The subjective deontic "ought" generates counterexamples to classical inference rules like modus ponens. It also conflicts with the orthodox view about modals and conditionals in natural language semantics. Most accounts of the subjective ought build substantive and unattractive normative assumptions into the semantics of the modal. I sketch a general semantic account, along with a metasemantic story about the context sensitivity of information-sensitive operators.

Many philosophers think that descriptive uncertainty is relevant to what we subjectively ought to do. This leads to a further question: is what we subjectively ought to do sensitive to our moral uncertainty as well? Includers say yes—what we subjectively ought to do is sensitive to both descriptive uncertainty and moral uncertainty. Excluders say no—only descriptive uncertainty matters to what we subjectively ought to do (i.e., moral uncertainty is irrelevant). Excluders argue that common motivations for the (...) subjective ought only give us reason to think that descriptive uncertainty matters. This paper focuses on one motivation: accessibility. Excluders argue that accessibility does not motivate the Includers’ view because moral truths are always accessible – unlike descriptive facts which are not always accessible. My goal is to defend the Includers’ view by arguing that moral truths are not always accessible in the relevant sense. (shrink)

This essay offers an account of the truth conditions of sentences involving deontic modals like ‘ought’, designed to capture the difference between objective and subjective kinds of ‘ought’ This account resembles the classical semantics for deontic logic: according to this account, these truths conditions involve a function from the world of evaluation to a domain of worlds (equivalent to a so-called “modal base”), and an ordering of the worlds in such domains; this ordering of the worlds itself (...) arises from two further elements – a probability function and a value function – since this ordering ranks the worlds in accordance with the expected value of certain propositions that are true at those worlds. Thus, a proposition of the form ‘Ought (p)’ is true at a world of evaluation w if and only if p is true at all the top-ranked worlds in the domain assigned to w. This domain of worlds consists of metaphysically possible worlds, while the probability function is defined over a space of epistemically possible worlds (which may include metaphysically impossible worlds, such as worlds where Hesperus is not Phosphorus). Evidence is given that this account assigns the correct truth conditions to a wide range of sentences involving ‘ought’. Since these truth conditions involve both a domain of metaphysically possible worlds and a space of epistemically possible worlds, there are two corresponding kinds of conditional involving ‘ought’, depending on which space of worlds is restricted by the conditional. Finally, some objections that might be raised against this account are answered. (shrink)

The prescriptive has both an objective and a subjective interpretation. In the objective sense, what one ought to do depends on what is actually true. In the subjective sense it depends on what one believes to be true. Ordinary usage seems to vacillate between these two interpretations. An example (the indecisive terrorist) is used to show that a subjective ought statement can have a determinate truth-value in situations where the corresponding objective ought statement has (...) no truth-value, not even an unknowable one. Therefore the subjective ought is not definable in terms of the objective ought. However, definability in the other direction is not excluded by this argument. (shrink)

Options and the subjective ought Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-18 DOI 10.1007/s11098-012-9880-0 Authors Brian Hedden, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.

There are cases in which, intuitively, an agent’s action is both morally right in one sense, and morally wrong in another sense. Such cases (along with other intuitions about blameless wrongdoing and action-guidance) support distinguishing between the objective moral ‘ought’ and the subjective moral ‘ought.’ This chapter argues against drawing this distinction, on the grounds that the prescriptions delivered by an adequate objective moral theory must be sensitive to the mental states of agents. Specifically, an adequate theory (...) of the objective moral ‘ought’ must respect a strong ought-implies-can principle—morally ought implies agentially can—in order to prescribe actions to real-life agents. An agent’s mental states determine what is agentially possible for that agent; thus, what an agent objectively morally ought to do is in part determined by the agent’s mental states. This chapter describes the structure of a compelling non-ideal moral theory that is both objective and mental state-sensitive. This non-ideal theory illuminates the shortcomings of extant objectivist and subjectivist moral theories, and illustrates how we can dispense with the subjective moral ‘ought.’. (shrink)

In the classic Miners case, an agent subjectively ought to do what they know is objectively wrong. This case shows that the subjective and objective ‘oughts’ are somewhat independent. But there remains a powerful intuition that the guidance of objective ‘oughts’ is more authoritative—so long as we know what they tell us. We argue that this intuition must be given up in light of a monotonicity principle, which undercuts the rationale for saying that objective ‘oughts’ are an authoritative (...) guide for agents and advisors. (shrink)

(2010). Ethical Rules for Human Subjects Research: A Case Where the “Is” Must Inform the “Ought”. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 10, No. 6, pp. 14-15.

In this paper, I motivate and defend the distinction between an objective and a subjective moral sense of “ought.” I begin by looking at the standard way the distinction is motivated, namely by appealing to relatively simple cases where an agent does something she thinks is best, but her action has a tragic outcome. I argue that these cases fail to do the job—the intuitions they elicit can be explained without having to distinguish between different senses of “ (...) class='Hi'>ought.” However, these cases are on the right track—I argue that more sophisticated versions of the cases provide strong motivation for the distinction. I then discuss two important problems for the distinction: the “which ‘ought’ is more important?” problem, and the “annoying profusion of ‘oughts’” problem. I argue that each of these problems can be solved in several different ways. (shrink)

This paper argues that a standard analysis of modals from formal semantics suggests a solution to the detaching problem — the problem of whether un-embedded 'ought'-claims can "detach" (be derived) from hypothetical imperatives and their antecedent conditions. On a broadly Kratzerian analysis, modals have a skeletal conventional meaning and receive a particular reading (e.g., deontic, epistemic, teleological) only relative to certain forms of contextual supplementation. I argue that 'ought'-claims can detach — subject to an important qualification — but (...) only as long as the 'ought's in the conditional premise and conclusion are interpreted relative to the same ordering sources. Although modus ponens can be shown to fail with hypothetical imperatives, the cases in question do not constitute a failure of detachment in the sense that ethicists have cared about. Rival wide-scoping accounts are proven to be linguistically problematic. They make incorrect predictions about the meanings of hypothetical imperatives, and founder in response to quantificational variants of the detaching problem. (shrink)

I consider cases in which risk or ignorance create barriers to our discovery of what we ought to do. I argue that neither expected utility theory, nor the maximin principle, nor a timid gambling temperament, is relevant to discovering what we ought to do in one-off or infrequently recurring types of decisions involving risk, or to decisions involving ignorance. I argue, contra Kolodny and MacFarlane, that the miners case does not require us to give up any classical logical (...) principle in order to avoid contradiction. I reject Graham’s claim that the appearance of contradiction depends upon a confusion between acting rightly and not being blameworthy. In the cases of risk and ignorance discussed, we cannot know what we ought to do; and any way of deciding what we shall do is objectively arbitrary even if it reflects our gambling temperament. Subjective probability and the subjective ought should be repudiated. (shrink)

Objectivists and perspectivists disagree about the question of whether what an agent ought to do depends on the totality of facts or on the agent’s limited epistemic perspective. While objectivism fails to account for normative guidance, perspectivism faces the challenge of explaining phenomena (occurring most notably in advice, but also in first-personal deliberation) in which the use of “ought” is geared to evidence that is better than the evidence currently available to the agent. This paper aims to defend (...) perspectivism by developing a perspectivist account that captures the phenomena in question. (shrink)

It seems that the debate between objective and subjective consequentialists might be resolved by appealing to the ought implies can principle. Howard-Snyder has suggested that if one does not know how to do something, cannot do it, and thus one cannot have an obligation to do it. I argue that this depends on an overly rich conception of ability, and that we need to look beyond the ought implies can principle to answer the question. Once we do (...) so, it appears that Prichard might have been at least partly right when he claimed that obligations are tryings. I go some way to defending a diluted version of Prichard's view. (shrink)

_ The Subject of Human Being_ discusses the basic powers of human kind arising from the foundation of the biological brain and manifesting in extraordinary psychological and social capacities and developments. The book consolidates theoretical insights into social ontology from several thinkers, whose profound advances toward understanding the relationship between individuals and society ought to revolutionize social theory as understood and practiced in the social sciences and humanities. Drawing from critical realist social theory developed by Bhaskar and Margaret Archer, (...) John Searle’s philosophy of mind and social ontology, Husserlean and Sartrean phenomenology of consciousness, and Lacanian and existential psychoanalytic theory, the book seeks to portray a unified social ontology that is materialist, emergent, realist, dialectical, processual, and liberatory. Offering a dialectical and progressive view of human being to counter the forces of exploitation and division inflicted on human kind and the ecosystems in which we reside, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of critical realism, philosophy and sociology. (shrink)

Utilitarianism has often been understood as a theory that concerns itself first and foremost with the rightness of actions; but many other things are also properly subject to moral evaluation, and utilitarians have long understood that the theory must be able to provide an account of these as well. In a landmark article from 1976, Robert Adams argues that traditional act utilitarianism faces a particular problem in this regard. He argues that a on a sensible utilitarian account of the rightness (...) of an agent’s motives, right motives will sometimes conflict with right actions, leaving the theory internally incoherent. The puzzle Adams raises has received a good deal of attention but few proposed solutions. Fred Feldman, however, has offered a solution that seems to be gaining adherents. In this paper I argue that Feldman’s approach cannot succeed. At bottom, it relies on a version of the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’—and subsequently an account of an agent’s alternatives—that is far too restrictive to be plausible. Despite the failure of this solution, however, I argue that the conflict Adams develops is not as theoretically troubling as he suggests. While traditional act utilitarianism may fail for other reasons, it will not fail due to the conflict between acts and motives. (shrink)

It is commonly recognized that ‘ought’ is a semantically flexible word admitting of more “objective” and more “subjective” senses. Which of these senses (if any) is the one that is of central concern in normative ethics? According to some philosophers, the sense ‘ought’ that is centrally at issue in normative ethics is the sense of ‘ought’ that features in the various ‘ought’ questions that rational subjects aim to answer when deliberating about what to do. An (...) assumption of this proposal is that there is a single deliberative sense of ‘ought’ that is the focus of rational and morally conscientious deliberation. In this paper, I contest this assumption. I raise objections to various attempts at characterizing this alleged deliberative ‘ought’ (giving special attention to a sophisticated account from Kiesewetter (2017)) and argue that deliberation can serve rational decision-making even if it is not ultimately focused on some normatively privileged sense of ‘ought.’. (shrink)

Focusing mainly on Meinong’s "Über emotionale Präsentation" and Veber’s "Die Natur des Sollens", I examine their respective conceptions of ought. Meinong has not written a specific work on the ought, he deals with it as a part of his value theory. In "Über emotionale Präsentation" the ought is a property of being, which cannot be viewed as separated from a desiring subject. The ought is an ideal object of higher order; it concerns neither factuality nor non-factuality, (...) but subfactuality, that is the realm of possibility. In "Die Natur des Sollens", Veber proposes a structured theory of ought, which is grounded on Meinongian concepts. The ought is the object of a volition, it is a genuine object, even though ideal. I conclude by portraying the differences between Veber's and Meinong's conceptions of the ought. (shrink)

The claim that epistemic oughts stem from the “role” of believer is widely discussed in the epistemological discourse. This claim seems to stem from the common view that, in some sense, epistemic norms derive from what it is to be a believer. Against this view, I argue that there is no such thing as a “role” of believer. But there is a role of knower, and this is the role to which some epistemic norms—epistemic role oughts—are attached. Once we conceive (...) of epistemic role oughts as attaching to the role of knower (and not the “role” of believer) we can better understand the nature of epistemic obligation and doxastic control. In advancing a new epistemic role ought approach that recognizes knowers as the subjects of epistemic role oughts, I explain why many epistemic oughts—epistemic role oughts—have normative force and presuppose voluntary control. (shrink)

Twentieth century philosophers introduced the distinction between “objective rightness” and “subjective rightness” to achieve two primary goals. The first goal is to reduce the paradoxical tension between our judgments of (i) what is best for an agent to do in light of the actual circumstances in which she acts and (ii) what is wisest for her to do in light of her mistaken or uncertain beliefs about her circumstances. The second goal is to provide moral guidance to an agent (...) who may be uncertain about the circumstances in which she acts, and hence is unable to use her standard moral principle directly in deciding what to do. This paper distinguishes two important senses of “moral guidance”; proposes criteria of adequacy for accounts of subjective rightness; canvasses existing definitions for “subjective rightness”; finds them all deficient; and proposes a new and more successful account. It argues that each comprehensive moral theory must include multiple principles of subjective rightness to address the epistemic situations of the full range of moral decision-makers, and shows that accounts of subjective rightness formulated in terms of what it would reasonable for the agent to believe cannot provide that guidance. -/- . (shrink)

This paper critically examines a formal argument against deducing ‘ought’-judgments from ‘is’-judgments, an argument suggested by a literal reading of a famous passage in Hume'sTreatise of Human Nature. According to this argument, judgments of the two kinds have different logical structures (i.e., their subjects are differently related to their predicates) and this difference disallows cross-categorical deductive inferences. I draw on Fregean accounts of the ‘is’- copula and on syntactical interpretations of ‘ought’-judgments that have become standard in deontic logic (...) to argue that twentieth century work in philosophical grammar and logic casts doubt on all three of the argument's premises. (shrink)

Here is a crucial principle for debates about moral luck, responsibility, and free will: a subject is blameworthy for an act only if, in acting, she did what she ought not to have done. That is, ‘blameworthiness’ implies ‘ought not’ (BION). There are some good reasons to accept BION, but whether we accept it mainly depends on complex questions about the objectivity of ought and the subjectivity of blameworthiness. This paper offers an exploratory defence of BION: it (...) gives three _prima facie_ reasons to accept it, provides a plausible interpretation of it, and shows how holding out against objections can yield fruitful lessons. Five objections to BION are considered: the objection from conscience, from reasons, from suberogation, from objectivity, and from excuses. Their main problem is to either over-subjectify blameworthiness or to over-objectify obligations. To accept BION, we must occupy a desirable middle ground. (shrink)

According to Democritus' anthropogeny is a microcosmic consequence within the process of cosmogony. However, the case of man is a peculiarity: man, this atom complex, is well aware of himself, yet is not aware of what he must do. Man does not naturally do that which promotes the harmonious ordering of his atoms. We must create a second nature. Now it becomes possible for us to be as we must be according to our first nature. Democritus is the is first (...) thinker who explains to us what our nature is and who, from our being, derives an ought: he who wishes to do the right thing for both himself and others finds himself subject to the ought requirement to do that which brings the most calm to the atoms. This is a direct connection between being and ought, an extravagant mechanical existentialism. (shrink)

Procedures for the selection of subjects for participation in randomized clinical trials--usually formalized as eligibility criteria in the study protocol--have both scientific and ethical implications. In this thesis, I undertake an examination of eligibility criteria at three stages in the genesis and dissemination of medical knowledge: clinical trial protocol, interpretation by investigators, and reporting of study results.In the first chapter, ethical issues in subject selection are reviewed and the main study questions are presented. In the second chapter, the results of (...) an examination of eligibility criteria in two sets of clinical trials, one sponsored by the NSABP, the other sponsored by POG, covering a twenty-year time span are presented. The POG trials had far fewer eligibility criteria than the NSABP studies, suggesting that large numbers of criteria may not be necessary for high quality research. In the third chapter, the impact of subjective eligibility criteria on enrollment and investigator uncertainty is explored. Subjective criteria were associated with more variable enrollment decisions and greater uncertainty. Such criteria represent a threat to the validity, conduct and interpretation of trials and, therefore, should only be included when carefully justified. The fourth chapter examines the accuracy of the reporting of eligibility criteria in sets of corresponding study protocol, methods paper, journal article, and Clinical Alert. Important information is lost at each step in the dissemination of study results. Unnecessary criteria ought to be dropped at a trial's inception; all other criteria must be reported faithfully. The fifth chapter attempts to provide a comprehensive philosophical account of just selection procedures for clinical research using the political philosophy of Michael Walzer. The sixth, and last, chapter, discusses explanatory and pragmatic approaches to clinical trial design, overlapping scientific and ethical concerns related to eligibility criteria, and questions for further study. (shrink)

Defenders of the Kantian maxim, i.e. ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, defend the maxim taking the term “implication” in the sense of ‘entailment’. But if it is granted that “implication” means entailment, then it can be shown that the Kantian maxim that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ is false. Sinnott-Armstrong attempts to prove the falsity of the maxim by his argument from Self-Imposed Impossibility in which he offers his famous example of Adams. But Sinnott-Armstrong’s example of Adams appears to be not strong (...) enough to prove the falsity of the maxim; it is a subject to be captured by a version of the maxim, namely the Maxim-KT. That is why two new examples of the argument from Self-Imposed Impossibility are presented in this paper which are stronger and are able to prove the falsity of the Kantian maxim. (shrink)

Huw Price’s subject naturalism has emerged as a leading pragmatist position within recent debates surrounding philosophical naturalism. Unlike orthodox views which tend to be guided by metaphysical questions about the “place” of, for instance, the mind, meaning, and morality within the natural world, subject naturalism focuses philosophical attention on language-users and the functions that certain concepts play within discursive practices. This paper considers two objections to subject naturalism and argues that they can be overcome by looking to the methodological insights (...) of philosophical genealogy. Although Price occasionally characterizes his project as a kind of genealogy, he offers little explanation of what such a methodological orientation is supposed to involve. I suggest that subject naturalists ought to remedy this theoretical lacuna by looking to the work of Bernard Williams. On the one hand, doing so can serve a diagnostic function: Williams’ conception of genealogy affords a perspective from which subject naturalism’s explanatory inadequacies are more clearly understood. On the other hand, Williams’ elaborated conception of genealogy represents a path by which the subject naturalist can overcome the shortcomings discussed in this paper. (shrink)

The Subject of Human Being presents a sweeping account of the nature of human existence. As a work of philosophical anthropology, the analysis ranges from the basic powers emerging from the mind, to our extraordinary psychological capacities, to the shared sociocultural worlds we inhabit. The book integrates different perspectives on social ontology from a selection of philosophers and theorists, whose advances toward understanding the relationship between individuals and society ought to revolutionize social theory as understood and practiced in the (...) social sciences and humanities. Although grounded in critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and social theory of Margaret Archer, the book also draws from philosophy of mind, phenomenology of consciousness, psychoanalytic theory, virtue ethics, and personalism to support and extend its arguments. Four elements of human existence are examined: the nature of consciousness, agency, subjectivity, and the social world. Thus, it addresses related issues of power, the agent-structure problem, the formation of beliefs and desires, human universals, and human rights. Portraying a unified social theory that is materialist, realist, dialectical, and centered on emergence, and offering a comprehensive and progressive theory of human being, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of critical realism, philosophy, and the social sciences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A RETURN TO THE SUBJECT: THE THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CHARLES TAYLOR'S SOURCES OF THE SELF JAMES J. BUCKLEY Loyola College Baltimore, Maryland ECENT THEOLOGIANS have widely argued (or pve-. sumed) that modernity's 1turn to the subject creates deep p11ohlems for imagining, thinking about, or enacting who we m'e. These theologians do not aJwaJ"s agree on what constitutes "modernity." And they ra11e!ly agree on the 'alternative to " the turn (...) to the :subject.'' That is, some theologians airgue or presume that the turn from the subject ought to he baiekwa:rid, retrieving our sou11ces prior to what Vatican II and others c:a:lrl "the modeTn world;" others argue o'l.' presume tha:t the turn ought be forwavd to "post-modernity," either accommodating ourseh11es to the decentered selves of the post-modern secular avant garde or proclaiming the strange, new wo1'1d of the Bible. Hut neo-Augustinians and Thomists, liberation theologians and pragmatists, Wittgensrteinians and Barthians all roughly agree (in spite of deep disagx,eements) that we need to turn from the subject;1 Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity is a massivie challenge to these presumptions and argument1s.2 It is, we might s'ay, a call to re-turn to the :subjeict-;hut quwlified this time by a gl'e3.1ter sense of this subject 'is historiml context in the Enlightenment and Romantioism 1 For a summary of critiques of different turns to the subject, see David H. Kelsey, "Human Being," in Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks, ed. Peter C. Hodgson and Robert H. King, Second Edition (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985 [Firnt Edition, 1982]), Chapter 6. 2 Charles Taylor Sources of the Sdf: The Making of the JJiodern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989), referred to in the body of this essay by page numbers in parentheses. 497 498 JAMES J. BUCKLEY a1s weU.as this subject's constant ternptaition to undermine the very world it mak!es. A rea1der's response to the book wilil depend not only on how one rea1ds Taylor (e.g., does he under- or over-qualify his ca11 to return to Lhe subject?) but also on where the reader finds heriseilf on the tlieological spectrum. However, the fact that T.aylor',s book has been greeted with critical enthusiasm by both theologiical 'agnostics and contempomry Augustinians and Thomists suggests tha1t it is a book whose power and scope will resonabe with very different sort1s of men and women.3 My aim here is not to summarize or 1 assess the riches of this book. Soumes of the Self is a book of such clarity, power, and 1scope that lit will takce some 1 time for rea;ders (or, ak least, this reader) fo absorb it a;nd to respond :to Taylor adequateJy. My aim is much more modest, nameJy, to pursue some of the connections between Tayl:or's proposal and theology. These connections vv:i.11 suggest some chores Taylor has discoveil'ed or crea;ted for theoilogians. I rea:lize that I risk doing an injustice to a book by a philosopher, not a theologian. Tayfor is candid about hls own theologica1l convictions, while not pretending fully to ddend or evcen fully expl~ca:te those convictions. Nonetihe1ess, I wiill show tha:t his theses challenge n1any of us in ways tha:t justify a foous on theo1ogica,l isisues.Je objecition to. Tayloi; rightly speaks of the "anti-humanism of much evange[ieail rie~ ligion today," bu:t I be1ievie he is mistaken when he fails to 1.2 He carefully distinguishes neo-Nietzscheans like Lyotard, Derrida, and even Foucault, from Nietzsche himself, who had a kind of "saving inconsistency " (489) in his simultaneous affirmation and denial of a " sense of the magnificent, of the categorically affi.rmable, of the infinitely worthy of love " (453). ON CHARLES TAYLOR 509 qualify lthis "murch" and also when he caMs "figures like Cardina1l Ra:tzinger" anti-humanistic (318). He!thinks that abortion debrutes a're not so murch deep disagreements as they are exceptionail disagreements that only provie h0:w suhs1tantial our agreements are (515). But Taylor... (shrink)

The concept of the subject relies on humanist presuppositions. Regardless of whether purported to be decentred and posthumanist, the subject conceived in poststructuralist and philosophical terms remains anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. There is something irrecuperably Cartesian in the poststructuralist idea of the subject. Physicality, both bodily and that of the materiality of the machinic prosthesis, is barred from the constitution of the Self, as the real is barred but also foreclosed to it. The subject, therefore, is yet another philosophical phantasm, which (...) in its material actuality is determined as an instance of the signifying automaton. I argue that the “posthumanist” self, if conceived in Marxian and non-philosophical terms, ought to be viewed as the radical dyad of the signifying automaton and the real. It renders Haraway’s notion of the Cyborg more radical and unravels its inhumanity rather than posthumanity. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to argue that justification should not be conceived of in purely objective terms. In arguing for that conclusion I focus in particular on Paul Robinson’s presentation of that position, since it is the most sophisticated defense of the objective account of justification in the literature. My main point will be that the distinction drawn by Robinson between objective and subjective accounts of justification is problematic, and that careful attention to the role played by (...) reasonableness in subjectivist accounts of justification reveals that the apparent puzzles Robinson raises for subjectivism are merely apparent. I will suggest that we ought to be reasonable subjectivists about justification, where “reasonableness” is understood in a particular manner. This has consequences for various other issues, including how we make sense of mistaken justification, and I will have something to say about those issues as they arise along the way. (shrink)

When we are touched by the beauty of something, we cannot help judging that the experienced feeling of pleasure ought to be shared by others. In Kantian terms, a pure judgement of taste requires or demands everyone else's assent. I examine some of the major intricacies of Kant's account and aim to correct some distorted views of it. I argue that the autonomy (or ‘heautonomy’) of the judgement of taste is not presupposed but made possible by the modal requirement (...) as such, i.e. by the ‘subjective necessity’ to be universally shared—a necessity that is not moral, as several commentators hold, but strictly epistemological. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

While it is generally believed that justification is a fallible guide to the truth, there might be interesting exceptions to this general rule. In recent work on bridge-principles, an increasing number of authors have argued that truths about what a subject ought to do are truths we stand in some privileged epistemic relation to and that our justified normative beliefs are beliefs that will not lead us astray. If these bridge-principles hold, it suggests that justification might play an interesting (...) role in our normative theories. In turn, this might help us understand the value of justification, a value that's notoriously difficult to understand if we think of justification as but a fallible means to a desired end. We will argue that these bridge-principles will be incredibly difficult to defend. While we do not think that normative facts necessarily stand in any interesting relationship to our justified beliefs about them, there might well be a way of defending the idea that our justified beliefs about what to do won't lead us astray. In turn, this might help us understand the value of justification, but this way of thinking about justification and its value comes with costs few would be willing to pay. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions and method converge on their treatment of the historical subject. Thinkers from both traditions claim that subjectivity is shaped by a historical worldview. Each tradition provides an account of how these worldviews are shaped, and thus how essentially historical subjective experience is molded. I argue that both traditions, although offering helpful ways of understanding the way history shapes subjectivity, go too far in their epistemic claims for the superiority (...) of subjective over positivist or academic history I propose that although the phenomenological/ hermeneutic approach to historical subjectivity is valuable for understanding both history and human nature, it cannot and ought not replace academic or what I will call ‘critical’ history. By showing the importance of historicity, and the force of historical consciousness on our actions, philosophers of history in these traditions expose the epistemic and perhaps even ethical requirement to engage in a rigorous critical history, one that recognizes the importance of historical consciousness. Such critical history is necessary to move beyond the subjective horizon of history as experienced to understand how events shaped this historical horizon. (shrink)

In Preference, Value, Choice, and Welfare, I argued, among other things, that preferences in economics are and ought to be total subjective comparative evaluations, that the theory of rational choice is a reformulation of everyday folk-psychological explanations and predictions of behaviour, and that revealed preference theory is completely untenable. All three of these theses have been challenged in essays by Erik Angner (2018), Francesco Guala (2019) and Johanna Thoma (2021a, 2021b). This essay responds to these criticisms and defends (...) these three theses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Simulation, Subjective Knowledge, and the Cognitive Value of Literary NarrativeScott R. Stroud (bio)IntroductionLiterary narrative holds the power to move individuals to thought, reflection, action, and belief. According to a longstanding view of literature, it is this impact on the reader that leads to literary narrative being valued so highly in our culture and in others. What exactly is the value of literature? Humanists such as Peter Lamarque and (...) Stein Olsen1 argue for this value in terms of perennial themes that literature allows one to "grapple with," as opposed to cognitivist accounts that discuss the value of literary narrative in terms of conveyed truths or knowledge. One particularly important position that explains the cognitive value of literature can be labeled the "Subjective Knowledge Theory" (SKT). Such an account of literature places its value in the subjective perspectives or experiences the narrative opens up to the reader. Thus, one can gain knowledge of "what it is like" to be caught in the throes of jealousy, endangered by an opposing army, or captivated by the lure of magical prowess. Lamarque and Olsen, however, argue that SKT is fundamentally flawed in its analysis of knowledge derivable from the literary narrative and in terms of its account of literary practice.I wish to defend a version of SKT in this article. In order to do so, I make and defend the following claims. First, Lamarque and Olsen's critique of SKT relies on a conflation of two distinct types of knowledge—the knowledge provided by the simulated subjective experience and its appropriation/ generalization to forms useful for the reader's real life activities. I will argue that the former of these outcomes is due strictly to the aesthetic features of the literary narrative, whereas the second involves a non-necessary psychological reaction to the text (that is, judgments of the veracity or usefulness of the text for one's own purposes). By conflating both of these into the cognitive knowledge derivable from the text, Lamarque and Olsen's critique can [End Page 19] gain its purchase against SKT. If these two processes and the resultant sorts of knowledge are separated, then the SKT account does seem to show how literature holds value in itself and in relation to the reader's moral activities/ judgments. Second, the process of simulation is the primary means by which one can gain any type of subjective knowledge from a literary narrative. This type of knowledge will be gained by virtue of the literary narrative's aesthetic qualities, which result in a certain type of activity in the reader. Third, I will argue that the second sort of knowledge—that derived from the simulated subjective experience—results from the process of reader identification with the values, beliefs, and/or behaviors of the simulated agent. This sense of identification involves selective appropriation and generalization and will be shown not to be subject to the critiques of simple identification offered by Noël Carroll.2 It is at this stage that individuals learn what they believe they ought to value, how they ought to act, and what they should believe from their experience of simulation in reading the literary narrative. Notice that this knowledge is separate from the first sort of knowledge, which is knowledge of what it is like to experience x through y's eyes.As I elucidate and defend these claims, I hope it will become clear that this is an account that does justice to the value resident in literature and in the activities readers do after they partake in the aesthetic object of the literary narrative. Thus, I will conclude by showing how this account does not fall prey to the conflation that both critics and supporters of SKT commit in muddling the different types of knowledge available from and in relation to a literary narrative.Before I proceed, it is important that some basic concepts are clearly set forth. A narrative can be defined as any representation of two or more events over time. The number of events and the relationship among them can be as simple or complex as one likes, but the crucial aspect is that the representation supplies the... (shrink)

Moti Mizrahi provides experimental evidence according to which subjects judge that a person ought to ? even when she cannot ?. He takes his results to constitute a falsification of the alleged intuitiveness of the ‘Ought Implies Can’ principle. We point out that in the light of the fact that (a) ‘ought’ is multiply ambiguous, that (b) only a restricted set of readings of ‘ought’ will be relevant to the principle, and that (c) he did not (...) instruct his subjects appropriately – or otherwise ensure that in their ‘ought’ judgements they applied the relevant concept(s) – Mizrahi’s conclusions appear premature. We suggest two ways in which the experimental design could be adjusted or supplemented. First, Mizrahi could instruct (or prime) subjects to read the ‘ought’ question in a particular way. Second, he could complement his experiment by asking follow-up questions aimed at uncovering the implications for blame of subjects’ judgements. Once these adjustments are applied, an experiment with a similar outcome would be more significant. (shrink)

My claim that probability ought to be defined as a purely subjective measure of human belief has been challenged in a recent and interesting article on these pages by Arnold Baise . Baise argues that probability ought to be defined, not as a purely subjective measure of human belief, as I have claimed, but rather in the following way: Probability P is a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how plausible it is that proposition A (...) is true, based on information I. In addition, one could add that a probability of 1 indicates certainty that the proposition is true, while a probability of 0 indicates certainty that the proposition is false. .The reasoning that leads Baise to advance this definition for probability, however, is seriously and apodictically flawed. As a consequence, his definition for probability must be rejected as a viable alternative to my purely subjective definition. (shrink)

Here is a crucial principle for debates about moral luck, responsibility, and free will: a subject is blameworthy for an act only if, in acting, she did what she ought not to have done. That is, ‘blameworthiness’ implies ‘ought not’ (BION). There are some good reasons to accept BION, but whether we should accept it depends on complex questions about the objectivity of ought and the subjectivity of blameworthiness. This paper offers an exploratory defence of BION: it (...) gives three prima facie reasons to accept it, provides a plausible interpretation of it, and shows how holding out against objections can yield fruitful lessons. Five objections to BION are considered: the objection from conscience, from reasons, from suberogation, from objectivity, and from excuses. Their main problem is to either over-subjectify blameworthiness or to over-objectify obligations. To accept BION, we must occupy a desirable middle ground. (shrink)

Subjective Bayesians typically find the following objection difficult to answer: some joint probability measures lead to intuitively irrational inductive behavior, even in the long run. Yet well-motivated ways to restrict the set of reasonable prior joint measures have not been forthcoming. In this paper I propose a way to restrict the set of prior joint probability measures in particular inductive settings. My proposal is the following: where there exists some successful inductive method for getting to the truth in some (...) situation, we ought to employ a (joint) probability measure that is inductively successful in that situation, if such a measure exists. In order to do show that the restriction is possible to meet in a broad class of cases, I prove a Bayesian Completeness Theorem, which says that for any solvable inductive problem of a certain broad type, there exist probability measures that a Bayesian could use to solve the problem. I then briefly compare the merits of my proposal with two other well-known proposals for constraining the class of admissible subjective probability measures, the leave the door ajar condition and the maximize entropy condition. (shrink)

Recent guidelines from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate the inclusion of adequate numbers of women in clinical trials. Ought such standards to apply internationally? Walzer's theory of justice is brought to bear on the problem, the first use of the theory in research ethics, and it argues for broad application of the principle of adequate representation. A number of practical conclusions for research ethics committees (RECs) are outlined. Eligibility criteria in clinical trials ought to be (...) justified by trial designers. Research ethics committees ought to question criteria that seem to exclude unnecessarily women from research participation. The issue of adequate representation should be construed broadly, so as to include consideration of the representation of the elderly, persons with HIV, mental illness and substance abuse disorders in clinical research. (shrink)

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad, says a Nigerian proverb. These words of wisdom re-echo in traditional approaches to mental health ethics in sub-Saharan Africa. Among many cultures in Nigeria, it is customary to subject persons with mental health illness, especially those who present with violent behavior, to physical restraint and beatings. The belief is that such subjugation could restore mental health in the early stages of madness. Physical restraint and beatings only form a part (...) of the healing process, as it also has communitarian cum spiritual aspects. The healing process is carried out by family members or community, who share in the life of the mentally ill person. Their... (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Once these similarities are delineated—that both philosophers are for the subject and against knowledge—Chalier’s central preoccupation is to analyze and assess differences. Central among them is Kant’s rejection of heteronomy and Levinas’s wholehearted acceptance of it. In this, Levinas proceeds similarly to Heidegger and many ancient Greek philosophers, but with a difference that Chalier highlights: Levinas, like Kant, does not seek to ground morality in a knowable order external to the subject such as the cosmos, being, nature, or society. Kant (...) seeks an internal disposition, the good will, and an internal categorical principle. This makes the principle of his ethics outside of knowledge but internal to the subject. Levinas, by contrast, seeks an “anarchic” ethics—anarchic, according to Chalier, because its arche or principle is outside the subject and outside of knowledge. Chalier describes, then, two very different philosophies of the subject beyond knowledge, one in which the subject is utterly autonomous and morality stems not from will in accord with a knowable order but from good will; another in which the origin of the subject and of moral obligation is unknowable but outside the subject. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out to defend the claim that a central principle in democratic theory, the all-subjected principle, applies not only when one is subject to a rule by a state but also when one is subject to a rule by a ‘non-state’ unit. I argue that self-government is the value underlying the all-subjected principle that explains why a subjected individual should be included because she is subjected. Given this, it is unfounded to limit the principle to the (...) state, as subjection which threatens self-government occurs in non-state units such as corporations and families. This means that following the all-subjected principle surprisingly implies that we ought to have family and workplace democracy. (shrink)

Reasons evidentialism is the view that normative reasons can be analyzed in terms of evidence about oughts (i.e., propositions concerning whether or not S ought to phi). In this paper, I defend a new reason-evidentialist account according to which normative reasons are evidence against propositions of the form S ought not to phi. The arguments for my view have two strands. First of all, I argue that my view can account for three difficulty cases, cases where (i) a (...) fact is both a reason for S to phi and a reason for S not to phi, (ii) a fact is both evidence for the proposition that S ought to phi and evidence for the proposition that S ought not to phi, and (iii) the subject is genuinely torn, as far as reasons are concerned, between phi-ing and not phi-ing. Second, I argue that my view can account for what a reason against S phi-ing is. (shrink)

The objective of this work is to investigate Karol Wojtyła’s meta-ethics. Following the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition, he maintains that ethics is a science. Contrary to the Aristotelian tradition, which conceives ethics as a practical science, Wojtyła sustains that ethics is also a science with theoretical objectivity. He posits the human “experience of morality,” in a specific sense, the moral experience of “I ought to do x”, as the ground for the objectivity of ethics as science. He also critiques (...) the understanding of experience as merely a sense-perception and appearance/phenomenon in empiricism and phenomenalism. However, it maintains the phenomenological understanding of experience as “lived-experience.” Thus, this work is an attempt to flesh out Karol Wojtyla's meta-ethics by investigating the following: 1. Karol Wojtyła’s Philosophy of Person as an Efficacious Moral Person. 2. Wojtyła’s Objectivity of Experience as Subjective Fact. 3. Exposition of his Understanding of Ethics. 4. Discussion of the experience of “I ought to do x”: As the Moral Ground in Karol Wojtyła’s Meta-Ethics. 5. A critical Evaluation and Conclusion. (shrink)

This essay reads a short narrative, “Savoir” by Hélène Cixous, to describe susceptibility as a problem organized around two lines of impingement: between subject and world and between consciousness and the wayward impulses of interior life. The young girl in Cixous’s text suffers a moment of disorientation and distress one misty morning and, against presumptions of inviolability and ideals of subjective consistency, this unhappy event comes to resonate with her disappointed trust in the generosity of the world, her anxious (...) sense of betrayal with respect to those who ought to protect her and her insecurity about her own role in this complex of associations. The frame of susceptibility thus opens up a space for Cixous’s reader and this essay to think the subject in her inconsistency and self-strangeness. (shrink)

Brian Hedden has proposed that any successful account of options for the subjective “ought” must satisfy two constraints: first, it must ensure that we are able to carry out each of the options available to us, and second, it should guarantee that the set of options available to us supervenes on our mental states. In this paper I show that, due to the ever-present possibility of Frankfurt-style cases, these two constraints jointly entail that no agent has any options (...) at any time. This consequence, however, is clearly unacceptable, so one of Hedden’s constraints must go. Because the ability constraint is indispensable, I argue, we have no choice but to reject the supervenience constraint. Hedden’s underlying motivation for imposing the supervenience constraint is the conviction that our options should be transparent to us, but transparency also proves to be incompatible with the ability constraint, so it must be rejected as well. I conclude by sketching an unabashedly externalist account of options, which conceives of options as exhaustive combinations of atomic movements. (shrink)