This article investigates the embodied identities of Hong Kong gay men in two different `sites of desire', namely London and Hong Kong. In London, Hong Kong gay men have constantly encountered the intertwining relationships between race and sexuality in the constellation of the Western construction of body/desire/masculinity. By contrast, Hong Kong gay men in Hong Kong tend to place more emphasis on issues of family and culture. The main site of struggle for Hong Kong gay men in Hong Kong is (...) the family-oriented and community-based environment. They adopt not a confrontational politics in a constitutional sense but rather derive tactics of microscopic resistance against societal and familial domination. By comparing 34 Hong Kong gay men living in London and Hong Kong, I argue the divergent constructions of being gay in these two contexts. Through the `voices' of these gay men, I criticize the `Western' construction of identity/the body and offer new insights into the discussion of gay identities. (shrink)

Hume’s destructive account of miracles has been thought by many to exclude the possibility of rationally accepting testimony to supernatural events. Here I argue that even if one grants that his argument works with respect to testimony about miracles, it does not succeed in showing that all testimony to the supernatural is inadmissible, since room is left open for religious experiences, especially those of an intersubjective kind, to function as evidence. If this is so, there is new reason to think (...) that his exclusion of miracle claims might be unwarranted. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

We examine the prevalent use of the phrase “local realism” in the context of Bell’s Theorem and associated experiments, with a focus on the question: what exactly is the ‘realism’ in ‘local realism’ supposed to mean? Carefully surveying several possible meanings, we argue that all of them are flawed in one way or another as attempts to point out a second premise (in addition to locality) on which the Bell inequalities rest, and (hence) which might be rejected in the face (...) of empirical data violating the inequalities. We thus suggest that the phrase ‘local realism’ should be banned from future discussions of these issues, and urge physicists to revisit the foundational questions behind Bell’s Theorem. (shrink)

This article considers Utopia’s unethical practices alongside The City of God’s understanding of the earthly polity’s relationship to eschatology. In Augustine’s view, within the earthly city every person could potentially become a friend of the heavenly city in time, and the existing political situation must always be rendered partial and incomplete against the telos of eternity. These convictions stand in conspicuous contrast with Utopia. The Utopian system is in important ways founded on institutionalized practices which not only exclude non-Utopians (or (...) ex-Utopians), but also habituate them to vice. Examining Utopia alongside The City of God illuminates how this ethical problem in Utopia is not just a matter of individual practices or institutions, but rather derives from a more fundamental metaphysical and theological outlook. Not only is Utopia invested in a Utopian/non-utopian distinction; more significantly, this distinction has a tacit eschatological role, since Utopian thinking implies that degradation of one’s capacity for virtue decreases one’s potential to be saved. (shrink)

It is shown how, starting with the de Broglie–Bohm pilot-wave theory, one can construct a new theory of the sort envisioned by several of QM’s founders: a Theory of Exclusively Local Beables (TELB). In particular, the usual quantum mechanical wave function (a function on a high-dimensional configuration space) is not among the beables posited by the new theory. Instead, each particle has an associated “pilot-wave” field (living in physical space). A number of additional fields (also fields on physical space) maintain (...) what is described, in ordinary quantum theory, as “entanglement.” The theory allows some interesting new perspective on the kind of causation involved in pilot-wave theories in general. And it provides also a concrete example of an empirically viable quantum theory in whose formulation the wave function (on configuration space) does not appear—i.e., it is a theory according to which nothing corresponding to the configuration space wave function need actually exist. That is the theory’s raison d’etre and perhaps its only virtue. Its vices include the fact that it only reproduces the empirical predictions of the ordinary pilot-wave theory (equivalent, of course, to the predictions of ordinary quantum theory) for spinless non-relativistic particles, and only then for wave functions that are everywhere analytic. The goal is thus not to recommend the TELB proposed here as a replacement for ordinary pilot-wave theory (or ordinary quantum theory), but is rather to illustrate (with a crude first stab) that it might be possible to construct a plausible, empirically viable TELB, and to recommend this as an interesting and perhaps-fruitful program for future research. (shrink)

In support of logical nihilism, according to which there are no logical laws, Gillian Russell offers purported counterexamples to two laws of logic. Russell’s examples rely on cleverly constructed predicates not found in ordinary English. I show that similar apparent counterexamples to the same logical laws can be constructed without exotic predicates but using only what ordinary language provides. We correctly analyze such arguments so that they do not actually constitute counterexamples to any logic laws. I claim that we can (...) and should do the same for Russell’s arguments. (shrink)

Marc Lange has recently raised three objections to the account of minimal model explanations offered by Robert Batterman and Collin Rice. In this article, I suggest that these objections are misguided. I suggest that the objections raised by Lange stem from a misunderstanding of the what it is that minimal model explanations seek to explain. This misunderstanding, I argue, consists in Lange’s seeing minimal model explanations as relating special types of models to particular target systems rather than seeing minimal model (...) explanations as looking to explain robust patterns of behavior that are exhibited by a variety of physically diverse systems. (shrink)

A thought makes truth turn in some given way on how things are. What it thus does decomposes in partial doings of this. For example, making truth turn on whether Sid is sober may decompose into making truth turn on which ways Sid is, and on which objects are sober. If we assume that a thought decomposed in just one such way. Such, then, would be a thought’s essential structure. That idea might then apply as follows. To hold a thought (...) true one must first grasp it. To grasp it one must each element of its essential structure. If, say, those elements are making truth turn on Sid and making it turn on who is sober, then one must grasp what it would be for something to be Sid (and for something to be sober). The working assumption here is false. But in any case this application is mistaken. Or so this essay argues. (shrink)

Joshua Parker’s article on green inhaler prescribing is important and timely. I agree with much of it, specifically regarding the institutional duty to make climate-friendly changes (from environmentally expensive prescriptions to ‘greener,’ similarly effective ones). The challenge, however, comes in determining how that institutional obligation impacts the rights and duties of patients. In this commentary, I want to offer a friendly alternative to Parker’s view of individual patient obligation, which I suggest is important for reasons that go beyond this one (...) case. Parker’s broad view is that, because metered-dose inhalers (MDIs) emit far more greenhouse gases (GHG) than do dry powder inhalers (DPIs), and the two are equally effective for most patients, the healthcare system should switch most patients on MDIs to DPIs, and the patients have a pro tanto duty to accept this change.1 The problem is that no individual inhaler use causes harmful climate change, and so it is difficult to explain a duty not to use MDIs. It seems that my individual behaviour ‘makes no difference’ to climate change, so familiar more principles have a difficult time justifying a prohibition of such behaviour. Parker’s response to this worry fits into the consequentialist tradition,2 3 as he argues that each individual contribution to climate change causes some amount of ‘expected harm,’ because it contributes a little bit to future climate changes which will cause harm. And since we have a duty to minimise expected harm, we have a duty not to make such small contributions to climate change. I think we should be sceptical of this sort of argument. It makes the most sense if we endorse a bathtub metaphor, in which the atmosphere is like a bathtub, and once it is full, every …. (shrink)

Value conservatism is the thesis that there is a distinctive reason to preserve valuable things even when a (somewhat) more valuable thing might be created by their destruction. I offer an account that improves on the current literature in response to Cohen's “Rescuing Conservatism.” In short, we become psychologically attached to valuable things that make up part of our lives; the same holds true, interestingly, with things of relatively neutral value. Severing attachments is painful. This yields a reason to favor (...) an object that someone is attached to over an object that no one is attached to. But an analysis is only part of a theory of conservatism: we also need to know whether such conservatism is justified. I argue that Cohen's idea of “accepting the given” can be read to yield such a justification: it is valuable to maintain some moderate disposition to accept what one already has. This attachment‐based account of conservatism displays a number of attractive theoretical features, including accounting for the impulse to restore past valuables and providing a framework for judging conservatism excessive. (shrink)

Multiple theories of problem-solving hypothesize that there are distinct qualitative phases exhibited during effective problem-solving. However, limited research has attempted to identify when transitions between phases occur. We integrate theory on collaborative problem-solving with dynamical systems theory suggesting that when a system is undergoing a phase transition it should exhibit a peak in entropy and that entropy levels should also relate to team performance. Communications from 40 teams that collaborated on a complex problem were coded for occurrence of problem-solving processes. (...) We applied a sliding window entropy technique to each team's communications and specified criteria for identifying data points that qualify as peaks and determining which peaks were robust. We used multilevel modeling, and provide a qualitative example, to evaluate whether phases exhibit distinct distributions of communication processes. We also tested whether there was a relationship between entropy values at transition points and CPS performance. We found that a proportion of entropy peaks was robust and that the relative occurrence of communication codes varied significantly across phases. Peaks in entropy thus corresponded to qualitative shifts in teams’ CPS communications, providing empirical evidence that teams exhibit phase transitions during CPS. Also, lower average levels of entropy at the phase transition points predicted better CPS performance. We specify future directions to improve understanding of phase transitions during CPS, and collaborative cognition, more broadly. (shrink)

Joseph Raz’s service conception of law remains one of the best known theories of political authority. Setting aside ongoing debates about the nature of authority, I locate a problem in the basic justificatory structure of the service conception. I show that the service justification of the state does not yield the conclusion that the law generates exclusionary reasons, which are meant to be the key hallmark of authority. An automatic but defeasible _habit _of obeying the state is likely to lead (...) to better outcomes than exclusionary deference to the state. Given the instrumental justification of the service conception, this means that exclusionary reasons to defer do not obtain. Habituation and automaticity have been developed in other contexts and are here extended to the context of political authority. The possibility of habitual obedience undercuts Raz's theory while suggesting a new approach to the question of political authority. (shrink)

Most discussions of John Doris’s situationism center on what can be called descriptive situationism, the claim that our folk usage of global personality and character traits in describing and predicting human behavior is empirically unsupported. Philosophers have not yet paid much attention to another central claim of situationism, which says that given that local traits are empirically supported, we can more successfully act in line with our moral values if, in our deliberation about what to do, we focus on our (...) situation instead of on our moral character. Call this prescriptive situationism. In this paper, we will point toward a previously unrecognized tension between these two situationist theses and explore some ways for the situationist to address it. (shrink)

The present article examines the theology of John Zizioulas with a view to understanding its coherence and viability for ecclesiology. Instead of treating his trinitarian theology, or his historical claims, I focus upon the basic themes of his personalistic ontology, especially the relationship between the ‘hypostasis’ and its ‘nature.’ I argue that Zizioulas's central concept of freedom rests upon an equivocation: he affirms both that freedom and being are identical, and that they are mutually exclusive. In conversation with the philosophy (...) of Levinas, I further argue that Zizioulas's proposal, as an ontology of communion, falls prey to the same reduction of being to thought that forms the central tenet of Western conceptions of subjectivity. In conclusion, I argue that both of these problems trade on a basic inability to account for grace as the fundamental reality of communion. Throughout my basic concern is to inquire into just what function the category of ‘being’ has in Zizioulas's theology, and to point out its surprising obscurity. (shrink)

There is a view abroad on which perceptual experience has representational content in this sense: in it something is represented to the perceiver as so. On the view, a perceptual experience has a face value at which it may be taken, or which may be rejected. This paper argues that that view is mistaken: there is nothing in perceptual experience which makes it so that in it anything is represented as so. In that sense, the senses are silent, or, in (...) Austin's term, dumb. Perceptual experience is not as such either veridical or delusive. It may mislead, but it does not take representation to accomplish that. (shrink)

Mark Schroeder has, rather famously, defended a powerful Humean Theory of Reasons. In doing so, he abandons what many take to be the default Humean view of weighting reasons—namely, proportionalism. On Schroeder’s view, the pressure that Humeans feel to adopt proportionalism is illusory, and proportionalism is unable to make sense of the fact that the weight of reasons is a normative matter. He thus offers his own ‘Recursive View’, which directly explains how it is that the weight of reasons is (...) a normative matter. In this paper, I argue against Schroeder that a Humean ought to be a proportionalist. On my view, proportionalism is clearly an intuitive theory of weighting for a Humean, so we should resist it only if Schroeder can demonstrate either that there is a serious problem with the view, or that there is a better alternative. I then further argue that Schroeder fails to deliver on either condition. As a result, I conclude that there are good intuitive reasons for a Humean to be a proportionalist, and no good reason not to be. (shrink)

It is an underappreciated fact within the philosophical literature on laws of nature that many scientific laws require the aid of a supporting cast of additional modelling ingredients (such as boundary conditions, material parameters, interfacial stipulations, rigidity constraints, and so on) in order to perform their traditional role in scientific inquiry. In this paper, I suggest that this underappreciated fact spells trouble for some recent reformulations of David Lewis's Best Systems Account (BSA) of laws of nature. Under the auspices of (...) 'pragmatic Humeanism,' several philosophers have recently argued that the criteria of strength and simplicity that lay at the heart of Lewis's original formulation should be replaced with alternatives that are more sensitive to the role that laws play in scientific practice. Although the criteria that these philosophers put forward differ in a variety of ways, they are primarily concerned with the ability of laws to furnish us with predictions and encode information. This, I suggest, is a problem. If it is true that many scientific laws do not on their own perform some of the roles with which they are traditionally associated, then they are unlikely in isolation to make meaningful contributions to the predictive strength of a system or encode information about particular systems. Such laws are thus unlikely to end up in the best system, and so these accounts will have trouble conferring lawhood upon them. (shrink)

Many of us in the modern world find ourselves implicated in massive, structural harms and injustices. We emit greenhouse gases, which—along with everyone else's emissions—are warming the planet. We buy products that result from bad labor practices. And many of us feel (appropriately, I think) some amount of guilt for our participation, but also find it difficult or impossible to fully extract ourselves from the problematic systems. I call this challenge of determining individual moral responsibility in the face of massive, (...) structural problems “catastrophe ethics.” In this Perspective commentary, I suggest that the ubiquity of catastrophe ethics cases in the modern world justifies adopting a position of moral humility, as we recognize that none of us is morally pure but, rather, we are each choosing our own version of impurity. (shrink)

Thought's Footing is an enquiry into the relationship between the ways things are and the way we think and talk about them. It is also a study of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: Charles Travis develops his account of certain key themes into a unified view of the work as a whole. The central question is: how does thought get its footing? How can the thought that things are a certain way be connected to things being that way?

Peter Singer argues that we’re obligated to donate our entire expendable income to aid organizations. One premiss of his argument is "If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so." Singer defends this by noting that commonsense morality requires us to save a child we find drowning in a shallow pond. I argue that Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment doesn’t justify this premiss. I offer (...) my own Drowning Children thought experiment, which should reveal that commonsense morality entails that premiss two is actually false. (shrink)

It has historically been a crime in Canada to provide assistance to someone in ending their own life, however, this paradigm was inverted in 2015 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that restrictions on this practice, within certain defined parameters, violated the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. Subsequently, recent legal and policy decisions have highlighted the issue of how to balance the rights of individuals to access MAiD with the rights of care providers to exercise (...) conscience-based objections to participation in this process. We argue that there is significant harm and ethical hazard in disregarding individual and institutional rights to conscientious objection and since measures less coercive than the threat of regulatory or economic sanctions do exist, there should be no justification for such threats in Canada’s health care systems. (shrink)

Abstract On Schellenberg’s formulation of the problem of divine hiddenness, a loving God would ensure that anyone capable of having a relationship with Him, and not resisting it, would be granted sufficient evidence to make belief in God rationally indubitable. And He would do this by granting a powerful religious experience to every person at the moment he or she reaches the age of reason. Here I lay out a new reason why God might delay revelation of himself, justifiably allowing (...) for some nonresistant nonbelief. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 1-11 DOI 10.1007/s11153-012-9338-5 Authors Travis Dumsday, Department of Religious Studies, Livingstone College, 701 West Monroe St., Salisbury, NC 28144, USA Journal International Journal for Philosophy of Religion Online ISSN 1572-8684 Print ISSN 0020-7047. (shrink)

Interpreters of the Phaedo often cite the Pythagorean context of the dialogue as a source of influence on the demanding conception of philosophy defended therein. Sandra Peterson offers a striking account of that influence: the Pythagorean sympathies of Socrates's interlocutors lead him to defend a conception of philosophy that captures their commitments, but that he himself rejects. Call this the Strong Influence Thesis. Peterson defends SIT by attempting to demonstrate a mismatch between the conception of philosophy espoused by Socrates in (...) the Apology and ‘true philosophy’ as described in the Phaedo. Assessing this defence thus requires a detailed examination of both sides of the comparison. This paper undertakes that task. I argue that when the beliefs and norms that define both philosophical lives are correctly understood, the appearance of a significant mismatch fades away. The life of true philosophy realizes the Apology ideal of caring most about wisdom, truth, and the best possible state of.. (shrink)

I formulate a compatibilism that is distinctively responsive to skeptical worries about the justification of punishment and other moral responsibility practices. I begin with an evolutionary story explaining why backward-looking reactive attitudes are “given” in human society. Cooperative society plausibly could not be sustained without such practices. The necessary accountability practices have complex internal standards. These internal standards may fully ground the appropriateness of reactive attitudes. Following a recent analogy, we can similarly hold that there are no external standards for (...) what is funny; the norms of comedy are complex, but funny is funny. However, this is compatible with moral reasons to change the practices themselves, and therefore change what is fitting within them: in the first instance, a moralistic “that's not funny” is ill-fitting, but “that shouldn't be funny” can be apt. The analogous reformist position prescribes practices constituting the minimal responsibility norms necessary for cooperative society. (shrink)

Brian Earp and his colleagues argue in this issue’s target article that racial justice requires ending the War on Drugs. In this they are absolutely correct. Indeed, de...

Jury nullification, that phenomenon whereby a jury returns a not-guilty verdict for a defendant it believes to be technically guilty of the alleged crime, is, obviously, a controversial issue. What is not a matter of controversy, however, is the fact that the law protects the jury’s ability to behave this way. Much of the controversy therefore centers on whether juries ought to be informed of this ability to nullify free from legal redress. In this paper I examine a number of (...) arguments both for and against the view that juries ought to be, in the words of the literature, fully informed. In the end I conclude that there is significant empirical evidence to suggest that, rather than simply promoting justice and mercy, as proponents of the instruction argue, fully informing a jury has the unforeseen consequence of encouraging juries to behave in a manner I label bad-faith, and that such bad-faith juries in fact corrupt the principles of justice and fairness that are the cornerstones of the trial system. (shrink)

Perhaps death’s badness is an illusion. Epicureans think so and argue that agents cannot be harmed by death when they’re alive nor when they’re dead. I argue that each version of Epicureanism faces a fatal dilemma: it is either committed to a demonstrably false view about the relationship between self-regarding reasons and well-being or it is involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. I first provide principled reason to think that any viable view about the badness of death must (...) allow that agents have self-regarding reason to avoid death if doing so would increase their total well-being. I then show that Epicurean views which do not preserve this link are subject to reductio arguments and so should be rejected. After that, I show that the Epicurean views which accommodate this desideratum are involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. (shrink)

This book provides a novel interpretation of the ideas about language in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Travis places the "private language argument" in the context of wider themes in the Investigations, and thereby develops a picture of what it is for words to bear the meaning they do. He elaborates two versions of a private language argument, and shows the consequences of these for current trends in the philosophical theory of meaning.

“Jury Nullification, Verdictal Asymmetry, and the Ultimate Logic of Anarchy” is a critical examination and analysis of the ‘anarchy objection’ to jury nullification, a common argument against informing juries of their nullification power. The anarchy objection posits that jury nullification leads to inconsistent verdicts (verdictal asymmetry) and, as a result, social anarchy and chaos. Through careful analysis, I argue that the anarchy objection is predicated on two flawed premises: first, that jury nullification promotes verdictal asymmetry, and second, that such asymmetry (...) leads to anarchy. Such commitments are, I argue, empirically unsupported and conceptually misguided. Verdictal asymmetry is an intrinsic feature of the common law system, present at nearly every adjudicative stage, and not uniquely linked to jury nullification; yet we certainly do not live in an environment of jural/social anarchy. Finally, I discuss how the principle of treating like cases alike is primarily a procedural constraint, not a mandate for verdictal symmetry. By dismantling the anarchy objection, I aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of the jurisprudence surrounding the jury nullification debate and its role within the legal system. (shrink)

Aristotle famously claims that Plato, unlike Socrates, separated the forms. Some argue that Plato's dialogues provide a record of this disagreement, with the Socratic and Platonic theories presente...

Among those who discuss America's opioid crisis, it is popular to claim that we know what we, as a society, ought to do to solve the problem—we simply don't want it badly enough. We don't lack knowledge; we lack the will to act and to fund the right policies. In fact, I've heard two versions of this. Among those who focus on prescription opioids, it is clear that we ought to stop prescribing so many powerful opioid painkillers. And among my (...) public health colleagues focusing on illicit drug use, it is clear that we ought to expand addiction treatment and harm‐reduction services. The problem, however, is that the second claim is not obvious (and, indeed, is denied by many Americans), and the first claim probably isn't even true (at least, not in so crude a form). In short, the opioid crisis presents not only a problem of political will but also one of ethics. It will take work to discover or justify our normative claims in this arena. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue by David DecosimoTravis KroekerEthics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue David Decosimo stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2014. 376 pp. $65.00 / $29.95If "debeo distinguere" represents the programmatic scholarly agenda for "prophetic Thomism," over against the more mystical narrative "exitus et reditus" itinerary of Dionysian Augustinianism, David Decosmio should be considered a virtuous (...) practitioner of this Thomistic craft in the domain of political ethics. To put it more accurately, Decosimo provides a complex, lucid account of his reading of Thomas as one who tutors Christians and especially Christian ethicists through "fraternal correction" in what it means to provide a generous, charitable account of "pagan virtue" via the making of distinctions. For Decosimo the word "pagan" refers to non-Christian "outsiders"—that is, "all those without charity" (11). While that may seem to be a noncharitable way to put it, Decosimo means it to bespeak that form of charity that allows non-Christians to be and to speak as non-Christians, absent (or refusing) those virtues that Thomas calls "theological"—those habits infused supernaturally by God through the "redemptive grace" that orders and unites humans "in loving friendship with the God revealed in Jesus Christ" (11). Thomas's representative pagan is, of course, Aristotle. Decosimo insists that a correct reading of Thomas opposes both "hyper-Augustinian Thomism" (on which account non-Christians are incapable of true virtue) as well as a "public reason Thomism" (which avoids theological claims). At the same time, Decosimo claims that Thomas remains fully Augustinian in his theological account of charity and yet "unites and transforms Aristotle and Augustine alike to teach charity toward outsiders and their virtues" (1). To put it in terms of the formula Decosimo reiterates throughout the book, Aquinas "strives to be Aristotelian by being Augustinian and vice versa" (41, 70, 181 253, etc.). In so doing, he offers resources for a prophetic Thomism that more charitably navigates the church's relations to secular politics by welcoming the contributions of pagan virtue to its own Christian virtue.If "charity's scholarly work is the multiplication of distinctions" (8) then Decosimo's book is a model of charity. Decosimo works as an analytic philosopher at a high level of erudition to elucidate the linguistic and syllogistic puzzles in Thomas's accounts of virtue in a close reading of a range of works to show that, for Thomas, natural human virtue oriented toward the shared human and political good (the highest good attainable without charity) is true [End Page 199] virtue in which Christians and non-Christians, Augustinians and Aristotelians, may fully share and participate together. Indeed, the theological virtues must be devoted to the charitable interpretation of all contributions dialectically considered and ordered to the highest human good. Only by adhering to such a vision of virtue that welcomes pagan virtue will Christians practice the ethics of charity, and prophetic Thomism provides a model for how the church may engage difference in a way that honors others while being faithful to its own vision of the gift of grace.I hope it will not be taken as uncharitable or (ugh!) "hyper-Augustinian" to suggest that Decosimo's account of prophetic Thomism is more attuned to Aristotelian logic and the dialectic of definitional distinctions than it is to Augustine's more Platonic account of pagan virtue as a Dionysian erotic dialectic in which the "logos is wild." But I am in full agreement with Decosimo's claim that ethics as a work of charity ought to be open to both (and "all") in providing resources to Christian and non-Christian ethicists alike for engaging contemporary political challenges concerning otherness and difference in the service of justice.Travis KroekerMcMaster UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument against the existence of God has generated a great deal of discussion. One prominent line of reply has been the idea that God refrains from making His existence more apparent in order to safeguard our moral freedom. Schellenberg has provided extensive counter-replies to this idea. My goal here is to pursue an alternate line of response, though one that still makes some reference to the importance of free-will. It will be argued that God may remain temporarily ‘hidden’ (...) to some people not merely in order to allow their free moral choice, but because His proper allowance of such choice has led to a great deal of suffering on the part of the victims of wicked choices. If His existence were constantly obvious to those victims, even in the midst of their victimization, many of them would be led to an attitude of enmity, even hatred, toward God. (shrink)

A warm, personal guide to building a strong ethical and moral compass in the midst of today's confusing, scary, global problems. The moral challenges of today are unfamiliar in the history of philosophy. Climate change is the paradigm example of what Travis Rieder calls "The Puzzle" in the way your choices can seem at odds with what the planet urgently needs. How do we decide the right thing to do in the face of a massive collective challenge? Should you (...) drink water from a plastic bottle or not? Drive a Tesla? Or is that just what Elon and all the other corporations want you to think? What makes individual ethics difficult to think about in the case of catastrophic climate change makes ethics difficult to think about in many other contexts as well. The Puzzle, as he explains, is everywhere now. The chapters include a lively, meaningful tour of traditional moral reasoning looking at the contributions of Plato, Hegel, and Kant among others. But they could not grasp The Puzzle we now face. Old fashioned exercises like trolley problems involving sacrificing one person on this track for a bunch of people on the other don't address the huge consequential and complex crises our global community faces today. The tools most of us unthinkingly rely on when we try to do the right thing don't help when it comes to reasoning about individual responsibility for large collective problems. Expanding our suite of ethical concepts is now urgently required. Rieder defines exactly how to change our thinking, addressing mundane issues like bottled water to the biggies like whether to have children. This is a way to live a morally decent life in the scary, always complicated world we and our children live in. It's how to build your own Catastrophe Ethics. (shrink)

There are too many people on the planet. This isn’t a popular thing to say, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s true, and that we need to do something to address it. Even in our radically unjust world, where billions of people do not have adequate access to food, water, energy, and other resources, we’re still living unsustainably—overcharging our ecological credit card and torching the climate. But discussing the link between these environmental problems and the population is (...) uncomfortable, because many people believe that procreation is an essentially private act that is morally and politically off-limits. In her new book, One Child, Sarah Conly argues that this belief is false: If... (shrink)

This chapter explores Tatjana Višak’s arguments for the claim that all animals have the same welfare ranges. It starts by defining capacity for welfare and reviews some theoretical considerations that bear on this question. Next, Višak’s empirically informed, theoretical arguments for the claim that all animals have the same welfare ranges are reviewed. Her arguments rely on the idea that relativized accounts of well-being are the most plausible accounts and appeal to a certain view about the evolutionary explanation of hedonic (...) capacities. It’s then argued that relativized accounts of well-being are implausible because (i) they generate absurd conclusions and (ii) cannot plausibly be extended to account for animals’ total well-being. The paper ends by reviewing Višak’s evolutionary explanation of hedonic capacities and argues that the descriptive features of evolution she discusses do not provide evidence of equal hedonic capacities across taxa. In fact, given the way that evolution works, it would be very surprising if that turned out to be true. Consequently, Višak’s arguments fail to establish their conclusion. (shrink)

Let us begin with a piece of intellectual history. The story begins in a period encapsulating the second world war – say the ‘40’s, give and take a bit. Around then, it began to be argued with force that an expression – e.g., an English one – while it well might mean something, does not say anything, and notably no one thing in particular. The principal behind the argument was surely J.L. Austin, though, I would claim, the same point was (...) argued in a somewhat different way by Wittgenstein. The intended point was not merely a grammatical one: we say of an expression that it means such and such, but not that it says such and such. Be that as it may, the main point was quite substantive: typically, an English expression is such that, with its meaning fixed, there are a variety of distinct things to be said in using it on some production of it or other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Augustine's Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to ChristianityTravis E. AblesBrian Dobell. Augustine's Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 250. Cloth, $82.00.The question of Augustine's Platonism is famously vexed. Since Peter Brown, the standard reading holds that Augustine did not move beyond the Neoplatonism of his early dialogues until he studied the writings of the apostle Paul (...) in the mid-390s CE, after which his distinctive theology begins to emerge. In this book, Brian Dobell's basic claim is that, whatever the validity of the "volitional conversion" of book 8, Augustine is not truly converted to orthodox Christianity until he discards the Photinian (adoptionist) Christology he admits to in Confessions [hereafter conf.] 7.19.25, and discards the Platonic ascent as a means to contemplative union with God, both of which take place with the reading of Paul. But the book is equally motivated by a concern to defend the historicity of conf.; Dobell claims it is perfectly reliable, once we understand the latter half of book 7 not as a few months in 386, but as a compressed narrative spanning Augustine's entire development until his true conversion to Christianity around 395. [End Page 137]Dobell develops this argument by isolating Augustine's twofold way of salvation in the writings of the late 380s. First is the "way of authority," in which Augustine's putative Photinian Christology portrays Christ as a kind of "poor man's Plato, sent to provide a path to salvation for the uneducated masses" (96). The human Jesus is "assumed" by God and is as "a man of outstanding wisdom" (73) but is not the incarnate Son. Dobell analyzes the homo assumptus/susceptus language of the early writings, arguing that Augustine does not truly hold an orthodox Christology until 396, concordant with the development of his theology of operative grace. The second, much longer section of the book concerns the "way of reason," the intellectualist path of salvation expressed in Augustine's early obsession with the liberal disciplines. Dobell dissects the Platonic ascents of conf. 7, adducing verbal and conceptual parallels from texts ca. 387–390 (De immortalitate animae, De ordine, De libero arbitrio, De vera religione) showing how Augustine's métaphysique des degrés d'être, a concept Dobell borrows from Olivier Du Roy, provides both a means of articulating these ascents and an answer to the problem of evil. But by De doctrina christiana, Augustine has decisively rejected the Platonic ascent and the liberal disciplines, and it simply remains for his Christology to come in line for the "intellectual conversion" to be complete.Dobell's book is a significant addition to the current debate. His knowledge of the first decade or so of Augustine's literary output is impressive, and his familiarity with the secondary literature is considerable, though not encyclopedic—he misses the work of J. Patout Burns, which complicates the Pauline thesis through consideration of the anti-Donatist literature. Dobell offers magisterial and invaluable discussions of famously fraught topics such as Augustine's indecisiveness about the preexistence of the soul, or the volitional solution to the problem of evil. There are some problems with Dobell's argument, though. While his main thesis that conf. 7.9.13ff. is a kind of précis of almost a decade of intellectual development deserves serious consideration, and is an elegant solution to debates about the historicity of Augustine's narrative in conf., the supporting arguments Dobell employs are less persuasive. A major portion of his book revolves around the contention that Augustine's early, heretical Photinian Christology extends much longer than modern scholarship has realized, that Augustine rectifies this Christology in conjunction with a Pauline soteriology of grace, and that all of this has to happen before Augustine's conversion is complete. If we suspend the question of normativity inherent in deciding Augustine's "orthodoxy" (particularly prior to Chalcedon), Dobell still does not succeed in showing that the early "pedagogical" homo assumptus Christology is, in fact, adoptionist; indeed, his evidence is often rather weak (for a tacit admission, see 73). On the flip... (shrink)

The ethics and moral psychology of the Phaedo crucially depend on claims made uniquely about bodily desire. This paper offers an analysis and defense of the account of bodily desire in the dialogue, arguing that bodily desires – desires with their source in processes or conditions of the body – are characterized by three features: motivational pull, assertoric force, and intensity. Desires with these features target the soul’s rational functions with distinctive forms of imprisonment. They target the soul’s capacity to (...) rule with servility; and they target the soul’s capacity for knowledge with confinement in the visible world. (shrink)

A relatively new debate in ethics concerns the relationship between one's present obligations and how one would act in the future. One popular view is actualism, which holds that what an agent would do in the future affects her present obligations. Agent's future behavior is held fixed and the agent's present obligations are determined by what would be best to do now in light of how the agent would act in the future. Doug Portmore defends a new view he calls (...) moral securitism, which is supposed to avoid the problems associated with actualism. On this account, what an agent would do in the future is treated as fixed iff that agent's future actions are not currently under the agent's present deliberative control. φ-ing is under an agent's present deliberative control iff whether the agent φ's depends upon the immediate outcome of the agent's present deliberations. I argue that moral securitism falls prey to two of the same serious problems that actualism does: it lets agents avoid incurring moral obligations because they have rotten moral dispositions and entails that agents ought to perform truly terribly acts. After providing a few standard counter-examples to actualism to show how it is plagued with these two problems, I offer my own example which demonstrates that moral securitism is subject to a version of these same two problems. I then review Portmore's response to my objection, arguing that it fails. I end the paper by offering a tentative revision of moral securitism that would allow it to avoid the aforementioned problems. (shrink)

If God exists, why isn't His existence more apparent? In recent analytic philosophy this longstanding question has been developed into an argument for atheism typically referred to as the 'problem of divine hiddenness'. My goal here is to put forward a new reply. The basic idea is that there is some reason to think that for many of us, our moral conduct would not improve even if God's existence were not subject to doubt. However, immoral conduct in such a state (...) of affairs would be even more immoral, and hence justly subject to greater punishment, than it is in a state of affairs in which God's existence is subject to doubt. As such, God mercifully remains 'hidden' in order to limit our moral culpability. (shrink)

Recent work on Mary Shepherd has largely focused on her metaphysics, especially as a response to Berkeley and Hume. However, relatively little attention has thus far been paid to the epistemological aspects of Shepherd’s program. What little attention Shepherd’s epistemology has received has tended to cast her as providing an unsatisfactory response to the skeptical challenge issued by Hume. For example, Walter Ott and Jeremy Fantl have each suggested that Shepherd cannot avoid Hume’s inductive skepticism even if she is granted (...) her metaphysics. In this paper, I examine Shepherd’s epistemology and argue that her response to Hume is more successful than the current literature suggests. In particular, I argue that, if Shepherd is granted her metaphysics, she can answer Hume’s demand for a rational justification of ordinary inductive inferences via a deductively justified uniformity principle and an appeal to parsimony. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg’s “problem of divine hiddenness” has generated much discussion. Swinburne has replied with his “responsibility argument,” according to which God allows some nonresistant nonbelief in order to foster the good of human responsibility, with some people tasked with leading others to belief in God. Schellenberg has supplied detailed replies to Swinburne. My goal is to provide a new formulation of the responsibility argument that defuses Schellenberg’s objections.

This is a short reply to Dan Demetriou's "Ashes of Our Fathers: Racist Monuments and the Tribal Right." Both are included in Oxford University Press's Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues That Divide Us.

Deprivationism cannot accommodate the common sense assumption that we should lament our death iff, and to the extent that, it is bad for us. Call this the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption. As such, either this assumption needs to be rejected or deprivationism does. I first argue that the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption is false. I then attempt to figure out which facts our attitudes concerning death should track. I suggest that each person should have two distinct (...) attitudes toward death: one determined by agent’s reasonable expectations about when she will die and one determined by the amount of metaphysically possible good one reasonably believes death precludes. (shrink)