Public conversation about biological contributors to mental disorder often centers on whether the problem is “biological or not.” In this paper, we propose moving beyond this bifurcation to a very different question:how exactlyare these problems understood to be biological? Specifically, we consider four issues around which different interpretations of the body’s relationship to mental disorder exist:1. The body’s relationship to day-to-day action; 2. The extent to which the body is changeable; 3. The body’s relationship to context; 4. The degree to (...) which states of the body directly cause mental disorder.Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenologists, we examine different responses to these questions and associated implications for how mental health treatment and recovery come to be experienced. Finally, we consider broader questions these patterns raise, including why certain portrayals of the brain dominate public attention and how to foster more deliberation in this regard. (shrink)

According to proponents of the continuity hypothesis, metaphors represent one end of a spectrum of linguistic phenomena, which includes various forms of loosening/broadening, such as category extensions and approximations, as well as hyperbolic interpretations. The continuity hypothesis is used to establish that the inferences derived from the set of linguistic expressions mentioned above result from the same or nearly similar pragmatic processes. In this paper, we want to challenge that particular aspect of the continuity hypothesis. We do so based on (...) considerations and analysis of an understudied linguistic phenomenon that we call the metaphorical uses of proper names (MPNs). We first explain how MPNs represent a unique linguistic class distinguishable from, for example, nicknames. In addition, we offer some remarks on how MPNs can be understood against the background of current debates between referentialists and predicativists about names. Our discussion leads us to conclude that MPNs are categorically different from literal interpretations of proper names. We spell out the consequences that the results of our analysis have for the continuity hypothesis. (shrink)

Powerful transformer models based on neural networks such as GPT-4 have enabled huge progress in natural language processing. This paper identifies three challenges for computer programs dealing with metaphors. First, the phenomenon of Twice-Apt-Metaphors shows that metaphorical interpretations do not have to be triggered by syntactical, semantic or pragmatic tensions. The detection of these metaphors seems to involve a sense of aesthetic pleasure or a higher-order theory of mind, both of which are difficult to implement into computer programs. Second, the (...) contexts relative to which metaphors are interpreted are not simply given but must be reconstructed based on pragmatic considerations that can involve presuppositional pretence. If computer programs cannot produce or understand such a form of pretence, they will have problems dealing with certain metaphors. Finally, adequately interpreting and reacting to some metaphors seems to require the ability to have internal, first-personal experiential and affective states. Since it is questionable whether computer programs have such mental states, it can be assumed that they will have problems with these kinds of metaphors. (shrink)

This paper examines different functions of metaphors in religious language. In order to do that it will be analyzed in which ways metaphorical language can be understood as irreducible. First, it will be argued that metaphors communicate more than just propositional contents. They also frame their targets with an imagistic perspective that cannot be reduced to a literal paraphrase. Furthermore, there are also cases where metaphors are used to fill gaps of what can be expressed with literal language. In order (...) to clarify this function of catachresis the notion of de re metaphors will be introduced. With those metaphors we can convey contents that we cannot conceptualize independently from a certain context of utterance. Hence, with such metaphors we can reach beyond the limits of our conceptual repertoire which is a crucial function for religious language. Finally, the consistency and plausibility of the radical position that all assertions about God are irreducibly and necessarily metaphorical if they are supposed to be true will be discussed on the basis of the results of the former considerations about the irreducibility of metaphors. (shrink)

With the position, he labels as “new” or “metalinguistic agnosticism” Robin LePoidevin can avoid some problems with which fictionalists about religious language are confronted. Religious fictionalism is a position according to which all religious claims[1] are considered to be false when taken at face value. But because fictionalists about religious language think that certain religious worldviews have pragmatic benefits, they interpret several claims in such worldviews as true in fiction. This enables them to gain pragmatic benefits because they live as (...) if a certain religious worldview were true. Nonetheless, they don’t believe that the respective worldview represents the non-fictional reality.[2][1] In the following I understand a “religious claim“ either as the claim that God exists or as a claim that presupposes the existence of God. Since also Le Poidevin focuses on theistic religions I want to keep this focus in my response. Nonetheless, it should be kept in mind that religious fictionalism is not restricted to theistic religions. I also think that metalinguistic agnosticism and the argumentation in this paper could in principle be extended to non-theistic religions.[2] A defense of religious fictionalism can be found in for example Andrew S. Eshleman, “Can an Atheist Believe in God?”, Religious Studies 41, no. 2 and Andrew S. Eshleman, “Religious Fictionalism Defended: Reply to Cordry”, Religious Studies 46, no. 1. (shrink)

The series offers a publication forum for innovative works on all topics of analytic philosophy. The focus is on the disciplines of theoretical philosophy: metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of language, logic. Furthermore, works that additionally include contributions to the history of philosophy are also welcome.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

Textual entailment is a relationship that obtains between fragments of text when one fragment in some sense implies the other fragment. The automation of textual entailment recognition supports a wide variety of text-based tasks, including information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Much ingenuity has been devoted to developing algorithms for identifying textual entailments, but relatively little to saying what textual entailment actually is. This article is a review of the logical and philosophical issues involved in (...) providing an adequate definition of textual entailment. We show that many natural definitions of textual entailment are refuted by counterexamples, including the most widely cited definition of Dagan et al. We then articulate and defend the following revised definition: T textually entails H = df typically, a human reading T would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by H from the proposition expressed by T. We also show that textual entailment is context-sensitive, nontransitive, and nonmonotonic. (shrink)

In August 2001, the Israeli Ministry of Health issued its Limitation of Smoking in Public Places Order, categorically forbidding smoking in hospitals. This forced the mental health system to cope with the issue of smoking inside psychiatric hospitals. The main problem was smoking by compulsorily hospitalized psychiatric patients in closed wards. An attempt by a psychiatric hospital to implement the tobacco smoking restraint instruction by banning the sale of cigarettes inside the hospital led to the development of a black market (...) and cases of patient exploitation in return for cigarettes. This article surveys the literature dealing with smoking among psychiatric patients, the role of smoking in patients and the moral dilemmas of taking steps to prevent smoking in psychiatric hospitals. It addresses the need for public discussion on professional caregivers’ dilemmas between their commitment to uphold the law and their duty to act as advocates for their patients’ rights and welfare. (shrink)

BackgroundWhether patients in the vegetative state (VS), minimally conscious state (MCS) or the clinically related locked-in syndrome (LIS) should be kept alive is a matter of intense controversy. This study aimed to examine the moral attitudes of lay people to these questions, and the values and other factors that underlie these attitudes.MethodOne hundred ninety-nine US residents completed a survey using the online platform Mechanical Turk, comprising demographic questions, agreement with treatment withdrawal from each of the conditions, agreement with a series (...) of ethical principles and three personality tests.ResultsMore supported treatment withdrawal from VS (40.2 % agreed, 17.6 % disagreed) than MCS (20.6 %, 41.2 %) or LIS (25.3 %, 35.8 %). Agreement with treatment withdrawal was negatively correlated with religiosity (r = −0.272, P < 0.001), though showed no significant relationship with need for cognition or empathy, and only a partial association with utilitarian judgment in a standard moral dilemma. Support for treatment withdrawal was most strongly associated with endorsement of the importance of patient autonomy, dignity, suffering, best interests. Distributive justice was not given significant weight by most. Importantly, agreement with treatment withdrawal was noticeably higher when considered from a first as opposed to third person perspective for VS (Z = −6.056, P < 0.001), MCS (Z = −6.746, P < 0.001) and LIS (Z = −6.681, P < 0.001).ConclusionLay attitudes to withdrawal of treatment in brain damaged patients are largely shaped by values similar to those central to the secular ethical debate. Neither traditional values such as the sanctity of life nor utilitarian values relating to resource allocation seem to play a central role. Far greater weight is given to autonomy, which may explain why participants were far more willing to endorse withdrawal of treatment when the issue was presented in the first person, or in relation to a concrete case involving a patient’s explicit wishes. Surveys focusing on abstract cases presented in the third person may not provide an accurate picture of lay attitudes to these critical ethical questions. (shrink)

This is the 8th edition of the book, with eight new essays to the volume. Table of contents: Are We Having Sex Now or What? (Greta Christina); Sexual Perversion (Thomas Nagel); Plain Sex (Alan Goldman); Sex and Sexual Perversion (Robert Gray); Masturbation and the Continuum of Sexual Activities (Alan Soble); Love: What’s Sex Got to Do with It? (Natasha McKeever); Is “Loving More” Better? The Values of Polyamory (Elizabeth Brake); What Is Sexual Orientation? (Robin Dembroff); Sexual Orientation: What Is It? (...) (Kathleen Stock); Asexuality (Luke Brunning and Natasha McKeever); LGBTQ ... Z? (Kathy Rudy); How to Be a Pluralist About Gender Categories (Katharine Jenkins); The Negotiative Theory of Gender Identity and the Limits of First-Person Authority (Burkay Ozturk); Racial Sexual Desires (Raja Halwani); Sex and Technology: The Ethics of Virtual Connection (Neil McArthur); A Realist Sexual Ethics (Micah Newman); Sexual Morality and the Concept of Using Another Person (Thomas Mappes); Sexual Use (Alan Soble); Dark Desires (Seiriol Morgan); The Harms of Consensual Sex (Robin West); Casual Sex, Promiscuity, and Objectification (Raja Halwani); Is Prostitution Harmful? (Ole Martin Moen); BDSM (Shaun Miller); Two Views of Sexual Ethics: Promiscuity, Pedophilia, and Rape (David Benatar); Sexual Gifts and Sexual Duties (Alan Soble); A Bibliography of the Philosophy of Sex . (shrink)

Jacobs introduces the issues, language, concepts and positions central to ethical theorizing. Entries range from antiquity to the present and basic to advance. Cross-referencing allows readers to explore topics in depth. Items explain complex issues of normative ethics, metaethics and moral psychology in non-technical language.

Betrachtet man die Geschichte des Begriffs ‚Phänomenologie‘, ist nicht auf den ersten Blick klar, was darunter zu verstehen ist. Wie Schuhmann (1984 ) herausgearbeitet hat, tritt dieser Begriff in der Philosophiegeschichte auf, noch lange bevor Edmund Husserl sich ihn zu Eigen machte, um sein eigenes philosophisches Projekt zu beschreiben. Auch hinderte Husserls Versuch, diesen Begriff für die Beschreibung seines eigenen einmaligen Projekts zu beanspruchen, seine Zeitgenossen (z.B. Pfänder, Reinach, Stein) keineswegs daran, denselben Begriff ebenfalls zur Beschreibung ihrer jeweiligen Projekte und (...) Methoden zu verwenden. Es versteht sich also, dass Husserl selbst beträchtlichen Aufwand betrieb, um zu definieren, was der Begriff ‚Phänomenologie‘ in seinen Augen zu bedeuten hatte. Zum Zeitpunkt der Publikation des ersten Buches seiner Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie im Jahre 1913 charakterisiert Husserl Phänomenologie als eine neue Wissenschaft, die sich von jeder anderen, bereits geschichtlich verankerten Wissenschaft wie Physik, Psychologie oder Kulturwissenschaft unterscheidet (Hua III/1, 1). Diese Darstellung von Phänomenologie lässt auf Anhieb eine wichtige Abweichung von seiner einstigen Gleichsetzung von Phänomenologie und deskriptiver Psychologie in den Logischen Untersuchungen (1901) erkennen. In der breiteren philosophischen Landschaft wären angesichts Husserls positiver Bestimmung dessen, was diese phänomenologische Wissenschaft ist, möglicherweise auch heute noch viele genauso irritiert wie einige der damaligen Teilnehmer des VI. Kongresses für experimentelle Psychologie, denen Husserl 1914 erklärte: „Analog wie die reine Geometrie Wesenslehre des ‚reinen‘ Raumes bzw. Wissenschaft von den ideal möglichen Raumgestalten ist, ist die reine Phänomenologie Wesenslehre des ‚reinen‘ Bewusstseins, Wissenschaft von den ideal möglichen Bewusstseinsgestalten (mit ihren ‚immanenten Korrelaten‘)“ (Schumann 1914, 144-5). Was heute wie damals für ein Verständnis dieser Darstellung von Phänomenologie der Klärung bedarf, ist Husserls Beschreibung der Phänomenologie als einer Wesenslehre, d.h. einer reinen oder eidetischen Wissenschaft, ebenso wie seine Aussage, deren Untersuchungsgegenstand sei das von ihm sogenannte reine Bewusstsein. Nur indem man die beiden Bedeutungen von ‚rein‘ erhellt, die hiermit angesprochen sind, wird auch deutlich, inwiefern Husserl behaupten kann, Phänomenologie unterscheide sich von anderen Wissenschaften: sowohl von empirischen wie Physik oder experimenteller Psychologie als auch von anderen eidetischen Wissenschaften wie Geometrie und deskriptiver Psychologie. Diese Erläuterung zeigt nicht nur, inwiefern Phänomenologie von all diesen Disziplinen verschieden ist, sondern auch, inwiefern sie mit ihnen zusammenhängt – und damit ist gerade die Idee der Phänomenologie begründet. (shrink)

Die Syntax als die Disziplin der Linguistik, die den Satzbau zum Gegenstand hat, ist heute in eine Vielfalt einzelner Schulen zerfallen, die sich oft radikal in ihren Zielen und Methoden unterscheiden. Diese Schulenvielfalt ist z.T. darauf zurückzuführen, daß traditionelle, strukturalistische und dependenzgrammatische Ansätze den in den sechziger Jahren einsetzenden Siegeszug der Generativen Grammatik überlebt haben, unter anderem, weil sie sich bei der Erstellung von nicht rein theoretisch orientierten Sprachbeschreibungen als handlicher erwiesen. Aber auch die interne Entwicklung der Generativen Grammatik trug (...) zur Schulenvermehrung bei, insbesondere die schon früh beginnende Propagierung von Modellen, die sich mehr oder weniger weit von dem an den Arbeiten Chomskys orientierten Standard-Modell entfernten. Hinzu kamen neue Schulen, die sich durch Methoden und Ergebnisse der Logik, der Pragmatik oder der Universalienforschung inspirieren ließen und denen gemeinsam ist, daß sie dem generativen Ideal einer autonomen Syntax die Forderung nach einer inhaltlich-funktionalen Fundierung entgegensetzten. Das Handbuch versucht, diese verschiedenen Auffassungen darüber, was die Syntax zu tun hat und wie sie es zu tun hat, möglichst vollständig zu dokumentieren, und zwar sowohl unter systematischen Gesichtspunkten als auch im Hinblick auf die wissenschaftshistorische Entwicklung, die von der Sprachforschung der Antike bis zu den aktuellsten Ausprägungen der erwähnten Theoriemodelle dargestellt wird, wobei auch Ausblicke in die indische und arabische Grammatiktradition gegeben werden. So werden zahlreiche Konvergenzen sichtbar, und so kann sich der Leser ein Urteil darüber bilden, ob und wo die Schulendiversifikation mit wissenschaftlichen Fortschritten verbunden war. - Dabei wurde jedoch die Aufgabe einer umfassenden Dokumentation der syntaktischen Theorienbildung nicht so interpretiert, daß alle Richtungen in gleichem Umfang vertreten sein sollen. Vielmehr waren bestimmte Gewichtungen unumgänglich. So wurde der Generativen Grammatik in ihren verschiedenen Spielarten besondere Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet, da von ihr die meisten Impulse ausgingen. Neben der Dokumentation der syntaktischen Schulen ist es Hauptaufgabe des Handbuchs, Materialien über die variierenden Ausprägungen syntaktischer Phänomene in den Sprachen der Welt sowie über Tendenzen der sprachhistorischen Veränderung des Satzbaus zur Verfügung zu stellen. Die Autoren haben sich bemüht, ihre Beiträge auch für nicht eingearbeitete Leser verständlich und instruktiv zu gestalten. Damit spricht das Handbuch nicht nur Sprachwissenschaftler, sondern auch andere Berufsgruppen an, die in ihrer Tätigkeit mit syntaktischen Fragen in Berührung kommen, etwa Psychologen, Lehrer, EDV-Fachleute, Übersetzer, Lektoren u.a.m. (shrink)

Some twenty years ago, Jacob Taubes’s lectures on Saint Paul, delivered in 1987, the year of his death, and first published in German in 1993, were published in English as The Political Theology of...

I am very grateful to Natalja, Jacob and Sebastian for their kind attention to my paper, and for their many insights on this topic, which have materially helped me get clearer about some of the issues. All the points of disagreement are constructive and it has been both a pleasure and an education to engage with them. I’m also happy to note some points of agreement, too! Here I attempt to reply to some of the objections.

This detailed 1990 book describes the light and dark adaptation of receptoral and post-receptoral mechanisms from a number of perspectives. The authors emphasise the importance of the study of achromatopsia, a rare congenital condition in which the visual mechanisms that mediate day vision are absent whilst those that mediate night vision remain intact.

Judith Shklar was a formative political thinker whose oeuvre defies traditional labels, and whose legacy is subtle but substantial. Her work emerged, as one observer has pointed out, between the "end of ideology" discussions of the 1950s and the early 1990s discussion of the "end of history." Shklar contributed significantly to American political thought by arguing for a new, more skeptical and stripped-down version of liberalism that intends to bring political theory and real-life experiences closer together. This book is the (...) first to comprehensively explore how Shklar's ideas emerged, how her political theory developed, and the impact and legacy she left behind."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

According to the Generality Constraint, mental states with conceptual content must be capable of recombining in certain systematic ways. Drawing on empirical evidence from cognitive science, I argue that so-called analogue magnitude states violate this recombinability condition and thus have nonconceptual content. I further argue that this result has two significant consequences: it demonstrates that nonconceptual content seeps beyond perception and infiltrates cognition; and it shows that whether mental states have nonconceptual content is largely an empirical matter determined by the (...) structure of the neural representations underlying them. (shrink)

I present a new argument for the repugnant conclusion. The core of the argument is a risky, intrapersonal analogue of the mere addition paradox. The argument is important for three reasons. First, some solutions to Parfit’s original puzzle do not obviously generalize to the intrapersonal puzzle in a plausible way. Second, it raises independently important questions about how to make decisions under uncertainty for the sake of people whose existence might depend on what we do. And, third, it suggests various (...) difficulties for leading views about the value of a person’s life compared to her nonexistence. (shrink)

The standard view of "believes" and other propositional attitude verbs is that such verbs express relations between agents and propositions. A sentence of the form “S believes that p” is true just in case S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition that p; this proposition is the referent of the complement clause "that p." On this view, we would expect the clausal complements of propositional attitude verbs to be freely intersubstitutable with their corresponding proposition descriptions—e.g., "the proposition that p"—as (...) they are in the case of "believes." In many cases, however, intersubstitution of that-clauses and proposition descriptions fails to preserve truth value or even grammaticality. These substitution failures lead some philosophers to reject the standard view of propositional attitude reports. Others conclude that propositional attitude verbs are systematically ambiguous. I reject both these views. On my view, the that-clause complements of propositional attitude verbs denote propositions, but proposition descriptions do not. (shrink)

I defend the view that a reason for someone to do something is just a reason why she ought to do it. This simple view has been thought incompatible with the existence of reasons to do things that we may refrain from doing or even ought not to do. For it is widely assumed that there are reasons why we ought to do something only if we ought to do it. I present several counterexamples to this principle and reject some (...) ways of understanding "ought" so that the principle is compatible with my examples. I conclude with a hypothesis for when and why the principle should be expected to fail. (shrink)

This is the first concise study to give full credit to the collaboration of works between French nobleman, writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) and his travel companion and friend Gustave de Beaumont (1802-66), and puts this collaboration into its social, historical and theoretical context. It accompanies the two friends to the US and analyses the fruitful encounter between the New and the Old World that was the result of that journey, particularly in relation to emerging Atlantic democracies and (...) revolutions. This includes the hopes but also the problems and contradictions that they have come to represent. The book also follows Tocqueville and Beaumont to England, Ireland, and Algeria. It discusses their political careers and their engagement in the abolitionist movement, their fight for liberal social and political reform, as well as their futile attempt to rationalize French colonization in Algeria. (shrink)

According to asymmetric comparativism, it is worse for a person to exist with a miserable life than not to exist, but it is not better for a person to exist with a happy life than not to exist. My aim in this paper is to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. My account of asymmetric comparativism begins with a different asymmetry, regarding the (dis)value of early death. I offer an account of this early death asymmetry, appealing to the (...) idea of conditional goods, and generalize it to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. I also address the objection that asymmetric comparativism has unacceptably antinatalist implications. (shrink)

Formal principles governing best practices in classification and definition have for too long been neglected in the construction of biomedical ontologies, in ways which have important negative consequences for data integration and ontology alignment. We argue that the use of such principles in ontology construction can serve as a valuable tool in error-detection and also in supporting reliable manual curation. We argue also that such principles are a prerequisite for the successful application of advanced data integration techniques such as ontology-based (...) multi-database querying, automated ontology alignment and ontology-based text-mining. These theses are illustrated by means of a case study of the Gene Ontology, a project of increasing importance within the field of biomedical data integration. (shrink)

The Meno, one of the most widely read of the Platonic dialogues, is seen afresh in this original interpretation that explores the dialogue as a theatrical presentation. Just as Socrates's listeners would have questioned and examined their own thinking in response to the presentation, so, Klein shows, should modern readers become involved in the drama of the dialogue. Klein offers a line-by-line commentary on the text of the Meno itself that animates the characters and conversation and carefully probes each significant (...) turn of the argument. "A major addition to the literature on the Meno and necessary reading for every student of the dialogue."--Alexander Seasonske, Philosophical Review "There exists no other commentary on Meno which is so thorough, sound, and enlightening."-- Choice Jacob Klein was a student of Martin Heidegger and a tutor at St. John's College from 1937 until his death. His other works include Plato's Trilogy: Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, also published by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

In this provocative and original work, Slavoj Zizek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock's Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author's acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political (...) significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations. -- Back cover. (shrink)

According to the person-affecting restriction, one distribution of welfare can be better than another only if there is someone for whom it is better. Extant problems for the person-affecting restriction involve variable-population cases, such as the nonidentity problem, which are notoriously controversial and difficult to resolve. This paper develops a fixed-population problem for the person-affecting restriction. The problem reveals that, in the presence of incommensurable welfare levels, the person-affecting restriction is incompatible with minimal requirements of impartial beneficence even in fixed-population (...) contexts. (shrink)

Matthew Adler's Measuring Social Welfare is an introduction to the social welfare function (SWF) methodology. This essay questions some ideas at the core of the SWF methodology having to do with the relation between the SWF and the measure of well-being. The facts about individual well-being do not single out a particular scale on which well-being must be measured. As with physical quantities, there are multiple scales that can be used to represent the same information about well-being; no one scale (...) is special. Like physical laws, the SWF and its ranking of distributions cannot depend on exactly which of these scales we use. Adler and other theorists in the SWF tradition have used this idea to derive highly restrictive constraints on the shape of the SWF. These constraints rule out seemingly plausible views about distributive justice and population ethics. I argue, however, that these constraints stem from a simple but instructive mistake. The SWF should not be applied to vectors of numbers such as 1 and 2, but rather to vectors of dimensioned quantities such as 1 util and 2 utils. This seemingly pedantic suggestion turns out to have far-reaching consequences. Unlike the orthodox SWF approach, treating welfare levels as dimensioned quantities lets us distinguish between real changes in well-being and mere changes in the unit of measurement. It does this without making the SWF depend on the scale on which welfare is measured, and in a way that avoids the restrictive constraints on the shape of the SWF. (shrink)

The public discourse surrounding sex and severe disability over the past 40 years has largely focused on protecting vulnerable populations from abuse. However, health professionals and activists are increasingly recognising the inherent sexuality of disabled persons and attempting to find ways to accommodate their intimacy needs. This essay explores several ethical issues arising from such efforts.

Are there key respects in which character and character defects are voluntary? Can agents with serious vices be rational agents? Jonathan Jacobs answers in the affirmative. Moral character is shaped through voluntary habits, including the ways we habituate ourselves, Jacobs believes. Just as individuals can voluntarily lead unhappy lives without making unhappiness an end, so can they degrade their ethical characters through voluntary action that does not have establishment of vice as its end. Choosing Character presents an account of ethical (...) disability, expanding the domain of responsibility and explicating the role of character in ethical cognition. Jacobs contends that agents become ethically disabled voluntarily when their habits impair their ability to properly appreciate ethical considerations. Such agents are rational, responsible individuals who are yet incapable of virtuous action. The view develops and modifies Aristotelian claims concerning the fixity of character. Jacobs' interpretation is developed in contrast to the overlooked work of Maimonides, who also used Aristotelian resources but argued for the possibility of character change. The notion of ethical disability has profound ramifications for ethics and for current debates about blame and punishment. (shrink)

Lara Buchak argues for a version of rank-weighted utilitarianism that assigns greater weight to the interests of the worse off. She argues that our distributive principles should be derived from the preferences of rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance, who ought to be risk averse. I argue that Buchak’s appeal to the veil of ignorance leads to a particular way of extending rank-weighted utilitarianism to the evaluation of uncertain prospects. This method recommends choices that violate the unanimous preferences of (...) rational individuals and choices that guarantee worse distributions. These results, I suggest, undermine Buchak’s argument for rank-weighted utilitarianism. (shrink)