Perceptions are externally-directed—they present us with a mind-independent reality, and thus contribute to our abilities to think about this reality, and to know what is objectively the case. But perceptions are also internally-dependent—their phenomenologies depend on the neuro-computational properties of the subject. A good theory of perception must account for both these facts. But naive realism has been criticized for failing to accommodate internal-dependence. This paper evaluates and responds to this criticism. It first argues that a certain version of naive (...) realism, often called “selectionism”, does indeed struggle with internal-dependence. It then develops an alternate version of naive realism which does not. This alternate version, inspired by an idea of Martin’s, accommodates the internal-dependence of perceptions by recognizing the role that the subject’s neuro-computational properties play in shaping perceptual phenomenology. At the same time, it retains the distinctive naive realist account of the external-directedness of perceptions. (shrink)

The phenomenal particularity thesis says that if a mind-independent particular is consciously perceived in a given perception, that particular is among the constituents of the perception’s phenomenology. Martin, Campbell, Gomes and French and others defend this thesis. Against them are Mehta, Montague, Schellenberg and others, who have produced strong arguments that the phenomenal particularity thesis is false. Unfortunately, neither side has persuaded the other, and it seems that the debate between them is now at an impasse. This paper aims to (...) break through this impasse. It argues that we have reached the impasse because two distinct conceptions of phenomenology—a “narrow” conception and a “broad” conception—are compatible with our what-it-is-like characterizations of phenomenology. It also suggests that each of these two conceptions has its own theoretical value and use. Therefore, the paper recommends a pluralistic position, on which we acknowledge that there are two kinds of phenomenology: narrow phenomenology and broad phenomenology. The phenomenal particularity thesis is true only with respect to the latter. (shrink)

Unconscious perceptions have recently become a focal point in the debate for and against naive realism. In this paper I defend the naive realist side. More specifically, I use an idea of Martin’s to develop a new version of naive realism—neuro-computational naive realism. I argue that neuro-computational naive realism offers a uniform treatment of both conscious and unconscious perceptions. I also argue that it accommodates the possibility of phenomenally different conscious perceptions of the same items, and that it can answer (...) a further challenge to naive realism raised by Berger and Nanay. (shrink)

In the early 1980’s van Inwagen presented the Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism with moral responsibility. In the course of the ensuing debate, Fischer, McKenna and Loewenstein have replied, each in their own way, that versions of the Direct Argument do not pose even a prima facie threat to compatibilism. Their grounds were that versions of the Direct Argument all use the “Transfer NR” inference rule in a dialectically problematic way. I rebut these replies here. By so doing, (...) I hope to set the Direct Argument debate on a more fruitful path. (shrink)

The volume offers a lively and wide-ranging debate on the major questions of perceptual epistemology, including how perceptual experiences can bestow positive epistemic standing to empirical judgments and beliefs; the relative epistemic import of veridical and non-veridical perceptual experiences; the relation between experience and knowledge; and the nature of experience in view of its epistemic linkages to discursive contents. The volume is centered around five cutting-edge essays by leading authors in these areas—Anil Gupta, Andrea Kern, Christopher Peacocke, Susanna Schellenberg and (...) Crispin Wright—along with no less than thirty contributions scrutinizing and critically discussing the essays, prompting detailed rejoinders from the lead authors. The volume closes with an extensive debate between Annalisa Coliva, Gupta and Wright. Taken as a whole, the volume covers much ground in epistemology of perception and displays a variety of approaches and perspectives through fruitful and accessible exchanges. It will be of interest not only to researchers working in perceptual epistemology but also to students new to the subject. (shrink)

Leibniz's views about human freedom are much debated today. While traditionalists hold that Leibniz was a compatibilist about freedom, some commentators are now suggesting that Leibniz can be read as an incompatibilist. This exciting new reading is often based on Leibniz's "Necessary and Contingent Truths" (AVI, 4 B, 1514-1524; henceforth: NCT). This paper shall argue that NCT supports not only an understanding of Leibniz as a freedom incompatibilist, but more radically, as embracing a particularly intriguing kind of libertarianism. On this (...) Leibnizian brand of libertarianism, a human action may be both free and unavoidable (in the sense that the agent could not have acted otherwise). (shrink)

I discuss a neglected solution to the skeptical problem introduced by Lewis Carroll’s “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles” (1895) in terms of a self-citational inferential license. I then consider some responses to this solution. The most significant response on behalf of the skeptic utilizes the familiar distinction between two ways of accepting a rule: as action-guiding and as a mere truth. I argue that this is ultimately unsatisfactory and conclude by opting for an alternative conception of rules as representations (...) of behavior deployed for various purposes, some theoretical and others practical. This alternative conception does not allow the skeptical problem to get off the ground. (shrink)

Theories deploy various theoretical representations of their explananda and one question we can ask about those representations is whether to regard them under a realist attitude, i.e. as revealing the nature of what they represent, or whether to regard them under an instrumentalist attitude instead, i.e. as serving particular explanatory ends without the further revelatory aspect. I consider structured propositions as theoretical representations within a particular explanatory setting -- the metaphysics of what is said -- and argue that a realist (...) attitude towards them is unwarranted. I offer various considerations against the widespread tendency to regard structured propositions as revealing the nature of what is said and conclude that they should be regarded under an instrumentalist attitude instead. (shrink)

Standing is a peculiar norm, allowing for deflecting that is rejecting offhand and without deliberation interventions such as directives. Directives are speech acts that aim to give directive-reasons, which are reason to do as the directive directs because of the directive. Standing norms, therefore, provide for deflecting directives regardless of validity or the normative weight of the rejected directive. The logic of the normativity of standing is, therefore, not the logic of invalidating directives or of competing with directive-reasons but of (...) ‘exclusionary permission’. That is, standing norms provide for permission to exclude from practical deliberation directive-reasons if given without the requisite standing, regardless of their normative weight. As such, standing is a type of second-order norm. Numerous everyday practices involve the deflection of directives, such as pervasive practices of deflecting hypocritical and officious directives. Of various possible models, the one that best captures the normative structure of these practices of deflection is the standing model. Accordingly, the normativity of standing is pervasive in our everyday practices. Establishing that standing, although a neglected philosophical idea, is a significant and independent normative concept. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 89-92.

What justifies practices of “standing”? Numerous everyday practices exhibit the normativity of standing: forbidding certain interventions and permitting ignoring them. The normativity of standing is grounded in facts about the person intervening and not on the validity of her intervention. When valid, directives are reasons to do as directed. When interventions take the form of directives, standing practices may permit excluding those directives from one’s practical deliberations, regardless of their validity or normative weight. Standing practices are, therefore, puzzling – forbidding (...) giving reasons and, if given, permitting disregarding such reasons. What justifies standing practices are the values that they protect, including privacy, autonomy, independence, valuable relationships, and equal respect. These values count in favor of standing’s duty against certain interventions and, when these duties of non-intervention are breached, the values underpinning those duties count in favor of standing’s permission to discount or exclude those interventions from one’s practical deliberations – the normative weight of those interventions notwithstanding. (shrink)

This article introduces and discusses a short correspondence that took place in November 1931 between Gershom Scholem and Jacob Gordin. Gordin was a Russian-Jewish philosopher of religion, an expert on Hermann Cohen, and a founding figure of the postwar Paris School of Jewish Thought. The initial motivation for the correspondence was Scholem’s wish to produce a critical edition of the 17th century kabbalistic work, Shaar Hashamayim by Abraham Cohen Herrera, for which he asked for Gordin’s help. A close reading of (...) Gordin’s response to Scholem and Scholem’s belated response to Gordin highlight the respective views of these thinkers regarding the relationship between kabbalah and Western philosophy in the modern era, and in German idealism in particular. The article is followed by a translation of the correspondence. (shrink)

Metasemantics is the metaphysics of semantic endowment: it asks how expressions become endowed with their semantic significance. Assuming that semantics is of the usual truth-conditional sort, metasemantics asks after the determinants of expressions’ distinctive contributions to truth-conditions. There are two widely divergent general approaches to the metasemantic project. Some theories – “productivist” ones such as causal theories or intention-based theories – emphasize conditions of production or employment of the items semantically endowed. Other metasemantic theories – “interpretationist” ones – emphasize conditions (...) of interpretive consumption or reception of such items. The book aims to articulate a set of considerations that favour metasemantic productivism over metasemantic interpretationism, to reconcile a general productivist metasemantic approach with contemporary truth-conditional semantics, and to apply the approach to more specialized case studies in the philosophy of language broadly construed. Finally, a major concern in contemporary philosophy of language after Quine is semantic indeterminacy, the worry that there is no fact of the matter as to the semantic significance of our words. The book articulates a distinctly metasemantic strategy to counter the worry. It is shown how the present approach delivers a more successful response to semantic indeterminacy than extant alternatives, a response that emphasizes the priority of reference over truth, which is both intuitively compelling and theoretically motivated. (shrink)

We often think about the alternatives to a decision that has been made. Thinking in this way is known as counterfactual thinking, that is, thinking about what could have been had an alternative dec...

Representations seem to play a major role in many neuroscientific explanations. Philosophers have long attempted to properly define what it means for a neural state to be a representation of a specific content. Teleosemantic theories of content which characterize representations, in part, by appealing to a historical notion of function, are often regarded as our best path towards an account of neural representations. This paper points to the anti-representationalist consequences of these accounts. I argue that assuming such teleosemantic views will (...) deprive representations of their explanatory role in computational explanations. My argument rests on the claim that many explanations in cognitive neuroscience are entirely independent of any historical considerations. In making this claim, I will also offer an adapted version of the famous Swampperson thought experiment, which is better suited to discussions of subpersonal neural representations. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Cummins Functions Approach to neural representations, which aims to capture the notion of representation that is relevant to contemporary neuroscientific practice. CFA shares the common view that “to be a representation of X” amounts to “having the function of tracking X,” but maintains that the relevant notion of function is defined by Robert Cummins’s account. Thus, CFA offers a notion of neural representation that is dependent on explanatory context. I argue that CFA can account for the (...) normativity of neural representations, and defend its dependence on explanations. (shrink)

Are there moral rights to do moral wrong? A right to do wrong is a right that others not interfere with the right-holder’s wrongdoing. It is a right against enforcement of duty, that is a right that others not interfere with one’s violation of one’s own obligations. The strongest reason for moral rights to do moral wrong is grounded in the value of personal autonomy. Having a measure of protected choice (that is a right) to do wrong is a condition (...) for an autonomous life and for autonomous moral self-constitution. This view has its critics. Responding to these objections reveals that none refute the coherence of the concept of a ‘moral right to do moral wrong’. At most, some objections successfully challenge the weight and frequency of the personal autonomy reasons for such rights. Autonomy-based moral rights to do moral wrong are therefore conceptually possible as well as, at least on occasion, actual. (shrink)

We report a series of experiments examining whether people ascribe knowledge for true beliefs based on probabilistic evidence. Participants were less likely to ascribe knowledge for beliefs based on probabilistic evidence than for beliefs based on perceptual evidence or testimony providing causal information. Denial of knowledge for beliefs based on probabilistic evidence did not arise because participants viewed such beliefs as unjustified, nor because such beliefs leave open the possibility of error. These findings rule out traditional philosophical accounts for why (...) probabilistic evidence does not produce knowledge. The experiments instead suggest that people deny knowledge because they distrust drawing conclusions about an individual based on reasoning about the population to which it belongs, a tendency previously identified by “judgment and decision making” researchers. Consistent with this, participants were more willing to ascribe knowledge for beliefs based on probabilistic evidence that is specific to a particular case. 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Speaking with conversational AIs, technologies whose interfaces enable human-like interaction based on natural language, has become a common phenomenon. During these interactions, people form their beliefs due to the say-so of conversational AIs. In this paper, I consider, and then reject, the concepts of testimony-based beliefs and instrument-based beliefs as suitable for analysis of beliefs acquired from these technologies. I argue that the concept of instrument-based beliefs acknowledges the non-human agency of the source of the belief. However, the analysis focuses (...) on perceiving signs and indicators rather than content expressed in natural language. At the same time, the concept of testimony-based beliefs does refer to natural language propositions, but there is an underlying assumption that the agency of the testifier is human. To fill the lacuna of analyzing belief acquisition from conversational AIs, I suggest a third concept: technology-based beliefs. It acknowledges the non-human agency-status of the originator of the belief. Concurrently, the focus of analysis is on the propositional content that forms the belief. Filling the lacuna enables analysis that considers epistemic, ethical, and social issues of conversational AIs without excluding propositional content or compromising accepted assumptions about the agency of technologies. (shrink)

The article discusses a set of emerging techno-social practices that transform interpersonal interactions into acts of production of valuable, durable objects such as SNS-posts and videos. These practices rely on a new attentiveness towards the world as Bestand/resource, from which value may be extracted. The rise of these practices and modes of attention obviously relies on new production and dissemination of technological infrastructures, but it also relies on and contributes to the evolution of hyperrational subjectivity, which is compatible with the (...) demands of late-modern economies. Like corporations, ordinary people come to view leisure time interpersonal interactions as sites for the extraction of value through their objectification. The article demonstrates how the objectification and productivization of events remoulds both common everyday practices and extreme forms of criminality, all sharing a common cultural logic. (shrink)

There is an existing debate regarding the view that technological instruments, devices, or machines can assert ‎or testify. A standard view in epistemology is that only humans can testify. However, the notion of quasi-‎testimony acknowledges that technological devices can assert or testify under some conditions, without ‎denying that humans and machines are not the same. Indeed, there are four relevant differences between ‎humans and instruments. First, unlike humans, machine assertion is not imaginative or playful. Second, ‎machine assertion is prescripted and (...) context restricted. As such, computers currently cannot easily switch ‎contexts or make meaningful relevant assertions in contexts for which they were not programmed. Third, ‎while both humans and computers make errors, they do so in different ways. Computers are very sensitive to ‎small errors in input, which may cause them to make big errors in output. Moreover, automatic error control ‎is based on finding irregularities in data without trying to establish whether they make sense. Fourth, ‎testimony is produced by a human with moral worth, while quasi-testimony is not. Ultimately, the notion of ‎quasi-testimony can serve as a bridge between different philosophical fields that deal with instruments and ‎testimony as sources of knowledge, allowing them to converse and agree on a shared description of reality, ‎while maintaining their distinct conceptions and ontological commitments about knowledge, humans, and ‎nonhumans.‎. (shrink)

Trump’s crusade against PC played a key role in his political rhetoric and resonated well among his supporters, yet his notion of PC differed greatly in meaning from earlier uses of the term and was used to denounce a much wider range of socio-political behaviors. Based on a systematic analysis of Trump’s use of this notion, I identified five main normative propositions organizing Trump’s anti-PC rhetoric. Viewed together, these propositions add up to a rehabilitation of White working-class culture but also (...) outline an emerging late-modern version of the authenticity ethic, whose power extends far beyond the working class. This ethic (as manifested in Trump’s anti-PC rhetoric) transforms the role of morality and the sacred in political drama and in symbolic struggles over social worth. Rather than presenting his commitment to moral values, ideals, and allegedly-universal rules, Trump used anti-PC rhetoric to expose and criticize the symbolic self-interests of others who speak on behalf of these values, rules, and ideals to claim superiority (and thus ironically mimicked the sociological critique of symbolic violence to legitimize bigotry). Yet, the sacred is not completely banished from political drama: authenticity as a principle of worth guiding moral evaluation and argumentation is revealed as a sacred in denial. The case of Trump’s anti-PC rhetoric thus allows theorizing the implications of the authenticity ethic for the dynamics of social struggles over recognized worth and for the role of ideals in the presentation of self in politics and beyond. (shrink)

This essay offers a new reading of Xunzi’s ritual theory against the backdrop of excavated technical manuals from the Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan collections. While most studies tend to focus on the sociopolitical and moral aspects of Xunzi’s thought, I attempt to demonstrate that in composing his theory of ritual, Xunzi was not only concerned with defending the Confucian tradition against the criticism of his fellow philosophical masters, but was also responding to the emergence of bio-spiritual practices such as meditation, sexual (...) cultivation, and gymnastic exercises. Alarmed by the growing popularity of these individual corporal techniques among the Warring States elite, Xunzi opted to repackage and redefine ritual as a superior technology of the body that would enable humans to transform their bodies and minds and obtain physical and spiritual bounties while at the same time enhancing sociopolitical stability and harmony by creating an organic communal body. (shrink)

This book argues that words and thoughts are typically about whatever they are about necessarily rather than contingently. The argument proceeds by articulating a requisite modal background and then bringing this background to bear on cognitive matters, notably the intentionality of cognitive episodes and states. The modal picture that emerges from the first two chapters is a strongly particularist one whereby possibilities reduce to possibilities for particular things (or pluralities thereof) where the latter are determined by the natures of the (...) particular things (or pluralities) involved. The next three chapters are devoted to the aboutness of referring terms in language and thought. The approach espoused is, again, strongly particularist in allotting explanatory priority to cognitive episodes and states regarding particular things (aka de re attitudes). (shrink)

Fatherly love should be evident in caring for the health and good of one's children, seeking to safeguard them from harm and to encourage their integrity. However, in Star Wars, Darth Vader promises his son's survival only on the condition that Luke Skywalker will serve his own monstrous, tyrannical master. Utilizing a philosophy of love and goodness to show how the parent–child relationship may be lost or regained, this chapter examines the transition in Anakin's life from a natural love of (...) others to a distorted, toxic caricature of love. The drama and trauma displayed in Star Wars allow us to recognize how an admirable love can lose its value, and in fact can become what motivates people to outrageously wicked acts. The chapter highlights that the good of the love in such relationships needs to be tempered by humility and wisdom. (shrink)

In many conflict situations, defense is easier to mobilize than attack. However, a number of factors, namely, the initial endowments available to each side, the stakes of the conflict, the respective costs of defense and attack, and the way that conflict is framed and perceived, may make attacking more attractive than defending.

Bermúdez argues for rational framing effects based on normatively appropriate quasi-cyclical preferences. We suggest that this argument conflates preferences over specific outcomes with preferences over outcome aspects. Instead of implying quasi-cyclical preferences, framing affects decisions through standard economic trade-offs. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that framing can affect behavior through altering perceptions of particular outcome aspects when framing effects are not decomposable.

Some believe that the harm or benefit of existence is assessed by comparing a person's actual state of wellbeing with the level of wellbeing they would have had had they never existed. This approach relies on ascribing a state or level of wellbeing to ‘nonexistent people’, which seems a peculiar practice: how can we attribute wellbeing to a ‘nonexistent person'? To explain away this oddity, some have argued that because no properties of wellbeing can be attributed to ‘nonexistent people’ such (...) people may be ascribed a neutral or zero level of wellbeing, setting the baseline for comparatively assessing the harm or benefit of coming into existence. However, this line of argumentation conflates the category of having zero wellbeing with the category of having no wellbeing. No Φ, unlike a zero level of Φ, is not comparable to levels of Φ — neutral, positive, or negative. Considering the nature of wellbeing and the fact that ‘nonexistent people’ cannot (metaphysically or conceptually) have wellbeing determinative properties, it follows that ‘nonexistent people’ have no wellbeing rather than zero wellbeing. (shrink)

The ability to engage in and recognize pretend play begins around 18 months. A major challenge for theories of pretense is explaining how children are able to engage in pretense, and how they are able to recognize pretense in others. According to one major account, the metarepresentational theory, young children possess both production and recognition abilities because they possess the mental state concept, PRETEND. According to a more recent rival account, the Behavioral theory, young children are behaviorists about pretense, and (...) only produce and recognize pretense as a sort of behavior--namely, behaving 'as-if'. We review both the metarepresentational and Behavioral accounts and argue that the Behavioral theory fails to characterize very young children's abilities to produce and to recognize pretense. Among other problems, the Behavioral theory implies that children should frequently mis-recognize regular behavior as pretense, while certain regular forms of pretend play should neither be produced nor recognized. Like other mental states, pretense eludes purely behavioral description. The metarepresentational theory does not suffer these problems and provides a better account of children's pretense. 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

A basic problem of daily life is determining who owns what. One way that people may solve this problem is by relying on a ‘first possession’ heuristic, according to which the first person who possesses an object is its owner, even if others subsequently possess the object. We investigated preschoolers’ use of this heuristic in five experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, 3- and 4-year-olds inferred that an object was owned by the character who possessed it first, even though another (...) character subsequently possessed it. Two-year-olds also showed this bias, but only when the object was placed between the characters when children were asked about ownership. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility that children’s bias to select the first possessor results from a tendency to select the character first associated with the object. Experiment 4 showed that 3- and 4-year-olds have difficulty disregarding the first possession heuristic, even when provided with evidence that the character who first possessed an object is not its owner. But Experiment 5 found that children can disregard the heuristic in at least some situations. These five experiments suggest that the first possession heuristic guides children’s ownership inferences. The findings provide the first evidence that preschoolers can infer who owns what, when not explicitly told, and when not reasoning about objects with which they are personally acquainted. (shrink)

While Foucault referred to Benjamin just once in his entire corpus, scholars have long noticed affinities between the two thinkers, mainly between their conceptions of history: their emphasis on discontinuity, their historiographical practices, and the role of archives in their work. This essay focuses, rather, on their practice of critique and, more specifically, on their conception of the relation of this practice to exercise or askesis. I examine the role of askesis as a self-transformative exercise in Foucault’s late work and (...) how this concept reverberates throughout his idea of critique as the exercise of an ethos demanding arduous work. Against this background, the role of exercise (Übung) in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Traeurspiel, his interest in ascetic kinds of exercise or schooling, and its ties to critique are discerned. This comparison reveals significant similarities in Foucault’s and Benjamin’s conception of philosophy, as well as different emphases in their inheritance of the Kantian critical project: critique as an exercise of an attitude attentive to possibilities for transformation in the present vs. critique as involving an attitude-transforming exercise; critique as a modern ethos that needs to be reactivated vs. critique as propaedeutic, as a preparation for a modern tradition. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a reflection on his Marxist past, J. F. Lyotard described a différend between himself and the revolutionary discourse. This might also represent the relations between the latter and the contemporary discourse of resistance, with its characteristic fascination with non-teleological political action. The disdain for teleology apparently justifies the incommensurability of these discourses, thus disabling any inheritance of elements of the revolutionary tradition. This essay challenges the unbridgeable nature of this gap and explores alternative relations between the two discourses, (...) such as mimetic ones, by reading Walter Benjamin's somewhat neglected fragments on barricades in his Arcades Project. Benjamin's concept of interruption – celebrated by contemporary theorists of resistance – alongside his non-teleological concept of revolution, provides the theoretical armature for this task. Thus, I use barricades, commonly conceived as the emblem of the revolutionary tradition, in order to reconsider the possibility of inheriting aspects of this tradition in times in which the predominant discourse is that of resistance. (shrink)

Why does Walter Benjamin claim “indirection” to be the proper method for philosophical contemplation and writing? Why is this method—embodied, according to Benjamin, in the convoluted form of scholastic treatises and in their use of citations—fundamental for understanding his Origin of German Trauerspiel as suggesting an alternative to most strands of modern philosophy? The explicit and well-studied function of this method is for the presentation of what cannot be represented in language, of what cannot be intended or approached in thinking. (...) Namely, of what Benjamin understands as “truth.” Indeed, as Adorno implied, providing a method for presenting an intentionless reality, rather than for re-presenting the world as corresponding to the mind, is revolutionary. However, I claim that beyond its presentational function, the method of indirection has a further, pedagogical function. Benjamin’s concept of truth requires thinking in a manner that does not impose any exterior form, any conceptual or intuitive intention on truth and the materials in which it might be exhibited. The methodological adoption of digressive and intermittent writing is supposed to transform the way we think, or more accurately, the position from which thinking occurs. By examining Benjamin’s use of pedagogical terms against the backdrop of scholastic history and the Urfigure of modern method, that of Descartes, I show that writing and reading in the form of the tractatus serves as exercise in receding from the subject-position—a position of a subject intending an object—and thus conditions the presentation of intentionless truth. (shrink)

I consider two competing approaches to metasemantics: productivism, whereby endowment with semantic significance emerges directly from conditions surrounding the production or employment of the items semantically endowed; and interpretationism, whereby endowment with semantic significance emerges directly from conditions surrounding the interpretive consumption of such items. Focusing on the version of interpretationism developed by Lewis and his followers, I present a novel argument to the conclusion that such an approach cannot secure determinacy for singular reference. I then draw a larger moral (...) for metasemantics and its relation to truth-conditional semantics. (shrink)

Prominent thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas and Michael Sandel are warning that biomedical enhancements will undermine fundamental political values. Yet whether biomedical enhancements will undermine such values depends on how biomedical enhancements will function, how they will be administered and to whom. Since only few enhancements are obtainable, it is difficult to tell whether these predictions are sound. Nevertheless, such warnings are extremely valuable. As a society we must, at the very least, be aware of developments that could have harmful (...) consequences. Indeed, if important values were to be jeopardized, we should take appropriate measures to protect them. This paper focuses on four central values: solidarity, personal responsibility, equality and autonomy. It delineates the conditions under which biomedical enhancements would undermine these values. It also details the circumstances under which these values would be unaffected by enhancements as well as those under which they would be promoted. Specifying these conditions is valuable; it would enable society to prepare appropriate ethical guidelines and policy responses in advance. (shrink)

More than 1.2 million people are killed annually in road crashes all over the world, and still it seems that philosophers and, perhaps more importantly, professional ethicists have not devoted thought to the many moral issues that road traffic was bound to create. This article tries to understand why road ethics is all but ignored by philosophers and ethicists, and makes a plea for a change. By exploring ethically the traffic safety problem of speeding it will be shown that ethical (...) analysis is not only appropriate but mandatory. (shrink)