In his book The future of human nature, Jürgen Habermas argues against a scenario of liberal eugenics, in which parents are free to prenatally manipulate their children’s genetic constitution via germline interventions. In this paper, I draw attention to the fact that his species‐ethical line of argument is pervaded by a substantial ambiguity between an argument from actual intervention (AAI) and an argument from mere controllability (AMC). Whereas the first argument focuses on threats for the autonomy and equality of prenatally (...) modified persons, the second argument takes all human beings, whether they have been modified or not, into account. Hence, when invoking Habermas in these debates, bioethicists need to consider carefully which argument they are referring to. (shrink)

In this essay, I seek to clarify and defend a unified account of realism, i.e. a conception of realism that does not only apply to philosophy of science, but also acknowledges how realism is understood in other philosophical disciplines—particularly, how moral realism is treated in metaethics. I will argue that integrating scientific and moral realism is less straightforward than is commonly assumed, due to several substantial, but often unnoticed disanalogies that obtain between both views. As a consequence, scientific realists should (...) consider modifying their traditional understanding and move towards an alternative conception of realism—one that is much more in line with the conception that moral realists usually adopt. Realism (about science or ethics) is, in the final analysis, best characterised as an alethic view which restricts itself to an idea about the objectivity of truth, rather than an epistemic view which underwrites more extensive theses concerning the accessibility of this truth for human knowledge. (shrink)

In this provocative and insightful work, Philip Leon examines the nature of power and its ethical implications, delving into topics such as social justice, democracy, and civil disobedience. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from philosophy, politics, and history, Leon offers a nuanced and thought-provoking exploration of one of the most fundamental issues of our time. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as (...) we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

There has been for some years a feeling in the philosophical world in this country that we have had enough of the unproductive working of the treadmill of linguistics and of the new logic and that Metaphysics is at least not criminal, and even justifiable; notable justifications of Metaphysics are Professor Emmet's The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking and Professor Barnes” The Philosophical Predicament . But what is Metaphysics about? That, it seems to me, is a question which has to be (...) looked into far more carefully than it has been, before we can think of justifying Metaphysics . “About the Whole” would appear to be the answer which no would-be metaphysician can avoid, however frightened he may be of being sent into a concentration camp by his Ayerian colleagues for giving it. What is this Whole and how is it to be got? Judging at least by most nineteenth-century metaphysics, it would seem that the Whole is some kind of totality , comparable, save in respect of comprehensiveness, to the totality say which Physics deals with, and that it is got by reflecting on the nature of any knowing and/or on all the branches of knowledge and their relations to each other; Metaphysics, we should conclude, is a synthesis or construct both crowning, and confirmed by, knowledge. (shrink)

The following is an attempt at an analysis of some of the difficulties of a certain religious or metaphysical attitude which, common as it has been to many ages, and familiar as we are with it in what we know of the early Greek thinkers and the Sophists, may yet, in the status of settled and almost universally accepted dogma which it has assumed, be said to be the peculiar inheritance of our own generation. We meet it in formal philosophic (...) garb in Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity and in Croce's idealism; with scientific claims it confronts us in Smuts’s Holism ; with more emphasis but less exactness it speaks in J. S. Huxley’s Religion without Revelation and in Middleton Murry's God, Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology; in imaginative literature it has found its ample "iconography" in Shaw's Back to Methuselah; best of all, strong and silent, unquestioned and unexplaining, like any master secure of his position, we may find it enthroned each in his own mind. Though here referred to as a religious attitude, we may also call it antireligionor the religion of the professedly anti-religious, and its God the God of the "Godless.". (shrink)

Just as the pleasant experience differs from the non-pleasant or unpleasant, and the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic, internally or qualitatively, and not merely in degree, or externally or relationally, so, it is natural to expect, a moment of moral living differs from a moral or immoral moment. Indeed, from many quarters, and most emphatically from the Stoic and Christian, we have been wont to hear that if we but leave our sinful or indifferent lives and put on righteousness or goodness, (...) we shall become new men or men reborn, even creatures of a different species. But according to many analyses of morality these promises of transfiguration or translation are nonsensical lies: for the moral experience, as exhibited in these analyses, differs from the non-moral or immoral only in respect of external relations, or at the most in degree. Whether the truth resides in the promises or in the analyses is, obviously, a question of no mean import. It is also a vast one, while the time and space that can be given up to an article are brief; hence the following will be barely more than a raising of the question, or a provocation, by means of rough statements, some dogmatic, others hypothetical. (shrink)

This article is concerned with reflection principles in the context of Cantor’s conception of the set-theoretic universe. We argue that within such a conception reflection principles can be formulated that confer intrinsic plausibility to strong axioms of infinity.

The logician Kurt Godel in 1951 established a disjunctive thesis about the scope and limits of mathematical knowledge: either the mathematical mind is equivalent to a Turing machine (i.e., a computer), or there are absolutely undecidable mathematical problems. In the second half of the twentieth century, attempts have been made to arrive at a stronger conclusion. In particular, arguments have been produced by the philosopher J.R. Lucas and by the physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose that intend to show that the (...) mathematical mind is more powerful than any computer. These arguments, and counterarguments to them, have not convinced the logical and philosophical community. The reason for this is an insufficiency if rigour in the debate. The contributions in this volume move the debate forward by formulating rigorous frameworks and formally spelling out and evaluating arguments that bear on Godel's disjunction in these frameworks. The contributions in this volume have been written by world leading experts in the field. (shrink)

This article explores ways in which the Revision Theory of Truth can be expressed in the object language. In particular, we investigate the extent to which semantic deficiency, stable truth, and nearly stable truth can be so expressed, and we study different axiomatic systems for the Revision Theory of Truth.

We investigate and classify the notion of final derivability of two basic inconsistency-adaptive logics. Specifically, the maximal complexity of the set of final consequences of decidable sets of premises formulated in the language of propositional logic is described. Our results show that taking the consequences of a decidable propositional theory is a complicated operation. The set of final consequences according to either the Reliability Calculus or the Minimal Abnormality Calculus of a decidable propositional premise set is in general undecidable, and (...) can be -complete. These classifications are exact. For first order theories even finite sets of premises can generate such consequence sets in either calculus. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)