Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, including Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted, and shows us how religion needs to be redescribed along the lines of cultural studies.

This article offers a reading of Sartre's phenomenological ontology in light of the pre-modern understanding of ‘transcendentals’ as universal properties and predicates of all determinate beings. Drawing on Sartre's transcendental account of nothingness in his early critique of Husserl as well as his discussion of ‘determination as negation’ in Being and Nothingness, this article argues that Sartre's universal predicate of ‘the not’ (le non) could be understood in a similar light to the medieval scholastic conception of transcendentals. But whereas the (...) scholastics saw the transcendental properties of oneness, truth, and goodness as reflections of God's divine perfections, Sartre's predicate of the ‘not’ operates as an atheistic transcendental which signifies the non-being of God – that God is not. By comparing Sartre's phenomenological ontology to medieval theological metaphysics, this article not only highlights the atheist underpinnings of Sartre's entire ontological schema in Being and Nothingness but also offers a new way of interpreting Sartre as a systematic transcendental metaphysician. (shrink)

This is a paper about the nature of snobbery and the undermining import of a charge of snobbery. On my account, snobs sincerely attempt to identify and correctly evaluate the aesthetically relevant features of an object, but they get things wrong, and their getting things wrong is explained by the fact that they under-value that which they associate with being lower-class. We can see the need for this account by reflecting on examples, and can distinguish it from existing accounts of (...) snobbery by thinking about when and why evidence of snobbery constitutes higher-order evidence against one’s aesthetic judgements. Existing accounts either are consistent with snobs’ aesthetic judgements being flawless, and thus not undermined by evidence of snobbery, or they imply that the canonical reasoning-process for arriving at aesthetic judgements has been bypassed altogether. On my account, by contrast, snobbery does not bypass the canonical aesthetic reasoning-process but distorts it in systematic and predictable ways. (shrink)

This article seeks to consider the compatibility between the doctrine of the Trinity and the theory of the transcendental properties by offering a consideration of the notion of the ‘gift’ as a transcendental term. In particular, this article presents a re-reading of John Milbank’s influential theology of the gift through Colin Gunton’s project of developing ‘trinitarian transcendentals’. In addition to showing how Milbank’s notion of the gift could be systematically understood in terms of what Gunton calls a ‘trinitarianly developed transcendental’ (...) which nonetheless avoids many of the problems found in Gunton’s original project, this article argues understanding ‘gift’ as a transcendental term can not only provide us with new ways of reconceiving the relationship between the philosophy of transcendental properties and various traditional doctrines, it can moreover show us how the traditional and biblical names of the Holy Spirit as ‘the Gift’ and the Son as ‘the Word’ can offer new ways of developing distinctively trinitarian accounts of metaphysics. (shrink)

This article offers a critical interpretation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a philosophical notion which exemplifies a secular conception of thinking. One way in which AI notably differs from the conventional understanding of “thinking” is that, according to AI, “intelligence” or “thinking” does not necessarily require “life” as a precondition: that it is possible to have “thinking without life.” Building on Charles Taylor’s critical account of secularity as well as Hubert Dreyfus’ influential critique of AI, this article offers a theological (...) analysis of AI’s “lifeless” picture of thinking in relation to the Augustinian conception of God as “Life itself.” Following this critical theological analysis, this article argues that AI’s notion of thinking promotes a societal privilege of certain rationalistic or calculative ways of thought over more existential or spiritual ways of thinking, and thereby fosters a secularization or de-spiritualization of thinking as an ethical human practice. (shrink)

Two treatises on memory which have come down to us from antiquity are Aristotle’s “On memory and recollection” and Plotinus’ “On perception and memory” ; the latter also wrote at length about memory in his “Problems connected with the soul”. In both authors memory is treated as a ‘modest’ faculty: both authors assume the existence of a persistent subject to whom memory belongs; and basic cognitive capacities are assumed on which memory depends. In particular, both theories use phantasia to explain (...) memory. Aristotle takes representations to be changes in concrete living things which arise from actual perception. To be connected to the original perception the representation has to be taken as a copy of the original experience ‑ this is the way Aristotle defines memory at the end of his investigation. Plotinus does not define memory: he is concerned with the question of what remembers. This is of course the soul, which goes through different stages of incarnation and disincarnation. Since the disembodied soul can remember, so he does not have Aristotle’s resources for explaining the continued presence of representations as changes in the concrete thing. Instead, he thinks that when acquiring a memory we acquire a capacity in respect of the object of the memory, namely to make it present at a later time. (shrink)

Contemporary critical theory and black studies have witnessed a surge in theoretical accounts of “blackness” as “nothingness”. Drawing on the work of the poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten, this article offers a reading of this recent postulation of blackness as “nothingness” in light of some of the similar theoretical endeavors in post-Kantian European philosophy. By comparing Moten’s “paraontological” conception of nothingness to Heidegger’s self-nihilating nothing, Sartre’s relative nothingness, as well as Schelling’s notion of absolute nothingness, this article argues that (...) Moten’s paraontology presents a more robust and systematic conception of nothingness than those of Heidegger, Sartre, and Schelling. By way of this comparison with these “canonical” accounts from European philosophy, this article highlights not only the unique features of Moten’s sophisticated formulation of nothingness, but also some of unacknowledged presumptions and prejudices of traditional metaphysics which Moten’s work calls into question. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology in light of Jean-Luc Marion’s more recent phenomenology. It may seem odd to compare Sartre to Marion, given that Sartre is well-known for his avowed atheism and his account of intentionality while Marion is primarily known for his work on religious phenomena and counter-intentionality. However, this article shows that there are many ways in which Sartre anticipates Marion’s work on phenomenological reduction and excessive phenomenality. By reading Sartre’s phenomenology in light of (...) Marion’s, and particularly Sartre’s analysis of the viscous slime in Being and Nothingness in relation to Marion’s account of ‘saturated phenomena’, this article presents a fresh interpretation of Sartre as a phenomenologist who has invaluable insights not only on the structures of consciousness and phenomenality, but also for the contemporary theoretical interest in the relationship between human and nonhuman entities. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Colin Gunton’s trinitarian theology in light of recent theological attempts to develop accounts of ‘new trinitarian ontologies’ in a strongly Christian Neo-Platonic vein. In particular, this article seeks to situate Gunton’s work within the broader context of late twentieth-century European thought by comparing his ‘trinitarian ontology’ to the anti-Platonic ontologies of Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. By way of considering the ‘anti-Platonic’ aspects of Gunton’s trinitarian theology, this article presents his theological project as a (...) testcase which highlights the stakes in constructing ‘new’ trinitarian ontologies as well as possible objections to the affirmative attitude towards Christian Neo-Platonism in contemporary theological metaphysics. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Plato in light of the recent debates concerning the unique ‘ontology’ of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline. In particular, this article suggests that Plato’s metaphysical account of the integral connection between human individual, the domestic state, and world order can offer IR an alternative outlook to the ‘political scientific’ schema of ‘levels of analysis’. This article argues that Plato’s metaphysical conception of world order can not only provide IR theory with a way (...) to re-imagine the relation between the human, the state, and world order. Moreover, Plato’s outlook can highlight or even call into question the post-metaphysical presuppositions of contemporary IR theory in its ‘borrowed ontology’ from modern social science, which can in turn facilitate IR’s re-interpretation of its own ‘ontology’ as well as its distinct contributions to the understanding of the various aspects of the social world and human life. (shrink)

This article considers how the notions of ‘word’ and ‘conversation’ can contribute to contemporary developments in theological metaphysics by drawing on Christoph Schwöbel’s ontological rendition of Martin Luther’s theology. By way of reading Schwöbel’s theological ontology of conversation with reference to John Milbank’s theology of the gift, this article shows that Schwöbel’s conception of the Trinity as an eternal ‘conversation’ can be understood as an ontology of ‘word-exchange’ in a fashion similar to Milbank’s account of trinitarian ‘gift-exchange’. Moreover, the article (...) argues that Schwöbel’s Lutheran construal of creation as God’s ‘created words’ (verba creata) can present a transcendental account of ‘word’ or verbum which complements Milbank’s ontology of the gift or donum. By bringing to light these perhaps surprising convergences between Schwöbel’s Lutheran theology of ‘the word’ and Milbank’s Christian Neo-Platonic theology of ‘the gift’, this article highlights some of the often-overlooked metaphysical insights in Luther’s theology of the word, which can contribute not only to ecumenical theological dialogue, but also foster new perspectives and conversations for contemporary developments and discussions in theological metaphysics. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend a traditional approach to semantics, that holds that the outputs of compositional semantics are propositional, i.e. truth conditions. Though traditional, this view has been challenged on a number of fronts over the years. Since classic work of Lewis, arguments have been offered which purport to show that semantic composition requires values that are relativized, e.g. to times, or other parameters that render them no longer propositional. Focusing in recent variants of these arguments involving quantification and (...) binding, we argue that a correct understanding of how composition works gives no reason to relativize semantic values, and that propositional semantic values are in fact the preferred option. We take our argument to be mainly empirical, but along the way, we defend some more general theses. Simple propositional semantic values are viable in composition, we maintain, because composition is itself a complex phenomenon, involving multiple modes of composition. Furthermore, some composition principles make adjustments to the meanings of constituents in the course of composition. These adjustments are by triggered syntactic environments. We argue such small contributions of meaning from syntactic structure are acceptable. (shrink)

Elinor Mason's Ways to be Blameworthy offers an interesting and potentially-fruitful distinction between varieties of blame and, correspondingly, between varieties of blameworthiness. The notion of "Grasping" Morality is central to her picture, distinguishing those who act subjectively wrongly and can be blamed in the ordinary way from those who only act objectively wrongly and can only be blamed in a detached way. Here I request more information about this central notion and pose a puzzle for Mason's account; I argue that (...) the various things Mason says about agents who grasp Morality appear inconsistent once we recognize that people can count as grasping Morality overall despite significant gaps in their understanding of it. (shrink)

We propose a two-step guessing game to measure the depth of thinking. We apply this method to the P beauty contest game. Using our method, we find that 81% of subjects do not make choice following best response reasoning while the classical method would suggest only 12%. The result suggests that the classical method has the fundamental problem that it cannot distinguish if a submitted number is due to best response reasoning or not. It also suggests that traditional level k (...) analysis falsely attributes some sophistication to random players, and that the degree of false attribution is large. Our procedure provides an alternative way to identify whether the individual has best response reasoning which is essential for any positive level of depth of thinking and differentiates between the depth of thinking and random choice, and hence provides a very different conclusion, which is suggestive of limitations of the classical method. (shrink)

Environmental destruction has contributed to climate change, a contemporary threat to the survival of the human race. Currently, many young people across the world are increasingly and actively involved in climate action, because of the realisation that climate change will disproportionately affect them. Kenya is adversely affected by climate change, with erratic and unpredictable rainfall patterns now being the norm. Given that the youth make up a large segment of the Kenyan population, they are well placed to contribute efficaciously to (...) combating climate change. This article relied on both primary and secondary sources of data. Interviews, participant observations, focus group discussions, articles, books and archival material were used to generate data. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used to get key informants. Data were analysed thematically as per the topic under study. The article focuses on how the Sengwer indigenous community created environmental awareness and utilised their epistemological approaches to ensure a conscious mindset amongst the youth on the sustainability of the environment. In this article, we argue that the complex social systems that have religious underpinnings in traditional society play a critical role in ensuring that young people are environmentally conscious. Religion facilitates knowledge acquisition amongst the youth and shapes their understanding and consciousness of the environment. The findings indicate that indigenous communities had an effective system of ensuring that young people are conscious of their environment.Contribution: This article seeks to contribute to an instauration of indigenous knowledges and epistemologies on environmental issues. It proffers for a holistic approach of incorporating indigenous ways of creating environmental consciousness and awareness amongst the youth. (shrink)

Biology is instrumental in establishing and perpetuating societal norms of gender and sexuality, owing to its afforded authoritative role in formulating beliefs about what is “natural”. However, philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science have shown how conceptions of gender and sexuality pervade the supposedly objective knowledge produced by the natural sciences. For example, in describing animal relationships, biologists sometimes use the metaphor of marriage, which brings with it conceptions of both cuckoldry and male ownership of female partners. These conceptions have (...) often led researchers to overlook female behavior and adaptations, such as female initiation of mating. Such social norms and ideologies influence both theories and research in biology. Social norms of gender and sexuality also influence school cultures. Although awareness of gender issues has had a major impact in Sweden during recent years, the interventions conducted have been based on a heteronormative understanding of sex; this has rendered sexual norms a non-prioritized issue and thereby rendered non-heterosexuals invisible in teaching and textbooks. Since this research was published in 2007 and 2009, norm critical pedagogics have been included in the Swedish National Agency for Education’s guidelines for teaching. This inclusion represents one way to tackle the recurring problem of heterosexuality being described as a naturalized “normal” behavior and homosexuals, bisexuals and transsexuals being described from a heteronormative perspective. In this paper, I employ gender and queer perspectives to scrutinize how animal sexual behavior is described and explained in Swedish biology textbooks. The analysis is based in gender and queer theory, feminist science studies, and evolutionary biology. The article begins with an outline a discussion of my theoretical framework, relating gender and queer perspectives on evolutionary biology to a discussion of queer methodology. I then scrutinize some empirical examples drawn from five contemporary biology textbooks used in secondary schools (by students aged 16-18 years old). Finally, I discuss the implications of the textbooks’ representations of animal sexual behavior, the problems of and need for a “textbook-version”, and providing examples of what an inclusive approach to biology education might look like. (shrink)

Though these expressions are often called “names of months”, there is good reason to hold that they are not names at all. Syntactically, these words behave as count nouns. They combine with determiners such as ‘every’, ‘many’, ‘exactly three’ etc. to form restricted quantifiers:3 (1) Every January I go skiing. (2) I spent many Januarys at Squaw Valley. (3) I wasted exactly three Januarys in Bakersfield. Like other count nouns, they can take relative clauses in constructions such as (1)-(3): (1a) (...) Every January that you visited we went skiing. (2a) I spent many Januarys that I will never forget at Squaw Valley. (3a) I wasted three Januarys that seemed interminable in Bakersfield. They also combine with the copula, indefinite article and adjectival modifiers to form predicates in the way that other count nouns do: (4) The first full month I lived in Northern California was a pleasant July. Further, it is generally held that only constituents of the same syntactic category can be conjoined. And as the following example shows, ‘January’ can be conjoined with other count nouns:4 (5) All Januarys and funerals last too long. Thus distributional evidence strongly suggests that ‘January’, ‘February’, etc. are count nouns. Since in general we take count nouns to express properties, we ought to take ‘January’, ‘February’ etc. to express properties as well.5 We shall return to the question of what properties such words express below. For now, we shall stick with syntax. (shrink)

Belief in propositions has had a long and distinguished history in analytic philosophy. Three of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore, believed in propositions. Many philosophers since then have shared this belief; and the belief is widely, though certainly not universally, accepted among philosophers today. Among contemporary philosophers who believe in propositions, many, and perhaps even most, take them to be structured entities with individuals, properties, and relations as constituents. For example, the (...) proposition that Glenn loves Tracy has Glenn, the loving relation, and Tracy as constituents. What is it, then, that binds these constituents together and imposes structure on them? And if the proposition that Glenn loves Tracy is distinct from the proposition that Tracy loves Glenn yet both have the same constituents, what is about the way these constituents are structured or bound together that makes them two different propositions? In The Nature and Structure of Content, Jeffrey C. King formulates a detailed account of the metaphysical nature of propositions, and provides fresh answers to the above questions. In addition to explaining what it is that binds together the constituents of structured propositions and imposes structure on them, King deals with some of the standard objections to accounts of propositions: he shows that there is no mystery about what propositions are; that given certain minimal assumptions, it follows that they exist; and that on his approach, we can see how and why propositions manage to have truth conditions and represent the world as being a certain way. The Nature and Structure of Content also contains a detailed account of the nature of tense and modality, and provides a solution to the paradox of analysis. Scholars and students working in the philosophy of mind and language will find this book rewarding reading. (shrink)

Through the critical examination of Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality, this article seeks to make a wider contribution to contempor ary debates about postmodernism. It draws on a post-Cartesian, Heideg gerian philosophy to demonstrate the weakness of the concept of hyperreality and reveal its foundation in a Cartesian epistemology. The article goes on to claim that this same Heideggerian tradition suggests a way in which the concept of hyperreality and nihilistic postmodern sociologies more generally might be dialectically superseded. Instead of these (...) theories being seen as saying anything insightful about recent social transformations, the epistemological void in which they position themselves should be inter preted as the intellectual expression of the wider cultural and postmodern trend of transgression. Key Words: Baudrillard • Cartesianism • Heidegger • hyperreality • postmodernism. (shrink)

Gene therapy is still a very crude way of treating very complicated problems. It's hard to get new genes to go where they're needed, and hard to keep them from going where they're not wanted. The worst‐case scenario is that they find their way into a patient's germ cells—eggs or sperm—and end up harming the patient's offspring. Yet this possibility is hard to study in human trials, and would be hard to deal with in the clinic. It should, instead, simply (...) be avoided. Doing so requires fundamentally changing our approach to gene therapy. (shrink)

As virtues of intellectual character are commonly discussed, they aim at _propositional _intellectual goods. But some creative works—especially those in music and the visual arts—are not primarily intended to gain, keep, or share propositional goods such as truth, knowledge, and understanding. They aim at something else. Thus, to conceive of intellectual creativity in a way that accords with standard discussions of intellectual virtue is to exclude paradigmatic works of the creative intellect. There is a kind of puzzle here: it appears (...) that we cannot maintain both the commonly-discussed notion of intellectual virtue and the claim that, say, Beethoven’s Ninth, or Monet’s Water Lilies, are central cases of intellectually virtuous creativity. We provide a two-part solution to the puzzle. First, we suggest that some works of music and visual art can convey propositional goods. Second, we appeal to the notion of _acquaintance _as an epistemic good that is conveyed through creative artistic and musical to an extent not conveyed in standard prose works. In this respect, intellectual creativity is the virtue that breaks the propositional mold of much contemporary virtue epistemology. (shrink)

This text offers examples of people across diverse disciplines and perspectives—from biomedical research to black theology to art—learning and performing emotions, expanding their desires, discovering new ways to behave, and altering their sense of self, purpose, and community because of passionate, but not romanticized, attachments to animals.

Some contextually sensitive expressions are such that their context independent conventional meanings need to be in some way supplemented in context for the expressions to secure semantic values in those contexts. As we’ll see, it is not clear that there is a paradigm here, but ‘he’ used demonstratively is a clear example of such an expression. Call expressions of this sort supplementives in order to highlight the fact that their context independent meanings need to be supplemented in context for them (...) to have semantic values relative to the context. Many philosophers and linguists think that there is a lot of contextual sensitivity in natural language that goes well beyond the pure indexicals and supplementives like ‘he’. Constructions/expressions that are good candidates for being contextually sensitive include: quantifiers, gradable adjectives including “predicates of personal taste”, modals, conditionals, possessives and relational expressions taking implicit arguments. It would appear that in none of these cases does the expression/construction in question have a context independent meaning that when placed in context suffices to secure a semantic value for the expression/construction in the context. In each case, some sort of supplementation is required to do this. Hence, all these expressions are supplementives in my sense. For a given supplementive, the question arises as to what the mechanism is for supplementing its conventional meanings in context so as to secure a semantic value for it in context. That is, what form does the supplementation take? The question also arises as to whether different supplementives require different kinds of supplementation. Let us call an account of what, in addition to its conventional meaning, secures a semantic value for a supplementive in context a metasemantics for that supplementive. So we can put our two questions thus: what is the proper metasemantics for a given supplementive; and do all supplementives have the same metasemantics? In the present work, I sketch the metasemantics I formulated for demonstratives in earlier work. Next, I briefly consider a number of other supplementives that I think the metasemantics I propose plausibly applies to and explain why I think that. Finally, I consider the prospects for extending the account to all supplementives. In so doing, I take up arguments due to Michael Glanzberg to the effect that supplementives are governed by two different metasemantics and attempt to respond to them. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt first argued the continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism'. This text uses Arwndt's insights as a starting point for further investigations into the ways in which race, imperialism, slavery and genocide are linked.

Does having a mental disorder, in general, affect whether someone is morally responsible for an action? Many people seem to think so, holding that mental disorders nearly always mitigate responsibility. Against this Naïve view, we argue for a Nuanced account. The problem is not just that different theories of responsibility yield different verdicts about particular cases. Even when all reasonable theories agree about what's relevant to responsibility, the ways mental illness can affect behavior are so varied that a more nuanced (...) approach is needed. (shrink)

This paper argues that if motivation by rightness de re is praiseworthy, then so is motivation by rightness de dicto. I argue that these two types of moral motivation have been unfairly compared, in light of a widespread failure to appreciate the structural similarities between them. These structural similarities become clear when we think more carefully about the nature of motivation and about moral metaphysics. I then argue that the two types of moral motivation are on a par by discussing (...) a series of minimal pairs. I argue that in good cases, in which the agent succeeds in doing what she is motivated to do, both motivations seem praiseworthy, and that bad cases, in which the agent fails, arise for motivation by rightness de re in precisely the same way as they do for motivation by rightness de dicto. I then offer a way to evaluate the unsuccessful agents, according to which someone's motivations can still be praiseworthy even if her actions and moral beliefs are both blameworthy, and someone can have certain praiseworthy motivations while lacking others. On my view, most of us are deeply flawed agents who nonetheless have some redeeming features—including our moral motivations. (shrink)

Response-dependence theories have historically been very popular in aesthetics, and aesthetic response-dependence has motivated response-dependence in ethics. This chapter closely examines the prospects for such theories. It breaks this category down into dispositional and fittingness strands of response-dependence, corresponding to descriptive and normative ideal observer theories. It argues that the latter have advantages over the former but are not themselves without issue. Special attention is paid to the relationship between hedonism and response-dependence. The chapter also introduces two aesthetic properties that (...) lead to wrong kinds of reasons problems for aesthetic response-dependence: insightfulness and the capacity to change one’s perspective. These properties do not have obvious parallels in the ethical domain, and so present an obstacle for response-dependence even in aesthetics. The chapter ends by examining replies on behalf of the response-dependence theorist, ultimately suggesting that a restricted form of response-dependence is the most promising way forward for fans of such theories. (shrink)

We evaluate people all the time for a wide variety of activities. We blame them for miscalculations, uninspired art, and committing crimes. We praise them for detailed brushwork, a superb pass, and their acts of kindness. We accomplish things, from solving crosswords to mastering guitar solos. We bungle our endeavors, whether this is letting a friend down or burning dinner. Sometimes these deeds are morally significant, but many times they are not. Simply Responsible defends the radical proposal that the blameworthy (...) artist is responsible in just the same way that the blameworthy thief is. We can be responsible for all kinds of different activities, from lip-synching to long division, from murders to meringues, but the relation involved, what author Matt King calls the basic responsibility relation, is the same in every case. We are responsible for the things we do first, then blameworthy or praiseworthy for having done them in light of whether they're good or bad, according to a variety of standards. Why is this a radical proposal? Firstly, because so much of the contemporary literature on moral responsibility has moralized its nature. According to most accounts, moral responsibility is either a special species of responsibility or else depends on moralized capacities. In contrast, King argues that we get a more complete and unifying picture of responsible agency from a more general theory of responsibility. Secondly, the proposal is radical due to its drastic simplicity. King foregoes many of the complications that feature in other accounts of responsibility, arguing that we can make do with less demanding theoretical elements. (shrink)

Invoking three desiderata (empirical adequacy, conceptual precision, and sensitivity to social positioning), this paper argues that poverty is best understood as the deprivation of certain human capabilities. It defends this way of conceiving of poverty against standard alternatives: lack of income, lack of resources, inequality, and social exclusion.

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias,1 Abelard distinguishes the form of an expression2 (oratio) from what it says, that is, its content. The content of an expression is its understanding (intellectus). This distinction is surely the most well-known and central idea in Abelard’s commentary. It provides him with the opportunity to distinguish statements (enuntiationes) from other kinds of expressions without implying a diference in their content, since the ability of a statement to signify something true or false (verum vel (...) falsum)3 cannot be found in its content. More precisely, Abelard distinguishes statements both from complete expressions (orationes perfectae) that are not statements but rather questions, requests, commands, etc. and from incomplete expressions, that is, mere word strings (orationes imperfectae), such as homo albus. These kinds of expressions, according to Abelard, do not differ in the understanding they present but in the way they present it. (shrink)

This article puts pressure on moral motivational internalism and rejects normative motivational internalism by arguing that we should be aesthetic motivational externalists. Parallels between aesthetic and moral normativity give us new reason to doubt moral internalism. I address possible disanalogies, arguing that either they fail, or they succeed, but aren’t strong enough to underwrite a motivational difference between the domains. Furthermore, aesthetic externalism entails normative externalism, providing further presumptive evidence against moral internalism. I also make the case that, regardless of (...) these particular conclusions, examining different normative domains alongside each other is a fruitful way to move debates forward. (shrink)

In the last decade, advances in technology have significantly disrupted the way firms provide goods and services. At the forefront of this technological disruption is the sharing economy, where individuals earn income by providing services or sharing assets through peer-to-peer platforms. With global revenues in the sharing economy projected to increase substantially in the next decade, income from this economy will continue to be an important source of tax revenues for governments around the world. However, sceptics argue that the sharing (...) economy inherently lends itself to dishonest reporting of taxable income. We employ an online experiment, using 746 taxpayers, to observe whether the prosocial benefits often promoted by P2P platforms reduce honest reporting of taxable sharing economy income. Consistent with moral licensing theory, we find that earning income from a prosocial-oriented P2P platform liberates taxpayers to dishonestly report their sharing economy income, and this result is fully driven by taxpayers whose personal values are incongruent with values promoted by the P2P platform. Our paper contributes to the limited but growing research on the sharing economy and its implications for ethical decisions. It also adds to the moral licensing literature by identifying value congruency as an important moderator for moral licensing effect. (shrink)

Institutional review boards and investigators are used to talking about risks of harm. Both low risks of great harm and high risks of small harm must be disclosed to prospective subjects and should be explained and categorized in ways that help potential subjects to understand and weigh them appropriately. Everyone on an IRB has probably spent time at meetings arguing over whether a three-page bulleted list of risk description is helpful or overkill for prospective subjects. Yet only a small fraction (...) of all the time and attention lavished on risk disclosure has been devoted to discussing whether and when potential benefit to subjects can reasonably be claimed and, if so, how it should be described in the consent form and process.Traditionally, IRBs and regulators have worked to ensure that clear lines can be drawn between research that, by definition, carries no potential for direct benefit — because it uses healthy volunteers or because it is not foreseeably focused on the development of treatments — and research that does have the development of effective treatments as its goal. (shrink)

Much has been written lately about cases in which blame of the blameworthy is nonetheless inappropriate because of facts about the blamer. Meddlesome and hypocritical cases are standard examples. Perhaps the matter is none of my business or I am guilty of the same sort of offense, so though the target is surely blameworthy, my blame would be objectionable. In this paper, I defend a novel explanation of what goes wrong with such blame, in a way that draws the cases (...) together. In brief, I argue that blaming is essentially an attentive activity, and that, consequently, meddlesome and hypocritical blamers are attending to the wrong things. (shrink)

This paper discusses a novel problem at the intersection of ethics and epistemology: there can be cases in which moral considerations seem to "encroach'' upon belief from multiple directions at once, and possibly to varying degrees, thereby leaving their overall effect on belief unclear. We introduce these cases -- cases of moral encroachment under moral uncertainty -- and show that they pose a problem for all predominant accounts of moral encroachment. We then address the problem, by developing a modular Bayesian (...) framework that, we argue, is sufficiently flexible and scaleable to accommodate the multifaceted uncertainty we describe while still generating clear recommendations for an agent's beliefs. Our framework has several practical upshots, and we close by articulating them: we derive insights about the relationship between moral character and doxastic behavior and make suggestions for how to encourage people to revise their doxastic states in morally laudable ways, without deviating from core Bayesian norms. (shrink)

Chapter 8 argues against the view that the moral rightness of an act is not a reason to perform it, and our reasons are instead the features that make the act right. Philosophers typically defend this view by noting that it seems redundant to take rightness to be an additional reason, once it has been acknowledged that the right-making features are already reasons. The author shows that this argument dramatically overgeneralizes, ruling out all cases in which two or more reasons (...) are arranged in relationships of metaphysical constitution. She then proposes an alternative way of thinking about these metaphysical hierarchies: Rather than assuming that at most one of the facts in each hierarchy is the “real” reason, bearing all the normative weight, it should be accepted that these facts can all be genuine reasons, whose normative weight is shared in virtue of the metaphysical relationships between them. Some tests are offered that can be used to determine which facts occur in metaphysical hierarchies with shared weight, and it is argued that the fact that an act is morally right passes the tests. The author then explains what she takes to be some kernels of truth underlying the redundancy argument, arguing that these phenomena are pragmatic, not metaphysical. (shrink)

The Global Burden of Disease project quantifies the impact of different health conditions by combining information about morbidity and premature mortality within a single metric, the Disability Adjusted Life Year. One important goal for the GBD project has been to inform decisions about global health priorities. A number of recent studies have used GBD data to argue that global health funding fails to align with the GBD. We argue that these studies’ shared assumption that global health resources should ‘align’ with (...) the burden of disease is unfounded and has troubling implications. First, since the allocation of resources involves difficult trade-offs between different, potentially competing goals, any ‘misalignment’ of allocation and disease burdens need not necessarily indicate that the allocation of funds fails to meet recipient countries’ needs or interests. Second, using alignment as a baseline implicitly makes controversial assumptions about how harms of different magnitudes affecting different numbers of individuals should be aggregated. We discuss two alternative ways in which GBD data could help inform decisions about resource allocation, neither of which gives more than a limited role to GBD data. (shrink)

The majority of recent work on the moral standing to blame (the idea that A may be unable to legitimately blame B despite B being blameworthy) has focused on blamers who themselves are blameworthy. This is unfortunate, for there is much to learn about the standing to blame once we consider a broader range of cases. Doing so reveals that challenged standing is more expansive than previously acknowledged, and accounts that have privileged the fact that the blamers are themselves morally (...) culpable likely require revision. One such account figures in Patrick Todd’s (2012) argument for incompatibilism, which ostensibly depends on considerations involving the standing to blame. I believe this argument fails. But its failure is instructive, for it allows us to appreciate the numerous ways in which one’s blame can be morally problematic, and hence ways in which one’s standing to blame can be challenged. Thus, while one objective of this paper is to show why Todd’s argument fails, the larger aim is to use that argument to frame discussion of some important (and novel) ways in which the standing to blame can be compromised. (shrink)

According to many believers there is no end to the enlightening things that may be truly said about God. Perhaps there is no end for them either to the useful ways of dividing these things up into illuminating classes. But as fairly traditional theists we suggest a need to stress two basic classes as two indispensable sides to a traditional theist’s coin. We suggest that neglect or rejection of either side can debase the currency under philosophical investigation, can lead a (...) philosopher—or at least his puzzled readers—into costly muddles about the analysis or evaluation of religious discourse and claims. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to raise a question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. Our question has rarely been raised previously. Among those who believe in the reality of human freedom, compatibilists have traditionally devoted their energies to providing an account that can avoid any commitment to the falsity of determinism while successfully accommodating a range of intuitive examples. Libertarians, in contrast, have aimed to (...) show that either physical indeterminacy or a certain kind of agent causation can find a place in the world for what they take to be genuine freedom. Few have considered whether moral responsibility requires a commitment to conscious attitudes.2 Our question derives from a confluence of two sources. First, there is reason to think that conscious attitudes matter to theories of responsibility, either directly, as a result of the latter’s commitments, or indirectly, by virtue of the assumptions that they make about certain intuitive examples. Second, there is accumulating evidence suggesting that there aren’t any conscious mental states possessing the sorts of causal roles required of propositional attitudes. Since theorists of responsibility should in general be concerned to make their views compatible with plausible claims about the natural world, the implications of this data should be carefully considered. Our aim is therefore to motivate and begin exploring answers to the following conditional question: If it should turn out that there are no conscious attitudes, then what would be the implications of this fact (if any) for theories of responsibility? We propose that theorists who aren’t skeptics about moral responsibility should examine their accounts, asking whether their theories (or the examples that motivate them) could survive the discovery that there are no conscious judgments, decisions, or evaluations. Since we take it that moral theorizing in general should operate with the weakest possible empirical assumptions about the natural world, such theorists should consider whether their accounts could be motivated in such a way as to be free of any commitment to the existence of conscious attitudes.. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, that is, that if we ought to do something, then it must be the case that we can do it. It is a frequent quip about this thesis that any account must specify three things: what is meant by the ‘ought’, what is meant by the ‘implies’, and what is meant by the ‘can’. Something is missed, though, when we state the thesis in its shortened, three-word form. We overlook what it means (...) to do something. It is, I think, not mere coincidence that nobody has discussed this issue: It is very difficult to specify what it means to do something in the relevant sense. This paper is devoted to fleshing out one way of doing something that is a problem for the thesis. (shrink)

This article addresses three questions about well-being. First, is well-being future-sensitive? I.e., can present well-being depend on future events? Second, is well-being recursively dependent? I.e., can present well-being depend on itself? Third, can present and future well-being be interdependent? The third question combines the first two, in the sense that a yes to it is equivalent to yeses to both the first and second. To do justice to the diverse ways we contemplate well-being, I consider our thought and discourse about (...) well-being in three domains: everyday conversation, social science, and philosophy. This article’s main conclusion is that we must answer the third question with no. Present and future well-being cannot be interdependent. The reason, in short, is that a theory of well-being that countenances both future-sensitivity and recursive dependence would have us understand a person’s well-being at a time as so intricately tied to her well-being at other times that it would not make sense to consider her well-being an aspect of her state at particular times. It follows that we must reject either future-sensitivity or recursive dependence. I ultimately suggest, especially in light of arguments based on assumptions of empirical research on well-being, that the balance of reasons favors rejecting future-sensitivity. (shrink)

Obstacles to Divine Revelation examines the notion that there are obstacles to God giving revelation, if God exists. Rolfe King argues that exploring these significantly refines ideas of evidence for God, including the claim that God must operate within a logically necessary structure of revelation. Examining obstacles to divine revelation clarifies this structure and paves the way to evaluating its significance.

There are two broadly competing pictures of moral responsibility. On the view I favor, to be responsible for some action is to be related to it in such a way that licenses attributing certain properties to the agent, properties like blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Responsibility is attributability. A different view understands being responsible in terms of our practices of holding each other responsible. Responsibility is accountability, which “involves a social setting in which we demand (require) certain conduct from one another and (...) respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson, Philos Top 24:227–248, 1996). My concern here is the relation between moral responsibility and desert. Plausibly, if someone is morally responsible for something wrong then they deserve blame, and it is on the basis of them being morally responsible and its being wrong that they deserve blame. In this paper, I try to make progress toward understanding why it would follow that being morally responsible for something supports a desert claim. I propose to do this by exploring how the “two faces” of responsibility should proceed. An important upshot is that we gain a new currency by which to evaluate extant theories of responsibility that might favor one or the other conception: do they carry plausible desert commitments? To illustrate this benefit, I argue that accountability theory carries implausible implications for deserved praise. (shrink)

My thesis is that moral ignorance does not imply a failure to care adequately about what is in fact morally significant. I offer three cases: one in which someone is ignorant of the precise nature of what she cares about; one in which someone does not reflect on the significance of what she cares about in a particular set of circumstances, and one in which someone cares deeply about two morally significant considerations while being mistaken about their relative significance. I (...) argue that these agents all clearly care at least “adequately” about everything morally significant, including the very considerations that in fact make their acts wrong. This creates theoretical room for a way of thinking about culpable moral ignorance that respects the key concerns of those in the voluntarist tradition who have held that moral ignorance is typically blameless, within an approach to thinking about moral responsibility according to which we are blameworthy for that which manifests poor quality of will; caring adequately does not require moral omniscience, but motivated moral ignorance and moral ignorance that reflects indifference to things that matter morally are still blameworthy. My thesis also suggests a fruitful change of direction for quality-of-will theorists: we should articulate the nature and structure of the standards for adequate caring, i.e. those that specify what it is to care “adequately”. I close by offering an initial proposal as to what these standards might look like and identifying four promising avenues for further research on this topic. (shrink)

Ns2 is an open-source communications network simulator primarily used in research and teaching. Ns2 provides substantial support for simulation of TCP, routing, and multicast protocols over wired and wireless networks. Although Ns2 is a widely used powerful simulator, it lacks a way to measure networks that are used to assess reliability and performance metrics and it does not analyse the trace files it produces. The data obtained from the simulations are not straightforward to analyse. Ns2 is still unable to provide (...) any data analysis statistics or graphics as requested. Moreover, the analysis of the Ns2 trace file using any software scripts requires further steps by a developer to do data processing and then produce graphical outputs. Lack of standardisation of tools means that results from different users may not be strictly comparable. There are alternative tools; however, most of them are not standalone applications, requiring some additional libraries. Also, they lack a user-friendly interface. This article presents the architecture and development considerations for the NsGTFA tool, which intends to simplify the management and enable the statistical analysis of trace files generated during network simulations. NsGTFA runs under Windows and has a friendly graphical user interface. This tool is a very fast standalone application implemented in VC++, taking as input an Ns2 trace file. It can output two-dimensional and 3D graphs or data sets, whatever the trace file format. It is also possible to specify the output of standard network performance metrics. NsGTFA satisfies most user needs. There is no complex installation process, and no external libraries are needed. (shrink)

The intrusive state has long viewed women as fetal containers. The Dobbs decision goes further, essentially causing women to vanish when fetuses are abstracted from their relationships to pregnant persons. The ways in which women are first controlled and then made invisible are clearly connected with the move from obedience to omission that has historically affected black Americans. When personal decisionmaking and participation in democracy are regarded as threats, those threatened restrict decisional freedom and political power, deepening structural injustices relating (...) to sex, race, and poverty. Fear of Dobbs has health effects on conditions unrelated to pregnancy and connects with erasures of human value that are not health-related. We reaffirm solidarity as a countering influence. Taking account of the richly relational context in which issues like abortion and political representation arise should lead to better, more meaningful policies, making so many people impossible to unsee. (shrink)

This article investigates the distribution of power in Poland’s drug reimbursement policy in the early 2000s. We examine competing theoretical expectations suggested by neopluralism, historical institutionalism, corporate domination, and clique theory of the post-communist state, using data from a purposive sample of 109 semi-structured interviews and documentary sources. We have four concrete findings. First, we uncovered rapid growth in budgetary spending on expensive drugs for narrow groups of patients. Second, to achieve these favorable policy outcomes drug companies employed two prevalent (...) methods of lobbying: informal persuasion of key members of local cliques and endorsements expressed by patient organizations acting as seemingly independent “third parties.” Third, medical experts were co-opted by multinational drug companies because they relied on these firms for scientific and financial resources that were crucial for their professional success. Finally, there was one-way social mobility from the state to the pharmaceutical sector, not the “revolving door” pattern familiar from advanced capitalist countries, with deleterious consequences for state capacity. Overall, the data best supported a combination of corporate domination and clique theory: drug reimbursement in Poland was dominated by Western multinationals in collaboration with domestically based cliques. (shrink)

Herbert Spencer was the most influential Anglophone sociologist of the nineteenth century, but his contributions are now largely forgotten. It is argued, however, that the clarity of his understanding of the use of biological metaphors in sociology gives his work a power which is worth rediscovering. This proposition is pursued through a discussion of his treatment of the professions and their role in industrial societies. His approach is compared with the "ecological" perspective of sociologists in the Chicago tradition, notably Andrew (...) Abbott. It is suggested that Spencer's work rests on an alternative interpretation of the ecological model; this opens the way to an understanding of the regulative structures of "the system of the profession," which fills a major gap in Abbott's account. (shrink)