Este trabalho tem como objetivo fazer uma análise da motivação da enfermeira italiana que, após o diagnóstico positivo para o novo coronavírus SARS-CoV-2, cometeu suicídio. Desde que esta doença se tornou uma pandemia, distintas reações das pessoas têm sido observadas nas várias sociedades pelo mundo. Para efeito de referencial teórico-filosófico, debruçaremos sobre a ética schopenhaueriana a fim de refletir sobre o suicídio de Daniela Trezzi. Inicialmente, traremos, em linhas gerais, o contexto e o fato ocorrido. Em seguida, abordaremos as justificativas (...) do julgamento condenatório do filósofo alemão a respeito do suicídio. No segundo momento deste trabalho, confrontaremos o suicídio da italiana dentro da filosofia schopenhaueriana e refletiremos a respeito das motivações morais. Seria este suicídio motivado, não por conta dos males que a doença lhe traria, ou seja, motivado não em virtude do sofrimento pessoal, mas sim por compaixão ao imaginar o mal que ela causaria aos outros? (shrink)

In this paper, we consider how certain longstanding philosophical questions about mental representation may be answered on the assumption that cognitive and perceptual systems implement hierarchical generative models, such as those discussed within the prediction error minimization framework. We build on existing treatments of representation via structural resemblance, such as those in Gładziejewski :559–582, 2016) and Gładziejewski and Miłkowski, to argue for a representationalist interpretation of the PEM framework. We further motivate the proposed approach to content by arguing that it (...) is consistent with approaches implicit in theories of unsupervised learning in neural networks. In the course of this discussion, we argue that the structural representation proposal, properly understood, has more in common with functional-role than with causal/informational or teleosemantic theories. In the remainder of the paper, we describe the PEM framework for approximate Bayesian inference in some detail, and discuss how structural representations might arise within the proposed Bayesian hierarchies. After explicating the notion of variational inference, we define a subjectively accessible measure of misrepresentation for hierarchical Bayesian networks by appeal to the Kullbach–Leibler divergence between posterior generative and approximate recognition densities, and discuss a related measure of objective misrepresentation in terms of correspondence with the facts. (shrink)

Research suggests that interventions involving extensive training or counterconditioning can reduce implicit prejudice and stereotyping, and even susceptibility to stereotype threat. This research is widely cited as providing an “existence proof” that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, but is summarily dismissed—by philosophers, psychologists, and activists alike—as lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice, discrimination, and inequality. Criticisms of these “debiasing” procedures fall into three categories: concerns about empirical efficacy, about practical feasibility, and about the (...) failure to appreciate the underlying structural-institutional nature of discrimination. I reply to these criticisms of debiasing, and argue that a comprehensive strategy for combating prejudice and discrimination should include a central role for training our biases away. (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)

This book explores how our minds represent things in the world, asking whether these representations necessarily have the structure of propositions about the world. The hope is that this will lead towards a more complete understanding of the puzzle of intentionality -- how it is that our minds make contact with the world.

We situate the debate on intentionality within the rise of cognitive neuroscience and argue that cognitive neuroscience can explain intentionality. We discuss the explanatory significance of ascribing intentionality to representations. At first, we focus on views that attempt to render such ascriptions naturalistic by construing them in a deflationary or merely pragmatic way. We then contrast these views with staunchly realist views that attempt to naturalize intentionality by developing theories of content for representations in terms of information and biological function. (...) We echo several other philosophers by arguing that these theories over-generalize unless they are constrained by a theory of the functional role of representational vehicles. This leads to a discussion of the functional roles of representations, and how representations might be realized in the brain. We argue that there’s work to be done to identify a distinctively mental kind of representation. We close by sketching a way forward for the project of naturalizing intentionality. This will not be achieved simply by ascribing the content of mental states to generic neural representations, but by identifying specific neural representations that explain the puzzling intentional properties of mental states. (shrink)

Discussions of aesthetic reasons and normativity are becoming increasingly popular. This piece outlines six basic questions about aesthetic reasons, normativity, and value and discusses the space of possible answers to these questions. I divide the terrain into two groups of three questions each. First are questions about the shape of aesthetic reasons: what they favour, how strong they are, and where they come from. Second are relational questions about how aesthetic reasons fit into the wider normative landscape: whether they are (...) distinctive, what their normative status is, and how they interact with each other and with non-aesthetic reasons. This piece aims to provide a taxonomy to clarify and organise the burgeoning literature and to make a few concrete suggestions for avenues of future research. (shrink)

I provide an opinionated overview of the literature on the relationship of contextualism to knowledge norms for action, assertion, and belief. I point out that contextualists about ‘knows’ are precluded from accepting the simplest versions of knowledge norms; they must, if they are to accept knowledge norms at all, accept “relativized” versions of them. I survey arguments from knowledge norms both for and against contextualism, tentatively concluding that commitment to knowledge norms does not conclusively win the day either for contextualism (...) or for its rivals. But I also suggest that an antecedent commitment to contextualism about normative terms may provide grounds for suspicion about knowledge norms, and a debunking explanation of some of the data offered in favor of such norms. (shrink)

This paper tries to do three things. First, it tries to make it plausible that correct rules of reasoning do not always preserve justification: in other words, if you begin with a justified attitude, and reason correctly from that premise, it can nevertheless happen that you’ll nevertheless arrive at an unjustified attitude. Attempts to show that such cases in fact involve following an incorrect rule of reasoning cannot be vindicated. Second, it also argues that correct rules of reasoning do not (...) even correspond to permissions of “structural rationality”: it is not always structurally permissible to base an attitude on other attitudes from which it follows by correct reasoning. Third, from these observations it tries to build a somewhat positive account of the correctness of rules of reasoning as a more sui generis notion irreducible to either justification or structural rationality. This account vindicates an important unity of theoretical and practical reasoning as well as a qualified version of the thesis that deductive logic supplies correct rules of reasoning. (shrink)

It seems possible to see a star that no longer exists. Yet it also seems right to say that what no longer exists cannot be seen. We therefore face a puzzle, the traditional answer to which involves abandoning naïve realism in favour of a sense datum view. In this article, however, I offer a novel exploration of the puzzle within a naïve realist framework. As will emerge, the best option for naïve realists is to embrace an eternalist view of time, (...) and claim that in the relevant case, one sees a still existent star‐stage located somewhere in the distant past. (shrink)

Adverbialist theories of thought such as those advanced by Hare and Sellars promise an ontologically sleek understanding of a variety of intentional states, but such theories have been largely abandoned due to the ‘many-property problem’. In an attempt to revitalize this otherwise attractive theory, in a series of papers as well as his recent book, Uriah Kriegel has offered a novel reply to the ‘many-property problem’ and on its basis he argues that ‘adverbialism about intentionality is alive and well’. If (...) true, Kriegel will have shown that the logical landscape has long been unnecessarily constrained. His key idea is that the many-property problem can be overcome by appreciating that mental states stand in the determinable–determinate relation to one another. The present paper shows that this relation can’t save adverbialism because it would require thinkers to think more thoughts than they need be thinking. (shrink)

Robotic warfare has now become a real prospect. One issue that has generated heated debate concerns the development of ‘Killer Robots’. These are weapons that, once programmed, are capable of finding and engaging a target without supervision by a human operator. From a conceptual perspective, the debate on Killer Robots has been rather confused, not least because it is unclear how central elements of these weapons can be defined. Offering a precise take on the relevant conceptual issues, the article contends (...) that Killer Robots are best seen as executors of targeting decisions made by their human programmers. However, from a normative perspective, the execution of targeting decisions by Killer Robots should worry us. The article argues that what is morally bad about Killer Robots is that they replace human agency in warfare with artificial agency, a development which should be resisted. Finally, the article contends that the issue of agency points to a wider problem in just war theory, namely the role of moral rights in our normative reasoning on armed conflict. (shrink)

Are grounding claims fully general in character? If an object a is F in virtue of being G, does it follow that anything that’s G is F for that reason? According to the thesis of Weak Formality, the answer here is ‘yes’. In this paper, however, I argue that there is philosophical utility in rejecting this thesis. More exactly, I argue that two currently unresolved problems in contemporary metaphysics can be dealt with if we hold that there can be cases (...) of ‘kind-dependent grounding’, the key thought being that once we allow for such cases, we must also accept that Weak Formality is false. (shrink)

Despite increasing prominence, ‘ought’-contextualism is regarded with suspicion by most metaethicists. As I’ll argue, however, contextualism is a very weak claim, that every metaethicist can sign up to. The real controversy concerns how contextualism is developed. I then draw an oft-overlooked distinction between “parochial” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are those that the speaker, or others in her environment, subscribe to—and “aspirational” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are the objective standards for the relevant domain. However, I argue that neither view (...) is acceptable. I suggest an original compromise: “ecumenical contextualism”, on which some uses of ‘ought’ are parochial, others aspirational. Ecumenical contextualism is compatible with realism or antirealism, but either combination yields interesting results. And though it’s a cognitivist view, it is strengthened by incorporating an expressivist insight: for robustly normative usages of ‘ought’, the contextually-relevant standards must be endorsed by the speaker. (shrink)

Intentionalism about demonstratives is the view that the referent of a demonstrative is determined solely by the speaker's intentions. Intentionalists can disagree about the nature of these intentions, but are united in rejecting the relevance of other factors, such as the speaker's gestures, her gaze, and any facts about the addressee or the audience. In this paper, I formulate a particular version of this view, and I defend it against six objections, old and new.

This paper presents a formal account of how to determine the discourse relations between propositions introduced in a text, and the relations between the events they describe. The distinct natural interpretations of texts with similar syntax are explained in terms of defeasible rules. These characterise the effects of causal knowledge and knowledge of language use on interpretation. Patterns of defeasible entailment that are supported by the logic in which the theory is expressed are shown to underly temporal interpretation.

This essay examines a recent line of thought in aesthetics that challenges realist-leaning aesthetic theories. According to this line of thought, aesthetic diversity and disagreement are good, and our aesthetic judgments, responses, and attachments are deeply personal and even identity-constituting. These facts are further used to support anti-realist theories of aesthetic normativity. I aim to achieve two goals: (1) to disentangle arguments concerning diversity, disagreement, and personality; and (2) to offer realist-friendly replies to all three.

Many philosophers believe that truth is grounded: True propositions depend for their truth on the world. Some philosophers believe that truth’s grounding has implications for our ontology of time. If truth is grounded, then truth supervenes on being. But if truth supervenes on being, then presentism is false since, on presentism, e.g., that there were dinosaurs fails to supervene on the whole of being plus the instantiation pattern of properties and relations. Call this the grounding argument against presentism. Many presentists (...) claim that the grounding argument fails because, despite appearances, supervenience is compatible with presentism. In this paper, I claim that the grounding argument fails because, despite appearances, truth’s grounding gives the presentist no compelling reason to adopt the sort of supervenience principle at work in the grounding argument. I begin by giving two precisifications of the grounding principle: truthmaking and supervenience. In Sect. 2, I give the grounding argument against presentism. In Sect. 3, I argue that we should distinguish between eternalist and presentist notions of grounding; once this distinction is in hand, the grounding argument is undercut. In Sect. 4, I show how the presentist’s notion of grounding leads to presentist-friendly truthmaking and supervenience principles. In Sect. 5, I address some potential objections. (shrink)

At the heart of John Broome’s research program in the philosophy of normativity is a distinction between reasons, on one hand, and requirements of rationality, on the other. I am a friend of Broome’s view that this distinction is deep and important, and that neither notion can be analyzed in terms of the other. However, I also think there are major challenges that this view is yet to meet. In the first part of the paper, I’ll raise four such challenges, (...) and programmatically indicate how I think such challenges might be headed off. In the second part of the paper, I’ll discuss a third normative notion that Broome is interested in: that of (rules of) correct reasoning. On Broome’s view, correct reasoning is closely tied to requirements of rationality. More particularly, every rule of correct reasoning corresponds to a “basing permission”, which states that it’s rationally permissible to base one attitude on one or more other attitudes. I’ll argue that this proposal can’t be made to work. If I’m right, this suggests that the same kind of pulling-apart that Broome has effected so persuasively with respect to reasons and requirements of rationality needs to be effected again to separate rules of correct reasoning from both of those other categories. (shrink)

: The debate over when medical research may be performed in developing countries has steered clear of the broad issues of social justice in favor of what seem more tractable, practical issues. A better approach will reframe the question of justice in international research in a way that makes explicit the links between medical research, the social determinants of health, and global justice.

An approach to implementing variational Bayesian inference in biological systems is considered, under which the thermodynamic free energy of a system directly encodes its variational free energy. In the case of the brain, this assumption places constraints on the neuronal encoding of generative and recognition densities, in particular requiring a stochastic population code. The resulting relationship between thermodynamic and variational free energies is prefigured in mind–brain identity theses in philosophy and in the Gestalt hypothesis of psychophysical isomorphism.

Epistemologists typically assume that the acquisition of knowledge from testimony is not threatened at the stage at which audiences interpret what proposition a speaker has asserted. Attention is instead typically paid to the epistemic status of a belief formed on the basis of testimony that it is assumed has the same content as the speaker’s assertion. Andrew Peet has pioneered an account of how linguistic context sensitivity can threaten the assumption. His account locates the threat in contexts in which an (...) audience’s evidence under-determines which proposition a speaker is asserting. I argue that Peet’s epistemic uncertainty account of the threat is mistaken and I propose an alternative. The alternative locates the threat in contexts that provide factors that give audiences a mistaken psychological certainty or confidence that a speaker has asserted a proposition she has not. (shrink)

The private sector plays an active role in implementation of mechanisms concerning the mitigation of climate change. In spite of that, the corporate actors play a limited direct role in international arenas when it comes to negotiating the design of climate and energy regime. The climate and energy governance in the United Nations system remains mostly state-centric, but the active participation of corporate actors in negotiation of climate and energy regimes is essential to increase the effectiveness of their governance. Business (...) is not just a subject of a regulatory climate and energy imposed by the state; rather, business is an intrinsic part of the fabric of climate and energy governance, as “rule-maker,” particularly in the many voluntary regimes. However, the architecture in place should guarantee that the private sector does not highjack the decisions and its positions are balanced by other non-governmental actors in the process. This article analyzes the role that the private sector can play in the global climate and energy governance. The private sector does not only play a “rule taker” role in the climate change and energy regime. Indeed, they are not passive observers as they influence through indirect means. The results suggest that the private sector is able to play a key role in global climate and energy governance based on the principle of multi-stakeholder participation in global decision-making, but the architecture should be able to balance the goods and bads of private direct influence in international regimes. (shrink)

I outline and defend two egalitarian theories, which yield distinctive and, I argue, complementary answers to why health-related inequalities matter: a brute luck egalitarian view, according to which inequalities due to unchosen, differential luck are bad because unfair, and a social egalitarian view, according to which inequalities are bad when and because they undermine people’s status as equal citizens. These views identify different objects of egalitarian concern: the brute luck egalitarian view directs attention to health-related well-being, while social egalitarianism focuses (...) on health-related capabilities that are central to a person’s status as a citizen. I argue that both views are correct and should jointly guide priority-setting in health. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Plotinus’s critique of divine deliberation in Ennead 6.7 does not seek to banish teleology altogether from his philosophy of nature. Rather, his critique aims to situate teleology within his own metaphysical system so as to reconcile it with the basic principles governing the intelligible universe. In this sense, Plotinus does not propose that we expunge all reference to notions of utility and benefit from our natural explanations; he merely wishes to render those notions coherent (...) with an ontology in which the intelligible always takes precedence over sensible reality. To this end, Plotinus introduces, first, what I call a vertical teleology, where the different animal species create the necessary conditions for the maintenance of higher forms of intelligible life, such as genera. Second, Plotinus advances what I call a horizontal teleology, where the various animal organs serve to provide a minimal coefficient of noetic content to each species in its respective ontic level. Plotinus thus sketches the outlines of a properly ‘noetic’ teleology in Ennead 6.7. (shrink)

In continuation with the New Thought movement that arose in the United States in the 19th Century, there is now a massive self-help industry that markets books and seminars. This industry has also extended to healthcare in the form of positive thinking, i.e., the idea that happy thoughts are essential for health. While some of these claims may seem reasonable and commonsensical, they are not free of problems. This article posits that positive thinking has some ethical underpinnings. Extreme positive thinking (...) may promote alternative forms of medicine that ultimately substitute effective treatment, and this is unethical. The emphasis on positive thinking for cancer patients may be too burdensome for them. Likewise, unrestricted positive thinking is not necessarily good for mental health. After considering the ethics of positive thinking, this article proposes a more realistic approach. (shrink)

It has become an intellectual commonplace to claim that we have entered the era of 'postmodernity'. Three themes are embraced in this claim the poststructurist critique by Foucault, Derrida and others of the philosophical heritage of the Enlightenment the supposed impasse of High Modern art and its replacement by new artistic forms and the alleged emergence of 'post-industrial' societies whose structures are beyond the ken of Marx and other theorists of industrial capitalism. Against Postmodernism takes issue with all these themes. (...) It challenges the idealist irrationalism of post-structuralism. It questions the existence of any radical break separating allegedly Postmodern from Modern art. And it denies that recent socio-economic developments represent any fundamental shift from classical patterns of capital accumulation. Drawing on philosophy and history, Against Postmodernism takes issue also with some of the most forthright critics of postmodernism -- Jurgen Habermas and Fredric Jameson, for example. But it is most distinctive in that it offers a historical reading of the theories of such currently fashionable thinkers as Baudrillard and Lyotard. Postmodernism, Alex Callinios argues, reflects the disappointed revolutionary generation of '68, and the incorporation of many of its members into the porfessional and managerial 'new middle class'. It is best read as a symptom of political frustration and social mobility rather than as a significant intellectual or cultural phenomenon in its own right. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of cultural anthropology in Cognitive Science. Culture is described as a very large pool of information passed along from generation to generation, composed of learned “programs” for action and understanding. These cultural programs differ in important ways from computer programs. Cultural programs tend to be unspecified and inexplicit rather than clearly stated algorithms learned through a slow process of guided discovery, and involve the manipulation of content based rather than formal symbol systems. Cultural symbol systems (...) often have affective as well as objective referents, giving them a strong directive effect. The argument is made that in the process of repeated social transmission and use, cultural programs come to take forms which have a good “fit” to the natural capacities and constraints of the human information processing system. (shrink)

The 2016 CIOMS International ethical guidelines for health‐related research involving humans states that ‘health‐related research should form an integral part of disaster response’ and that, ‘widespread emergency use [of unproven interventions] with inadequate data collection about patient outcomes must therefore be avoided’ (Guideline 20). This position is defended against two lines of criticism that emerged during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. One holds that desperately ill patients have a moral right to try unvalidated medical interventions (UMIs) and that it is therefore (...) unethical to restrict access to UMIs to the clinical trial context. The second holds that clinical trials in contexts of high‐mortality diseases are morally suspect because equipoise does not exist between a standard of care that offers little prospect of clinical benefit and a UMI that might offer some clinical advantage. (shrink)

In what circumstances is it legitimate to use force? How should force be used? These are two of the most crucial questions confronting world politics today. The Just War tradition provides a set of criteria which political leaders and soldiers use to defend and rationalize war. This book explores the evolution of thinking about just wars and examines its role in shaping contemporary judgements about the use of force, from grand strategic issues of whether states have a right to pre-emptive (...) self-defence, to the minutiae of targeting. Bellamy maps the evolution of the Just War tradition, demonstrating how it arose from a myriad of sub-traditions, including scholasticism, the holy war tradition, chivalry, natural law, positive law, Erasmus and Kant's reformism, and realism from Machiavelli to Morgenthau. He then applies this tradition to a range of contemporary normative dilemmas related to terrorism, pre-emption, aerial bombardment and humanitarian intervention. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a novel analysis of presuppositions, paying particular attention to the interaction between the knowledge resources that are required to The analysis has two main features. First, we capture an analogy between presuppositions, anaphora and scope ambiguity (cf. van der Sandt 1992), by utilizing semantic under-specification (c£ Reyle 1993). Second, resolving this underspecification requires reasoning about how the presupposition is rhetorically connected to the discourse context. This has several consequences. First, since pragmatic information plays a role (...) in computing the rhetorical relation, it also constrains the interpretation of presuppositions. Our account therefore provides a formal framework for analysing problematic data, which require pragmatic reasoning. Second, binding presuppositions to the context via rhetorical links replaces accommodating them, in the sense of adding them to the context (cf. Lewis 1979). The treatment of presupposition is thus generalized and integrated into the discourse update procedure. We formalize this approach in SDRT (Asher 1993; Lascarides & Asher 1993), and demonstrate that it provides a rich framework for interpreting presuppositions, where semantic and pragmatic constraints are integrated. (shrink)

What must linguistic knowledge be like if it is to explain our capacity to use language? All linguists and philosophers of language presuppose some answer to this critical question, but all too often the presupposition is tacit. In this collection of sixteen previously unpublished essays, a distinguished international line-up of philosophers and linguists address a variety of interconnected themes concerning our knowledge of language.

Can we trust our intuitive judgments of right and wrong? Are moral judgements objective? What reason do we have to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong? In Conversations on Ethics, Alex Voorhoeve elicits answers to these questions from eleven outstanding philosophers and social scientists: -/- Ken Binmore; Philippa Foot; Harry Frankfurt; Allan Gibbard; Daniel Kahneman; Frances Kamm; Alasdair MacIntyre; T. M. Scanlon; Peter Singer; David Velleman; Bernard Williams. -/- The exchanges are direct, open, and sharp, (...) and give a clear account of these thinkers' core ideas about ethics. They also provide unique insights into their intellectual development - how they became interested in ethics, and how they conceived the ideas for which they became famous. Conversations on Ethics will engage anyone interested in moral philosophy. (shrink)

As it has historically been the case with many pandemics, the Covid-19 experience will induce many philosophers to reconsider the value of medical practice. This should be a good opportunity to critically scrutinize the way medical research and medical interventions are carried out. For much of its history, medicine has been very inefficient. But, even in its contemporary forms, a review of common protocols in medical research and medical interventions reveal many shortcomings, especially related to methodological flaws, and more importantly, (...) conflicts of interests due to profit incentives. In the face of these problems, we propose a program of “gentle medicine”. This term, originally formulated by philosopher Jacob Stegenga, describes a form of medicine in which physicians intervene less than they currently do. As part of this general program, we advance a series of reform recommendations that could be enacted both by medical staff in their everyday practice, but also by public health officials and policymakers. (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)

Our moral convictions cannot, on the face of it, count in evidence against scientific claims with which they happen to conflict. Moral anti-realists of whatever stripe can explain this easily: science is immune to moral refutation because moral discourse is defective as a trustworthy source of true and objective judgments. Moral realists, they can add, are unable to explain this immunity. After describing how anti-realists might implement this reasoning, the paper argues that the only plausible realist comeback turns on the (...) practical nature of moral reasoning. This comeback, however, places significant constraints on the structure of evidence for moral judgments. These constraints cannot be met by coherentist defenders of reflective-equilibrium methodology or by anyone sympathetic to bottom-up, case-driven foundationalism, including those who claim we have perceptual or perception-like access to moral truths. Unfortunately for realists in these categories, alternative realism-friendly accounts of science’s apparent moral immunity are unpromising. These neither explain nor explain away our unwillingness to infer an is from an ought, as Hume might have put it. Science’s apparent immunity to moral refutation therefore poses a serious problem for any realist unhappy with top-down, theory-driven conceptions of the structure of moral evidence. (shrink)

English has plural terms as well as singular terms. But our standard formal languages, e.g., the predicate calculus, feature only singular terms. How can the plural idiom be formalized?‘Changing the subject’ is by far the most common plurals strategy among both philosophers and linguists: a plural term is replaced by a singular term standing for some complex object that ‘contains’ the individuals to which the plural term alludes. For example, one might simply replace ‘A, B imply C’ with ‘{A, B} (...) implies [singular] C’. We uncover a surprising variety of ways to change the subject, of ever‐increasing complexity and ingenuity. Our question is whether any can made to work. (shrink)

In the last decade there has been a torrent of work at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics on predicates of personal taste, subjective expressions like fun and tasty that are used to express opinions rather than matters of fact. In each section of this paper I discuss a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked in the literature on PPTs. In Section 1, I identify a neglected experiential reading of these adjectives. All other theories of expressions like fun take them (...) to express some standing property, but distributional and compositional considerations suggest that the basic meaning of fun adjectives is experiential. In Section 2, I discuss the relation between fun claims relativized to particular experiencers and their unrelativized counterparts, arguing that previous theories fail to capture the evaluativity unique to the latter. Finally, I argue... (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of a 'standard of care' as it has been used in recent arguments over the ethics of international human-subjects research. It argues that this concept is ambiguous along two different axes, with the result that there are at least four possible standard of care arguments that have not always been clearly distinguished. As a result, it has been difficult to assess the implications of opposing standard of care arguments, to recognize important differences in their supporting (...) rationales, and even to locate the crux of the disagreement in some instances. The goal of the present discussion, therefore, is to disambiguate the concept of a 'standard of care' and to highlight the areas of genuine disagreement among different standards. In the end it is argued that one standard of care argument in particular is more complex than either its proponents or its critics may have recognized and that understanding this possibility opens up a potentially promising avenue of inquiry that remains to be carefully explored. (shrink)

Going about our daily lives in an orderly manner requires us, once we are aware of them, to dismiss many metaphysical possibilities. We take it for granted that we are not brains in vats, or living in the Matrix, or in an extended dream. Call these things that we take for granted “anti-skeptical assumptions”. What should a reflective agent who believes these things think of these beliefs? For various reasons, it can seem that we do not have evidence for such (...) anti-skeptical assumptions. Are anti-skeptical assumptions, then, beliefs that one may rationally hold without evidence for them – indeed, even in the face of a positive judgment that one lacks evidence for them? I survey and criticize some prominent answers to this question, and then offer a positive view that blends externalism about evidence with a mild, qualified kind of pragmatism. The view I offer aims to do justice to the sense that anti-skeptical assumptions are evidentially groundless while also maintaining that one cannot rationally believe something that one judges oneself to lack sufficient evidence for. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of equipoise in evaluating international research. It distinguishes two possible formulations of the equipoise requirement that license very different evaluations of international research proposals. The interpretation that adopts a narrow criterion of similarity between clinical contexts has played an important role in one recent controversy, but it suffers from a number of problems. An alternative interpretation that adopts a broader criterion of similarity does a better job of avoiding both exploitation of the brute fact of (...) social deprivation and the exploitation of needy populations for the benefit of more well-off populations. It also holds out the promise of reconciling the need to find interventions that can be employed in developing world contexts with the cluster of moral values that must constrain the way such research is carried out. (shrink)

What is medicine? One obvious answer in the context of the contemporary clinical tradition is that medicine is the process of curing sick people. However, this “curative thesis” is not satisfactory, even when “cure” is defined generously and even when exceptions such as cosmetic surgery are set aside. Historian of medicine Roy Porter argues that the position of medicine in society has had, and still has, little to do with its ability to make people better. Moreover, the efficacy of medicine (...) for improving population health has been famously doubted by historians and epidemiologists. The curative thesis demands that we have mostly been stupid, duped, or staggeringly hopeful, given that medicine has not until recently offered more than a handful of effective cures. I suggest, in this article, that the core medical competence is neither to cure, nor to prevent, disease, but to understand and to predict it. I argue that this approach does a better job than the curative thesis at explaining why not all medicine is concerned with curative efforts and that it enjoys historical support from the ancient entanglement of prophecy and medicine and from the fact that medicine thrived for centuries with almost no effective cures and continues to thrive today in various forms that are mostly without curative efficacy. I suggest that this approach grounds a fairer approach to alternative, traditional, and other medical practices, as well as some fresh lessons for the development of mainstream medicine. (shrink)

Following a boom in investment and overinflated expectations in the 1980s, artificial intelligence entered a period of retrenchment known as the “AI winter.” With advances in the field of machine learning and the availability of large datasets for training various types of artificial neural networks, AI is in another cycle of halcyon days. Although medicine is particularly recalcitrant to change, applications of AI in health care have professionals in fields like radiology worried about the future of their careers and have (...) the public tittering about the prospect of soulless machines making life‐and‐death decisions. Medicine thus appears to be at an inflection point—a kind of Groundhog Day on which either AI will bring a springtime of improved diagnostic and predictive practices or the shadow of public and professional fear will lead to six more metaphorical weeks of winter in medical AI. (shrink)

It follows from David Lewis's counterpart-theoretic analysis of modality and his counterfactual theory of causation that causal claims are relativized to a set of counterpart relations. Call this Shlewis's view. I show how Shlewis's view can provide attractively unified solutions to similar modal and causal puzzles. I then argue that Shlewis's view is better motivated, by his own lights, than the view Lewis actually held, and also better motivated than a similar approach which relativizes causal claims to sets of ‘contrast (...) events’. (shrink)

Any view of equipoise faces perhaps the most radical and far-reaching objections from moral foundations. These objections hold that the equipoise requirement conflates the ethics of medical research and the ethics of clinical medicine. Once this conflation is recognized, this position holds, research can be given a new foundation on the imperative to avoid exploiting research participants. This article argues that what is novel in this critique is not as successful as its proponents claim and that the ultimate success of (...) this approach actually hinges on a version of the objection from utility. Nevertheless, this criticism highlights the limited scope of applicability of the equipoise requirement. The article concludes, therefore, by describing the outlines of what the article calls an ‘integrative approach’ to clinical trials. This approach represents one way in which the normative requirements of equipoise and the non-exploitation approach might be unified under a single, broad framework. (shrink)

Recent debates over the use of sham surgery as a control for studies of fetal tissue transplantation for Parkinson’s disease have focused primarily on rival interpretations of the US federal regulations governing human-subjects research. Using the core ethical and methodological considerations that underwrite the equipoise requirement, we nd strong prima facie reasons against using sham surgery as a control in studies of cellular-based therapies for Parkinson’s disease and more broadly in clinical research. Additionally, we believe that these reasons can be (...) generalized to apply to the use of other placebo controls that carry signi cant risks of positive harms in and of themselves. As a result, our arguments are centrally relevant to the emerging drive to subject therapies with a surgical component to the same rigorous standards of evaluation as those governing the approval of new pharmaceuticals. (shrink)

Lying is an everyday moral phenomenon about which philosophers have written a lot. Not only the moral status of lying has been intensively discussed but also what it means to lie in the first place. Perhaps the most important criterion for an adequate definition of lying is that it fits with people’s understanding and use of this concept. In this light, it comes as a surprise that researchers only recently started to empirically investigate the folk concept of lying. In this (...) paper, we describe three experimental studies which address the following questions: Does a statement need to be objectively false in order to constitute lying? Does lying necessarily include the intention to deceive? Can one lie by omitting relevant facts? (shrink)

Despite its centrality and its familiarity, W. V. Quine's dispute with Rudolf Carnap over the analytic/synthetic distinction has lacked a satisfactory analysis. The impasse is usually explained either by judging that Quine's arguments are in reality quite weak, or by concluding instead that Carnap was incapable of appreciating their strength. This is unsatisfactory, as is the fact that on these readings it is usually unclear why Quine's own position is not subject to some of the very same arguments. A satisfying (...) and surprising account is here presented that stitches together the puzzling pieces of this important philosophical exchange and that in turn leads to an explanation of why it is so difficult to say whether anything of substance is at stake. (shrink)