Luck, Value, and Commitment comprises eleven new essays which engage with, or take their point of departure from, the influential work in moral and political philosophy of Bernard Williams (1929-2003).

Hannah Arendts Philosophie des Politischen ist in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts zum Klassiker avanciert. Ihr emphatischer Begriff des Politischen wird in der Sozialphilosophie und in der politischen Theorie kontrovers debattiert. In jüngster Vergangenheit ist auch in der politischen Bildung eine deutliche Zunahme der Arendt Rezeption zu verzeichnen, in der auf ganz unterschiedliche Weise auf ihre Schriften Bezug genommen wird. Die Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes nehmen dies zum Anlass, bildungspolitische Zugänge und Lektüren von Hannah Arendts Schriften zu präsentieren, (...) um damit ihren grundlagentheoretischen Beitrag zur politischen Bildung zu erfassen. Mit Beiträgen von Fred Dewey, Jerome Kohn, Wolfgang Heuer, Ingo Juchler, Dirk Lange, Bettina Lösch, Helgard Mahrdt, Waltraud Meints-Stender, Ingeborg Nordmann, Tonio Oeftering und Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. (shrink)

It has become common to distinguish between two kinds of ethical concepts: thick and thin ones. Bernard Williams, who coined the terms, explains that thick concepts such as “coward, lie, brutality, gratitude and so forth” are marked by having greater empirical content than thin ones. They are both action-guiding and world-guided: -/- If a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a reason for action… At the same time, their application is guided by the world. A concept (...) of this sort may be rightly or wrongly applied, and people who have acquired it can agree that it applies or fails to apply to some new situation. -/- Thin concepts are concepts such as good and bad, right and wrong, obligation and duty. Judgments applying thick concepts have been seen as lending support to the possibility of explaining moral knowledge, and objectivity in ethics. It appears that due to their empirical content – their world-guidedness – judgments employing thick concepts can be true or false, depending on whether they get the worldly facts right. In addition they provide reasons for action – they are action-guiding – and thus may provide the starting point of a realist account of practical reasons: the view that reasons are facts and whether or not a person has a reason to act does not (normally) depend on her attitudes. The cruelty of an action is a reason not to perform it or to prevent it; that an action is kind is a reason in its favour. Of course these remarks aren’t conclusive – far from it. But even so, some non-cognitivists may regard them as completely wrongheaded, and so does Bernard Williams even though he is not a non-cognitivist. However, he believes that having a practical reason does depend on a person’s attitudes and motives. A certain worry about thick concepts will make clear what the problem is. It has most expressly been raised by Simon Blackburn, who sees it as undermining even the most superficial plausibility of moral cognitivism, as well as the claim that the properties picked out by thick concepts provide reasons. While we may readily accept that the kindness of an action or the fact that it is required by justice is a reason to perform it, there are many thick concepts whose action-guiding role we would reject. Some derogatory – e.g., racist or sexist - words express thick concepts too, Blackburn notes. And surely there are no racist or sexist truths. Furthermore there are concepts that some people use evaluatively (like chaste or obscene), but many of us do not regard the propositions in which those concepts feature as even prima facie reason giving. In raising these points, Blackburn claims that it is morally objectionable to regard the facts asserted in propositions which employ thick concepts as action-guiding because it leads to “a conservative and ultimately self-serving complacency.” As he sees it, the problem is that if we believe that the correct application of thick concepts yields evaluative truths and that evaluative truths state reasons for actions, we seem to be committed to accepting that some people are, say, fat, derog., and therefore to be ridiculed, and that there is at least a pro tanto reason to lead a chaste life, or feel affection towards cute women. Therefore, the view that all evaluative properties provide reasons for action or for attitudes such as admiration, affection or (dis)approval must be rejected. I will call this worry henceforth Blackburn’s challenge. The challenge is that understanding judgments employing thick concepts as expressing evaluative truths and providing reasons for actions or for attitudes leads to a morally unacceptable view. Blackburn suggests instead that we should separate the conditions for applying thick concepts and the reasons that we have in virtue of the concept applying. She may be cute, yes, but that is not a reason for “admiration and arousal.” -/- …it is morally vital that we proceed by splitting the input from the output in such a case. By refusing to split we fail to open an essential specifically normative dimension of criticism. -/- According to Blackburn, the meaning of thick concepts is made up of two distinct and in principle separable components: a descriptive one and the expression of an attitude. The truth-aptness and cognitive appearance of judgments employing thick concepts is explained by the descriptive component alone. Blackburn writes “[w]e get nothing but detachable and flexible attitudes, coupled with delineations of traits of character or action”. I will call this reply to Blackburn’s challenge the separability thesis. I agree with Blackburn that any account of thick concepts has to face and answer the challenge that he poses. In this paper, I will focus on one reply to the challenge which denies separability, namely Bernard Williams’s. Williams answers Blackburn’s challenge, while holding on to a cognitivist understanding of thick concepts. But his particular brand of cognitivism is peculiar: Williams rejects the separability thesis, and claims that correct applications of thick concepts yield evaluative (and not just descriptive) knowledge. But this is a special kind of knowledge. It is confined to a local community. The members of a community which uses certain thick concepts may have reasons to act accordingly, but the non-members do not. And even the reasons of members remain a little fragile: they may not want to continue using their concepts upon thorough reflection. The local knowledge view allows Williams to answer Blackburn’s challenge, because even though thick concepts are evaluative concepts and their application can yield evaluative knowledge, no one who isn’t a member of the relevant community has reason to be guided by the concept. Complementing a cognitivist view of thick concepts with reasons internalism allows Williams to answer the challenge. My aim in this paper is to show that Williams’s position is, despite its initial attraction, untenable. In particular, I am going to show why the internal reasons view is incompatible with Williams’s own understanding of thick concepts. My modest result is that the internalist view of reasons does not help to answer Blackburn’s challenge. My aim in this paper is not to answer the challenge but, rather, to explore the possibility of developing Williams’s attenuated version of cognitivism, and the possibility of combining it with reasons internalism. (shrink)

It appears to be a feature of our ordinary understanding of morality that we ought not to act in certain ways at all. We ought not to kill, torture, deceive, break our promises (say)—exceptional circumstances apart. Many moral duties are thought of in this way. Killing another person would be wrong even if it achieved a great good, and even if it led to preventing the deaths of several others. This feature of moral thinking is at the core of deontological (...) ethics. But while it is also part and parcel of ordinary moral thought, it seems puzzling, because it requires an agent to act (or to abstain from acting) in certain ways, even if by violating the duty she could achieve a better outcome in terms of the very restriction that she is required to heed. If the explanation of the duty not to kill were that it preserves human life it would be hard to understand why killing is not morally permitted when it leads to preserving a greater number of lives. Moreover, why should we not violate a restriction if doing so leads to fewer violations of that very restriction? There are two questions here. (1) Why not violate a restriction whose point it is to preserve lives, if doing so leads to preserving a greater number of lives? (2) Why not violate a restriction if doing so minimizes the violation of that very restriction? The latter question concerns what is sometimes called ‘the paradox of deontology’ or the problem of ‘minimizing violations’. The former may concern the so-called trolley cases, for instance. After all, a trolley hurtling towards a number of innocent people is not about to violate the moral restriction on killing innocent people, as it is not the kind of thing that can be subject to such a restriction. In this paper I am concerned only with (2): the paradox of deontology. To put it in Nozick’s terms: ‘How can a concern for the nonviolation of C [i.e. some deontological constraint] lead to refusal to violate C even when this would prevent other more extensive violations of C? -/- Samuel Scheffler, puzzled by the same idea, put it in terms of ‘agent-centred restrictions’ (ACR), because the restriction requires an agent (not) to act in certain ways, contrasting thereby with a requirement that certain actions not be done. The restriction is thus an agent-relative rather than an agent-neutral one. Scheffler ended up rejecting the idea of agent-centred restrictions, as even on close investigation the puzzle would not dissolve. Scheffler maintains that ACRs have ‘an air of paradox’ to them, as they violate what he calls maximizing rationality. ACRs appear to clash with the idea of maximizing rationality, because they require an agent to choose the option that worse achieves her goal of not harming people. I call this, following common parlance, the paradox of deontology, even though it is not strictly speaking a paradox. Exploring whether there is really a problem here, and how it might be solved, is the main objective of this paper. I begin by explaining the puzzlement about agent-centred restrictions in more detail. I then discuss promising as an example of a kind of action which is thought to be subject to agent-centred restrictions. It turns out that they are surprisingly easy to explain. The difficult case is killing—and that should put us on guard. I argue that the problem is not with the very idea of deontological restrictions, but with puzzling aspects of the ethics of killing. (shrink)

If you injure me, it matters morally whether it was an accident or you did it intentionally, and whether you did it because you thought it would be fun. I take it that any ethical theory will have to include some explanation of why this is. There are two dominant views in the current debate about the moral significance of an agent’s intentions: The one is that the intention with which someone acts at least sometimes determines whether what she does (...) is right or wrong (permissible or impermissible). Proponents of the so-called doctrine of double-effect (DDE) hold that an action which has certain bad outcomes may be permissible if the bad consequences are only foreseen, even if the same action would be morally wrong if they were intended as a means. This is not the only way in which intentions could make a difference to an action’s permissibility, but it is the best-known defense that they do. According to the second view, intentions don’t matter in this way: they do not determine the permissibility of an action. They do matter, but in a different dimension of normative assessment: They determine whether the agent is a good or a bad person; or alternatively: they determine the “moral worth” of an action or its “meaning”, including its praiseworthiness or blameworthiness , or the severity of a wrong-doing. The main thesis is what Thomson called “The Irrelevance-of-Intentions-to-Permissibility Thesis” (for short: IIP) -/- [IIP] “It is irrelevant to the question whether X may do alpha what intention X would do alpha with if he or she did it.” -/- IIP is driven in part by skepticism about DDE: since – according to proponents of IIP - DDE is false, we must explain the relevance of intentions and reasons in a different way. Proponents of IIP tend not to consider the possibility that intentions might matter to permissibility in ways that are different from DDE. In this paper I do not focus on the arguments for or against DDE, but investigate IIP itself more closely, and look at some of the arguments for and against it. (shrink)

The buck-passing account of value (BPA) is very fertile ground that has given rise to a number of interpretations and controversies. It has originally been proposed by T.M. Scanlon as an analysis of value: according to it, being good ‘is not a property that itself provides a reason to respond to a thing in certain ways. Rather, to be good or valuable is to have other properties that constitute such reasons’. Buck-passing stands in a complicated relation to the fitting-attitude analysis (...) of normativity that reaches back to the work of Brentano and Ewing. Proponents of FA-analysis hold that, as a matter of the conceptual analysis of ‘good’, something is good if it is fitting to have pro-attitudes of a certain kind towards it. The ambition of FA-analysis is to explain all practical normativity in terms of the fittingness of attitudes, which – while being itself a normative concept – is the only normative concept which grounds all others. Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen welcomed BPA as a contemporary version of FA-analysis, and others have followed this suggestion. But whether BPA should be regarded as a version of FA-analysis is a moot point. In section I, I show that BPA is not as obviously a successor of the fitting-attitude analysis of value as some have thought. The much discussed wrong-kind-of-reasons (for short: WKR) problem afflicts buck-passing only in so far as it incorporates a version of FA analysis, or at any rate is expressed in terms of reasons for attitudes. There can be a buck-passing account of value which is not affected by the problem: one that limits the account to reasons for actions (rather than attitudes). However, insofar as BPA does inherit elements of FA analysis, it also has a WKR problem. In section II, I discuss this problem and its solution. I show that it has been misidentified in the current literature, and that – once we understand the problem correctly – its solution is likely to be unavailable to the buck-passer. Hence we should reject any account of BPA that incorporates FA analysis. That leaves us with versions which do not: versions that formulate BPA in terms of reasons for actions only, rather than reasons for attitudes. Finally, in section III, I discuss why buck-passing seemed to be appealing to begin with, and whether a version of BPA that does not incorporate FA analysis is a viable contender of the account – beyond the WKR problem. (shrink)

Explaining the relation of values and reasons is a major focus of Joseph Raz’s work. I examine his account of the relation of values and reasons, focusing in particular on practical reasons. As a preliminary way of delineating two basic alternatives for mapping the relation of values and reasons, let me pose the Euthyphro-style question: (1) Is something valuable because we have reasons to behave in some way with respect to it? Or: (2) Do we have reasons to behave in (...) some way with respect to it because it is valuable? Though helpful for contrasting different approaches, this question is still multiply ambiguous. It may be interpreted as a question concerning the metaphysical primacy of values and reasons respectively - that is, whether there have to be things of value for there to be reasons, or vice versa. There is also a question of conceptual primacy: Can ‘value’ be defined in terms of reasons, or can ‘reason’ be defined in terms of value? A related, but different question is epistemological: Does a person have to be able to master the concept of value in order to understand the concept of a reason (or, again, vice versa)? I use these three questions as guidelines for investigating Raz’s view of the relation of values and reasons. Are values (1) metaphysically, (2) conceptually, and/or (3) epistemologically prior to reasons? Or are reasons in all or any of these respects prior to value? My strategy in the paper is as follows: In section 1, I locate Raz’s position with respect to these three questions by contrasting his views with those of Thomas Scanlon. In section 2, I work out Raz’s account of reasons and values in some greater detail. And then, in section 3, I discuss what I take to be the remaining major problem with Raz’s approach. (shrink)

In his seminal paper, “Moral Luck,” Bernard Williams begins to develop an account of responsibility for unintentional aspects of our agency. It rests on a crucial distinction of success and failure, internal or external to an agent’s project. I argue that a success which results from conditions that are internal to a project is not a lucky success, nor is a failure which results from something that is internal to the project just unlucky. There is no internal luck. Responsibility-defying luck (...) is always external. An important result of this exploration is that Williams’s view opens a path for understanding responsibility neither as being concerned with reactive attitudes such as indignation or blame, nor in a common rationalist way as being based on an agent’s reason-responsiveness. Instead, responsibility depends on how a person’s actions relate to the exercise of her abilities in the pursuit of her projects and how they are integrated into her life. (shrink)

In this paper, I comment on Waismann’s view of ‘motivational explanations’ as he develops it in his unfinished, posthumously published essay ‘Will and Motive’. According to a traditional view, when we act, the motive is an internal psychological state of which we can know through introspection, and it triggers or causes the action. Thus the motive causally explains an independent event which is the action. As Waismann sees it, everything here is false. The motive is (1) not an internal psychological (...) state. (2) We do not know it through introspection. (3) It does not trigger an action, and (4) there is no causal explanation in which the motive is the cause and the action the effect. I analyze Waismann’s arguments for these claims and work out his positive view. Waismann draws our attention to two features: the uncertainty and instability of motives, and the fact that they are often ascribed on the basis of the action even when the agent wasn’t aware of them prior to acting. Might this hold only for certain motives: viz. ‘Triebfedern’ (drives), in particular those that are unconscious, but not for motives in the sense of ‘Beweggrund’ (reason, purpose)? If action explanations in the light of an agent’s purposes or reasons are unaffected by Waismann’s arguments for the instability and uncertainty of motives, then perhaps the traditional view would not be false for this kind of explanation: it is not uncertain, or unstable. However, I understand Waismann as trying to show (in particular through his interpretation of Dostojevki’s Raskolnikov) that even if a reason for which a person acts or a purpose is something that the agent is aware of prior to action, we get the same kind of instability and uncertainty that occurs with unconscious motives. Here is why: agents are normally aware of quite a number of reasons for and against acting in a certain way. But for any one of those reasons, they may deny – as Raskolnikov does – that that is the reason for which they did it. It was a reason, all right, and even one that they considered, but not the one for which they acted. Thus the problems of instability and uncertainty that Waismann points out affects motives not only insofar as they are unconscious and mere drives. They affect motives in the sense of ‘Beweggrund’ as well. (shrink)

Why do relationships of friendship and love support partiality, but not relationships of hatred or commitments of racism? Where does partiality end and why? I take the intuitive starting point that important cases of partiality are meaningful. I develop a view whereby meaning is understood in terms of transcending self-limitations in order to connect with things of external value. I then show how this view can be used to distinguish central cases of legitimate partiality from cases of illegitimate partiality and (...) how it puts pressure on the traditional way of thinking about partiality. (shrink)

Our view is that fundamental appetitive and defensive motivation systems evolved to mediate a complex array of adaptive behaviors that support the organism’s drive to survive—defending against threat and securing resources. Activation of these motive systems engages processes that facilitate attention allocation, information intake, sympathetic arousal, and, depending on context, will prompt tactical actions that can be directed either toward or away from the strategic goal, whether defensively or appetitively determined. Research from our laboratory that measures autonomic, central, and somatic (...) reactions when processing emotional scenes is described which indicates that motivationally relevant cues, whether appetitive or defensive, capture attention preferentially, prompt enhanced perceptual processing and information gathering, and occasion metabolic arousal that mobilizes the organism for coping actions. (shrink)

This chapter proceeds in five steps. First, we will describe and justify the structure of the traditional system of species classification. Second, we will discuss three formal principles governing the development of taxonomies in general. It will emerge that, in addition to these formal principles, a division of living beings must meet certain empirical constraints. In the third section, we will show that the traditional division of living beings into species best meets these constraints. Fourth, we will argue that a (...) taxonomic system based on this notion of species provides a more natural alternative to the many arbitrary classifications that are possible. Hence, the traditional classificatory system is also the most natural one. Finally, we will discuss and reject an alternative account that suggests defining species solely with a view to their evolutionary history. We will argue that taxonomic trees do not depict hereditary connections but, rather, something else. (shrink)

Donald Davidson writes that “[r]easons for intending to do something are very much like reasons for action, indeed one might hold that they are exactly the same except for time.” That the reasons for forming an intention and the reasons for acting as intended are in some way related is a widely accepted claim. But it can take different forms: (1) the reasons may mirror each other so that there is a (derivative) reason to intend whenever there is a reason (...) to act; or (2) they may reduce to just one kind: perhaps all reasons for action are really reasons for forming intentions.3 Or the other way around: (3) all reasons for intentions are really reasons to act. The three versions are not equally strong contenders though. The third - that reasons to intend could reduce to reasons to act - seems unlikely. After all, there may be reasons to form future-directed intentions, in particular, independently of the reason to act as intended. The second suggestion falls prey to different considerations: reasons to act can, at least sometimes, be reasons to produce a certain outcome, quite independently of the intention with which the action is done, or whether it is done intentionally at all. In these cases, the reason to act is not (or not obviously) a reason to intend. Therefore, I don’t pursue the possibility of a reduction in this paper. My focus is on the first, non-reductive proposal. I will discuss various versions of it in some detail, but ultimately reject it. (shrink)

Williams’s attack on the ‘morality system’ in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy was preceded by his famous but misunderstood essay ‘Moral Luck’. This essay pursues two principal aims. First and foremost, I take a fresh look at Williams’s argument in ‘Moral Luck’, to assess its defensibility. Second, I investigate how Williams’s treatment of moral luck shapes and informs the wider assault on the ‘morality system’ which reached its fullest expression in the later work. We can learn something about both (...) of Williams’s projects—his defence of moral luck, and his attack on the morality system—by seeing how each of these projects contributes to the other. Drawing on Williams’s discussion of Gauguin’s desertion of his family for a life of artistic endeavour in Tahiti, six interpretations of Williams’s argument are suggested. While some of these are better than others, none is completely satisfying or convincing. It is suggested, in conclusion, that the attack on anti-luckism does not make an indispensable contribution to Williams’s attack on the morality system. (shrink)

Several philosophers have argued that ‘constraints’ constrain (and thereby explain) by virtue of being modally stronger than ordinary laws of nature. In this way, a constraint applies to all possible systems, for a variety of possibility that is broader (that is, more inclusive) than the variety we employ when we say that the ordinary laws of nature apply to all physically possible systems. Explanations by constraint are thus more broadly unifying than ordinary causal explanations. Philosophical examples of good candidates for (...) constraints have heretofore been drawn almost exclusively from fundamental physics. This paper argues for the existence of such constraints (even multiple levels of them) in at least one human science (linguistics), not just in physics. (shrink)

The problem of moral luck arises from the apparent conflict of two commonly accepted claims: it seems, on the one hand, that we are responsible only for those actions that are under our control; on the other hand, we seem to be responsible for the results of our actions, even if those depend on the cooperation of factors that we do not control directly. The opponents of moral luck side with the so-called control principle. In this paper, I argue, first, (...) that their understanding of control leads into absurdities, and is in many ways inadequate. It makes it near impossible to explain responsibility for failed or negligent actions, for instance. Secondly, I develop a different understanding of control – control through skills - , and show that having control in this sense is compatible with moral luck, and also allows us to explain when and why we are responsible for failed and negligent actions. -/- Das Problem des moralischen Zufalls ergibt sich aus dem vermeintlich Konflikt zweier tief in unserem Alltagsverständnis von Verantwortung verankerter Annahmen: einerseits scheint es, dass wir nur für das verantwortlich sind, was unter unserer Kontrolle ist; andererseits sind wir aber verantwortlich für das, wir tun – für die Ergebnisse unseres Handeln - und die sind gewöhnlich nicht unter unserer Kontrolle, sondern hängen von vielen Umständen ab, auf die wir als Handelnde keinen direkten Einfluss haben. Die Gegner des moralischen Zufalls verteidigen das sogenannte Kontrollprinzip. In diesem Aufsatz argumentiere ich zum einen dafür, dass der Kontrollbegriff, der diesem Ansatzes unterliegt, zu Absurditäten führt und in verschiedenen Hinsichten unzureichend ist. Insbesondere gelingt es seinen Vertretern nicht, zu erklären, wann und warum wir für verfehlte und nachlässige Handlungen verantwortlich sind. Zum anderen entwickele ich einen anderen Kontrollbegriff – Kontrolle durch Fertigkeiten – und zeige, dass die Kontrolle über unser Handeln in diesem Sinn mit moralischem Zufall vereinbar ist. Darüberhinaus erlaubt uns dieser Kontrollbegriff zu erklären, wann und in welchem Umfang wir für missglückte und nachlässige Handlungen verantwortlich sind. (shrink)

A vital step to successfully orienting Deleuze with biosemiotics (and theories of biological complexity overall) is to discover a coherent scientific throughline in his work that also accounts for the aesthetic/creative dimension of his philosophy. This requires the heterodox move (from a Deleuzean point of view) of giving priority to the organism. I argue that Deleuze’s treatment of the organism does more than signal a superficial relation to biological complexity theory that, as a result of his nuanced take on the (...) matter, undermines the value of the organic body to his system. Instead, we can recognize a working theory of autopoiesis in the early Deleuze that scaffolds as well as substantiates his later ethological and biosemiotic observations and reveals a definite, albeit minimal, notion of subjectivity in his work. Most importantly, reorienting his logic of sense as a logic of sense-making, or the context-dependent signification between system and environment (Thompson, 2007), allows us to begin the work of mining a scientific throughline in Deleuze’s work akin to biological complexity theory that is of value to both Deleuze studies and biosemiotics. (shrink)

As sophisticated artificial intelligence software becomes more ubiquitously and more intimately integrated within domains of traditionally human endeavor, many are raising questions over how responsibility (be it moral, legal, or causal) can be understood for an AI’s actions or influence on an outcome. So called “responsibility gaps” occur whenever there exists an apparent chasm in the ordinary attribution of moral blame or responsibility when an AI automates physical or cognitive labor otherwise performed by human beings and commits an error. Healthcare (...) administration is an industry ripe for responsibility gaps produced by these kinds of AI. The moral stakes of healthcare are often life and death, and the demand for reducing clinical uncertainty while standardizing care incentivizes the development and integration of AI diagnosticians and prognosticators. In this paper, we argue that (1) responsibility gaps are generated by “black box” healthcare AI, (2) the presence of responsibility gaps (if unaddressed) creates serious moral problems, (3) a suitable solution is for relevant stakeholders to voluntarily responsibilize the gaps, taking on some moral responsibility for things they are not, strictly speaking, blameworthy for, and (4) should this solution be taken, black box healthcare AI will be permissible in the provision of healthcare. (shrink)

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by social/communicative difficulties and perseverative behaviours. While research on autism has flourished recently, few studies have been conducted on the disorder in non‐Western contexts. In low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs), biomedical research on autism is required to better understand the needs of the population and to develop contextually appropriate interventions. However, autistic individuals are a vulnerable study population and LMICs present with various considerations. While the presentation of autism is heterogeneous, stigma (...) is a common social consequence affecting research. Drawing specifically on the South African context, the ethical intersections of these issues are discussed, along with the limitations of the current informed consent process. Community engagement is recommended as an adjunct to informed consent to ensure that biomedical research is conducted in a more inclusive way. Practical pointers are provided for implementing systematic support for conducting community engagement alongside biomedical research. (shrink)

Not all scientific explanations work by describing causal connections between events or the world's overall causal structure. In addition, mathematicians regard some proofs as explaining why the theorems being proved do in fact hold. This book proposes new philosophical accounts of many kinds of non-causal explanations in science and mathematics.

Machine learning has become a key component of contemporary information systems. Unlike prior information systems explicitly programmed in formal languages, ML systems infer rules from data. This paper shows what this difference means for the critical analysis of socio-technical systems based on machine learning. To provide a foundation for future critical analysis of machine learning-based systems, we engage with how the term is framed and constructed in self-education resources. For this, we analyze machine learning tutorials, an important information source for (...) self-learners and a key tool for the formation of the practices of the machine learning community. Our analysis identifies canonical examples of machine learning as well as important misconceptions and problematic framings. Our results show that machine learning is presented as being universally applicable and that the application of machine learning without special expertise is actively encouraged. Explanations of machine learning algorithms are missing or strongly limited. Meanwhile, the importance of data is vastly understated. This has implications for the manifestation of social inequalities through machine learning-based systems. (shrink)

Sir Ernst Gombrich and the Barber from Tuscany In the spirit of Sir Ernst Gombrich, this essay uses an anecdote—a chat between Gombrich and a barber from Tuscany—to illustrate a deeper point, namely, how cultural memory, tradition, and a canon give rise to an implied language of culture and cultural value. Gombrich staunchly defended tradition against relativism. By relativism, he meant something like "radical subjectivism." To his mind, subjectivism (in the cultural and social sense of the term) is not only (...) impossible, since meaning is conferred through culture and society, but it is also dangerous (in the cultural and ethical sense of the term), since it denies the existence of shared values. Against consensus on the one hand and radical subjectivism on the other, Gombrich advocated a middle way: criticism and self-criticism to ensure latitude; the search for "truth" to ensure a limited plurality of interpretations. (shrink)

Adaptation to novel visuomotor transformations for example when navigating a cursor on a computer monitor by using a computer mouse, can be explicit or implicit. Explicit adjustments are made when people are informed about the occurrence and the type of a novel visuomotor transformation and intentionally modify their movements. Implicit adjustments, in contrast, are made without reportable knowledge of a novel visuomotor transformation and without a change intention. The relation of implicit adjustments to explicit adjustments needs further clarification. Here we (...) show that these two types of adjustment occur at the same time and remain functionally independent. The size of total adjustment turned out to be the sum of explicit and implicit adjustments measured in isolation, even when both processes produce opposite outcomes. In perspective our results demonstrate that automatic, implicit processes of motor control are not superseded by intentional, explicit ones, but only superposed. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a person can have a reason to do what she cannot do. In a nutshell, the argument is that a person can have derivate reasons relating to an action that she has a non-derivative reason to perform. There are clear examples of derivative reasons that a person has in cases where she cannot do what she (non-derivatively) has reason to do. She couldn’t have those derivative reasons, unless she also had the non-derivative reason to (...) do what she cannot do. I discuss a number of objections to this view, in particular two: (1) The objection that if there were reasons to do what one cannot do, many of those would be ‘crazy reasons’, and (2) the worry that if there were such reasons, then agents would have reasons to engage in futile deliberations and tryings. I develop an explanation of ‘crazy reasons’ that shows that not all reasons to do the impossible are crazy and only those that are need to be filtered out, and, regarding the second objecting, I show that the reasons for trying as well as for taking the means to doing something—instrumental reasons in a broad sense—are different from the reasons for performing the action in the first place. They are affected by impossibility, and we can explain why that is so. The view I argue for is that a person may have a reason to do what she cannot do, but she does not have a reason to try to do so or to take means to realizing the impossible. (shrink)

It is an assumption common to many theories of rationality that all practical reasons are based on a person's given desires. I shall call any approach to practical reasons which accepts this assumption a "Humean approach". In spite of many criticisms, the Humean approach has numerous followers who take it to be the natural and inevitable view of practical reason. I will develop an argument against the Humean view aiming to explain its appeal, as well as to expose its mistake. (...) I focus on just one argument in favour of the Humean approach, which I believe can be constructed as the background idea of many Humean accounts: the argument from motivation. (shrink)

Worldwide there are substantial differences within and between countries in aggression and violence. Although there are various exceptions, a general rule is that aggression and violence increase as one moves closer to the equator, which suggests the important role of climate differences. While this pattern is robust, theoretical explanations for these large differences in aggression and violence within countries and around the world are lacking. Most extant explanations focus on the influence of average temperature as a factor that triggers aggression, (...) or the notion that warm temperature allows for more social interaction situations in which aggression is likely to unfold. We propose a new model, CLimate, Aggression, and Self-control in Humans, that helps us to understand differences within and between countries in aggression and violence in terms of differences in climate. Lower temperatures, and especially larger degrees of seasonal variation in climate, call for individuals and groups to adopt a slower life history strategy, a greater focus on the future, and a stronger focus on self-control. The CLASH model further outlines that slow life strategy, future orientation, and strong self-control are important determinants of inhibiting aggression and violence. We also discuss how CLASH differs from other recently developed models that emphasize climate differences for understanding conflict. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and societal importance of climate in shaping individual and societal differences in aggression and violence. (shrink)

Section one of this article gives the narrative background to the love affair between Otto Gross and Else Jaffé. Otto Gross took Freud's psychoanalytic method in a libertarian direction and he became an influential figure in German anarchist circles shortly before 1914. Else Jaffé was a leading figure in Heidelberg's academic community. Section 2 provides the first complete translation of the Gross-Jaffé letters. Section 3 contrasts the positions of Gross and Max Weber to Nietzsche and comments on Else Jaffé's intermediate (...) role. It was her person that contributed to the development of both men's thinking on the erotic. An appendix provides the transcription of the Gross-Jaffé correspondence in German. (shrink)

Many of the things we do in the course of a day we don't do intentionally: blushing, sneezing, breathing, blinking, smiling—to name but a few. But we also do act intentionally, and often when we do we act for reasons. Whether we always act for reasons when we act intentionally is controversial. But at least the converse is generally accepted: when we act for reasons we always act intentionally. Necessarily, it seems. In this paper, I argue that acting intentionally is (...) not in all cases acting for a reason. Instead, intentional agency involves a specific kind of control. Having this kind of control makes it possible to modify one's action in the light of reasons. Intentional agency opens the possibility of acting in the light of reasons. I also explain why when we act with an intention we act for reasons. In the second part of the paper, I draw on these results to show that the dominant view of reasons to intend and the rationality of intentions should be rejected. (shrink)

Humboldts texttheoretischer Ansatz, dessen Einfluß auf die moderne (Text-)Linguistik größer ist als bisher wahrgenommen, wird im ersten Teil dieses Bandes erstmals zusammenhängend nachgewiesen.

The pattern of recourse to late medieval church courts suggests how late medieval Christians imagined their Church. Their choice of defendants, crimes, and punishments allowed them to define their communities. In the case of excommunication for debt, the use of procedural excommunications announced from the choir screen after the bidding prayers permitted the exclusion of debtors from the sacramental and economic community. Indeed, failure to pay one’s debts was as uncharitable as usury because the two communities were imperfectly distinguished – (...) until c. 1500. (shrink)

In his posthumously published Living Up to Death Paul Ricoeur left an impressive testimony on what it means to live at a high old age with death approaching. In this article I present him as a teacher who reminds us of valuable lessons taught by patients in palliative care and their caretakers who accompany them on their way to death, and also as a guide in our search for a modern ars moriendi, after—what many at least experience as—the breakdown of (...) traditional religious belief in a personal afterlife. These lessons can be summarized in the following theses. ‘Living up to death, one cannot experience one’s own death. Therefore, never consider someone dying as moribund’. ‘Though everybody is alone in dying, nobody should die alone.’ ‘The preparation for death is an affirmation of life’. ‘Life experienced as a gift can be given up’. The plausibility of the last thesis, however, may go beyond the confines of austere philosophical thinking. (shrink)

Is the wrongness of an action a reason not to perform it? Of course it is, you may answer. That an action is wrong both explains and justifies not doing it. Yet, there are doubts. Thinking that wrongness is a reason is confused, so an argument by Jonathan Dancy. There can’t be such a reason if ‘ϕ-ing is wrong’ is verdictive, and an all things considered judgment about what (not) to do in a certain situation. Such judgments are based on (...) all the relevant reasons for and against ϕ-ing. If that ϕ-ing is wrong, while being an all things considered verdict, would itself be a reason, it would upset the balance of reasons: it would be a further reason which has not yet been considered in reaching the verdict. Hence, the judgment wasn’t ‘all things considered' after all. I show that the argument against wrongness being a reason is unsuccessful, because its main assumption is false. Is main assumption is that a consideration which necessarily does not affect the balance of reasons is not a reason. I also argue that there can be no deontic buck-passing account. (shrink)

Ethical approval must be obtained before medical research can start. We describe the differences in EA for an pseudonymous, non-interventional, observational European study. Sixteen European national coordinators of the international study on very old intensive care patients answered an online questionnaire concerning their experience getting EA. N = 8/16 of the NCs could apply at one single national ethical committee, while the others had to apply to various regional ECs and/or individual hospital institutional research boards. The time between applying for (...) EA and the first decision varied between 7 days and 300 days. In 9/16 informed consent from the patient was not deemed necessary; in 7/16 informed consent was required from the patient or relatives. The upload of coded data to a central database required additional information in 14/16. In 4/16 the NCs had to ask separate approval to keep a subject identification code list to de-pseudonymize the patients if questions would occur. Only 2/16 of the NCs agreed that informed consent was necessary for this observational study. Overall, 6/16 of the NCs were satisfied with the entire process and 8/16 were unsatisfied. 11/16 would welcome a European central EC that would judge observational studies for all European countries. Variations in the process and prolonged time needed to get EA for observational studies hampers inclusion of patients in some European countries. This might have a negative influence on the external validity. Further harmonization of ethical approval process across Europe is welcomed for low-risk observational studies. Getting ethical approval for low-risk, non-interventional, observational studies varies enormously across European countries. (shrink)