A particular amount of punishment is justified if and only if that amount of punishment is deserved and the desert claim is not overridden. In the case of some multiple murderers or people who perform serious violent acts in addition to murder, the deserved punishment must involve torture. I argue that this legitimate desert claim is not overridden by objections based on notions of brutality and inhumanity, the Kantian concern that persons be treated as ends, the intuitive distaste that many (...) persons have for torture, the negative consequences of institutionalized torture, the concern for bias in the imposition of punishment, and the need for accuracy in measuring harms. (shrink)

The title of this paper is intended as a provocative reference to Ursula Coope 's recent article 'Why Does Aristotle Say That There Is No Time Without Change?', which provides much of the impetus for the present paper.1 For although Coope 's strategy in answering this question is admirable, and although I think that her criticisms of the standard interpretation of the argument that opens Physics IV 11 hit their mark, I believe that her own interpretation fails and that something (...) rather like the standard interpretation is correct. In the first section, I rehearse Coope 's treatment of the standard interpretation and critically evaluate her alternative to it. In the second section, I present an interpretation of the argument that seems to me to succeed where the others fail and also to hold the promise of being quite fruitful in reconstructing the rest of Aristotle's temporal theory. While such a reconstruction lies well beyond the scope of this paper, I shall conclude by mentioning a few of the more significant points that fall out of the interpretation developed here. (shrink)

Aristotle's definition of time as 'a number of motion with respect to the before and after' has been branded as patently circular by commentators ranging from Simplicius to W. D. Ross. In this book Tony Roark presents an interpretation of the definition that renders it not only non-circular, but also worthy of serious philosophical scrutiny. He shows how Aristotle developed an account of the nature of time that is inspired by Plato while also thoroughly bound up with Aristotle's sophisticated (...) analyses of motion and perception. When Aristotle's view is properly understood, Roark argues, it is immune to devastating objections against the possibility of temporal passage articulated by McTaggart and other 20th century philosophers. Roark's novel and fascinating interpretation of Aristotle's temporal theory will appeal to those interested in Aristotle, ancient philosophy and the philosophy of time. (shrink)

The central challenge for the temporal realist is providing a coherent analysis of temporal passage, the apparent ‘flow’ of time from earlier to later. I show here how the account of time Aristotle presents in Physics IV could serve as a basis for just such an analysis, for his view is immune to the standard stock of objections levelled by twentieth century philosophers. And although his account is itself subject to a damning objection, I believe that the troublemaking element might (...) be supplanted by alternative views suited to fulfil the requisite theoretical role. I conclude that, subject to such revision, an Aristotelian conception of time looks to be the leading candidate. (shrink)

So serious a matter is capital punishment that we must consider very carefully any claim regarding its justification. Brian Calvert has offered a new version of the “argument from arbitrariness,” according to which a retributivist cannot consistently hold that some, but not all, first-degree murderers may justifiably receive the death penalty, when it is conceived to be a unique form of punishment. At the heart of this argument is the line-drawing problem, and I am inclined to think that it is (...) a genuine challenge for the retributivist. I respond on behalf of the retributivist by formulating a line-drawing method that relies on the distinction between clearly deserving and not clearly deserving and is justified by a version of the lex talionis modified with an epistemic constraint. (shrink)

Removing the Commons defends a Lockean Left-Libertarian account of the moral conditions in which people may remove, either via use or appropriation, natural resources from the commons. I conclude that self-owning agents may remove natural resources from the commons just so long as they leave others the competitive value of their removal in a way that best affords others an equal opportunity for welfare.

Gyula Klima maintains that Anselm's ontological argument is best understood in terms of a theory of reference that was made fully explicit only by later medievals. I accept the interpretative claim but offer here two objections to the argument so interpreted. The first points up a certain ambiguity in Klima's formulation of the argument, the correction of which requires a substantive revision of the argument's conclusion. The second exploits the notion of semantic closure introduced by Tarski. Klima offers the atheist (...) an ?out? by drawing a distinction between constitutive and parasitic reference. I argue that using Klima's preferred description (?the thought object than which no thought object can be thought to be greater?) to refer constitutively to God results in conceptual closure, a condition analogous to semantic closure that renders the instant conceptual scheme inconsistent and subject to paradox. Although the proof ultimately fails, Klima's development of the notions of constitutive and parasitic reference has important and far-reaching implications. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Thomas Aquinas’s attempt at theodicy (the reconciliation of evil in the world with the existence of an all-powerful, -knowing, and -loving God). Aquinas’s theodicy, utilizing the book of Job, maintains that God uses suffering and fear as a method to encourage us to form a loving relationship with Him. I argue that Aquinas’s theodicy fails because an all-loving God would not utilize suffering and fear as a method by which to encourage us to form a (...) loving relationship with Him. As I argue through example, loving relationships between persons are not underwritten on the foundations of suffering and fear, and as such we have no good reason to think that God would use such methods to form His loving relationships. (shrink)

On the life and works of the Indian philosopher Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950.

Aristotle’s views on time have received sporadic at tention over the years, but Ursula Coope’s elegantl y- written book is the first monograph available in En glish dedicated exclusively to the account that Ari stotle develops in the final five chapters of Physics IV. Three topics form the thematic core of the boo k: time’s relation to change, time’s status as a kind of numb er, and the unity and diversity of times. I shall t ouch on each of these (...) themes and indicate how I think Coope ’s interpretation fares. While I disagree with her reconstruction of the account on several central po ints, it exhibits a great deal of ingenuity and sophistication and deserves careful consideration. (shrink)

Extant accounts of exploitation typically focus on either an exchange or interaction between persons, or on exploitative systems (i.e., global capitalism). We propose a new account of exploitation that focuses instead on the benefits an exploiter enjoys which are had at the expense of another, the exploited party. This account is developed by considering the benefits enjoyed by consumers (e.g., inexpensive sweatshop-made goods) and the manner in which those benefits are produced (e.g., the loss of dignity suffered by sweatshop workers). (...) On our account, an exploitative relationship need not involve any interaction or exchange between exploiter and exploited. Neither is exploitation a property of systems or institutions. Instead, we argue that a consumer who buys a shirt produced under near slave-like conditions engages in a moral wrong by exploiting the worker who made it even though the two may be far-removed in space and time. (shrink)

This article sets out a new conception of ‘property as an asset of resilience’. Building on Fineman’s emphasis on ‘webs’ of resilience, and applying insights from Actor-Network Theory and Resilient Property Theory, we examine how the rhetorical claims asserted by owners and non-owners, individually and collectively, and the ways that law recognizes and endorses those claims, affect the production of property-as-resilience. Applying Fineman’s framework, we argue that the ‘embodiment’ and ‘embeddedness’ of human vulnerability is revealed by the necessary and inevitable (...) relationship we have with land, housing and place. Everyone—including homeless people—must ‘be’ somewhere (embodiment); however, it is our ability to access ‘assets of resilience’ through our social embeddedness in institutional structures and relationships that mitigates (or not) our experience and life opportunities. In this article we analyze the nature of real property as an asset of resilience, the consequences of exclusionary concepts of ownership for how resilience is allocated, and the implications for how we think and talk about ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ in property theories and property law. We consider the roles that states perform in the allocation of property as an asset of resilience: both directly, through the protection and enforcement of private property rights and official narratives about the nature of private property; and indirectly, as owners leverage the hinterland of privilege extended to ‘ownership’ and owners to deepen their own networks of resilience. (shrink)

We argue that agents have a prima facie moral duty to help other agents fulfill their moral duties; we call this duty moral charity. The duty is an extension of the traditional duty of charity, where an act of charity is one that helps an agent fulfill her needs. The traditional focus of charity has long been limited to material needs, such as money, food, and shelter. We think this is overly restrictive and ignores other important needs. Our needs are (...) a function of our natures, which are biological, psychological, social, and moral. Accordingly, we have correlative needs in each domain given by the requirements of our nature. A moral need, following from our moral nature, is the requirement to fulfill our moral obligations. An act of moral charity aids others in fulfilling their moral obligations when it would be difficult or impossible for them to do so otherwise. The duty of charity that requires us to help the hungry and the homeless also requires that we help others do what they o .. (shrink)

A sample of 2,359 sixth-form pupils in Northern Ireland responded in 1998 to Greer's classic question 'Have you ever had an experience of God, for example, his presence or his help or anything else?' Religious experience was reported by 29% of Protestant males, 29% of Catholic males, 39% of Protestant females and 38% of Catholic females. Compared with earlier data these figures reveal a particularly marked decline in reported religious experience among Catholic females . The content of the reported religious (...) experience is analysed and illustrated within nine descriptive categories characterised as: help and guidance, exams, God's presence, answered prayer, death, sickness, conversion, difficulty in describing, and miscellaneous. (shrink)

This study builds on a long-established tradition within the psychology of religion concerned with the analysis and interpretation of prayer. Drawing on 917 prayer-cards le in one rural church over a sixteenth-month period, the analysis distinguishes between three aspects of intercessory and supplicatory prayer defined as reference, intention, and objective. Results of the analysis showed that only 4% of prayer requests had the prayer author as a key focus, and that there was a preference to pray for other people and (...) for world or global issues . Specific concrete issues were not included in 29% of prayer requests, but in the 71% of requests where concrete contexts were provided, 76% of these were concerned with illness, death, and conflict or disaster. Overall, there were more examples of secondary control than primary control , and primary control was found more often in requests which had the prayer author as a key focus and in the categories of illness, growth, work, relationships, and general requests. These results give rise to a number of hypotheses regarding prayers authors' perceptions of prayer and its purpose. (shrink)