Indirect discrimination (or disparate impact) is one of the focal points of current antidiscrimination policies. However, few political/moral philosophers have paid substantial attention to indirect discrimination until recently. This contribution provides an overview of the two philosophical questions in this context: the definitional question (DQ) and the moral question (MQ). DQ concerns what distinguishes indirect discrimination from direct discrimination and inequality. Conceptually, either (1) indirect discrimination is not a genuine subtype of discrimination; (2) it is a (...) subtype of discrimination secondary to direct discrimination; or (3) it is a subtype of discrimination independent of direct discrimination. A more substantial distinction between direct and indirect discrimination can be drawn according to the discriminator’s intention, the disproportionateness of intergroup disadvantage, and so forth. MQ addresses what makes indirect discrimination morally wrong. Conceptually, either (1) indirect discrimination cannot be morally wrong qua discrimination in its own right; (2) it can be morally wrong qua discrimination in its own right, where the wrongness must be connected to past direct discrimination; or (3) it can be morally wrong qua discrimination regardless of past direct discrimination. Substantially, possible wrong-making factors of indirect discrimination include the discriminator’s objectionable intentions, the objectionable message that discriminatory practices may carry, and their harmful effects. This framework is a first step for future works that are necessary to yield a comprehensive insight into the relationship between discrimination and inequality and address contemporary forms of discrimination that tend to be indirect rather than direct. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a new compatibilist account of free action: indirect conscious control compatibilism, or just indirect compatibilism for short. On this account, actions are free either when they are caused by compatibilist‐friendly conscious psychological processes, or else by sub‐personal level processes influenced in particular ways by compatibilist‐friendly conscious psychological processes. This view is motivated by a problem faced by a certain family of compatibilist views, which I call conscious control views. These views hold that (...) we act freely when we act in a way that is caused by certain conscious psychological processes. One problem for such views is that current neuroscience suggests that most of our actions are not caused by such processes. Instead, many of the actions we typically suppose are free are caused by sub‐personal level processes and hence would count as not free according to contemporary conscious control views. I argue, contra these views, that many actions caused by these sub‐personal level processes are indirectly free. Further, most of the actions we ordinarily judge to be free are free in this indirect manner. (shrink)

In this article, we address the problem of how people understand predicative metaphors such as “The rumor flew through the office,” and argue that predicative metaphors are understood as indirect (or two-stage) categorizations. In the indirect categorization process, the verb (e.g., fly) of a predicative metaphor evokes an intermediate entity, which in turn evokes a metaphoric category of actions or states (e.g., “to spread rapidly and soon disappear”) to be attributed to the target noun (e.g., rumor), rather than (...) directly evoking a metaphoric category as argued by CitationGlucksberg's (2001) categorization theory. We test our argument using two experiments, namely, offline comprehension and online priming. The offline comprehension experiment showed that interpretation of predicative metaphors had greater overlap with words indirectly associated with the verb than those directly associated with the verb. The online priming experiment demonstrated that indirectly associated words were activated during predicative metaphor comprehension, but directly associated words were not. These results provide convergent evidence for our argument, and thus the psychological validity of two-stage categorization as a process of predicative metaphor comprehension was confirmed. (shrink)

When allocating scarce healthcare resources, the expected benefits of alternative allocations matter. But, there are different kinds of benefits. Some are direct benefits to the recipient of the resource such as the health improvements of receiving treatment. Others are indirect benefits to third parties such as the economic gains from having a healthier workforce. This article considers whether only the direct benefits of alternative healthcare resource allocations are relevant to allocation decisions, or whether indirect benefits are relevant too. (...) First, we distinguish different conceptions of direct and indirect benefits and argue that only a recipient conception could be morally relevant. We analyze four arguments for thinking that indirect benefits should not count and argue that none is successful in showing that the indirectness of a benefit is a good reason not to count it. We conclude that direct and indirect benefits should be evaluated in the same way. (shrink)

Can supervaluationism successfully handle indirect speech reports? This chapter considers, and rejects, Schiffer’s claim that they cannot. One alleged problem with indirect speech reports is that the truth of “Carla said that Bob is tall” implausibly requires that Carla said all of a huge number of precise things (i.e. that Bob was over n feet tall, for values of n corresponding to precisifications of “tall”). The paper shows why the supervaluationist is not committed to this. Vague singular terms (...) are no particular problem for supervaluationism within indirect speech reports, it is argued, but there remain some issues surrounding certain vague demonstratives. The supervaluationist has good responses available, however, and any remaining questions face all theories of vagueness and are more appropriately addressed within a theory of demonstratives rather than a theory of vagueness. (shrink)

Abstract: An indirect report typically takes the form of a speaker using the locution “said that” to report an earlier utterance. In what follows, I introduce the principal philosophical and pragmatic points of interest in the study of indirect reports, including the extent to which context sensitivity affects the content of an indirect report, the constraints on the substitution of co-referential terms in reports, the extent of felicitous paraphrase and translation, the way in which indirect reports (...) are opaque, and the use of indirect reports as pragmatic vehicles for other speech acts such as humor, insult, or irony. Throughout I develop several positions: (i) that a semantic analysis of indirect reports is insufficient, (ii) that the distinction between direct and indirect reports is not clear and that indirect reports are the predominate way of reporting while direct reports may be a para-linguistic variation on them, (iii) that most questions about the semantics and pragmatics of indirect reports will rely on a full understanding of the nature of what is reported and how it gets reported, (iv) that an analysis of reporting requires the pragmatic tools of metarepresentation and a social, inter-personal understanding of relevance and shared knowledge. (shrink)

We provide a new link between deductive and probabilistic reasoning fallacies. Illusory inferences from disjunction are a broad class of deductive fallacies traditionally explained by recourse to a matching procedure that looks for content overlap between premises. In two behavioral experiments, we show that this phenomenon is instead sensitive to real-world causal dependencies and not to exact content overlap. A group of participants rated the strength of the causal dependence between pairs of sentences. This measure is a near perfect predictor (...) of fallacious reasoning by an independent group of participants in illusory inference tasks with the same materials. In light of these results, we argue that all extant accounts of these deductive fallacies require non-trivial adjustments. Crucially, these novel _indirect_ illusory inferences from disjunction bear a structural similarity to seemingly unrelated _probabilistic reasoning_ problems, in particular the conjunction fallacy from the heuristics and biases literature. This structural connection was entirely obscure in previous work on these deductive problems, due to the theoretical and empirical focus on content overlap. We argue that this structural parallelism provides arguments against the need for rich descriptions and individuating information in the conjunction fallacy, and we outline a unified theory of deductive illusory inferences from disjunction and the conjunction fallacy, in terms of Bayesian confirmation theory. (shrink)

This paper contributes to two debates: (i) the debate about whether or not ancient Greek has Free Indirect Discourse (FID), and (ii) the debate about how we should analyze FID semantically. We do this by showing that there is a distinction between FID and what we call Unembedded Indirect Discourse (UID). The semantic analysis that we develop for the latter shows that the two phenomena, though superficially similar, are semantically fundamentally different. We conclude that UID would have been (...) more deserving of the title ‘free indirect discourse’ than the more quotative and direct discourse-like narrative technique that is now confusingly called so. 1. (shrink)

There has been a long debate on whether demonstratives are directly referential as Kaplan originally argued, or indirectly referential like a definite description. I propose a new analysis of demonstratives that combines intuitions from both direct and indirect approaches. The demonstrative is analyzed as an indirectly referential expression with a binary maximality operator that takes two arguments, where the second argument can be a deictic pointing, an anaphoric index, or a relative clause. Direct reference is encoded not in the (...) meaning of the demonstrative but in the meaning contributed by the pointing gesture, thus capturing both direct and indirect uses. I further propose that some pronouns in English function as demonstratives, realizing the binary structure and competing with the demonstrative. The main advantages of this proposal include (a) deriving the distribution of pronominal and adnominal demonstratives systematically; (b) capturing the unique interaction that demonstratives have with a pointing gesture; and (c) locating English demonstratives against a larger, cross-linguistic picture. (shrink)

The non-identity problem is the problem of grounding moral wrongdoing in cases in which an action affects who will exist in the future. Consider a woman who intentionally conceives while on medication that is harmful for a fetus. If the resulting child is disabled as a result of the medication, what makes the woman's action morally wrong? I argue that an explanation in terms of harmful rights violations fails, and I focus on Peter Markie's recent rights-based defense. Markie's analysis rests (...) on the notion of an indirect harm, and I show that the calculation of an indirect harm relies on an improper baseline for the determination of whether or not an action adversely affects a patient's interests. I also defend an impersonal duty-based analysis of the wrongdoing in non-identity cases against an objection by Markie. I close by arguing that the rights-based analysis is insensitive to context and that context is morally relevant in the determination of the moral valence of actions in cases of non-identity. This failure provides a pro tanto reason to favor an impersonal duty-based analysis of the wrongdoing in non-identity cases. (shrink)

Martin Luther affirms his theological position by saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Supposing that Luther’s claim is true, he lacks alternative possibilities at the moment of choice. Even so, many libertarians have the intuition that he is morally responsible for his action. One way to make sense of this intuition is to assert that Luther’s action is indirectly free, because his action inherits its freedom and moral responsibility from earlier actions when he had alternative possibilities and (...) those earlier directly free actions formed him into the kind of person who must refrain from recanting. Surprisingly, libertarians have not developed a full account of indirectly free actions. I provide a more developed account. First, I explain the metaphysical nature of indirectly free actions such as Luther’s. Second, I examine the kind of metaphysical and epistemic connections that must occur between past directly free actions and the indirectly free action. Third, I argue that an attractive way to understand the kind of derivative moral responsibility at issue involves affirming the existence of resultant moral luck. (shrink)

There is a strong intuition that we can listen to works of music, yet musical ontologies on which works of music are abstract objects, perhaps most notably, type theories of music, seem to imply that this is impossible. This problem has received relatively little attention in the literature. I here explore and develop a solution suggested by Julian Dodd and argue that it has at least two problematic consequences, namely (i) that some works of music cannot be listened to unless (...) one has already studied the relevant score or through a similar process learned roughly what the work requires of its performances and (ii) that it is possible for two people to listen to different musical works while listening to the same performance. (shrink)

The non‐identity problem is the problem of grounding moral wrongdoing in cases in which an action affects who will exist in the future. Consider a woman who intentionally conceives while on medication that is harmful for a fetus. If the resulting child is disabled as a result of the medication, what makes the woman's action morally wrong? I argue that an explanation in terms of harmful rights violations fails, and I focus on Peter Markie's recent rights‐based defense. Markie's analysis rests (...) on the notion of an indirect harm, and I show that the calculation of an indirect harm relies on an improper baseline for the determination of whether or not an action adversely affects a patient's interests. I also defend an impersonal duty‐based analysis of the wrongdoing in non‐identity cases against an objection by Markie. I close by arguing that the rights‐based analysis is insensitive to context and that context is morally relevant in the determination of the moral valence of actions in cases of non‐identity. This failure provides a pro tanto reason to favor an impersonal duty‐based analysis of the wrongdoing in non‐identity cases. (shrink)

I defend indirect perceptual realism against two recent and related charges to it offered by A. D. Smith and P. Snowdon, both stemming from demonstrative reference involving indirect perception. The needed aspects of the theory of demonstratives are not terribly new, but their connection to these objections has not been discussed. The groundwork for my solution emerges from considering normal cases of indirect perception (e.g., seeing something depicted on a television) and examining the role this indirectness plays (...) in demonstrative assertions. I argue that indirectness routinely if not typically plays a justificatory role in such judgements, and not a semantic one, and that the same can be said of such judgements when considered within the indirect realist framework. The denial of this, on my analysis, is essential to the criticisms of Snowdon and Smith. The discussion is extended to include scenarios involving the sorts of misconceptions Smith employs. (shrink)

It is widely held that children’s linguistic input underdetermines the correct grammar, and that language learning must therefore be guided by innate linguistic constraints. Here, we show that a Bayesian model can learn a standard poverty‐of‐stimulus example, anaphoric one, from realistic input by relying on indirect evidence, without a linguistic constraint assumed to be necessary. Our demonstration does, however, assume other linguistic knowledge; thus, we reduce the problem of learning anaphoric one to that of learning this other knowledge. We (...) discuss whether this other knowledge may itself be acquired without linguistic constraints. (shrink)

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume (...) adds an empirical and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque. (shrink)

In this thesis, I will defend a new kind of compatibilist account of free action, indirect conscious control compatibilism (or indirect compatibilism for short), and argue that some of our actions are free according to it. My argument has three components, and involves the development of a brand new tool for experimental philosophy, and the use of cognitive neuroscience. The first component of the argument shows that compatibilism (of some kind) is a conceptual truth. Contrary to the current (...) orthodoxy in the free will literature, which is that our concept of free will is an incompatibilist concept - a concept according to which we have free will only if determinism is false - I will show that our concept of free will is in fact a compatibilist concept - a concept according to which we can have free will even if determinism is true - and I do so using a new experimental philosophy methodology inspired by two-dimensional semantics. -/- Of course, even if our concept of free will is a compatibilist concept, this does not mean that there are any free actions in the world: the current empirical evidence from the brain sciences appears to show that there might be no, or very few, free actions in the world, even on many compatibilist understandings of what it would take for there to be free will. The second component of the argument addresses this concern by extending our understanding of compatibilism. Agents act freely either when their actions are caused by compatibilistically acceptable psychological processes, or are indirectly caused by those same processes. Hence the name of my account: indirect compatibilism. -/- The final component of the argument defends my new account against some interesting objections and provides evidence from cognitive neuroscience that some of our actions count as free by the lights of indirect compatibilism. (shrink)

According to Uriah Kriegel’s self-representational theory of consciousness, mental state M is conscious just in case it is a complex with suitably integrated proper parts, M 1 and M 2, such that M 1 is a higher-order representation of lower-order representation M 2. Kriegel claims that M thereby “indirectly” represents itself, and he attempts to motivate this claim by appealing to what he regards as intuitive cases of indirect perceptual and pictorial representation. For example, Kriegel claims that it’s natural (...) to say that in directly perceiving the front surface of an apple one thereby perceives the apple itself. Cases such as this are supposed to provide intuitive support for the principle that if X represents Y, and Y is highly integrated into complex object Z, then X indirectly represents Z. In this paper I provide counterexamples to Kriegel’s principle of indirect representation, before going on to argue that we can explain what is going on in those cases in which the subject seems to represent a complex whole by representing one its parts without positing indirect representations anyway. I then argue that my alternative approach is superior to Kriegel’s in a number of ways, thereby rendering his theory of consciousness implausible. (shrink)

According to Frege, expressions shift their reference when they occur in indirect contexts: in “Anna believes that Plato is wise” the expression “Plato” no longer refers to Plato but to what is ordinarily its sense. Many philosophers, including Carnap, Davidson, Burge, Parsons, Kripke and Künne, believe that on Frege's view the iteration of indirect context creating operators gives rise to an infinite hierarchy of senses. While the former two take this to be problematic, the latter four welcome the (...) hierarchy with open arms. In this paper I argue that the hierarchy should be avoided and that it can be avoided. (shrink)

In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts, particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech acts and to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. We provide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, including the subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speech acts. This analysis draws heavily on parallels between phenomena at the speech act level and the lexical level. First, we (...) argue that, just as co-predication shows that some words can behave linguistically as if they're `simultaneously' of incompatible semantic types, certain speech acts behave this way too. Secondly, as Horn and Bayer (1984) and others have suggested, both the lexicon and speech acts are subject to a principle of blocking or "preemption by synonymy": Conventionalized indirect speech acts can block their `paraphrases' from being interpreted as indirect speech acts, even if this interpretation is calculable from Gricean-style principles. We provide a formal model of this blocking, and compare it with existing accounts of lexical blocking. (shrink)

In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts,particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech actsand to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. Weprovide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, includingthe subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speech acts. Thisanalysis draws heavily on parallels between phenomena at the speechact level and the lexical level. First, we argue that, just as co-predicationshows that (...) some words can behave linguistically as if they're `simultaneously'of incompatible semantic types, certain speech acts behave this way too.Secondly, as Horn and Bayer (1984) and others have suggested, both thelexicon and speech acts are subject to a principle of blocking or ``preemptionby synonymy'': Conventionalized indirect speech acts can block their`paraphrases' from being interpreted as indirect speech acts, even ifthis interpretation is calculable from Gricean-style principles. Weprovide a formal model of this blocking, and compare it withexisting accounts of lexical blocking. (shrink)

Imagination and Convention by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone is a sustained attack on a standard piece of contemporary philosophical lore, Grice’s (1975) theory of conversational implicatures, and on indirect meanings in general. Although I agree with quite a lot of what they say, and with some important aspects of their theoretical stance, here I will respond to some of their criticism. I’ll assume a characterization of implicatures as theory-neutral as possible, on which implicatures are a sort of indirectly (...) conveyed meanings, illustrated by some traditional examples. Then I will discuss the claim that one can make an assertion indirectly, through a mechanism essentially like the one envisaged by Grice in his account of implicatures. This is something that not just L&S have argued against, but other writers as well, for more or less related reasons. Since it will be clear that assertions, the way I will characterize them, “convey information inthe usual sense” and provide “information in the semantic sense of publicly accessible content that supports inquiry”, I will be thereby arguing for a claim clearly at odds with some of those made by L&S. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the worries about whether a consequentialist agent will be alienated from those who are special to her go deeper than has so far been appreciated. Rather than pointing to a problem with the consequentialist agent's motives or purposes, we argue that the problem facing a consequentialist agent in the case of friendship concerns the nature of the psychological disposition which such an agent would have and how this kind of disposition sits with those which (...) are commonly thought proper to relations of friendship. To the extent that we are right, then, the rejoinders which indirect consequentialists have offered to the problem of alienation are ill directed and so do not succeed in meeting the real problem. In articulating what we see as the source of the alienation problem which friendship poses for consequentialism, we also hope to clarify the general distinction between dispositions and motives and to show how certain kinds of guiding internalized normative dispositions help us to define and therefore distinguish between various types of relationships. Undertaking this task may also help to identify some of the crucial issues for an adequate moral psychology of friendship and its place in any plausible ethical theory. (shrink)

Suppose a diner says, 'Can you pass the salt?' Although her utterance is literally a question (about the physical abilities of the addressee), most would take it as a request (that the addressee pass the salt). In such a case, the request is performed indirectly by way of directly asking a question. Accordingly this utterance is known as an indirect speech act. On the standard account of such speech acts, a single utterance constitutes two distinct speech acts. On this (...) account then, 'Can you pass the salt?' is both a question and a request. In a provocative essay, Rod Bertolet argues that there are no indirect speech acts. According to Bertolet, 'Can you pass the salt?' is only a question. It is a question that merely functions as a request (without also being one). In this paper we respond to Bertolet's skeptical argument. Appealing to Searle's theory of speech acts and to certain features of linguistic communication, we argue that, despite Bertolet's challenge, there is good reason to countenance indirect speech acts. (shrink)

By considering the new notion of theinversesof syllogisms such asBarbaraandCelarent, we show how the rule ofIndirect Proof, in the form (no multiple or vacuous discharges) used by Aristotle, may be dispensed with, in a system comprising four basic rules of subalternation or conversion and six basic syllogisms.

The interpretation of indirect discourse is one of the most persistent and pervasive themes in post-Fregean semantics. Since Frege we have managed to learn a good deal about the workings of various technical approaches to indirect discourse, but fundamental philosophical issues have remained unresolved.

In this paper, I offer an indirect argument for the Access Theory of privacy. First, I develop a new version of the rival Control Theory that is immune to all the classic objections against it. Second, I show that this new version of the Control Theory collapses into the Access Theory. I call the new version the ‘Negative Control Account’. Roughly speaking, the classic Control Theory holds that you have privacy if, and only if, you can control whether other (...) people know personal information about you. Critics of the Control Theory often give counterexamples, where privacy is either not diminished even though the claimant has lost control, or where privacy is diminished even though the claimant is in control. I argue that none of these alleged counterexamples work against the Negative Control Account. However, this is not a victory for the control theorist, because the Negative Control Account collapses into the Access Theory. The paper thus adds to the recent trend in the literature of favoring the Access Theory over the Control Theory. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

This article argues that, as commonly understood, indirect discrimination is not necessarily unjust: 1) indirect discrimination involves the disadvantaging in relation to a particular benefit and such disadvantages are not unjust if the overall distribution of benefits and burdens is just; 2) indirect discrimination focuses on groups and group averages and ignores the distribution of harms and benefits within groups subjected to discrimination, but distributive justice is concerned with individuals; and 3) if indirect discrimination as such (...) is unjust, strict egalitarianism has to be the correct account of distributive justice, but such egalitarianism appears vulnerable to the leveling down objection (whether decisively or not), and many theorists explicitly reject strict egalitarianism anyway. The last point threatens the position of liberals who oppose indirect discrimination but think significant inequalities can be just. (shrink)

The paper deals with sentence adverbials and clauses with the propositional content “no doubt can be cast on ...” and their occurrence in monological argumentative discourse. Such adverbials and clauses are regarded as illocutionary indicators of indirect directives aiming at the verbal behaviour of the reader, or, more precisely, at the omission of verbal activity on reader's part. Such attempts to influence the reader's behaviour can be both fair ones, to anticipate reader's objections, but also manipulative ones, so as (...) to suppress them. That is why some general guidelines are given how to distinguish between the discourse-organizing and the manipulative function of indirect directives in concern. (shrink)

Political instrumentalism claims that the right to rule should be distributed such that justice is promoted best. Building on a distinction made by consequentialists in moral philosophy, I argue that instrumentalists should distinguish two levels of normative thinking about legitimacy, the critical and applied level. An indirect instrumentalism which acknowledges this distinction has significant advantages over simpler forms of instrumentalism that do not.

Epistemic Indirect Realism is the position that justification for contingent propositions about the extra-mental world requires an inference based on a subjective, experiential mental state. One objection against EIR is that it runs contrary to common sense and practice; in essence, ordinary people do not form beliefs about things in the external world on the basis of experiential mental states. This objection implies EIR is contrary to ordinary experience, impractical, and leads to scepticism. In this paper, I will defend (...) EIR against this objection by distinguishing EIR based on conceptual awareness and non-conceptual awareness. In particular, I will argue that direct acquaintance provides sufficient awareness that can explain how ordinary folks are capable of forming justified beliefs about the external world in a way consistent with EIR. Overall, I present a framework for showing that EIR can satisfy ordinary epistemic practices without betraying human nature or over-intellectualizing the required epistemic standards for possessing a justified belief. (shrink)

In this chapter I deal with indirect reports in terms of language games. I try to make connections between the theory of language games and the theory of indirect reports, in the light of the issue of clues and cues. Indirect reports are based on an interplay of voices. The voice of the reporter must allow hearers to ‘reconstruct’ the voice of the reported speaker. Ideally, it must be possible to separate the reporter’s voice from that of (...) the reported speaker. When we analyze the language game of indirect reporting, we ideally want to establish which parts belong to the primary voice and which parts belong to the reporter’s voice. In this paper I apply considerations on language games by Dascal et al. and I explore the dialectics between abstract pragmatics principles and considerations about situated uses that are sensitive to cues and clues. (shrink)

Indirect directives in recipes: a cross-linguistic perspective The present paper is intended as a cross-linguistic study of the range of possible realizations of instructional speech acts as a special type of directives, as realized in the domain of cooking recipes. Even a cursory comparison of orders as directive speech acts across languages brings to light an extreme degree of variation concerning their formal realization. While imperatives are virtually the only possibility in English, a contrastive linguistic perspective reveals that other (...) construction types are attested in other languages, instead, or in addition to the imperative. The central goal of the present paper is to shed light on the motives for these intralingual and interlingual similarities. The data from Germanic, Romance, Slavic languages, and Hungarian are analyzed against the background of the speech-act scenario model, and then discussed with the help of two cultural models of HELP, which are claimed to provide the basis for the motivation of the cross-linguistic distribution of various constructions. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists have devoted considerable attention to discussing whether anthropocentric or nonanthropocentric arguments provide more appropriate means for defending environmental protection. This paper argues that philosophers, scientists, and policy makers should pay more attention to a particular type of anthropocentric argument. These anthropocentric indirect arguments defend actions or policies that benefit the environment, but they justify the policies based on beneficial effects on humans that are not caused by their environmental benefits. AIAs appear to have numerous appealing characteristics, and (...) their weaknesses do not provide compelling reasons to avoid them. Elucidating these arguments should inspire social scientists and philosophers to study the range of situations in which AIAs can be ethically and effectively employed and the extent to which they increase or diminish public support for environmentalism. (shrink)

Anthropocentric indirect arguments , which call for specific policies or actions because of human benefits that are correlated with but not caused by benefits to the environment, are gaining increasing traction with those who take a pragmatic approach to environmental protection. I contend that nonanthropocentrists might remain justifiably uneasy about AIAs because such arguments fail to challenge prevailing speciesist moral attitudes. I close by considering whether Elliott can address this concern of nonanthropocentrists by appealing to the ability of AIAs (...) to engender an intrinsic concern for the environment in the people they persuade. (shrink)

There is a class of views about our moral relations with non-human animals that share the idea that animals do not matter directly for ethical purposes: whatever duties or obligations we have with respect to animals are indirect, connected somehow to other duties or obligations – to other human beings, for example – in which the well-being or interests of animals do not figure. Criticisms of indirect duty theories have often focused either upon denying the link that is (...) supposed to exist between how we treat animals and how or whether we discharge other obligations or upon denying that the indirect duty theorist has an adequate account of the animal-related duties we are confident that we have. I shall not pursue either of these options. Instead, I shall argue, first, that there is a tension within the indirect duty theorist’s view that makes it doubtful that anything will enable him to get what he wants from a theory, and second, that even if the necessary link between the way animals and humans are treated is assumed to be present, it will turn out that its best explanation will imply that there are direct duties to animals after all. (shrink)

Over the past decade, scholars, institutions, and activists have voiced strong concerns about the potential of automated decision systems to indirectly discriminate against vulnerable groups. This article analyses the ethics of algorithmic indirect discrimination, and argues that we can explain what is morally bad about such discrimination by reference to the fact that it causes harm. The article first sketches certain elements of the technical and conceptual background, including definitions of direct and indirect algorithmic differential treatment. It next (...) introduces three prominent accounts of fairness as potential explanations if the badness of algorithmic indirect discrimination, but argues that all three are vulnerable to powerful levelling-down-style objections. Instead, the article demonstrates how proper attention to the way differences in decision-scenarios affect the distribution of harms can help us account for intuitions in prominent cases. Finally, the article considers a potential objection based on the fact that certain forms of algorithmic indirect discrimination appear to distribute rather than cause harm, and notes that we can explain how such distributions cause harm by attending to differences in individual and group vulnerability. (shrink)

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume (...) adds an empirical and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque. (shrink)

In evolutionary models of indirect reciprocity, reputation mechanisms can stabilize cooperation even in severe cooperation problems like the prisoner’s dilemma. Under certain circumstances, conditionally cooperative strategies, which cooperate iff their partner has a good reputation, cannot be invaded by any other strategy that conditions behavior only on own and partner reputation. The first point of this paper is to show that an evolutionary version of backward induction can lead to a breakdown of this kind of indirectly reciprocal cooperation. Backward (...) induction, however, requires strategies that count and then cease to cooperate in the last, last but one, last but two, … game they play. These strategies are unlikely to exist in natural settings. We then present two new findings. (1) Surprisingly, the same kind of breakdown is also possible without counting. Strategies using rare golden opportunities for defection can invade conditional cooperators. This can create further golden opportunities, inviting the next wave of opportunists, and so on, until cooperation breaks down completely. (2) Cooperation can be stabilized against these opportunists, by letting an individual’s initial reputation be inherited from that individual’s parent. This ‘inclusive reputation’ mechanism can cope with any observably opportunistic strategy. Offspring of opportunists who successfully exploited a conditional cooperator cannot repeat their parents’ success because they inherit a bad reputation, which forewarns conditional cooperators in later generations. (shrink)

The Movement of Showing investigates the idea, shared by Derrida, Hegel and Heidegger, that the value of their thought is not found in its results or conclusions, but in its "movement." All three describe the heart of their work in terms of a pathway, development, or movement rather than in terms of its propositions or conclusions. This seems to deprive their thought of a solid ground, and indeed deconstruction in particular is often criticized in this way. Johan de Jong argues (...) that this is a structural vulnerability that is both its weakness and the source of its value, tracing Derrida's indirect method from his early to later works, and considering his engagements with Hegel and Heidegger. His analysis locates an affinity among Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida in a shared distrust of externality and, against the grain of some Levinasian commentaries, argues that Derrida's indirectness results in an ethics of complicity. The Movement of Showing answers a central question that many polemics about continental philosophy and postmodernism revolve around concerning how, methodologically, one can philosophize responsibly. It shows the difference between critique and polemics, and why simply taking up a position for or against is insufficient in order to think responsibly. (shrink)

Most act‐utilitarians now reject the direct utilitarianism of Bentham. They do so because they are convinced of what I call the paradox of utilitarianism—the thought that one cannot maximize happiness if one is trying to maximize happiness. Instead, they adopt some form of indirect utilitarianism (IU), arguing that the optimal decision procedure may differ markedly from the criterion of rightness for actions. Here I distinguish between six different versions of indirect utilitarianism, arguing that the weaker versions of IU (...) also fall prey to the paradox of utilitarianism, while the stronger versions of IU violate an overwhelmingly plausible moral principle, the principle that one ought to V only if one can V intentionally. (shrink)

There is growing evidence to support the claim that we react differently to robots than we do to other objects. In particular, we react differently to robots with which we have some form of social interaction. In this paper I critically assess the claim that, due to our tendency to become emotionally attached to social robots, permitting their harm may be damaging for society and as such we should consider introducing legislation to grant social robots rights and protect them from (...) harm. I conclude that there is little evidence to support this claim and that legislation in this area would restrict progress in areas of social care where social robots are a potentially valuable resource. (shrink)

Derek Parfit has notably argued that while a moral theory should not be directly self-defeating, there is nothing necessarily wrong with a moral theory that is only indirectly self-defeating. Here I resist this line of argument. I argue instead that indirectly self-defeating moral theories are indeed problematic. Parfit tries to sidestep the oddities of indirectly self-defeating theories by focusing on the choice of dispositions rather than actions. But the very considerations that can make it impossible to achieve a theory's aims (...) if we try to do what the theory recommends can also make it impossible to achieve a theory's aims if we instead try to adopt the dispositions the theory recommends. What makes a theory indirectly self-defeating has little to do with the object of choice, but with the nature of choosing itself. (shrink)

Signals regarding the behavior of others are an essential element of human moral systems and there are important evolutionary connections between language and large-scale cooperation. In particular, social communication may be required for the reputation tracking needed to stabilize indirect reciprocity. Additionally, scholars have suggested that the benefits of indirect reciprocity may have been important for the evolution of language and that social signals may have coevolved with large-scale cooperation. This paper investigates the possibility of such a coevolution. (...) Using the tools of evolutionary game theory, we present a model that incorporates primitive “moral signaling” into a simple setting of indirect reciprocity. This model reveals some potential difficulties for the evolution of “moral signals.” We find that it is possible for “moral signals” to evolve alongside indirect reciprocity, but without some external pressure aiding the evolution of a signaling system, such a coevolution is unlikely. (shrink)