This book presents a theory of habitat rights for wild animals, positioning animal property rights within the existing institution of property and discussing the practical implications of giving property rights to animals.

Recent social science research indicates that animal rights philosophy plays the functional role of a religion in the lives of the most committed animal rights advocates. In this paper, I apply the functional religion thesis to the recent debate over the place of direct action animal rights advocacy in democratic theory. I outline the usefulness of the functional religion thesis and explain its implications for theorists that call for deliberative theories to be more inclusive of coercive forms of activism.

An Inquiry into the first principles of morals and justice: This book restores to us an understanding that was once settled in the 'moral sciences': that there are propositions, in morals and law, which are not only true but which cannot be ...

Review of Julian H. Franklin, Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy (Columbia, 2005).

Hadley Arkes argues that it is necessary to move "beyond the Constitution", to the principles that stood antecedent to the text, if we are to understand the text and apply the Constitution to the cases that arise every day in our law.

Third-party intervention has been the focus of recent debate in self-defense theory. When is it permissible for third-parties to intervene on behalf of an innocent victim facing an unjustified attack or threat? In line with recent self-defense theory, if an attacker is morally responsible for their actions and does not have an acceptable excuse then it is permissible for third-parties to use proportionate violence against them.

Fodor's and Pylyshyn's stand on systematicity in thought and language has been debated and criticized. Van Gelder and Niklasson, among others, have argued that Fodor and Pylyshyn offer no precise definition of systematicity. However, our concern here is with a learning based formulation of that concept. In particular, Hadley has proposed that a network exhibits strong semantic systematicity when, as a result of training, it can assign appropriate meaning representations to novel sentences (both simple and embedded) which contain words (...) in syntactic positions they did not occupy during training. The experience of researchers indicates that strong systematicity in any form is difficult to achieve in connectionist systems.Herein we describe a network which displays strong semantic systematicity in response to Hebbian, connectionist training. During training, two-thirds of all nouns are presented only in a single syntactic position (either as grammatical subject or object). Yet, during testing, the network correctly interprets thousands of sentences containing those nouns in novel positions. In addition, the network generalizes to novel levels of embedding. Successful training requires a, corpus of about 1000 sentences, and network training is quite rapid. The architecture and learning algorithms are purely connectionist, but ‘classical’ insights are discernible in one respect, viz, that complex semantic representations spatially contain their semantic constituents. However, in other important respects, the architecture is distinctly non-classical. (shrink)

In this paper I bring together self-defense theory and animal rights theory. The extension of self-defense theory to animals poses a serious problem for proponents of animal rights. If, in line with orthodox self-defense theory, a person is a legitimate target for third-party self-defensive violence if they are responsible for a morally unjustified harm without an acceptable excuse; and if, in line with animal rights theory, people that consume animal products are responsible for unjustified harm to animals, then many millions, (...) if not billions, of otherwise law abiding and decent people will be legitimate targets for third-party self-defense violence on behalf of animals. I call this problem: the multiple inappropriate targets problem for animal rights. (shrink)

Much of traditional AI exemplifies the explicit representation paradigm, and during the late 1980''s a heated debate arose between the classical and connectionist camps as to whether beliefs and rules receive an explicit or implicit representation in human cognition. In a recent paper, Kirsh (1990) questions the coherence of the fundamental distinction underlying this debate. He argues that our basic intuitions concerning explicit and implicit representations are not only confused but inconsistent. Ultimately, Kirsh proposes a new formulation of the distinction, (...) based upon the criterion ofconstant time processing.The present paper examines Kirsh''s claims. It is argued that Kirsh fails to demonstrate that our usage of explicit and implicit is seriously confused or inconsistent. Furthermore, it is argued that Kirsh''s new formulation of the explicit-implicit distinction is excessively stringent, in that it banishes virtually all sentences of natural language from the realm of explicit representation. By contrast, the present paper proposes definitions for explicit and implicit which preserve most of our strong intuitions concerning straightforward uses of these terms. It is also argued that the distinction delineated here sustains the meaningfulness of the abovementioned debate between classicists and connectionists. (shrink)

This study reports the findings of a survey of television news directors drawn from a Radio?Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) sample. Rationale for the study centers around an apparent trend in television news to extend its ethical boundaries to include high proportions of sensationalism, privacy invasion, deception, unfair reporting, and the like. Five principles of journalism ethics? truth, justice, freedom, humaneness, and stewardship?are used as the framework for discussing results of 34 ethical questions. Results show most news directors clearly favor (...) traditional ethical solutions to ethical questions related to truth, justice, freedom, and stewardship principles. There is more disagreement among news directors in responses related to humaneness. (shrink)

The city of Cincinnati, we know, can be an engaging place, but federal judge Arthur Spiegel also found, in the mid-'90s, that it could be quite a vexing place. The city council of Cincinnati had passed what was called the Human Rights Ordinance of 1992, which barred virtually all species of discriminationAppalachian origin.sexual orientation.minority status” in the law. The framers of the amendment objected to the tendency to treat gays and lesbians on the same plane as groups that have suffered (...) discrimination based on race, religion, or gender. The proposal, known as Issue 3, drew wide support and passed in a referendum in 1993. It was, of course, challenged in the courts, which is why it found its way into the hands of Judge Spiegel. (shrink)

Libertarians concede that non-autonomous sentient beings pose a problem for their theory. But, while they acknowledge that libertarianism denies non-autonomous sentient beings basic moral rights, libertarians have overlooked how their theory also denies non-autonomous sentient beings basic moral powers. In this article, I show how the libertarian entitlement theory of justice, specifically, the theory for the original acquisition of holdings, denies non-autonomous sentient beings the moral power to originally acquire or make property. Attempts to avoid this problem by appealing to (...) interests or preference autonomy are likely to be unsuccessful. (shrink)

In his most comprehensive book on the subject , Roger Penrose provides arguments to demonstrate that there are aspects of human understanding which could not, in principle, be attained by any purely computational system. His central argument relies crucially on oft-cited theorems proven by Gödel and Turing. However, that key argument has been the subject of numerous trenchant critiques, which is unfortunate if one believes Penrose's conclusions to be plausible. In the present article, alternative arguments are offered in support of (...) Penrose-like conclusions . It is argued here that a purely computational agent, which lacked conscious awareness, would be incapable of possessing crucial concepts and of understanding certain kinds of geometrically-based proofs. Specifically, it is argued that the acquisition of human-like concepts of countable and non-denumerable infinities, and human-like comprehension of a particular geometrically motivated proof does require conscious apprehension of the subject matter involved. This does not preclude the possibility that a computational agent might come to possess the requisite consciousness, but it is argued that if this consciousness does arise within the agent, it does so, at best, as an emergent, contingent side-effect of the underlying processes involved. (shrink)

Halley and colleagues highlight important aspects of advocacy and justice in rare disease and provide recommendations for stakeholders to encourage progress toward equity and justice. In the rare d...

"Dialogue" is one of American religion's shopworn terms. Although we hear much talk about dialogue, very little of it actually takes place. Religious discourse - especially about politics and public affairs - is increasingly polarized, involving much contestation but little conversation. If truth are to be tested, however, there is no substitute for dialogue.

For James Schall, revelation becomes open to us, on the most important questions that revelation can address, when it is opened by people who “study politics,” as Samuel Johnson had it. For Plato, the best city, the best political order, was spun out in the world of speech. It is not a place we expect to inhabit. But Plato had Socrates say at the end of the Republic that, whether this City exists anywhere or not, it is the only city (...) in which the thoughtful man would wish to take part. But even so, as Schall says, revelation alerts us to the possibility that our true home will really be elsewhere. (shrink)

After reestablishing the connection between morality and the law, the author develops a coherent position on many of the most controversial issues of urban life: the political uses of the streets; verbal assaults and the defamation of racial groups; the legitimate restriction of public speech; segregation, busing, and the use of racial quotas; education, housing, and the problem of the ghetto"; prostitution, gambling, and the "regulation of vices." Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology (...) to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

It is argued that van der Velde and de Kamps employ binding circuitry that effectively constitutes a form of conjunctive binding. Analogies with prior systems are discussed and hypothetical origins of binding circuitry are examined for credibility.

An earlier article by the author, "quine and strawson on logical theory" ("analysis" volume 34, pages 207-208), is expanded and defended against criticisms made by charles sayward in "the province of logic" ("analysis" volume 36, pages 47-48). it is shown that quine's definition of logical truth presupposes an understanding of "possibility," even if the term 'sentence' is used set-theoretically, and that if quine is allowed the concept of "possibility," then strawson must be allowed modal concepts for his purposes. the traditional (...) claim that an argument is valid if and only if the corresponding conditional is necessary is also defended. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the ethics of street photography. I firstly discuss the close-up ‘in-your-face’ style street photography made famous by American photographer, Bruce Gilden. In close-up street photography, the proximity of the camera to the subject and the element of surprise work in tandem to produce a striking and evocative picture. Close-up street photography is shown to be ethically contentious on wellbeing-related and autonomy-related grounds. I next examine the more orthodox ‘respectable distance’ kind of street photography. In orthodox (...) street photography, the photographer positions the camera some distance away from a nonconsenting subject that may or may not be aware a picture is to be taken. The main ethical problem with this form of street photography relates to the subject’s vanity and sense of self. When street photographers produce and publish images without the consent of subjects, they express their own creative freedom at the expense of the subject’s right to editorial control. I discuss the scope and potentially demanding practical implications of a right to editorial control. To conclude, I offer a workable solution to the ethical dilemma facing street photographers and discuss the implications of smart phones and photo-sharing social media platforms. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the potentially environmentally destructive scope of a libertarian property rights regime can be narrowed by applying reasonable limits to those rights. I will claim that excluding the right to destroy from the libertarian property rights bundle is consistent with self-ownership and Robert Nozick’s interpretation of the Lockean proviso.

For too long, Spinoza's ethics was misread as an ethics of ideals, in which the most virtuous life possible was said to consist of the life of pure reasoning. The "free man," Spinoza's paragon of virtue, was understood to be the individual who is neither helped nor harmed by anything external. The goal, on this view, was to transcend the life of the body, of the material, and of the political, in order to focus solely on becoming like God by (...) increasing one's store of rational ideas.This, of course, is an impoverished understanding of Spinoza's aims. Not only does it cast virtue as something unattainable for actually existing, materially and socially embedded individuals, but it overlooks a vast swath of Spinoza's... (shrink)

In this paper I extend liberal property rights theory to nonhuman animals.I sketch an outline of a nonhuman animal property rights regime and argue that both proponents of animal rights and ecological holism ought to accept nonhuman animal property rights. To conclude I address a series of objections.

Do classical, contemplative philosophies have anything to teach which is relevant to life here and now? In the case of Plotinus, yes. While Platonic metaphysics is most often summarized as dualistic, where one sensible world stands apart from and in tension with an intelligible world, in the case of Plotinus this interpretation is incorrect. He does distinguish between sensibles and sense-experience, on one hand, and intelligibles and intelligible experience, on the other; but the two belong together intimately: both are located (...) in the same space, and the sensible is related to the intelligible as a shadow to its object or a reflection to what it reflects. Plotinus’ world is one. Given this picture, one rightly wonders at the status of the Plotinian exhortation for the soul to flee "alone to the Alone." Does not the journey of the soul to its source require a passing beyond of this world to some other? No, Plotinus exhortation should be understood as a reorientation, a reordering within the world here and now, not a rejection of one reality in favor of some other. This can be likened to Aesop’s fable, "The Dog and the Bone," where the dog had the choice between one real and one illusory bone, not two separate bones. Similarly, Plotinus’ world, though it can be perceived dualistically, is ontologically one; hence his metaphysics, far from otherworldly, offers a means of understanding life as it is to be lived here and now. (shrink)

Discourses of social justice offer the sense of a progressive and developing narrative within the arts sector. Cultural democracy, cultural equity and cultural diversity address broad policy issues related to production, consumption and representation. This article questions whether these approaches have failed in their challenge to the long-established power dynamics of the cultural sector. We take this position of failure as a starting point for a self-reflexive account of the lack of progressive change in the sector. We argue that reflexivity (...) is needed to avoid the elision of the progressive impulse through the inauthentic and rhetorical promotion of ‘fakequity’. As scholars from divergent yet mutually Anglo-centric traditions, our aim is to better understand how a self-reflexive approach might counter the (non)performative behaviour of the cultural sector. Without such an approach, initiatives supposedly designed to be culturally democratic risk enforcing structures of exclusion and facilitating a ‘non-performative woke democratisation of culture’. (shrink)

In his discussion of results which I (with Michael Hayward) recently reported in this journal, Kenneth Aizawa takes issue with two of our conclusions, which are: (a) that our connectionist model provides a basis for explaining systematicity “within the realm of sentence comprehension, and subject to a limited range of syntax” (b) that the model does not employ structure-sensitive processing, and that this is clearly true in the early stages of the network's training. Ultimately, Aizawa rejects both (a) and (b) (...) for reasons which I think are ill-founded. In what follows, I offer a defense of our position. In particular, I argue (1) that Aizawa adopts a standard of explanation that many accepted scientific explanations could not meet, and (2) that Aizawa misconstrues the relevant meaning of ‘structure-sensitive process’. (shrink)

There is broad anthropological interest in understanding how people define “insiders” and “outsiders” and how this shapes their attitudes and behaviors toward others. As such, a suite of hypotheses has been proposed to account for the varying degrees of in-group preference between individuals and societies. We test three hypotheses related to material insecurity, pathogen stress, and views of gender equality among cross-sectional and longitudinal samples of young people in Ethiopia to explore stability and change in their preferences for coethnic spouses. (...) We show that food insecurity is associated with a greater likelihood of intolerant mate preferences. We also find that young people who hold more gender equitable attitudes tended to hold more tolerant mate preferences. Finally, we find no support for the hypothesis that expected pathogen exposure is associated with intolerant mate preferences. Our results most strongly support a material insecurity hypothesis of in-group bias, which assumes that uncertainty over meeting basic needs leads people to favor those in their in-group. As such, our findings join a small but growing group of studies that highlight the importance of material insecurity for understanding tolerance, xenophobia, in-group bias, and favoritism. (shrink)

Abstract Drawing upon evolutionary theory and the work of Daniel Dennett and Nicholas Agar, I offer an argument for broadening discussion of the ethics of disenhancement beyond animal welfare concerns to a consideration of animal “biopreferences”. Short of rendering animals completely unconscious or decerebrate, it is reasonable to suggest that disenhanced animals will continue to have some preferences. To the extent that these preferences can be understood as what Agar refers to as “plausible naturalizations” for familiar moral concepts like beliefs (...) and desires, then they can make moral claims on us and provide support for intuitive opposition to disenhancement. Content Type Journal Article Category Original Paper Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0142-6 Authors John Hadley, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney, 7.G.10b, Bankstown Campus, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia Journal NanoEthics Online ISSN 1871-4765 Print ISSN 1871-4757. (shrink)

Fodor's and Pylyshyn's stand on systematicity in thought and language has been debated and criticized. Van Gelder and Niklasson, among others, have argued that Fodor and Pylyshyn offer no precise definition of systematicity. However, our concern here is with a learning based formulation of that concept. In particular, Hadley has proposed that a network exhibits strong semantic systematicity when, as a result of training, it can assign appropriate meaning representations to novel sentences (both simple and embedded) which contain words (...) in syntactic positions they did not occupy during training. The experience of researchers indicates that strong systematicity in any form is difficult to achieve in connectionist systems.Herein we describe a network which displays strong semantic systematicity in response to Hebbian, connectionist training. During training, two-thirds of all nouns are presented only in a single syntactic position (either as grammatical subject or object). Yet, during testing, the network correctly interprets thousands of sentences containing those nouns in novel positions. In addition, the network generalizes to novel levels of embedding. Successful training requires a, corpus of about 1000 sentences, and network training is quite rapid. The architecture and learning algorithms are purely connectionist, but classical insights are discernible in one respect, viz, that complex semantic representations spatially contain their semantic constituents. However, in other important respects, the architecture is distinctly non-classical. (shrink)

abstract Most moral philosophers accept that we have obligations to provide at least some aid and assistance to distant strangers in dire need. Philosophers who extend rights and obligations to nonhuman animals, however, have been less than explicit about whether we have any positive duties to free‐roaming or ‘wild’ animals. I argue our obligations to free‐roaming nonhuman animals in dire need are essentially no different to those we have to severely cognitively impaired distant strangers. I address three objections to the (...) view that we have positive duties to free‐roaming nonhuman animals, and respond to the predation objection to animal rights. (shrink)

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a novel stance on semantic representation, and its relationship to context sensitivity. Connectionist-minded philosophers, including Clark and van Gelder, have espoused the merits of viewing hidden-layer, context-sensitive representations as possessing semantic content, where this content is partially revealed via the representations'' position in vector space. In recent work, Bodén and Niklasson have incorporated a variant of this view of semantics within their conception of semantic systematicity. Moreover, Bodén and Niklasson contend that they (...) have produced experimental results which not only satisfy a kind of context-based, semantic systematicity, but which, to the degree that reality permits, effectively deals with challenges posed by Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988), and Hadley (1994a). The latter challenge involved well-defined criteria for strong semantic systematicity. This paper examines the relevant claims and experiments of Bodén and Niklasson. It is argued that their case fatally involves two fallacies of equivocation; one concerning ''semantic content'' and the other concerning ''novel test sentences''. In addition, it is argued that their ultimate construal of context sensitive semantics contains serious confusions. These confusions are also found in certain publications dealing with "latent semantic analysis". Thus, criticisms presented here have relevance beyond the work of Bodén and Niklasson. (shrink)