Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2020, Page 114-130.

Public health and service delivery programmes, interventions and policies are typically developed and implemented for the primary purpose of effecting change rather than generating knowledge. Nonetheless, evaluations of these programmes may produce valuable learning that helps determine effectiveness and costs as well as informing design and implementation of future programmes. Such studies might be termed ‘opportunistic evaluations’, since they are responsive to emergent opportunities rather than being studies of interventions that are initiated or designed by researchers. However, current ethical guidance (...) and registration procedures make little allowance for scenarios where researchers have played no role in the development or implementation of a programme, but nevertheless plan to conduct a prospective evaluation. We explore the limitations of the guidance and procedures with respect to opportunistic evaluations, providing a number of examples. We propose that one key missing distinction in current guidance is moral responsibility: researchers can only be held accountable for those aspects of a study over which they have control. We argue that requiring researchers to justify an intervention, programme or policy that would occur regardless of their involvement prevents or hinders research in the public interest without providing any further protections to research participants. We recommend that trial consent and ethics procedures allow for a clear separation of responsibilities for the intervention and the evaluation. (shrink)

In a recent issue of Journal of Medical Ethics, we discussed the ethical review of evaluations of interventions that would occur whether or not the evaluation was taking place. We concluded that standard research ethics frameworks including the Ottawa Statement, which requires justification for all aspects of an intervention and its roll-out, were a poor guide in this area. We proposed that a consideration of researcher responsibility, based on the consequences of the research taking place, would be a more appropriate (...) way delineate the scope of research ethics review. Weijer and Taljaard present a counterargument to our proposal, which we address in this reply. They claim that a focus on researcher responsibility will weaken the protection of research participants and link it to ‘unethical research’ and a ‘government experimenting on its own people’. However, the moral responsibility of researchers is defined in terms of the consequences of the research on human welfare and harm, not in opposition to it. Weijer and Taljaard argue that researchers must justify what they are studying whether or not they have any control over it and that governments must justify their programmes, including by demonstrating equipoise, to a research ethics committee if they implement them in a randomised way. We strongly disagree that this is a defensible way to define the scope of research ethics review and argue that this provides no further protections to research participants beyond what we propose, but places a potential barrier to learning from government programmes. (shrink)

Mintz examines seventeenth-century reactions to the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

Scholars discuss the nature of semantics, the problems and characteristics of contemporary communication, and man's linguistic behavior. Bibliogs.

Ethical training in graduate programs is an important part of the professional development process. Such training has taken a position of prominence in both counseling and clinical psychology but seems to be lagging behind in the field of sport psychology. A debate exists about whether such training is necessary and, if so, how it should be provided. An important step in better understanding these issues is to identify how such training is currently taking place. This study surveyed the program directors (...) of sport psychology programs listed in the Directory of Graduate Programs in Applied Sport Psychology (Burke, Sachs, & Schrader, 2002) about the ethical training that takes place in their programs and their perceptions of the preparedness of the students in their programs. Of those contacted, 54% (n = 47) responded to the e-mail based survey. The results from these respondents indicated that 64.4% of programs require training in ethics and that the training was most commonly integrated into other nonethics courses. Overall, respondents did not feel as if students were completely prepared for either the ethical or legal issues that they will face in their professional careers. The importance of ethical training and suggestions for improving ethical training are discussed. (shrink)

This paper focuses on how African national leaders can make global democracy relevant to sustainable development in Africa. Seeing the problem of sustainable development in Africa from the structural and functional angles, this paper begins with an introduction and a clarification of terms such as ‘democracy’, ‘globalization’ and ‘development’. It then analyzes the underlying foundations of global democracy and its implications to cultures of the African peoples. This paper tries to place the impact of global democracy on Africa in perspectives (...) by weighing the pros and cons of global democracy. Tracing the genesis of functional and developmental problems in the post-colonial Africa to structural problems occasioned by Africa’s colonial experience, this paper however strongly contends that the main problem militating against sustainable development in the post-colonial Africa is bad politics and mismanagement of national resources. African peoples need to be taught that some of the African national leaders are responsible for the bad condition of underdevelopment in the global period because of bad political governance ranging from the inability of African leaders to calculate all the relevant factors in the making of their policies as well as failing to provide effective technologies and competent staff to deal with rigging of elections and other electoral problems in addition to corruption and mismanagement of public funds. There is no way for the African nations to survive without production of goods and services in terms of farming, agriculture and diversification of their revenue base. National leaders of the various African nations cannot avoid policies that enable the industrialization of African nations through the provision of the basic infrastructures and viable amenities for social, economic, and political development. They should however be wary of debt traps of International Monetary Fund and World Bank because borrowing nations are often given difficult conditions that often make it difficult for them to obtain the desired benefits in terms of sustainable development. The study recommends that for sustainable development to take place in Africa there is need for national leaders to embrace good political governance that places the people at the centre of development to be manifested in guileless electoral process and effective management of the resources. This paper contends that the realization of sustainable development in African nations requires moral, political, and economic integration. It concludes with perspectives for further research on the issue. (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on the massive modularity hypothesis defended by evolutionary psychologists---the hypothesis that the human mind is composed largely or perhaps even entirely of special purpose information processing organs or "modulees" that have been shaped by natural selection to handle the sorts of recurrent information processing problems that confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears. ;In discussing MMH, I have three central goals. First, I aim to clarify the hypothesis and develop theoretically useful notions of "module" and "domain-specificity" that can play the (...) roles required of them by evolutionary psychology. Second, I aim to evaluate the plausibility MMH in the light of the broad range of arguments that have been developed and defended in the literature. I argue that all the main, general arguments both for and against MMH are unsatisfactory. Moreover, I suggest that if the case for MMH is to be made, it will only result from the successive accumulation of specific, empirical evidence for the existence of particular modules. ;Finally, I address a range of issues that arise from evolutionary psychological approaches to reasoning and rationality. Much of what evolutionary psychologists have said about human reasoning is in response to a widely discussed "pessimistic" interpretation that has been developed and defended by Kahneman, Tversky and their followers. According to this view, human beings are prone to systematic deviations from appropriate norms of rationality because they lack the underlying competence to handle a wide array of reasoning tasks. Evolutionary psychologists appear to reject this pessimistic interpretation in favor of the view that we possess a wide range of reasoning modules that employ rational rules of inference. I argue, however, that there is no genuine disagreement between evolutionary psychologists and their opponents over the extent to which human beings are rational. I also discuss the distinction between competence efforts and performance efforts. Although this distinction has played a central role in recent discussions of human rationality, I argue that if MMH is true, then we face insurmountable problems in trying to draw the performance error/competence error distinction. (shrink)

I am writing on moral knowledge in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. There are two basic parts. In the first part, I articulate and attack a predominant interpretation of the Essay . This interpretation attributes to Locke the view that he did not write in the Essay anything that would be inconsistent with his early views in the Questions Concerning the Laws of Nature that there exists a single, ultimate, moral standard, i.e., the Law of Nature. For example, John Colman, (...) in his book John Locke's Moral Philosophy , argues that even though Locke explains in the Essay that we arbitrarily create our moral notions, they are still objective since they are bound together with the Law of Nature. Colman explains that the features of human nature relevant to the derivation of the Law of Nature are universally shared needs and concerns . I argue that this presupposes a view of Locke which assumes that there are essences of species independent of our beliefs about them. However, I attempt to show from the text of the Essay that this view cannot be supported. ;In the second part, I argue that the text of the Essay supports two alternative theses. The first is that given the kind of metaphysical world-view presupposed by the corpuscular method of science employed within the Essay, coupled with Locke's commitment to the possibility of moral knowledge, he was left with only one option with reference to ethics, viz., to make moral goodness or evil a mind-dependent relation between a rule and an action, instead of a property of an action or person which exists independently of our moral beliefs. This view is logically inconsistent with the existence of the Law of Nature. The second is that Locke has a semantical view of moral claims which is consistent with his relational view of moral goodness, viz., the primary function of moral judgments is to recommend behavior for ourselves and others. I described. However, Locke explains in the Essay that the opposite takes place with respect to our moral notions: events and persons must conform to the moral notion. ;On the account that I offer, Locke's views on moral epistemology are much closer to David Hume's than many have supposed, and correspondingly, anticipate the more skeptical views of moral epistemology in the twentieth century. (shrink)

I provide a theory of the metaphysical foundations of identity: an account what grounds facts of the form a=b. In particular, I defend the claim that indiscernibility grounds identity. This is typically rejected because it is viciously circular; plausible assumptions about the logic of ground entail that the fact that a=b partially grounds itself. The theory I defend is immune to this circularity.

I provide an analysis of sentences of the form ‘To be F is to be G’ in terms of exact truth-maker semantics—an approach that identifies the meanings of sentences with the states of the world directly responsible for their truth-values. Roughly, I argue that these sentences hold just in case that which makes something F also makes it G. This approach is hyperintensional and possesses desirable logical and modal features. In particular, these sentences are reflexive, transitive, and symmetric, and if (...) they are true, then they are necessarily true, and it is necessary that all and only Fs are Gs. I motivate my account over Correia and Skiles’ [11] prominent alternative and close by defining an irreflexive and asymmetric notion of analysis in terms of the symmetric and reflexive notion. (shrink)

[Samuel Scheffler] Some egalitarian liberals have proposed a division of moral labour between social institutions and individual agents, but the division-of-labour metaphor has been understood in different ways. This paper aims to disentangle some of these different understandings, with an eye to clarifying the appeal of the egalitarian-liberal project and the challenges that it faces. The idea of a division of moral labour is best understood as the expression of a strategy for accommodating diverse values. It is not an (...) apology for economic self-interest or a device for justifying personal acquisitiveness. /// [Véronique Munoz-Dardé] Are there distinctively political values? Certain egalitarians seem to think that equality is one such value. Scheffler's contribution to the symposium seeks to articulate a division of moral labour between norms of personal morality and the principles of justice that regulate social institutions, and using this suggests that the egalitarian critique of Rawls can be deflected. In this paper, instead, I question the status of equality as an intrinsic value. I argue that an egalitarianism which focuses on the status of equality as valuable in itself embraces a theory of value with the worst elements of utilitarianism while leaving behind any of the intuitive appeal that utilitarianism has. In its place I press that we need a political conception of egalitarianism which stresses the role we engage beyond those found in the norms of personal morality. (shrink)

I am concerned with epistemic closure—the phenomenon in which some knowledge requires other knowledge. In particular, I defend a version of the closure principle in terms of analyticity; if an agent S knows that p is true and that q is an analytic part of p, then S knows that q. After targeting the relevant notion of analyticity, I argue that this principle accommodates intuitive cases and possesses the theoretical resources to avoid the preface paradox.

It is often said that there are two varieties of identity theory. Type-identity theorists interpret physicalism as the claim that every property is identical to a physical property, while token-identity theorists interpret it as the claim that every particular is identical to a physical particular. The aim of this paper is to undermine the distinction between the two. Drawing on recent work connecting generalized identity to truth-maker semantics, I demonstrate that these interpretations are logically equivalent. I then argue that each (...) has the resources to resolve problems facing the other. (shrink)

We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control (...) explain culpability for unwitting omissions. (shrink)

Frege's picture of attitude states and attitude reports requires a notion of content that is shareable between agents, yet more fine-grained than reference. Kripke challenged this picture by giving a case on which the expressions that resist substitution in an attitude report share a candidate notion of fine-grained content. A consensus view developed which accepted Kripke's general moral and replaced the Fregean picture with an account of attitude reporting on which states are distinguished in conversation by their (private) representational properties. (...) I begin in support of the consensus by showing how a sort of de facto coordination on mental symbols is possible, even for unsophisticated agents. But I go on to argue that whenever conditions are ripe for de facto coordination on symbols, there is an inter-subjective relation that supports a fine-grained notion of content resistant to Kripke's challenge. The consensus view corresponds to a Kripke-resistant strain of the Fregean picture. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed growing controversy over the “wisdom of the multitude.” As epistemic critics drawing on vast empirical evidence have cast doubt on the political competence of ordinary citizens, epistemic democrats have offered a defense of democracy grounded largely in analogies and formal results. So far, I argue, the critics have been more convincing. Nevertheless, democracy can be defended on instrumental grounds, and this article demonstrates an alternative approach. Instead of implausibly upholding the epistemic reliability of average voters, I (...) observe that competitive elections, universal suffrage, and discretionary state power disable certain potent mechanisms of elite entrenchment. By reserving particular forms of power for the multitude of ordinary citizens, they make democratic states more resistant to dangerous forms of capture than non-democratic alternatives. My approach thus offers a robust defense of electoral democracy, yet cautions against expecting too much from it—motivating a thicker conception of democracy, writ large. (shrink)

This article challenges the association between realist methodology and ideals of legitimacy. Many who seek a more “realistic” or “political” approach to political theory replace the familiar orientation towards a state of justice with a structurally similar orientation towards a state of legitimacy. As a result, they fail to provide more reliable practical guidance, and wrongly displace radical demands. Rather than orienting action towards any state of affairs, I suggest that a more practically useful approach to political theory would directly (...) address judgments, by comparing the concrete possibilities for action faced by real political actors. (shrink)

It is often said that there are two varieties of identity theory. Type-identity theorists interpret physicalism as the claim that every property is identical to a physical property, while token-identity theorists interpret it as the claim that every particular is identical to a physical particular. The aim of this paper is to undermine the distinction between the two. Drawing on recent work connecting generalized identity to truth-maker semantics, I demonstrate that these interpretations are logically equivalent. I then argue that each (...) has the resources to resolve problems facing the other. (shrink)

This paper presents a puzzle about the logic of real definition. I demonstrate that five principles concerning definition—that it is coextensional and irreflexive, that it applies to its cases, that it permits expansion, and that it is itself defined—are logically incompatible. I then explore the advantages and disadvantages of each principle—one of which must be rejected to restore consistency.

My primary target in this paper is a puzzle that emerges from the conjunction of several seemingly innocent assumptions in action theory and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. The puzzle I have in mind is this. On one widely held account of moral responsibility, an agent is morally responsible only for those actions or outcomes over which that agent exercises control. Recently, however, some have cited cases where agents appear to be morally responsible without exercising any control. This leads some (...) to abandon the control-based account of responsibility and replace it with an alternative account. It leads others to deny the intuition that agents are responsible in these troublesome cases. After outlining the account of moral responsibility I have in mind, I look at some of the arguments made against the viability of this theory. I show that there are conceptual resources for salvaging the control account, focusing in particular on the nature of vigilance. I also argue that there is empirical data that supports the control account so conceived. (shrink)

When considering potential solutions to meaning-scepticism, Kripke (1982) did not consider a causal-theoretic approach. Kusch (2006) has argued that this is due to the qua-problem. I consider Kusch’s criticism of Maddy (1984) and McGinn (1984) before offering a different way to solve the qua-problem, one that is not susceptible to sceptical attack. If this solution is successful, at least one barrier to using a causal theory to refute Kripke’s scepticism is removed.

Josh is a typical 27-year-old in a career that he enjoys and a successful marriage. Josh begins to exhibit the symptoms of a manic episode. He is soon diagnosed with bipolar disorder. While non-manic, Josh’s preferences are typical. While manic, his preferences change dramatically. He quits his job, cheats on his partner, and squanders his savings. These are behaviors that Josh, when non-manic (euthymic), would never agree to. When Josh returns to a euthymic state, he regrets these decisions. Should those (...) close to Josh have prevented him from making these decisions, or does his competence to decide persist despite his acute mania? In this paper, I examine the connections be-tween bipolar disorder and consent. I defend the view that many (although far from all) individuals with bipolar disorder are competent to consent to a wide variety of things when they are in a manic state. This means that mania should not be presumed to undermine competence in clinical settings. -/- I have several goals in this paper. I want to bring philosophy to bear on the connection between consent and bipolar disorder. Additionally, I intend this paper to contribute to the general debate about the conditions of informed consent. Bipolar disorder presents novel challenges to existing conceptions of competence to consent which require stable core of values for an agent to be competent. For example, Buchanan and Brock endorse such a view. In showing that shifting values do not undermine the competence of a person experiencing acute mania, I show that the aforementioned views of competence are false. Overall, this paper makes substantive contributions to the debate about competence to consent and presents the first sustained philosophical treatment of consent among people with bipolar disorder. (shrink)

I provide an analysis of sentences of the form ‘To be F is to be G’ in terms of exact truth-maker semantics—an approach that identifies the meanings of sentences with the states of the world directly responsible for their truth-values. Roughly, I argue that these sentences hold just in case that which makes something F is that which makes it G. This approach is hyperintensional, and possesses desirable logical and modal features. These sentences are reflexive, transitive and symmetric, and, if (...) they are true, then they are necessarily true, and it is necessary that all and only Fs are Gs. I close by defining an asymmetric and irreflexive notion of analysis in terms of the reflexive and symmetric one. (shrink)

Among contemporary philosophers, there is widespread consensus that begging the question is a grave argumentative flaw. However, there is presently no satisfactory analysis of what this flaw consists of. Here, I defend a notion of question-begging in terms of analyticity. In particular, I argue that an argument begs the question just in case its conclusion is an analytic part of the conjunction of its premises.

Do grounding claims entail corresponding supervenience claims? The question matters, as a positive answer would help grounding theorists address worries that their hyperintensional primitive is obscure, and also increase the argumentative strategies that are available within ground-theoretic frameworks for metaphysical inquiry. Leuenberger (Erkenntnis 79:227–240, 2014a) argues for a negative response, by specifying some candidate principles of entailment and then claiming that each of them is subject to counterexamples. In this paper, I critically assess those principles and the objections he raises (...) against them, and advocate a novel entailment principle that overcomes all the problems suffered by those other principles. The principle I defend places a supervenience-based constraint on grounding claims, and secures a substantive connection between grounding and modality, weaker than necessitation. (shrink)

This morning I intended to get out of bed when my alarm went off. Hearing my alarm, I formed the intention to get up now. Yet, for a time, I remained in bed, irrationally lazy. It seems I irrationally failed to execute my intention. Such cases of execution failure pose a challenge for Mentalists about rationality, who believe that facts about rationality supervene on facts about the mind. For, this morning, my mind was in order; it was my action that (...) apparently made me irrational. What, then, should Mentalists say about the phenomenon of execution failure? The phenomenon of execution failure, and the puzzle it raises for Mentalists, have rarely been discussed. This paper addresses the puzzle in two parts. First, it argues that execution failure is a real phenomenon. It is possible for agents to irrationally fail to act on their present-directed intentions. It follows that Mentalists in the philosophy of action must solve the puzzle of explaining what is irrational about cases of execution failure. Second, this paper begins the search for such a solution. It considers six possible resolutions to the puzzle, arguing that none is obviously the most attractive. These resolutions include a requirement of overall conative consistency, an appeal to the norm of intention consistency, a form of Volitionalism, an appeal to factive mental states, and a proposal due to Garrett Cullity, and a novel requirement of proper functioning. (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects (...) persist by enduring rather than perduring. Second, that most people have a view of change on which enduring but not perduring objects count as changing. Third, that one reason why the folk represent time as dynamical is because it seems to them, and they believe that, they endure through time. We found no evidence to support these claims. While there are certainly plenty of ‘folk’ endurantists in the population we tested, there are also plenty of ‘folk’ perdurantists. We did not find robust evidence that a majority of people believed that, or it seemed to them as though, objects endure rather than perdure. We conclude that many arguments in favour of endurantism that appeal to folk beliefs about, or experiences of, persisting objects and change rest on views about those beliefs and experiences that are empirically unsupported. There is no evidence to suggest that endurantism is the folk friendly view of persistence, and so we should stop treating it as such without argument. (shrink)

Leibniz’s views on modality are among the most discussed by his interpreters. Although most of the discussion has focused on Leibniz’s analyses of modality, this essay explores Leibniz’s grounding of modality. Leibniz holds that possibilities and possibilia are grounded in the intellect of God. Although other early moderns agreed that modal truths are in some way dependent on God, there were sharp disagreements surrounding two distinct questions: (1) On what in God do modal truths and modal truth-makers depend? (2) What (...) is the manner(s) of dependence by which modal truths and modal truth-makers depend on God? Very roughly, Leibniz’s own answers are: (1) God’s intellect and (2) a form of ontological dependence. The essay first distinguishes Leibniz’s account from two nearby (and often misunderstood) alternatives found in Descartes and Spinoza. It then examines Leibniz’s theory in detail, showing how, on his account, God’s ideas provide both truth-makers for possibilities and necessities and an ontological foothold for those truth-makers, thereby explaining modal truths. Along the way, it suggests several refinements and possible amendments to Leibniz’s grounding thesis. It then defends Leibniz against a pair of recent objections by Robert Merrihew Adams and Andrew Chignell that invoke the early work of Kant. I conclude that whereas Leibniz’s alternative avoids collapsing into yet another form of Spinozism, the alternatives proposed by Adams, Chignell, and the early Kant do not. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics 1. 7, Aristotle gives a definition of the human good, and he does so by means of the “ ergon argument.” I clear the way for a new interpretation of this argument by arguing that Aristotle does not think that the ergon of something is always the proper activity of that thing. Though he has a single concept of an ergon, Aristotle identifies the ergon of an X as an activity in some cases but a product in (...) others, depending on the sort of thing the X is—for while the ergon of the eye is seeing, the ergon of a sculptor is a sculpture. This alternative interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of an ergon allows the key explanatory middle term of the ergon argument to be what, I argue, it ought to be: “the best achievement of a human.”. (shrink)

*Please email me for a copy of the paper if you are interested! -/- Liberal theories of animal consciousness maintain that we should attribute consciousness widely across various species. Conservative theories of animal consciousness maintain that we should not attribute consciousness widely. This paper makes a case for a conservative theory of animal consciousness. The case depends on two defensive moves and one offensive move. The defensive moves indicate that the indistinguishable causal profiles of conscious and non-conscious mental states are (...) not a problem for conservative theories and that intuitions about animal consciousness should not play a role in theory selection. Offensively, I argue that liberal theories of animal consciousness are less parsimonious than conservative theories. The upshot is that liberal theories of animal consciousness are not obviously rationally preferable to conservative theories. (shrink)

Two families of positions dominate debates over a metaphysically reductive analysis of knowledge. Traditionalism holds that knowledge has a complete, uniquely identifying analysis, while knowledge-first epistemology contends that knowledge is primitive—admitting of no reductive analysis whatsoever. Drawing on recent work in metaphysics, I argue that these alternatives fail to exhaust the available possibilities. Knowledge may have a merely partial analysis: a real definition that distinguishes it from some, but not all other things. I demonstrate that this position is attractive; it (...) evades concerns that its rivals face. (shrink)