Do participants in shared activity have mutual obligations to do their bit? This article shows this question has no one-size-fits-all answer and offers a pluralist account of the normativity of shared agency. The first part argues obligations to do one's bit have three degrees of involvement in shared activity. Such obligations might, obviously, bolster co-participants’ resolve to act as planned (degree 1). Less obviously, there also are higher and lower degrees of involvement. Obligations to do one's bit might provide our (...) agency-pooling mechanism. When they do, we act together by virtue of satisfying them (degree 2). Conversely, some shared activities involve no obligation (degree 0). In the second part, I argue shared agency theory is best served by a non-moralistic conception of obligation, one on which co-participants’ obligations need be neither strict-performance obligations, nor directed ones. Overall, my arguments suggest that we can choose how to coordinate normatively our shared activities. (shrink)

Research programs in empirical psychology from the past two decades have revealed implicit biases. Although implicit processes are pervasive, unavoidable, and often useful aspects of our cognitions, they may also lead us into error. The most problematic forms of implicit cognition are those which target social groups, encoding stereotypes or reflecting prejudicial evaluative hierarchies. Despite intentions to the contrary, implicit biases can influence our behaviours and judgements, contributing to patterns of discriminatory behaviour. These patterns of discrimination are obviously wrong and (...) unjust. But in remedying such wrongs, one question to be addressed concerns responsibility for implicit bias. Unlike some paradigmatic forms of wrongdoing, such discrimination is often unintentional, unendorsed, and perpetrated without awareness; and the harms are particularly damaging because they are cumulative and collectively perpetrated. So, what are we to make of questions of responsibility? In this article, we outline some of the main lines of recent philosophical thought, which address questions of responsibility for implicit bias. We focus on (a) the kind of responsibility at issue; (b) revisionist versus nonrevisionist conceptions of responsibility as applied to implicit bias; and (c) individual, institutional, and collective responsibility for implicit bias. (shrink)

Philosophers who have written about implicit bias have claimed or implied that individuals are not responsible, and therefore not blameworthy, for their implicit biases, and that this is a function of the nature of implicit bias as implicit: below the radar of conscious reflection, out of the control of the deliberating agent, and not rationally revisable in the way many of our reflective beliefs are. I argue that close attention to the findings of empirical psychology, and to the conditions for (...) blameworthiness, does not support these claims. I suggest that the arguments for the claim that individuals are not liable for blame are invalid, and that there is some reason to suppose that individuals are, at least sometimes, liable to blame for the extent to which they are influenced in behaviour and judgment by implicit biases. I also argue against the claim that it is counter-productive to see bias as something for which individuals are blameworthy; rather, understanding implicit bias as something for which we are liable to blame could be constructive. (shrink)

The term 'implicit bias' has very swiftly been incorporated into philosophical discourse. Our aim in this paper is to scrutinise the phenomena that fall under the rubric of implicit bias. The term is often used in a rather broad sense, to capture a range of implicit social cognitions, and this is useful for some purposes. However, we here articulate some of the important differences between phenomena identified as instances of implicit bias. We caution against ignoring these differences: it is likely (...) they have considerable significance, not least for the sorts of normative recommendations being made concerning how to mitigate the bad effects of implicit bias. (shrink)

This book by one of America's preeminent legal theorists is concerned with the conflict between the goals of justice and economic efficiency in the allocation of risk, especially risk pertaining to safety. The author approaches his subject from the premise that the market is central to liberal political, moral, and legal theory. In the first part of the book, he rejects traditional "rational choice" liberalism in favor of the view that the market operates as a rational way of fostering stable (...) relationships and institutions within communities of individuals with broadly divergent conceptions of the good. However, markets are needed most where they are most difficult to create and sustain, and one way to understand contract law in liberal legal theory, according to Professor Coleman, is as an institution designed to reduce uncertainty and thereby make markets possible. Another target of this book is the prevalent view that tort law helps rectify market failures when transaction costs are too high to permit contracting. The author argues instead that tort law should be understood as a way of rectifying wrongful losses not inefficient exchanges. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Jurisprudence: Method and Subject Matter Legality and Authority Positivism: Austin vs. Hart The Authority of Law Judicial Discretion Incorporationism and Legality Raz' s Theory of Authority Incorporationism and Authority Conclusion Postscript References.

Our focus here is on whether, when influenced by implicit biases, those behavioural dispositions should be understood as being a part of that person’s character: whether they are part of the agent that can be morally evaluated.[4] We frame this issue in terms of control. If a state, process, or behaviour is not something that the agent can, in the relevant sense, control, then it is not something that counts as part of her character. A number of theorists have argued (...) that individuals do not have control, in the relevant sense, over the operation of implicit bias. We will argue that this claim is mistaken. We articulate and develop a notion of control that individuals have with respect to implicit bias, and argue that this kind of control can ground character-based evaluation of such behavioural dispositions. (shrink)

Jules Coleman, one of the world's most influential philosophers of law, here expounds his recent views on a range of important issues in legal theory. Coleman offers for the first time an explicit account of the pragmatist method that has long informed his work, and takes on the views of highly respected contemporaries such as Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz.

The first part of this book is a translation of a philosophical work by the Breton philosopher Jules Lequyer, which explores questions of divine justice and human equality. The second part is a biography of Lequyer by Donald Wayne Viney, based on Prosper Hemon's life of Lequyer, and other material.

Research programs in empirical psychology over the past few decades have led scholars to posit implicit biases. This is due to the development of innovative behavioural measures that have revealed aspects of our cognitions which may not be identified on self-report measures requiring individuals to reflect on and report their attitudes and beliefs. But what does it mean to characterise such biases as implicit? Can we satisfactorily articulate the grounds for identifying them as bias? And crucially, what sorts of cognitions (...) are in fact being measured; what mental states or processes underpin such behavioural responses? In this paper, we outline some of the philosophical and empirical issues engaged when attempting to address these three questions. Our aim is to provide a constructive taxonomy of the issues, and how they interrelate. As we will see, any view about what implicit bias is may depend on a range of prior theoretical choices. (shrink)

Next SectionIn emphasizing the importance of the separability thesis, legal philosophers have inadequately appreciated other philosophically important ways in which law and morality are or might be connected with one another. In this article, I argue that the separability thesis cannot shoulder the philosophical burdens that it has been asked to bear. I then turn to two issues of greater importance to jurisprudence. These are ‘the moral semantics of law’ and ‘the normativity of theory construction in jurisprudence’. The moral semantics (...) claim is that legal content is best understood as moral directives about what is to be done and who is to decide what is to be done. The problem is that legal positivists typically hold that only social facts contribute to the content of law, and it is hard to see how a positivist can hold both the social-facts claim and the moral-semantics claim. I argue that not only are the two claims consistent with one another, but that legal positivists must hold some version of the moral semantics claim if they are to make sense of the claim that legal reasons purport to be content-independent moral reasons for acting. In Section 3 of the article, I take up the question of whether theory construction in jurisprudence is normative or descriptive. This is hard to do in part because so little attention has been paid to correctly formulating the issue. I suggest a demanding test for descriptivism; namely, that an adequate analysis of law can be provided entirely in terms of its formal features. I then defend this claim against three arguments designed to show because governance by law is necessarily desirable or valuable that, we cannot characterize law without making reference to those values or to other material features of law. This constitutes a limited but powerful defence of descriptive jurisprudence. (shrink)

Philosophers have had a lot to say about blame, much less about praise. In this paper, I follow some recent authors in arguing that this is a mistake. However, unlike these recent authors, the reasons I identify for scrutinising praise are to do with the ways in which praise is, systematically, unjustly apportioned. Specifically, drawing on testimony and findings from social psychology, I argue that praise is often apportioned in ways that reflect and entrench existing structures of oppression. Articulating what (...) is going wrong here helps us to see what to do about it. (shrink)

Jules Coleman, one of the world's leading philosophers of law, here presents his most mature work so far on substantive issues in legal theory and the appropriate methodology for legal theorizing. In doing so, he takes on the views of highly respected contemporaries such as Brian Leiter, Stephen Perry, and Ronald Dworkin.

We explore the relationship between jurisprudential theories pertaining to the nature of law and semantic and metasemantic theories pertaining to the meaning of ‘law’ in the wake of Dworkin’s notorious Semantic Sting argument in Law’s Empire (HUP 1986). Along the way we delineate various aspects of the semantic and metasemantic underpinnings of ‘law’ as an artifact term and advance the general methodological point that jurisprudential inquiry is only negligibly constrained by the findings of semantic and metasemantic inquiry.

In this paper, I set out some desiderata for a model of implicit cognition. I present test cases and suggest that, when considered in light of them, some recent models of implicit cognition fail to satisfy these desiderata. The test cases also bring to light an important class of cases that have been almost completely ignored in philosophical discussions of implicit cognition and implicit bias. These cases have important work to do in helping us understand both the role of implicit (...) cognition in action and our attempts to combat implicit biases. (shrink)

Suppose the prevailing distribution of property rights is unjust as determined by the relevant conception of distributive justice. You have far more than you should have under that theory and I have far less. Then I defraud you and in doing so reallocate resources so that our holdings ex post more closely approximate what distributive justice requires. Do I have a duty to return the property to you? There are many good reasons for requiring me to return to you what (...) I have taken. One is that while you may have no right in justice to all that you own, it does not follow that I do, or that I have a right to take it. Thus, requiring me to return the property to you is a way of recognizing that I had no right to take it from you in the first place. (shrink)

Relational conceptions of autonomy attempt to take into account the social aspects of autonomous agency. Those views that incorporate not merely causally, but constitutively necessary relational conditions, incorporate a condition that has the form: A necessary condition for autonomous agency is that the agent stands in social relations S. I argue that any account that incorporates such a condition cannot play one of autonomy’s key normative roles: identifying those agents who ought to be protected from paternalistic intervention. I argue, against (...) objections from Oshana, that there are good reasons for maintaining the notion of autonomy in this role, and thus that such relational conceptions should not be accepted. This rejection goes beyond that from John Christman, which holds only for those relational conditions which are value-laden. (shrink)

Reactive emotion accounts hold that blameworthiness should be analyzed in terms of the familiar reactive emotions. However, despite the attractions of such views, we are not persuaded that blameworthiness is ultimately a matter of correctly felt reactive emotion. In this paper, we draw attention to a range of little-discussed considerations involving the moral significance of the passage of time that drive a wedge between blameworthiness and the reactive emotions: the appropriateness of the reactive emotions is sensitive to the passage of (...) time in ways that attributions of blameworthiness are not. There are a number of ways in which reactive emotion accounts might attempt to accommodate the moral significance of time, however. We consider the most important of these, but ultimately find them wanting. Accordingly, we conclude that the prospects for the reactive emotion accounts are bleak. Our argument, if successful, has a range of implications for legal theory, most importantly in providing a novel moral basis for statutes of limitations and in shedding light on new avenues in the theory of criminal law generally. (shrink)

Two German philosophers working during the Weimar Republic in Germany, between the two World Wars, produced seminal texts that continue to resonate almost a hundred years later. Franz Rosenzweig—a Jewish philosopher, and Martin Heidegger—a philosopher who at one time was studying to become a Catholic priest, each in their own, particular way include in their writings powerful philosophies of art that, if approached phenomenologically and ethically, provide keys to understanding their radically divergent trajectories, both biographically and for their philosophical heritage. (...) Simon provides a close reading of some of their essential texts—The Star of Redemption for Rosenzweig and Being and Time and The Origin of the Work of Art for Heidegger—in order to draw attention to how their philosophies of art can be understood to provide significant ethical directives. (shrink)

This book presents a learned and ingenious attempt to understand the origin and nature of philosophical inquiry. It draws on material from numerous disciplines and from all periods of philosophy and provides challenging arguments on a wide range of topics. The author constructs a hierarchy of ontological claims, beginning with perceptual experience, moving to language and science. He traces subtle and unexpected relations among these and concludes by offering a system for classifying philosophical theories which reveals why they take the (...) form they do and why philosophical dispute is ineradicable. The book offers many fresh insights into such topics as the nature of experience, the nature of language and that of philosophy itself. It will interest a wide range of philosophers, in particular those concerned with categorical schemes, grammar and ontology. (shrink)

Recent empirical research has substantiated the finding that very many of us harbour implicit biases: fast, automatic, and difficult to control processes that encode stereotypes and evaluative content, and influence how we think and behave. Since it is difficult to be aware of these processes - they have sometimes been referred to as operating 'unconsciously' - we may not know that we harbour them, nor be alert to their influence on our cognition and action. And since they are difficult to (...) control, considerable work is required to prevent their influence. We here focus on the implications of these findings for epistemology. We first look at ways in which implicit biases thwart our knowledge seeking practices (sections 1 & 2). Then we set out putative epistemic benefits of implicit bias, before considering ways in which epistemic practices might be improved (section 3). Finally, we consider the distinctive challenges that the findings about implicit bias pose to us as philosophers, in the context of feminist philosophy in particular (section 4). (shrink)

Should the state punish its disadvantaged citizens who have committed crimes? Duff has recently argued that where disadvantage persists the state loses its authority to hold individuals to account and to punish for criminal wrongdoings. I here scrutinize Duff’s argument for the claim that social justice is a precondition for the legitimacy of state punishment. I sharpen an objection to Duff’s argument: with his framework, we seem unable to block the implausible conclusion that where disadvantage persists the state lacks the (...) authority to punish any citizen for any crime. I then set out an alternative line of argument in support of the claim that social deprivation can threaten the states legitimate punitive authority. I argue that a penal system must incorporate certain proportionality principles, and that these principles cannot both be met where citizens suffer from deprivation. (shrink)

This essay explores my own situation of teaching philosophy in a more or less traditional undergraduate setting but in a way that is especially relevant to the theme of this Congress, namely, the theme of "philosophy educating humanity." In my case, I teach philosophy but from a perspective that is non-traditional and which undercuts the standard questions originating from and orienting around a "philosophia perennia." Specifically, I teach philosophy of religion from the perspective of Jewish philosophy, and even more specifically, (...) from the perspective of the French Jewish philosophy of Emmanuelle Levinas. Moreover, I teach philosophy in an educational environment that is representative of the greater global community because I teach at the University of Texas at El Paso, situated on the border that separates the United States and Latin America. Finally, my teaching situation is one that is further marginalized because of the precarious nature of my academic position, namely, trained outside the traditional borders of philosophical faculty and working at first as a part-timer and only recently as a full-time, non-tenure track teacher of philosophy and humanities. Hence, I offer my experience of doing work of successfully teaching philosophy "on the borders" in the hope that others gathered here will be challenged to think differently about their own way of educating others. (shrink)

The article introduces a critical distinction into an analysis of the phenomenon of human motivation out of the philosophies of Spinoza and Rosenzweig through an alternative reading of their respective conceptions of motivation. The essay attempts to show how the ethical problem of motivation entails the concept of transgression in these two great thinkers.

The shared trajectory and thought between the phenomenological hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and midrashic analysis of Franz Rosenzweig is established with respect to the task of taking up existing “classical” texts such as “The Song of Songs” and “The Ister” as well with respect to the embodied conditions of understanding through language with a view to delineating the motivating factors and the structural guidelines that determine our interpretive activities; specifically, intentional structures that distinguish communicative acts from one another that either (...) brings them into conflict or into fruitful and harmonious communities. (shrink)

This article articulates our everyday notion of cooperation. First, I topple an orthodoxy of shared agency theory by arguing that shared intentions to J are neither necessary nor sufficient for J to be cooperative. I refute the necessity claim by providing examples of shared intention-free cooperation (in institutional contexts and beyond). I refute the sufficiency claim by observing that coercion and exploitation need not preclude shared intentions but do preclude cooperation. These arguments, in turn, lead to my positive proposal. People (...) cooperate, I argue, just in case their activities are coordinated in ways that do not undermine any participant’s agency. (shrink)