Examines the relevance of empirical studies of responsibility judgments for traditional philosophical concerns about free will and moral responsibility. We argue that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates, but that setting up experiments and interpreting data in just the right way is no less difficult than negotiating traditional philosophical arguments. Both routes are valuable, but so far neither promises a way to secure significant agreement among the competing parties. To illustrate, we focus on three sorts of issues. For (...) illustration, we discuss an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy Nahmias and colleagues, the role that empirical studies might have in the assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, and the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. (shrink)

Appealing to the original meaning of the Greek term nomos, Hannah Arendt claims that a bounded legal space is constitutive for political community. Can this seemingly anachronistic claim be substantiated in the conceptually strong sense that every polity - the Greek city-state as much as a hypothetical world state - must constitute itself as a nomos? It is argued that whereas Arendt falls short of justifying this claim, a reflexive reading of nomos can do the trick: the space of political (...) community is necessarily bounded because no polity is imaginable that does not raise a claim to an inside as the community’s own space. A world state, were it ever to be founded, would globalize nomos, not suppress it. Whence the political problem: how does a polity deal with its outside? This problem is particularly pressing because Carl Schmitt’s defense of nomos radically challenges Arendt’s position. A reinterpretation of her analyses of the foundation of a political community suggests how the representational structure of a politics of boundaries parries Schmitt’s challenge. (shrink)

Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in deterministic scenarios depends on whether the deterministic laws are couched in neurological or psychological terms (Nahmias et. al. 2007), on whether actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression they seem to represent (Nichols & Knobe 2007). Finally, people are more inclined to hold an agent (...) responsible for bringing about bad than for bringing about good side effects that the agent is indifferent about (Knobe 2003). Elsewhere, we have presented an analysis of the everyday concept of moral responsibility that provides a unified explanation of paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility, and accounts for the force of both typical excuses and the most influential skeptical arguments against moral responsibility or for incompatibilism. In this article, we suggest that it also explains the divergent and apparently incoherent set of intuitions revealed by these new studies. If our hypothesis is correct, the surprising variety of judgments stems from a unified concept of moral responsibility. -Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63, pp.190–93. -Nahmias, E.; Coates, J.; Kvaran. T. (2007) Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest studies in Philosophy XXXI -Nichols, S.; Knobe, J. (2007) Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions, Noûs 41:4, 663-685. (shrink)

We defend a contextualist account of deontic judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends, against recent objections that turn on practices of moral disagreement. Kolodny & MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice; we suggest in response that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are evaluations of propositions other than those asserted. Weatherson, Schroeder and others have raised (...) parallel objections to standard-relative contextualism; we argue for a parallel solution. (shrink)

According to the alternative semantics for focus, the semantic reflec of intonational focus is a second semantic value, which in the case of a sentence is a set of propositions. We examine a range of semantic and pragmatic applications of the theory, and extract a unitary principle specifying how the focus semantic value interacts with semantic and pragmatic processes. A strong version of the theory has the effect of making lexical or construction-specific stipulation of a focus-related effect in association-with-focus constructions (...) impossible. Furthermore, while focus has a uniform import, the sources of meaning differences in association with focus are various. (shrink)

This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, because teleological (...) entities seem to be free to either reach their ends or not, it was assumed that they could not be deterministic. Mayr’s modern account of teleonomy adheres to this basic assumption. Yet, the seeming tension between teleology and determinism is illusory because freedom and agency do not, in fact, conflict with a deterministic world. To show this, we present a taxonomy of different types of freedom that we see as inherent in teleological systems. Then we show that our taxonomy of freedom, which is crucial to understanding teleology, shares many of the features of a philosophical position regarding free will that is known in the contemporary literature as ‘compatibilism’. This position maintains that an agent is free when the sources of its actions are internal, when the agent itself is the deterministic cause of those actions. Our view shows that freedom is not only indispensable to teleology, but also that, contrary to common intuitions, there is no conflict between teleology and causal determinism. (shrink)

The traditional metaethical distinction between cognitivist absolutism,on the one hand, and speaker relativism or noncognitivism, on the other,seemed both clear and important. On the former view, moral judgmentswould be true or false independently on whose judgments they were, andmoral disagreement might be settled by the facts. Not so on the latter views. But noncognitivists and relativists, following what Simon Blackburn has called a “quasi-realist” strategy, have come a long way inmaking sense of talk about truth of moral judgments and itsindependence (...) of moral judges and their attitudes or standards. Thesuccess of this strategy would undermine the traditional way of understanding the distinction, and it is not obvious how it can be reformulated. In this paper, I outline the difficulty posed by quasi-realism, raise problems for some prior attempts to overcome it, and present my own suggestion, focusing on correctness conditions that are internal to the act of moral judgment. (shrink)

Reflexive Methodology established itself as a groundbreaking success, providing researchers with an invaluable guide to a central problem in research methodology – how to put field research and interpretations in perspective, paying attention to the interpretive, political, and rhetorical nature of empirical research. Now thoroughly updated, the Second Edition includes a new chapter on positivism, social constructionism, and critical realism, and offers new conclusions on the applications of methodology. It provides further illustrations and updates that build on the acclaimed and (...) successful First Edition. (shrink)

In this article a brief overview is given of the field of medical ethics in Sweden in recent years. The presentation concentrates on the occurrence of official ethical norms for physicians, current ethical committees, the educational situation, legislation in force, and some essential features of the ethical debate on a few central issues.

Gunnar Olsson's tale follows an explorer from the oldest creation epics extant to the power struggles of today, an attempt to codify the taken-for-granted, a struggle with the invisible powers that make us so obedient and so predictable.

What kind of a science is psychoanalysis? What constitutes its domain? What truth claims does it maintain? In this unique and scholarly work concerning the nature of psychoanalysis, Gunnar Karlsson guides his arguments through phenomenological thinking which, he claims, can be seen as an alternative to the recent attempts to cite neuropsychoanalysis as the answer to the crisis of psychoanalysis. Karlsson criticizes this effort to ground psychoanalysis in biology and neurology and emphasizes instead the importance of defining the psychoanalytic (...) domain from the vantage point of the character of consciousness. His understanding of the unconscious, the libido and the death drive offer new insights into the nature of psychoanalysis, and he also illuminates and develops neglected dimensions such as consciousness and self-consciousness. Karlsson's approach to psychoanalysis is rigorous yet original, and this book fills an intellectual gap with implications for both the theoretical understanding and clinical issues of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Polities appeal to the principle of distributive justice when justifying the right to inclusion and exclusion they claim for themselves with respect to immigrants: to each their own place. This paper attempts, in a first stage, to explain the nature of the link between distributive justice and an alleged right to inclusion and exclusion, as manifested in the political use of indexicals such as ‘we’, ‘here’, and ‘now’. Drawing on an analysis of the European Union, it subsequently shows why the (...) use of political indexicals, when officials exercise the EU’s putative jus includendi et excludendi, is only possible by invoking the utterance of a first ‘we-here-now’ that has no referent. The relation between distributive justice and an alleged right to inclusion and exclusion*a polity as a nomos, as I will call it*is rendered both possible and continuously undermined by an anomos*the invocation of a polity and a world that are not and cannot be in empirical space and time. Keywords: borders; political reflexivity; European Union; inclusion/exclusion (Publication online: 7 November 2008) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics. Vol. 1, No. 4, 2008, pp. 193-212. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v1i4.1893. (shrink)

The act of `setting the law' enjoysa central position in Kelsen's theory of authority.His analysis of this act criticizes, amongst others,the assumption of natural-law doctrines that norms areobjective when they duplicate a content given directlyto cognition and independently of the act whereby thenorm is enacted. Correctly, Kelsen attacks the conceptof representation underlying this assumption as anexample of metaphysical dualism and a copy theory ofknowledge. Does, then, an alternative understanding ofauthority require scrapping representation from atheory of positive law? Or does it (...) requireinterpreting representation differently? Following thesecond path, this paper reconstructs the act ofsetting the law in terms of the critical concept ofrepresentation developed by Ernst Cassirer andsuggests how, thus reconstructed, the structure ofthis act can account for the law's authority and itscontingency. (shrink)

The epistemological soundness of controlled clinical trials is questioned. It is argued that the real effect of therapies cannot be determined by such experiments because there is a significant interaction between the placebo effect and real effect created by the individual therapist and treatment situation which, however, is neglected in controlled clinical trials. This critical standpoint is supported by several pharmacological examples.

Recently, contextualism about epistemic modals and predicates of taste have come under fire from advocates of assessment relativistic analyses. Contextualism, they have argued, fails to account for what we call "felicitous insensitive assessments". In this paper, we provide one hitherto overlooked way in which contextualists can embrace the phenomenon by slightly modifying an assumption that has remained in the background in most of the debate over contextualism and relativism. Finally, we briefly argue that the resulting contextualist account is at least (...) as plausible as the relativist alternative and should be carefully considered before contextualism is abandoned for relativism. (shrink)

My perspective in this paper is to look at sport and other physical activities as a way of exploring and experimenting with the environing world. The human being is basically the homo movens – born...

The exact correspondence between ordinal notations derived from Skolem hull operators, which are classical in ordinal analysis, and descriptions of ordinals in terms of Σ1-elementarity, an approach developed by T.J. Carlson, is analyzed in full detail. The ordinal arithmetical tools needed for this purpose were developed in [G. Wilken, Ordinal arithmetic based on Skolem hulling, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 145 130–161]. We show that the least ordinal κ such that κ<1∞ 19–77] and described below) is the proof theoretic (...) ordinal of the set-theoretic system , confirming a claim of Carlson. Moreover, we characterize the class of all ordinals κ such that κ<1∞ and provide an ordinal arithmetical analysis of Carlson’s entire structure in the style of [T.J. Carlson, Ordinal arithmetic and Σ1-elementarity, Archive for Mathematical Logic 38 449–460]. (shrink)

There’s a general assumption that teleology and function do not exist in inanimate nature. Throughout biology, it is generally taken as granted that teleology (or teleonomy) and functions are not only unique to life, but perhaps even a defining quality of life. For many, it’s obvious that rocks, water, and the like, are not teleological, nor could they possibly have stand-alone functions. This idea - that teleology and function are unique to life - is the target of this paper. I (...) begin with an overview of McShea’s field theoretic account of teleology. I start with the field theoretic account because it presents a promising analysis of teleological systems. It is promising because, in not making any assumptions about life’s special status in teleological systems, it avoids counterexamples that have problematized other accounts. I then consider some of the prominent efforts that have been made to attempt to avoid ascribing functions or teleology to some form of inanimate nature. In my assessment, none of the efforts are successful. I conclude by offering mineral evolution as a case study to show how inanimate nature can be both teleological and functional. The evolution of mineral species reveals that teleology and function extend to inanimate nature, and that teleology and function come in degrees. (shrink)

Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have sought to replace it with less problematic notions like teleonomy. And still others have tried to naturalize it in a way that distances it from the vitalism of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role that function plays in teleological explanation. No (...) consensus has seemed possible in this debate. This paper takes a different approach. It argues that teleology is a perfectly acceptable scientific notion, but that the debate took an unfortunate misstep some 2300 years ago, one that has confused things ever since. The misstep comes in the beginning of Aristotle’s Physics when a distinction is made between two types of teleological explanation. One type pertains to artifacts while the other pertains to entities in nature. For Aristotle, artifacts are guided by something external to themselves, human intentions, while natural entities are guided by an internal nature. We aim to show that there is, in fact, only one type of legitimate teleological explanation, what Aristotle would have considered a variant of an artifact model, where entities are guided by external fields. We begin with an analysis of the differences between the two types of explanation. We then examine some evidence in Aristotle’s biological works suggesting that on account of his natural-artifactual distinction, he encountered difficulties in trying to provide teleological accounts of spontaneous generation. And we show that it is possible to resolve these difficulties with a more robust version of an artifact model of teleology, in other words, with an externalist teleology. This is McShea’s model, in which goal-directed entities are guided by a nested series of upper-level fields. To explain teleological behavior, this account invokes only external physical forces rather than mysterious internal natures. We then consider how field theory differs from other efforts to naturalize teleology in biology. And finally, we show how the account enables us to grapple with certain difficult cases – genes and intentions – where, even in biology today, the temptation to posit internal natures remains strong. (shrink)

Our food and farming system is not socially, economically or ecologically sustainable. Many of the ills are a result of market competition driving specialization and linear production models, externalizing costs for environmental, social and cultural degradation. Some propose that market mechanisms should be used to correct this; improved consumer choice, internalization of costs and compensation to farmers for public goods. What we eat is determined by the path taken by our ancestors, by commercialization and fierce competition, fossil fuels and demographic (...) development. Based on those, governments and the food industry are the choice architects who determine what we eat; consumer choice plays a marginal role. Using market mechanisms to internalize cost and compensate farmers for public goods has been proposed for decades but little progress has been made. There are also many practical, ethical and theoretical objections to such a system. The market is not a good master for a sustainable food system. Instead we need to find new ways of managing the food system based on food as a right and farming as a management system of the planet Earth. The solutions should be based on relocalization of food production and de-commodification of food and our symbionts, the plants and animals we eat. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present a phenomenological description of how athletes in specific risk sports explore human interaction with natural elements. Skydivers play with, and surf on, the encountering air while falling towards the ground. Kayakers play on the waves and with the stoppers and currents in the rivers. Climbers are ballerinas of the vertical, using cracks and holds in the cliffs to pull upwards against gravity forces. The theoretical background for the description is found in the (...) phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The phenomenology of Husserl focused on the theoretical intentionality of the transcendental ego. With Heidegger the human being's concrete and practical interaction with the environing world moved to the foreground. Heidegger's analyses of ?equipmentality? also throw important light on equipmentality in sports and how we deal with tools and equipment in sports. However, in Heidegger's analyses the body resides in the background both as subject and object. The importance of the active body-subject is well documented in the work of Merleau-Ponty, and also Todes. The human being is a bodily ?being-in-the-world? and the body is the active medium through which the world is grasped. The body is however also situated and aligned with the fundamental dimensions of the world, with vertical gravity and with horizontal action space. In this article I show in a concrete way how in some sports we use fundamental characteristics of the environing world in a mode of playfulness. In these sports human beings play in an extreme way with fundamental elements of nature. The article thus puts phenomenology to a test. It should be able to move from general characteristics to specific features of our bodily human involvement with the environing world. (shrink)

This article compares Wolfgang Köhler's pioneering field theory of the consciousness–brain relation with Benjamin Libet's conscious mental field theory and Karl Popper's mental force field hypothesis. In the discussion of Köhler's theory we devote special attention to his analysis of problems of sense perception and to his explanation of figural after-effects. Both Libet and Popper take consciousness to causally interact with the brain, and we argue that even Köhler presupposes an interactionist interpretation of the consciousness–brain relation. We argue that nothing (...) necessarily rules out that consciousness as something subjective may causally interact with the brain as something objective. We discuss an evolutionary argument for the theory that consciousness causally interacts with the brain, and we consider some arguments for consciousness having had a survival value. (shrink)

It is clear that lack of awareness of the consequences of an action can undermine moral responsibility and blame for these consequences. But when and how it does so is controversial. Sometimes an agent believing that the outcome might occur is excused because it seemed unlikely to her, and sometimes an agent having no idea that it would occur is nevertheless to blame. A low or zero degree of belief might seem to excuse unless the agent “should have known better”, (...) but it is unclear how to spell out this normative condition. -/- This chapter combines (a) an independently motivated account of responsibility, blame, and credit as grounded in a normal explanatory relation between agential qualities and objects of responsibility with (b) the familiar Strawsonian idea that moral blame and credit depend on the agent’s quality of will. The resulting explanatory quality of will condition on moral responsibility is then further motivated by being shown to account for the effects on moral blame and credit of justifications, as well as of excuses and undermined control in cases not involving ignorance. -/- The explanatory quality of will condition is finally applied to cases involving various degrees of lack of awareness. Though this condition itself involves no awareness requirement, it is shown how it accounts for the degrees to which lack of awareness can excuse. It is also explained how lack of awareness fails as an excuse exactly when the agent should have known better and can be blamed for not doing so. (shrink)

Measures of happiness are increasingly being used throughout the social sciences. While these measures have attracted numerous types of criticisms, a crucial aspect of these measures has been left largely unexplored—their calibration. Using Eran Tal’s recently developed notion of calibration we argue first that the prospect of continued calibration of happiness measures is crucial for the science of happiness, and second, that continued calibration of happiness measures faces a particular problem—The Two Unknowns Problem. The Two Unknowns Problem relies on the (...) claim that individuals are necessarily a part of the measurement apparatus in first person measures of happiness, and the claim that we have no reason to believe that the evaluation standards people employ are invariant across individuals and time. We argue that calibrating happiness measures therefore involves solving an equation with two unknowns—an individual’s degree of happiness, and their evaluation standards—which is, generally, not possible. Third, we consider two possible escape routes from this problem and we suggest that the most promising route requires yet unexplored empirical and theoretical work on linking happiness to behavioral or neural evidence. (shrink)

This study aims at discovering the essential constituents involved in the experiences of guilt and shame. Guilt concerns a subject’s action or omission of action and has a clear temporal unfolding entailing a moment in which the subject lives in a care-free way. Afterwards, this moment undergoes a reconstruction, in the moment of guilt, which constitutes the moment of negligence. The reconstruction is a comprehensive transformation of one’s attitude with respect to one’s ego; one’s action; the object of guilt and (...) the temporal-existential experience. The main constituents concerning shame are its anchorage in the situation to which it refers; its public side involving the experience of being perceptually objectified; the exclusion of social community; the bodily experience; the revelation of an undesired self; and the genesis of shame in terms of a history of frozen now-ness. The article ends with a comparison between guilt and shame. (shrink)

A long-standing problem in understanding goal-directed systems has been the insufficiency of mechanistic explanations to make sense of them. This paper offers a solution to this problem. It begins by observing the limitations of mechanistic decompositions when it comes to understanding physical fields. We argue that introducing the field concept, as it has been developed in field theory, alongside mechanisms is able to provide an account of goal directedness in the sciences.

A social conception of science -- The pursuit of forms -- Beyond the doctrine of signs -- Structures of mediation -- Signs in action -- Prospects of communication -- From a rhetorical point of view.

Skill is obviously a central part of sports and should therefore be central in sport philosophic studies. My aim in this paper is to try to place skill in a wider context and thus give skill the place it deserves. I will do this by taking up four points. I first try to place the concept of skill in relation to concepts like ability and know how. I argue that ability is something one has as part of a natural endowment, (...) but skill is something one must acquire. ‘Knowing how’ seems to a greater extent to demand a cognitive grasp and is thus more than a skill. My second point is about development of skills toward expertise and the role of thinking and consciousness. When one is exercising a skill does one need to be conscious of what one is doing or can one act like a zombie and perform non-consciously? I argue that expertise demands know how and conscious thinking. My third point is about the role of skills in sport competitions. What we measure in sports are different sporting skills as they are disp... (shrink)

The Bachmann-Howard structure, that is the segment of ordinal numbers below the proof theoretic ordinal of Kripke-Platek set theory with infinity, is fully characterized in terms of CARLSON’s approach to ordinal notation systems based on the notion of Σ1-elementarity.

Research into the causes of the 2008 financial crisis has drawn attention to a link between growing income inequality in the United States and high household indebtedness. Most accounts trace the U.S. idea of credit-as-welfare to the period of wage stagnation and welfare retrenchment that began in the early 1970s. Using France as a comparison case, I argue that the link between credit and welfare was not unique to the United States. Indeed, U.S. charitable lending institutions that emerged at the (...) beginning of the twentieth century were modeled in part on older French financial institutions. Three historical factors drove U.S. lenders and policymakers to push for expanded credit access for the working class. First, welfare reformers in the interwar period embraced private credit as an alternative to an expansive welfare state. Second, U.S. organized labor in the wake of World War II embraced credit access as a means to sustain industrial employment and finance strike actions. Third, commercial banks in the 1950s began offering revolving credit accounts as a means to attract new depositors at a time when banking regulation restricted the interest they could offer on deposits. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of possibility , and not merely that of actuality , for an inquiry into the bodily constitution of experience. The paper will study how the possibilities of action that may (or may not) be available to the subject help to shape the meaning attributed to perceived objects and to the situation occupied by the subject within her environment. This view will be supported by reference to empirical evidence (...) provided by recent and current research on the perceptual estimation of distances and the effects brought about by the use of a tool on the organisation of our perceived immediate space. (shrink)

A frequent justification in the literature for using stated preference methods (SP) is that they are the only methods that can capture the so-called total economic value (TEV) of environmental changes to society. Based on follow-up interviews with SP survey respondents, this paper addresses the implications of that argument by shedding light on the construction of TEV, through respondents’ perspective. It illuminates the deficiencies of willingness to pay (WTP) as a measure of value presented as three aggregated themes considering respondents’ (...) unintentionality, their retraction once they understood that their WTP could be decisive in cost-benefit analysis and the inherent incompleteness of WTP. We discuss why the TEV discourse persists, how it conceals rather than reveals broader notions of value and in what ways our results support the development of alternative approaches that truly endorse plurality in environmental valuation and decision-making. (shrink)

BackgroundHuman embryonic stem cells as a source for the development of advanced therapy medicinal products are considered for treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Research has shown promising results and opened an avenue of great importance for patients who currently lack a disease modifying therapy. The use of hESC has given rise to moral concerns and been the focus of often heated debates on the moral status of human embryos. Approval for marketing is still pending.ObjectiveTo Investigate the perspectives and concerns of patients (...) with PD, patients being the directly concerned stakeholders in the ethical discussion.MethodsQualitative semi-structured interviews related to this new therapy in seventeen patients from two Swedish cities.ResultsThe participants expressed various interests related to the use of human embryos for development of medicinal therapies; however, overall, they were positive towards the use of hESC for treatment of PD. It was deemed important that the donating woman or couple made the choice to donate embryos voluntarily. Furthermore, there were concerns that the industry does not always prioritise the patient over profit; thus, transparency was seen as important. (shrink)

It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligations can be understood in terms of (...) moral demands on individual group members. It has also been suggested that members of groups can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome. This paper discusses the agency problem and argues that the most promising attempts at solutions understand group obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents. (shrink)