies (...) have more in common than the orthodox account suggests. In two survey articles and thirteen essays on individual philosophers, the contributors show that the rise of modern philosophy was much more complicated and much more interesting than is usually thought. They consider not only metaphysics and the sciences but also claims of Machievelli, Hobbes and Spinoza to have invented `modern' ethics and politics. These two aspects of `modernity' in philosophy are connected for the first time. The book offers a broad view of the early modern philosophers, covering not only the much-studied major figures but also relatively neglected writers: Mersenne, Gassendi, White, and Sergeant. (shrink)

Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau bring together original essays by the world's leading Hobbes scholars to discuss Hobbes's masterpiece after three and a half centuries. The contributors address three different themes. The first is the place of Leviathan within Hobbes's output as a political philosopher. What does Leviathan add to The Elements of Law (1640) and De Cive (1642; 1647)? What is the relation between the English Leviathan and the Latin version of the book (1668)? Does Leviathan deserve its (...) pre-eminence? The second theme concerns the connections between Hobbes's psychology and Hobbes's politics. The essays discuss Hobbes's curious views on the significance of laughter, evidence that he connected life in the state with passionlessness; the ways in which such things as fear for one's life entitle subjects to rebel; and the question of how the sovereign's personal passions are to be squared with his personifying a multitude. The third theme is Hobbes's views on the Bible and the Church: contributors examine the tensions between any allowance for ecclesiastical and (differently) biblical authority on the one hand, and political authority on the other. This is a book which anyone working on Hobbes or on this period of intellectual history will want to read. (shrink)

Tom Sorell modifies an interpretation he presented in his book, Hobbes (1986) . He continues to maintain that Hobbesian natural philosophy and Hobbesian civil philosophy are methodologically quite distinct, as well as distinct in subject-matter. But it is misleading to put this by saying that civil philosophy is normative and natural philosophy is explanatory, as if civil philosophy itself weren’t supposed to be explanatory. Civil philosophy can be explanatory in the sense of specifying normative precepts for achieving a certain (...) goal precepts that correspondingly explain the achievement of that goal. Explanatory civil science is still quite distinct from explanatory natural science, however, contrary to what is claimed by Sorell’s critics. (shrink)

Since anecdotal evidence for a clash of culture between philosophy and business would appear to exist, it is hardly surprising that some business academics should be inclined to question the value of philosophical business ethics in general andmoral theory in particular. John Kaler's approach to questioning philosophical business ethics is surprising partly because it does not rely on considerations of this kind (Kaler 1999). He claims that ethical theories are open to a kind of internal criticism, and that this criticism (...) justifies people in dispensing with moral theories. The argument is strikingly abstract and general for a criticism of moral philosophy, surprisingly `philosophical' or `theoretical', and if it is supposed to contribute to business ethics partly by drawing on negative arguments from the ethical theory it attacks, it may be self-refuting. (shrink)

There is something intuitively correct about singling out emergency workers for legal protection, and for criminalizing not just assault, but obstruction. Moreover, at least one sophisticated theory of right and wrong – Scanlon’s—indicates some deep reasons for endorsing these intuitions. After applying Scanlon’s theory in the relevant way, I want to argue that the same grounds it provides for recent Scottish legislation and UK sentencing guidelines can also be given for punishing more seriously offences that current English law trivialises.

This volume is an exploration of the ethical issues raised by health insurance, which is particularly timely in the light of recent advances in medical research and political economy. Focusing on a wide range of areas, such as AIDS, genetic engineering, screening and underwriting, new disability legislation and the ethics of private and public health insurance, this comprehensive and sometimes controversial book provides an essential survey of the key issues in health insurance. Divided into two parts, the first considers the (...) ethics of underwriting, risk assessment and the acceptance and refusal of insurance risk by insurers. Discussing the unjust treatment of high-risk applicants, the authors identify sources of unfairness to both parties of the insurance contract, indicating how reasonable trade-offs can be made. The second part considers the argument for a mix of public and private insurance for acute and long-term care, offering recommendations for changes in the balance of social insurance, and discussing the shift toward long-term contracts in private health care and pension insurance. (shrink)

One of the commonest complaints in Britain against the current National Health Service is that business and commercial values are being allowed, and even encouraged, to dominate the more humane values involved in caring for people in their weakness. What is the situation and where are the problems, and what can Britain learn from Germany and Holland? We are grateful to the distinguished author on business ethics and member of our Editorial Board, Professor Tom Sorell, for undertaking the production (...) of this FOCUS section of the October Review on such a sensitive and topical issue. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Bankers have been slow to claim responsibility or apologise for the seismic damage of the 2008 financial crisis. How is this shortcoming to be spelled out? One possibility is by saying that the bankers failed to display what Susan Wolff calls "the nameless virtue" --the disposition to take responsibility for untoward events that occur in one's area of influence, even if we did not intend them or directly cause them. I think this diagnosis is unduly generous to leaders of banks (...) at the centre of the crisis. Even where the nameless virtue has arguably been displayed, it is no substitute for submitting to criminal proceedings for recklessness in financial markets. (shrink)

I shall consider the preferred design of micro-lending (microfinance) institutions in the poorest parts of the world, and also in richer jurisdictions where welfare state provision is shrinking. The institutions needed in these different contexts are, unsurprisingly, different, and part of their design involves interacting with institutions that are not primarily designed to reduce poverty. I shall assume that design considerations also extend to exploiting opportunities thrown up by globally significant recent events: the world banking and financial crisis has altered (...) the image of large mainstream retail and investment banks. The fact that they had a large share of the responsibility for the crisis has prompted many developed country governments to impose punitive taxes on them: some of the proceeds could well be used to support financial services for the poor. Again, some tax incentives could be used to promote certain kinds of partnerships between developed country banks and Southern micro-lending institutions. (shrink)

The sense in which Hobbes produced a science of politics is often misunderstood. It was not a science because it was derived somehow from scientific psychology or mechanics. It was not a science in the sense that he broke down states into their component systems and their properties. Instead, it is a normative doctrine. It states precepts for citizens to escape the condition of total war, and it states precepts for sovereigns to legislate well (frame "good laws" in the sense (...) of Leviathan, ch. 30.) The normativity of Hobbes's science is often missed. It contributes to what I call the "autonomy" of Hobbes politics within his system. (shrink)

Digilantism is punishment through online exposure of supposed wrongdoing. Paedophile hunting is one example, and the practice is open to many of the classical objections to vigilantism. But it lies on a spectrum that contains many other kinds of digilantism. Scambaiting is among the other kinds. It consists of attracting online approaches from perpetrators of different kinds of online advance-fee fraud. Characteristically, it takes the form of protracted email exchanges between scammers and scambaiters. These exchanges are mainly down-to-earth and occasionally (...) testy conversations about the details of fictitious money transfers or involved explanations of delays in payment. They succeed in their purpose if they waste a lot of their targets’ time, but they can also be pursued as a sort of comic art form. Scambaiting exchanges seem often, but not always, to be relatively harmless. They therefore help to make intelligible a region of morally permissible digilantism on the spectrum of digilantism. Not that scambaiters never go too far, but their typical weapons inflict and risk inflicting far less harm than those of other digilantes, and there are actual scambaiting norms that have been chosen because of their relative harmlessness. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a special number of the journal Etudes Philosophiques co-authored by Luc Foisneau and Tom Sorell.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Insight and Inference: Descartes's Founding Principle and Modern PhilosophyTom SorellMurray Miles. Insight and Inference: Descartes's Founding Principle and Modern Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. xviii + 564. Cloth, $120.00.This book reopens the question of the correct interpretation of 'cogito, ergo sum,' and considers the significance of Descartes's first principle for Western philosophy up to and including the twentieth century. The gist of Miles's interpretation is (...) captured in the first three words of his title. The cogito is both insight and inference. How is it an inference, exactly? In the course of a process of selective attention to elements of thought, the cogito brings each person to the explicit knowledge of the fact of his or her existence (49). We have an implicit grasp of what the cogito makes explicit; and the passage from implicit to explicit knowledge amounts to a kind of inference. It is like an Aristotelian induction (cf. chapter 20).Inference is the topic of Part Three. Part Two concerns certainty. The cogito is certain in Meditation Two not in the light of the thought that God is veracious, but in the light solely of reflection on one's actually occurring thoughts (47). As for what Cartesian thoughts are, Miles seems to suggest that they are rather like what Husserl gets out of his phenomenological reduction: "intentionally-structured or object-directed acts of thinking" that are the sole immediate objects of consciousness (45). Miles rejects, correctly I think, the attribution to Descartes of any of the usual forms of representationalism.The diagnosis in Part Two of the certainty of the cogito seemed to me to be plausible on its face. It is in line with, although much more elaborate than, some reasonably familiar "psychologistic" interpretations clearing Descartes of the charge of circularity in the reasoning from clarity and distinctness to God's existence and nature and back again. (See A. Kenny, Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy [New York: Random House, 1968], chapter 8, and J. Tlumak, "Certainty and Cartesian Method" in M. Hooker, ed., Descartes: Critical and Interpretive Essays [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978], 40-73. See also L. Loeb's article on the Cartesian Circle in J. Cottingham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Descartes [New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992], 200-235.) To the extent that Miles departs from these interpretations, it seems to be by trying to base the authority of the cogito on the immutability of God (215-18). But this move seems ill-advised. Not only does it land Descartes in difficulties over the interpretation of pieces of scripture in which God changes his mind; it may also be in tension with the idea of omnipotence. On the whole, however, there is much in Part Two to admireófrom the interpretation of the simple natures (chapter 10), to the differences between scientia, persuasio, and notitia (chapter 11).Part One is less satisfactory, because Miles seems intent on reading Descartes through Husserl. Although he does not evade the objection that this approach is anachronistic (91-93), Miles does reinforce the impression, already created in the 55-page introduction, that he is unsure which interpretive perspective to use to control the book. Is he writing primarily as a twentieth century reader attracted to phenomenology, or is he someone who is keen to penetrate the seventeenth century and earlier and let the meanings of the early modern period infuse the text? Miles leaves the reader uncertain. In Part One we have a Husserlian Descartes. In the Introduction, the sixteenth and seventeenth century perspectives supply the preferred interpretation of [End Page 122] Descartes's metaphysics as something more or less traditional—concerned with the most certain, most universal, and the highest kind of being, the kind of being studied by theology.It is hard not to be put off by Miles's very swift dismissals of mainstream Anglo-American interpretations of Descartes's metaphysics as having some special connection with his physics (27ff). Can this line of interpretation really be refuted by quoting passages in which Descartes says that metaphysics is more basic and more certain than physics? Surely not. In choosing the formulation... (shrink)

The freedom of A Hobbesian sovereign is limited by the freedom of other sovereigns but is otherwise extremely extensive. The other side of the coin of this wide latitude, however, are the huge responsibilities and practical challenges of seeing to the good of the people. This involves both the compulsion of obedience and the permission of enterprise on the part of the many. It also calls for equity in the application of law. Overall, the burdensomeness of sovereignty probably vastly outweighs (...) the attractions of being above the law. (shrink)

This article concentrates on Hobbes's inference from the passions to the inevitability of war in the state of nature, asking how this could be expected to persuade. The inference gets some support from experience but also from its position in a certain kind of science.

In earlier work, I have expressed scepticism about privacy-based criticisms of bulk collection for counter-terrorism ( Sorell 2018 ). But even if these criticisms are accepted, is bulk collection nonetheless legitimate on balance – because of its operational utility for the security services, and the overriding importance of the purposes that the security services serve? David Anderson’s report of the Bulk Powers review in the United Kingdom suggests as much, provided bulk collection complies with strong legal safeguards ( Anderson (...) 2016 ). I think it is hard to mount a uniformly compelling operational utility argument, because purposes other than counter-terrorism are pursued by the security services with the help of bulk collection. For example, the Intelligence Services Act 1994, section 1(2) says that apart from the interests of national security and the prevention and detection of serious crime, the Secret Intelligence Service may act “in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.”The phrase “interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom” is opento a disturbingly wide range of interpretations, and it is doubtful that these interests justify bulk collection even when relevant “economic interests” are confined to those “also relevant to the interests of national security”, as required by the Investigatory Powers Act (2016) section 204 (3a). (shrink)

It was as a political thinker that Thomas Hobbes first came to prominence, and it is as a political theorist that he is most studied today. Yet the range of his writings extends well beyond morals and politics. Hobbes had distinctive views in metaphysics and epistemology, and wrote about such subjects as history, law, and religion. He also produced full-scale treatises in physics, optics, and geometry. All of these areas are covered in this Companion, most in considerable detail. The volume (...) also reflects the multidisciplinary nature of current Hobbes scholarship by drawing together perspectives that are now being developed in parallel by philosophers, historians of science and mathematics, intellectual historians, political scientists, and literary theorists. (shrink)

Automation does not always replace human labour altogether: there is an intermediate stage of human co-existence with machines, including robots, in a production process. Cobots are robots designed to participate at close quarters with humans in such a process. I shall discuss the possible role of cobots in facilitating the eventual total elimination of human operators from production in which co-bots are initially involved. This issue is complicated by another: cobots are often introduced to workplaces with the message (from managers) (...) that they will not replace human operators but will rather assist human operators and make their jobs more interesting and responsible. If, in the process of learning to assist human operators, robots acquire the skills of human operators, then the promise of avoiding replacement can turn out to be false, and if a human operator loses his job, he has been harmed twice over: once by unemployment and once by deception. I shall suggest that this moral risk attends some cobots more than others. (shrink)

No single text could be considered more important in the history of philosophy than Descartes' Meditations. This unique collection of background material to this magisterial philosophical text has been translated from the original French and Latin. The texts gathered here illustrate the kinds of principles, assumptions, and philosophical methods that were commonplace when Descartes was growing up. The selections are from: Francisco Sanches, Christopher Clavius, Pierre de la Ramee, Francisco Suárez, Pierre Charron, Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Scipion Dupleix, Marin Mersenne, (...) Pierre Gassendi, Jean de Silhon, François de la Mothe le Vayer, Charles Sorel, and Jean-Baptiste Morin. (shrink)

Principlism is the approach promoted by Beauchamp and Childress for addressing the ethics of medical practice. Instead of evaluating clinical decisions by means of full-scale theories from moral philosophy, Beauchamp and Childress refer people to four principles—of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Now it is one thing for principlism to be invoked in an academic literature dwelling on a stock topic of medical ethical writing: end-of-life decisions, for example. It is another when the topic lies further from the mainstream. In (...) such cases the cost of reaching for the familiar Beauchamp and Childress framework, with its formulaic set of concerns, may be to miss something morally important. After discussing an example of the sort of academic literature I have in mind, I propose to distinguish the uses of the formulaic from the uses of the more unapologetically theoretical in applied ethics, and to suggest that the latter can make up for some of the limitations of the former. This is not to say that the more theoretical literature has no limitations of its own, or that it should take the place of the formulaic. On the contrary, there is room in applied ethics and a use in applied ethics for both. But there is a sense in which there is a greater dependence of principlism on theory than the other way round, and at the end I try to spell out the significance of this fact. (shrink)

Audio and video footage produced with the help of AI can show politicians doing discreditable things that they have not actually done. This is deepfaked material. Deepfakes are sometimes claimed to have special powers to harm the people depicted and their audiences—powers that more traditional forms of faked imagery and sound footage lack. According to some philosophers, deepfakes are particularly “believable,” and widely available technology will soon make deepfakes proliferate. I first give reasons why deepfake technology is not particularly well (...) suited to producing “believable” political misinformation in a sense to be defined. Next, I challenge claims from Don Fallis and Regina Rini about the consequences of the wide availability of deepfakes. My argument is not that deepfakes are harmless, but that their power to do major harm is highly conditional in liberal party political environments that contain sophisticated mass-media. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Three Contributions to Science The New Optics The New Science of Natural Justice All of Science Taught from the Elements.

Rorty maintains that idealism and realism are dead ends and that somewhere beyond them is a better philosophy--a special kind of pragmatism--without the pretensions or illusions of what it supersedes. Unfortunately, the view of philosophy that Rorty puts forward is neither independently attractive nor easy to understand as a wholesome middle way between idealism and realism. In some ways it is hard to recognise as a view of philosophy at all. I argue for something closer to Thomas Nagel's view of (...) philosophy, and Nagel's realism. (shrink)

Reviews issues in the ethics of access to health insurance based on health problems due to genetic inheritance.

In this chapter, I begin by taking issue with Rorty over what is involved in the idea of the world's intrinsic nature; then I ask whether it really is advisable to dispense with higher entities and, in Rorty's phrase 'dedivinize culture." I shall suggest that Rorty caricatures the ideas he seeks to discredit and that, in particular, he gives us no very compelling reason to dispense with the idea of the world's intrinsic nature. Turning from the bad onld divinity-worshipping philosophy, (...) science and poetry to their dedivinized successors, I shall suggest that Rorty is without the resources to explain why they are better than what they replace. (shrink)

Descartes was disappointed with most of the Objections collected to accompany the Meditations in 1641, but he took a particularly dim view of the Third Set. ‘I am surprised that I have found not one valid argument in these objections,’ he wrote, close to the end of a series of curt and dismissive replies. The author of the objections was Thomas Hobbes. There was one other unfriendly exchange between Descartes and Hobbes in 1641. Descartes received through Mersenne some letters criticizing (...) theses in the Dioptrics, one of the Essays published with the Discourse on Method in 1637. Mersenne did not name Hobbes as the writer of the letters, attributing them to an unspecified Englishman, and it seems that Descartes never connected the critic of his optics with the author of the objections to his metaphysics. Nevertheless, Descartes responded with some hostility to the letters, angrily rebutting some points about refraction and charging that others had been appropriated from his own writings. Insinuating that the English correspondent was dishonest, Descartes decided to have no more to do with him. A meeting between the two men did take place in 1648 at a dinner given by the Marquis of Newcastle, but even on this occasion they did not see eye to eye, getting into an argument about the nature of hardness. (shrink)

Agents sometimes feel free to resort to underhand or brutal measures in coping with an emergency. Because emergencies seem to relax moral inhibitions as well as carrying the risk of great loss of life or injury, it may seem morally urgent to prevent them or curtail them as far as possible. I discuss some cases of private emergency that go against this suggestion. Prevention seems morally urgent primarily in the case of public emergencies. But these are the responsibility of defensibly (...) partisan agents, and call for the exercise of powers that are legitimately hard to control. Philosophical standards for dealing with public emergency often ignore these facts, and are unduly moralistic as a result. (shrink)