Who gets to decide what it means to live a healthy lifestyle, and how important a healthy lifestyle is to a good life? As more governments make preventing obesity and diet-related illness a priority, it's become more important to consider the ethics and acceptability of their efforts. When it comes to laws and policies that promote healthy eating--such as special taxes on sugary drinks and the banning of food deemed unhealthy--critics argue that these policies are paternalistic, and that they limit (...) individual autonomy over food choices. In Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach, Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti show that both paternalistic justifications for healthy eating efforts and anti-paternalistic arguments against them can be grounded in perfectionist views that overly prioritize some values over others. The authors therefore propose a more inclusive, public reason approach to healthy eating policy that will be appealing to those who take pluralism and cultural diversity seriously, by providing a framework through which different kinds of values, including but not limited to autonomy and health, can be factored into the public justification for healthy eating efforts. Additionally, the book adopts a 'farm to fork' approach to the ethics of healthy eating efforts: it engages with theories and debates in political philosophy, considers the implications of different theoretical positions for healthy eating efforts, and then develops a concrete tool for assessing policies that will be of interest to both scholars and policymakers. As well as offering a novel normative analysis of healthy eating policy, the authors offer a new theoretical framework that will be applicable to a wide range of public policy scenarios. (shrink)

Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory.

_Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory._.

There are countless circumstances under which random individuals COULD act together to prevent something morally bad from happening or to remedy a morally bad situation. But when OUGHT individuals to act together in order to bring about a morally important outcome? Building on Philip Pettit’s and David Schweikard’s account of joint action, I will put forward the notion of joint duties: duties to perform an action together that individuals in so-called random or unstructured groups can jointly hold. I will show (...) how this account of joint duties is preferable to one which defends individual duties to cooperate. I then discuss the limits of joint duties and the ways in which one can fail to comply with them. It will become apparent that the circumstances under which individuals in random collectives acquire such joint duties are rare. (shrink)

In this article, I will consider whether, and in what way, doxastic states can harm. I’ll first consider whether, and in what way, a person’s doxastic state can harm her, before turning to the question of whether, and in what way, it can harm someone else.

Why equality cannot be conditional on a shared human “nature” but has to be for all For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural equality invited gradations of natural difference, and the ambiguity at the heart of “nature” enabled generations to write of people as equal by nature while barely noticing the exclusion of those marked as inferior by their gender, race, (...) or class. Despite what we commonly tell ourselves, these exclusions and gradations continue today. In Unconditional Equals, political philosopher Anne Phillips challenges attempts to justify equality by reference to a shared human nature, arguing that justification turns into conditions and ends up as exclusion. Rejecting the logic of justification, she calls instead for a genuinely unconditional equality. Drawing on political, feminist, and postcolonial theory, Unconditional Equals argues that we should understand equality not as something grounded in shared characteristics but as something people enact when they refuse to be considered inferiors. At a time when the supposedly shared belief in human equality is so patently not shared, the book makes a powerful case for seeing equality as a commitment we make to ourselves and others, and a claim we make on others when they deny us our status as equals. (shrink)

People hold wildly opposing and very strong views on the question whether mental disorders are brain disorders, and the disagreement is primarily a conceptual one, not one about whether there are,...

Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. This has resulted in long-standing metaphysical puzzles, such as the problems of personal identity and material constitution, being increasingly addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of identity. This development within metaphysics is in significant tension with the growing tendency amongst philosophers of biology to regard biological identity as a deep puzzle in its own right, especially following recent advances in our understanding of symbiosis, the evolution of (...) multi-cellular organisms and the inherently dynamical character of living systems. Moreover, and building on these biological insights, the broadly substance ontological framework of metaphysical theories of biological identity appears problematic to a growing number of philosophers of biology who invoke process ontology instead. This volume addresses this tension, exploring to what extent it can be dissolved. For this purpose, the volume presents the first selection of essays exclusively focused on biological identity and written by experts in metaphysics, the philosophy of biology and biology. The resulting cross-disciplinary dialogue paves the way for a convincing account of biological identity that is both metaphysically constructive and scientifically informed, and will be of interest to metaphysicians, philosophers of biology and theoretical biologists. (shrink)

The standard view of ignorance is that it consists in the mere lack of knowledge or true belief. Duncan Pritchard has recently argued, against the standard view, that ignorance is the lack of knowledge/true belief that is due to an improper inquiry. I shall call, Pritchard’s alternative account the Normative Account. The purpose of this article is to strengthen the Normative Account by providing an independent vargument supporting it.

It is commonly accepted – not only in the philosophical literature but also in daily life – that ignorance is a failure of some sort. As a result, a desideratum of any ontological account of ignorance is that it must be able to explain why there is something wrong with being ignorant of a true proposition. This article shows two things. First, two influential accounts of ignorance – the Knowledge Account and the True Belief Account – do not satisfy this (...) requirement. They fail to provide a satisfying normative account of the badness of ignorance. Second, this article suggests an alternative explanation of what makes ignorance a bad cognitive state. In a nutshell, ignorance is bad because it is the manifestation of a vice, namely, of what Cassam calls “epistemic insouciance”. (shrink)

COVID-19 vaccine refusal seems like a paradigm case of irrationality. Vaccines are supposed to be the best way to get us out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet many people believe that they should not be vaccinated even though they are dissatisfied with the current situation. In this paper, we analyze COVID-19 vaccine refusal with the tools of contemporary philosophical theories of responsibility and rationality. The main outcome of this analysis is that many vaccine-refusers are responsible for the belief that (...) they should not be vaccinated and epistemically rational in holding it. This is an important result because it provides insights into the legitimacy of certain public health policies. In particular, this result shows that a public health policy that would abandon the project of convincing certain vaccine-refusers with reasons – e.g., by simply making vaccination compulsory – is prima facie illegitimate. (shrink)

Prison work creates ethical challenges for which a training program was initiated for Dutch prison staff to foster their Moral Craftsmanship (MCS). The concept of MCS is not yet defined and operationalized in literature. This explorative study aims to 1) define MCS, 2) identify conceptual elements of MCS, and 3) develop a measurement tool for MCS. A document and literature study provided input for the definition and selection of conceptual elements related within DCIA policy documents, identifying three conceptual levels of (...) MCS: individual (cognition, attitude, and actions), team, and leadership. This first MCSQ consists of seventy-one items distributed across the domains: values and norms, judgment and reasoning, consultation, implementation, looking back, interactions, and leadership. We tested its usability via ‘think-aloud interviews.’ Validation of the current version of the MCS-Questionnaire and consensus among experts about what to include or exclude in the concept of MCS are needed for further development. (shrink)

This Element has two aims. The first is to discuss arguments philosophers have made about the difference God's existence might make to questions of general interest in metaethics. The second is to argue that it is a mistake to think we can get very far in answering these questions by assuming a thin conception of God, and to suggest that exploring the implications of thick theisms for metaethics would be more fruitful.

Our moral obligations can sometimes be collective in nature: They can jointly attach to two or more agents in that neither agent has that obligation on their own, but they – in some sense – share it or have it in common. In order for two or more agents to jointly hold an obligation to address some joint necessity problem they must have joint ability to address that problem. Joint ability is highly context-dependent and particularly sensitive to shared (or even (...) common) beliefs. As such, joint ability can be deliberately generated in a given collection of agents by providing information related to collective goals and contributory actions. As moral agents, we regularly face problems wherein the outcome of our actions depends on how others choose. There are two ways of deliberating about our own choices in such cases. We can either think of our choices as best responses to others’ choices (I-mode reasoning). Or we can think of our own choices as contributions to the collectively best option (even when we do not know how others are (likely) to choose) (we-mode reasoning). In deliberating about the right (individual) course of action vis-à-vis collective action problems, agents regularly we-frame the case at hand, that is, they include options in their deliberation that are only collectively available, and they we-reason with regard to their individual contributory actions. It is a necessary condition for collective obligations that potential collaborators facing a joint necessity case have grounds to privilege we-reasoning over reasoning in I-mode. (shrink)

The most remarkable about the continuity in Chomsky's thought about language is that it takes place against a theoretical landscape in constant flux, the landscape of generative grammar. Chomsky introduced a central distinction between E‐languages and I‐language, the internalized knowledge of language that each speaker has and which is the result of the interaction between his or her language faculty and the (limited) experience that he or she had of his or her mother tongue during language acquisition. The Faculty of (...) Language narrowly understood corresponds to “the abstract linguistic computational system alone, independent of the other systems with which it interacts”. This chapter aims to follow the trail of Chomsky's strongly reiterated claim throughout the years that language is not primarily a tool for communication, but rather, a tool for thought. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adornos posthum veröffentlichte Ästhetische Theorie exponiert die Krise der Kunst im Zeitalter ihrer gesellschaftlichen Integration. Gesättigt mit der Erfahrung konkreter Kunstwerke, hinterfragt sie das tradierte Kategoriensystem philosophischer Ästhetik. Der vorliegende Band unternimmt erstmals eine kommentierende Auslegung, um den dichten Text aufzuschließen und ein Weiterdenken von Adornos kritischer Ästhetik anzuregen.

Research on emotion and psychopathology has blossomed due in part to the translation of affective science theory and methods to the study of diverse disorders. This translational approach has helped the field to hone in more precisely on the nature of emotion deficits to identify antecedent causes and maintaining processes, and to develop promising new interventions. The future of emotion research in psychopathology will benefit from three inter-related areas, including an emphasis on emotion difficulties that cut across traditional diagnostic boundaries (...) (i.e., a transdiagnostic approach), the explicit linking of emotion and cognition in behavioral and neuroimaging studies in psychopathology, and continued translation of the latest conceptualizations of emotion to the study of psychopathology. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to commentaries on my book “Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders?”. The topics I discuss are: accounts of function and dysfunction, constraints on the relationship between processes at the level of the brain and the mind, externalism in psychiatry, implications for moral responsibility and the question whether my account is a form of conceptual engineering. I defend my account and argue that the key criterion for whether mental disorders are brain disorders is whether we can map (...) dysfunctional psychological processes onto specific differences in brain function. I also acknowledge that my commentators have identified points where my account needs further development. (shrink)

The traditional concept of prime matter – a purely potential substratum that persists through substantial change and serves to constitute the generated substance – has played a dwindling part in Aristotelian scholarship over the centuries. In medieval interpretations of Aristotle, prime matter was thought to play these two roles in all substantial changes, not only in changes at the level of the four elements. In more recent centuries, traditional prime matter was relegated only to the context of substantial changes between (...) the four elements. And in the last few decades of Aristotelian scholarship, it has become common either to downplay or even to eliminate prime matter’s role in elemental changes too. I will support the traditional concept of prime matter by showing that it aligns Aristotle’s view of elemental change with one of the central constraints on matter imposed in his Physics to a degree that cannot be achieved on the non-traditional interpretations: the need for matter to be in potentiality in a way that avoids the two problematic extremes of mere persistence, on the one hand, and destruction, on the other. This point will be supported by Aristotle’s rejection of both monism and pluralism in On Generation and Corruption. Second, I will argue that Aristotle calls for precisely the same kind of potentiality in a very different context: his critique of Anaxagoras’s view of matter in the Generation of Animals. Here the very same problematic extremes of mere persistence and destruction that plague the alternate views to traditional prime matter also plague the dominant views on the matter for animal generation. Especially since Aristotle takes living things to be paradigmatic substances, these comparisons suggest that the apparent idiosyncrasies of elemental transformation which have motivated interpreters to depart from traditional prime matter may not be so idiosyncratic after all. And if that is so, it may be that the problem lies not so much with traditional prime matter as with our assumptions about how persistence and constitution work in substantial change according to Aristotle. In the end, this line of argument opens the door to three new potential interpretations of the matter for substantial generation in Aristotle, interpretations which align with his concept of potentiality and – to varying degrees – with traditional prime matter as well. (shrink)

This book explores the way in which, working within the investigative tradition associated with the Royal Society, the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) used ...

Current perspectives on attractiveness-related prosocial biases emphasize the contribution of evolutionarily shaped mating drives. Here, we extend these concepts by highlighting the pivotal role of the hypothalamic peptide oxytocin in augmenting the salience and rewarding value of social stimuli, including the partner's face, thereby fostering social bonding in general and the stability of monogamous pair bonds and offspring care in particular.

Some feminist theorists have argued that emphasizing women's self-defense mistakenly emphasizes women's behavior and choices rather than male aggression as a cause of sexual violence. I argue here that such critiques of self-defense are misguided, and do not sufficiently take into account the ways in which feminist self-defense courses can constitute embodied transformations of the meanings of femininity and rape. While certainly not sufficient to counter a rape culture by themselves, self-defense courses should remain a crucial element in feminist anti-rape (...) activism. (shrink)

In the contemporary virtue ethics literature, eudaimonia is discussed far more often than it is defined or fully articulated. It was introduced into the contemporary virtue ethics literature by philosophers who work in ancient philosophy, and who are familiar with the work of ancient eudaimonists (where the ancient eudaimonists are typically thought to include Plato, the Stoics, and (especially) Aristotle). Yet, predictably, among philosophers who study ancient philosophy, there is not consensus, but rather lively debate, about what eudaimonia is: how (...) the various ancient eudaimonists understood it, the role it played in their theories, and so on.2 In this chapter, I will discuss the role of eudaimonia in contemporary virtue ethics, and especially contemporary eudaimonist virtue ethics. (shrink)

Human persons exist longer than a single moment in time; they persist through time. However, so far it has not been possible to make this natural and widespread assumption metaphysically comprehensible. The philosophical debate on personal identity is rather stuck in a dilemma: reductionist theories explain personal identity away, while non-reductionist theories fail to give any informative account at all. This chapter argues that this dilemma emerges from an underlying commitment, shared by both sides of in the debate, to an (...) ontology which that gives the priority to static unchanging things. The claim defended here is that the dilemma of personal identity can be overcome if we acknowledge the biological nature of human persons and switch to a process- ontological framework that takes process and change to be ontologically primary. Human persons are biological higher-order processes, rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated. (shrink)

Since Foucault introduced the notion of biopolitics, it has been fiercely debated—usually in highly generalized terms—how to interpret and use this concept. This article argues that these discussions need to be situated, as biopolitics have features that do not travel from one site to the next. This becomes apparent if we attend to an aspect of biopolitics that has only received scant attention so far: the knowledge practices required to constitute populations as intelligible objects of government. To illustrate this point, (...) the article focuses on processes of biopolitical bordering: the delineation of the target population that is to be known via statistical practices. Drawing on the example of Estonia I show that methodological decisions involved in this work have important biopolitical implications as they affect the size and composition of the population, thus shaping the design of programmes of government aiming at its regulation. (shrink)

Recent work in positive psychology demonstrates the importance of self-transcendence: understanding oneself to be part of something greater than the self, such as a family, community, or tradition of sacred practice. Self-transcendence is positively associated with wellbeing and a sense of meaning and purpose. Philosophers have argued that self-transcendent motivation has a central role in good character, or virtue. Positive psychologists are just now beginning to integrate the aim of developing such motivation in character interventions. In this paper we draw (...) attention to an important but overlooked condition on effectively developing self-transcendent motivation constitutive of virtue: such a process must engage the subject’s will in the right way. If a process does not meet this condition it will fail to produce motivation constitutive of virtue according to leading philosophical accounts of virtue. We identify a suite of strategies for cultivating motivations that do meet this condition but have not been explored in relation to character interventions, namely, reappraisal strategies from the extended process model of emotion regulation (EPM-ER). (shrink)

Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. This has resulted in long-standing metaphysical puzzles, such as the problems of personal identity and material constitution, being increasingly addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of identity. This development within metaphysics is in significant tension with the growing tendency amongst philosophers of biology to regard biological identity as a deep puzzle in its own right, especially following recent advances in our understanding of symbiosis, the evolution of (...) multi-cellular organisms and the inherently dynamical character of living systems. Moreover, and building on these biological insights, the broadly substance ontological framework of metaphysical theories of biological identity appears problematic to a growing number of philosophers of biology who invoke process ontology instead. This volume addresses this tension, exploring to what extent it can be dissolved. For this purpose, the volume presents the first selection of essays exclusively focused on biological identity and written by experts in metaphysics, the philosophy of biology and biology. The resulting cross-disciplinary dialogue paves the way for a convincing account of biological identity that is both metaphysically constructive and scientifically informed, and will be of interest to metaphysicians, philosophers of biology and theoretical biologists. (shrink)

Mainstream historians in recent decades have often treated formal categories and rules as something to be 'used' by individuals, as one might use a stick or stone, and the gains of an earlier legal history are often needlessly set aside. Anthropologists, meanwhile, have treated rules as analytic errors and categories as an imposition by outside powers or by analysts, leaving a very thin notion of 'practice' as the stuff of social life. Philosophy of an older vintage, as well as the (...) work of scholars such as Charles Taylor, provides fresh approaches when applied imaginatively to cases beyond the traditional ground of modern Europe and North America. Not only are different kinds of rules and categories open to examination, but the very notion of a rule can be explored more deeply. This volume approaches rules and categories as constitutive of action and hence of social life, but also as providing means of criticism and imagination. A general theoretical framework is derived from analytical philosophy, from Wittgenstein to his critics and beyond, and from recent legal thinkers such as Schauer and Waldron. Case-studies are presented from a broad range of periods and regions, from Amazonia via northern Chad, Tibet, and medieval Russia to the scholarly worlds of Roman law, Islam, and Classical India. As the third volume in the Legalism series, this collection draws on common themes that run throughout the first two volumes: Legalism: Anthropology and History and Legalism: Community and Justice, consolidating them in a framework that suggests a new approach to rule-bound systems. (shrink)

Die Herrschaft des Behaviorismus in der Psychologie ist gebrochen! Das ist die Ausgangsthese dieses Buches, die im Rahmen des Modells revolutionärer Wissenschaftsentwicklung (Kuhn) als Behauptung eines Paradigmawechsels präzisiert wird. Die Argumentation beschränkt sich nicht nur auf den Nachweis des Niedergangs des Behaviorismus, sondern gibt auch konstruktiv das mögliche neue Paradigma an: als Psychologie des reflexiven Subjekts, das wie der Wissenschaftler (subjektive) Theorien aufstellt, überprüft, bewertet. Der Aufriss einer solchen Psychologie des epistemischen Subjekts unter allgemein-, sozial-, pädagogisch- und klinisch-psychologischem Aspekt thematisiert (...) vor allem: die Rationalität der Reflexionen, Normenkritik und -begründung im Austausch von wissenschaftlichen und naiven Theorien sowie die Berücksichtigung von Reflexivität in der therapeutischen Praxis. Die Rückwendung dieser pychologisch-metatheoretischen Perspektiven auf die Wissenschaftstheorie führt auch zu einer neu. (shrink)

'Community' and 'justice' recur in anthropological, historical, and legal scholarship, yet as concepts they are notoriously slippery. Historians and lawyers look to anthropologists as 'community specialists', but anthropologists often avoid the concept through circumlocution: although much used by historians, legal thinkers, and political philosophers, the term remains strikingly indeterminate and often morally overdetermined. 'Justice', meanwhile, is elusive, alternately invoked as the goal of contemporary political theorizing, and wrapped in obscure philosophical controversy. A conceptual knot emerges in much legal and political (...) thought between law, justice, and community, but theories abound, without any agreement over concepts.The contributors to this volume use empirical case studies to unpick threads of this knot. Local codes from Anglo-Saxon England, north Africa, and medieval Armenia indicate disjunctions between community boundaries and the subjects of local rules and categories; processes of justice from early modern Europe to eastern Tibet suggest new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between law and justice; and practices of exile that recur throughout the world illustrate contingent formulations of community. In the first book in the series, Legalism: Anthropology and History, law was addressed through a focus on local legal categories as conceptual tools. Here this approach is extended to the ideas and ideals of justice and community. Rigorous cross-cultural comparison allows the contributors to avoid normative assumptions, while opening new avenues of inquiry for lawyers, anthropologists, and historians alike. (shrink)

'Community' and 'justice' recur in anthropological, historical, and legal scholarship, yet as concepts they are notoriously slippery. Historians and lawyers look to anthropologists as 'community specialists', but anthropologists often avoid the concept through circumlocution: although much used by historians, legal thinkers, and political philosophers, the term remains strikingly indeterminate and often morally overdetermined. 'Justice', meanwhile, is elusive, alternately invoked as the goal of contemporary political theorizing, and wrapped in obscure philosophical controversy. A conceptual knot emerges in much legal and political (...) thought between law, justice, and community, but theories abound, without any agreement over concepts.The contributors to this volume use empirical case studies to unpick threads of this knot. Local codes from Anglo-Saxon England, north Africa, and medieval Armenia indicate disjunctions between community boundaries and the subjects of local rules and categories; processes of justice from early modern Europe to eastern Tibet suggest new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between law and justice; and practices of exile that recur throughout the world illustrate contingent formulations of community. In the first book in the series, Legalism: Anthropology and History, law was addressed through a focus on local legal categories as conceptual tools. Here this approach is extended to the ideas and ideals of justice and community. Rigorous cross-cultural comparison allows the contributors to avoid normative assumptions, while opening new avenues of inquiry for lawyers, anthropologists, and historians alike. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Difference Between Appropriate and Inappropriate Boundary Violations Why Does Prospective Action Work? Rules on Prospective Boundary Violation Conclusions.

Research has demonstrated that how teachers spend their time is an important educational issue. In this paper it is argued that there is a good case for examining teachers’ personal and professional time simultaneously in order to enhance the quality of teaching, learning and teachers’ lives.

This chapter contains sections titled: Education as Gardening: An Image of Natural Growth Do We All Possess Fertile Souls? The Gardener: What is His Contribution to the Growth of the Seeds? Gardening: Labor and Reward Plato as Gardener Dialogue Between Text and Reader: Cultivating the Seeds Teaching Us to Become Gardeners of Our Souls Plato's Literary Garden: A Corpus of Works Gardeners of Souls Notes.