This essay argues for a more methodologically diverse search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and study of habitable exoplanets that might contribute to the emergent field of critical habitability studies across the sciences and humanities. Whether or not contact is made with extraterrestrials, this effort is implicated in changing concepts of otherness at home and the ongoing work to decolonize Earth and make it more inhabitable. I examine historical efforts to think aliens philosophically in the work of Kant, to conclude with (...) a reflection on the trope of contact between humans, nonhuman animals, and aliens in Ted Chiang’s short story “The Great Silence.”. (shrink)

There are two ways of understanding experimental philosophy's process of appealing to intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical claims: the positive and negative programs. This chapter deals with how the positivist method of conceptual analysis is affected by the results of the negative program. It begins by describing direct extramentalism, semantic mentalism, conceptual mentalism, and mechanist mentalism, all of which argue that intuitions are credible sources of evidence and will therefore be shared. The negative program challenges this view by (...) questioning if there can be in fact a shared intuition about a specific hypothetical case, as conflicting intuitions are as likely to arise. The chapter then discusses other issues raised by the negativists such as the limits of surveys and the proper domain problem. (shrink)

Edouard Machery argues that many traditional philosophical questions are beyond our capacity to answer. Answering them seems to require using the method of cases, a method that involves testing answers to philosophical questions against what we think about real or imagined cases. The problem, according to Machery, is that this method has proved unreliable ; what we think about these kinds of cases is both problematically heterogeneous and volatile. His bold solution: abandon the method of cases altogether and with it (...) many of the questions that we have come to associate with philosophy itself. Many of the critical responses to Machery’s book have focused on whether empirical work on judgements about philosophical cases supports his claim that the method of cases is unreliable. Our problem with these responses is that they accept that reliability is the right way to frame empirically informed concerns about the method of cases, and we think that it is not. The reason is simple: the kind of unreliability thesis that Machery needs proves to be empirically intractable, at least by anything like the current methods used by experimental philosophers, or so we shall argue here. While we have empirical grounds for thinking that unreliability arguments don’t give us reason to abandon the method of cases, we do think that there are empirical grounds for thinking that it needs to be reformed. There are other standards that we expect our methods to meet beyond mere reliability, especially standards of practical rationality, which are too often forgotten in metaphilosophical discussions that tend to focus exclusively on epistemological considerations. Methodological considerations, after all, are not just matters of epistemic normativity, but practical rationality as well. What’s more, considerations of practical rationality become particularly important when we move from the kind of extreme scepticism that Machery endorses to the kind of progressive reformation that we think should be pursued. And so we conclude by arguing that thinking about philosophical inquiry in terms of standards of practical rationality allows us both to better understand what kinds of problems recent empirical work on philosophical cognition raises for the method of cases and also how that work can point the way to reforming it. (shrink)

This article analyses the extent to which expert authorities have basic communicative obligations to be open, honest, and transparent, with a view to shaping strategies of public engagement with such authorities. This article is in part a response to epistemic paternalists such as Stephen John, who argue that the communicative obligations of expert authorities, such as scientists, permit the use of lying, or lack of openness and transparency, as a means of sustaining public trust in scientific authority. In this article, (...) I elucidate John’s position and reject it. I argue that expert authorities have strong communicative obligations to be open, honest, and transparent, which are grounded in the insight that such authorities hold positions of public trust. After demonstrating how this insight undermines John’s position, I conclude the article by considering the implications regarding public engagement with expert authorities. (shrink)

Learning more about philosophical cognition has yielded significant insights into the methods that we employ when doing philosophy, and has led some experimental philosophers to raise concerns about the role that intuitions play in philosophical practice. One popular response to these methodological concerns involves appeal to philosophical expertise, and has become known as the expertise defense because it aims to defend the use of at least some kinds of intuitional evidence in philosophy. The basic idea is that philosophical expertise consists (...) in having developed, through a process of critical reflection, increased conceptual competence and theoretical accuracy, as well as a special knack for reading and thinking about philosophical thought experiments that call upon us to exercise our conceptual competence and theoretical acumen. It turns out to be an open question whether this folk theory of philosophical expertise can restore hope in the value of intuitional evidence, and here we examine two ways of trying to answer that question: one that involves careful reflection on the supposed benefits of philosophical education, and one that involves careful empirical examination of “expert” philosophical intuitions. (shrink)

This paper calls into question the idea that moral disgust is usefully regarded as a form of genuine disgust. This hypothesis is questionable even if, as some have argued, the spread of moral norms through a community makes use of signaling mechanisms that are central to core disgust. The signaling system is just one part of disgust, and may well be completely separable from it. Moreover, there is plausibly a significant difference between the cognitive scientist’s concept of an emotion and (...) the everyday notion of that emotion. Finally, even if, as this paper contests, some form of disgust were directly elicited by the moral wrongness of certain kinds of behavior, research on the socio-moral elicitors of the disgust mechanism would still be unlikely to shed much direct light on the nature or content of morality. (shrink)

Abstract:Psychological forces in play across individual, group, and organizational levels of analysis increase the likelihood that people in business organizations will engage in misconduct. Therefore, it is argued, we must turn our attention from dominant normative and empirical trends in business ethics, which revolve around boundaries and constraints, and instead concentrate on methods for promoting ethical behavior in practice, exploiting psychological forces conducive to ethical conduct. This calls for a better understanding of how organizations and their inhabitants function, and, in (...) turn, it points to pragmatic solutions. Ethical conduct can be promoted by (1) normatively justifying vivid aims worthy of pursuit alongside economic objectives, and (2) empirically identifying the conditions and practices that advance those aims in firms. This approach challenges us to bring empirical and normative inquiry together—in ways unsettling to both. It pushes us to move beyond an empirical preoccupation with decision making and judgment, and it requires us to cope with political liberalism’s legitimate qualms about discussions of the good. (shrink)

In order to receive controlled pain medications for chronic non-oncologic pain, patients often must sign a “narcotic contract” or “opioid treatment agreement” in which they promise not to give pills to others, use illegal drugs, or seek controlled medications from health care providers. In addition, they must agree to use the medication as prescribed and to come to the clinic for drug testing and pill counts. Patients acknowledge that if they violate the opioid treatment agreement, they may no longer receive (...) controlled medications. OTAs have been widely implemented since they were recommended by multiple national bodies to decrease misuse and diversion of narcotic medications. But critics argue that OTAs are ethically suspect, if not unethical, and should be used with extreme care if at all. We agree that OTAs pose real dangers and must be implemented carefully. But we also believe that the most serious criticisms stem from a mistaken understanding of OTAs’ purpose and ethical basis. (shrink)

Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, and T. M. S canlon, among others, all hold that reasons for action are provided by facts about those actions. They also hold that the fact that an action would promote or achieve the object of an agent's desire is not one of the relevant facts, and does not provide a reason. Rather, the facts that provide reasons are typically facts about valuable states of affairs that the action is likely to bring about, or valuable properties (...) that the action itself will instantiate. For this reason it is appropriate to call Parfit, Raz, and Scanlon "value-based" theorists about reasons for action. In contrast to value-based theorists, there is a strong current of contemporary theorizing, starting with Bernard Williams, that can be called "desire-based." Desire-based theorists argue that practical reasons should be understood in terms of the desires of the agents who are said to have those reasons. (shrink)

One rather common way of doing philosophy involves what is called “the method of cases,” where philosophers design hypothetical cases and use what we think about those cases—our “philosophical intuitions”—as evidence that certain philosophical theories are true or false, and as reasons for believing that those theories are true or false. This way of doing philosophy has been challenged in recent years on the basis of both general epistemological considerations and more specific methodological concerns. These methodological concerns have focused not (...) on whether philosophical intuitions can be a good source of evidence, but rather on whether they can be used in the ways that they currently are used in actual philosophical practice given how little we know about them and some of the worrisome things that we have learned about them in recent years. My goal here is to provide you with a short introduction to this way of challenging to how philosophers use the method of cases, and to walk you through some of the more popular ways of responding to this kind of methodological challenge and some of their shortcomings. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard’s claim that having faith requires being contemporary with Christ is one of the most important, yet difficult to interpret claims across his entire authorship. How can one be contemporary with a figure who existed more than two millennia ago? A prominent answer to this question is that contemporaneity with Christ is achieved through a kind of imaginative co-presence made possible by reading Scripture. However, I argue, this ignores what Kierkegaard thinks about Christ as a living agent, and not (...) a merely historical agent. By drawing on Kierkegaard’s discussion of Christ’s true presence in the sacrament of Communion, I argue that contemporaneity with Christ should be understood in the same way as any other intersubjective relation. That is, I argue, that just as relating to any living person as contemporary requires a kind of two-way attention-sharing, relating to Christ as contemporary, on Kierkegaard’s account, requires a kind of two-way attention-sharing with Christ. (shrink)

But that which remains the poets have founded.In contemporary rhetorical theory, the relationship between rhetoric and art tends to be articulated in terms of aesthetics. This increasingly popular discourse on “aesthetic rhetoric,” however, is characterized by a remarkable diversity. The rhetoric of fiction, poetry, and other literary genres, for example, has been explored in these terms (e.g., Booth 1983), as has the rhetoric of film (Haskins 2003), photography (Hariman and Lucaites 2007), and even natural landscapes (Clark 2004). From a different (...) perspective, aesthetics has been distilled to a range of “features” or “elements” that a given text is said to possess. Nathan Crick and Jeremy Engels, for example .. (shrink)

This article explores what it calls the “documentarist” hypothesis: the belief that the subject matter of history, the past, is structurally absent and thus can be reached only by way of documents, testamentary traces of various sorts . The first part of the article works out the documentarist position through interpretations of creative works that embody it and of a variety of reflections on historiography—those of Michel de Certeau and Paul Ricoeur, as well as some “postmodern historiography.” It argues that (...) documentarism ultimately faces an insoluble problem: it presupposes the pastness of the past, yet it cannot give itself the latter by way of the documents to which it believes itself confined. Documentarism assumes as already at hand a historical-temporal horizon of past, present, and future, for which it itself cannot account. In the second part of the article, accordingly, I turn to the historiographical portion of Faulkner's The Bear to expose the operativity of this always already given temporality. Faulkner's tale gives us access to a more radical historicity than any upon which documentarists reckon; yet this historicity turns out to sit askew from the usual frameworks of history as we know them, especially those of periods and epochs. The tension in Faulkner's own work between periodizing and event-laden explanations, I conclude, points to questions that fall beyond history as currently conceived. (shrink)

Intuitively, vagueness involves some sort of indeterminacy: if Plato is a borderline case of baldness, then there is no fact of the matter about whether or not he’s bald—he’s neither bald nor not bald. The leading formal treatments of such indeterminacy—three valued logic, supervaluationism, etc.—either fail to validate the classical theorems, or require that various classically valid inference rules be restricted. Here we show how a fully classical, yet indeterminist account of vagueness can be given within natural semantics, an alternative (...) semantics for classical proof theory. The key features of the account are: there is a single notion of truth—definite truth—and a single notion of validity; sentences can be true, false, or undetermined; all classical theorems and all classical inference rule are valid; the sorites argument is unsound; ‘definitely’ is treated as a meta-language predicate; higher-order vagueness is handled via semantic ascent. (shrink)

This note on Propertius 4.7 argues that Cynthia, repeatedly cast in the role of the poet's Muse, rejects the burden of inspiration through a learned choice of words (non tamen insector, 4.7.49). The verb insector constitutes a clear reference to the invocation of the Camena in Livius Andronicus and of the Muse in Ennius. Cynthia recalibrates the parlance of poetic inspiration to end her relationship with Propertius, both as his puella and as his Muse.

Forgiveness has traditionally been characterized an affective response to a wrongdoing, i.e. a psychological process that involves ridding oneself of resentment or other negative reactive attitudes. In contrast to the prevailing model, this paper advocates for the emerging position that forgiveness should be understood as a normative power akin to a promise. In particular, I argue that forgiveness involves surrendering the right to discount the interests of a perpetrator (a special permission the victim acquires in virtue of having been wronged). (...) I argue that this model fits and/or explains important features of forgiveness, such as the idea that forgiveness is a personal response to a blameworthy wrong, that forgiveness re-establishes a relation of equality, and that forgiveness is ‘normatively significant’. I further develop the position by showing how it can provide a unified case of paradigmatic forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and third-party forgiveness—this explanatory power distinguishes the view from previous articulations of the idea that forgiveness is a normative power. The final section further explores these distinctions by delimiting the scope of forgiveness to exclude powers related to apologies, compensation, or ‘redemption’. (shrink)

Good communication is critical to the practice of medicine. This is particularly true when outcomes are unpredictable and/or patients lack the capacity to participate in medical decision making. Disputes may develop that cannot be addressed using basic communication skills. Conflict of this nature can burden patients, families, and medical staff and may result in increased suffering for all parties. Many physicians lack the necessary communication tools to handle difficult conversations. Training in bioethics mediation provides physicians with skills that can promote (...) healing by empowering participants to engage in effective discourse and break down barriers to find common ground. Mediation training for physicians can expand their capacity to connect with patients and enhance their ability to identify potential conflict early on, in order to collaborate more effectively. Competency in the processes of negotiation and conflict resolution should therefore be seen as essential elements of medical training. (shrink)

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One of the most pressing ethical challenges facing phase I cancer research centres is the process of informed consent. Historically, most scholarship has been devoted to redressing therapeutic misconception, that is, the conflation of the nature and goals of research with those of therapy. While therapeutic misconception continues to be a major ethical concern, recent scholarship has begun to recognise that the informed consent process is more complex than merely a transfer of information and therefore cannot be evaluated only according (...) to how well an individual understands such information. Other components of decision-making operate independently of understanding and yet still may compromise the quality of informed consent. Notable among these components is unrealistic optimism, an event-specific belief that one has a better chance of receiving benefit than others similarly situated. In this article, we consider responses to interviews with parents who had recently completed an informed consent conference for enrolling their child in a phase I cancer clinical trial to examine how this influence manifests and how investigators might address it during informed consent. (shrink)

Cuteness is one of the most culturally pervasive aesthetics of the new millennium and its rapid social proliferation suggests that the affective responses it provokes find particular purchase in a contemporary era marked by intensive media saturation and spreading economic precarity. Rejecting superficial assessments that would deem the ever-expanding plethora of cute texts trivial, The Aesthetics and Affects of Cutenessdirects serious scholarly attention from a variety of academic disciplines to this ubiquitous phenomenon. The sheer plasticity of this minor aesthetic is (...) vividly on display in this collection which draws together analyses from around the world examining cuteness's fundamental role in cultural expressions stemming from such diverse sources as military cultures, high-end contemporary art worlds,and animal shelters. Pushing beyond prevailing understandings that associate cuteness solely with childhood or which posit an interpolated parental bond as its primary affective attachment, the essays in this collection variously draw connections between cuteness and the social, political, economic, and technological conditions of the early twenty-first century and in doing so generate fresh understandings of the central role cuteness plays in the recalibration of contemporary subjectivities. (shrink)

This discussion examines two of the central notions at work in Sterba’s From Rationality to Equality: question-beggingness, and the notion of a rational requirement. I point out that, against certain unreasonable positions, begging the question is a perfectly reasonable option. I also argue that if we use the sense of “rational requirement” that philosophers ought to have in mind when defending the idea that morality is rationally required, then Sterba has not succeed in defending this idea. Rather, he has at (...) most demonstrated the rational preferability of morality over two other positions: an extreme egoism, and a very particular form of altruism. But another position exists: one that holds altruistic reasons to exist, and to be capable of justifying sacrifices, but that also holds that they do not require us to sacrifice our interests in the way that morality sometimes does require. (shrink)

In a recent issue of this journal, Benjamin Schnieder has presented an objection to the account of individual substance that we have developed and put to various uses in our works on metaphysics. According to Schnieder's objection, our proposal to analyse this notion of substantiality suffers from a special kind of circularity. In this paper, we give two replies to Schnieder's objection. The first is that a successful analysis is not, in fact, required to avoid the sort of circularity about (...) which Schnieder complains. The second is that our analysis does not involve the alleged circularity. (shrink)

When a rainbow spans the sky the eye may rest with simple rapture on the arch of colours, or the mind may interpret it as an interplay between raindrops and light. This perceptibly separates the aesthetic relish of the colours from the scientific understanding of the bow. Archbishop Temple distinguished the restfulness of art from the restlessness of science. This applies to the wider aesthetic which includes natural products, such as snow-scenes or daffodils or rainbows, with the pictures, statues, buildings, (...) poems, and other products of man-made art. The rainbow clearly separates the understanding sought by science from the immediate contemplative aesthetic satisfaction with the colours. (shrink)

1. Legal Positivism vs Natural Law -- An Overview -- 2. The Centrality of Normativity to the Concept of Law -- 3. The Gewirthian Solution -- 4. Defending the Necessary Connection -- 5. Reasons, Law and all that Raz -- 6. Accepting the Trojan Horse -- The Necessary Conclusion.

The droid rights movement may also need a snappy byline. “La Lutte Continue” – may the struggle continue – was one of the most popular social justice slogans to emerge from L'Atelier Populaire during the 1968 Paris riots. This chapter looks at what legal personhood actually means. Legal systems today still operate on this binary. But most legal systems see no necessary connection between moral persons and legal persons. Instead, they see legal persons as an entirely separate legal category. So, (...) for example, legal systems have no problem recognizing things like ships or temple ruins as legal persons with rights despite their not being moral persons. If L3 is right and droid sentience means they're rational, moral persons deserving of rights, then a lawyer working from ideas of natural law would say their legal personhood must be recognized. (shrink)

As divisive as the work undoubtedly remains, ‘On Civil Religion’ merits renewed attention. Possessing the courage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s convictions and contradictions both, it offers a flawed yet productive confrontation with still-enduring politico-theological tensions and, more broadly, a compelling case for the pedagogical value of provocation. By pressing these debates upon our collective attention, he alerts us, in no uncertain terms, to the vital role contentiousness plays in civic affairs. And in potentially fanning the flames of this still-burning fire, Rousseau’s (...) ‘purely civil profession of faith’ provokes us once again to reconsider the theoretical and practical reconciliation of religious and political institutions, all while pushing us – insistently, at times even unreasonably – down a path towards some form of democratic rapprochement. ‘On Civil Religion’ therefore reflects a tense dialectic between piety and profanity, pessimism and idealism, civility and intolerance, civic-mindedness and individualism, reason and emotion. Yet in striking so many dissonant chords, it prods us even now to revisit the relationship between religious and civic institutions as they are, and envision how it might be. (shrink)