In his new introduction to this current edition of this classic in the field originally published in 1982 (Humanities Press), Hoppe (economics, U. of Nevada, Las Vegas--as was the late author) extols Rothbard's marriage of the "value-free" science of economics with the normative enterprise of ethics and their offspring: libertarianism. Discussion areas are: natural law, a theory of liberty, the state vs. liberty, modern alternative theories of liberty, and toward a theory of strategy for liberty. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, (...) Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Much of contemporary epistemology proceeds on the assumption that tracking theories of knowledge, such as those of Dretske and Nozick, are dead. The word on the street is that Kripke and others killed these theories with their counterexamples, and that epistemology must move in a new direction as a result. In this paper we defend the tracking theories against purportedly deadly objections. We detect life in the tracking theories, despite what we perceive to be a premature burial.

This paper proposes a retributive argument against punishment, where punishment is understood as going beyond condemnation or censure, and requiring hard treatment. The argument sets out to show that punishment cannot be justified. The argument does not target any particular attempts to justify punishment, retributive or otherwise. Clearly, however, if it succeeds, all such attempts fail. No argument for punishment is immune from the argument against punishment proposed here. The argument does not purport to be an argument only against retributive (...) justifications of punishment, and so leave open the possibility of a sound non-retributive justification of punishment. Punishment cannot be justified, the paper argues, because it cannot be demonstrated that any punishment, no matter how minimal, is not a disproportionate retributive response to criminal wrongdoing. If we are to hold onto proportionality—that is, proportionality as setting a limit to morally permissible punishment—then punishment is morally impermissible. The argument is a retributive argument against punishment insofar as a just retributive response to wrongdoing must be proportionate to the wrongdoing. The argument, that is, is concerned with proportionality as a retributive requirement. The argument against punishment is set out on the basis of a familiar version of the ‘anchoring problem’, according to which it is the problem of determining the most severe punishment to anchor or ground the punishment scale. To meet the possible criticism that we have chosen a version of the anchoring problem particularly favourable to our argument, various alternative statements of the anchoring problem are considered. Considering such statements also provides a more rounded view of the anchoring problem. One such alternative holds that the punishment scale must be anchored not just in the most severe punishment, but in the least severe punishment as well. Other alternatives hold that it is necessary and sufficient to anchor the punishment scale in any two punishments, neither of which needs to be the most or least severe punishment. A further suggestion is that one anchoring point anywhere along the punishment scale is sufficient, because it is possible to ‘project’ from such a point, so as to determine the correlative punishments for all other crimes, and so derive a complete punishment scale. Finally, the suggestion is considered that one can approach the issue of a punishment scale ‘holistically’, denying any distinction between anchoring and derived (or ‘projected’) punishments. (shrink)

What is the relationship between detailed critical analysis and the background assumptions made by a given theory of film spectatorship? In this article, I approach this question by looking at Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra's The Empathic Screen in the light of the method of triangulation—the coordination and integration of phenomenological, psychological, and neuroscientific evidence, as set out in my Film, Art, and the Third Culture. In particular, I examine Gallese and Guerra's arguments concerning the role of camera movement in (...) prompting immersive, embodied simulation, as well as critiques of these arguments from David Bordwell and Malcolm Turvey. I focus on the special, irreducible role of critical analysis in these arguments. Detailed analysis of film form and style plays an essential role, I argue, in demonstrating the plausibility (or otherwise) of the thesis advanced by Gallese and Guerra. Such analysis is where the rubber of theoretical assumptions meets the road of the material work. (shrink)

Consider the following situation. It is the first day of school, and the new third-grade students file into the classroom to be shown to their seats for the coming year. As they enter, the third-grade teacher notices one small boy who is particularly unkempt. He looks to be in desperate need of bathing, and his clothes are dirty, torn and tight-fitting. During recess, the teacher pulls aside the boy's previous teacher and asks about his wretched condition. The other teacher informs (...) her that he always looks that way, even though the boy's family is quite wealthy. The reason he appears as he does, she continues, is that the family observes an odd practice according to which the children do not receive many important things – food, clothing, bathing, even shelter – unless they specifically request them. Since the boy, like many third-graders, has little interest in bathing and clean clothes, he just never asks for them. (shrink)

attempt to justify the State, or at least a minimal State confined to the functions of protection. Beginning with a free-market anarchist state of nature, Nozick portrays the State as emerging, by an invisible hand process that violates no one’s rights, first as a dominant protective agency, then to an "ultra-minimal state," and then finally to a minimal state. Before embarking on a detailed critique of the various Nozickian stages, let us consider several grave fallacies in Nozick’s conception itself, each (...) of which would in itself be sufficient.. (shrink)

A philosophical exploration of the problematic nature of the disposable.

A generation ago, we adopted a national system for the protection of human subjects in research. Today, that system is facing new challenges. Many argue that the system has failed to evolve in concert with dramatic changes in the research environment. Accordingly, efforts are underway to reform the existing process to make it both more efficient and more effective. At the same time, many are also reexamining the system in more fundamental ways — going well beyond considerations of policies and (...) compliance and raising questions that go to the very foundations of what constitutes an ethical conduct of human research.Experimentation involving human subjects is a necessary step in the process of translating scientific discovery and technological advancement into procedures and products that offer the prospect of better lives for all of us. It helps us to better understand why we do the things we do and believe what we believe. (shrink)

A generation ago, we adopted a national system for the protection of human subjects in research. Today, that system is facing new challenges. Many argue that the system has failed to evolve in concert with dramatic changes in the research environment. Accordingly, efforts are underway to reform the existing process to make it both more efficient and more effective. At the same time, many are also reexamining the system in more fundamental ways — going well beyond considerations of policies and (...) compliance and raising questions that go to the very foundations of what constitutes an ethical conduct of human research.Experimentation involving human subjects is a necessary step in the process of translating scientific discovery and technological advancement into procedures and products that offer the prospect of better lives for all of us. It helps us to better understand why we do the things we do and believe what we believe. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 146-160, June 2022.

_A philosophical exploration of the problematic nature of the disposable._.

Combined oral contraceptives have been demonstrated to have significant benefits for the treatment and prevention of disease. These medications also are associated with untoward health effects, and they may be directly contraceptive. Prescribers and users must compare and weigh the intended beneficial health effects against foreseeable but unintended possible adverse effects in their decisions to prescribe and use. Additionally, those who intend to abide by Catholic teachings must consider prohibitions against contraception. Ethical judgments concerning both health benefits and contraception are (...) approached in this essay through an overview of the therapeutic, prophylactic, untoward, and contraceptive effects of COC and discussion of magisterial and traditional Catholic teachings from natural law. Discerning through the principle of double effect, proportionate reason, and evidence gathered from the sciences, medical and moral conclusions are drawn that we believe to be fully compliant with good medicine and Catholic teaching. (shrink)

The Catholic Church proscribes methods of birth control other than sexual abstinence. Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recognizes abstinence as an acceptable method of birth control in research studies, some pharmaceutical companies mandate the use of artificial contraceptive techniques to avoid pregnancy as a condition for participation in their studies. These requirements are unacceptable at Catholic health care institutions, leading to conflicts among institutional review boards, clinical investigators, and sponsors. Subjects may feel coerced by such mandates to (...) adopt contraceptive techniques inconsistent with their personal situation and beliefs; women committed to celibacy or who engage exclusively in non-heterosexual activities are negatively impacted. We propose principles to insure informed consent to safeguard the rights of research subjects at Catholic institutions while mitigating this ethical conflict. At the same time, our proposal respects the interests of pharmaceutical research agencies and Catholic moral precepts, and fully abides by regulatory guidance. (shrink)

The relevance of Marx’s theory of value and his ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ to the analysis of the financial crisis of 2007–8 and the ensuing global slump is affirmed. The hypertrophic growth of unproductive constant capital, including the wages of ‘socially necessary’ unproductive labour and tax revenues, is identified as an important manifestation of an historical-structural crisis of capitalism, alongside the increasing weight of fictitious capital and the proliferation of fictitious profits in the (...) lead-up to the financial crisis. These phenomena have obscured the deepest roots of the global slump in the long-term profitability problems of productive capital – that is, in a crisis of surplus-value production. With these considerations taken into account, a better empirical assessment of trends in the composition of capital becomes possible, and with it a more accurate understanding of the impact of the ongoing displacement of living labour from production on the average rate of profit and the future of US and global capitalism. (shrink)

Recent debates concerning the nature of epistemic justification primarily turn on two distinctions: the objective-subjective distinction and the internal-external distinction. John Pollock has defended a view that is both internalist and subjectivist. He has provided a novel, naturalized account of epistemic justification. In this paper, I argue that data from cognitive psychology and biology is radically at odds with Pollock's project.

Russell probes Morgenthau's realist ethics and the underpinnings of the nuclear threat in a technologically evolving modern world with increasingly obsolescent national boundaries.

In “Beat the (Backward) Clock,” we argued that John Williams and Neil Sinhababu’s Backward Clock Case fails to be a counterexample to Robert Nozick’s or Fred Dretske’s Theories of Knowledge. Williams’ reply to our paper, “There’s Nothing to Beat a Backward Clock: A Rejoinder to Adams, Barker and Clarke,” is a further attempt to defend their counterexample against a range of objections. In this paper, we argue that, despite the number and length of footnotes, Williams is still wrong.

This article constitutes the first part of a larger paper concerning the philosophical provenance of Mr. Cogito, the title character of poems by Zbigniew Herbert, which were published under the same title by “Czytelnik” in 1974. The poet used to study philosophy and corresponded for many years with his Master, Professor Henryk Elzenberg. The first part of the paper presents Mr. Cogito’s polemics with Cartesian apriorism, according to which only rational thinking leads to the knowledge of the truth. Herbert’s lyrical (...) character draws attention to the fallacy of Cartesian methodological reductionism; Mr. Cogito’s knowledge is individual, connected with both his mind and his sense and empirical experience. In the terminology of J.H. Newman, whose philosophy was known to Herbert, there is not merely notional knowledge, based on ratio, but the equally important real knowledge, which stems from the experience of an individual human being. (shrink)

The article constitutes the second part of a larger paper concerning the philosophical heritage of Mr. Cogito, the lyrical subject of Zbigniew Herbert’s poems. The self-consciousness of the title character is formed, quite like in P. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of existence, in relation to the sphere of history and culture, as well as to the other. Mr. Cogito, when confronted with the war and annihilation, cannot simply use the Cartesian deductive method of reasoning in order to intelligibly prove the existence of (...) God and an immortal soul. Therefore, he refers in his philosophical thinking not merely to rationalism, but also to symbol, which more profoundly than ratio describes the nature of his existence. When challenged by boundary situations, he unsuccessfully attempts to find consolation in the Upanishads, Stoicism, or the wisdom of Chasidism. His attitude towards the modern philosophy of nature as well as to the relative motion theory is that of a sceptic; he juxtaposes them with Aristotle’s Logic. The propensity of contemporary Western civilization to follow magic or gnosis is perceived by him as a sign of self-delusion, or even self-destruction. (shrink)