Our research’s aim is to assess the effect of cultural factors on business ethical decision-making process in a Western cultural context and in a non-Western cultural context. Specifically, this study investigates ethical perceptions, religiosity, personal moral philosophies, corporate ethical values, gender, and ethical intentions of U.S. and Moroccan business managers. The findings demonstrate that significant differences do exist between the two countries in idealism and relativism. Moroccan managers tend to be more idealistic than the U.S. managers. There is a strong (...) positive relationship between religiosity and idealism. There were mixed findings in examining the correlates of religiosity and various components of ethical intentions. Moroccan managers were more homogenous in their corporate ethical values than were the U.S. managers. The results demonstrate that (in general) idealism is a good predictor of ethical intentions and behaviors. Additionally, managers from the two countries differed in the degree of relationship between perceptions and intentions in three of the four scenarios. This study’s results confirm other research findings that, in general, female business managers have higher ethical sensitivity in terms of their ethical judgment than their male counterparts. Managerial implications are also discussed. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the most acute global crises in recent history, which profoundly impacted the world across many dimensions. During this period, racism manifested in ways specifically related to the pandemic, including xenophobic sentiments, racial attacks, discriminatory policies, and disparate outcomes across racial/ethnic groups. This paper examines some of the pressing questions about pandemic racism and inequity. We review what research has revealed about the nature and manifestations of racism, the entrenchment of structural racism, and trajectories (...) of racism during COVID-19. (shrink)

This study aims to contribute to emerging human-robot interaction research by adding longitudinal findings to a limited number of long-term social robotics home studies. We placed 70 robots in users’ homes for a period of up to six months, and used questionnaires and interviews to collect data at six points during this period. Results indicate that users’ evaluations of the robot dropped initially, but later rose after the robot had been used for a longer period of time. This is congruent (...) with the so-called mere-exposure effect, which shows an increasing positive evaluation of a novel stimulus once people become familiar with it. Before adoption, users focus on control beliefs showing that previous experiences with robots or other technologies allows to create a mental image of what having and using a robot in the home would entail. After adoption, users focus on utilitarian and hedonic attitudes showing that especially usefulness, social presence, enjoyment and attractiveness are important factors for long-term acceptance. (shrink)

Van Gelder presents the distinction between dynamical systems and digital computers as the core issue of current developments in cognitive science. We think this distinction is much less important than a reassessment of cognition as a neurally, bodily, and environmentally embedded process. Embedded cognition lines up naturally with dynamical models, but it would also stand if combined with classic computation.

In the nineteenth century, astronomers thought that a planet between Mercury and the Sun was causing perturbations in the orbit of Mercury, and they introduced ‘Vulcan’ as a name for such a planet. But they were wrong: there was, and is, no intra-Mercurial planet. Still, these astronomers went around saying things like (2) Vulcan is a planet between Mercury and the Sun. Some philosophers think that, when nineteenth-century astronomers were theorizing about an intra-Mercurial planet, they created a hypothetical planet.

Accoding to G.E. Moore, something''s intrinsic valuedepends solely on its intrinsic nature. Recently Thomas Hurka andShelly Kagan have argued, contra Moore, that something''s intrinsic valuemay depend on its extrinsic properties. Call this view the ConditionalView of intrinsic value. In this paper I demonstrate how a Mooreancan account for purported counterexamples given by Hurka and Kagan. I thenargue that certain organic unities pose difficulties for the ConditionalView.

It is often said that while we have a strong reason not to create someone who will be badly off, we have no strong reason for creating someone who will be well off. In this paper I argue that this asymmetry is incompatible with a plausible principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives, and that a more general asymmetry between harming and benefiting is difficult to defend. I then argue that, contrary to what many have claimed, it is possible to harm (...) or benefit someone by bringing her into existence. (shrink)

David Benatar argues that creating someone always harms them. I argue that his master argument rests on a conceptual incoherence.

Decision-making Capacity matters to whether a patient’s decision should determine her treatment. But why it matters in this way isn’t clear. The standard story is that dmc matters because autonomy matters. And this is thought to justify dmc as a gatekeeper for autonomy – whereby autonomy concerns arise if but only if a patient has dmc. But appeals to autonomy invoke two distinct concerns: concern for authenticity – concern that a choice is consistent with an individual’s commitments; and concern for (...) sovereignty – concern that an individual exercises control over that which is hers to control. Here, I argue, neither concern can alone explain why dmc matters. Instead, dmc matters because it indicates a harmony between the two concerns – the demands of each concern are more likely to agree if a patient has dmc. This vindicates the standard story, but also makes clear that dmc is an inappropriate gatekeeper for autonomy. (shrink)

This paper investigates the effect of female representation on the board of directors on corporate response to stakeholders’ demands for increased public reporting about climate change-related risks. We rely on the Carbon Disclosure Project as a sustainability initiative supported by institutional investors. Greenhouse gas emissions measurement and its disclosure to investors can be thought of as a first step toward addressing climate change issues and reducing the firm’s carbon footprint. Based on a sample of publicly listed Canadian firms over the (...) period 2008–2014, we find that the likelihood of voluntary climate change disclosure increases with women percentage on boards. We also find evidence that supports critical mass theory with regard to board gender diversity. These findings reinforce initiatives being undertaken around the world to promote gender diversity in corporate governance while demonstrating board effectiveness in stakeholder management. (shrink)

The daring idea that convention - human decision - lies at the root of so-called necessary truths, on the one hand, and much of empirical science, on the other, reverberates through twentieth-century philosophy, constituting a revolution comparable to Kant's Copernican revolution. Conventionalism is the first comprehensive study of this radical turn. One of the conclusions it reaches is that the term 'truth by convention', widely held to epitomize conventionalism, reflects a misunderstanding that has led to the association of conventionalism with (...) relativism and postmodernism. Conventionalism, this book argues, did not contend that truths can be stipulated, but rather, that stipulations are often confused with truths. Their efforts were thus directed toward disentangling truth and convention, not reducing truth to convention."--Jacket. (shrink)

In my dissertation (UCLA 2002), I argue that, by appropriating Fregean resources, Millians can solve the problems that empty names pose. As a result, the debate between Millians and Fregeans should be understood, not as a debate about whether there are senses, but rather as a debate about where there are senses.

We develop positive model theory, which is a non first order analogue of classical model theory where compactness is kept at the expense of negation. The analogue of a first order theory in this framework is a compact abstract theory: several equivalent yet conceptually different presentations of this notion are given. We prove in particular that Banach and Hilbert spaces are compact abstract theories, and in fact very well-behaved as such.

I develop a formal logic in which quantified arguments occur in argument positions of predicates. This logic also incorporates negative predication, anaphora and converse relation terms, namely, additional syntactic features of natural language. In these and additional respects, it represents the logic of natural language more adequately than does any version of Frege’s Predicate Calculus. I first introduce the system’s main ideas and familiarize it by means of translations of natural language sentences. I then develop a formal system built on (...) these principles, the Quantified Argument Calculus or Quarc. I provide a truth-value assignment semantics and a proof system for the Quarc. I next demonstrate the system’s power by a variety of proofs; I prove its soundness; and I comment on its completeness. I then extend the system to modal logic, again providing a proof system and a truth-value assignment semantics. I proceed to show how the Quarc versions of the Barcan formulas, of their converses and of necessary existence come out straightforwardly invalid, which I argue is an advantage of the modal Quarc over modal Predicate Logic as a system intended to capture the logic of natural language. (shrink)

Nanomedicine offers remarkable options for new therapeutic avenues. As methods in nanomedicine advance, ethical questions conjunctly arise. Nanomedicine is an exceptional niche in several aspects as it reflects risks and uncertainties not encountered in other areas of medical research or practice. Nanomedicine partially overlaps, partially interlocks and partially exceeds other medical disciplines. Some interpreters agree that advances in nanotechnology may pose varied ethical challenges, whilst others argue that these challenges are not new and that nanotechnology basically echoes recurrent bioethical dilemmas. (...) The purpose of this article is to discuss some of the ethical issues related to nanomedicine and to reflect on the question whether nanomedicine generates ethical challenges of new and unique nature. Such a determination should have implications on regulatory processes and professional conducts and protocols in the future. (shrink)

Millianism and Fregeanism agree that a sentence that contains a name expresses a structured proposition but disagree about whether that proposition contains the object that the name refers to (Millianism) or rather a mode of presentation of that object (Fregeanism). Various problems – about simple sentences, propositional‐attitude ascriptions, and sentences that contain empty names – beset each view. To solve these problems, Millianism can appeal to modes of presentation, and Fregeanism can appeal to objects. But this raises a further problem: (...) namely, to explain why the proposition expressed by a sentence that contains a name matters in some cases but not in others. (shrink)

Mill’s harm principle is commonly supposed to rest on a distinction between self-regarding conduct, which is not liable to interference, and other-regarding conduct, which is. As critics have noted, this distinction is difficult to draw. Furthermore, some of Mill’s own applications of the principle, such as his forbidding of slavery contracts, do not appear to fit with it. This article proposes that the self-regarding/other-regarding distinction is not in fact fundamental to Mill’s harm principle. The sphere of protected liberty includes not (...) only self-regarding conduct, but also actions that affect only consenting others. On the other hand, the occasional permissibility of interfering with self-regarding conduct can plausibly be explained by reference to the agent’s consent. Thus, the more important distinction appears to be that between consensual and non-consensual harm, rather than that between the self-regarding and non-self-regarding action. That is, interference can be justified in order to prevent non-consensual harms, but not to prevent consensual harms. It is argued that the harm principle, thus reformulated, both captures Mill’s intentions and is a substantively plausible position. (shrink)

It is often thought that some version of what is generally called the publicity condition is a reasonable requirement to impose on moral theories. In this article, after formulating and distinguishing three versions of the publicity condition, I argue that the arguments typically used to defend them are unsuccessful and, moreover, that even in its most plausible version, the publicity condition ought to be rejected as both question-begging and unreasonably demanding.

ABSTRACT Scientific advances in genetic analysis have been made possible in recent years by technical developments in computational biology, or bioinformatics. Bioinformatics has opened up the human genome to diverse analyses involving automated laboratory hardware and machine learning algorithms and software. As part of an emerging field of social genomics, recent educational genetics studies using big data have begun to raise challenging findings linking DNA to predicted life outcomes. Bioinformatic technologies and techniques including ‘genome-wide association’ and ‘polygenic scoring’ are producing (...) new kinds of genetic biodata and expert knowledge for rethinking the upbringing and education of children. This article takes as an empirical opening a recent epistemic and ethical controversy over the use of biodata to make genetic predictions about educational, socio-economic and life outcomes, detailing the forms of expert knowledge and technologies involved these predictions, and exploring the social and ethical implications of data-intensive bioinformatics. (shrink)

The paper provides a new characterization of the concepts of necessity and contingency as they should be used in the historical context. The idea is that contingency (necessity) increases in direct (reverse) proportion to sensitivity to initial conditions. The merits of this suggestion are that it avoids the conflation of causality and necessity (or contingency and chance), that it enables the bracketing of the problem of free will while maintaining the concept of human action making a difference, that it sanctions (...) tendencies without recourse to teleology, and that it recasts the controversy between historicists and anti‐historicists in less dogmatic language. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the metaphysical view referred to by Harry Silverstein as “four-dimensionalism,” but referred to in this chapter as “eternalism.” In contrast to presentism, eternalism posits that purely past and purely future objects and events exist. If a person goes out of existence at the moment of death, the problem arises as to how death is bad for its victim. According to Silverstein, this problem arises from the truth of the “Values Connect with Feelings” thesis, according to which it (...) must be possible for someone to have feelings about a thing in order for that thing to be bad for that person. The badness of death may entail eternalism, but it is for an entirely different reason. Eternalism must be true in order for there to be a time at which death is bad for its victim. These two conflicting views are discussed in this chapter. (shrink)

Whole-genome analysis and whole-exome analysis generate many more clinically actionable findings than traditional targeted genetic analysis. These findings may be relevant to research participants themselves as well as for members of their families. Though researchers performing genomic analyses are likely to find medically significant genetic variations for nearly every research participant, what they will find for any given participant is unpredictable. The ubiquity and diversity of these findings complicate questions about disclosing individual genetic test results. We outline an approach for (...) disclosing a select range of genetic results to the relatives of research participants who have died, developed in response to relatives? requests during a pilot study of large-scale medical genetic sequencing. We also argue that studies that disclose individual research results to participants should, at a minimum, passively disclose individual results to deceased participants? relatives. (shrink)

In this paper I present and defend a highly demanding principle of justice in education that has not been seriously discussed thus far. According to the suggested approach, “all the way equality”, justice in education requires nothing short of equal educational outcome between all individual students. This means not merely between equally able children, or between children from different groups and classes, but rather between all children, regardless of social background, race, sex and ability. This approach may seem implausible at (...) first, due to the far-reaching implications it entails, primarily its requirement to deny better-off children their advantage for the sake of equality. However the paper argues that all-the-way-equality, in fact, does a better job realizing the goals of justice in education than alternative conceptions of justice. It is further argued that at least some of the principle’s most radical consequences, those that make it seem counterintuitive, can be mitigated by balancing all-the-way-equality with competing interests. (shrink)

This paper challenges a pervasive, if not always explicit assumption of the present state of theorising in business ethics. This is the idea that a workable theory of organizational ethics must provide a unified perspective on its subject matter. In this paper we will sketch the broad outlines of an alternative understanding of business ethics, which focuses on constraints on corporate conduct that cannot reasonably be rejected. These constraints stem from at least three different levels or spheres of social reality, (...) i.e. the preconditions of a well-ordered society, the internal morality of economic activity and the preconditions of autonomous agency. (shrink)

Emch, G.G., Liu, C.: The Logic of Thermostatistical Physics. Springer, Berlin/ Heidelberg (2002) 11. Frigg, R., Werndl, C.: Entropy – a guide for the perplexed. Forthcoming in: Beisbart, C., Hartmann, S. (eds.) Probabilities in Physics. Oxford  ...

Lotteries have long been used to resolve competing claims, yet their recent implementation to allocate school places in Brighton and Hove, England led to considerable public outcry. This article argues that, given appropriate selection is impossible when parties have equal claims, a lottery is preferable to an auction because it excludes unjust influences. Three forms of contractualism are discussed and the fairness of lotteries is traced to the fact that they give each person an equal chance, as a surrogate for (...) their equal claim to the good. It is argued that this can be a reason to favour an artificially-constructed lottery to a 'natural' lottery where there is suspicion that the latter may be biased. (shrink)

It is a platitude that whereas language is mediated by convention, depiction is mediated by resemblance. But this platitude may be attacked on the grounds that resemblance is either insufficient for or incidental to depictive representation. I defend common sense from this attack by using Grice's analysis of meaning to specify the non-incidental role of resemblance in depictive representation.

Volker Kessler argues two points to Rudolf Bohren’s list of four areas where God becomes beautiful should be extended with a fifth one: mathematics and mathematics can be argued as a place where God becomes beautiful. In this response, we would like to argue that the extension of Bohren’s list that Kessler argues in favour of is superfluous and that Kessler makes a number of questionable assumptions about mathematics. By arguing against Kessler, we intend to make an interdisciplinary contribution to (...) the discussion about the relationship between mathematics and theology by pushing the debate into direction of a more careful consideration of mathematics as an area in which God’s beauty may become apparent.Contribution: Contributing to the interdisciplinary exploration of theology in HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, this article further develops the consideration of the fundamental theological topic of God, the beautiful and mathematics as it was proposed in this journal by Volker Kessler, by discussing it from a systematic theological and mathematical perspective. (shrink)

Abstract‘Adoptionism’ is an early Christian ‘heresy’ often associated with early strands of Jewish Christian tradition. It figures as such in handbooks of church history and New Testament studies alike. This essay investigates the origins of the concept of ‘adoptionism’ in the historiography of early Christianity, offers a fresh analysis of the relevant ‘adoptionist’ sources, and concludes that the concept is a misleading one. Therefore, the proposal is made to abandon the notion of ‘adoptionism’ as a category and to focus on (...) the authors involved as such and to investigate what their soteriological and christological concerns were, rather than to identify them as ‘adoptionists’ and to study them with that identification as a starting point. (shrink)

Purpose At times, a traditional minority group that opposes a change in the patriarchal structure is violent toward women who wish to adopt modern lifestyles. This study aims to examine online comments regarding a shooting at a café in an Arab-Bedouin city in Israel, where women were employed as servers. The event was framed in Israeli media as an act of backlash by young men, who call themselves “The Modesty Guard.” Design/methodology/approach In this qualitative study, the authors collected 916 online (...) comments that were published on five main online news sites. A thematic and rhetorical analysis of online comments was conducted. Findings The findings uncovered five main themes: the expression of support for Bedouin women; ideas for dealing with the Modesty Guard; blaming Bedouin tradition for the shooting; comparison of the violent behavior to a parallel phenomenon among Charedim; and criticism of the lack of treatment by Israeli security forces. The responses reflected a supportive stance toward Arab-Bedouin women, who were open to progress. Conflict discourse, however, expressed alienation and increased social-national schism between the Jewish majority and Arab-Bedouin minority groups in Israel. Originality/value This study sheds light on the backlash phenomenon in Negev Bedouin society. Moreover, it exposes the lack of significant supportive actions and a lack of understanding of the deep processes unfolding in this traditional society. (shrink)

Interference is paternalistic when it restricts an individual’s freedom for their own good. Anti-paternalists, such as John Stuart Mill, object to this for various reasons, including that the individual is usually a better judge of her own interests than the would-be paternalist. However, Wilkinson argues that a Parfitian reductivist approach to personal identity opens the door to what he calls ‘identity-relative paternalism’ where someone’s present action is restricted for the sake of a different future self.1 This is an interesting argument, (...) but it is not clear whether it involves permissible paternalism. At the risk of stating the obvious, permissible paternalism must be both permissible and paternalistic. Wilkinson’s identity-relative paternalism could be either, but not obviously both. If the present and future selves are different individuals, then interference is potentially permissible but no longer paternalistic. Alternatively, they are identical, in which case the interference is genuine paternalism, but cannot be justified by appeal to their distinctness. Wilkinson may escape this dilemma by invoking Parfit, who challenges the common notion that identity is all or nothing.2 According to Parfit’s revisionary view, the present and future self may share some connections but not others. However, once we have identified these similarities and differences, there is no further question whether or not they …. (shrink)

I argue against several extant views (Rolston, etc) about the value of endangered species. I argue that the best way to defend a non-anthropocentric view about the value of endangered species is to appeal to the intrinsic value of biological diversity.

Envy involves the wish to have something that someone else has; jealousy involves the wish not to lose something that the subject has and someone else does not. Envy and jealousy would seem to involve a similar emotional attitude. Both are concerned with a change in what one has: either a wish to obtain or a fear of losing. This is not a negligible distinction, however. The wish not to lose something is notably different from the wish to obtain something (...) and this difference has significant implications. (shrink)

New reproductive technologies allow parents some choice over their children. Various moral principles have been suggested to regulate such choices. This article starts from a discussion of Julian Savulescu's Principle of Procreative Beneficence, according to which parents ought to choose the child expected to have the best quality of life, before combining two previously separate lines of attack against this principle. First, it is suggested that the appropriate moral principles of guiding reproductive choices ought to focus on general wellbeing rather (...) than prioritizing that of the child and, second, that they ought to be non-maximizing. Though neither of these suggestions is entirely novel, combining them results in a new, and arguably more plausible, principle to regulate procreative choices, which I call the Principle of Generalized Procreative Non-Maleficence. According to this principle, the primary obligation on parents is not to cause harm to other people through their reproductive choices. (shrink)

The question of how to treat an incapacitated patient is vexed, both normatively and practically—normatively, because it is not obvious what the relevant objectives are; practically, because even once the relevant objectives are set, it is often difficult to determine which treatment option is best given those objectives. But despite these complications, here is one consideration that is clearly relevant: what a patient prefers. And so any device that could reliably identify a patient’s preferences would be a promising tool for (...) guiding the treatment of incapacitated patients. The patient preference predictor is just such a tool—an algorithm that takes as inputs a patient’s sociodemographic characteristics, and outputs a reliable prediction about that patient’s treatment preferences.1 But some have worried that the use of such a tool would violate or fail to appropriately respect patients’ autonomy. There are, I think, two ways to understand this kind of criticism. First, globally—as a worry that any systematic implementation of the PPP would be problematic on the grounds that it would result in significant or pervasive autonomy violations. Second, locally—as a worry that in some important range of cases, certain uses of the PPP would be problematic on autonomy grounds. Jardas et al, as I read them, address global autonomy-based criticisms, arguing—convincingly, in my view—that there’s no reason to suspect the autonomy concerns raised by the PPP would be so significant and pervasive as to render any implementation of it generally problematic.1 But even with the global criticisms rebuffed, there remains work to be done. Any ethically acceptable implementation of the PPP must be sensitive to the more local autonomy-based criticisms, with restrictions and safeguards in place to ensure respect for autonomy in the kinds of cases in which the use of the PPP might otherwise threaten …. (shrink)

As dominant liberal conceptions of the relationship between rights and freedom maintain, freedom is a property of the individual human subject and rights are a mechanism for protecting that freedom—whether it be the freedom to speak, to associate, to practise a certain religion or cultural way of life, and so forth. Rights according to these kinds of accounts are protective of a certain zone of permitted or valorised conduct and they function either as, for example, a ‘side-constraint’ on the actions (...) of others or as a ‘trump’ over governmental or community goals. In such accounts, of course, the emphasis is placed upon the forms of power against which rights protect the individual, whether that be the trespasses of others or the overweening attentions of the state. Such accounts famously do not themselves take much account of the multiple ways in which rights also function as forms of power, often delimiting the courses of action that a putative rights-holder can take and affecting the manner of its exercise, indeed often in the very name of freedom itself. Of course, there is a sizeable critical literature which does address itself to these kinds of question, most notably from the radical traditions of Marxism and critical legal theory, which see rights in terms of the relations of production, consumption and exploitation that they establish between legal subjects. For various reasons, Foucault has not figured as prominently in critical discussions of rights. Here I do not propose to enter into debates surrounding Foucault’s engagement with, or failure to engage with, law as an object of study, nor with the emergent literature on Foucault’s deployments of rights, indeed even of human rights. Rather, what I want to do in this paper is to articulate and defend the view that through a reading of Foucault’s work, both on rights and on power relations more broadly, we can discern an understanding of the political ambivalence of rights. For Foucault (and for some of the post-Foucaultian scholars whose work I shall address, below), rights are both political tools for the contestation and alteration of mechanisms of power and simultaneously mechanisms of inscription, both disciplinary and governmental, which work to conduct those who rely upon them. Far from being an unproblematic tool for the protection of the subject’s freedom, rights emerge in this account as conflicted and ambivalent mechanisms. In the first part of this paper I develop a Foucaultian account of rights along these lines and then hope to illustrate it by reference to several examples, from the constitution of gender and cultural identity via rights to the figure of the refugee, whilst in the final part of the paper I make a return to the idea of freedom in Foucault’s work and link the view of rights developed herein to a certain conception of freedom in his work. (shrink)

The relationship between emotions and argumentation is not always clear. I attempt to clarify this issue by referring to three basic questions: (1) Do emotions constitute a certain kind of argumentation?; (2) Do emotions constitute rational argumentation?; (3) Do emotions constitute efficient argumentation? I will claim that there are many circumstances in which the answer to these questions is positive. After describing such circumstances, the educational implications of the connection between emotions and argumentation will be indicated.

This paper examines Quine’s web of belief metaphor and its role in his various responses to conventionalism. Distinguishing between two versions of conventionalism, one based on the under-determination of theory, the other associated with a linguistic account of necessary truth, I show how Quine plays the two versions of conventionalism against each other. Some of Quine’s reservations about conventionalism are traced back to his 1934 lectures on Carnap. Although these lectures appear to endorse Carnap’s conventionalism, in exposing Carnap’s failure to (...) provide an explanatory account of analytic truth, they in fact anticipate Quine’s later critique of conventionalism. I further argue that Quine eventually deconstructs both his own metaphor and the thesis of under-determination it serves to illustrate. This enables him to hold onto under-determination, but at the cost of depleting it of any real epistemic significance. Lastly, I explore the implications of this deconstruction for Quine’s indeterminacy of translation thesis. (shrink)

This paper criticizes Kripke’s and Putnam’s theory of the semantics of natural kind terms (KPT) and develops an alternative theory. It first examines description theories of natural kind terms, to see what their flaws are and what can be preserved of them. It then presents the KPT and makes three main criticisms. These rely on the meaning of elementary particles’ names, on reactions to the absence of a common essential nature, and on applications of old terms to new cases. Lastly, (...) it develops a theory that takes noun phrases to be plural referring expressions, and shows how that theory meets the objections to the KPT. (shrink)

Sarah McGrath argues that, when it comes to our controversial moral views, we have no reason to think that we are less likely to be in error than those who disagree with us. I refer to this position as the Moral Peer View. Under pressure from Nathan King, McGrath admits that the MPV need not always have been true, though she maintains it is true now. Although King seems to think that there should be current counterexamples to the MPV, he (...) holds back from actually proposing any. I argue that those of us who favor marriage equality and gender equality are currently in a position to reject the MPV with regard to these issues, and I propose conditions under which people can reasonably take their moral beliefs to be epistemically advantaged. King and McGrath agree that opponents of slavery like William Wilberforce could reasonably believe that they enjoyed an epistemic advantage over proponents of slavery, and I suggest that proponents of marriage equality and gender equality might make similar claims. I propose that we can make additional claims to epistemic advantages if we believe that almost everyone who considers the matter admits that there are advantages, those who disagree with us would admit that there are advantages and we can give a plausible explanation as to why those who we think are epistemically disadvantaged have not noticed that they are disadvantaged. Finally, I argue that it is reasonable to think that our controversial beliefs are justified if we can find reasons to think that our opponents are mistaken, and do not see similar reasons to think ourselves mistaken. This is a better policy than supposing that we are just as prone to mistakes as our opponents, as the latter is both less defensible in theory, and more likely to stifle intellectual progress. (shrink)

The richness of Putnam's philosophical oeuvre consists not only in the broad spectrum of problems addressed, but also in the transformations and restructuring his positions have undergone over the years. The essays collected in this volume are sensitive to both these dimensions. They discuss Putnam's major philosophical contributions to the theory of meaning, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science and mathematics, and moral theory. But, in addition, tracing threads of change and continuity, they analyze the dynamics underlying the (...) unfolding of Putnam's thought. The volume also constitutes a critical introduction to a number of central issues in contemporary philosophy, including quantum logic, realism, functionalism, the 'minds as computer' metaphor, and the fact/value dichotomy. (shrink)