Slurs are pejorative expressions that derogate individuals or groups on the basis of their gender, race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation and so forth. In the constantly growing literature on slurs, it has become customary to appeal to so-called “neutral counterparts” for explaining the extension and truth-conditional content of slurring terms. More precisely, it is commonly assumed that every slur shares its extension and literal content with a non-evaluative counterpart term. I think this assumption is unwarranted and, in this paper, I (...) shall present two arguments against it. (i) A careful comparison of slurs with complex or thick group-referencing pejoratives lacking neutral counterparts shows that these are in fact very hard to distinguish. (ii) Slurs lack the referential stability of their alleged neutral counterparts, which suggests that they are not coreferential. Developing (ii) will involve introducing a new concept which I regard as essential for understanding how slurs behave in natural language: referential flexibility. I shall support my claims by looking at historical and current ways in which slurs and other pejorative terms are used, and I shall argue that both etymological data and new empirical data support the conclusion that the assumption of neutral counterparts not only is unwarranted but obscures our understanding of what slurs are, and what speakers do with them. (shrink)

Although many scientists and engineers insist that technologies are value-neutral, philosophers of technology have long argued that they are wrong. In this paper, I introduce a new argument against the claim that technologies are value-neutral. This argument complements and extends, rather than replaces, existing arguments against value-neutrality. I formulate the Value-Neutrality Thesis, roughly, as the claim that a technological innovation can have bad effects, on balance, only if its users have “vicious” or condemnable preferences. (...) After sketching a microeconomic model for explaining or predicting a technology’s impact on individuals’ behavior, I argue that a particular technological innovation can create or exacerbate collective action problems, even in the absence of vicious preferences. Technologies do this by increasing the net utility of refusing to cooperate. I also argue that a particular technological innovation can induce short-sighted behavior because of humans’ tendency to discount future benefits too steeply. I suggest some possible extensions of my microeconomic model of technological impacts. These extensions would enable philosophers of technology to consider agents with mixed motives—i.e., agents who harbor some vicious preferences but also some aversion to acting on them—and to apply the model to questions about the professional responsibilities of engineers, scientists, and other inventors. (shrink)

Since 2014, British schools have been required to ‘actively promote’ the value of ‘mutual respect’ to the children in their care. This is relatively unproblematic: liberals are agreed that good citizenship education will involve teaching mutual respect. However, there is disagreement over how ‘respect’ should be understood and what it should imply for norms of respectful classroom discussion. Some political liberals have indicated that when engaging in discussion in the classroom, students should provide only neutral reasons to defend their views. (...) This paper provides a number of arguments against this claim. For example, I argue that this norm relies on a distorted understanding of what it is to respect others and that it stifles the development of civic and epistemic virtue in the next generation of citizens. Even from within the perspective of political liberalism, there are good reasons to favour critical discussion of non-neutral reasons. Education policy should therefore accord greater priority to discussion of students’ actual motivating reasons than to discussion constrained by a norm of neutral discourse. (shrink)

Though largely unnoticed, in "Two Dogmas" Quine himself invokes a distinction: a distinction between logical and analytic truths. Unlike analytic statements equating 'bachelor' with 'unmarried man', strictly logical tautologies relating two word-tokens of the same word-type, e.g., 'bachelor' and 'bachelor' are true merely in virtue of basic phonological form, putatively an exclusively non-semantic function of perceptual categorization or brute stimulus behavior. Yet natural language phonemic categorization is not entirely free of interpretive semantic considerations. "Phonemic reductionism" in both its linguistic and (...) behavioral, Newbury Park, CA, Sage Publications, 164-167) guise is false. The semantic basis of phonological equivalence, however, has repercussions vis-à-vis Quine's critique of analyticity. A consistent rejection of meaning-based equivalencies eliminates not only analyticity, but imposes a form of phonological eliminativism too. Phonological eliminativism is the reductio result of applying Quinean meaning skepticism to the phonological typing of natural language. But unlike analyticity, phonology is presumably not subject to philosophical dismissal. The semantic basis of natural language phonology serves to neutralize Quine's argument against analyticity: without the semantics of meaning, more than just synonymy is lost; basic phonology must also be forfeited. (shrink)

According to what we call the neutral view of poisoning the well, poisoning the well is an argumentative move that appeals to an opponent’s social identity as an attempt to diminish their credibility. This view holds that poisoning the well is a very special and dangerous fallacy, because it silences the recipient on the basis of their social identity, and therefore never counts as a legitimate move in a debate. In this paper, we take issue with this view. First, we (...) show that this account is committed to the ideal of neutrality, which is highly problematic. Second, we argue that after abandoning the ideal of neutrality, it’s clear that not all cases of poisoning the well constitute silencing. Finally, we reflect on the phenomenon of poisoning the well from a non-neutral approach, and explore further situations that could count as instances of it. Poisoning the well is, many times, a virtuous move. (shrink)

The dissertation begins with a question: Are the mind and brain the same or different? -/- I spend Chapter 1 showing how this simple question leads to a philosophical puzzle known as the mind-body problem. By way of explaining the puzzle, I show that there are two demands that a satisfactory solution to the puzzle must meet – what I call the Ontological and Explanatory Demands. I also explain why ontological idealism is not an attractive solution to the problem. Along (...) the way, I refine the starting question into something more familiar to current discussions of the mind-body problem: Are phenomenal properties fundamentally the same or fundamentally different from physical properties? -/- Chapter 2 develops the impasse that contemporary philosophers find themselves in by discussing the Causal Argument against dualism and the Epistemic Argument against materialism. Neither materialism nor dualism seem capable of meeting both demands from Chapter 1. Thus, the rest of the dissertation is an exploration of a fourth, non-standard solution – neutral monism – that hopes to meet these demands. -/- Chapter 3 shows how the most popular way to develop neutral monism, called Russellian monism, does not work. The basic problem is that most ways to develop this view falls to a dilemma such that it is either incoherent or really just one of the more standard solutions to the puzzle in new dressing. The final two options – Reductionist Russellian Monism and Epistemic Russellian Monism – have the capacity to accomplish the goal of neutral monism, but the uniquely Russellian aspects of the views do nothing to help accomplish this. As such, I leave Russellian monism behind and focus on non-Russellian views. -/- Chapter 4 argues that reductionist neutral monism cannot work. Since it relies on reductionism, it faces a different dilemma. Either the phenomenal can be reduced or it cannot. If it cannot, then obviously reductionist neutral monism is false. If it can, then there is no motivation for supposing that it reduces to some neutral stuff rather than reducing to the physical. So, the only possibility is to attempt to develop an epistemic neutral monism. I spend the majority of the chapter explaining what this style of solution might look like, paying close attention to very similar types of answers known as a posteriori physicalism and the powerful qualities view. The result is that epistemic neutral monism as standardly employed also can’t be made to work, but I suggest one final possibility that relies on a conventionalist metaphysics. -/- Chapter 5 is where I develop an account of conventionalist neutral monism and explain how it avoids the common dilemma raised against Russellian monism. Here I show how a conventionalist neutral monism is both coherent and substantially different from the other solutions to the mind-body problem. -/- Chapter 6 relates the solution developed in Chapter 5 to the question raised at the beginning of the dissertation and shows how a conventionalist neutral monist ought to answer the question. This answer does two things. First, it helps explain what goes wrong with the standard understanding of the Causal Argument and the Epistemic Argument that creates the appearance of an impasse. Second, it shows how conventionalist neutral monism successfully meets the demands developed in Chapter 1. (shrink)

Hanks has defended a novel account of what propositions are. His key argument against Soames' rival view is that predication is not neutral. According to Hanks, predication is essentially committal. I show that Hanks' argument for this conclusion raises problems for his own account of questions and orders.

A significant proportion of states grants constitutional recognition to a single religion, leaving various other religions within society constitutionally unrecognised. Many philosophers believe that this is problematic even when such recognition is (almost) wholly symbolic. The four most common and prima facie plausible objections to what I call ‘mono-recognition’ are that it alienates citizens who do not adhere to the constitutionally recognised religion; that it symbolically subordinates these individuals; that it reinforces oppressive social hierarchies; and that it violates principles of (...) justificatory neutrality. This article shows that none of these objections establish that mono-recognition is wrong within contemporary societies—or even merely pro tanto wrong. However, it goes on to propose a novel argument that does suggest that this type of religious establishment is pro tanto wrong within most societies, if not all. According to this argument, which I refer to as the ‘desire-based objection’, mono-recognition is pro tanto wrong when it fails to accommodate at least some citizens (a) who desire constitutional recognition of their unrecognised religion on morally reasonable, or simply not unreasonable, grounds or who would do so if they were to independently ponder the possibility of receiving such recognition without having to fear any social backlash that receiving it might cause and (b) whose religion is entitled to constitutional recognition based on the size of its population within society; the societal contributions of its members; and any injustices that its members have suffered at the hands of the state or the wider society. As I show, even when one particular religion has the strongest claim to constitutional recognition, this does not normally justify granting sole recognition to it given that the weaker claims of other religions could be accommodated under a system whereby state religions are rotated and recognised for different durations depending on the strength of their claims. (shrink)

Those who favor and those who oppose the interruption of pregnancy with anencephalic fetuses answer the question ‘what is the right to life?’ differently. Those in favor argue that life exists only when it is ‘viable’; that is to say, when cerebral activities occur or may occur. Those who oppose it argue that it is not possible to describe ‘life’ as residing in a particular quality, since life ‘exists from conception’. In fact, in both cases, the noun ‘life’ is being (...) defined by a particular quality, either as ‘viable’ or as ‘existing from the time of conception’. Also, simply saying that ‘there is life’ cannot count as a neutral answer since those who utter such a sentence employ an unspecified criterion to establish if there is life or not. There are two possible ways to investigate this controversial matter: either we look for a definition of ‘life’ which is neutral and objective and does not reside in a particular quality or we try to establish whether or not the search for a neutral point of view can lead to a satisfactory answer. In this article we explore the argument against the interruption of pregnancy – as defined above – in order to show 1) the impossibility of establishing a neutral point of view regarding knowledge; 2) the existence of a psychological motivation which justifies the longing for an absolute criterion for the evaluation of human actions. This psychological motivation is analyzed from a Nietzschean perspective. (shrink)

(Winner of The Res Publica Essay Prize) This article defends a moderate version of state perfectionism by using Gerald Gaus’s argument for liberal neutrality as a starting point of discussion. Many liberal neutralists reject perfectionism on the grounds of respect for persons, but Gaus has explained more clearly than most neutralists how respect for persons justifies neutrality. Against neutralists, I first argue that the state may promote the good life by appealing to what can be called (...) “the qualified judgments about the good life,” which have not been considered by liberal perfectionists including Joseph Chan and Steven Wall. Then I clear up several possible misunderstandings of these judgments, and argue that: (a) moderate perfectionism does not rely on controversial rankings of values and is committed to promoting different valuable ways of life by pluralistic promotion; and (b) moderate perfectionism requires only an indirect form of coercion in using tax money to support certain moderate perfectionist measures, which is justifiable on the grounds of citizens’ welfare. Thus, I maintain that moderate perfectionism does not disrespect citizens, and is not necessarily unfair to any particular group of people. It is, in fact, plausible and morally important. The defence of moderate perfectionism has practical implications for the state’s policies regarding art development, drug abuse, public education, and so on. (shrink)

The past few decades have seen a substantial increase in the focus on the myriad ethical implications of artificial intelligence. Included amongst the numerous issues is the existential risk that some believe could arise from the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) which is an as-of-yet hypothetical form of AI that is able to perform all the same intellectual feats as humans. This has led to extensive research into how humans can avoid losing control of an AI that is at (...) least as intelligent as the best of us. This ‘control problem’ has given rise to research into the development of ‘friendly AI’ which is a highly competent AGI that will benefit, or at the very least, not be hostile toward humans. Though my question is focused upon AI, ethics and issues surrounding the value of friendliness, I want to question the pursuit of human-friendly AI (hereafter FAI). In other words, we might ask whether worries regarding harm to humans are sufficient reason to develop FAI rather than impartially ethical AGI, or an AGI designed to take the interests of all moral patients—both human and non-human—into consideration. I argue that, given that we are capable of developing AGI, it ought to be developed with impartial, species-neutral values rather than those prioritizing friendliness to humans above all else. (shrink)

George Sher’s book Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics has, he says, two main purposes. The first is to “defuse the main reasons to deny that the state may seek to promote the good”, the other is to “develop a conception of the good that is worth promoting” (1). In this article, I will not be concerned with either of these aims. Instead, I will focus on Sher’s preliminary discussion of the “scope and meaning” of neutralism (20). I consider Sher’s (...) careful analysis of the structure of neutralism one of the book’s virtues, alongside his original theory of the good and his comprehensive and convincing arguments against neutralism. This careful analysis inspires me to attempt some critique and development. I will defend an account of neutralism according to which this doctrine puts a constraint on what reasons should enter into political reasoning. What I defend is not neutralism per se, but only this account of neutralism relative to competing accounts. I believe this account is an improvement over Sher’s, in terms of conceptual precision and normative plausibility, both in general and from the perspective of the doctrine’s proponents in particular. (shrink)

The symbolic argument against women's ordination supposes that the theological significance of Christ's sex is his saving relationship to the Church, which takes the form of that of a bridegroom and his bride. It infers that a male priest alone is fit to represent Christ in his capacity as the Saviour of the Church, and thus that only men should be ordained. Since the emergence of the symbolic argument, however, scholars have rediscovered a long tradition of understanding (...) Christ's saving relationship to the Church in maternal terms. While remaining neutral on whether women ultimately ought to be ordained or not, I argue that the Jesus as Mother tradition undermines the symbolic argument against women's ordination. Other critics of the symbolic argument tend to contest what is seen as its ‘literalist’ or ‘essentialist’ or overly gendered-valanced assumptions about priestly representation. I show that even if we grant to the symbolic argument more gendered and ‘essentialist’ views on each of the major points of disagreement in these debates, women might still be fit to represent Christ because of the maternal ways that Christ has traditionally been thought to relate to the Church. As a result, the symbolic argument may be repurposed to support women's ordination rather than undermine it. (shrink)

De Vries’ article essentially makes what could be called a negative case for state neuro-neutrality: identifying and refuting what he believes are the strongest arguments against it (de Vries 2024)...

Notes for a talk exploring Timothy Williamson's arguments against evidence neutrality.

IntroductionThe idea of neutrality is one of the trademarks and also one of the most controversial ideas of contemporary liberalism as a political philosophy. One part of this idea is that, in determining the political principle of justice, the state should be neutral with respect to individuals’ religious and metaphysical conceptions of the good or the lack thereof. In their argument against political liberalism, communitarian philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor have argued the opposite: the (...) political conception of justice must be embedded in some type of religious or metaphysical conception of the good. In contrast to these communitarians, regarded as radical perfectionists, a number of other philosophers, notably George Sher, Thomas Hurka, Joseph Raz, and Derek Parfit, have adopted a moderate version of perfectionism by shifting to a different battlefield against the liberal idea of neutrality. In addition to religious and metaphysical conceptions of the good, .. (shrink)

Philosophical studies of complex scientific concepts are predominantly “adaptationist,” arguing that conceptual complexity serves important purposes. This is a historical artifact. Having had to defend their views against a monist presumption favoring simpler concepts, pluralists and patchwork theorists felt compelled to show that complexity can be beneficial. This neglects an alternative possibility: Conceptual complexity is largely neutral, persisting simply because it does little harm. This article defends the neutral theory of conceptual complexity in two forms: (a) as a plausible (...) theory in its own right and (b) as a useful foil for adaptationist arguments. (shrink)

Materialism/physicalism that generally dominates in the contemporary analytic philosophy is challenged by fairly powerful anti-materialist arguments, notably the zombie argument (most influentially defended by David Chalmers) and the knowledge argument (the most widely discussed version of which was advanced and defended by Frank Jackson). These arguments highlight the explanatory gap from the physical (which, if materialism is true, should constitute everything that exists, including consciousness) to phenomenal mental states, the principal impossibility to explain the latter by the former, (...) and from this conclude that phenomenal consciousness is not physical, and so materialism is false. Materialist philosophers attempt to neutralize these arguments in several ways, the most influential of which is the strategy of phenomenal concepts. This article analyzes the main points of this debate with a focus on the knowledge argument, examines and responds to the main objections to the knowledge argument — that it should be mistaken because the alternative is epiphenomenalism, which is unacceptable; that no new knowledge but only new capacities and/or acquaintance are involved; that the knowledge is the same but in different forms; that the knowledge argument affects only type physicalism but not token physicalism. The case is made that psychophysical identities assumed by a posteriori physicalism are unexplainable in principle, and the postulation of brute unexplainable psychophysical identities glossed over by the strategy of phenomenal concepts amounts to dogmatic commitment (motivated by scientism) to a view despite its apparent falsity and its unintelligibility (the impossibility to explain how it can be true), made less unpalatable by offering an ad hoc theory about the mindbrain arrangement that makes us unable to see how the view can be true. As opposed to this, the position of the supporters of the knowledge argument and the zombie argument can be seen as guided by the principle of rational trust in obviousness and our capacities of judgement. (shrink)

Russell’s theory of desire in _The Analysis of_ Mind is subject to a seemingly overwhelming objection, apparently stated first by Wittgenstein and subsequently elaborated even more compellingly by Anthony Kenny. The puzzle is that, before he became a neutral monist, Russell had used essentially the same argument as part of a critique of William James’s theory of knowledge. Since Russell had already formulated the argument as part of his case against generally naturalistic, and specifically neutral monist, theories (...) of propositional attitudes, why did he think his own neutral monist theory of desire was exempt? I canvass various suggestions, but argue that none of them are effective. (shrink)

Dembroff and Wodak (2018, 2021) argue that we have a duty to use gender-neutral pronouns, but do not extend this argument to all other aspects of our language. We evaluate the extent to which gender neutral language is desirable in the context of parental leave schemes, taking as a case study the parental leave schemes found at a Higher Education Institution in the UK. We argue that the considerations Dembroff and Wodak (2018, 2021) take to speak against gender (...) specific pronouns and some other gender specific aspects of language also strongly speak against gender specific language in the context of parental leave policies. As a project in non-ideal theory, we argue against the framing of existing policies which refer to ‘maternity’ and ‘paternity’ leave, and for moving to the language of ‘parental’ or ‘family’ leave. The fact that the majority of those giving birth are women does not provide decisive reasons for framing policies in gender-specific terms. Moreover, we argue that given the welcome move to facilitate shared parental leave, any concerns for gender equity, and equity for carers, are better served by requesting demographic information for monitoring purposes, rather than by policies that refer to gender specific parenting roles. -/- . (shrink)

Educational neutrality states that decisions about school curricula and instruction should be made independently of particular comprehensive doctrines. Many political philosophers of education reject this view in favor of some non-neutral alternative. Contrary to what one might expect, some prominent liberal neutralists have also rejected this view in parts of their work. This paper has two purposes. The first part of the paper concerns the relationship between liberal neutrality and educational neutrality. I examine arguments by Rawls and (...) Nagel and argue that some of the same arguments they use to justify liberal neutrality also justify educational neutrality; thus, if we accept these arguments for liberal neutrality, we should also accept educational neutrality. The second part of the paper defends educational neutrality against objections that it is impossible and objections that it is undesirable. (shrink)

Consider (i) the humility thesis that we only know the causal natures of the external world and (ii) the thesis we are directly acquainted with the intrinsic natures of our phenomenal experiences. The conjunction of these two theses has motivated a version of panpsychism, which states that the intrinsic nature of all matter is phenomenal. Contemporary panpsychists, such as Lockwood (1991, 1993), Rosenberg (1999, 2004) and Maxwell (2002), have taken it upon themselves to flesh out a plausible story of how (...) this is so. Moreover, the story they tell involves the physical depending on the phenomenal. Now, most of us these days, including such contemporary panpsychists, acknowledge that our phenomenal experiences are, in some sense, representational. That is, when we introspect our phenomenal experiences, it seems like there are certain properties represented in these experiences. The aim of this paper is to use this well-conceded point that our phenomenal experiences are representational to cast doubt on contemporary panpsychism. (shrink)

RECENT PHILOSOPHICAL ATTENTION TO THE LANGUAGE OF DISEASE HAS FOCUSED PRIMARILY ON THE QUESTION OF ITS VALUE-NEUTRALITY OR NON-NEUTRALITY. PROPONENTS OF THE VALUE-NEUTRALITY THESIS SYMBOLICALLY COMBINE POLITICAL AND OTHER CRITICISMS OF MEDICINE IN AN ATTACK ON WHAT THEY SEE AS VALUE-INFECTED USES OF DISEASE LANGUAGE. THE PRESENT ESSAY ARGUES AGAINST TWO THESES ASSOCIATED WITH THIS VIEW: A METHODOLOGICAL THESIS WHICH TENDS TO DIVORCE THE ANALYSIS OF DISEASE LANGUAGE FROM THE CONTEXT OF THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE AND (...) A SUBSTANTIVE THESIS WHICH HOLDS THAT DISEASE LANGUAGE IS EVALUATIVELY NEUTRAL. IN PARTICULAR, THE ESSAY CRITICALLY FOCUSES ON THE VALUE NEUTRAL POSITION ADOPTED BY CHRISTOPHER BOORSE, WHICH HE TERMS A FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF DISEASE. THE ARGUMENT CONCERNS WHETHER OR NOT ONE CAN HAVE VALUE NEUTRAL DESCRIPTION OF DISEASE STATES OR WHETHER DISEASE LANGUAGE ESSENTIALLY INVOLVES VALUES. (shrink)

McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time was first published in the 1908 article “The Unreality of Time,” and a revised version appeared in the 1927 book The Nature of Existence. I argue that these two versions are significantly different. The second construction of the argument is important because it neutralizes a compelling objection. McTaggart’s initial argument tries to show that the conception of an A-series is self-contradictory. A natural objection is that the apparent contradiction can be (...) resolved by making clear that an event has incompatible A-properties only successively. McTaggart anticipates and responds to the objection. My main contention is this: McTaggart’s initial response to the objection fails, but in the second construction of his argument he succeeds in showing that the contradiction cannot be resolved in the way suggested by the objection. I also explain why the second construction has been overlooked for so long. (shrink)

What marks emergence as a metaphysically interesting idea is that many macro-level entities and their properties are ontologically and causally autonomous in relation to the micro-level entities and properties they depend on---or so argues Jessica Wilson in Metaphysical Emergence (2021). To do so, she adopts a “metaphysically highly neutral” (p. 32) approach to questions about powers, causation, properties, and laws. That is, while explaining what emergence is and arguing that there is indeed emergence in the natural world, she doesn’t restrict (...) her analyses and arguments to any specific metaphysical accounts of these concepts, and she doesn’t commit to any controversial theses about them. In this article, I assess Wilson’s project against this methodological ideal of metaphysical neutrality. (shrink)

Just as some types of philosophical analysis are more useful than others to historians or political scientists, so, I find, are some sorts of historical research more useful to philosophers than are other sorts. Sommerville makes history useful to non-historians by clarifying the large-scale historical background against which his investigative questions are posed, and then separating out crucial figures, ideas, and events from arcana of interest primarily to specialist historians. His interpretations are relatively neutral, striking a welcome balance between (...) mere reporting of events or textual ideas on the one hand, and on the other, accounts so theoretically laden that they prejudge or foreclose promising interpretive possibilities. (shrink)

Is the welfare state neutral to personal morality?1 In today's welfare states one can find numerous life-styles existing side by side. These indicate a wide scope for 'personal moralities'2, but do not prove that the welfare state is 'neutral' to them. Welfare states interfere in more or less onerous ways with the business of (private) life with police checks, administrative controls and a vast arsenal of regulatory, penal and/or fiscal regimes. Some of the regulations may be more or less reasonable (...) attempts to minimise the risk of one person inflicting irreparable damage on others or their property, but a great many are not. It is not too difficult to see the hand of special (economic, ideological, even sectarian) interests in the bulk of the rules and regulations on the books.3 The state's non-neutrality is often an unintended outcome, but not always. Officials introduce new regulations with proud declarations of their intention to enforce particular 'moral choices', to treat one thing as a 'merit good' and another as an evil. They also justify intrusive policies with blatantly paternalistic arguments—remember their promise, or was it threat, to take care of us "from the cradle to the grave"—, with self-congratulatory references to an unspecified 'responsibility of the government'. There is no more direct negation of the role of private morality than the claim that one discharges one's own responsibility by depriving others of the opportunity to exercise theirs. As far as protection against onerous interference is concerned, the presumption of innocence—which is the linchpin of the rule of law—counts for very little. One delinquent person or business entity is often enough to let loose the regulatory juggernaut on everybody in the same group or category. In short, the question, whether the welfare state is neutral to personal morality, is largely rhetorical and academic. Behind the question there is the presupposition that the welfare state should be neutral to personal morality.. (shrink)

An argument against the bias towards the near; how a defence of temporal neutrality is not a defence of S; an appeal to inconsistency; why we should reject S and accept CP.

There is overwhelming consensus today that passively allowing someone to die in medical contexts is sometimes morally permissible and desirable. Active euthanasia, however, remains controversial. The legal systems and the medical establishments of both the United States and Canada maintain absolute, formal prohibitions against direct killing in medical settings. This clearly reflects the deep-seated belief, evident throughout our cultural and religious history, that there is some important moral difference between killing and allowing to die. Yet much that has been (...) written recently on this topic by philosophers has denied moral relevance for this distinction. While this general conclusion appears to have gained popularity, especially within philosophy, the reasons advanced for it seem inconclusive to some. In what follows I examine the principal philosophical argument for the claim of irrelevance. I then develop an alternative view that, to my knowledge, has not been distinctly articulated in the current literature. I begin, however, with a preliminary discussion of the intuitive basis of the distinction between killing and letting die. (shrink)

This article responds to an article by Francis J. Beckwith that argued that the consistent application of generic liberal principles requires that same-sex marriage not be recognised in civil law. This response demonstrates that Beckwith's article contains a series of interpretative and substantive flaws that render his argument unsuccessful. These relate to a misinterpretation of core liberal principles and a sidestepping of the matter of undue bias against same-sex partners. In correcting these flaws I tentatively propose a Voltairean (...) argument in favour of same-sex civil marriage for those citizens with moral qualms about same-sex relationships derived from their reasonable comprehensive doctrine. (shrink)

This article, forthcoming in the international legal philosophy journal Ratio Juris, responds to an article by Francis J. Beckwith arguing that the consistent application of liberal principles requires that same-sex marriage not be recognised in civil law. This response demonstrates that Beckwith’s article contains a series of interpretative and substantive flaws that render his argument unsuccessful. These relate to a misinterpretation of core liberal principles and a sidestepping of the matter of undue bias against same-sex partners. In correcting (...) these flaws I tentatively propose a ‘Voltarian argument’ in favour of same-sex civil marriage for those citizens with moral qualms about same-sex relationships derived from their reasonable comprehensive doctrine. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell abandoned the notion of acquaintance in July 1918. What changes does this force in his account of the mind? This paper focuses on one puzzle of interpretation about this. In 1913, Russell offered an account of ‘egocentric particulars’, his term for indexicals and demonstratives. He argued that the fundamental objection to neutral monism was that it could not provide an adequate theory of these terms. In 1918, Russell now embraces a form of neutral monism, but he does not (...) return to the problem of indexicals until 1940 in his William James lectures. Is the account given in 1940 significantly different from the one given in 1913? What was the argument against neutral monism in 1913? Does Russell offer a new solution in 1940 or reject his earlier view as mistaken? The answers offered here are used to draw more general morals about the current debate concerning relational theories of sense perception. (shrink)

Arguments do not occur against silent backdrops. From the drone of televisions to the music in a retail space to the symphony of combustion engines on the street, we are perpetually immersed in sound. We live in a noisy world. The combined sounds of these environments, or soundscapes, provide the very conditions of social interaction. Charles Hirschkind remarked that soundscapes are as necessary "to politics and public reason as are markets, associations, formal institutions, and information networks". These soundscapes are (...) far from neutral and can be designed to promote desired outcomes: soothing tones as you board an airplane to alleviate fear, a blaring voice over the loudspeaker to compel... (shrink)

A very common argument against restrictions on hate speech says that since such restrictions curtail freedom of speech, they cause more harm than they prevent. A no less common reply has it that the harms caused by hate speech are sufficiently great to justify legal restrictions on free speech. In ‘Freedom of Expression and Derogatory Words’, West questions a common assumption of both arguments concerning the use of slurs, i.e. that restricting the use of slurs necessarily curtails freedom (...) of speech. According to West, everything that can be said with a slur can be said with its neutral counterpart. Given the psychological and social harms of slurs, this would give us a compelling reason to put legal restrictions on their use. However, in this article, I will argue that, according to the main theories of slurs, slurs can be used to express derogatory information which cannot be expressed by their neutral counterparts. This will leave us with two options when it comes to avoiding the negative effects of slurs: (i) to restrict freedom of speech or (ii) to argue that the derogatory information expressed by slurs is not covered by free speech. Both options will depart significantly from West's argument. (shrink)

This article attacks the view that global justice should be understood in terms of a global principle of equality. The principle mainly discussed is global equality of opportunity – the idea that people of similar talent and motivation should have equivalent opportunity sets no matter to which society they belong. I argue first that in a culturally plural world we have no neutral way of measuring opportunity sets. I then suggest that the most commonly offered defences of global egalitarianism – (...) the cosmopolitan claim that human lives have equal value, the argument that a persons nationality is a morally arbitrary characteristic, and the more empirical claim that relationships among fellow-nationals are no longer special in a way that matters for justice – are all defective. If we fall back on the idea of equality as a default principle, then we have to recognize that pursuing global equality of opportunity systematically would leave no space for national self-determination. Finally, I ask whether global inequality might be objectionable for reasons independent of justice, and argue that the main reason for concern is the inequalities of power that are likely to emerge in a radically unequal world. (shrink)

This article is divided into two main sections. In section 1, I highlight some of the most significant results of Parfit's discussion of self-defeating theories in Part I of Reasons and Persons. I then argue, against Parfit, that, depending on the nature of the good, the structure of consequentialist, or agent-neutral, theories does not preclude the possibility that such theories may be self-defeating. In section 2, I discuss Parfit's ingenious argument against the self-interest theory, to the effect (...) that as a “hybrid” theory, which is “partial” with respect to people but “neutral” with respect to time, the self-interest theory occupies a dangerous middle ground that is open to attack from two sides: on one side, by a “pure” theory that is partial with respect to both people and times, and on the other side, by a “pure” theory that is neutral with respect to both people and times. I then raise doubts, prompted by the form of Parfit's argument, as to whether there is a general requirement that we treat people, places and times the same, except, perhaps, in cases involving special relations. Specifically, I suggest that there may be reason to treat space differently than time, and that there are compelling reasons to treat persons differently than time. (shrink)

The Argument from Principles, the primary motivation for impurism or pragmatic encroachment theories in epistemology, is often presented as an argument for everyone—an argument that proceeds from harmless premises about the nature of rationally permissible action to the surprising conclusion that one’s knowledge is partly determined by one’s practical situation. This paper argues that the Argument from Principles is far from neutral, as it presupposes the falsity of one of impurism’s main competitors: epistemic contextualism. As a (...) consequence, hybrid positions combining impurism and contextualism—positions that impurists have sometimes hinted at in the literature—are, while logically consistent, ill-motivated. Once the impurist embraces contextualism, the Argument from Principles can no longer get off the ground. The paper concludes that those who make use of the Argument from Principles are committed to an invariantist impurism and their case in support of impurism can only ever be as strong as their case against contextualism. Given recent contextualist work on the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions, this is likely to turn out problematic for the impurists. (shrink)

A theory is value-neutral when no constitutive values are part of its content. Nonneutral theories seem to lack objectivity because it is not clear how the constitutive values could be empirically confirmed. This article analyzes Franz Boas’s famous arguments against nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology and racial theory. While he recognized that talk of "higher civilizations" encoded a constitutive, political value with consequences for slavery and colonialism, he argued against it on empirical and methodological grounds. Boas’s arguments thus provide a (...) model of how, under the right conditions, scientific inquiry can provide empirically objective grounds for political critique. Key Words: value-freedom • Franz Boas • race • objectivity • neutrality. (shrink)

While we consider directive teaching to be detrimental to the Community of Inquiry, we nonetheless find ourselves in qualified agreement with Hand as he challenges certain norms of practice that support the common presumption in favour of nondirective teaching in the moral CoI. We agree with Hand that it is possible for teachers to impart their own moral beliefs without indoctrinating students, yet we argue that the risk of indoctrination remains present in the many realistic scenarios in which teachers misjudge (...) controversial standards as uncontroversial or in which teachers’ arguments bypass students’ reason. We agree with Hand that substantively closed questions can generate satisfying inquiries, with the caveat that in the absence of open inquiry there is a chronic risk of eroding the ethos of trust in a CoI. Similarly, we find qualified agreement with Hand regarding teachers’ philosophical self-effacement. We accept that teachers may judiciously suspend neutrality in order to ensure that sound arguments and objections are aired and understood, yet we caution teachers against endorsing any particular justification or rebuttal. We further raise three distinct concerns about Hand’s theory. Firstly, we argue that Hand’s theory is insensitive to the varieties of moral controversy that emerge within the CoI. We maintain that a nondirective approach is required for a proper exploration of controversy over conflicting justifications for shared moral standards grounded in diverse normative ethical theories, where the conative power of particular justifications may differ among individuals; controversy over the meaning, scope and significance of moral concepts; and controversy over the application of moral standards and concepts to actual cases. Secondly, we argue that in light of teachers’ susceptibility to motivated reasoning and myside bias, Hand’s theory places undue demands on teachers to exercise objective judgement. Where teachers unwittingly transmit biases to students, we are not assured that Hand’s proposal can safeguard against indoctrination. Thirdly, we do not share Hand’s conception of moral inquiry as concerned exclusively with argument over the content and justification of moral standards. The narrowness of this conception, together with available evidence that moral argument alone has little effect on moral behaviour, leads us to question Hand’s claim that a fundamental reason for engaging students in moral inquiry is to reinforce their moral formation. We suggest that the scope of the moral CoI should not be limited to argument over the content and justification of moral standards, but should also include the cultivation of virtues and dispositions that prepare students for complex moral decision-making, as well as the investigation of Aristotelian questions concerning what is worthwhile in human life. Given our broader conception of the CoI as both moral and ethical, and our emphasis on students having both the freedom and the responsibility to judge reasonableness for themselves, we conclude that nondirective teaching remains a beneficial regulatory principle for CoI practice. (shrink)

One powerful argument against self-ownership is that it degrades personhood by leading individuals to view themselves and others as mere instrumental goods, alienable commodities to be exchanged in markets like other products and services. In general terms, this line of criticism (called the “commodification argument”) maintains that a direct and causal relationship exists between certain legal institutions (self-ownership) and certain attitudes (instrumentalism) and that the undesirability of the latter justifies restrictions on the former. In this article, I (...) will critically examine Margaret Jane Radin’s book Contested Commodities (1996), which presents a well-developed, compelling version of the commodification argument. I will advance three central points over the course of the article: first, the purported causal connection between self-ownership and instrumentalism is either weak or nonexistent; second, the commodification argument does little independent moral work, tending instead to be parasitic on arguments against economic, racial, and gender inequality; and third, what independent moral work it does do seems to be directed not so much at self-ownership as at liberal neutrality. I will conclude by showing that the weaknesses of Radin’s diverse defenses of the commodification argument cast doubt upon the anticommodificationist enterprise as a whole. (shrink)

Ever since the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996, 1995) first entered the scene in the debate over consciousness many have taken it to show the limitations of a scientific or naturalist explanation of consciousness. The hard problem is the problem of explaining why there is any experience associated with certain physical processes, that is, why there is anything it is like associated with such physical processes? The character of one’s experience doesn’t seem to be entailed by physical processes and (...) so an explanation which can overcome such a worry must (1) explain how physical processes give rise to experience (explain the entailment), (2) give an explanation which doesn’t rely on such physical processes, or (3) show why the hard problem is misguided in some sense. Recently, a rather ambitious and novel theory of consciousness has entered the scene – Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Consciousness (Oizumi et al., 2014; Tononi, 2008; Tononi et al., 2016) – and proposes that consciousness is the result of a specific type of information processing, what those developing the theory call integrated information. The central aim of this dissertation is to philosophically investigate IIT and see whether it has the ability to overcome the hard problem and related worries. I then aim to use this philosophical investigation to answer a set of related questions which guide this dissertation, which are the following: Is it possible to give an information-theoretic explanation of consciousness? What would the nature of such an explanation be and would it result in a novel metaphysics of consciousness? In this dissertation, I begin in chapter one by first setting up the hard problem and related arguments against the backdrop of IIT (Mindt, 2017). I show that given a certain understanding of structural and dynamical properties IIT fails to overcome the hard problem of consciousness. I go on in chapter two to argue that a deflationary account of causation is the best view for IIT to overcome the causal exclusion problem (Baxendale and Mindt, 2018). In chapter three, I explain IIT’s account of how the qualitative character of our experience arises (qualia) and what view of intentionality (the directedness of our mental states) IIT advocates. I then move on in chapter four to show why the hard problem mischaracterizes structural and dynamical properties and misses important nuances that may shed light on giving a naturalized explanation of consciousness. In the last and fifth chapter, I outline a sketch of a novel metaphysics of consciousness that takes the conjunction of Neutral Monism and Information-Theoretic Structural Realism to give what I call Information-Theoretic Neutral-Structuralism. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to challenge the Modern assertion that economics is a theologically neutral science founded in the pure rationality of number, yet also connected to morality, particularly in regards to the ancient virtue of justice—“to render to each one their due”. Such an understanding has come at great philosophical, moral, and economic cost, as the Great World Recession of 2008–2013 is demonstrating. Instead, I argue that today's current economic crises are due precisely to a loss of (...) orthodox Christian theological understanding of economics and virtue. I make this argument by examining St. Thomas Aquinas’ theological understanding of the virtues and his consequent understanding of political economy in the Summa Theologica. To evaluate the viability of applying Aquinas’ thought in addressing today's severe economic and ethical crises, I also consider Alasdair MacIntyre's call for a revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics along with his advocacy of Thomisic rationalism to combat the West's ethical decline. However, with John Milbank, I maintain that the integral deprivation of Western moral philosophy and political economy requires a distinctly theological solution that supersedes MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelianism and neo-Thomism. This is to be found in a orthodox reading of Aquinas’ Summa. (shrink)

In recent years the 'zombie argument' has come to occupy a central role in the case against physicalist views of consciousness, in large part because of the powerful advocacy it has received from David Chalmers.1 In this paper I seek to neutralize it by showing that a parallel argument can be run for physicalism, an argument turning on the conceivability of what I shall call anti-zombies. I shall argue that the result is a stand-off, and that (...) the zombie argument offers no independent reason to reject physicalism. (shrink)

A central tenet of moral individualism is that only an entity’s intrinsic (non-relational) properties can ground moral status because only intrinsic properties give rise to agent-neutral reasons. However, I show that the two main approaches to making the agent-neutral/agent-relative distinction fail to exclude morally salient relational (extrinsic) properties from giving rise to agent-neutral reasons. As such, moral individualism accounts of moral status are false. Further, arguments that depend on moral individualism’s central tenet—like the argument from “marginal” cases—are unable to (...) defend their thesis by merely claiming that special relations cannot ground moral status. (shrink)

Để xem bóng đá và phát sóng video trực tiếp tốc độ cao, Xoilac là trang web lý tưởng. Đặc biệt, Xoilac không có bất cứ quảng cáo nào, vì vậy người xem vẫn thoải mái thưởng thức trận bóng đá mà không lo bị phân tâm vì bất cứ vấn đề gì. Ngoài ra, Xoilac có đội ngũ dày dặn chuyên môn, luôn đưa ra những nhận định chuẩn xác cho từng trận đấu bóng đá. Với đồ hoạ sinh (...) động, âm thanh lôi cuốn và sống động, Xoilac sẽ lưu lại dấu ấn sâu đậm trong tâm trí người xem bóng đá. (shrink)

Outcomes tyrannize over prevailing accounts of ethics, actions, reasons, attitudes, and social practices. The right action promotes the best outcome, the end of every action is an outcome to be promoted, reasons to act are reasons to promote outcomes, and preferences and desires rationalize actions that aim at the outcome of realizing their contents—making their contents true. The case for this tyranny turns on a related set of counterintuitive outcome-centered interpretations of deeply intuitive claims that it is always right to (...) do what’s best, that every action brings about an outcome, and that the good is prior to the right. The ethical case for consequentialism elides the distinction between these claims in each case, allowing the counter-intuitive interpretations to hijack the plausibility of the intuitively plausible counterparts. This ethical hijacking has succeeded in large part because a conflation between two different senses of bringing about, and an assumption that all non-deontic value rationales for action are outcome-centered, are thoroughly entrenched at the non-ethical level as well. The “neutral” framework of reasons, actions, and attitudes within which we frame the ethical debate begs the question in favor of a consequentialist resolution of the debate, providing a non-ethical argument for outcome-centered ethics. To expose this conflation and this unwarranted assumption, then, is to undermine the case for these default outcome-centered accounts of reasons, actions, and attitudes as well, and in doing so to expose a subtle but pernicious shift from looking directly at oneself, one’s reasons, the values they reflect, one’s actions, and the practices in which one is involved, to looking at these same things as if in a fun house mirror—the recognizable features are there, but subtly, profoundly distorted, often beyond recognition. (shrink)

By presenting a case study based on the argumentative analysis of news in the press, this article introduces and discusses strategic manoeuvring with contextual frames. Drawing on the linguistic notion of frame, I introduce the concept of contextual frame to refer to the news context, that is, the background against which a certain event is presented as a piece of news. I argue that newspapers and journalists make use of contextual frames in the apparently neutral genre of news reporting (...) to propose specific interpretations of the facts at issue, which become the basis for explicit comments and editorials. To show how this works, I investigate in detail a case of newspaper coverage of a complex episode using the pragma-dialectical notion of strategic manoeuvring and the Argumentum Model of Topics to analyse argument schemes. I show that, in the use of contextual frames, there is a prominent relation between presentational devices and topical potential; contextual frames provide the implicit material premises which are at the basis of argumentations through which newspapers interpret and comment on the news. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We appreciate and respond to Cokelet’s thoughtful criticisms of our book. First, he points to deliberative forms of practical wisdom as objectionable to anti-rationalist’s. In response, we point to non-conscious (yet complex) forms of deliberation that occur as individuals automatically process and respond to virtue-relevant stimuli. Second, Cokelet states that reflecting upon one’s life as a whole may be unnecessary and ineffective for virtue development. We clarify that reflection is not the only means of virtue cultivation, and even flawed (...) reflection is likely helpful. Finally, Cokelet recommends aiming for ‘theoretical neutrality’ by recasting these core tenets as empirical hypotheses. We argue against a neutral perspective that accommodates antirationalist views that we think are on the wrong track. Non-neutral claims help generate testable empirical hypotheses that can move virtue science forward. (shrink)