This book presents a theoretical treatment of externalities, public goods, and club goods. The new edition updates and expands the discussion of externalities and their implications, coverage of asymmetric information, underlying game-theoretic formulations, and intuitive and graphical presentations. Aimed at well-prepared undergraduates and graduate students making a serious foray into this branch of economics, the analysis should also interest professional economists wishing to survey recent advances in the field. No other single source for the range of materials explored is currently (...) available. Topics investigated include Nash equilibrium, Lindahl equilibria, club theory, preference-revelation mechanism, Pigouvian taxes, the commons, Coase Theorem, and static and repeated games. The authors use mathematical techniques only as much as necessary to pursue the economic argument. They develop key principles of public economics that are useful for subfields such as public choice, labor economics, economic growth, international economics, environmental and natural resource economics, and industrial organization. (shrink)

Humans and many other species selectively attend to stimuli or stimulus dimensions—but why should an animal constrain information input in this way? To investigate the adaptive functions of attention, we used a genetic algorithm to evolve simple connectionist networks that had to make categorization decisions in a variety of environmental structures. The results of these simulations show that while learned attention is not universally adaptive, its benefit is not restricted to the reduction of input complexity in order to keep it (...) within an organism's processing capacity limitations. Instead, being able to shift attention provides adaptive benefit by allowing faster learning with fewer errors in a range of ecologically plausible environments. (shrink)

Several theoretical perspectives have generated research on grandparental investment, notably socialization and evolutionary psychological perspectives. Using data collected from more than 200 older adults (mean age 67 years), we test three hypotheses derived from socialization and evolutionary perspectives about grandparents’ relationships with and investment in grandchildren. Results indicate that (1) emotional closeness with both children and children-in-law is positively related to reports of emotional closeness with grandchildren; (2) maternal grandmothers invest more in grandchildren than do other grandparents; and (3) grandparents (...) invest more in daughters’ children than in sons’ children. Discussion addresses limitations of self-report methodology in this context and situates the current findings within the body of research indicating the existence of psychological mechanisms designed to guide differential nepotism. (shrink)

Analyses of between-sex differences have provided a powerful starting point for evolutionarily informed work on human sexuality. This early work set the stage for an evolutionary analysis of within-sex differences in human sexuality. A comprehensive theory of human sexual strategies must address both between-sex differences and within-sex differences in evolved psychology and manifest behavior.

Young men are more distressed by a partner’s sexual infidelity, whereas young women are more distressed by a partner’s emotional infidelity. The present research investigated (a) whether the sex difference in jealousy replicates in an older sample, and (b) whether younger people differ from older people in their selection of the more distressing infidelity scenario. We presented forced-choice dilemmas to 202 older people (mean age = 67 years) and to 234 younger people (mean age = 20 years). The sex difference (...) replicated in the older sample. In addition, older women were less likely than younger women to select a partner’s emotional infidelity as more distressing than a partner’s sexual infidelity. Discussion offers directions for future work on sex differences and age differences in jealousy. (shrink)

Using data collected from people with at least one brother and one sister, and consistent with an evolutionary perspective, we find that older men and women (a) are more upset by a brother’s partner’s sexual infidelity than by her emotional infidelity and (b) are more upset by a sister’s partner’s emotional infidelity than by his sexual infidelity. There were no effects of participant sex or sex of in-law on upset over a sibling’s partner’s infidelities, but there was an effect of (...) participant sex on reports of upset over one’s own partner’s infidelities. The results suggest that the key variable among older participants is the sex of the sibling or, correspondingly, the sex of the sibling’s partner, as predicted from an evolutionary analysis of reproductive costs, and not the sex of the participant, as predicted from a socialization perspective. Discussion offers directions for future work on jealousy. (shrink)

In The Sufi Doctrine of Man , Richard Todd examines the life and thought of Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī , Ibn 'Arabī's chief disciple and a key figure in the development of Sufi metaphysics.

Discourse topic is an intractable and inherently subjective notion making analysis problematic. This paper overcomes some of the problems by treating topic as a fuzzy concept and views discourse topics as sets of topic keywords. The study examines the identification of topic boundaries and topic keywords by informants and by four methods of analyzing topics — topical structure analysis, given-new progression, lexical analysis, and topic-based analysis. Comparing the findings from these four methods against those from the informants, it was found (...) that given-new progression is the most valid method for identifying topic boundaries, and topic-based analysis is the most valid for identifying topic keywords. There are also notable differences in the types of keywords identified and the bases for identifying keywords between the methods and the informants. (shrink)

During meiosis, homologous chromosomes must pair in order to permit recombination and correct chromosome segregation to occur. Two recent papers1,2 show that meiotic pairing is also important for correct gene expression during meiosis. They describe data for the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa that show that a lack of pairing generated by ectopic integration of genes can result in silencing of genes expressed during meiosis. This can result in aberrant meioses whose defects are specific to the function of the unpaired gene. (...) Furthermore, mutations affecting the silencing mechanism have been selected in a gene encoding a putative RNA‐dependent RNA polymerase. This finding indicates the involvement of a meiotic specific post‐transcriptional gene silencing mechanism (PTGS) similar to that observed in vegetative cells in N. crassa and other organisms. Finally, this gene product is essential for normal meiosis, suggesting that RNA‐dependent processes are fundamental to the sexual cycle. BioEssays 25:99–103, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Wattpad is a popular online writing website in which individuals write, upload, and comment on original stories. In 2020, the platform had more than a hundred million registered users. In this article, we use a mixture of close and distant reading methods to study how lay authors wrote about the COVID-19 global pandemic during its first year. We examine some of the formal and generic norms these authors used to narrativize this event; how such norms evolved over time as the (...) pandemic dragged on; and how these online COVID stories differ from more established online genres, such as mystery and romance. Overall, this article explores how a large reading and writing public, leveraging the novel affordances of user generated content, came to respond to a massive social crisis in real time, before they knew how it would end. This exploration allows us to accomplish two things. First, we are able to situate real-time pandemic stories against the retrospective narratives that we expect from literary fiction. How does writing crisis in real time and in a collaborative mode produce its own unique plot and narrative structures, and how do stories written in the immediate wake of the pandemic anticipate later mainstream cultural productions (fiction, film, television)? Second, we gain a broader understanding of how new genres of writing emerge within a cultural ecosystem increasingly defined by generic predictability and the recycling of familiar cultural intellectual property (IP), such as The Avengers and Harry Potter. COVID-19 dramatically disrupted global economic, political, and health systems. How did it also disrupt cultural systems? (shrink)

The Catholic Church proscribes methods of birth control other than sexual abstinence. Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recognizes abstinence as an acceptable method of birth control in research studies, some pharmaceutical companies mandate the use of artificial contraceptive techniques to avoid pregnancy as a condition for participation in their studies. These requirements are unacceptable at Catholic health care institutions, leading to conflicts among institutional review boards, clinical investigators, and sponsors. Subjects may feel coerced by such mandates to (...) adopt contraceptive techniques inconsistent with their personal situation and beliefs; women committed to celibacy or who engage exclusively in non-heterosexual activities are negatively impacted. We propose principles to insure informed consent to safeguard the rights of research subjects at Catholic institutions while mitigating this ethical conflict. At the same time, our proposal respects the interests of pharmaceutical research agencies and Catholic moral precepts, and fully abides by regulatory guidance. (shrink)

Can new technology enhance purpose-driven, democratic dialogue in groups, governments, and societies? Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice is the first book that attempts to sample the full range of work on online deliberation, forging new connections between academic research, technology designers, and practitioners. Since some of the most exciting innovations have occurred outside of traditional institutions, and those involved have often worked in relative isolation from each other, work in this growing field has often failed to reflect the full (...) set of perspectives on online deliberation. This volume is aimed at those working at the crossroads of information/communication technology and social science, and documents early findings in, and perspectives on, this new field by many of its pioneers. -/- CONTENTS: -/- Introduction: The Blossoming Field of Online Deliberation (Todd Davies, pp. 1-19) -/- Part I - Prospects for Online Civic Engagement -/- Chapter 1: Virtual Public Consultation: Prospects for Internet Deliberative Democracy (James S. Fishkin, pp. 23-35) -/- Chapter 2: Citizens Deliberating Online: Theory and Some Evidence (Vincent Price, pp. 37-58) -/- Chapter 3: Can Online Deliberation Improve Politics? Scientific Foundations for Success (Arthur Lupia, pp. 59-69) -/- Chapter 4: Deliberative Democracy, Online Discussion, and Project PICOLA (Public Informed Citizen Online Assembly) (Robert Cavalier with Miso Kim and Zachary Sam Zaiss, pp. 71-79) -/- Part II - Online Dialogue in the Wild -/- Chapter 5: Friends, Foes, and Fringe: Norms and Structure in Political Discussion Networks (John Kelly, Danyel Fisher, and Marc Smith, pp. 83-93) -/- Chapter 6: Searching the Net for Differences of Opinion (Warren Sack, John Kelly, and Michael Dale, pp. 95-104) -/- Chapter 7: Happy Accidents: Deliberation and Online Exposure to Opposing Views (Azi Lev-On and Bernard Manin, pp. 105-122) -/- Chapter 8: Rethinking Local Conversations on the Web (Sameer Ahuja, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, and Andrea Kavanaugh, pp. 123-129) -/- Part III - Online Public Consultation -/- Chapter 9: Deliberation in E-Rulemaking? The Problem of Mass Participation (David Schlosberg, Steve Zavestoski, and Stuart Shulman, pp. 133-148) -/- Chapter 10: Turning GOLD into EPG: Lessons from Low-Tech Democratic Experimentalism for Electronic Rulemaking and Other Ventures in Cyberdemocracy (Peter M. Shane, pp. 149-162) -/- Chapter 11: Baudrillard and the Virtual Cow: Simulation Games and Citizen Participation (Hélène Michel and Dominique Kreziak, pp. 163-166) -/- Chapter 12: Using Web-Based Group Support Systems to Enhance Procedural Fairness in Administrative Decision Making in South Africa (Hossana Twinomurinzi and Jackie Phahlamohlaka, pp. 167-169) -/- Chapter 13: Citizen Participation Is Critical: An Example from Sweden (Tomas Ohlin, pp. 171-173) -/- Part IV - Online Deliberation in Organizations -/- Chapter 14: Online Deliberation in the Government of Canada: Organizing the Back Office (Elisabeth Richard, pp. 177-191) -/- Chapter 15: Political Action and Organization Building: An Internet-Based Engagement Model (Mark Cooper, pp. 193-202) -/- Chapter 16: Wiki Collaboration Within Political Parties: Benefits and Challenges (Kate Raynes-Goldie and David Fono, pp. 203-205) -/- Chapter 17: Debian’s Democracy (Gunnar Ristroph, pp. 207-211) -/- Chapter 18: Software Support for Face-to-Face Parliamentary Procedure (Dana Dahlstrom and Bayle Shanks, pp. 213-220) -/- Part V - Online Facilitation -/- Chapter 19: Deliberation on the Net: Lessons from a Field Experiment (June Woong Rhee and Eun-mee Kim, pp. 223-232) -/- Chapter 20: The Role of the Moderator: Problems and Possibilities for Government-Run Online Discussion Forums (Scott Wright, pp. 233-242) -/- Chapter 21: Silencing the Clatter: Removing Anonymity from a Corporate Online Community (Gilly Leshed, pp. 243-251) -/- Chapter 22: Facilitation and Inclusive Deliberation (Matthias Trénel, pp. 253-257) -/- Chapter 23: Rethinking the ‘Informed’ Participant: Precautions and Recommendations for the Design of Online Deliberation (Kevin S. Ramsey and Matthew W. Wilson, pp. 259-267) -/- Chapter 24: PerlNomic: Rule Making and Enforcement in Digital Shared Spaces (Mark E. Phair and Adam Bliss, pp. 269-271) -/- Part VI - Design of Deliberation Tools -/- Chapter 25: An Online Environment for Democratic Deliberation: Motivations, Principles, and Design (Todd Davies, Brendan O’Connor, Alex Cochran, Jonathan J. Effrat, Andrew Parker, Benjamin Newman, and Aaron Tam, pp. 275-292) -/- Chapter 26: Online Civic Deliberation with E-Liberate (Douglas Schuler, pp. 293-302) -/- Chapter 27: Parliament: A Module for Parliamentary Procedure Software (Bayle Shanks and Dana Dahlstrom, pp. 303-307) -/- Chapter 28: Decision Structure: A New Approach to Three Problems in Deliberation (Raymond J. Pingree, pp. 309-316) -/- Chapter 29: Design Requirements of Argument Mapping Software for Teaching Deliberation (Matthew W. Easterday, Jordan S. Kanarek, and Maralee Harrell, pp. 317-323) -/- Chapter 30: Email-Embedded Voting with eVote/Clerk (Marilyn Davis, pp. 325-327) -/- Epilogue: Understanding Diversity in the Field of Online Deliberation (Seeta Peña Gangadharan, pp. 329-358). -/- For individual chapter downloads, go to odbook.stanford.edu. (shrink)

I answer Alvin Plantinga's challenge to provide a ‘proper’ de jure objection to religious belief. What I call the ‘sophisticates’ evidential objection' concludes that sophisticated Christians lack epistemic justification for believing central Christian propositions. The SEO utilizes a theory of epistemic justification in the spirit of the evidentialism of Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. I defend philosophical interest in the SEO against objections from Reformed epistemology, by addressing Plantinga's criteria for a proper de jure objection, his anti-evidentialist arguments, and (...) the relevance of ‘impulsional evidence’. I argue that no result from Plantinga-style Reformed epistemology precludes the reasons I offer in favour of giving the SEO its due philosophical attention. (shrink)

Todd Ryan - Berkeley et Les Philosophes du XVIIe Siecle: Perception et Scepticisme - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 402-404 Book Review Berkeley et Les Philosophes du XVIIe Siècle: Perception et Scepticisme Richard Glauser. Berkeley et Les Philosophes du XVIIe Siècle: Perception et Scepticisme. Sprimont: Mardaga, 1999. Pp. 352. Paper, NP. One of the central criticisms Berkeley makes of his materialist opponents is that they are inevitably committed to skepticism (...) concerning both the existence and nature of physical objects. This accusation is all the more striking for its uncompromising universality. Berkeley maintains that by virtue of their distinguishing between sensible ideas and the sensible qualities they represent, all materialist philosophers of the seventeenth century are either.. (shrink)

Michael Bergmann seeks to motivate his externalist, proper function theory of epistemic justification by providing three objections to the mentalism and mentalist evidentialism characteristic of nonexternalists such as Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. Bergmann argues that (i) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that justification depends on mental states; (ii) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of an epistemic input to a belief-forming process must be due to an essential feature of that input, (...) and, relatedly, that mentalist evidentialism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of doxastic response B to evidence E is an essential property of B–E; and (iii) mentalist evidentialism is “unmotivated”. I object to each argument. The argument for (i) begs the question. The argument for (ii) suffers from the fact that mentalist evidentialists are not committed to the consequences claimed for them; nevertheless, I show that there is, in the neighborhood, a substantive dispute concerning the nature of doxastic epistemic fittingness. That dispute involves what I call “Necessary Fittingness”, the view that, necessarily, exactly one (at most) doxastic attitude ( belief , or disbelief , or suspension of judgment ) toward a proposition is epistemically fitting with respect to a person’s total evidence at any time. Reflection on my super-blooper epistemic design counterexamples to Bergmann’s proper function theory reveals both the plausibility of Necessary Fittingness and a good reason to deny (iii). Mentalist evidentialism is thus vindicated against the objections. (shrink)

Poststructural criticisms of classical and neoclassical economic conceptions of human motivation and agency often include rejections of how market exchange is conceived to involve only the desires and rationality of a solitary human agent. While many of these criticisms are illuminating, they also tend not to offer a positive, constructive alternative. In this chapter, I discuss the contributions of Paul Ricoeur's understanding of mutual recognition and how it can be used--albeit perhaps despite Ricoeur's own intention and critical assessment of economics--to (...) retrieve a theory of exchange in which mutuality is possible. My analysis consists of five sections. First, I recapitulate Ricoeur’s criticism of exchange. Second, I examine how the economist Richard Ebeling attempts to read mutuality in exchange through the hermeneutics of Ricoeur and why this attempt fails. Third, I revive Ricoeur’s broader conception of value in relation to care for the other. This allows me, in the fourth section, to correlate Ricoeur’s discussion of ethical value to exchange-value. Finally, I join exchange to mutual recognition via Ricoeur’s discussion of epieikeia. (shrink)

Herodotus tells us in book vii, ch. 220, that the Pythian priestess gave the Spartans a warning couched in hexameters, of which the second line begins ἢ μγα στυ ρικυδς. To this text the admirable commentary of How and Wells takes exception in the following note: ‘The synizesis στυ ρικυδς is intolerable. Read δμ' ρικυδς, στυ being a gloss, H. Richards, Cl. Rev. xix. 345.’ Doubtless this union of vowels is harder than that of υω in ρινων or in γενων (...) and δυωδεκμηνον, accepted by Christ in his edition of Pindar . Let us grant that from the point of view of elegance it is even intolerable; the question still remains, should the line be altered? (shrink)

For the most part, the papers collected in this volume stern from presentations given at a conference held in Tucson over the weekend of May 31 through June 2, 1985. We wish to record our gratitude to the participants in that conference, as well as to the National Science Foundation and the University of Arizona SBS Research Institute for their financial support. The advice we received from Susan Steele on organizational matters proved invaluable and had many felicitous consequences for the (...) success of the con­ ference. We also would like to thank the staff of the Departments of Linguistics of the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for their help, as weIl as a number of individuals, including Lin Hall, Kathy Todd, and Jiazhen Hu, Sandra Fulmer, Maria Sandoval, Natsuko Tsujimura, Stuart Davis, Mark Lewis, Robin Schafer, Shi Zhang, Olivia Oehrle-Steele, and Paul Saka. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Martin Scrivener, our editor, for his patience and his encouragement. Vll INTRODUCTION The term 'categorial grammar' was introduced by Bar-Rillel as a handy way of grouping together some of his own earlier work and the work of the Polish logicians and philosophers Lesniewski and Ajdukiewicz, in contrast to approaches to linguistic analysis based on phrase structure grammars. (shrink)

These two books are Volumes 1 and 2 of a three-volume work; the projected third volume, Warranted Christian Belief, has yet to be published. In the first volume, Warrant: The Current Debate, Plantinga surveys the current chaos in epistemology stemming from the breakdown of classical foundationalism and examines critically the efforts of several contemporary philosophers to introduce some order into the field, most particularly Roderick Chisholm, William Alston, John Pollock, Laurence BonJour and, to a lesser extent, others such as (...) class='Hi'>Richard Foley, Fred Dretske and Alvin Goldman. In this volume, Plantinga is trying not only to put out of play the views he rejects but also to provide the reader with anticipations of his own views in Warrant and Proper Function. Although there is an immense amount of overlap between these books, and there is much cross-referencing, they are not continuous; each can be read entirely independently of the other. Even should, through some misfortune, the projected third volume fail to be written, these two volumes are certain to stand for a long time as exceptionally important works. Warrant and Proper Function, in particular, is likely to generate a veritable Niagara of Ph.D. theses in a field many had come to see as having reached the point of diminishing nits. (shrink)

It is quite impossible to write an adequate review of this book within the word limits any sane editor would impose. The nine chapters and four Epilogues on the History of Philosophy comprising this enormous production were written by sixty-one authors and are of greatly varying quality. Richard Popkin himself acknowledges that “No effort has been made to force the different authors into a common expository style or into a common point of view. Readers will find that the various (...) authors... have many points of view and often differ with each other”. Despite Popkin’s own desperate interventions in the form of connecting passages designed to relate one chapter or section of a chapter to others, little coherence is achieved. (shrink)

We have benefited from conversations with Archon Fung, Brian Jacob, Todd Pittinsky, Peter Schuck, Ani Satz, Andrew Williams, and students in a joint class on statistics and ethics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in October 2002. We are also grateful to our audience at the conference “The Priority of Practice,” organized by Jonathan Wolff at University College London in September 2003, and to Arthur Applbaum, Miriam Avins, Frances Kamm, Simon Keller, Frederick Schauer, Alan Wertheimer, and the (...) Editors of Phi- losophy & Public Affairs for insightful comments. We have benefited from prepublication reading of Schauer’s work on profiling, Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003). We thank Avedis Koutoujian for research assistance. (shrink)

The examination of the works and views of Muḥy al-Dīn al-’Arabī’s spiritual heir Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, due to the notorious terseness of his style, is an extremely difficult task. In addition, al-Qūnawī expected the reader to be acquainted with the entire corpus of his works, since many important ideas are mentioned in only one of them, without ever being repeated elsewhere in his writings. In many cases, he limits himself to a brief allusion or hint, without discussing the point at (...) issue in detail. Furthermore, not infrequently he warns the reader that, for certain reasons, one or more important aspects of the issue are not mentioned at all, since they must be kept secret. In his last will, he instructed his.. (shrink)

In “The Epidemiology of ‘Regrettable Kinship’: Gender, Epidemic, and Community in Todd Haynes' [Safe] and Richard Powers' Gain,” the author analyzes two contemporary cultural texts about women and environmentally-linked illnesses to rethink commonplace understandings of the relationship between gender, disease, and community formation. By reading these narratives side by side, Lynch is able to address difficult issues about gendered subjectivity and the fragile construction of collective political identity. While the female protagonists in the texts Lynch examines relate differently (...) to their illnesses, both portray the ways in which women negotiate the potential and limitations of “illness communities.”. (shrink)

This book launches a sustained defense of a radical interpretation of the doctrine of the open future. Patrick Todd argues that all claims about undetermined aspects of the future are simply false.

At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...) that, looking backwards, it was the case that there would be a sea battle? This tension forms, in large part, what might be called the problem of future contingents. A dominant trend in temporal logic and semantic theorizing about future contingents seeks to validate both intuitions. Theorists in this tradition--including some interpretations of Aristotle, but paradigmatically, Thomason (1970), as well as more recent developments in Belnap, et. al (2001) and MacFarlane (2003, 2014)--have argued that the apparent tension between the intuitions is in fact merely apparent. In short, such theorists seek to maintain both of the following two theses: (i) the open future: Future contingents are not true, and (ii) retro-closure: From the fact that something is true, it follows that it was the case that it would be true. It is well-known that reflection on the problem of future contingents has in many ways been inspired by importantly parallel issues regarding divine foreknowledge and indeterminism. In this paper, we take up this perspective, and ask what accepting both the open future and retro-closure predicts about omniscience. When we theorize about a perfect knower, we are theorizing about what an ideal agent ought to believe. Our contention is that there isn’t an acceptable view of ideally rational belief given the assumptions of the open future and retro-closure, and thus this casts doubt on the conjunction of those assumptions. (shrink)

I want to suggest that it would be bad if compatibilism were true, and that this gives us good reason to think that it isn't. This is, you might think, an outlandish argument, and the considerable burden of this paper is to convince you otherwise. There are two key elements at stake in this argument. The first is that it would be ‐ in a distinctive sense to be explained ‐ bad if compatibilism were true. The thought here is that (...) compatibilism ultimately presents us with a picture on which, in principle, powerful manipulators can effectively guarantee that finite moral agents should become blameworthy. To my mind, this isn't just false ‐ though I think that it is ‐ it is also such that it would be bad (unfortunate, undesirable…) if it were true. The second is that the fact that it would be ‐ in this sense ‐ bad if true gives us reason to think that it isn't. It may be bad that there is no afterlife. But that, in itself, hardly gives us reason to think that there is an afterlife. That is true, but ‐ as others before me have suggested ‐ when the object of the relevant badness is morality itself, the inference seems secure. A more general aim of the paper is to investigate the nature of this very form of argument in itself, and I compare my argument (inter alia) to a recent argument from Sayre–McCord against the possibility of genuine moral dilemmas. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that there is what has been called a non-hypocrisy norm on the appropriateness of moral blame; roughly, one has standing to blame only if one is not guilty of the very offence one seeks to criticize. Our acceptance of this norm is embodied in the common retort to criticism, “Who are you to blame me?”. But there is a paradox lurking behind this commonplace norm. If it is always inappropriate for x to blame y for a (...) wrong that x has committed, then all cases in which x blames x (i.e. cases of self-blame) are rendered inappropriate. But it seems to be ethical common-sense that we are often, sadly, in position (indeed, excellent, privileged position) to blame ourselves for our own moral failings. And thus we have a paradox: a conflict between the inappropriateness of hypocritical blame, and the appropriateness of self-blame. We consider several ways of resolving the paradox, and contend none is as defensible as a position that simply accepts it: we should never blame ourselves. In defending this startling position, we defend a crucial distinction between self-blame and guilt. (shrink)