A major philosophical mind in his day, William Paley wrote in a lucid style that made complex ideas more accessible to a wide readership. This work, first published in 1785, was based on the lectures he gave on moral philosophy at Christ's College, Cambridge. Cited in parliamentary debates and remaining on the syllabus at Cambridge into the twentieth century, it stands as one of the most influential texts to emerge from the Enlightenment period in Britain. An orthodox theologian, grounding (...) his utilitarian ethics in strong religious faith, Paley held notably progressive views on issues of toleration and the slave trade. His perspicuity prompted one contemporary to remark that the book 'presents a subject which has always been considered as harsh and difficult, in the most agreeable and intelligible form … we sit down to be informed of our duty, and are surprised to meet with amusement'. (shrink)

This work opens with a development of the notion of Unfathomed Knowledge, which Bartley makes clear by using it to explain such recent scientific advances as the development of drugs for the treatment of AIDS, and by showing its implications for such far-flung fields as the Marxist theory of alienation, the sociology of knowledge, patent law, and morality.

Political authority is the moral power to impose moral duties upon a perhaps unwilling citizenry. David Enoch has proposed that authority be understood as a matter of "robust" duty-giving. This paper argues that Enoch's conditions for attempted robust duty- or reason-giving are, along with his non-normative success condition, implausibly strong. Moreover, Enoch's attempt and normative- success conditions ignore two facts. The first is that success requires that citizens be tolerant of modest errors by the authority, which means that, in conditions (...) of modest error, performing as directed must have a non-instrumental, intrinsic value. The second is that an attempt to exercise authority involves an intention to trigger a moral principle endowing conforming performances with intrinsic value. The mystery of political authority is the mystery of how official directives could possibly suffice to endow conforming performances with intrinsic value. (shrink)

Now under what circumstances is a conditional true? Even to raise this question is to depart from everyday attitudes. An affirmation of the form ‘if p then q’ is commonly felt less as an affirmation of a conditional than as a conditional affirmation of the consequent…. If, after we have made such an affirmation, the antecedent turns out true, then we consider ourselves committed to the consequent, and are ready to acknowledge error if it proves false. If on the other (...) hand the antecedent turns out to have been false, our conditional affirmation is as if it had never been made. (shrink)

Designed to provide scientific personnel, policymakers, and the public with a succinct summary of the public aspects of scientific issues, this book focuses on how values and science intersect and how social values can be brought to bear on complex technical enterprises. Themes examined include: (1) relation of science and technology to human values (citing ways science and technology influence social philosophies); (2) changing sociotechnical milieu (describing recent trends toward politicization in technical endeavors); (3) complexion of science and social sciences (...) (surveying the attributes of the social sciences); (4) professionalism and responsibility (exploring the need for stewardship); (5) architectonics of technical trust (examining the interlocking elements of technical trust and focusing on the recombinant DNA controversy); (6) societal guidance of inquiry and application (discussing the possibilities and limits of scientific freedom); (7) systematic assessment for decision making (offering suggestions for dealing with fact/value distinctions); (8) social values and ethics (examining the role of values in decision making); (9) science and technology in the polis (reviewing ways of managing and reducing undue polarization in sociotechnical disputes); and (10) stewardship (suggesting needs and opportunities for exercising technical responsibility). An extensive bibliography is provided. (ML). (shrink)

The following paper presents a characterization of three distinctions fundamental to computationalism, viz., the distinction between analog and digital machines, representation and nonrepresentation-using systems, and direct and indirect perceptual processes. Each distinction is shown to rest on nothing more than the methodological principles which justify the explanatory framework of the special sciences.

Throughout the developing world, it is a well-documented fact that women farmers tend to get lower yields than their male counterparts. Typically this is attributed to disproportionate access to high-quality inputs and labor, with some even arguing there could be a skills-gap stemming from unbalanced access to training and education. This article examines the gender-based yield gap in the context of Zambian maize producers. In addition to the usual drivers, we argue that Zambia’s patriarchal and multi-tiered land distribution system could (...) disfavor women with respect to accessing quality soils. We are uniquely able to control for soil characteristics using farm data from a sample of 1573 fields with accompanying soil analysis. We find an expected difference in yields, but no evidence of a gap in unobserved characteristics, like skill, after controlling for access to inputs, especially quality soil, suggesting women are indeed disproportionately disadvantaged. We discuss how our findings could be used to develop self-targeting policy interventions that could empower women and would be consistent with the government’s stated equity goals. (shrink)

This is the text available from Emory University.

Business ethics in the new millennium will confront both new and old questions that are being transformed by the changed pace and direction of human evolution. These questions embrace human nature, values, inquiring methods, technological change, geopolitics, natural disasters, and the moral role of business in all of these. The emergence and acceptance of technosymbolic phenomena may signal a slow transition of carbon-based human life toward greater dependence upon silicon-based virtualities across a wide range ofhuman possibilities. The resultant moral issues (...) call for a renewal and redefinition of business ethics theories and methods. (shrink)

SummaryScholars of international relations generally invoke Hobbes as the quintessential theorist of international anarchy. David Armitage challenges this characterisation, arguing that Hobbes is regarded as a foundational figure in international relations theory in spite of as much as because of what he wrote on the subject. Thus, for Armitage, Hobbes is not the theorist of anarchy that he is made out to be. This article agrees with the general thrust of Armitage's critique while maintaining that it is still possible to (...) imagine Hobbes as a theorist of anarchy. Hobbes is a theorist of anarchy, not in a political sense, but in a metaphysical sense. This conception of anarchy is a reflection of a comprehensive theological account of reality that is grounded in an omnipotent God. Any historical inquiry into the foundations of modern international thought must take account of theology, because theology defines the ultimate coordinates of reality in terms of which the concepts of international thought are intelligible. (shrink)

Aristotle’s analysis of emotion and his moral psychology are discussed, as are the relation of virtue to emotion, the status of animals, human friendship and the subordinate role of slaves and women. Persuasion through words and character also receive attention.

The article examines and extends work bringing together engineering ethics and Science and Technology Studies, which had built upon Diane Vaughan’s analysis of the Challenger shuttle accident as a test case. Reconsidering the use of her term “normalization of deviance,” the article argues for a middle path between moralizing against and excusing away engineering practices contributing to engineering disaster. To explore an illustrative pedagogical case and to suggest avenues for constructive research developing this middle path, it examines the emergence of (...) green chemistry and green engineering. Green chemistry began when Paul Anastas and John Warner developed a set of new rules for chemical synthesis that sought to learn from missed opportunities to avoid environmental damage in the twentieth century, an approach that was soon extended to engineering as well. Examination of tacit assumptions about historical counterfactuals in recent, interdisciplinary discussions of green chemistry illuminate competing views about the field’s prospects. An integrated perspective is sought, addressing how both technical practice within chemistry and engineering and the influence of a wider “social movement” can play a role in remedying environmental problems. (shrink)

Consider Dretske's measles example (from page 74 in his Knowldege and the Flow of Information (MIT/Bradford: 1981) ): since the question of whether Alice's being one of Herman's children carries the information that she has the measles is a question about conditional probabilities, we must be careful about our specification of the condition, the antecedent. Although we are to suppose that it is a true generalization that all of Herman's children have the measles, since that is a coincidence, we can (...) just as well suppose that Alice is an only child with the measles. It is of course true that the conditional probability of Alice's having measles given that she has the measles is 1; but that is not relevant to the question Dretske raises. In Dretske's example, the question is whether Alice's being Herman's child carries the information that she has measles. And so the relevant condition in this example is simply Alice's being Herman's child. While it is in fact true that Alice has the measles, that isn't part of the condition: for the question is, "how probable is the one state of affairs given some other state of affairs,". (shrink)

A number of philosophers have defended the view that mental or psychological verbs share a certain distinctive logical feature, though there is disagreement as to exactly what feature it is. Harold Morick has recently accused several of these philosophers of having “ignored or misinterpreted” verbs of a certain kind, in their search for this characteristic trait of mental verbs.The verbs he is talking about are those that represent some of a person's activities, which are physical activities but which that person (...) must allegedly be conscious in order to perform. Since a “basic sentence” containing such a verb typically entails the existence of its object's referent, Morick contends, the verb in question fails io count as “intentional” either on Brentano's definition, on Chisholm's, or on mine. Thus, Brentano, Chisholm and I have failed to make good our claim that all mental or psychological verbs are intentional. (shrink)

Traditionally, identity and supervenience have been proposed in philosophy of mind as metaphysical accounts of how mental activities (fully understood, as they might be at the end of science) relate to brain processes. Kievet et al. suggest that to be relevant to cognitive neuroscience, these philosophical positions must make empirically testable claims and be evaluated accordingly – they cannot sit on the sidelines, awaiting the hypothetical completion of cognitive neuroscience. We agree with the authors on the importance of rendering these (...) positions relevant to ongoing science. We disagree, however, with their proposal that a metaphysical relationship (identity or supervenience) should “serve as a means to conceptually organize and guide the analysis of neurological and behavioral data” (p. 7). Instead, we advance a different view of the goals of cognitive neuroscience and of the proper means of relating metaphysics and explanation. Our central objection to the psychometric approach deployed by Kievet et al. is that the formal models only account for correlations between variables (measurements) and do not aid in explaining phenomena. Cognitive neuroscience is concerned with the latter. We develop this point in section 2 in which we present what we find to be problematic in their proposed models. In section 3 we advance an account of what is required to explain phenomena: (a) providing an adequate description of a phenomenon; and (b) characterizing the mechanism responsible for it. In doing so we will characterize a version of the identity theory, heuristic identity theory (HIT) which figures centrally in developing such explanations and illustrate its role in what we take to.. (shrink)

The project of referring to localized cognitive operations in the brain has a long history and many impressive successes. It is a core element in the practice of giving mechanistic explanations of mental abilities. But it has also been challenged by prominent critics. One of the critics’ claims is that brain regions are not specialized for specific cognitive operations and any science that refers to them is misguided. Most recently this claim has been advanced by theorists promoting a dynamical-systems perspective (...) on cognition. There are, however, two ways to view the dynamical-systems perspective. The first is as a competitor to the mechanist perspective, rejecting altogether the conception of the brain as a mechanism or set of mechanisms underlying mental phenomena and thereby rejecting any reference to localized cognitive operations. The second is as a corrective to an overly simplistic conception of a mechanism and as complementary to a more adequate understanding of how mechanisms function. In this chapter I defend the later perspective. On this perspective, the traditional project of referring to localized mental operations in the brain is still important, but both the cognitive operations and brain regions in which they are localized must be conceived in the context of a dynamically active system. (shrink)