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)

In this book, Travis DeCook explores the theological and political innovations found in early modern accounts of the Bible's origins. In the charged climate produced by the Reformation and humanist historicism, writers grappled with the tension between the Bible's divine and human aspects, and they produced innovative narratives regarding the agencies and processes through which the Bible came into existence and was transmitted. DeCook investigates how these accounts of Scripture's production were taken up beyond the expected boundaries of biblical (...) study, and were redeployed as the theological basis for wide-reaching arguments about the proper ordering of human life. DeCook provides a new, critical perspective on ideas regarding secularity, secularization, and modernity, challenging the dominant narratives regarding the Bible's role in these processes. He shows how these engagements with the Bible's origins prompt a rethinking of formulations of secularity and secularization in our own time. (shrink)

The ontology of Bohmian mechanics includes both the universal wave function and particles. Proposals for understanding the physical significance of the wave function in this theory have included the idea of regarding it as a physically-real field in its 3N-dimensional space, as well as the idea of regarding it as a law of nature. Here we introduce and explore a third possibility in which the configuration space wave function is simply eliminated—replaced by a set of single-particle pilot-wave fields living in (...) ordinary physical space. Such a re-formulation of the Bohmian pilot-wave theory can exactly reproduce the statistical predictions of ordinary quantum theory. But this comes at the rather high ontological price of introducing an infinite network of interacting potential fields which influence the particles’ motion through the pilot-wave fields. We thus introduce an alternative approach which aims at achieving empirical adequacy with a more modest ontological complexity, and provide some preliminary evidence for optimism regarding the program of trying to replace the configuration space wave function with a set of fields in ordinary physical space. (shrink)

Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts (...) less tightly to the linguistic forms which express them than traditional views of the matter, and in two directions: a given linguistic form, meaning fixed, may express an indefinite variety of thoughts; one thought can be expressed in an indefinite number of syntactically and semantically distinct ways. Travis highlights the importance of this view for linguistic theory, and shows how it gives new form to a variety of traditional philosophical problems. (shrink)

Recent research in moral psychology has highlighted how the current internal states of observers can influence their moral judgments of others’ actions. In this article, we argue that an important internal state that serves such a function is the sense of control one has over one’s own actions. Across four studies, we show that an individual’s own current sense of control is positively associated with the intensity of moral judgments of the actions of others. We also show that this effect (...) extends not only to judgments of rightness and wrongness (Study 1), but also to assignments of reward and punishment (Study 2). Finally, we demonstrate that this effect is based on the current experience of control by showing a moderation of the effect via motivational states (promotion; prevention) that either lead one to incorporate or disregard internal states when making judgments (Study 3) and by subtly manipulating participants’ sense of control (Study 4). (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)

A small industry has grown up around these works - Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens - complaining not just about their theological illiteracy but also about their ...

Complex work in teams requires coordination across team members and their technology as well as the ability to change and adapt over time to achieve effective performance. To support such complex interactions, recent efforts have worked toward the design of adaptive human-autonomy teaming systems that can provide feedback in or near real time to achieve the desired individual or team results. However, while significant advancements have been made to better model and understand the dynamics of team interaction and its relationship (...) with task performance, appropriate measures of team coordination and computational methods to detect changes in coordination have not yet been widely investigated. Having the capacity to measure coordination in real time is quite promising as it provides the opportunity to provide adaptive feedback that may influence and regulate teams’ coordination patterns and, ultimately, drive effective team performance. A critical requirement to reach this potential is having the theoretical and empirical foundation from which to do so. Therefore, the first goal of the paper is to review approaches to coordination dynamics, identify current research gaps, and draw insights from other areas, such as social interaction, relationship science, and psychotherapy. The second goal is to collate extant work on feedback and advance ideas for adaptive feedback systems that have potential to influence coordination in a way that can enhance the effectiveness of team interactions. In addressing these two goals, this work lays the foundation as well as plans for the future of human-autonomy teams that augment team interactions using coordination-based measures. (shrink)

Charles Travis presents a series of essays on philosophy of perception, inspired by the insights of Gottlob Frege. He engages with a range of contemporary thinkers, and explores key issues including how perception can make the world bear on what we do or think, and what sorts of capacities we draw on in representing something as (being) something.

The growing field of machine morality has becoming increasingly concerned with how to develop artificial moral agents. However, there is little consensus on what constitutes an ideal moral agent let alone an artificial one. Leveraging a recent account of heroism in humans, the aim of this paper is to provide a prospective framework for conceptualizing, and in turn designing ideal artificial moral agents, namely those that would be considered heroic robots. First, an overview of what it means to be an (...) artificial moral agent is provided. Then, an overview of a recent account of heroism that seeks to define the construct as the dynamic and interactive integration of character strengths and situational constraints that afford the opportunity for moral behavior . With this as a foundation, a discussion is provided for what it might mean for a robot to be an ideal moral agent by proposing a dynamic and interactive connectionist model of robotic heroism. Given the limited accounts of robots engaging in moral behavior, a case for extending robotic moral capacities beyond just being a moral agent to the level of heroism is supported by drawing from exemplar situations where robots demonstrate heroism in popular film and fiction. (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.

I consider how complex logical operations might self-assemble in a signalling-game context via composition of simpler underlying dispositions. On the one hand, agents may take advantage of pre-evolved dispositions; on the other hand, they may co-evolve dispositions as they simultaneously learn to combine them to display more complex behaviour. In either case, the evolution of complex logical operations can be more efficient than evolving such capacities from scratch. Showing how complex phenomena like these might evolve provides an additional path to (...) the possibility of evolving more or less rich notions of compositionality. This helps provide another facet of the evolutionary story of how sufficiently rich, human-level cognitive or linguistic capacities may arise from simpler precursors. 1Signalling and Self-assembly2Simple Unary Logic Games3Composing Unary Functions for Binary Inputs 3.1Utilizing pre-evolved dispositions3.2Co-evolving logical dispositions3.3Learning appropriate outputs3.4Taking account of the full state-space of unary games3.5Role-free composition4Discussion 4.1Efficacy and efficiency of learning complex dispositions4.2Other binary operations4.3To infinity and beyond5Conclusion. (shrink)

An abiding puzzle in the Phaedo is the transition in the text from initial pessimism about the possibility of wisdom during human life to a more optimistic view. Prominent interpretations posit different kinds or degrees of wisdom at issue in the two sets of passages. By contrast, I argue that the pessimistic view rests on the implicit premise that the soul cannot be completely purified during human life—a premise which arises from an initial conception of impurity and its cause. In (...) developing his eschatology, Socrates refines this conception and rejects the implicit premise. Because the embodied soul can be completely purified, it can achieve philosophical wisdom as well. (shrink)

Provides an international perspective as to the potential of restorative justice to * Deliver better ways of dealing with offenders and victims * Reduce the use ...

Phenomenology and logical positivism both subscribed to an empirical-verifiability criterion of mental or linguistic meaning. The acceptance of this criterion confronted them with the same problem: how to understand the Other as a subject with his own experience, if the existence and nature of the Other's experiences cannot be verified. Husserl tackled this problem in the Cartesian Meditations, but he could not reconcile the verifiability criterion with understanding the Other's feelings and sensations. Carnap's solution was to embrace behaviorism and eliminate (...) the idea of private sensations, but behaviorism has well-known difficulties. Heidegger broke this impasse by suggesting that each person's being included being-with, an innate capacity for understanding the Other. To be human is to be "hardwired" to make sense of the Other without having to verify the Other's private sensations. I suggest that being-with emerged from an evolutionary imperative for conspecific animals to recognize each other and to coordinate their activities. Wittgenstein also rejected the verifiability criterion. He theorized that the meaning of a term is its usage and that terms about private sensations were meaningful because they have functions in our language-games. For example, "I'm in pain," like a cry of pain, functions to get the attention of others and motivate others to help. Wittgenstein's theory shows how Dasein's being-with includes "primitive" adaptive behavior such as cries, smiles, and threatening or playful gesture. As Dasein is acculturated, these behaviors are partially superseded by functionally equivalent linguistic expressions. (shrink)

A photographic journey alongside hunters in Wisconsin, Blaze Orange captures the joy, excitement, and camaraderie of deer hunting in the state.

This paper explores a type of poetry, music, and theater that is said to be responsible for the birth of participatory democracy. While Aristotle and Nietzsche briefly mention a similar genealogy of democracy in their work, Book III of Plato’s Laws archives a remarkable history of how participatory democracy emerged in Athens’s theater. After connecting Plato's account to a participatory style of music and poetry that is associated initially with the term polyphōnia, I consider a line of philosophical commentary on (...) this type of music from Plato to Rousseau to Derrida. For these philosophers, I claim, polyphōnia disrupts the political hierarchy of those with and those with bare voices and encourages equal participation. If the phenomenon of polyphōnia is indeed behind Plato’s historical account of democracy in the Laws, then it may tell us how democracy was first performed in the theater and how it was initially critiqued by philosophers. (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)

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)

Sometimes retracted or refuted scientific information is used and propagated long after it is understood to be misleading. Likewise, retracted news items may spread and persist, despite being publi...

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)

This study compared professional and amateur classical musicians matched for age, gender, and education on reaction times during the Stroop color-word test, brainwaves during an auditory ERP task and during paired reaction-time tasks, responses on the Gibbs Sociomoral Reflection questionnaire, and self-reported frequencies of peak experiences. Professional musicians were characterized by: lower color-word interference effects , faster categorization of rare expected stimuli , and a trend for faster processing of rare unexpected stimuli , higher scores on the Sociomoral Reflection questionnaire, (...) and more frequent peak experiences during rest, tasks, and sleep. Both groups had high values on the Brain Integration Scale. These findings are interpreted in light of a Unified Theory of Performance, which posits that effectiveness in any area is influenced by one’s level of mind-brain development—emotional, cognitive, moral, ego and cortical development—with higher mind-brain development supporting greater effectiveness in any domain. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest that differing approaches to the science of social cognition mirror the arguments between radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognition. We contrast the use in social cognition of theoretical inference and mental simulation mechanisms with approaches emphasizing a direct perception of others’ mental states. We build from a recent integrative framework unifying these divergent perspectives through the use of dual-process theory and supporting social neuroscience research. Our elaboration considers two complementary notions of direct perception: one (...) primarily stemming from ecological psychology and the other from enactive cognition theory. We use this as the foundation from which to offer an account of the informational basis for social information and assert a set of research propositions to further the science of social cognition. In doing so, we point out how perception of the minds of others can be supported in some cases by lawful information, supporting direct perception of social affordances and perhaps, mental states, and in other cases by cues that support indirect perceptual inference. Our goal is to extend accounts of social cognition by integrating advances across disciplines to provide a multi-level and multi-theoretic description that can advance this field and offer a means through which to reconcile radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Michael Walzer argues that except in cases involving genocide or mass slaughter, humanitarian intervention is unjustifiable because “citizens get the government they deserve, or, at least, the government for which they are ‘fit.’”Yet, if people are autonomous and deserve the government that rules over them, then it would seem that they are responsible for the government’s actions, including their nation’s wars of aggression.That line of thought undermines the doctrine of noncombatant immunity, which is perhaps the most important of Walzer’s jus (...) in bello principles. In this way, the concept of self-determination frustrates Walzer’s attempts to keep jus ad bellum and jus in bello considerations separate. (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)

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)

Charles Travis; IX*—On Constraints of Generality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 165–188, https://doi.org/10.10.

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)

Hirst distills the relevant and common themes that have been discussed throughout this topic. He successfully integrates the various interdisciplinary works on the dynamics and outcomes associated with conversational remembering and how it is currently changing due to social media. Notably, he ends with thoughts about the future of conversational remembering research and areas of future research.

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)

It has been argued that the attempt to meet indispensability arguments for realism in mathematics, by appeal to counterfactual statements, presupposes a view of mathematical modality according to which even though mathematical entities do not exist, they might have existed. But I have sought to defend this controversial view of mathematical modality from various objections derived from the fact that the existence or nonexistence of mathematical objects makes no difference to the arrangement of concrete objects. This defense of the controversial (...) view of mathematical modality obviously falls far short of a full endorsement of the counterfactual approach, but I hope my remarks may serve to help keep such an approach a live option. (shrink)