C.I. Lewis never completed his final project on ethics. There are a few short papers published based on lectures that he has given in the 1950s, and a vast amount of draft materials that he was working on up until the time of his death in 1964. But his ultimate life project, the final book on ethics, never came to fruition. From the materials available, it seems that even towards the end of his life, Lewis was still adjusting and refining (...) his view on how to answer the question “What is right?” That said, it is clear that the core arguments remain consistent throughout his works and draft manuscripts. The main goal of this paper is to reconstruct from the available materials the overall ethical framework Lewis was working towards; and to present the key arguments that lie at the heart of his ethical theory. In doing so, I will also attempt to show that Lewis’s pragmatic conception of the a priori developed in the 1920s actually plays a critical role in grounding his entire ethical view. This paper concludes with a brief evaluation of how well the argument based on a pragmatic a priori fares against the moral skeptic. (shrink)

Coordinated inauthentic behaviours online are becoming a more serious problem throughout the world. One common type of manipulative behaviour is astroturfing. It happens when an entity artificially creates an impression of widespread support for a product, policy, or concept, when in reality only limited support exists. Online astroturfing is often considered to be just like any other coordinated inauthentic behaviour; with considerable discussion focusing on how it aggravates the spread of fake news and disinformation. This paper shows that astroturfing creates (...) additional problems for social media platforms and the online environment in general. The practice of astroturfing exploits our natural tendency to conform to what the crowd does; and because of the importance of conformity in our decision-making process, the negative consequences brought about by astroturfing can be much more far-reaching and alarming than just the spread of disinformation. (shrink)

Coordinated inauthentic behaviours online are becoming a more serious problem throughout the world. One common type of manipulative behaviour is astroturfing. It happens when an entity artificially creates an impression of widespread support for a product, policy, or concept, when in reality only limited support exists. Online astroturfing is often considered to be just like any other coordinated inauthentic behaviour; with considerable discussion focusing on how it aggravates the spread of fake news and disinformation. This paper shows that astroturfing creates (...) additional problems for social media platforms and the online environment in general. The practice of astroturfing exploits our natural tendency to conform to what the crowd does; and because of the importance of conformity in our decision-making process, the negative consequences brought about by astroturfing can be much more far-reaching and alarming than just the spread of disinformation. (shrink)

Coordinated inauthentic behaviours online are becoming a more serious problem throughout the world. One common type of manipulative behaviour is astroturfing. It happens when an entity artificially creates an impression of widespread support for a product, policy, or concept, when in reality only limited support exists. Online astroturfing is often considered to be just like any other coordinated inauthentic behaviour; with considerable discussion focusing on how it aggravates the spread of fake news and disinformation. This paper shows that astroturfing creates (...) additional problems for social media platforms and the online environment in general. The practice of astroturfing exploits our natural tendency to conform to what the crowd does; and because of the importance of conformity in our decision-making process, the negative consequences brought about by astroturfing can be much more far-reaching and alarming than just the spread of disinformation. (shrink)

Comparatively speaking, philosophy has not been especially long-winded in attempting to answer questions about what is funny and why we should think so. There is the standard debate of many centuries’ standing between superiority and incongruity accounts of humor, which for the most part attempt to identify the intentional objects of our amusement.1 There is the more recent debate about humor and morality, about whether jokes themselves may be regarded as immoral or about whether it can in certain circumstances (...) be wrong to laugh.2 There is even apparently some disagreement about whether amusement is an emotion proper or a different kind of psychological attitude altogether. While I have almost despite myself taken .. (shrink)

"ACT Administrative Appeals Tribunal Decisions." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (200), pp. 42.

The theory of branching space-times is designed as a rigorous framework for modelling indeterminism in a relativistically sound way. In that framework there is room for "funny business", i.e., modal correlations such as occur through quantummechanical entanglement. This paper extends previous work by Belnap on notions of "funny business". We provide two generalized definitions of "funny business". Combinatorial funny business can be characterized as "absence of prima facie consistent scenarios", while explanatory funny business characterizes situations (...) in which no localized explanation of inconsistency can be given. These two definitions of funny business are proved to be equivalent, and we provide an example that shows them to be strictly more general than the previously available definitions of "funny business". (shrink)

This essay first traces change in, roughly, the epistemology of the humanities from the 1950s to the 21st century. The second section looks at how the meaning and options in moral philosophy altered in more or less the same period. The last and easily most speculative section examines how these changes permeated American culture, and how professional philosophers responded to the challenges of the new political world they inhabited.

A Zen Maoist koan: Bill is developing a crazy synthesis that brings together Buddhism, Maoism, and French Marxism, especially Badiou. Running through all three are themes concerning emptiness, letting go, and contingency. On the other hand, when Bill's mind runs toward just making up stuff that seems funny to him, it is hard for him to stop. This “essay” is a meeting point between these two activities, and at some point in the underdetermined, contingent future there will have to (...) be expansion upon these themes and “examples” – “Joke Ideas,” as Bill calls them – and some serious analysis of what we have learned in this experiment. Best read with John Cage playing in the background – and we don’t mean 4′33″. That would be silly. (shrink)

The present study aims to elucidate whether insight problem solving could be facilitated by the cognitive component of humour. The authors take interest in whether the logical mechanisms of humour can affect how fast insight problems are solved. To that end, the authors conducted two experiments where participants solved insight problems after watching visual humorous stimuli such as videos and slideshows. The first experiment demonstrated the overall impact of facilitation by humour on insight problem solving; however, it did not show (...) any difference in how particular logical mechanisms of humour affect the solution time of insight problems. The second experiment showed that the cognitive component of humour could selectively affect insight problems whose difficulty stems from different sources. These results suggest that the cognitive component of humour, when operationalised as logical mechanisms and schema switching, contributes to solving insight problems. (shrink)

Humour has been a surprisingly neglected topic in philosophy. However, Noah Greenstein has recently given an intuitive schema for modelling the logical structure of puns. Having this logical structure is indeed what makes a pun punny, but I argue that it is not what makes a pun funny. In order for a pun to be funny, the components comprising its logical structure must be related to one another such that certain conditions are satisfied. By using Graeme Ritchie's linguistic (...) model of jokes, I give these conditions in terms of those components. (shrink)

Very often, different people, with different constitutions and comic sensibilities, will make divergent, conflicting judgments about the comic properties of a given person, object, or event, on account of those differences in their constitutions and comic sensibilities. And in many such cases, while we are inclined to say that their comic judgments are in conflict, we are not inclined to say that anybody is in error. The comic looks like a poster domain for the phenomenon of faultless disagreement. I argue (...) that the kind of theory that does the best job of accounting for the appearance of faultless disagreement is a de se version of a response-dependence account, according to which thinking that x is funny is self-attributing a property of the type, being disposed to have R to x in C. (shrink)

The Daily Show is simultaneously one of the funniest television programs ever made and one of the most earnest voices calling for political change in the United States. Why engage in political mockery like that seen on The Daily Show? Obviously, we like to be entertained, and The Daily Show is very funny; but like the work of other political satirists throughout history, The Daily Show also serves to promote a political agenda. Yet it's precisely The Daily Show's ability (...) to make us laugh that makes it politically useful—people are reminded about important political issues as a side effect. Jon Stewart and the team behind The Daily Show may not be warriors in anybody's army, but signing up to take and give orders in the regular army isn't the only way to contribute to a war effort. (shrink)

According to James Conant, the 'revocations' made of the "Concluding Unscientific Postscript" and the "Tractatus" by their authors mean that we should view these texts as containing 'simple nonsense'. I firstly criticize the reading of the Postscript's 'revocation' which leads Conant to this conclusion. Next, I aim to show why we shall better understand the revocation's significance if we pay close attention to two factors: the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus's description of himself as a 'humorist'; and, more importantly, what the (...) text tells us about 'humour' as an entire existential life-view; one given much less attention in Kierkegaard scholarship than the much better-known 'aesthetic', 'ethical' and 'religious' views of life. (shrink)

This chapter examines the ethics of political comedy as exemplified by The Daily Show, investigating the issue of when, if ever, it is appropriate to use comedy as a political tool. It is argued that mockery may be useful as a way to keep political issues on people's minds, though it becomes dangerous when used as a substitute for reason.

This chapter examines the ethics of political comedy as exemplified by The Daily Show, investigating the issue of when, if ever, it is appropriate to use comedy as a political tool. It is argued that mockery may be useful as a way to keep political issues on people's minds, though it becomes dangerous when used as a substitute for reason.

Bill Cosby’s immorality has raised intriguing aesthetic and ethical issues. Do the crimes that he has been convicted of lessen the aesthetic value of his stand-up and, even if we can enjoy it, should we? This article first discusses the intimate relationship between the comedian and audience. The art form itself is structurally intimate, and at the same time the comedian claims to express an authentic self on stage. After drawing an analogy between the question of the moral character of (...) comedians and the aesthetic value of their stand-up and the debate over the ethical criticism of art, this article argues that it is reasonable to find a comedian’s performance less funny, because stand-up’s artistic success relies on this intimacy. It contrasts the comedy of Bill Cosby with that of Louis C.K. C.K.’s moral flaws are much more present in his comedy, and it is therefore more difficult to find him funny. Last, it is ethically permissible to enjoy their comedy, if no harm to others results, both because it does not corrupt the audience’s character and because amusement is valuable. (shrink)

A widely accepted view in the philosophy of humour is that immoral jokes, like racist, sexist or homophobic jokes, can nevertheless be funny. What remains controversial is whether the moral flaws in these jokes can sometimes increase their humour. Moderate comic immoralism claims that it is possible, in at least some cases, for moral flaws to increase the humour of jokes. Critics of moderate comic immoralism deny that this ever occurs. They recognise that some jokes are both funny (...) and immoral, yet they claim that it is always something other than the moral flaws of jokes that contribute to their humour. In a series of recent papers, Aaron Smuts has pressed this objection to moderate comic immoralism. I argue that Smuts' attempt to narrow the range of cases in which humour can be attributed to immoral features is not sufficient to demonstrate that moderate comic immoralism is false. Specifically, I claim that Smuts cannot rule out a case for moderate comic immoralism grounded in the possibility that humour is normatively relative while the ethical status of jokes is not. (shrink)

This essay explores Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire as functioning according to the logic of tragedy and compares it with Alenka Zupančič’s concept of love as comedy, demonstrating however that the latter remains too caught up in the Lacanian worldview to truly capture the active side of love. The essay argues that Zupančič’s interpretation of Lacan can be reinterpreted again through the lenses of “messianic psychoanalysis” – psychoanalysis “slightly adjusted” – standing not on the side of the tragic acceptance of (...) fate, but of the promise of “more life.” Drawing from the reflections of Agata Bielik-Robson, Eric Santner and Jonathan Lear, this essay intends to demonstrate that Zupančič’s comedy of love can be reconciled with the more relational notion of love as a psychoanalytical counterpart of messianic Exodus. An example of such a liberating combination of eros and wit can be found in Freud’s interpretation of Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Where are the Funnies? Writing Images, Drawing Words Without Words Just Looking Where's the Fun? “What's That For?” Arts and Artifacts Notes References.

Stuart Murray's 'Care and the self: biotechnology, reproduction, and the good life' utilizes Foucault's "care of the self" to examine health domains in its title. The present author discusses three important articulations of concern with the Foucauldian concepts of care of the self that are absent in the work of Murray and others: first, the voluntarism and individualism inherent in ideas about care of the self; second, the absence of the interactional and relational; and, third, the perpetuation of the interpretation (...) of Foucault's concept of governmentality, 'the conduct of conduct', as primarily coercive. (shrink)

Attempts to arrange all of classical mechanics upon a self-contained basis encounter difficulties due to "the lousy encyclopedia phenomenon": hard cases involving, e.g., billiard balls, often require that the standard treatments be abandoned in favor of conceptually different accounts. Worse yet, these chains of interdependence often travel in circular loops, where the practitioner is returned to formalisms that she had previously abandoned. However, behaviors of this sort are to be expected if classical doctrine is instead viewed as a "reduced variable" (...) covering of quantum mechanics, which is the point of view that this essay recommends. (shrink)

Finding something humorous is intrinsically rewarding and may facilitate emotion regulation, but what creates humour has been underexplored. The present experimental study examined humour generated under controlled conditions with varying social, affective, and cognitive factors. Participants listed five ways in which a set of concept pairs (e.g. MONEY and CHOCOLATE) were similar or different in either a funny way (intentional humour elicitation) or a “catchy” way (incidental humour elicitation). Results showed that more funny responses were produced under the (...) incidental condition, and particularly more for affectively charged than neutral concepts, for semantically unrelated than related concepts, and for responses highlighting differences rather than similarities between concepts. Further analyses revealed that funny responses showed a relative divergence in output dominance of the properties typically associated with each concept in the pair (that is, funny responses frequently highlighted a property high in output dominance for one concept but simultaneously low in output dominance for the other concept); by contrast, responses judged not funny did not show this pattern. These findings reinforce the centrality of incongruity resolution as a key cognitive ingredient for some pleasurable emotional elements arising from humour and demonstrate how it may operate within the context of humour generation. (shrink)

One quality of remarriage comedies is that, for all their ingratiating manners, and for all the ways in which they are among the most beloved of Hollywood films, a moral cloud remains at the end of each of them. And that moral cloud has to do with what is best about them. What is best are the conversations that go on in them, where conversation means of course talk, but means also an entire life of intimate exchange between the principal (...) pair. We are bound to remember from these films, even years after viewing them, something of their sound: of conversation between Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth, or between Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, or Grant and Katharine in Bringing up Baby, or those two together with James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story, or between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam’s Rib. We feel that these people know one another, and they know how to play together in a way to make one happy and hope for the best. But the moral cloud has to do with what that conversation is meant to do, and what I say about those films is that the conversation is in service of the woman’s sense of herself as in need of an education. Importantly for that reason, I call her a descendent of Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, who in one of the most celebrated moments in modern theater, ends a play by closing a door behind her. She leaves the dollhouse saying to her husband that she requires an education and that he is not the man who can provide it for her. The implication is that since he is not this man, he cannot be her husband. And implying the contrary as well: if he were, then he would be, and their relationship would accordingly—“miracle of miracles”—constitute a marriage. Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism , This New Yet Unapproachable America , and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of how immoral elements in instances of humour affect funniness. Comic ethicism is the position that each immoral element negatively affects funniness and if their cumulative effect is sufficient, then funniness is eliminated. I focus on Berys Gaut’s central argument in favour of comic ethicism; the merited response argument. In this journal, Noël Carroll has criticized the merited response argument as illegitimately conflating comic merit with moral merit. I argue that the merited response argument, and (...) hence comic ethicism more generally, is vulnerable to Carroll’s criticism only if the comic ethicist fails to distinguish between three closely-related but distinct concepts; humour, amusement and funniness. By providing separate accounts of these three concepts, I explain how Carroll’s criticism is unsuccessful. In summary, accepting my distinctions between humour, amusement and funniness makes it clear that comic ethicism is the right position. (shrink)