New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 763-771, September 2021.

It is widely thought that firms that employ workers in “sweatshop” conditions wrongfully exploit those workers. This claim has been challenged by those who argue that because companies are not obligated to hire their workers in the first place, employing them cannot be wrong so long as they voluntarily accept their jobs and genuinely benefit from them. In this article, I argue that we can maintain that at least many sweatshop employees are wrongfully exploited, while accepting the plausible claim at (...) the core of many defenses of sweatshops, namely that engaging in a voluntary and mutually beneficial transaction with a person in need cannot constitute morally worse treatment of that person than doing nothing at all to benefit her. We can do this, I claim, by accepting that wealthy multinational corporations have positive duties to employ or otherwise benefit the global poor. I argue that these duties can be plausibly grounded in the fact that potential sweatshop workers are victims of global structural injustice, from which multinational corporations typically benefit. (shrink)

Brian Skyrms constructs a theory of "dynamic deliberation" and uses it to investigate rational decision-making in cases of strategic interaction. This illuminating book will be of great interest to all those in many disciplines who use decision theory and game theory to study human behavior and thought. Skyrms begins by discussing the Bayesian theory of individual rational decision and the classical theory of games, which at first glance seem antithetical in the criteria used for determining action. In his effort (...) to show how methods for dealing with information feedback can be productively combined, the author skillfully leads us through the mazes of equilibrium selection, the Nash equilibria for normal and extensive forms, structural stability, causal decision theory, dynamic probability, the revision of beliefs, and, finally, good habits for decision. The author provides many clarifying illustrations and a handy appendix called "Deliberational Dynamics on Your Personal Computer." His powerful model has important implications for understanding the rational origins of convention and the social contract, the logic of nuclear deterrence, the theory of good habits, and the varied strategies of political and economic behavior. (shrink)

As anyone who has flown out of a cloud knows, the boundaries of a cloud are a lot less sharp up close than they can appear on the ground. Even when it seems clearly true that there is one, sharply bounded, cloud up there, really there are thousands of water droplets that are neither determinately part of the cloud, nor determinately outside it. Consider any object that consists of the core of the cloud, plus an arbitrary selection of these droplets. (...) It will look like a cloud, and circumstances permitting rain like a cloud, and generally has as good a claim to be a cloud as any other object in that part of the sky. But we cannot say every such object is a cloud, else there would be millions of clouds where it seemed like there was one. And what holds for clouds holds for anything whose boundaries look less clear the closer you look at it. And that includes just about every kind of object we normally think about, including humans. Although this seems to be a merely technical puzzle, even a triviality, a surprising range of proposed solutions has emerged, many of them mutually inconsistent. It is not even settled whether a solution should come from metaphysics, or from philosophy of language, or from logic. Here we survey the options, and provide several links to the many topics related to the Problem. (shrink)

It is argued that propositions cannot be the compositional semantic values of sentences (in context) simply due to issues stemming from the compositional semantics of modal operators (or modal quantifiers). In particular, the fact that the arguments for double indexing generalize to multiple indexing exposes a fundamental tension in the default philosophical conception of semantic theory. This provides further motivation for making a distinction between two sentential semantic contents—what (Dummett 1973) called “ingredient sense” and “assertoric content”.

In three experiments, subjects attempted to track multiple items as they moved independently and unpredictably about a display. Performance was not impaired when the items were briefly (but completely) occluded at various times during their motion, suggesting that occlusion is taken into account when computing enduring perceptual objecthood. Unimpaired performance required the presence of accretion and deletion cues along fixed contours at the occluding boundaries. Performance was impaired when items were present on the visual field at the same times and (...) to the same degrees as in the occlusion conditions, but disappeared and reappeared in ways which did not implicate the presence of occluding surfaces (e.g. by imploding and exploding into and out of existence, instead of accreting and deleting along a fixed contour). Unimpaired performance did not require visible occluders (i.e. Michotte’s tunnel effect) or globally consistent occluder positions. We discuss implications of these results for theories of objecthood in visual attention. (shrink)

Consciousness often presents itself as a problem for materialists because no matter which physical explanation we consider, there seems to remain something about conscious experience that hasn't been fully explained. This gives rise to an apparent explanatory gap. The explanatory gulf between the physical and the conscious is reflected in the broader population, in which dualistic intuitions abound. Drawing on recent empirical evidence, this essay presents a dual-process cognitive model of consciousness attribution. This dual-process model, we suggest, provides an important (...) part of the explanation for why dualism is so attractive and the explanatory gap so vexing. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 72-75.

Perceptual illusionism is the view that perceptual experience is, in general, radically illusory. That is, perceptual experience presents objects as having certain sensible properties and standing in certain sensible relations, but nothing in the subject’s environment has those properties or stands in those relations. This paper makes the case for perceptual illusionism by showing how a broad set of philosophical and scientific considerations converge to support illusionism about the full range of sensible properties and relations. After clarifying the illusionist thesis, (...) I set out the argument in three parts. First, I briefly make the case for an illusionist view of color. I then argue for illusionism about the spatial/temporal properties presented in experience on the assumption that some “radical” view of space (and/or time) is correct—that is, some view according to which nothing like our ordinary three-dimensional space (or four-dimensional spacetime) exists at the fundamental level. Finally, I argue that there is a strong case for illusionism even if all radical views turn out to be false. (shrink)

Dominant social sciences approaches to complexity suggest that awareness of complexity in late-modern society comes from various recent scientific insights. By examining today’s plant and human genomics sciences, I question this from both ends: first suggesting that typical public culture was already aware of particular salient forms of complexity, such as limits to predictive knowledge ; second, showing how up-to-date genomics science expresses both complexity and its opposites, predictive determinism and reductionism, as coexistent representations of nature and scientific knowledge. I (...) suggest we can understand this self-authored epistemic confusion in modern science by avoiding ‘the usual suspects’ – fading simpler discourses left over from previous scientific times; media oversimplifications; or the need to ‘simplify’ to essentials, for ignorant publics – and looking instead at the silent imaginations of extra-scientific reference groups reflected and projectively performed in scientific discourses-practices themselves. Thus contradictions of complex scientific understandings are systematically created by science’s own embodiment of epistemic commitments influenced by commercial cultures, and by imagined publics who are important new constructed objects of institutional scientific concerns – over authority and trust. New dimensions of complexity thus come alive through paying attention to neglected tacit dimensions of science–society interrelations. (shrink)

The notion that visual attention can operate over visual objects in addition to spatial locations has recently received much empirical support, but there has been relatively little empirical consideration of what can count as an `object' in the ®rst place. We have investi- gated this question in the context of the multiple object tracking paradigm, in which subjects must track a number of independently and unpredictably moving identical items in a ®eld of identical distractors. What types of feature clusters can (...) be tracked in this manner? In other words, what counts as an `object' in this task? We investigated this question with a technique we call target merging: we alter tracking displays so that distinct target and distractor loca- tions appear perceptually to be parts of the same object by merging pairs of items (one target with one distractor) in various ways ± for example, by connecting item locations with a simple line segment, by drawing the convex hull of the two items, and so forth. The data show that target merging makes the tracking task far more dif®cult to varying degrees depending on exactly how the items are merged. The effect is perceptually salient, involving in some conditions a total destruction of subjects' capacity to track multiple items. These studies provide strong evidence for the object-based nature of tracking, con®rming that in some contexts attention must be allocated to objects rather than arbitrary collections of features. In addition, the results begin to reveal the types of spatially organized scene components that can be independently attended as a function of properties such as connectedness, part struc- ture, and other types of perceptual grouping. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In recent years, Ingrid Robeyns and several others have argued that, whatever the correct complete account of distributive justice looks like, it should include a Limitarian requirement. The core Limitarian claim is that there is a ceiling – a limit – to the amount of resources that it is permissible for any individual to possess. While this core claim is plausible, there are a number of important questions about precisely how the requirement should be understood, and what its implications are (...) regarding the obligations of various agents, that have not been adequately addressed in the discussions thus far. In this paper, I focus on questions about the relationship between the grounds for the Limitarian requirement and its role in generating obligations of justice for different agents. I argue that the plausible grounds for the requirement are incompatible with the widely accepted view, deriving from John Rawls, that the principles of justice apply directly to the institutions of what Rawls calls the “basic structure of society,” but do not apply directly to the conduct of individuals and other possible agents acting within that structure. If my argument succeeds, then Limitarians must accept that if the grounds that they have offered in defense of Limitarian policy interventions are compelling, then individuals are obligated to voluntarily direct any resources that they possess above the threshold in ways that will promote the same goals that justify Limitarian policies. (shrink)

Several scholars have claimed that small-scale agriculture in which farmers sell goods to the local market has the potential to strengthen social ties and a sense of community, a phenomenon referred to as “civic agriculture.” Proponents see promise in the increase in the number of community supported agriculture programs, farmers markets, and other locally orientated distribution systems as well as the growing interest among consumers for buying locally produced goods. Yet others have suggested that these novel or reborn distribution mechanisms (...) are still primarily means of instrumental economic exchange and that optimistic characterizations of a renewed sense of community emerging from these practices are unfounded. This study provides an empirical assessment of the extent to which these community-based agriculture markets are associated with connection to community, volunteerism, and civic and political activities. In order to assess the relationship between civic agriculture and community engagement, we surveyed over 1,300 people in the Mid-Hudson region of New York State. The study design includes “civic agriculture participants” as the unit of analysis, defined as CSA farm members, shoppers at independent health food stores, and farmers market patrons. For comparison, a telephone survey of randomly selected residents of the region’s general population was also conducted. Unlike studies that focus solely on the perceptions of certain civic agriculture participants, by comparing the perceptions and behaviors of those engaged in a range of civic agriculture practices, we are able to identify the effects of different forms of participation. The results demonstrate higher levels of voluntarism and engagement in local politics among civic agriculture participants relative to the general population. In addition, we found variation among those engaged in different forms of civic agriculture, with those immersed in more socially embedded forms of exchange demonstrating greater community and political involvement. These findings lend empirical support to the civic agriculture thesis. (shrink)

Lettered selves and beyond -- The alphabetic body -- Gesture and non-alphabetic writing -- Technologized mathematics -- Parallel selves -- Ghost effects.

Since its publication in 1965 _Political Argument_ has come to be recognized as occupying a key position in the revival of Anglo-American political philosophy. A number of the ideas introduced by Barry have become part of the standard vocabulary, such as the distinction between ideal-regarding and want-regarding principles and the division of principles into aggregative and distributive. _Political Argument_ provided the first precise analysis, still frequently cited, of the conception that political values have trade-off relations; the analysis of the notion (...) of the public interest has also enjoyed wide influence. For this long-awaited reprint, the author has prepared a substantial, new introductory essay in which he recounts the process of writing the book and sets it in the intellectual milieu of its time. He then offers extensive comments on the subsequent fate of some of the leading ideas and assesses the book in light of criticisms and later developments. Finally, Barry evaluates current approaches to political philosophy as they look today. This new edition of _Political Argument_ will interest political theorists, philosophers, economists, and a range of other scholars. Brilliant and incisive, it will engender discussion and debate from many quarters. (shrink)

This article advances the theoretical and practical value of workplace spirituality by drawing on person–organization (PO) fit theory and transpersonal psychology to investigate three questions: (a) What antecedents lead individuals and organizations to seek and foster workplace spirituality? (b) What are the perceived spiritual needs of individuals, and how are those needs fulfilled in the workplace? and (c) What are the consequences of meeting spiritual needs as individuals perceive them? Using constructivist grounded theory, analysis of interview data from thirty-four participants (...) located in organizations across the Netherlands, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Portugal led to development of a workplace spirituality, PO fit model in which we propose reconciling self as a core factor of workplace spirituality. We note how through the process of reconciling self, workplace spirituality is related to meaning making and how an individual perceives their work environment as conducive to self-expression and inner purpose. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed, as are limitations of the study and ideas for future research. (shrink)

Much of modern ethics is built around the idea that we should respect one another’s autonomy. Here, “we” are typically imagined to be adult human beings of sound mind, where the soundness of our mind is measured against what we take to be the typical mental capacities of a neurodevelopmentally “normal” person—perhaps in their mid-thirties or forties. When deciding about what constitutes ethical sex, for example, our dominant models hold that ethical sex is whatever is consented to, while a lack (...) of consent makes sex wrong.1 Consent, in turn, is analysed in terms of autonomous decision-making: a “yes” or “no” that reflects the free and informed will of our idealised, sound-minded adult. Whether such models provide adequate normative guidance for ethical, much less good, sex between neurotypical human adults is an open question.2 3 When it comes to the ethics of sexual activity between humans and non-humans—robots, say—or between humans who don’t fit the rational stereotype, we hardly know where to begin.4–7 It is therefore heartening to see a number of papers in this issue tackling the difficult question how to respectfully facilitate or respond to the needs, desires, and decisions of people with different kinds or degrees of autonomy.8 For example, Sumytra Menon and colleagues9 explicitly discuss the notion of “borderline capacity” and argue, in the medical domain, for shared and supportive decision-making practices to “foster the autonomy of patients with compromised mental capacity while being mindful of the need to safeguard their well-being.” Touching on a similar theme, Zahra Ladan 10 asks how we should conceive of liberty in the case of persons with certain inborn physical or mental limitations. Might it sometimes be necessary to …. (shrink)

Assisted reproductive technology is a global market engaging a variety of local moral economies where the construction of the demand–supply relationship takes different forms through the operation of the politics of value. This paper analyzes how the market–culture relationship works in different settings, showing how power and resources determine what value will, or will not, accrue from that relationship. A commodity’s potential economic value can only be realized through the operation of the market if its cultural status is seen to (...) be legitimate. At the same time, local moral economies and their associated social orders are potentially susceptible to the destabilizing implications of new commodities. The formal or informal organization of power relationships in the market–culture interaction can enable potential value to become manifest and tangible over time or block its path. The interaction is steered through national institutional sources of cultural authority embedded in state and religion, where the visible contest in the politics of value is conducted. Increasingly, that interaction finds its expression in transnational institutions of governance where the struggle for control of the cultural agenda reflects the global nature of the ART market. (shrink)

(1980). Jewish theologies of space in the scientific revolution: Henry More, Joseph Raphson, Isaac Newton and their predecessors. Annals of Science: Vol. 37, No. 5, pp. 489-548.

It is increasingly clear that virtue ethics has an important role to play in environmental ethics. However, virtue ethics—which has always been characterized by a degree of ambiguity—is faced with substantial challenges in the contemporary “postmodern” cultural milieu. Among these challenges is the lure of relativism. Most virtue ethics depend upon some view of the good life; however, today there is no unambiguous, easily agreed-upon account of the good life. Rather, we are presented with a bewildering variety of conflicting accounts (...) of the good life. Narrative—in particular Paul Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity—has much to contribute to virtue ethics, including resources that can help us respond to the chal­lenges presented by the postmodern context. Narrative constitutes an “ethical laboratory” by providing us with an “as if” experience through which we can try out various ethical alternatives. Two sorts of environmental narratives, working in concert, further help to limit relativist objections: narratives of environmental survival and narratives of environmental flourishing. (shrink)