One of the central, abiding, and unresolved questions in environmental ethics has focused on the criterion for moral considerability or practical respect. In this essay, I call that question itself into question and argue that the search for this criterion should be abandoned because (1) it presupposes the ethical legitimacy of the Western project of planetary domination, (2) the philosophical methods that are andshould be used to address the question properly involve giving consideration in a root sense to everything, (3) (...) the history of the question suggests that it must be kept open, and (4) our deontic experience, the original source of ethical obligations, requires approaching all others, of all sorts, with a mindfulness that is clean of any a priori criterion of respect and positive value. The good work that has been doneon the question should be reconceived as having established rules for the normal, daily consideration of various kinds of others. Giving consideration in the root sense should be separated from giving high regard or positive value to what is considered. Overall, in this essay I argue that universal consideration—giving attention to others of all sorts, with the goal of ascertaining what, if any, direct ethical obligations arise from relating with them—should be adopted as one of the central constitutive principles of practical reasonableness. (shrink)

Even with the very best intentions , Western culture’s approach to wilderness and wildness, the otherness of nature, tends to be one of imperialistic domination and appropriation. Nevertheless, in spite of Western culture’s attempt to gain total control over nature by imprisoning wildness in wilderness areas, which are meant to be merely controlled “simulations” of wildness, a real wildness, a real otherness, can still be found in wilderness reserves . This wildness can serve as the literal ground for the subversion (...) of the imperium, and consequently as the basis for the practical establishment of and residence in what WendeII Berry has called the “landscape of harmony.” Here all land becomes wild sacred space that humans consciously come to reinhabit. In this subversive potential lies the most fundamental justification for the legal establishment of wilderness reserves. (shrink)

Anorexia nervosa and obsessive–compulsive disorder are commonly reported to co-occur and present with overlapping symptomatology. Executive functioning difficulties have been implicated in both mental health conditions. However, studies directly comparing these functions in AN and OCD are extremely limited. This review provides a synthesis of behavioral and neuroimaging research examining executive functioning in AN and OCD to bridge this gap in knowledge. We outline the similarities and differences in behavioral and neuroimaging findings between AN and OCD, focusing on set shifting, (...) working memory, response inhibition, and response monitoring. This review aims to facilitate understanding of transdiagnostic correlates of executive functioning and highlights important considerations for future research. We also discuss the importance of examining both behavioral and neural markers when studying transdiagnostic correlates of executive functions. (shrink)

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This book explores the religious concerns of Enlightenment thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson. Using an innovative method, the study illuminates the intellectual history of the age through interpretations of Jesus between c.1650 and c.1826. The book demonstrates the persistence of theology in modern philosophy and the projects of social reform and amelioration associated with the Enlightenment. At the core of many of these projects was a robust moral-theological realism, sometimes manifest in a natural law ethic, but (...) always associated with Jesus and a commitment to the sovereign goodness of God. This ethical orientation in Enlightenment discourse is found in a range of different metaphysical and political identities which intersect with earlier ‘heretical’ tendencies in Christian thought. This intellectual matrix helped to produce the discourses of irenic toleration which are a legacy of the Enlightenment at its best. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:God, Evil and the Limits of Theology by Karen KilbyVincent BirchGod, Evil and the Limits of Theology by Karen Kilby (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 176 pp.Karen Kilby's God, Evil and the Limits of Theology is a collection of essays reminiscent in multiple respects of Herbert McCabe's God Matters. Kilby cites McCabe on only a handful of occasions, but, more so than the references, the form and the content (...) of Kilby's volume bring McCabe to mind. Like McCabe's book, God, Evil and the Limits of Theology consists of mostly short and readable but highly provocative essays, notwithstanding that Kilby's essays are more academic in form and hang together thematically better than McCabe's text. Regarding content, it is clear that Kilby is aligning herself in certain respects with the tradition of grammatical Thomism that McCabe helped initiate, though it might be better to consider Kilby's work an exercise in "grammatical apophaticism," since Thomas figures prominently in only three of the eleven essays. Even the "grammatical" attribution should be applied with caution, though Kilby does use the term herself, because Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose influence puts the "grammatical" in grammatical Thomism, is not at all explicitly drawn upon for theological purposes. Nevertheless, as will become clear through our discussion of the essays in particular, the arguments and themes of the collection build upon and assist in providing a valuable expansion of the line of thinking carried on by grammatical Thomists.The first four essays treat various concerns in Trinitarian theology, and the first, entitled "Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity," does some important preliminary critical work before Kilby makes her own constructive contribution to Trinitarian theology. For Kilby, social Trinitarianism (Jurgen Moltmann, Colin Gunton, and Patricia Wilson-Kastner are some proponents with whom she engages) is characterized by the idea that the Trinity, conceived as the interpenetration or perichoresis of three persons ("person" applied with fairly minimal negation), should be understood more as a rich source of [End Page 733] insight for apprehending the proper nature of human sociality than as a fundamentally mysterious doctrine. As the title of the chapter suggests, Kilby's primary critique of social theories of the Trinity is that they entail projection of human experience and reality into the Godhead, and she takes this critique a step further in arguing that it is of the very nature of social theories of the Trinity that they do just that. Her defense consists of a key claim that recurs throughout the rest of the Trinitarian essays—that human beings cannot know what it means for God to be three persons but one God. Consequently, social Trinitarians' bold descriptions of insights pertaining to how the three persons are united in perichoresis could be only a product of projection. Kilby concludes this essay by gesturing toward her constructive alternative to social theories of the Trinity: the doctrine of the Trinity does not give insight into God; rather, it determines the grammar for the structure of Christianity.Kilby follows up her first chapter with a study of Thomas Aquinas's Trinitarian theology, and as might be suggested by the conclusion of her first essay, she offers a thoroughly apophatic interpretation of Thomas, very much in the vein of David Burrell's Aquinas: God and Action. That is, Kilby claims that Thomas is not giving us insight into God but only manifesting the limits of our God-talk. Kilby is critical of various contemporary retrievals of Thomas that attempt to show some sort of "making sense" in Thomas's Trinitarian theology, and she focuses her argument regarding what might be called its "nonsense" on Thomas's uses of the terms "procession" and "relation." Kilby claims these terms appear to lose all intelligible connection to human experience when applied to the Trinity, especially noting the tension between, on the one hand, the subsisting relations being identical to the divine essence and, on the other, their being really distinct from each other. It is precisely the apparent incoherencies that arise within Thomas's Trinitarian theology that corroborate for Kilby that Thomas's theology offers... (shrink)

This book is about the liberation of the concept of life from the bondage fashioned by the interpreters of life ever since biology began, and about the liberation of the life of humans and non-humans alike from the bondage of social structures and behaviour, which now threatens the fullness of life's possibilities if not survival itself. It falls into a tradition of writings about human problems from a perspective informed by biology. It rejects the mechanistic model of life dominant in (...) the Western world and develops an alternative 'ecological model' which is applicable to the life of the cell and the life of the human community. For the first time it brings together in one work the insights of modern biology with those of a modern holistic philosophy and a liberal theology in a way which challenges conventional approaches to science, agriculture, sociology, politics, economics, development and liberation movements. (shrink)

Brich convincingly argues that science and religion must come together if we are to heal and renew our planet.

Issues of reliability are claiming center-stage in the epistemology of machine learning. This paper unifies different branches in the literature and points to promising research directions, whilst also providing an accessible introduction to key concepts in statistics and machine learning – as far as they are concerned with reliability.

Earth is changing in ways it hasn't for hundreds of thousands of years. At the same time, Christianity is breaking away from its millennium-long geographical and cultural center in the Euro-West. Its growth is in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, primarily in Pentecostal, evangelical, and independent churches. These dramatically changed planetary and ecclesial landscapes have led many to conclude that we need a new way of thinking about our collective existence: who are we and what is the nature of our (...) responsibility in this deeply altered world? To address that question, biblical scholars Bruce C. Birch and Jacqueline E. Lapsley and Christian ethicists Larry L. Rasmussen and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda carry on "a new conversation" that engages how Christians are to understand the authority and use of Scripture, the basic elements of any full-bodied Christian ethic attuned to our circumstances, and the nature of our responsibility to our planetary neighbors and creation itself. (shrink)

The hunt for a biologically respectable definition for the folk concept of innateness is still on. I defend Ariew’s Canalization account of innateness against the criticisms of Griffiths and Machery, but highlight the remaining flaws in this proposal. I develop a new analysis based on the notion of environmental induction. A trait is innate, I argue, iff it is not environmentally induced. I augment this definition with a novel analysis of environmental induction that draws on the contrastive nature of causal (...) explanation. Whether a trait is environmentally induced, I argue, depends on a context sensitive contrast class. I argue that a “Noninduction” analysis of innateness allows the concept an explanatory role in biology. I show how my proposal co-opts the successes of the Canalization account whilst avoiding its pitfalls, and I account for why biologists associate a range of disparate properties with innateness. (shrink)

Looking back on it, it seems almost incredible that so many equally educated, equally sincere compatriots and contemporaries, all drawing from the same limited stock of evidence, should have reached so many totally different conclusions---and always with complete certainty.

Consciousness has an important role in ethics: when a being consciously experiences the frustration or satisfaction of its interests, those interests deserve higher moral priority than those of a behaviourally similar but non-conscious being. I consider the relationship between this ethical role and an a posteriori (or “type-B”) materialist solution to the mind-body problem. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, if type-B materialism is correct, then the reference of the concept of phenomenal consciousness is radically indeterminate between a (...) neuronal-level property that is distinctive to mammals and a high-level functional property that is much more widely shared. This would leave many non-mammalian animals (such as birds, fish, insects and octopuses) with indeterminate moral status. There are ways to manage this radical moral indeterminacy, but all of these ways lead to profoundly troubling consequences. (shrink)

Human neural organoid research is advancing rapidly. As Greely notes in the target article, this progress presents an “onrushing ethical dilemma.” We can’t rule out the possibility that suff...

Thomas Reid, the Scottish natural and moral philosopher, was one of the founding members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid believed that common sense should form the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He criticised the sceptical philosophy propagated by his fellow Scot David Hume and the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world did not exist outside the human mind. Reid was also critical of the theory of ideas (...) propagated by Locke and Descartes, arguing that it was incompatible with physical and experiential facts. For Reid, our senses demonstrate that the external world must exist, and this work is organised in chapters examining each of the senses in turn. The book, based on his lectures, was first published in 1764 when Reid was a regent professor at King's College, Aberdeen, and was reissued in 1818. (shrink)

There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue. How can the debate move forward? I distinguish three broad types of approach: theory-heavy, theory-neutral and theory-light. Theory-heavy and theory-neutral approaches face serious problems, motivating a middle path: the theory-light approach. At the core of the theory-light approach is a minimal commitment about the relation between phenomenal consciousness and cognition that is compatible with many specific theories of consciousness: the (...) hypothesis that phenomenally conscious perception of a stimulus facilitates, relative to unconscious perception, a cluster of cognitive abilities in relation to that stimulus. This “facilitation hypothesis” can productively guide inquiry into invertebrate consciousness. What is needed? At this stage, not more theory, and not more undirected data gathering. What is needed is a systematic search for consciousness-linked cognitive abilities, their relationships to each other, and their sensitivity to masking. (shrink)

Sentience is the capacity to have feelings, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement. It is not simply the capacity to feel pain, but feelings of pain, distress or harm, broadly understood, have a special significance for animal welfare law. Drawing on over 300 scientific studies, we evaluate the evidence of sentience in two groups of invertebrate animals: the cephalopod molluscs or, for short, cephalopods (including octopods, squid and cuttlefish) and the decapod crustaceans or, (...) for short, decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish). We also evaluate the potential welfare implications of current commercial practices involving these animals. (shrink)

How does consciousness vary across the animal kingdom? Are some animals ‘more conscious’ than others? This article presents a multidimensional framework for understanding interspecies variation in states of consciousness. The framework distinguishes five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, and self-consciousness. For each dimension, existing experiments that bear on it are reviewed and future experiments are suggested. By assessing a given species against each dimension, we can construct a consciousness profile for (...) that species. On this framework, there is no single scale along which species can be ranked as more or less conscious. Rather, each species has its own distinctive consciousness profile. (shrink)

From mitochondria to meerkats, the natural world is full of spectacular examples of social behaviour. In the early 1960s W. D. Hamilton changed the way we think about how such behaviour evolves. He introduced three key innovations - now known as Hamilton's rule, kin selection, and inclusive fitness - and his pioneering work kick-started a research program now known as social evolution theory. This is a book about the philosophical foundations and future prospects of that program. [Note: only the Introduction (...) is available to download.]. (shrink)

In debates about animal sentience, the precautionary principle is often invoked. The idea is that when the evidence of sentience is inconclusive, we should “give the animal the benefit of the doubt” or “err on the side of caution” in formulating animal protection legislation. Yet there remains confusion as to whether it is appropriate to apply the precautionary principle in this context, and, if so, what “applying the precautionary principle” means in practice regarding the burden of proof for animal sentience. (...) Here I construct a version of the precautionary principle tailored to the question of animal sentience together with a practical framework for implementing it. I explain and defend the key features of this framework, argue that it is well-aligned with current practice in animal welfare science, and consider and reject a number of influential counterarguments to the use of precautionary reasoning in this area. (shrink)

The application of machine-learning technologies to medical practice promises to enhance the capabilities of healthcare professionals in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, of medical conditions. However, there is growing concern that algorithmic bias may perpetuate or exacerbate existing health inequalities. Hence, it matters that we make precise the different respects in which algorithmic bias can arise in medicine, and also make clear the normative relevance of these different kinds of algorithmic bias for broader questions about justice and fairness in healthcare. (...) In this paper, we provide the building blocks for an account of algorithmic bias and its normative relevance in medicine. (shrink)

When two agents engage in a joint action, such as rowing together, they exercise joint know-how. But what is the relationship between the joint know-how of the two agents and the know-how each agent possesses individually? I construct an “active mutual enablement” account of this relationship, according to which joint know-how arises when each agent knows how to predict, monitor, and make failure-averting adjustments in response to the behaviour of the other agent, while actively enabling the other to make such (...) adjustments. I defend the AME account from three objections, and I then use this account as the platform for an examination of the reducibility of joint know-how to joint propositional knowledge. A summative account of joint propositional knowledge is incompatible with the reduction of joint know-how to joint propositional knowledge, whereas a distributive account is not. I close by highlighting some open questions the AME account brings into view concerning the evolutionary origin and scaling up of joint know-how. (shrink)

We are all guided by thousands of norms, but how did our capacity for normative cognition evolve? I propose there is a deep but neglected link between normative cognition and practical skill. In modern humans, complex motor skills and craft skills, such as toolmaking, are guided by internally represented norms of correct performance. Moreover, it is plausible that core components of human normative cognition evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of transmitting complex motor skills and craft skills, especially (...) skills related to toolmaking, through social learning. If this is correct, the expansion of the normative domain beyond technique to encompass more abstract norms of fairness, reciprocity, ritual and kinship involved the elaboration of a basic platform for the guidance of skilled action by technical norms. This article motivates and defends this “skill hypothesis” for the origin of normative cognition and sets out various ways in which it could be empirically tested. (shrink)

Drawing on the SAGE minutes and other documents, I consider the wider lessons for norms of scientific advising that can be learned from the UK’s initial response to coronavirus in the period January-March 2020, when an initial strategy that planned to avoid total suppression of transmission was abruptly replaced by an aggressive suppression strategy. I introduce a distinction between “normatively light advice”, in which no specific policy option is recommended, and “normatively heavy advice” that does make an explicit recommendation. I (...) argue that, although scientific advisers should avoid normatively heavy advice in normal times in order to facilitate democratic accountability, this norm can be permissibly overridden in situations of grave emergency. SAGE’s major mistake in early 2020 was not that of endorsing a particular strategy, nor that of being insufficiently precautionary, but that of relying too heavily on a specific set of “reasonable worst-case” planning assumptions. I formulate some proposals that assign a more circumscribed role to “worst-case” thinking in emergency planning. In an epilogue, I consider what the implications of my proposals would have been for the UK’s response to the “second wave” of late 2020. (shrink)

Skyrms, building on the work of Dretske, has recently developed a novel information-theoretic account of propositional content in simple signalling systems. Information-theoretic accounts of content traditionally struggle to accommodate the possibility of misrepresentation, and I show that Skyrms’s account is no exception. I proceed to argue, however, that a modified version of Skyrms’s account can overcome this problem. On my proposed account, the propositional content of a signal is determined not by the information that it actually carries, but by the (...) information that it would carry at the nearest separating equilibrium of the underlying evolutionary dynamics. I show that this amended account yields reasonable ascriptions of false propositional content in a well-known formal model of the evolution of communication , and close with a discussion of the serious but perhaps not insuperable difficulties we face in applying the account to examples of signalling in the real world. (shrink)

Cette étude essaye d’établir qu’il y a deux notions très différentes de « fondation » à l’œuvre dans les Recherches logiques de Husserl. Dans la IIIème Recherche, où le terme est formellement introduit, lorsqu’il se demande quels sont les contenus qui peuvent exister d’une manière autonome (indépendants) et lesquels peuvent exister uniquement en tant que moments d’autre chose (dépendants), Husserl suit ce que j’appelle un « modèle ontologique ». Selon ce modèle, le concret possède une priorité sur à l’abstrait qui (...) est fondé en lui. Dans la VIème Recherche, en revanche, Husserl s’oriente principalement sur un « modèle gnoséologique » qui voit le complexe comme fondé sur ce qui est relativement simple, étant donné que les expériences d’ordre supérieur (telles les perceptions de types d’objets plus complexes) sont « fondées sur » des expériences plus simples, bien qu’elles ne puissent pas y être réduites. L’exemple principal ici est celui des intuitions catégoriales : fondées sur les intuitions sensibles, elles n’y sont pas réductibles. Mais cette distinction entre deux sens différents du terme de « fondation » peut également nous aider à mieux comprendre de nombreuses thèses husserliennes plutôt controversées. Par exemple, elle peut nous permettre de mieux comprendre dans quelle mesure faire l’expérience d’un être humain comme un tout se fonde sur l’expérience d’un corps physique, et cela même si l’étant que nous rencontrons inclut à la fois des aspects corporels et des aspects spirituels – les deux étant vus, d’une manière essentielle, comme des moments de cette unique personne qui fait l’objet de notre expérience. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, Ginsburg and Jablonka have developed a novel approach to studying the evolutionary origins of consciousness: the Unlimited Associative Learning framework. The central idea is that there is a distinctive type of learning that can serve as a transition marker for the evolutionary transition from non-conscious to conscious life. The goal of this paper is to stimulate discussion of the framework by providing a primer on its key claims and a clear statement of its main empirical (...) predictions. (shrink)

This is a response to the nine commentaries on our target article “Unlimited Associative Learning: A primer and some predictions”. Our responses are organized by theme rather than by author. We present a minimal functional architecture for Unlimited Associative Learning that aims to tie to together the list of capacities presented in the target article. We explain why we discount higher-order thought theories of consciousness. We respond to the criticism that we have overplayed the importance of learning and underplayed the (...) importance of spatial modelling. We decline the invitation to add a negative marker to our proposed positive marker so as to rule out consciousness in plants, but we nonetheless maintain that there is no positive evidence of consciousness in plants. We close by discussing how UAL relates to development and to its material substrate. (shrink)

In the policy discourses of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and European Commission, modern biotechnology and the life sciences are represented as an emerging “bioeconomy” in which the latent value underpinning biological materials and products offers the opportunity for sustainable economic growth. This articulation of modern biotechnology and economic development is an emerging scholarly field producing numerous “bio-concepts.” Over the last decade or so, there have been a number of attempts to theorize this relationship between biotechnologies and their (...) capitalization. This article highlights some of the underlying ambiguities in these conceptualizations, especially in the fetishization of everything “bio.” We offer an alternative view of the bioeconomy by rethinking the theoretical importance of several key economic and financial processes. (shrink)

In a new study, Ben-Haim et al. use subliminal stimuli to separate conscious and unconscious perception in macaques. A programme of this type, using a range of cognitive tasks, is a promising way to look for conscious perception in more controversial cases.

Definitions of animal welfare often invoke consciousness or sentience. Marian Stamp Dawkins has argued that to define animal welfare this way is a mistake. In Dawkins’s alternative view, an animal with good welfare is one that is healthy and “has what it wants.” The dispute highlights a source of strain on the concept of animal welfare: consciousness-involving definitions are better able to capture the normative significance of welfare, whereas consciousness-free definitions facilitate the validation of welfare indicators. I reflect on how (...) the field should respond to this strain, ultimately recommending against splitting the concept and in favor of consciousness-involving definitions. (shrink)

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

What makes fast, cumulative cultural evolution work? Where did it come from? Why is it the sole preserve of humans? We set out a self-assembly hypothesis: cultural evolution evolved culturally. We present an evolutionary account that shows this hypothesis to be coherent, plausible, and worthy of further investigation. It has the following steps: (0) in common with other animals, early hominins had significant capacity for social learning; (1) knowledge and skills learned by offspring from their parents began to spread because (...) bearers had more offspring, a process we call CS1 (or Cultural Selection 1); (2) CS1 shaped attentional learning biases; (3) these attentional biases were augmented by explicit learning biases (judgements about what should be copied from whom). Explicit learning biases enabled (4) the high-fidelity, exclusive copying required for fast cultural accumulation of knowledge and skills by a process we call CS2 (or Cultural Selection 2), and (5) the emergence of cognitive processes such as imitation, mindreading and metacognition – ‘cognitive gadgets’ specialised for cultural learning. This self-assembly hypothesis is consistent with archaeological evidence that the stone tools used by early hominins were not dependent on fast, cumulative cultural evolution, and suggests new priorities for research on ‘animal culture’. (shrink)