Our commentary outlines a number of arguments questioning an autonomous model of word recognition without feedback. Arguments are presented against the need for a phonemic decision stage and in support of a featural level in a model including feedback.

Concern for the rapidly growing scale and intensity of the human exploitation of the environment, in particular the alienation of natural ecosystems, but also resource exhaustion, pollution, and congestion, leads one to wonder about the short time. horizons allowed for in decision making. Time preference is dictated by the rate of interest, allowing in practice a horizon often not exceeding several decades. I argue that this is unsatisfactory. Some minimal social rate of discount should not be enforced. Instead, it is (...) more feasible to set absolute environmental standards, thereby introducing quantity constraints on our decision making, within which time preference can be permitted to find its own level. This acknowledges that the myopia of human vision may not be a flaw but rather a biological design which has served us weIl in evolution. It may, therefore, be better to change the rules by introducing self-imposed collective constraints than to try to change the shortsightedness of people in their day-to-day grass-roots decision making. (shrink)

This paper takes up recent challenges to consequentialist forms of ethically evaluating risks and explores how a non-consequentialist form of deliberation, Kantian ethics, can address questions about risk. I examine two cases concerning ethically- questionable financial risks: investing in abstruse financial instruments and investing while relying on a bailout. After challenging consequentialist evaluations of these cases, I use Kant’s distinction between morals and prudence to evaluate when the investments are immoral and when they are merely imprudent. I argue that the (...) investment practices are imprudent when they do not take adequate precautions to secure the firm’s long- term flourishing. They are immoral in a Kantian sense when they risk the destruction of the financial system upon which the firms depend. The upshot of my analysis is that moral actions require more risk aversion than prudent actions and prudent actions require more risk aversion than expected-value-maximizing actions. (shrink)

Concern for the rapidly growing scale and intensity of the human exploitation of the environment, in particular the alienation of natural ecosystems, but also resource exhaustion, pollution, and congestion, leads one to wonder about the short time. horizons allowed for in decision making. Time preference is dictated by the rate of interest, allowing in practice a horizon often not exceeding several decades. I argue that this is unsatisfactory. Some minimal social rate of discount should not be enforced. Instead, it is (...) more feasible to set absolute environmental standards, thereby introducing quantity constraints on our decision making, within which time preference can be permitted to find its own level. This acknowledges that the myopia of human vision may not be a flaw but rather a biological design which has served us weIl in evolution. It may, therefore, be better to change the rules by introducing self-imposed collective constraints than to try to change the shortsightedness of people in their day-to-day grass-roots decision making. (shrink)

I investigate ethical questions concerning a novel cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, using a Fichtean account of the ethics of currency. Fichte holds that currencies should fulfill an ethical purpose: providing access, in perpetuity, to the material welfare that underwrites citizens' basic rights. In his nineteenth‐century context, Fichte argues that currencies fulfill this purpose better when nations control them (i.e., when they are “national currencies”) than when foreigners freely trade them (as “world currencies”). After exploring conditions in which national currencies fail to secure (...) material stability over time, e.g., in corrupt regimes, I develop a Fichtean model for ethically evaluating currencies and evaluate the extent to which Bitcoin meets its standards for ethical currency. I argue that Bitcoin undermines the (monetary) power of nations and, as such, threatens their ability to provide access to necessary material goods. While offering citizens a means of defending themselves against corrupt regimes, Bitcoin forsakes the general welfare and is, as such, unethical by Fichtean lights. (shrink)

I evaluate two contractualist approaches to the ethics of risk: mutual constraint and the probabilistic, ex ante approach. After explaining how these approaches address problems in earlier interpretations of contractualism, I object that they fail to respond to diverse risk preferences in populations. Some people could reasonably reject the risk thresholds associated with these approaches. A strategy for addressing this objection is considering individual risk preferences, similar to those Buchak discusses concerning expected-utility approaches to risk. I defend the risk-preferences-adjusted contractualist (...) approach, which calculates a population’s average risk preference and permits risk thresholds below that preference, only. (shrink)

This paper examines the resources of Kantian ethics to establish corporate moral responsibility. I defend Matthew Altman’s claim that Kantian ethics cannot hold corporations morally responsible for corporate malfeasance. Rather than following Altman in interpreting this inability as a reason not to use Kantian ethics, however, I argue that the Kantian framework is correct: business ethicists should not seek to hold corporations morally responsible. Instead, they should use Kantian resources to criticize the actions of individual businesspeople. I set forth a (...) model for decomposing business actions into their individual parts and reconstituting them in a context-specific “maxim” that Kantian ethics can evaluate. The reconstituted form of Kantian ethics that I defend is better able to manage decision-making complexity than traditional interpretations. To demonstrate the usefulness of my approach, I apply it to the recent Wells Fargo bogus-accounts scandal. (shrink)

Notwithstanding the notion of progress, the social and environmental record of our age poses serious doubts for the present and the future. Technology, being the mainspring of progress, may be seen, accordingly, as the master of history more than the servant of society. In line with this view, a case can be made to strengthen the value of technology and to weaken the deterministic character of history. To do so, the paper canvasses the use of artificial markets designed to improve (...) compliance of technology with environmental or social standards. The emerging interest in following this path poses a radical departure from the traditional policy approach to technology assessment. The traditional approach may be described asex ante, relying on cost-benefit analysis to anticipate the welfare effects of technology, combining this analysis with bureaucratic management based on command and control. Cost-benefit analysis, however, is piecemeal and shortsighted and, in a dynamic and synergistic world, can be considered of limited value to ensure longer-term goals. On the other hand, artificial markets operateex post and on the basis of ambient standards. As such, they constitute an artificial device that does not require discretion and a predictive capacity that social science cannot offer. Nonetheless, and given political will, this new approach offers the potential to ensure efficient and sustainable outcomes under conditions of uncertainty. (shrink)

To use Kantian ethics in an applied context, decision makers typically try to determine whether the “maxim” of their possible action conforms to Kant’s supreme principle of morality: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (4:402). The action’s maxim is a way of expressing the decision maker’s (a) putative action and (b) conditions that prompt the action in a (c) preposition of a form that (...) will allow her to perform (d) tests, specified by Kant’s moral principle, which determine the action’s moral permissibility. Despite the clear importance of crafting this maxim—e.g., so it meets standards (a)-(d)—for using Kantian ethics to answer real and pressing ethical questions, existing accounts do not offer sustained guidance about maxim crafting. This paper offers such guidance. The paper also shows that properly crafting maxims, using guidelines that Kant implies but does not himself set forth, allows Kantian ethics to defeat classic objections. Both projects contribute to the aim of showing that Kantian ethics should play a role both in debating current ethical challenges and in teaching ethics. (shrink)

Research on ethical norms has grown in recent years, but imprecise language has made it unclear when these norms prescribe “what ought to be” and when they merely describe behaviors or perceptions (“what is”). Studies of ethical norms, moreover, tend not to investigate whether participants were influenced by the prescriptive aspect of the norm; the studies primarily demonstrate, rather, that people will mimic the behaviors or perceptions of others, which provides evidence for the already well-substantiated social proof theory. In this (...) review article, we delineate three streams of norms research in business ethics: behavioral, perceptual, and prescriptive. We argue that by properly categorizing norms, and designing studies to investigate when prescriptions, more than mere mimicry, improve ethical outcomes in organizations, researchers can enhance managers’ efforts to promote ethical outcomes in organizations. (shrink)

This article examines the role of maxims in Kantian ethics. Maxims are propositions that describe individual actions as instances of general rules. Because Kantian ethics evaluates the morality of actions by testing the actions’ maxims, it is important to formulate the maxim well. I begin by (1) investigating how maxims relate to actions. Next, I (2) review how Kantian ethics tests maxims, focusing on the Formula of Universal Law (FUL). I engage Kant’s conceptions of determining and reflecting judgment from the (...) Third Critique to illuminate the role of judgment in crafting and testing maxims. Then, I present (3) my interpretation of how to craft maxims in a Kantian context: In condition C, I do action A. I apply my interpretation to (4) several examples, including Kant’s own, Kant’s critics, and contemporary Kantians. I (5) consider several objections and (6) explain how this interpretation of crafting maxims has helped my applied ethics students. (shrink)

Introductory background -- Paradigms in the arts and social sciences -- General-integrative paradigms in psychology -- Particular-specific paradigms in psychology -- Operational paradigms in psychology -- Conclusion.

We address how to ethically evaluate workplace practices when workplace behavioral norms conflict with employees’ attitudes toward those norms, which, according to research on psychological contract violations, regularly occurs. Drawing on Scanlonian contractualism, we introduce the intersubjective reflection process (IR process). The IR process ethically evaluates workplace practices according to whether parties to a workplace practice have intersubjectively valid grounds to veto the practice. We present normative and empirical justification for this process and apply the IR process to accounts of (...) workplace moral dilemmas. We end by identifying future directions for research related to the IR process. (shrink)

Scharding argues that Bitcoin is unethical on Fichte’s view because its instability makes it unable to guarantee that users can afford what they need to live. She contrasts Bitcoin with currencies controlled by central authorities that can guarantee their stability. Allison objects that not all centrally controlled currencies are stable and not all non-centrally controlled currencies are unstable. I clarify that both stability and a means of securing stability are necessary, but not sufficient, for a currency to be ethical.

This paper investigates one of Anderson’s (2007) objections to individually-allocating principles of distributive justice: that they are incompatible with the free market. I argue that Anderson’s objection applies only to the specific principle she discusses, associated with luck egalitarianism, and not to individually-allocating principles generally. I then discuss different individually-allocating principles, the precepts of justice, broached by Rawls (1971,1999) but never developed by him. The precepts determine people’s distributive entitlements based on their contributions, efforts, and needs. I offer an interpretation (...) of each precept, explain why its distributive standard is compelling, show how the precepts avoid Anderson’s objection, and address Rawls’s rationale for not using the precepts in his account of distributive justice. I conclude by comparing the precepts to the kind of principle that Anderson prefers, range-constraining rules, arguing that the precepts meet the key standard associated with those rules. (shrink)

This paper investigates individual differences-based income entitlements in a context of political equality. Three regimes for distributing income are considered: guaranteed basic income, no guaranteed income, and guaranteed work opportunities. Whereas GBI attends to equality while remaining silent on difference and NGI attends to difference while de-emphasizing equality, GWO attends to both difference and equality. Balancing individual differences and political equality is a plausible goal for distributive justice, and the GWO regime seems well suited to accommodate these joint concerns.

This article addresses a dilemma about autonomous vehicles: how to respond to trade-off scenarios in which all possible responses involve the loss of life but there is a choice about whose life or lives are lost. I consider four options: kill fewer people, protect passengers, equal concern for survival, and recognize everyone’s interests. I solve this dilemma via what I call the new trolley problem, which seeks a rationale for the intuition that it is unethical to kill a smaller number (...) of people to avoid killing a greater number of people based on numbers alone. I argue that killing a smaller number of people to avoid killing a greater number of people based on numbers alone is unethical because it disrespects the humanity of the individuals in the smaller-numbered group. I defend the recognize-everyone’s-interests algorithm, which will probably kill fewer people but will not do so based on numbers alone. (shrink)

Discusses problems in business ethics, tools to solve them, contemporary case studies, and the future of business ethics.

Moral philosophers agree that welfare matters. But they disagree about what it is, or how much it matters. In this vital new work, Wayne Sumner presents an original theory of welfare, investigating its nature and discussing its importance. He considers and rejects all notable theories of welfare, both objective and subjective, including hedonism and theories founded on desire or preference. His own theory connects welfare closely with happiness or life satisfaction. Reacting against the value pluralism that currently dominates moral philosophy, (...) he advances welfare as the only basic ethical value. He concludes by discussing the implications of this thesis for ethical and political theory. Written in clear, non-technical language, and including a definitive survey of other work in this area, Sumner's book is essential reading for moral philosophers, political theorists, and welfare economists. (shrink)

As physicians, we have seen patients with substance use disorders leave the hospital against medical advice, slipping through the cracks of our health care system. In fact, despite a high burden of life‐threatening illnesses, patients with SUDs are at a nearly threefold increased risk of leaving the hospital against medical advice. Leaving against medical advice is associated with an increased thirty‐day mortality rate as well as an increased rate of hospital readmission. When a patient leaves in this way, the health (...) care system loses the opportunity to engage with someone who is struggling with an SUD and whose health is at imminent risk. Fortunately, there are ways to address some of these challenges within existing organizational frameworks. Addiction consult teams and supervised injection facilities are two interventions that have proven successful. (shrink)

Can philosophy offer reasonable grounds for the existence of a God possessing genuine religious significance and not proposed simply as the solution to a purely intellectual philosophical problem? Certainly many contemporary thinkers have insisted that no genuine religion could be based upon metaphysics. In this book, however, T. L. S. Sprigge examines sympathetically the most notable metaphysical systems of the last four centuries which purport to put religion on a rational footing and, after a thorough examination of their claims, considers (...) what kind of religious outlook they might support and how they actually affected the lives of their proponents. The thinkers studied include Spinoza, Hegel, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, Josiah Royce, A. N. Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne, concluding with an exposition of the author's own viewpoint and a general discussion on the relation between metaphysics and religion. There is also a chapter on Kierkegaard as the most important critic of metaphysical religion. (shrink)

Critics of contemporary metaphysics argue that it attempts to do the hard work of science from the ease of the armchair. Physics, not metaphysics, tells us about the fundamental facts of the world, and empirical psychology is best placed to reveal the content of our concepts about the world. Exploring and understanding the world through metaphysical reflection is obsolete. In this paper, I will show why this critique of metaphysics fails, arguing that metaphysical methods used to make claims about the (...) world are similar to scientific methods used to make claims about the world, but that the subjects of metaphysics are not the subjects of science. Those who argue that metaphysics uses a problematic methodology to make claims about subjects better covered by natural science get the situation exactly the wrong way around: metaphysics has a distinctive subject matter, not a distinctive methodology. The questions metaphysicians address are different from those of scientists, but the methods employed to develop and select theories are similar. In the first section of the paper, I will describe the sort of subject matter that metaphysics tends to engage with. In the second section of the paper, I will show how metaphysical theories are classes of models and discuss the roles of experience, common sense and thought experiments in the construction and evaluation of such models. Finally, in the last section I will discuss the way these methodological points help us to understand the metaphysical project. Getting the right account of the metaphysical method allows us to better understand the relationship between science and metaphysics, to explain why doing metaphysics successfully involves having a range of different theories, to understand the role of thought experiments involving fictional worlds, and to situate metaphysical realism in a scientifically realist context. (shrink)

The paradox of knowability, derived from a proof by Frederic Fitch in 1963, is one of the deepest paradoxes concerning the nature of truth. Jonathan Kvanvig argues that the depth of the paradox has not been adequately appreciated. It has long been known that the paradox threatens antirealist conceptions of truth according to which truth is epistemic. If truth is epistemic, what better way to express that idea than to maintain that all truths are knowable? In the face of the (...) paradox, however, such a characterization threatens to undermine antirealism. If Fitch's proof is valid, then one can be an antirealist of this sort only by endorsing the conclusion of the proof that all truths are known.Realists about truth have tended to stand on the sidelines and cheer the difficulties faced by their opponents from Fitch's proof. Kvanvig argues that this perspective is wholly unwarranted. He argues that there are two problems raised by the paradox, one that threatens antirealism about truth and the other that threatens everybody's view about truth, realist or antirealist. The problem facing antirealism has had a number of proposed solutions over the past 40 years, and the results have not been especially promising with regard to the first problem. The second problem has not even been acknowledged, however, and the proposals regarding the first problem are irrelevant to the second problem. This book thus provides a thorough investigation of the literature on the paradox, and also proposes a solution to the deeper of the two problems raised by Fitch's proof. It provides a complete picture of the paradoxicality that results from Fitch's proof, and presents a solution to the paradox that claims to address both problems raised by the original proof. (shrink)

I defend a one category ontology: an ontology that denies that we need more than one fundamental category to support the ontological structure of the world. Categorical fundamentality is understood in terms of the metaphysically prior, as that in which everything else in the world consists. One category ontologies are deeply appealing, because their ontological simplicity gives them an unmatched elegance and spareness. I’m a fan of a one category ontology that collapses the distinction between particular and property, replacing it (...) with a single fundamental category of intrinsic characters or qualities. We may describe the qualities as qualitative charactersor as modes, perhaps on the model of Aristotelian qualitative (nonsubstantial) kinds, and I will use the term “properties” interchangeably with “qualities”. The qualities are repeatable and reasonably sparse, although, as I discuss in section 2.6, there are empirical reasons that may suggest, depending on one’s preferred fundamental physical theory, that they include irreducibly intensive qualities. There are no uninstantiated qualities. I also assume that the fundamental qualitative natures are intrinsic, although physics may ultimately suggest that some of them are extrinsic. On my view, matter, concrete objects, abstract objects, and perhaps even spacetime are constructed from mereological fusions of qualities, so the world is simply a vast mixture of qualities, including polyadic properties (i.e., relations). This means that everything there is, including concrete objects like persons or stars, is a quality, a qualitative fusion, or a portion of the extended qualitative fusion that is the worldwhole. I call my view mereological bundle theory. (shrink)

In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, leading figures in the fields of virtue ethics and ethics come together to present the first ...

The purpose of this article is to discuss an external whistleblowing event that occurred after all internal whistleblowing through the hierarchy of the organization had failed. It is argued that an organization that does not support those that whistle blow because of violation of professional standards is indicative of a failure of organizational ethics. Several ways to build an ethics infrastructure that could reduce the need to resort to external whistleblowing are discussed. A relational ethics approach is presented as a (...) way to eliminate the negative consequences of whistleblowing by fostering an interdependent moral community to address ethical concerns. (shrink)

In _Real Natures and Familiar Objects_ Crawford Elder defends, with qualifications, the ontology of common sense. He argues that we exist -- that no gloss is necessary for the statement "human beings exist" to show that it is true of the world as it really is -- and that we are surrounded by many of the medium-sized objects in which common sense believes. He argues further that these familiar medium-sized objects not only exist, but have essential properties, which we are (...) often able to determine by observation. The starting point of his argument is that ontology should operate under empirical load -- that is, it should give special weight to the objects and properties that we treat as real in our best predictions and explanations of what happens in the world. Elder calls this presumption "mildly controversial" because it entails that arguments are needed for certain widely assumed positions such as "mereological universalism". Elder begins by defending realism about essentialness. He then defends this view of familiar objects against causal exclusion arguments and worries about vagueness. Finally, he argues that many of the objects in which common sense believes really exist, including artifacts and biological devices shaped by natural selection, and that we too exist, as products of natural selection. (shrink)

Preterm birth is defined as delivery occurring before 37 weeks gestation.1 Infants born prematurely have increased risks of morbidity and mortality throughout life, especially during the first year. These risks increase as the gestational age at birth decreases.2 Additionally, there are significant racial and ethnic differences in preterm birth rates. In 2022, the rate of preterm birth among non-Hispanic black women was approximately 50% higher than that observed in non-Hispanic white women.1 The outcomes for these infants are also disparate–preterm birth (...) and low birth weight are the second-leading causes of infant mortality (deaths before 1 year of age). Notably, among preterm neonates, infants born to non-Hispanic black women have a mortality rate more than double that of infants born to non-Hispanic white mothers.3 Importantly, there is a small but significant group of neonates that can be classified as severely premature (those born <28 weeks). Infants born before 28 weeks have varied and uncertain outcomes. While this group accounts for only 0.4% of preterm births, it also accounts for 40% of deaths among preterm neonates.4 As noted by Romanis and Adkins, the advent of artificial amnion and placenta technology (AAPT) holds promise for its potential to address the physiologic complications and mortality risks of extreme prematurity by introducing amniotic substitutes that mimic in vivo placental oxygenation and substrate delivery. In contrast …. (shrink)