This chapter surveys recent work on philosophical issues raised by religious diversity or pluralism. It focuses on four topics. The first is the epistemological challenge of religious diversity. The rationality of commitment to any particular religious tradition seems to be threatened by the existence of rival traditions. The second is the political problem of religious toleration. Religious conflict throughout the world suggests a need for better arguments against religious intolerance than those currently available. The third is the task of understanding (...) the concept of religion. Religious pluralism fuels debate about whether the concept of religion can be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions or, if it cannot, whether it must be analyzed in terms of family resemblances. And the fourth is the enterprise of making constructive comparisons in religious ethics. Similarities and differences between the virtue theories of diverse religious traditions illuminate strengths and weaknesses in the ethical thought of the religions subjected to comparison. The chapter argues from these examples to the conclusion that religious diversity gives rise to several exciting and important problems that ought to be high on the agenda of philosophy of religion. (shrink)

contemporary ethical project--one that should inform our lives as well as our thoughts.

In “Epistemology in Philosophy of Religion,” Philip Quinn focuses on the central problem of religious epistemology for monotheistic religions: the epistemic status of belief in the existence of God. He explores what epistemic conditions arguments for God's existence would have to satisfy to be successful and whether any arguments satisfy those conditions. Turning to the claims of reformed epistemology about belief in God, Quinn assesses Alvin Plantinga's claim that belief in God is for many theists properly basic, that (...) is, has positive epistemic status even when it is not based on arguments or any other kind of propositional evidence. Quinn distinguishes two versions of this claim. According to the first, emphasized in Plantinga's earlier work, theistic belief is properly basic with respect to justification or rationality, while according to the second version, prominent in Plantinga's more recent work, theistic belief is properly basic with respect to warrant. (shrink)

This chapter defends a divine command theory consisting of two central claims. First, a kind of action is morally obligatory just in case God has commanded that actions of that kind be performed. Second, God’s commanding that a kind of action be performed is what makes it obligatory. God’s commands bring it about that the wrong actions are wrong, and the required actions are required. Moreover, God’s goodness ensures that His commands are not arbitrary. God is the standard of Goodness. (...) Something is good just in case it resembles God in a relevant way. Since God resembles Himself, He is good, and His commands are suited to ground moral obligations. Deontic or duty-related properties depend on God’s commands, but axiological or evaluative properties, such as goodness, do not. (shrink)

In _Ecce Homo_ Friedrich Nietzsche calls himself "the first immoralist" and adds "that makes me the annihilator _par excellence_". Lester Hunt examines this and other radical claims in order to show that Nietzsche does have a coherent ethical and political philosophy. He uses Nietzsche's writings as a starting point for a critique of a wider, contemporary ethical project - one that should inform our lives as well as our thoughts.

McCradden and colleagues' (2022) argues that machine learning in health care poses new challenges to appropriate evaluation for safe use in clinical care. It also claims that “the longstanding syst...

This comprehensive anthology of Bertrand Russell's writings brings together his definitive essays from the period 1903 to 1959. It covers the most fertile and the most lasting work on every significant area he published in.

We show that data collected from corpuses of documents violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell’s inequality and therefore indicate the presence of quantum entanglement in their structure. We obtain this result by considering two concepts and their combination and coincidence operations consisting of searches of co-occurrences of exemplars of these concepts in specific corpuses of documents. Measuring the frequencies of these co-occurrences and calculating the relative frequencies as approximate probabilities entering in the CHSH inequality, we obtain manifest violations of the (...) latter for all considered corpuses of documents. In comparing these violations with those analogously obtained in an earlier work for the same combined concepts in psychological coincidence experiments with human participants, also violating the CHSH inequality, we identify the entanglement as being carried by the meaning connection between the two considered concepts within the combination they form. We explain the stronger violation for the corpuses of documents, as compared to the violation in the psychology experiments, as being due to the superior meaning domain of the human mind and, on the other side, to the latter reaching a broader domain of meaning and being possibly also actively influenced during the experimentation. We mention some of the issues to be analyzed in future work such as the violations of the CHSH inequality being larger than the ‘Cirel’son bound’ for all of the considered corpuses of documents. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that warrant for Lewis’ principle of recombination presupposes warrant for a combinatorial analysis of intrinsicality, which in turn presupposes warrant for the principle of recombination. This, I claim, leads to a vicious circularity: warrant for neither doctrine can get off the ground.

On getting a clear view -- Belief and proof -- The role of ethics in learning and teaching -- Learning, teaching and thinking for oneself -- The problem of life and the problems of life -- Studying oneself.

In this paper I argue against three leading accounts of self-deception in the philosophical literature and propose a heretofore overlooked route to self-deception. The central problem with extant accounts of self-deception is that they are unable to balance two crucial desiderata: (1) to make the dynamics of self-deception (e.g., the formation of self-deceptive beliefs) psychologically plausible and (2) to capture self-deception as an intentional phenomenon for which the self-deceiver is responsible. I argue that the three leading views all fail on (...) one or both counts. However, I claim that many or most cases of self-deception conform to a different model, which I call ‘Self-deception as Omission’. In these cases, the process of self-deceptive belief formation and the intentional act for which the self-deceiver is responsible come apart, allowing us to meet both desiderata. Self-deceptive beliefs are often formed by unconscious mechanisms closely analogous to the 'System 1' processes of dual-systems psychology, or by other mechanisms of motivated reasoning. The nascently self-deceptive subject then acquiesces in the comforting belief and commits an epistemic failure by allowing it to persist. If this is done for motivationally biased reasons — e.g., preferring that the belief in question be true — then the subject is self-deceived and is blameworthy for her epistemic omission. (shrink)

The consideration of the problem of healthcare allocation as a special case of distributive justice is especially alluring when we only consider consequentialist theories. I articulate here an alternative Rawlsian non-consequentialist theory which prioritizes the fairness of healthcare allocation procedures rather than directly setting distributive parameters. The theory in question stems from Rawlsian commitments that, it is argued, have a better Rawlsian pedigree than those considered as such by Tännsjö. The alternative framework is worthy of consideration on its own merits, (...) but it also casts light on two related difficulties with Tännsjö’s approach: (i) the limits of his supposedly ecumenical methodology, which is revealed to be dialectically suspect and (ii) issues with the type of abstraction and idealization from actual judgements and preferences which the approach requires. (shrink)

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a serious condition with a large disease burden. It is often claimed that MDD is a “brain disease.” What would it mean for MDD to be a brain disease? I argue that the best interpretation of this claim is as offering a substantive empirical hypothesis about the causes of the syndrome of depression. This syndrome-causal conception of disease, combined with the idea that MDD is a disease of the brain, commits the brain disease conception of (...) MDD to the claim that brain dysfunction causes the symptoms of MDD. I argue that this consequence of the brain disease conception of MDD is false. It incorrectly rules out genuine instances of content-sensitive causation between adverse conditions in the world and the characteristic symptoms of MDD. Empirical evidence shows that the major causes of depression are genuinely psychological causes of the symptoms of MDD. This rules out, in many cases, the “brute” causation required by the brain disease conception. The existence of cases of MDD with non-brute causes supports the reinstatement of the old nosological distinction between endogenous and exogenous depression. (shrink)

Despite concerns about the relationships between health professionals and the medical device industry, the issue has received relatively little attention. Prevalence data are lacking; however, qualitative and survey research suggest device industry representatives, who are commonly present in clinical settings, play a key role in these relationships. Representatives, who are technical product specialists and not necessarily medically trained, may attend surgeries on a daily basis and be available to health professionals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to provide (...) advice. However, device representatives have a dual role: functioning as commissioned sales representatives at the same time as providing advice on approaches to treatment. This duality raises the concern that clinical decision-making may be unduly influenced by commercial imperatives. In this paper, we identify three key ethical concerns raised by the relationship between device representatives and health professionals: impacts on healthcare costs, the outsourcing of expertise and issues of accountability and informed consent. These ethical concerns can be addressed in part through clarifying the boundary between the support and sales aspects of the roles of device representatives and developing clear guidelines for device representatives providing support in clinical spaces. We suggest several policy options including hospital provision of expert support, formalising clinician conduct to eschew receipt of meals and payments from industry and establishing device registries. (shrink)

This paper argues that many so-called digital technologies can be construed as notational technologies, explored through the example of Monegraph, an art and digital asset management platform built on top of the blockchain system originally developed for the cryptocurrency bitcoin. As the paper characterizes it, a notational technology is the performance of syntactic notation within a field of reference, a technologized version of what Nelson Goodman called a “notational system.” Notational technologies produce abstracted entities through positive and reliable, or constitutive, (...) tests of socially acceptable meaning. Accordingly, this account deviates from typical narratives of blockchains, instead demonstrating that blockchain technologies are effective at managing digital assets because they produce abstracted identities through the performance of notation. Since notational technologies rely on configurations of socially acceptable meaning, this paper also provides a philosophical account of how blockchain technologies are socially embedded. (shrink)

It is vital that social workers have a deep and critical understanding of the social work value-base, and are able to analyse and apply values and ethics to their everyday practice. This fully-revised edition of one of our best-selling titles identifies current issues in social work and then applies an ethical dimension. These issues are then investigated further within an anti-discriminatory framework and against the background of the code of practice for social care workers and employers. Traditional value perspectives are (...) clearly explained and current developments in virtue theory and the ethics of care for social work are also introduced. (shrink)

Business ethics as an applied inquiry requires an expanded normative method which allows both philosophical and religious ethical considerations to be employed in resolving complex issues or cases. The proposed foundational normative method provides a comprehensive framework composed of major philosophical and religious ethical theories. An extensive rationale from the current trends in business ethics and metaethical considerations supports the development of this method which is illustrated in several case studies. By using this method, scholars and business persons gain greater (...) certitude about the ethical quality of their deliberations and decision making than what may be achieved with current nonsystematic or nascent normative methods. (shrink)