This article provides a review and critique of Andrew Linzey’s article "C. S. Lewis’s Theology of Animals". In his article, Linzey, modern-day father of the Christian animal advocacy movement and director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, evaluates fellow Anglican C. S. Lewis’s contributions to a theology of animals. The article considers Lewis’s perspective on animals and Linzey’s evaluation of the same within four general categories: animal pain, animal resurrection, human superiority, and human cruelty. The contributions of both authors (...) to a theology of animals are acknowledged, but the lack of theocentric focus in their mutual thought is questioned. (shrink)

This is the first work to apply complex systems science to the psychological interplay of order and chaos. The author draws on thought from a wide range of disciplines-both conventional and unorthodox-to address such questions as the nature of consciousness, the relation between mind and reality, and the justification of belief systems. The material should provoke thought among systems scientists, theoretical psychologists, artificial intelligence researchers, and philosophers.

In a world of industralized farming and feed lots, is eating meat ever a morally responsible choice? Is eating organic or free range sufficient to change the moral equation? Is there a moral cost in not eating meat? As billions of animals continue to be raised and killed by human beings for human consumption, affecting the significance and urgency in answering these questions grow. This volume collects twelve new essays by leading moral philosophers who address the difficult questions surrounding meat (...) eating by examining various implications and consequences of our food choices. Some argue for the moral permissibility of eating meat by suggesting views such as farm animals would not exist and flourish otherwise, and the painless death that awaits is no loss to them. Others consider more specific examples like whether buying french fries at McDonalds is just as problematic as ordering a Big Mac due to the action's indirect support of a major purveyor of meat. The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat is a stimulating contribution to the ongoing debate on meat consumption and actively challenges readers to reevlaute their stand on food and animal ethics. (shrink)

Many philosophers endorse the view that global or “narrative” features of a life at least partly determine its value. For instance, a life in which the subject redeems her past failures and sacrifices with later successes is thought to be better, ceteris paribus, than one in which her later successes are unrelated to her previous failures. In this paper I distinguish some views about narrative value, including Fischer’s views about the importance of free will for narrative value, and raise a (...) number of problems for the idea of narrative value. (shrink)

Borrowing from the philosophy of Kierkegaard, one way of understanding the apparent conflict between science and religion is to frame each as a discourse in terms of ‘about’ and ‘of’ languages that appeal to objective-explicit and subjective-tacit aspects of experience. About languages are discourses that are about something else, where science is nominally about nature, empirical events and objective descriptions, whereas religions are about doctrines, rituals, liturgies, institutional structures and so on. About languages are those things that can be stated (...) propositionally, explicitly and objectively. In contrast, of languages refers to lived practices that are socio-historical. It is not just the doing of those practices but also the background conditions that contextualise them. This language is experienced tacitly and subjectively. Whilst we might be able to work from definitions by explicitly-objectively stating what science and religion are about, the tacit-subjective element eludes such reduction. Christianity, for example, may be about Jesus, Love and the Gospels, but we might be unsatisfied in saying that is all that Christianity is. Equally, we might be unsatisfied in claiming science is only about experimental verification, consensus building or falsification when history offers scientific counterexamples that fail to meet our definition. I argue that this unsatisfactory result is due to a metaphysical conflation of two discourses, which then create their own pseudo-problems, such as proving the existence of God as a route to the ‘Truth’ of religion or supplying a scientific basis for being ethical as a way of ‘disproving’ the religious experience. (shrink)

The concept of well-being plays a central role in moral and political theory. Policies and actions are justified or criticized on the grounds that they make people better or worse off. But is there really such a thing as well-being, and if so, what is it? Is it pleasure, desire-satisfaction, knowledge, virtue, achievement, some combination of these, or something else entirely? How can we measure well-being, amongst individuals and society? And how can we use it to make moral judgements about (...) people, policies and institutions? In this entertaining and accessible new book, Ben Bradley guides readers through the various philosophical theories of well-being, such as hedonism, perfectionism and pluralism, showing the benefits and drawbacks of each theory. He explores the role of well-being in moral and political theory, and the limitations of welfare-based approaches to ethics such as utilitarianism and welfare egalitarianism. Finally, he introduces puzzles about well-being that arise in moral and prudential deliberations about procreation and death. Well-Being is an ideal introduction to these topics for those with no philosophical background, or for philosophers looking for an overview of current thinking about the subject. (shrink)

Research ethics guidelines grew out of several infamous episodes where research subjects were exploited. There is significant international synchronization of guidelines. However, indigenous groups in New Zealand, Canada and Australia have criticized these guidelines as being inadequate for research involving indigenous people and have developed guidelines from their own cultural perspectives. Whilst traditional research ethics guidelines place a lot of emphasis on informed consent, these indigenous guidelines put much greater emphasis on interdependence and trust. This article argues that traditional guidelines (...) are premised on relationships of equal power, and that often the researcher has more power that is not fully equalized by providing information. Where there is a relationship of unequal power, then focusing on interdependence and trust is more likely to achieve ethical safety. We illustrate this thesis by describing the detail of a research project looking at the use of interpreters, where we video-recorded live consultations and then interviewed the patient, interpreter and doctor. We conclude by suggesting that mainstream research ethics guidelines should pay more attention to the development of a trustworthy relationship between subject and researcher, and that, following the lead from clinical medicine, we should develop a culturally competent ethical framework for research on human subjects. (shrink)

Two important assumptions of behavioral momentum theory are contradicted by existing data. Resistance to change is not due simply to the Pavlovian contingency between a discriminative stimulus and the rate of reinforcement in its presence, because variations in the response-reinforcer contingency, independent of the stimulus-reinforcer contingency, produce differential resistance to change. Resistance to change is also not clearly related to measures of preference, in that several experiments show the two measures to dissociate.

Chalmers suggests that, if a Singularity fails to occur in the next few centuries, the most likely reason will be 'motivational defeaters' i.e. at some point humanity or human-level AI may abandon the effort to create dramatically superhuman artificial general intelligence. Here I explore one plausible way in which that might happen: the deliberate human creation of an 'AI Nanny' with mildly superhuman intelligence and surveillance powers, designed either to forestall Singularity eternally, or to delay the Singularity until humanity more (...) fully understands how to execute a Singularity in a positive way. It is suggested that as technology progresses, humanity may find the creation of an AI Nanny desirable as a means of protecting against the destructive potential of various advanced technologies such as AI, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. (shrink)

Toulmin’s formulation of “analytic arguments” in his 1958 book, The Uses of Argument, is opaque. Commentators have not adequately explicated this formulation, though Toulmin called it a “key” and “crucial” concept for his model of argument macrostructure. Toulmin’s principle “tests” for determining analytic arguments are problematic. Neither the “tautology test” nor the “verification test” straightforwardly indicates whether an argument is analytic or not. As such, Toulmin’s notion of analytic arguments might not represent such a key feature of his model. Absent (...) a clearer formulation of analytic arguments, readers of Toulmin should be hesitant to adopt this terminology. (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)

This paper discusses the Saudi Arabian case by Abdallah Adlan and Henk ten Have, published in a 2012 issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, regarding a congenitally disabled child enrolled in a research project examining the genetics of her condition. During the course of the study, her father was found not to be genetically related, and the case discussed the dilemma between disclosing to the family all findings as promised in consent documents or withholding paternity information because of the (...) likely severe social repercussions. Using Adlan and ten Have’s example, this paper proposes a framework to consider cases outside of the conventional bioethics frame of reference, splitting the bioethical task into three elements: understanding the problem from the patient’s and the clinician’s perspective and then engaging in dialogue to decide what to do next. The process of dialogue between affected parties is vital. Presuming that there is a common morality undermines the effectiveness of the dialogue needed to find a resolution. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that applied philosophers hoping to develop a stronger role in public policy formation can begin by aligning their methods with the tools employed in the policy sciences. I proceed first by characterizing the standard view of policymaking and policy education as instrumentally oriented toward the employment of specific policy tools. I then investigate pressures internal to philosophy that nudge work in applied philosophy toward the periphery of policy debates. I capture the dynamics of these pressures (...) by framing them as the “dilemma dilemma” and the “problem problem.” Seeking a remedy, I turn to the interdisciplinarity of a unique approach to policymaking generally known as the “policy sciences.” Finally, I investigate the case of bioethics, an instance where philosophy has made decent headway with policymakers. From this I draw parallels to public policy. I suggest that because the policy sciences are essentially analchemist’s brew of academic fields, and because philosophy covers many of the foundational questions associated with these fields, it is only natural that applied philosophers should begin collaborations with other applied academics by adopting the strategies that have so successfully applied in other theoretical fields. (shrink)

A novel theory of reflective consciousness, will and self is presented, based on modeling each of these entities using self-referential mathematical structures called hypersets. Pattern theory is used to argue that these exotic mathematical structures may meaningfully be considered as parts of the minds of physical systems, even finite computational systems. The hyperset models presented are hypothesized to occur as patterns within the "moving bubble of attention" of the human brain and any roughly human-mind-like AI system. These ideas appear to (...) be compatible with both panpsychist and materialist views of consciousness, and probably other views as well. Their relationship with the CogPrime AI design and its implementation in the OpenCog software framework is elucidated in detail. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Well-Being: An Introduction. By Fletcher Guy.

Pickeringet al’s paper argues that the capacity of the decision-maker is the sole consideration in whether a decision should stand, and that the risk of the decision should not be considered. This argument ignores the existence of the player who is of the view that a decision is not wise. This paper argues that patient autonomy is not the sole determinant of whether a person is able to make an unwise decision, particularly in healthcare where there are always others affected (...) by the patient decision. Rather than asserting that patients have an unfettered autonomous choice on clinical decisions this paper argues that these decisions should be looked at through the lens of quality in health care that has proposed four parameters to be balanced; the patient experience, wise use of resources, the effect on public health and the clinician experience. (shrink)

The present note is part of a commentary on the first six chapters of the Historical Preface – the preface intended by Bentham for the second edition of A Fragment on Government As Sir John Bowring, the executor of Jeremy Bentham’s work, testifies, « This preface was first printed in 1828, during Mr. Bentham’s lifetime. ». On this, as on other occasions, Bentham employs the literary convention of the preface to demo...

This paper addresses the phenomenon of judicial greatness by developing a general concept of greatness and applying it to law. Under the view offered in the paper, greatness is connected to theoretical or methodological diversification. When applied to adjudication, this means that great judges are revered because they successfully make a prima facie case for their novel adjudicative methods. This is not a judicial duty but rather a voluntary project. However, once a judge succeeds in making such a prima facie (...) case, he is exempt from other judicial duties. This thesis challenges many theories of judicial duty, which do not allow normative room for supererogatory actions in law. The paper demonstrates these claims by discussing two paradigmatic great judges – Chief Justice Marshall and Justice Holmes. (shrink)

Liberal political theory acknowledges the interdependence of the wellbeing of individuals and the flourishing of the cultural groups to which they belong. Consequently, many liberal political philosophers have proposed policies and laws aimed at multicultural accommodation. That is, policies and laws aimed at assisting communities to preserve their cultural values and practices, and at allowing them greater autonomy and self-government. However, certain religious and cultural groups hold beliefs, values, and practices that are oppressive and discriminatory against some of their own (...) members. Accommodating such groups may contribute to the discrimination and oppression. This question of “minorities within minorities” poses a real dilemma for liberal political philosophy. In this Paper I focus on certain cases that fall under the “minorities within minorities” framework that raise particularly complicated theoretical considerations. These are the cases where the demands for equal treatment are raised not by the state or by outsiders, but by disadvantaged individuals and groups within a community, who base their claim for greater equality not on the superiority of liberal values over the values of their culture but rather on an alternative, competing, interpretation of the values of their culture. I suggest that strong normative considerations support the view that the liberal state should assist challenges by marginalized individuals within communities to reinterpret cultural values and traditions in ways more favorable to them. (shrink)