In Freedom: An Impossible Reality, Ray Tallis argues that we escape imprisonment by causal determinism, and thus gain free will, by the virtual distance from natural laws afforded us by intentionality, a human capacity that he claims cannot be naturalized. I respond that we can’t know in advance that intentionality will never be subsumed by science, and that our capacities to entertain possibilities and decide among them are natural cognitive endowments that supervene on generally reliable neural processes. Moreover, any disconnection (...) from the multi-level determinants that account for human behavior cannot augment, but would likely undermine, effective human agency. Our full inclusion in nature, understood in terms of a pragmatic, explanatory determinism, is therefore not a prison from which we need to escape. (shrink)

The words quoted above distill the common secular conception of death. If we decline the traditional religious reassurances of an afterlife, or their fuzzy new age equivalents, and instead take the hard-boiled and thoroughly modern materialist view of death, then we likely end up with Gonzalez-Cruzzi. Rejecting visions of reunions with loved ones or of crossing over into the light, we anticipate the opposite: darkness, silence, an engulfing emptiness. But we would be wrong.

The enduring metaphysical question about minds and mental phenomena concerns their nature. At least since Descartes this question—the mind-body problem—has been understood in terms of the viability or necessity of mind-body dualism, the thesis that minds and bodies are essentially distinct kinds of substance. Assuming that the nonmental (‘body’) portions of the world are constituted of physical stuff, the remaining question is: Are minds or mental phenomena essentially distinct non-physical substances, or phenomena that essentially involve such distinct kinds of substances? (...) By the middle of the Twentieth Century there was broad philosophical and scientific consensus that the answer to this classical question about minds is negative: Minds and mental phenomena are not essentially distinct substances, nor are they phenomena that essentially involve distinct kinds of substances. There are at least two broad trends and one specific argument that lead to this conclusion. One trend is the decreasing influence of specifically theological arguments and commitments in philosophical argumentation, so that religious belief in immortal souls was no longer given much weight in the ontology of mind. The second trend, perhaps related to the first, is the increased demand that metaphysical theories bear explanatory fruits, so that the postulation of an immaterial and essentially mental substance appears to be a abdication from explanatory duties rather than a useful proposal. The argument, known to Descartes from the very beginning, is that there has never been an adequate account of 1 how two essentially distinct and incompatible substances could causally interact.1 Descartes’ solution was inadequate and brute, and his followers struggled with the problem—leading to Leibniz’s parallelism and Malebranche’s occasionalism, among other views. The problem of mental causation, then, is the central difficulty that underines substance dualism.2 The negative answer on the question of substance dualism, however, only increases the pressure for some monistic account of the nature of minds.. (shrink)

THE INTERPRETIVE TASK The aim of ethical inquiry is to understand moral experience, not simply as a given, but with reference to human potentialities. ...

This chapter contains sections titled: Background: mapping the field of business ethics The evolution of social contract approaches to business ethics Integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) Remaining issues and promising research directions for contractarian business ethics.

Existentialism has come to be identified as a critical, reactionary way of thinking, celebrating the individual, freedom, embodiment, and the limits of rationality and systematic theorizing. For the most part this assessment is true of the early and, by now, "classical" works of existentialism, those that first burst upon the philosophical and cultural scene. Circulating Being centers on the later works of several well-known French existentialists to trace out the development of their existential thinking about language, communicative life, ethics, and (...) politics. This development "from embodiment to incorporation" carries existentialism beyond identification with the mere reactionary and reveals how, while prefiguring postmodernism in important ways, the existential thinkers dealt with here reveal themselves to be reconstructive of the Western tradition. This is apparent in the growing appreciation of difference in their late works along with a reluctance to surrender the ideal of unity, and in their reappropriation of truth and justice while repudiating a totalizing metaphysics. (shrink)

This study explores Nietzsche's political education as a means of understanding his wider political thought. Incorporating biographical details of Nietzsche's own education, it outlines the course of political education that Nietzsche recommends as an antidote to the crisis in Western European culture. Heilke begins by examining Nietzsche's formulation of this crisis, especially his conceptions of "Romantic Pessimism," "Socratism," and Christianity. For Nietzsche, only a properly ordered education could resolve the problem of how one can transform a society whose fundamental cultural (...) and political premises one rejects. Through education Nietzsche sought to establish a new political and social system founded upon the principles of tragedy and grounded in the aesthetic tradition of German Romanticism. Nietzsche's Tragic Regime focuses on Nietzsche's political philosophy until his resignation from his post as professor in 1876, with attention also to the later writings. (shrink)

PROLOGUE: HOSPITALITY TO THE STRANGER AS METAPHOR FOR THE MORAL LIFE You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, ...

Since Hilary Putnam offered multiple realization as an empirical hypothesis in the 1960s, philosophical consensus has turned against the idea that mental processes are identifiable with brain processes, and multiple realization has become the keystone of the 'antireductive consensus' across philosophy of science. Thomas W. Polger and Lawrence A. Shapiro offer the first book-length investigation of multiple realization, which serves as a starting point to a series of philosophically sophisticated and empirically informed arguments that cast doubt on the generality (...) of multiple realization in the cognitive sciences. They argue that mind-brain identities have played an important role in the growth and achievements of the cognitive sciences, and suggest that there is little prospect for multiple realization in an empirically-based theory of mind. This leads Polger and Shapiro to offer an alternative framework for understanding explanations in the cognitive sciences, as well as in chemistry, biology, and other non-basic sciences. (shrink)

In Natural Minds Thomas Polger advocates, and defends, the philosophical theory that mind equals brain -- that sensations are brain processes -- and in doing so brings the mind-brain identity theory back into the philosophical debate about consciousness. The version of identity theory that Polger advocates holds that conscious processes, events, states, or properties are type- identical to biological processes, events, states, or properties -- a "tough-minded" account that maintains that minds are necessarily indentical to brains, a position held (...) by few current identity theorists. Polger's approach to what William James called the "great blooming buzzing confusion" of consciousness begins with the idea that we need to know more about brains in order to understand consciousness fully, but recognizes that biology alone cannot provide the entire explanation. Natural Minds takes on issues from philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and metaphysics, moving freely among them in its discussion.Polger begins by answering two major objections to identity theory -- Hilary Putnam's argument from multiple realizability and Saul Kripke's modal argument against mind-brain identity. He then offers a detailed account of functionalism and functional realization, which offer the most serious obstacle to consideration of identity theory. Polger argues that identity theory can itself satisfy the kind of explanatory demands that are often believed to favor functionalism. (shrink)

May lethal autonomous weapons systems—‘killer robots ’—be used in war? The majority of writers argue against their use, and those who have argued in favour have done so on a consequentialist basis. We defend the moral permissibility of killer robots, but on the basis of the non-aggregative structure of right assumed by Just War theory. This is necessary because the most important argument against killer robots, the responsibility trilemma proposed by Rob Sparrow, makes the same assumptions. We show that the (...) crucial moral question is not one of responsibility. Rather, it is whether the technology can satisfy the requirements of fairness in the re-distribution of risk. Not only is this possible in principle, but some killer robots will actually satisfy these requirements. An implication of our argument is that there is a public responsibility to regulate killer robots ’ design and manufacture. (shrink)

This paper critiques the view that consciousness is likely something extra which accompanies or is produced by neural states, something beyond the functional cognitive processes realized in the brain. Such a view creates the `explanatory gap'between function and nomenology which many suppose cannot be filled by functionalist theories of mind. Given methodological considerations of simplicity, ontological parsimony, and theoretical conservatism, an alternative hypothesis is recommended, that subjective qualitative experience is identical to certain information-bearing, behaviour-controlling functions, not something which emerges from (...) them. This hypothesis explains the isomorphism between the structure of experience and neural organization, while providing a naturalistic account of qualiait's relational properties of informational states, not a sparate ontology of phenomenal essences. On this functionalist view, the hard, empirical problem of consciousness is to discover precisely which neural functions constitute subjective experience. (shrink)

Trust is difficult to define. Instead of doing so, I propose that the best way to understand the concept is through a genealogical account. I show how a root notion of trust arises out of some basic features of what it is for humans to live socially, in which we rely on others to act cooperatively. I explore how this concept acquires resonances of hope and threat, and how we analogically apply this in related but different contexts. The genealogical account (...) explains both why the notion has such value for us and why it is difficult to define. (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness is often thought to involve a first-person perspective or point of view which makes available to the subject categorically private, first-person facts about experience, facts that are irreducible to third-person physical, functional, or representational facts. This paper seeks to show that on a representational account of consciousness, we don't have an observational perspective on experience that gives access to such facts, although our representational limitations and the phenomenal structure of consciousness make it strongly seem that we do. Qualia (...) seem intrinsic and functionally arbitrary, and thus categorically private, because they are first-order sensory representations that are not themselves directly represented. Further, the representational architecture that on this account instantiates conscious subjectivity helps to generate the intuition of observerhood, since the phenomenal subject may be construed as outside, not within, experience. Once the seemings of private phenomenal facts and the observing subject are discounted, we can understand consciousness as a certain variety of neurally instantiated, behaviour controlling content, that constituted by an integrated representation of the organism in the world. Neuroscientific research suggests that consciousness and its characteristic behavioural capacities are supported by widely distributed but highly integrated neural processes involving communication between multiple functional sub- systems in the brain. This 'global workspace' may be the brain's physical realization of the representational architecture that constitutes consciousness. (shrink)

This article develops a social epistemological analysis of Web-based search engines, addressing the following questions. First, what epistemic functions do search engines perform? Second, what dimensions of assessment are appropriate for the epistemic evaluation of search engines? Third, how well do current search engines perform on these? The article explains why they fulfil the role of a surrogate expert, and proposes three ways of assessing their utility as an epistemic tool—timeliness, authority prioritisation, and objectivity. “Personalisation” is a current trend in (...) Internet-delivered services, and consists in tailoring online content to the interests of the individual user. It is argued here that personalisation threatens the objectivity of search results. Objectivity is a public good; so there is a prima facie case for government regulation of search engines. (shrink)

"Displaying a masterful grasp of the texts, the author shows how otherness forces itself upon the existentialist Sartre, gradually constraining him to modify his understanding of consciousness as omnipotent. The issue is Sartre’s discovery of the social and its conceptual assimilation into his individualistic, consciousness-oriented philosophy." —Thomas R. Flynn "This very successful and accessible scholarly book... is simultaneously a succinct and clear overview of Sartre’s philosophical works.... and a fresh consideration of Sartre’s body of work." —Choice "Busch’s admirably clear (...) and compact discussion is essential reading for Sartre scholars, since it powerfully addresses many issues dividing them... " —Ethics "... a useful overview of the evolution of Sartre’s thought... " —Review of Politics "... a thought provoking reassessment of Sartre's philosophical career." —Man and World "... succinct, richly documented survey... " —International Studies in Philosophy. (shrink)

The brain disease model of addiction is widely endorsed by agencies concerned with treating behavioral disorders and combatting the stigma often associated with addiction. However, both its accuracy and its effectiveness in reducing stigma have been challenged. A proposed alternative, the “choice” model, recognizes the residual rational behavior control capacities of addicted individuals and their ability to make choices, some of which may cause harm. Since harmful choices are ordinarily perceived as blameworthy, the choice model may inadvertently help justify stigma. (...) This paper seeks to fully naturalize the choice model by highlighting the determinants of voluntary action and thus increase its potential for destigmatizing addiction. In light of a deterministic understanding of behavior, it is unreasonable to suppose that addicted individuals could have made different choices in becoming addicted and in subsequent situations. To the extent that stigma is motivated by the supposition that addicted individuals could have chosen otherwise in actual situations, a deterministic understanding of addictive behavior promises to mitigate blame and stigma. (shrink)

Extant social contracts, deriving from communities of individuals, constitute a significant source of ethical norms in business. When found consistent with general ethical theories through the application of a filtering test, these real social contracts generate prima facie duties of compliance on the part of those who expressly or impliedly consent to the terms of the social contract, and also on the part of those who take advantage of the instrumental value of the social contracts. Businesspeople typically participate in multiple (...) communities and, as a consequence, encounter conflicting ethical norms. Priority rules can be devised to resolve such conflicts. The framework of extant social contracts merges normative and theoretical research in business ethics and specifies a domain for empirical studies. (shrink)

With each of our three criminal-law topics—defining offenses, apprehending suspects, and establishing punishments—we feel, I believe, strong moral resistance to the idea that our practices should be settled by a prospective-participant perspective. This becomes quite clear when we look at how the “reforms” suggested by institutional viewing might combine once we consider all three topics together: imagine a more extensive and swifter use of the death penalty in homicide cases coupled with somewhat lower standards of evidence; or think of backing (...) a strict-liability criminal statute with the death penalty. Of course, such “reforms” would increase the execution of innocents; but, their proponents will tell us, any penal system involves the punishment of some innocents, and, if it provides for the death penalty, the execution of some innocents. Moreover, why is it worse for innocents to be punished than for innocents to suffer an equivalent harm in some other way? Formulated from a prospective-participant perspective: Why not run a small risk of being innocently executed in exchange for reducing, much more significantly, the risk of dying prematurely in other ways? (shrink)

During the past ten years Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) has become part of the repertoire of specialized decision-oriented theories in the business ethics literature. The intention here is to (1)␣provide a brief overview of the structure and strengths of ISCT; (2) identify recurring themes in the extensive commentary on the theory including brief mention of how ISCT has been applied outside the business ethics literature; (3) describe where research appears to be headed; and (4) specify challenges faced by those (...) who seek to reform ISCT. Key themes in the critiquing literature relate to (a) the identification process for hypernorms; (b) justification of the recognition of hypernorms; (c) proposals for considering meso or meta norms; (d)␣clarification of the relationship between stakeholder concepts and ISCT; (e) problems with potentially unoccupied moral free space; (f) sources of ethical obligation within the ISCT framework; and (g) the potential role for concepts of stakeholder dialogue and engagement. (shrink)

This paper extends the discussion of guanxi beyond instrumental evaluations and advances a normative assessment of guanxi. Our discussion departs from previous analyses by not merely asking, Does guanxi work? but rather Should corporations use guanxi? The analysis begins with a review of traditional guanxi definitions and the changing economic and legal environment in China, both necessary precursors to understanding the role of guanxi in Chinese business transactions. This review leads us to suggest that there are distinct types of, and (...) uses for guanxi. We identify the potentially problematic aspects of certain forms of guanxi from a normative perspective, noting among other things, the close association of particular types of guanxi with corruption and bribery. We conclude that there are many different forms of guanxi that may have distinct impacts on economic efficiency and the well-being of ordinary Chinese citizens. Consistent with Donaldson and Dunfee (1999), we advocate a particularistic analysis of the different forms of guanxi. (shrink)

This thesis examines Kant's and Nietzsche's treatments of the moral agent. It argues for three broad conclusions. Firstly, it argues that, although Nietzsche's explicit criticisms of Kant's conception of the moral agent can be understood only in the context of Nietzsche's broader moral philosophy, neither these criticisms nor their context are well understood by the prevailing literature. The thesis thus engages with existing scholarship on the nature of Nietzsche's moral philosophy and with the scanty literature on the relationship between Kant's (...) and Nietzsche's moral philosophies. Secondly, the thesis argues that Kant's conception of the moral agent is not undermined by the criticisms which Nietzsche explicitly levels at it, or, indeed, by others which are commonly made in Nietzsche's name. In doing so, the thesis combines original interpretations of Kant with elements of recent Kant scholarship. Finally, however, the thesis argues that neglected elements of Nietzsche's own moral philosophy provide for a more sophisticated, telling, and, indeed, original critical engagement with Kant's conception of the moral agent is not undermined by the criticisms which Nietzsche explicitly levels at it, or, indeed, by others which are commonly made in Nietzsche's name. In doing so, the thesis combines original interpretations of Kant with elements of recent Kant scholarship. Finally, however, the thesis argues that neglected elements of Nietzsche's own moral philosophy provide for a more sophisticated, telling, and, indeed, original critical engagement with Kant's conception of the moral agent. Thus the thesis defends an original interpretation of Nietzsche's moral philosophy and its critical relation to Kant's, and demonstrates the pertinence of a certain neglected critical approach to Kant's conception of the moral agent. On the basis of these conclusions, the thesis ultimately defends a conception of the moral agent which, although Kantian, owes something to both Kant and Nietzsche. (shrink)

Contributors from several countries discuss the central moral issues arising in the emerging global order: the responsibilities of the strongest societies, moral priorities for the next decades, and the role of intellectuals in view of the huge gap between widely expressed moral ambitions and prevailing political and economic realities.