Seth Vannatta argues that there can be a fruitful synthesis of pragmatism and classical conservatism. In doing this, he focuses the methodological commitments of pragmatism and conservatism. However, I will demonstrate with a reading of Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action that other commitments might prevent this synthesis—at least a synthesis between the thought of John Dewey and Edmund Burke. My conclusion is that pragmatism and conservativism might travel parallel to one another but that we have good reasons for keeping some (...) separation between the theories based upon their fundamental commitments. Deweyan pragmatism remains tied to democracy; conservatism remains tied to history. (shrink)

The perception of behavior as a moral or conventional concern can be influenced by contextual variables, including status and power differences. We propose that social processes and in particular social role enactment through the exercise of power will psychologically motivate moralization. Punishing or rewarding others creates a moral dilemma that can be resolved by externalizing causation to incontrovertible moral rules. Legitimate power related to structure and position can carry moral weight but may not influence the power holder’s perceptions of rules (...) and general norms of behavior. Social identity theory suggests moralization could be promoted by a concern for shared, defining values. However, the tendency to moralize another’s behavior can be injurious to shared identity. We explored white-collar employees’ perceptions of several categories of noxious or deviant workplace behaviors and regressed these perceptions on the tendency to use legitimate, referent, or reward and punish power; social identity; and the interaction of social identity and power, in particular legitimate power. Only the tendency to influence others through punishment or reward predicted moralization. Alternative causal explanations for the findings were addressed through the absence of any relationships between punishment and reward power and perceptions of deviant behaviors as wrong, upsetting, or requiring punishment. We discuss these results in the context of self and social processes, the social construction of morals and power, and the impact of managers’ behavior on group or organizational ethics. (shrink)

Based upon research done by evolutionary psychologists into the reason why human beings feel depression in social situations, I argue that philosophers have significant warrant to consider depression as an important feature conditioning moral imagination. The moral imagination come up with new enterprises and new ways of organizing social life. This reorganization would meet many of the goals put forth by pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. I argue that depression will work as a leading clue and unique imaginative “space” to reconstruct (...) various social situations. (shrink)

In a typical book review, I would look for and examine what is new about a particular thinker’s idea or presentation. However, as I read The Cambridge Companion to Dewey I find that I cannot and should not use the same criteria for evaluation. I pick up a Cambridge Companion when I need an introduction or a refresher on material—not when I need to see what the cutting-edge scholarship is. That being said, a companion ought not propagate the status quo (...) or fail to communicate what is current in the understanding of a figure or an area. Therefore, a companion ought, first, to provide an adequate introduction to a literate, but inexpert, person to the field it purports to introduce. Second, a companion should show the .. (shrink)

In this chapter, we critique a concept of resilience that has emerged from contemporary positive psychology and its application to health education. We argue that the present popularity of “resilience” as a strategy for managing mental health discourages educational institutions from providing students with the mental health services they need. Using the tools of American pragmatism, especially the work of John Dewey, we criticize the paradigm of resilience and identify several concrete reformulations of disability studies which would make concrete differences (...) in the lives of those with mental disability. (shrink)

This study examines the varying roles of power, status, and national culture in unethical decision-making. Most research on unethical behavior in organizations is grounded in Western societies; empirical comparative studies of the antecedents of unethical behavior across nations are rare. The authors conduct this comparative study using scenario studies with four conditions in both China and Canada. The results demonstrate that power is positively related to unethical decision-making in both countries. Status has a positive effect on unethical decision-making and facilitates (...) the unethical decisions of Canadian participants who have high power but not Chinese participants who have high power. To explicate participants’ unethical decision-making rationales, the authors ask participants to justify their unethical decisions; the results reveal that Chinese participants are more likely to cite position differences, whereas Canadian participants are more likely to cite work effort and personal abilities. These findings expand theoretical research on the relationship between social hierarchy and unethical decision-making and provide practical insights on unethical behavior in organizations. (shrink)

With an upsurge of interest and investment in new legal technologies comes consideration of who is making them and whether these individuals or entities should be subject to regulation. This article looks at how such regulation might function in light of the existing regulatory regimes governing lawyers and the capacities of legal regulators. It considers the ramifications both of maintaining the existing system, or in extending some form of regulation to these new entrants to the legal services market.

With an upsurge of interest and investment in new legal technologies comes consideration of who is making them and whether these individuals or entities should be subject to regulation. This article looks at how such regulation might function in light of the existing regulatory regimes governing lawyers and the capacities of legal regulators. It considers the ramifications both of maintaining the existing system, or in extending some form of regulation to these new entrants to the legal services market.

In Memories and Portraits, H. G. Callaway presents us with the memoir of a philosopher. I will, as readers of this review will hardly find surprising, be reviewing this book with two foci. First, I will address the merits of the work itself and, second, with an eye toward our shared interests in John Dewey, other pragmatists, and how the work incorporates or neglects pragmatism’s contributions to the themes Callaway discusses. However, in many ways this second task is auxiliary. Callaway (...) does not present us with a systematic text in philosophy, but rather a text that is a memoir about the author as much as it is about a philosopher, specifically, how the philosopher’s experiences have demonstrated the importance.. (shrink)

Pragmatism seeks to reconstruct the individual's understanding of herself so that she is better equipped to grow and seek integration in her community. Given radical changes through the modern age and into our contemporary time, the idea of individualism that informs modern philosophy is radically out of step with reality. Pragmatism holds that individuality develops in interaction with an environment and, therefore, there is no originary individual such as moderns like Locke posit that exists antecedent to social life. However, the (...) rejection of modern philosophy's Promethean individual is not a rejection of individuality. Wholesale rejection makes the mistake of reinforcing the individual-society dualism by .. (shrink)

Western aesthetics has privileged contemplation as a necessary condition for authentic aesthetic experience. In contrast, I argue that the adequacy of aesthetic comportment must be measured by the self-presentation of the object in question, shaped by the place from which such presentations issue. Thus, the specific character of many forms of art, particularly in urban contexts, solicits a kind of “distracted” engagement rather than contemplative attention. Distraction is a positive mode of aesthetic engagement. I begin with a critical account of (...) the formalist theories of Kant and Bell as examples of this privileging of contemplative hermeneutics. I then consider Walter Benjamin’s theory of mimesis as a basis for a more fruitful account of aesthetic form, of which certain “distractive” artworks serve as examples. Distraction is an appropriate response to certain presentations, in the face of which absorption would be a kind of aesthetic failure. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Justin Bell's “Depression Applied to Moral Imagination: Deweyan Tools for Moral Inquiry." The author first contextualizes Bell’s use of evolutionary psychology in the context of two influential philosophical engagements with medicine: Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of the therapeutic and the recent turn towards person-centered medicine over disease-centered medicine. He then raises two concerns about the accounts of depression used in the sources Bell draws on: the way they identify depression as oriented (...) towards social problems and the way they view depression as intentional. (shrink)

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) initiate needed discourse on environmental justice and the...

An exceptional contribution to the teaching and study of Chinese thought, this anthology provides fifty-eight selections arranged chronologically in five main sections: Han Thought, Chinese Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, Late Imperial Confucianism, and the early Twentieth Century. The editors have selected writings that have been influential, that are philosophically engaging, and that can be understood as elements of an ongoing dialogue, particularly on issues regarding ethical cultivation, human nature, virtue, government, and the underlying structure of the universe. Within those topics, issues of (...) contemporary interest, such as Chinese ideas about gender and the experiences of women, are brought to light. -/- Introductions to each main section provide an overview of the period, while brief headnotes to selections highlight key points. -/- The translations are the works of many distinguished scholars, and were chosen for their accuracy and accessibility, especially for students, general readers, and scholars who do not read Chinese. Special effort has been made to maintain consistency of key terms across translations. -/- Also included are a glossary, bibliography, index of names, and an index locorum of The Four Books. (shrink)

This classic analysis of Western liberal capitalist society contends that capitalism harbors the seeds of its downfall, particularly by effecting a certain cultural tendency among its most successful subjects that is bound to corrode its very foundations. As such, it is a conservative critique employing cultural concerns precisely where Marx prioritized economic ones.

Inquiry into the meaning of logical terms in natural language (‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if’) has generally proceeded along two dimensions. On the one hand, semantic theories aim to predict native speaker intuitions about the natural language sentences involving those logical terms. On the other hand, logical theories explore the formal properties of the translations of those terms into formal languages. Sometimes, these two lines of inquiry appear to be in tension: for instance, our best logical investigation into conditional connectives may (...) show that there is no conditional operator that has all the properties native speaker intuitions suggest if has. Indicative conditionals have famously been the source of one such tension, ever since the triviality proofs of both Lewis (1976) and Gibbard (1981) established conclusions which are in prima facie tension with ordinary judgments about natural language indicative conditionals. In a recent series of papers, Branden Fitelson has strengthened both triviality results (Fitelson 2013, 2015, 2016), revealing a common culprit: a logical schema known as IMPORT-EXPORT. Fitelson’s results focus the tension between the logical results and ordinary judgments, since IMPORT-EXPORT seems to be supported by intuitions about natural language. In this paper, we argue that the intuitions which have been taken to support IMPORT-EXPORT are really evidence for a closely related, but subtly different, principle. We show that the two principles are independent by showing how, given a standard assumption about the conditional operator in the formal language in which IMPORT-EXPORT is stated, many existing theories of indicative conditionals validate one, but not the other. Moreover, we argue that once we clearly distinguish these principles, we can use propositional anaphora to show that IMPORT-EXPORT is in fact not valid for natural language indicative conditionals (given this assumption about the formal conditional operator). This gives us a principled and independently motivated way of rejecting a crucial premise in many triviality results, while still making sense of the speaker intuitions which appeared to motivate that premise. We suggest that this strategy has broad application and an important lesson: in theorizing about the logic of natural language, we must pay careful attention to the translation between the formal languages in which logical results are typically proved, and natural languages which are the subject matter of semantic theory. (shrink)

The assumption that the concept of phenomenal consciousness is pretheoretical is often found in the philosophical debates on consciousness. Unfortunately, this assumption has not received the kind of empirical attention that it deserves. We suspect that this is in part due to difficulties that arise in attempting to test folk intuitions about consciousness. In this article we elucidate and defend a key methodological principle for this work. We draw this principle out by considering recent experimental work on the topic by (...) Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz (2008). We charge that their studies do not establish that the folk have a concept of phenomenal consciousness in part because they compare group agents to individuals . The problem is that group agents and individuals differ in some significant ways in terms of functional organization and behavior. We propose that future experiments should establish that ordinary people are disposed to ascribe different mental states to entities that are given behaviorally and functionally equivalent descriptions. (shrink)

Literature on racism, anti‐racism, whiteness, nursing education and nurse educators was reviewed and analysed for the development of race consciousness and application of anti‐racist pedagogy. The literature describes an oppressive educational climate for non‐white identifying people, a curriculum that does not attend to the social construction of difference, and a nursing culture that is not consciously situated in a broader sociopolitical context. A particular focus on studies of nurse educators demonstrates a stark need for personal and professional development towards effectively (...) delivering anti‐racist pedagogy and a deconstruction of white normativity and dominance amongst white faculty. The protection and reproduction of white privilege is identified through the scholarship itself through a lack of racial analysis, an externalization of the root of oppression and non‐specific study measures and outcomes. The persistence and pervasiveness of white dominance in nursing and the lack of anti‐racist competence in white educators, particularly, merits a shift in anti‐racist efforts away from short‐term skill acquisition initiatives towards the deconstruction of socialized white supremacy and enactments of white privilege in nurse educators themselves. (shrink)

Provides a critical and analytical history of ancient Greek theories on the nature of pleasure, and of its value and rolein human lfie, from the ealriest times down to the period of Epicurus and the early Stoics.

In Setting Limits, Daniel Callahan advances the provocative thesis that age be a limiting factor in decisions to allocate certain kinds of health services to the elderly. However, when one looks at available data, one discovers that there are many more elderly women than there are elderly men, and these older women are poorer, more apt to live alone, and less likely to have informal social and personal supports than their male counterparts. Older women, therefore, will make the heaviest demand (...) on health care resources. If age were to become a limiting factor, as Dr. Callahan suggests it should, the limits that will be set are limits that will affect women more drastically than they affect men. This review essay examines the implications of Callahan's thesis for elderly women. (shrink)

Empirical work on the use of causal language by ordinary people indicates that their causal attributions tend to be sensitive not only to purely descriptive considerations, but also to broadly moral considerations. For example, ordinary causal attributions appear to be highly sensitive to whether a behavior is permissible or impermissible. Recently, however, a consensus view has emerged that situates the role of permissibility information within a broader framework: According to the consensus, ordinary causal attributions are sensitive to whether or not (...) a behavior is generally out of the norm, where being out of the norm might indicate deviation from a prescriptive norm (a broadly moral consideration) or deviation from a statistical norm (a purely descriptive consideration). In contrast, we conjecture that ordinary causal attributions are more directly connected to broadly moral judgments about normative responsibility (the responsibility view). We present the results of a series of new experimental studies that are consistent with the responsibility view, while indicating that the consensus position is seriously mistaken. (shrink)

Promoting the ethical formation of engineering students through the cultivation of their discipline-specific knowledge, sensitivity, imagination, and reasoning skills has become a goal for many engineering education programs throughout the United States. However, there is neither a consensus throughout the engineering education community regarding which strategies are most effective towards which ends, nor which ends are most important. This study provides an overview of engineering ethics interventions within the U.S. through the systematic analysis of articles that featured ethical interventions in (...) engineering, published in select peer-reviewed journals, and published between 2000 and 2015. As a core criterion, each journal article reviewed must have provided an overview of the course as well as how the authors evaluated course-learning goals. In sum, 26 articles were analyzed with a coding scheme that included 56 binary items. The results indicate that the most common methods for integrating ethics into engineering involved exposing students to codes/standards, utilizing case studies, and discussion activities. Nearly half of the articles had students engage with ethical heuristics or philosophical ethics. Following the presentation of the results, this study describes in detail four articles to highlight less common but intriguing pedagogical methods and evaluation techniques. The findings indicate that there is limited empirical work on ethics education within engineering across the United States. Furthermore, due to the large variation in goals, approaches, and evaluation methods described across interventions, this study does not detail “best” practices for integrating ethics into engineering. The science and engineering education community should continue exploring the relative merits of different approaches to ethics education in engineering. (shrink)

What an agent ought to do is determined by competition between reasons bearing on the options open to her. The popular metaphor of balancing or weighing reasons on a scale to represent this competition encourages a focus on competition between reasons for competing options. But what an agent ought to do also depends on the reasons against those options. The balancing metaphor does not provide an obvious way to represent reasons against. Partly as a result of this, there is a (...) serious lack of work on reasons against. A simple view is that there is no problem here, since reasons against an option are really just more reasons for—in particular, reasons for certain alternatives. This simple view lets us maintain the balancing metaphor, and more importantly, it simplifies theorizing about the competition between reasons. This is because if it’s true, there is really just one kind of competition, the competition between reasons for competing options. This paper challenges the simple view, arguing against several ways of identifying which alternatives to an option the reasons against it are reasons for. I also sketch a competing view, according to which reasons against are distinct from reasons for—these are two different normative relations. If this kind of view is correct, then our theory of the competition between reasons will need to recognize at least two kinds of competition: the one between reasons for competing options, and the one between the reasons for an option and the reasons against it. (shrink)

I develop a reduction of grounding to essence. My approach is to think about the relation between grounding and essence on the model of a certain conceptof existential dependence. I extend this concept of existential dependence in a coupleof ways and argue that these extensions provide a reduction of grounding to essenceif we use sorted variables that range over facts and take it that for a fact to obtain is forit to exist. I then use the account to resolve various (...) issues surrounding the concept of grounding and its connection with essence; apply the account to paradigm cases andto the impure logic of grounding; and respond to objections. (shrink)

I argue that not all context dependent expressions are alike. Pure (or ordinary) indexicals behave more or less as Kaplan thought. But quasi indexicals behave in some ways like indexicals and in other ways not like indexicals. A quasi indexical sentence φ allows for cases in which one party utters φ and the other its negation, and neither party’s claim has to be false. In this sense, quasi indexicals are like pure indexicals (think: “I am a doctor”/“I am not a (...) doctor” as uttered by different individuals). In such cases involving a pure indexical sentence, it is not appropriate for the two parties to reject each other’s claims by saying, “No.” However, in such cases involving a quasi indexical sentence, it is appropriate for the par- ties to reject each other’s claims. In this sense, quasi indexicals are not like pure indexicals. Drawing on experimental evidence, I argue that gradable adjectives like “rich” are quasi indexicals in this sense. e existence of quasi indexicals raises trouble for many existing theories of context dependence, including standard contextualist and relativist theories. I propose an alternative semantic and pragmatic theory of quasi indexicals, negotiated contextualism, that combines insights from Kaplan 1989 and Lewis 1979. On my theory, rejection is licensed with quasi indexicals (even when neither of the claims involved has to be false) because the two utterances involve conflicting proposals about how to update the conversational score. I also adduce evidence that conflicting truth value assessments of a single quasi indexical utterance exhibit the same behavior. I argue that negotiated contextualism can account for this puzzling property of quasi indexicals as well. (shrink)

Criticism plays an essential role in the growth of scientific knowledge. In some cases, however, criticism can have detrimental effects; for example, it can be used to ‘manufacture doubt’ for the purpose of impeding public policy making on issues such as tobacco consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Oreskes & Conway 2010). In this paper, we build on previous work by Biddle and Leuschner (2015) who argue that criticism that meets certain conditions can be epistemically detrimental. We extend and refine (...) their account by arguing that such criticism can be epistemically corrupting—it can create social conditions that are conducive to the development of epistemic vice by agents operating within them. (shrink)

This chapter investigates different ways that pro tanto reasons bearing on our options can compete with one another in order to determine the overall normative status of those options. It argues for two key claims: (i) any theory of this competition must include a distinct role for reasons against, in addition to reasons for, and (ii) any theory must allow for comparative verdicts about how strongly supported the options are by the reasons, rather than simply which options are permissible or (...) required. A simple balancing account and an account based on a distinction between requiring and justifying reasons are rejected, and a new account giving a distinct role for reasons against is introduced. (shrink)

Many philosophers and brain scientists hold that explaining consciousness is one of the major outstanding problems facing modern science today. One type of consciousness in particular—phenomenal consciousness—is thought to be especially problematic. The reasons given for believing that this phenomenon exists in the first place, however, often hinge on the claim that its existence is simply obvious in ordinary perceptual experience. Such claims motivate the study of people's intuitions about consciousness. In recent years a number of researchers in experimental philosophy (...) of mind have begun to shed light on this area, investigating how people understand and attribute those mental states that have been thought to be phenomenally conscious. In this article, we discuss the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness and detail the work that has been done on the question of whether lay people have this concept. (shrink)

What is it for something to be essential to an item? For some time, it was standard to think that the concept of necessity alone can provide an answer: for something to be essential to an item is for it to be strictly implied by the existence of that item. We now tend to think that this view fails because its analysans is insufficient for its analysandum. In response, some argue that we can supplement the analysis in terms of necessity (...) with a further condition. In this paper I argue that this view is untenable in its current form. I then provide a glimmer of hope to those who think that essence is at least partially analyzable in terms of necessity. (shrink)

Pleasure and Desire The Case of Hedonism Reviewed.

For epistemic subjects like us, updating our credences incurs epistemic costs. Expending our limited processing power and working memory to properly update our credences by some information can come at the cost of not responding to other available information. It is thus desirable to flesh out and compare alternative ways of taking information into account in light of cognitive shortcomings like our own. This paper is a preliminary attempt to do so. I argue that it is better, in a range (...) of circumstances and from the point of view of expected credal accuracy, for epistemic subjects like us not to update on available information that bears on propositions for which substantial evidence has been gathered than it is to update on information as it presents itself. In order to clarify the argument, and enable comparisons between information-response policies more generally, I develop a queue-theoretic model of learning for subjects with cognitive limitations. The model characterizes how policies for responding to information interact with a subject’s limitations to yield confidences. Finally, I discuss implications of the discussion for work on confidence, outright belief, and the relationship between those two states. The comparison of information-response policies helps to explain how some of the “biases” revealed by psychological research might be cognitively valuable, clarify views that take outright belief to be a kind of epistemic plan that resists reconsideration, and assuage certain “demandingness” worries for the hypothesis that we are credal reasoners. (shrink)

It is not uncommon to find assumptions being made about folk psychology in the discussions of phenomenal consciousness in philosophy of mind. In this article I consider one example, focusing on what Dan Dennett says about the 'folk theory of consciousness'. I show that he holds that the folk believe that qualities like colours that we are acquainted with in ordinary perception are phenomenal qualities. Nonetheless, the shape of the folk theory is an empirical matter and in the absence of (...) empirical investigation there is ample room for doubt. Fortunately, experimental evidence on the topic is now being produced by experimental philosophers and psychologists. This article contributes to this growing literature, presenting the results of six new studies on the folk view of colours and pains. I argue that the results indicate against Dennett's theory of the folk theory of consciousness. (shrink)