A variety of ethical objections have been raised against the military employment of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones). Some of these objections are technological concerns over UAVs abilities’ to function on par with their inhabited counterparts. This paper sets such concerns aside and instead focuses on supposed objections to the use of UAVs in principle. I examine several such objections currently on offer and show them all to be wanting. Indeed, I argue that we have a duty to protect an (...) agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent's ability to act justly. UAVs afford precisely such protection. Therefore, we are obligated to employ UAV weapon systems if it can be shown that their use does not significantly reduce a warfighter's operational capability. Of course, if a given military action is unjustified to begin with, then carrying out that act via UAVs is wrong, just as it would be with any weapon. But the point of this paper is to show that there is nothing wrong in principle with using a UAV and that, other things being equal, using such technology is, in fact, obligatory. (shrink)

A new powerful military weapon has appeared in the skies of world and with it a new form of warfare has quickly emerged bringing with it a host of pressing ethical questions and issues. Killing By Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military brings together some of the best scholars currently working on these questions.

In Plato’s Sophist (245e–247e) an argument against metaphysical materialism in the “battle of gods and giants” is presented which is oft the cause of consternation, primarily because it appears the characters are unfair to the materialist position. Attempts to explain it usually resort to restructuring the argument while others rearrange the Sophist entirely to rebuild the argument in a more satisfying form. I propose a different account of the argument that does not rely on a disservice to the materialist nor (...) restructuring Plato’s argument. I contend, instead, that the argument is enthymematic in nature, allowing the definitions employed to flow out of the reasoning as originally presented. Moreover, it suggests that Plato’s idealism was so deeply ingrained that modern defenses of materialism were not even live options. (shrink)

Killing bin Laden: A Moral Analysis is a short treatise on the possible ethical justification for the U.S. mission to kill Osama bin Laden. After rejecting the standard justifications most commonly used in support of the killing, Strawser ultimately argues that the killing was ethically permissible as an act of defensive harm on behalf of innocents. The book contends bin Laden was morally responsible for a collection of unjust threats such that he was liable to be killed. Moreover, the (...) many unique features of the bin Laden case -such as the use of pre-emptive harm and the collective agency of al-Qaeda - do not defeat that liability. The monograph also includes discussions of the apparent violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and the morally dubious celebrations of bin Laden's death, among other morally relevant issues. (shrink)

Realism about material objects faces a variety of epistemological objections. Recently, however, some realists have offered new accounts in response to these long-standing objections; many of which seem plausible. In this paper, I raise a new objection against realism vis-à-vis how we could empirically come to know mind-independent essential properties for objects. Traditionally, realists hold kind-membership and persistence as bound together for purposes of tracing out an object’s essential existence conditions. But I propose kind-membership and persistence for objects can conceptually (...) come apart and function epistemologically distinctly from one another—in which case the usual reliance by realists on an assumption of persistence to determine kind-membership conditions is unjustified. Thus, present realist attempts to explain how empirical detection of mind-independent essential properties for objects could possibly occur inevitably results in circularity. The charge against the realist is to explain why we don’t have to first discover persistence conditions for an object before we can ascertain kind-membership conditions for an object. If no answer is forthcoming, then it seems the weight of the epistemological objection to realism is back in full force. (shrink)

Most people believe that killing someone, while generally morally wrong, can in some cases be a permissible act. Most people similarly believe that war, while awful, can be justified. This book addresses both subjects as equal parts in a larger meditation on the ethics of harm and moral responsibility—whether in war collectively or in individual cases of self-defense—and whatever it is that lies in between the two. The book sets out by examining the moral justification for individual defensive killing and (...) then tests its application to collective war as a natural outgrowth of the former. In seeking sincere answers to these morally vexing questions, it offers a novel theory of liability attribution based upon evidence-relative norms: we should only be held morally responsible for what we could possibly know is wrong based on the evidence before us. In developing this theory of liability as it applies to war, Bounds of Defense also gives a robust apologia of what has been called as “revisionist” just war theory and charts a neo-liberal basis for just war theory grounded on the value of individual autonomy along the way. The entire book is an earnest attempt to take individual rights and responsibilities seriously in our thinking over killing and the horrors of war. (shrink)

In Plato’s Sophist (245e–247e) an argument against metaphysical materialism in the “battle of gods and giants” is presented which is oft the cause of consternation, primarily because it appears the characters are unfair to the materialist position. Attempts to explain it usually resort to restructuring the argument while others rearrange the Sophist entirely to rebuild the argument in a more satisfying form. I propose a different account of the argument that does not rely on a disservice to the materialist nor (...) restructuring Plato’s argument. I contend, instead, that the argument is enthymematic in nature, allowing the definitions employed to flow out of the reasoning as originally presented. Moreover, it suggests that Plato’s idealism was so deeply ingrained that modern defenses of materialism were not even live options. (shrink)

Philosophical and ethical discussions of warfare are often tied to emerging technologies and techniques. Today we are presented with what many believe is a radical shift in the nature of war-the realization of conflict in the cyber-realm, the so-called.

Review of: Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military, edited by Bradley Jay Strawser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

We propose that the prevalent moral aversion to AWS is supported by a pair of compelling objections. First, we argue that even a sophisticated robot is not the kind of thing that is capable of replicating human moral judgment. This conclusion follows if human moral judgment is not codifiable, i.e., it cannot be captured by a list of rules. Moral judgment requires either the ability to engage in wide reflective equilibrium, the ability to perceive certain facts as moral considerations, moral (...) imagination, or the ability to have moral experiences with a particular phenomenological character. Robots cannot in principle possess these abilities, so robots cannot in principle replicate human moral judgment. If robots cannot in principle replicate human moral judgment then it is morally problematic to deploy AWS with that aim in mind. Second, we then argue that even if it is possible for a sufficiently sophisticated robot to make ‘moral decisions’ that are extensionally indistinguishable from (or better than) human moral decisions, these ‘decisions’ could not be made for the right reasons. This means that the ‘moral decisions’ made by AWS are bound to be morally deficient in at least one respect even if they are extensionally indistinguishable from human ones. Our objections to AWS support the prevalent aversion to the employment of AWS in war. They also enjoy several significant advantages over the most common objections to AWS in the literature. (shrink)

Are contemporary soldiers exploited by the state and society that they defend? More specifically, have America's professional service members disproportionately carried the moral weight of America's war-fighting decisions since the inception of an all-volunteer force? In this volume, Michael J. Robillard and Bradley J. Strawser, who have both served in the military, examine the question of whether and how American soldiers have been exploited in this way. Robillard and Strawser offer an original normative theory of 'moral exploitation'--the (...) notion that persons or groups can be wrongfully exploited by being made to shoulder an excessive amount of moral weight. They make the case that this exploitation accurately describes the relationship between the United States and the members of its military, and offer a thorough and in-depth analysis of some of the exploitative and misleading elements of present-day military recruitment, the moral burdens soldiers often bear, and the stifling effect that a 'Thank You for Your Service' and 'I support the troops' culture has had on serious public engagement about America's ongoing wars. Robillard and Strawser offer a piercing critique of the pernicious divide between military members and the civilians who direct them. They conclude by arguing for several normative and prudential prescriptions to help close this ever-widening fissure between the U.S. and its military, and within the U.S. itself. In so doing, their work gives a much needed and urgent voice to America's soldiers, the other 1%. (shrink)

This volume collects influential and groundbreaking philosophical work on killing in war. A " of contemporary scholars, this volume serves as a convenient and authoritative collection uniquely suited for university-level teaching and as a reference for ethicists, policymakers, stakeholders, and any student of the morality of war.

In July 2020, more than 1000 companies that advertise on social media platforms withdrew their business, citing failures of the platforms (especially Facebook) to address the proliferation of harmful content. The #StopHateForProfit movement invites reflection on an understudied topic: the ethics of boycotting by corporations. Under what conditions is corporate boycotting permissible, required, supererogatory, or forbidden? Although value-driven consumerism has generated significant recent discussion in applied ethics, that discussion has focused almost exclusively on the consumption choices of individuals. As this (...) article underscores, value-driven consumerism by business corporations complicates these issues and invites further examination. We propose principles for the ethics of boycotting by corporations, indicate how these principles relate to different CSR paradigms, and show how these insights can help assess recent instances of corporate boycotting. (shrink)

Jay Newhard (2021) proposes a novel solution to the Liar Paradox, which he calls the alethic indeterminacy solution to the Liar Paradox. Bradley Armour-Garb (2021) raises a pair of objections to the alethic indeterminacy solution. Both objections are based upon the alethic indeterminacy solution’s alleged commitment that the truth conditions for a Liar Sentence are indeterminate, and therefore not true. In this paper, this alleged commitment is shown to be mistaken. The alethic indeterminacy solution is compatible with maintaining that (...) the truth conditions for a Liar Sentence are a non-truth-functional biconditional which is true, and not indeterminate. Logically complex sentences are typically and standardly treated as truth-functional, and the philosophical literature on non-truth-functionality is diffuse. Two independent accounts of non-truth-functional biconditionals are defended. The first account is based on the claim that indicative conditionals express a non-truth-functional dependency relation between consequent and antecedent. The second account is based upon connected sentences having interdependent truth conditions, which can occur with any polyadic connective. These accounts are fully general, not ad hoc measures. Each account solves both of Armour-Garb’s objections. With both objections met, the alethic indeterminacy solution is shown to be a viable solution to the Liar Paradox worth further development. (shrink)

Vesey argues in his introduction that the history of idealism would be worth studying even if it turned out that there is no single sense of "idealism." Just to discover how the term "idea" has evolved in philosophical usage can elucidate the history of philosophy. The majority of the essays in this book focus on a single philosopher or school of philosophy, and so do not raise the problem of defining idealism in general. However, as each author develops a working (...) definition for his own historical purposes, several senses of "idealism" emerge. Most of these writers define idealism as the doctrine that all we can know are our ideas and the meaning of words and sentences, that truth consists of the coherence of our ideas, and that we cannot directly observe external reality as it is in itself Some writers adopt variations on this, either to the effect that objects exist for a subject or to the effect that objects are structured by a subject. Some authors interpret idealism as the view that truth is created by human activity and thought, one identifies idealism with mental monism, and two suggest that any use at all of the word "idea" as a philosophical first principle is enough to constitute an "idealism". There is an implicit attempt to cover most if not all major periods of idealist or allegedly idealist philosophy in this collection, including Greek skepticism, Descartes and Berkeley, Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Marx, Bradley, linguistic relativism, and Wittgenstein. Some articles consider idealism in so far as it raises questions of epistemology and consciousness, others in so far as it raises questions of freedom, action, and will. However, there is no treatment of the role of idealism in mediaeval or modern religious philosophy, and there is no mention of the phenomenology of the lived body, which constitutes so much of the response of twentieth century philosophers to problems of idealism. (shrink)

Book review of "Killing by remote Control," Bradley Jay Strawser (Ed), Oxford university Press.

A review and commentary on Killing By Remote Control: the Ethics of an Unmanned Military, edited by Bradley Jay Strawser (forward by Jeff McMahan), (Oxford University Press). -/- .

Michael Robillard and Bradley Strawser’s Outsourcing Duty: The Moral Exploitation of the American Soldier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) is outstanding. The arguments in it are important, new, and powerful, and it is extremely well-written. It is accessibly written, including eye-opening personal stories (including the authors’ stories), an interesting array of economic and sociological studies, and colorful illustrative quotes from The Bourne Legacy, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Tommy. It also includes colorful-and-caustic comments on the (...) Bush- and Obama-administrations’ decisions regarding going to war and staying at war that nicely highlight what is at stake. In short, the book is a tour de force. (shrink)

In this eye-opening look at the doctor-patient decision-making process, physician and law professor Jay Katz examines the time-honored belief in the virtue of silent care and patient compliance. Historically, the doctor-patient relationship has been based on a one-way trust -- despite recent judicial attempts to give patients a greater voice through the doctrine of informed consent. Katz criticizes doctors for encouraging patients to relinquish their autonomy, and demonstrates the detrimental effect their silence has on good patient care. Seeing a growing (...) need in this age of medical science and sophisticated technology for more honest and complete communication between physician and patients, he advocates a new, informed dialogue that respects the rights and needs of both sides. In a new foreword to this edition of The Silent World of Doctor and Patient , Alexander Morgan Capron outlines the changes in medical ethics practice that have occurred since the book was first published in 1984, paying particular attention to the hotly debated issues of physician-assisted suicide and informed consent in managed care. (shrink)

The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais Paradox. In this paper we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world semantics for conditionals, and showing that preferences that are sensitive to counterfactual considerations can still be desirability maximising. We (...) end the paper by investigating the conditions necessary and sufficient for a desirability function to be an expected utility. It turns out that the additional conditions imply highly implausible epistemic principles. (shrink)

Arguing that Kierkegaard (1813-55) can and should be taken seriously as a philosopher even in today's postmodern climate, Strawser (philosophy, Folkuniversitetet, Helsingborg, Sweden) offers evidence that in marking the juncture between objective philosophy and philosophy that recognized its subjective and provisional nature, he represents not a break between the aesthetic and the religious but a bridge between them. Paper edition (unseen), $17.00. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

When making decisions, people naturally face uncertainty about the potential consequences of their actions due in part to limits in their capacity to represent, evaluate or deliberate. Nonetheless, they aim to make the best decisions possible. In Decision Theory with a Human Face, Richard Bradley develops new theories of agency and rational decision-making, offering guidance on how 'real' agents who are aware of their bounds should represent the uncertainty they face, how they should revise their opinions as a result (...) of experience and how they should make decisions when lacking full awareness of, or precise opinions on relevant contingencies. He engages with the strengths and flaws of Bayesian reasoning, and presents clear and comprehensive explorations of key issues in decision theory, from belief and desire to semantics and learning. His book draws on philosophy, economics, decision science and psychology, and will appeal to readers in all of these disciplines. (shrink)

The Desire-as-Belief thesis (DAB) states that any rational person desires a proposition exactly to the degree that she believes or expects the proposition to be good. Many people take David Lewis to have shown the thesis to be inconsistent with Bayesian decision theory. However, as we show, Lewis's argument was based on an Invariance condition that itself is inconsistent with the (standard formulation of the) version of Bayesian decision theory that he assumed in his arguments against DAB. The aim of (...) this paper is to explore what impact the rejection of Invariance has on the DAB thesis. Without assuming Invariance, we first refute all versions of DAB that entail that there are only two levels of goodness. We next consider two theses according to which rational desires are intimately connected to expectations of (multi-levelled) goodness, and show that these are consistent with Bayesian decision theory as long as we assume that the contents of 'value propositions' are not fixed. We explain why this conclusion is independently plausible, and show how to construct such propositions. (shrink)

Examines the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience behind visual experience. Chapters on attention, illusions, aftereffects, binocular rivalry, hemispheric differences, attentional blink, agnosias and other disorders. Particular attention paid to consciouseness. The systematic review of key topics and the multitude of perspectives make this book an ideal primary or ancillary text for graduate courses in perception, vision, consciousness, or philosophy of mind.

F. H. Bradley was the foremost philosopher of the British Idealist school, which came to prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bradley, who was a life fellow of Merton College, Oxford, was influenced by Hegel, and also reacted against utilitarianism. He was recognised during his lifetime as one of the greatest intellectuals of his generation and was the first philosopher to receive the Order of Merit, in 1924. His work is considered to have been important (...) to the formation of analytic philosophy. In metaphysics, he rejected pluralism and realism, and believed that English philosophy needed to deal systematically with first principles. This work, first published in 1893, is divided into two parts: 'Appearance' deals with exposing the contradictions that Bradley believed are hidden in our everyday conceptions of the world; and in 'Reality', he builds his positive account of reality and considers possible objections to it. (shrink)

Mereological nihilism is the view that no objects have proper parts. Despite how counter‐intuitive it is, it is taken quite seriously, largely because it solves a number of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects – or so its proponents claim. In this article, I show that for every puzzle that mereological nihilism solves, there is a similar puzzle that (a) it doesn’t solve, and (b) every other solution to the original puzzle does solve. Since the solutions to the new (...) puzzles apply just as well to the old puzzles, the old puzzles provide no motivation to be a mereological nihilist. (shrink)

In this paper, I articulate and argue for a new truthmaker view of ontological commitment, which I call the “General Truthmaker View”: when one affirms a sentence, one is ontologically committed to there being something that makes true the proposition expressed by the sentence. This view comes apart from Quinean orthodoxy in that we are not ontologically committed to the things over which we quantify, and it comes apart from extant truthmaker views of ontological commitment in that we are not (...) ontologically committed to the truthmakers of our sentences. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new theory of grounding. The theory has it that grounding is a job description that is realized by different properties in different contexts. Those properties play the grounding role contingently, and grounding is the property that plays the grounding role essentially. On this theory, grounding is monistic, but ‘grounding’ refers to different relations in different contexts. First, I argue against Kit Fine’s monist univocalism. Next, I argue against Jessica Wilson’s pluralist multivocalism. Finally, I introduce (...) monist multivocalism, explicate three versions of it (of which the above is one), and show its advantages. (shrink)

During John Dewey's lifetime, one public opinion poll after another revealed that he was esteemed to be one of the ten most important thinkers in American history. His body of thought, conventionally identified by the shorthand word "Pragmatism," has been the distinctive American philosophy of the last fifty years. His work on education is famous worldwide and is still influential today, anticipating as it did the ascendance in contemporary American pedagogy of multiculturalism and independent thinking. His University of Chicago Laboratory (...) School thrives still and is a model for schools worldwide, especially in emerging democracies. But how was this lifetime of thought enmeshed in Dewey's emotional experience, in his joys and sorrows as son and brother, husband and father, and in his political activism and spirituality? Acclaimed biographer Jay Martin recaptures the unity of Dewey's life and work, tracing important themes through the philosopher's childhood years, family history, religious experience, and influential friendships. Based on original sources, notably the vast collection of unpublished papers in the Center for Dewey Studies, this book tells the full story, for the first time, of the life and times of the eminent American philosopher, pragmatist, education reformer, and man of letters. In particular, _The Education of John Dewey_ highlights the importance of the women in Dewey's life, especially his mother, wife, and daughters, but also others, including the reformer Jane Addams and the novelist Anzia Yezierska. A fitting tribute to a master thinker, Martin has rendered a tour de force portrait of a philosopher and social activist in full, seamlessly reintegrating Dewey's thought into both his personal life and the broader historical themes of his time. (shrink)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has developed a novel framework for assessing and communicating uncertainty in the findings published in their periodic assessment reports. But how should these uncertainty assessments inform decisions? We take a formal decision-making perspective to investigate how scientific input formulated in the IPCC’s novel framework might inform decisions in a principled way through a normative decision model.

World problems are intercultural, requiring sensitivity to cultural integrity in order to resolve them. Wu Kuang-ming has been grappling with cultural clashes at their boundary for half a century, insisting that we must first let Chinese thinking be Chinese, not Western, leading thereby to a truly fruitful China-West and West-China interculture. Wu has been proposing how to do so in a dozen published volumes and beyond. China-West Interculture reports Wu's personal and academic journey on this matter, followed by fourteen international (...) scholars' critical appreciations and Wu's grateful responses. (shrink)

A study of contemporary philosophical and neuroscientific perspectives on the relation of action, perception, and cognition as it is lived in embodied and socially embedded experience.

This book expounds and defends a new conception of the relation between truth and meaning. Atlas argues that the sense of a sense-general sentence radically underdetermines its truth-conditional content. He applies this linguistic analysis to illuminate old and new philosophical problems of meaning, truth, falsity, negation, existence, presupposition, and implicature. In particular, he demonstrates how the concept of ambiguity has been misused and confused with other concepts of meaning, and how the interface between semantics and pragmatics has been misunderstood. The (...) problems he tackles are common to philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, and his conclusions will be of interest to all those working in these fields. (shrink)

A quick look at what is happening in the corporate world makes it clear that the stakeholder idea is alive, well, and flourishing; and the question now is not “if ” but “how” stakeholder theory will meet the challenges of its success. Does stakeholder theory’s “arrival” mean continued dynamism, refinement, and relevance, or stasis? How will superior stakeholder theory continue to develop? In light of these and related questions, the authors of these essays conducted an ongoing dialogue on the current (...) state and future of stakeholder thinking. Beginning with a review of research and theory that has developed since the major stakeholder theorizing efforts of the 1990s, the authors individually offer their perspectives on the key issues relevant today to stakeholder thinking, and to suggest possible approaches that might lead toward and enable the continuing development of superior stakeholder theory. (shrink)