Two partners plan to rob a bank. The first recruits a driver while the second purchases a shotgun from a gun dealer. The driver knows he’s taking part in a robbery, although not a bank robbery. The gun dealer should have checked his customer’s police record before the sale, but failed to do so. The bank is robbed, a guard is killed, and the robbers escape, only to be caught later. “They committed bank robbery,” a prosecutor will say. But does (...) “they” include the gun dealer, whose lax standards made the robbery possible? “They conspired to rob the bank”—but does “they” here include the driver, who didn’t know it was a bank they were robbing? “They killed a bank guard”—but does it matter which robber inside the bank pulled the trigger? (shrink)

Collective action is a widespread social phenomenon, ranging from intricate duets to routinized, hierarchical cooperation within bureaucratic structures. Standard accounts of collective action (such as those offered by Bratman, Gilbert, Searle, and Tuomela and Miller) have attempted to explain cooperation in the context of small-scale, interdependent, egalitarian activities. Because the resulting analyses focus on the intricate networks of reciprocal expectation present in these contexts, they are less useful in explaining the nature of collective action in larger or more diffuse social (...) contexts. I argue here instead for a minimalist account of collective action, which explains collective action across a broad range of contexts by reference to individuals’ overlapping “participatory intentions,” i.e., intentions to do one’s part in a collective act. Participatory intentions are, formally, simply species of individual instrumental intentions, although their objects make irreducible reference to collective acts. (shrink)

We live in a morally flawed world. Our lives are complicated by what other people do, and by the harms that flow from our social, economic and political institutions. Our relations as individuals to these collective harms constitute the domain of complicity. This book examines the relationship between collective responsibility and individual guilt. It presents a rigorous philosophical account of the nature of our relations to the social groups in which we participate, and uses that account in a discussion of (...) contemporary moral theory. Christopher Kutz shows that the two prevailing theories of moral philosophy, Kantianism and consequentialism, both have difficulties resolving problems of complicity. He then argues for a richer theory of accountability in which any real understanding of collective action not only allows but demands individual responsibility. (shrink)

I argue, contrary to standard claims, that accomplice liability need not be a causal relation. One can be an accomplice to another’s crime without causally contributing to the criminal act of the principal. This is because the acts of aid and encouragement that constitute the basis for accomplice liability typically occur in contexts of under- and over-determination, where causal analysis is confounded. While causation is relevant to justifying accomplice liability in general, only potential causation is necessary in particular cases. I (...) develop this argument through the example of the role of U.S. legal officials in abetting the acts of unlawful interrogation that have taken place since 2001. I also suggest that there may be a limited justification for ex post ratificatory accomplice liability. (shrink)

Introduction : war, politics, democracy -- Democratic security -- Citizens and soldiers : the difference uniforms make -- A modest case for symmetry : are soldiers morally equal? -- Leaders and the gambles of war : against political luck -- War, democracy, and sSecrecy : secret law -- Must a democracy be ruthless? : torture and existential politics -- Humanitarian intervention and the new democratic holy wars -- Drones and democracy -- Democracy and the death of norms -- Democratic states (...) in victory : vae victis? -- Looking backward : democratic transitions and the choice of justice. (shrink)

Abstract. Revelations in the United States of secret legal opinions by the Department of Justice, dramatically altering the conventional interpretations of laws governing torture, interrogation, and surveillance, have made the issue of "secret law" newly prominent. The dangers of secret law from the perspective of democratic accountability are clear, and need no elaboration. But distaste for secret law goes beyond questions of democracy. Since Plato, and continuing through such non-democratic thinkers as Bodin and Hobbes, secret law has been seen as (...) a mark of tyranny, inconsistent with the notion of law itself. This raises both theoretical and practical questions. The theoretical questions involve the consistency of secret law with positivist legal theory. In principle, while a legal system as a whole could not be secret, publicity need not be part of the validity criteria for particular laws. The practical questions arise from the fact that secret laws, and secret governmental operations, are a common and often well-accepted aspect of governmental power. This paper argues that the flaw of secret law goes beyond accountability and beyond efficiency to the role that law plays, and can only play, in situating subjects' understanding of themselves in relation to the state. Secret law, as such, is inconsistent with this fundamental claim of the law to orient us in moral and political space, and undermines the claim to legitimacy of the state's rulers. (shrink)

Arguments about the ownership of natural resources have focused on the claims of cosmopolitans, who urge an equality of global claims to resources, and resource sovereigntists, who argue that national peoples are the proper owners of their resources. This focus is mistaken: Whatever one believes about the in-principle claims of the global community, there remains the practical question of how the national surplus is to be distributed. And in addressing this question, we must look at a distinction heretofore ignored in (...) resource discussions—that between resident workers and citizens. I argue that the extracted value of natural resources should benefit all residents of the states in which they are found, not merely all citizens. By contrast, control of natural resources should be vested in a democratic citizenry, who are nonetheless normatively constrained by the distributive principle described above. I illustrate the argument with data showing the gap, especially in the Gulf States, between principles that allocate benefits to all citizens vs. to all resident workers. My argument is grounded in a broader theory of collective agency as it applies to questions of distributive justice, and it is aimed not only to criticize practices in the Gulf but to support the more inclusive resource policies found in democracies. (shrink)

In the _Phaedrus_, Plato provides an intriguing dramatic detail immediately before Socrates's first speech. "I shall veil myself to speak," Socrates declares, "so that I may run through the speech as quickly as possible and may not be at a complete loss from a sense of shame as I look towards you." In this essay, I argue that Socrates's veiling illustrates how authors of dialogic literature about philosophical topics subtly use dramatic and literary details to suggest preferred philosophical takeaways.

A large and impressive literature has arisen over the past fifteen years concerning the emergence, transfer, and sustenance of political norms in international life. The presumption of this literature has been, for the most part, that the winds of normative change blow in a progressive direction, toward greater or more stringent normative control of individual or state behavior. Constructivist accounts detail a spiral of mutual normative reinforcement as actors and institutions discover the advantages of normative self- and other evaluation. There (...) is also now much interesting research focused on the question of how to predict the emergence of future norms.I focus, however, on a different issue here: the death of norms that had once seemed well internalized and institutionalized. The issue arises in relation to one of the most dramatic features in the defense policy of the United States since 2001: the crumbling of highly restrictive normative regimes prohibiting interrogatory torture and assassination as part of the “global war on terror.” My aim here is to sketch what I take to be the central features of cases in which even norms that are clearly defined and apparently well internalized in a democracy nonetheless lose their grip on policy. The ultimate lesson, however, is an unappealing irony: While democracies surely do better than authoritarian regimes in adopting and internalizing certain kinds of constraints, in part because of a greater sensitivity to public mobilization around normative questions, that same sensitivity makes the long-term survival of these norms precarious. In particular, I suggest that force-constraining norms are most effectively internalized by coherent and relatively insulated professional cadres who see themselves as needing to act consistently over time. But in a democracy the values and arguments of those cadres are susceptible to being undermined by a combination of public panic and the invocation by policymakers of a public interest that can override the claims both of law and pragmatic restraint. Democracy, hence, can be at the same time both fertile and toxic: fertile as a source of humanitarian values and institutions, but toxic to the very institutions it cultivates.The model I will describe may be of predictive use in helping us to see the special vulnerability of normative orders in democracies. But my hope is that it is also constructive in showing us how states and institutions committed to maintaining a certain normative order, especially democratic states, might best try to entrench those norms. While my argument is conceptual and philosophical, it draws on this recent history. I also add two qualifications to this article's title. First, I am not addressingallnorms, but specific norms concerning the state use of force in national security policy. I therefore do not make claims about the generalizability of the conflict I describe to other norms, for example, norms of racial, sexual, or religious orthodoxy or hierarchy, or norms of reciprocal interaction. Second, reports of a norm's death are frequently exaggerated, since norms can be latent, then resurrected. Arguably, the anti-torture norm was resuscitated by President Obama in 2009 when, as one of his first official acts as chief executive, he moved to prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees. I write here about the path of decay, whether or not that path is unidirectional, and why previously salient norms no longer seem to govern policy choice among political decision-makers. (shrink)

Normal 0 0 1 85 487 UBC 4 1 598 11.773 0 0 0 Under what conditions is the failure to have evidence that p evidence that p is false? Absent evidence reasoning is common in many sciences, including astronomy, archeology, biology and medicine. An often-repeated epistemological motto is that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Analysis of absent evidence reasoning usually takes place in a deductive or frequentist hypothesis-testing framework. Instead, I develop a Bayesian analysis of (...) this motto and prove that, under plausible assumptions about the nature of evidence, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. (shrink)

Previous research found that mixed handers were more likely than strong handers to update their beliefs . It was assumed that this was due to greater degrees of communication between the two cerebral hemispheres in mixed handers. Niebauer and Garvey made connections between this model of updating beliefs and metacognitive processing. The current work proposes that variations in interhemispheric interaction contribute to differences in consciousness, specifically when consciousness is used in rumination versus the metacognitive task of self-reflection. Using the Rumination–Reflection (...) Questionnaire , predictions were supported such that strong handedness was associated with self-rumination; whereas, mixed handedness was associated with increased self-reflection p values < .01, . James’s concept of the “fringe of consciousness” is used to make connections between metacognition, updating beliefs, and self-reflection. Several studies are reviewed suggesting that mixed handers experience fringe consciousness to a greater degree than strong handers. (shrink)

Christopher Lee has written a delightfully compelling introduction to Frantz Fanon. Well-researched and thoroughly grounded, Lee s study admirably situates Fanon in the broadest historical context, while subtly explaining Fanon s powerful legacy today. This book taught me many things, revealing in intriguing ways the works of a black thinker from Martinique who so passionately embraced the Algerian Revolution, and so ardently desired to be embraced by it.

Philosophical debates about the metaphysics of time typically revolve around two contrasting views of time. On the A-theory, time is something that itself undergoes change, as captured by the idea of the passage of time; on the B-theory, all there is to time is events standing in before/after or simultaneity relations to each other, and these temporal relations are unchanging. Philosophers typically regard the A-theory as being supported by our experience of time, and they take it that the B-theory clashes (...) with how we experience time and therefore faces the burden of having to explain away that clash. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether these intuitions about the experience of time are shared by the general public. We asked directly for people’s subjective reports of their experience of time—in particular, whether they believe themselves to have a phenomenology as of time’s passing—and we probed their understanding of what time’s passage in fact is. We find that a majority of participants do share the aforementioned intuitions, but interestingly a minority do not. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

In various places we have defended the position that a new human organism, that is, an individual member of the human species, comes to be at fertilization, the union of the spermatozoon and the oocyte. This individual organism, during the ordinary course of embryological development, remains the same individual and does not undergo any further substantial change, unless monozygotic twinning, or some form of chimerism occurs. Recently, in this Journal Jason Morris has challenged our position, claiming that recent findings in (...) reproductive and stem cell biology have falsified our view. He objects to our claim that a discernible substantial change occurs at conception, giving rise to the existence of a new individual of the human species. In addition, he objects to our claim that the embryo is an individual, a unified whole that persists through various changes, and thus something other than a mere aggregate of cells. Morris raises a number of objections to these claims. However, we will show that his arguments overlook key data and confuse biological, metaphysical, and ethical questions. As a result, his attempts to rebut our arguments fail. (shrink)

Recent studies have suggested that while both adults and children hold past-future hedonic preferences – preferring painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future – these preferences are abandoned when the quantity of pain or pleasure under consideration is greater in the past than in the future. We examined whether such preferences might be affected by the utility people assign to experiential memories, since the recollection of events can itself be pleasurable or aversive, (...) and we examined the developmental trajectory of the value that people assign to experiential memories of past painful experiences. Using a task in which we manipulated hypothetical memory loss in a series of brief vignettes, we found that for some adults, but not for children, the disutility attached to the recollection of painful past events outweighed the disutility of living through future painful events. Between middle childhood and adulthood, experiential memory appears to assume a more important role in determining the value that people assign to past experiences and in mitigating bias toward the future. (shrink)

It seems self-evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future (...) pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but prefer their pleasure to lie in the past, and do not predict that others’ levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past-future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible. (shrink)

Some 20 years ago Todd and colleagues proposed that rhythm perception is mediated by the conjunction of a sensory representation of the auditory input and a motor representation of the body (Todd, 1994a, 1995 ), and that a sense of motion from sound is mediated by the vestibular system (Todd, 1992a, 1993b ). These ideas were developed into a sensory-motor theory of rhythm and beat induction (Todd et al., 1999 ). A neurological substrate was proposed which might form the biological (...) basis of the theory (Todd et al., 2002 ). The theory was implemented as a computational model and a number of experiments conducted to test it. In the following time there have been several key developments. One is the demonstration that the vestibular system is primal to rhythm perception, and in related work several experiments have provided further evidence that rhythm perception is body dependent. Another is independent advances in imaging, which have revealed the brain areas associated with both vestibular processing and rhythm perception. A third is the finding that vestibular receptors contribute to auditory evoked potentials (Todd et al., 2014a, b ). These behavioral and neurobiological developments demand a theoretical overview which could provide a new synthesis over the domain of rhythm perception. In this paper we suggest four propositions as the basis for such a synthesis. (1) Rhythm perception is a form of vestibular perception; (2) Rhythm perception evokes both external and internal guidance of somatotopic representations; (3) A link from the limbic system to the internal guidance pathway mediates the “dance habit”; (4) The vestibular reward mechanism is innate. The new synthesis provides an explanation for a number of phenomena not often considered by rhythm researchers. We discuss these along with possible computational implementations and alternative models and propose a number of new directions for future research. (shrink)

People hold intuitive theories of the physical world, such as theories of matter, energy, and motion, in the sense that they have a coherent conceptual structure supporting a network of beliefs about the domain. It is not yet clear whether people can also be said to hold a shared intuitive theory of time. Yet, philosophical debates about the metaphysical nature of time often revolve around the idea that people hold one or more “common sense” assumptions about time: that there is (...) an objective “now”; that the past, present, and future are fundamentally different in nature; and that time passes or flows. We empirically explored the question of whether people indeed share some or all of these assumptions by asking adults to what extent they agreed with a set of brief statements about time. Across two analyses, subsets of people's beliefs about time were found consistently to covary in ways that suggested stable underlying conceptual dimensions related to aspects of the “common sense” assumptions described by philosophers. However, distinct subsets of participants showed three mutually incompatible profiles of response, the most frequent of which did not closely match all of philosophers’ claims about common sense time. These exploratory studies provide a useful starting point in attempts to characterize intuitive theories of time. (shrink)

This clear and engaging introduction is the first book to assess the ideas of Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Ghanaian-British philosopher who is a leading public intellectual today. The book focuses on the theme of 'identity' and is structured around five main topics, corresponding to the subjects of his major works: race, culture, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and moral revolutions. This handy guide: teaches students about the sources, opportunities, and dilemmas of personal and social identity - whether on the basis of race, gender, (...) sexuality, or class, among others - in the purview of Appiah. locates Appiah within a broader tradition of intellectual engagement with these issues - involving such thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, John Stuart Mill, and Martha Nussbaum - and thus how Appiah is both an inheritor and innovator of preceding ideas. seeks to inspire students on how to approach and negotiate identity politics in the present. This book ultimately imparts a more diverse and wider-reaching geographic sense of philosophy through the lens of Appiah and his intellectual contributions, as well as emphasize the continuing social relevance of philosophy and critical theory more generally to everyday life today. (shrink)

This article examines the visual archive of the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia. Better known as the Bandung Conference or simply Bandung, this diplomatic meeting hosted 29 delegations from countries in Africa and Asia to address questions of sovereignty and development facing the emergent postcolonial world. A number of well-known leaders attended, including Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Zhou Enlai of China, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Sukarno of the host country, Indonesia. Given its importance, the meeting was (...) documented extensively by photojournalists. The argument of this article is that the visual archive that resulted has contributed to the enduring symbolism and mythology of Bandung as a moment of Third World solidarity. More specifically, the street photography style of many images - with leaders walking down the streets of Bandung surrounded by adoring crowds - depicted an informality and intimacy that conveyed an accessible, anti-hierarchical view of the leaders who were present. These qualities of conviviality and optimism can also be seen in images of conference dinners, airport arrivals, delegate speeches, and working groups. Drawing upon the critical work of scholars of southern Africa and Southeast Asia, this article summarily positions the concept of the 'decolonising camera' to describe both the act of documenting political decolonisation as well as the ways in which visual archives produced during decolonisation can contribute to new iconographies of the political, which are both factual and mythic at once. (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

Contemporary business often encompasses or aspires towards the automated, networked production of industrial goods across transnational supply chains that have many digitalized interfaces. This allows competitive operations in time, costs, and quality, which have been widely discussed. On the downside, it entails cyber threats with significant risks for society in areas including business, environment, and health. Hence, to adequately manage these risks in the emerging digital world, there is a vital necessity to raise awareness, establish, maintain, and further develop cyber-security (...) measures to ensure an appropriate level of protection along the entire value chain and supply chain. Blockchain capabilities are introduced to improve the technical and organizational basis for secured operations in industrial networks. Its advantages are explained by a simple USB-device use case, that has often been the root cause to subsequent security incidents, especially in the Stuxnet incident. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

The overarching purpose of Moral Cruelty is to identify and sensitize the reader to the existence of "moral sadism." It is the authors' contention that what we as individuals perceive as "normal" modes of interaction conceal hidden contributions to cruelty.

This teaching case focuses on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at a museum. At the beginning of 2021, the organization found itself in a crisis when more than 2,000 community members and 85 anonymous employees demanded the resignation of the museum’s President due to the language he defended in a job posting advocating for a job applicant to diversify audiences while “maintaining the traditional white core audience of the museum” (Salaz 2021). Students take on the role of an external consultant (...) to assess DEI maturity at the museum. The case challenges students to propose implementation and impact metrics for a DEI action plan. The case facts provide a timely and relevant setting to discuss DEI challenges in not-for-profit organizations. (shrink)

The Plant Ontology (PO) is a community resource consisting of standardized terms, definitions, and logical relations describing plant structures and development stages, augmented by a large database of annotations from genomic and phenomic studies. This paper describes the structure of the ontology and the design principles we used in constructing PO terms for plant development stages. It also provides details of the methodology and rationale behind our revision and expansion of the PO to cover development stages for all plants, particularly (...) the land plants (bryophytes through angiosperms). As a case study to illustrate the general approach, we examine variation in gene expression across embryo development stages in Arabidopsis and maize, demonstrating how the PO can be used to compare patterns of expression across stages and in developmentally different species. Although many genes appear to be active throughout embryo development, we identified a small set of uniquely expressed genes for each stage of embryo development and also between the two species. Evaluating the different sets of genes expressed during embryo development in Arabidopsis or maize may inform future studies of the divergent developmental pathways observed in monocotyledonous versus dicotyledonous species. The PO and its annotation databasemake plant data for any species more discoverable and accessible through common formats, thus providing support for applications in plant pathology, image analysis, and comparative development and evolution. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we (...) take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)