People convicted of crimes are subject to a criminal sentence, but they also face a host of other restrictive legal measures: Some are denied access to jobs, housing, welfare, the vote, or other goods. Some may be deported, may be subjected to continued detention, or may have their criminal records made publicly accessible. These measures are often more burdensome than the formal sentence itself. -/- In Beyond Punishment?, Zachary Hoskins offers a philosophical examination of these burdensome legal measures, called collateral (...) legal consequences. Drawing on resources in moral, legal, and political philosophy, Hoskins analyzes the various kinds of collateral consequences imposed in different legal systems and the important moral challenges they raise. Can collateral legal consequences ever be justified as forms of criminal punishment or as civil measures? Hoskins contends that, considered as forms of punishment, such restrictions should be constrained by considerations of proportionality and offender reform. He also argues that they may in a limited range of cases be permissible as risk-reductive civil measures. Whether considered as criminal punishment or civil measures, however, collateral legal consequences are justifiable in a far narrower range of cases than we find in current legal practice. -/- Considering just how pervasive collateral legal consequences have become and their dramatic effects on offenders' lives, Beyond Punishment? sheds valuable light on whether these restrictive measures are ever morally justified. (shrink)

Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) is a theory of choice underradical uncertainty– situations where outcomes cannot be enumerated and probabilities cannot be assigned. Whereas most theories of choice assume that people rely on (potentially biased) probabilistic judgments, such theories cannot account for adaptive decision-making when probabilities cannot be assigned. CNT proposes that people usenarratives– structured representations of causal, temporal, analogical, and valence relationships – rather than probabilities, as the currency of thought that unifies our sense-making and decision-making faculties. According (...) to CNT, narratives arise from the interplay between individual cognition and the social environment, with reasoners adopting a narrative that feels “right” to explain the available data; using that narrative to imagine plausible futures; and affectively evaluating those imagined futures to make a choice. Evidence from many areas of the cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences supports this basic model, including lab experiments, interview studies, and econometric analyses. We identify 12 propositions to explain how the mental representations (narratives) interact with four inter-related processes (explanation, simulation, affective evaluation, and communication), examining the theoretical and empirical basis for each. We conclude by discussing how CNT can provide a common vocabulary for researchers studying everyday choices across areas of the decision sciences. (shrink)

How far may Americans properly rely on their religious beliefs when they make and defend political decisions? For example, are ordinary citizens or legislators doing something wrong when they consciously allow their decisions respecting abortion laws to be determined by their religious views? Despite its intense contemporary relevance, the full dimensions of this issue have until now not been thoroughly examined. Religious Convictions and Political Choice represents the first attempt to fill this gap. Beginning with an account of the (...) basic premises of our liberal democracy, Greenawalt moves to a comparison between rational secular grounds of decision and grounds based on religious convictions. He discusses particular issues such as animal rights and abortion, showing how religious convictions can bear on an individual's decisions about them, and inquires whether reliance on such convictions is compatible with liberal democratic premises. In conclusion, he argues that citizens cannot be expected to rely exclusively on rational, secular grounds. (shrink)

Society typically shows conscientious objectors more deference than civil disobedients, on the grounds that they appear more conscientious and less strategically minded than the latter. Kimberley Brownlee challenges this standard picture in Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience, where she claims that civil disobedience is more conscientious than conscientious objection, in virtue of its communicativeness. Brownlee conceives of conscientious conviction as necessarily communicative, and distinguishes it from ‘conscience’—the set of practical moral skills involved in adequately responding (...) to complex situations. This review article argues that Brownlee’s account of conviction is too narrow, as it excludes many core beliefs which we would want to classify as convictions although they violate one or more of the criteria of communicativeness, while her account of conscience is incomplete, because it ignores some of the persistent obstacles for the development of conscience produced by structural injustice. The article identifies these obstacles and offers some strategies for protecting against them, namely, vigilance, self-scrutiny, empathy and collaborative ambivalence. (shrink)

This article reconstructs a pragmatist conception of political conviction from the works of William James. Pragmatism is often criticized for failing to account for the force of moral convictions to motivate risky and confrontational political action. This article argues that such criticisms presume a conception of conviction as an experience of moral command that pragmatism rejects. In its place, pragmatism portrays the experience of conviction as acting on faith. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the stutter, (...) I argue that this experience of faith is neither a deliberative justification nor a form of decisionism but rather a style of moral deliberation that is experimental, social and affective. I consider the sole piece of political oratory in James’ corpus, his 1897 oration to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, as a significant example of stuttering conviction. James’ oration seeks to demonstrate the ways that convictions can take hold of actors without relying on deep philosophical foundations or justifications. Although James places his argument squarely within the context of the politics of race, he himself does not attend to the ways his celebration of Shaw obscures the moral experiences of the African–American soldiers of the 54th. In response to this blindness, the final section considers whether or not the martyrdom of John Brown provides a more appropriate conception of conviction than James’ Shaw. (shrink)

This article reconstructs a pragmatist conception of political conviction from the works of William James. Pragmatism is often criticized for failing to account for the force of moral convictions to motivate risky and confrontational political action. This article argues that such criticisms presume a conception of conviction as an experience of moral command that pragmatism rejects. In its place, pragmatism portrays the experience of conviction as acting on faith. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the stutter, (...) I argue that this experience of faith is neither a deliberative justification nor a form of decisionism but rather a style of moral deliberation that is experimental, social and affective. I consider the sole piece of political oratory in James’ corpus, his 1897 oration to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, as a significant example of stuttering conviction. James’ oration seeks to demonstrate the ways that convictions can take hold of actors without relying on deep philosophical foundations or justifications. Although James places his argument squarely within the context of the politics of race, he himself does not attend to the ways his celebration of Shaw obscures the moral experiences of the African–American soldiers of the 54th. In response to this blindness, the final section considers whether or not the martyrdom of John Brown provides a more appropriate conception of conviction than James’ Shaw. (shrink)

We connect Conviction Narrative Theory to an account that views people as intuitive scientists who can flexibly create, evaluate, and modify representations of decision problems. We argue that without understanding how the relevant complex narratives (or indeed any representation, simple to complex) are themselves constructed, we also cannot know when and why people would rely on them to make choices.

Interpretations of Kant’s account of the forms of “taking-to-be-true” (Fürwahrhalten) have generally focused on three such forms: opinion (Meinung), belief (Glaube), and knowledge (Wissen). A second distinction that has received comparatively less attention is that between conviction (Überzeugung) and persuasion (Überredung). Kant appears to use the distinction between the subjective and the objective sufficiency of a taking-to-be-true to characterize all of these forms. However, it is impossible to account for the differences between them by relying on this (...) latter distinction alone. In turn, this makes it difficult to fit all of these forms into a single classification of taking-to-be-true. In this chapter, I propose a new approach to conviction and persuasion that dissolves these problems. Conviction and persuasion are not single forms of taking-to-be-true with distinctive characteristics, yet it is not useful to treat them as “classes” of taking-to-be-true either. Rather, they are “operators” that determine whether a taking-to-be-true is apt or inapt, depending on whether it rests on a correct evaluation of the grounds we have. (shrink)

It is argued that standard accounts of the epistemology of religious commitmentfail to be properly sensitive to certain important features of the nature of religious conviction. Once one takes these features of religious conviction seriously, then it becomes clear that we are not to conceive of the epistemology of religious conviction along completely rational lines.But the moral to extract from this is not fideism, or even a more moderate proposal that casts the epistemic standing of basic religious (...) beliefs along nonrational lines. Rather, one needs to recognise that in an important sense religious convictions are not beliefs at all, but that this is compatible with the idea that many other religious commitments are beliefs. This picture of the nature of religious commitment is shown to fit snugly with the Wittgensteinian account of hinge commitments, such that all rational belief essentially presupposes certain basic arational hinge commitments, along lines originally suggested by John Henry Newman. We are thus able to marshal a parity-style argument in defence of religious commitment. Although religious belief presupposes basic arational religious convictions, it is not on this score epistemically amiss since all belief presupposes basic arational convictions, or hinge commitments. The resulting view of the epistemology of religious commitment is a position I call quasi-fideism. (shrink)

Although many scholars have recognized the pivotal importance that the notion of conscience plays in Hegel’s thought, much of the scholarship surrounding this notion has remained piecemeal. Dean Moyar’s book Hegel’s Conscience breaks new ground on this subject in offering a comprehensive analysis of the indispensable role that conscience plays in Hegel’s philosophy, demonstrating not only its foundational place for Hegel’s approach to ethics, but also the contemporary relevancy of Hegel’s account for understanding the performative character of practical reason. (...) Despite the novelty and intellectual rigor of Moyar’s position, my essay “Translating Convictions into a Clear Conscience” argues that in confining his approach to a “cognitivist” interpretation of conscience, Moyar ends up neglecting the richness and existential depth of Hegel’s discussion. And so although Moyar’s interpretation is clear, succinct, and plausible, it accomplishes this by overlooking much of Hegel’s original phenomenological fidelity to the actual experience of conscience. (shrink)

Abstract: When do we meet the standard of proof in a criminal trial? Some have argued that it is when the guilt of the defendant is sufficiently probable on the evidence. Some have argued that it is a matter of normic support. While the first view provides us with a nice account of how we ought to manage risk, the second explains why we shouldn’t convict on the basis of naked statistical evidence alone. Unfortunately, this second view doesn’t help (...) us understand how we should manage risk (e.g., the risk of violating rights against wrongful conviction) and faces counterexamples of its own. I shall defend an alternative approach that builds on the strengths of these two accounts. On the approach defending here, it is objectively suitable to punish iff we know a defendant to be guilty. To determine what is consistent with procedural justice and to determine what we prospectively ought to do, we need to think about the risks we face of deviating from this objective ideal. (shrink)

The abandonment of sole reliance on the logical positivist canon of wholly general, topic-neutral, a priori inference principles has created a pressing need for a principled way to set limits on the demand for justification. I diagnose the problems with several contemporary proposals via two case studies, the first concerned with the possibility of groundlessly rational theism, and the second with the use of groundlessly rational commitments in defense of scientific rationality. ;I argue that William Alston's appeal to the "practical" (...) rationality of engaging in a socially established belief-forming practice and Alvin Plantinga's defense of properly basic belief in God are overly permissive. Alston's position gives too much scope to pragmatic and social considerations, while Plantinga's rejection of polemically useful epidemic principles leaves him with an implausible externalism about rationality as the only way to block irrationality. In the case of scientific rationality, I argue that Bas van Fraassen's "liberal probabilism" gives too much scope to tradition and pragmatic factors, while Richard Boyd's methodological argument for scientific realism gives too much weight to the successful use of theories that happen to belong to one's own scientific tradition. ;In the light of these defects, I argue that the only propositions that don't require justification are "hinge-propositions"--topic-specific, defeasible principles that express conceptual competence conditions--because groundless doubt of them is either irrational or betrays lack of conceptual grasp. ;This account provides adequate fundamental principles for science, but sets strict limits to groundless rationality. For example, theistic belief-forming practices can't be groundlessly rational because they involve an unjustified departure from the application of the concept of a person in response to experience. ;I defend the closure claim that hinge-propositions are the only kind of groundlessly rational propositions by arguing that this account provides the best explanation for our shared uncontroversial judgments of rationality and irrationality. My account makes the strongest demands for justification that are compatible with our shared and secure judgments of prima facie rationality and the weakest demands for justification that are compatible with our shared and secure judgments about epistemically responsible beliefs. (shrink)

This review of Hoskins’ book on the collateral legal consequences of a criminal conviction focuses on some of the consequences of his concept of collateral legal consequences for our understanding of justifications of criminalization, the theory of punishment and incapacitation upon which it rests, and the implications for the prosecutor’s role that goes beyond Hoskins’ suggestions in the last part of the book. The review particularly engages with Hoskins’ distinction between punishment and incapacitation, which forms the core of his (...) defense of collateral sanctions as in principle capable of moral justification and his excellent discussion of contemptuous punishment, which he uses to sketch out the limits of both direct and indirect criminal sanctions. (shrink)

Rape conviction rates have fallen to all-time lows in recent years, prompting governments to explore a range of strategies to improve them. This paper argues that, while the current legal impunity for rape cannot be condoned, increasing conviction rates is not in itself a valid objective of law reform. The paper problematises the measure of rape law that conviction rates provide by developing an account of (some) feminist aims for rape law reform. Three feminist aims and (...) associated measures are explained—all of which look beyond conviction rates to qualitative and victim-centred outcomes of criminal justice processes. Applying these measures, I argue that strategies designed solely to increase conviction rates are more likely to work against, rather than in support of, feminist aims. The paper thus underscores the need for continued feminist engagement with rape law reform, broadly conceived, notwithstanding its acute limitations for feminist anti-violence politics. (shrink)

Stoics and Sceptics distinguish belief (doxa) from a representationally and functionally similar but sub-doxastic state: passive yielding to appearance. Belief requires active assent to appearances, that is, affirmation of the appearances as true. I trace the roots of this view to Plato's accounts of doxa in the Republic and Theaetetus. In the Republic, eikasia and pistis (imaging and conviction) are distinguished by their objects, appearances versus ordinary objects; in the Theaetetus, perception and doxa are distinguished by their objects, proper (...) perceptibles versus ‘commons’, including being. But underlying these ontological distinctions is a psychological one: the lower mental states are confined to their lower objects because they are passive; the higher mental states have access to higher objects because they result from questioning appearances and making active affirmations about how things are. This doctrine of doxa anticipates both the Hellenistic one and modern accounts of belief as ‘aiming at truth’; it also shows Plato's views of doxa to have more in their favour philosophically and to cohere better with one another than generally thought. (shrink)

Integrity looks dangerous. Passionate willpower, focused devotion and driving self-belief nestle all-too-closely to extremism, narcissism and intolerant hubris. How can integrity skirt such perils? This question opens the perennial issue of whether devout, driven devotees can guard themselves from antisocial extremes. Current proposals to inoculate integrity from moral danger hone in on integrity’s reflective side. I argue that this epistemic approach disarms integrity’s dangers only by stripping it of everything that initially made it worthwhile. Instead, I argue that integrity contains (...) substantive moral principles serving to surgically target the dangers the trait would otherwise pose. The person of integrity avoids extremism not by questioning whether her values are right, but by recognizing that in a social world whether her values are right is not the only factor that bears on how she should act. Normatively, the proposed account allows integrity to retain its intuitive allures of willpower, direction and unified character. Descriptively, it explains the surprising capacity for principled compromise displayed by canonical figures of integrity. Ultimately, integrity empowers us to be fit for society, even as we are true to ourselves. (shrink)

Discrete choice experiments (DCE) are often used to elicit preferences, for instance, in health preference research. However, DCEs only provide binary responses, whilst real-life choices are made with varying degrees of conviction. We aimed to verify whether eliciting self-reported convictions on a 0–100 scale adds meaningful information to the binary choice. Eighty three respondents stated their preferences for health states using DCE and the time trade-off method (TTO). In TTO, utility ranges were also elicited to account for preference (...) imprecision. We verified the properties of the conviction across three areas: (1) response to various choice task modifications (e.g. dominance, increase in complexity, distance from the status quo) and association with rationality violations (e.g. intransitivity); (2) association with test–retest results; (3) relation to the utility difference and imprecision estimated in TTO. Regarding (1), conviction increased in choice tasks with lower complexity, larger relative attractiveness, and lower distance to the status quo. Regarding (2), choices made with above-median conviction were sustained in 90% of the cases, compared to 68% for below-median conviction. Regarding (3), the conviction increases with utility difference and it decreases with utility imprecision; overconfidence seems to prevail: non-zero conviction is reported even for identical utilities. Self-reported conviction in DCE is associated in an intuitive way with the observed choices. It may, therefore, be useful in explaining or predicting behaviour or bridging the gap between the results of various elicitation tasks. (shrink)

It is argued that two plausible goals of the educational enterprise are (i) to develop the intellectual character, and thus the intellectual virtues, of the student, and (ii) to develop the student's intellectual self-confidence, such that they are able to have conviction in what they believe. On the face of it, however, these two educational goals seem to be in tension with one another, at least insofar as intellectual humility is a genuine intellectual virtue. This is because intellectual humility (...) seems to require that one does not have conviction in one's beliefs. It is argued that this tension can be avoided so long as we have the right account of intellectual humility in play. This enables us to understand what educating for intellectual humility might involve, and how it might co-exist with the educational development of a student's intellectual self-confidence. (shrink)

How far may Americans properly rely on their religious beliefs when they make and defend political decisions? For example, are ordinary citizens or legislators doing something wrong when they consciously allow their decisions respecting abortion laws to be determined by their religious views? Despite its intense contemporary relevance, the full dimensions of this issue have until now not been thoroughly examined. Religious Convictions and Political Choice represents the first attempt to fill this gap. Beginning with an account of the (...) basic premises of our liberal democracy, Greenawalt moves to a comparison between rational secular grounds of decision and grounds based on religious convictions. He discusses particular issues such as animal rights and abortion, showing how religious convictions can bear on an individual's decisions about them, and inquires whether reliance on such convictions is compatible with liberal democratic premises. In conclusion, he argues that citizens cannot be expected to rely exclusively on rational, secular grounds. (shrink)

Convicted offenders face a host of so-called “collateral” consequences: formal measures such as legal restrictions on voting, employment, housing, or public assistance, as well as informal consequences such as stigma, family tensions, and financial insecurity. These consequences extend well beyond an offender’s criminal sentence itself and are frequently more burdensome than the sentence. This essay considers two respects in which collateral consequences may be relevant to the question of what the state should, or may, criminalize. First, they may be relevant (...) according to specific accounts of criminalization, including plausible versions of the harm principle and legal moralism. Second, they may be relevant to the legitimacy of state criminalization more generally. Thus for legal theorists concerned with the issue of legitimate criminalization, normative questions raised by collateral consequences are of central importance. (shrink)

In recent decades few moral concepts have suffered as much neglect at the hands of ethicists as the notion of conscience. My paper argues that this neglect is largely in reaction to an ‘authoritarian’ conception of conscience that is outdated and based on a naïve faculty psychology. When construed in terms of a narrative of self-integration, in which conscience designates our struggle to balance the affective and cognitive dimensions of moral experience, its neglect appears unjustified. It is my contention that (...) the phenomenon of conscience discloses the experience of moral agency in a way that is highly instructive, and that we miss a valuable window into moral behavior by ignoring it. In order to make this case I argue that the most serious criticisms of conscience—that it has no justifiablemoral criteria, clear distinguishing ‘identity,’ or motivating power—are leveled against a largely obsolete and essentialist reading of conscience. Once we see that ‘having a conscience’ refers to how people contend with the multiple moral warrants that anchor their own sense of accountability, and not some timeless moral intuition, the indispensability of the concept becomes clear. (shrink)

Readers of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism recognize that Weber attempts to provide an ideal account of development of modern rational capitalism. What readers apparently do not realize is that Weber believes that there is a political development that is parallel to this economic development. Weber believed that Luther’s passive theology and doctrine of two kingdoms lead to quiet resignation in earthly matters. Luther advises shunning politics and avoiding political confrontation. In contrast, Weber held that Calvin’s (...) theology of awe and his doctrine of predestination lead to active political stances and even imply a duty to resist tyranny. However, Weber rejects both Luther’s and Calvin’s political stances because both believed in a divinely ordered world and held that the consequences of their actions were ultimately left to God. Weber contends that only those people who have the proper understanding of the nature of power and have a real appreciation for the ‘diabolic’ nature of politics are suitable to be political actors. Thus, Weber insists that only those people who will take responsibility for their own political actions have the right to ‘stick their hands in the wheels of history’. (shrink)

This paper evaluates four competing psychological explanations for why the jury in the O.J. Simpson murder trial reached the verdict they did: explanatory coherence, Bayesian probability theory, wishful thinking, and emotional coherence. It describes computational models that provide detailed simulations of juror reasoning for explanatory coherence, Bayesian networks, and emotional coherence, and argues that the latter account provides the most plausible explanation of the jury's decision.

Responsibility and accountability of CEOs has been a major ethical concern over the past 10 years. Major ethical dilemmas at Enron, Worldcom, AIG, as well as other well-known organizations have been at least partially blamed on CEO malfeasance. Interviews with Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, after his 2006 fraud convictions provides an opportunity to document his perceived role in the demise of Enron. Possibly no other CEO has had as much impact on the scrutiny and legalization of business ethics as (...) Ken Lay. This analysis is timely because of many information sources now available and the recent Supreme Court decisions on Enron conviction appeals. Using Ken Lay as the focal point, a review of literature provides the background for research questions to explore the role of the CEO in developing an ethical corporate culture. (shrink)

In order for a religious conviction to receive protection under the First Amendment or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), it must be a sincere religious conviction. Some critics of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby have suggested that the plaintiffs in that case and in related cases were motivated more by political ideology than by sincere religious conviction. The remedy, they argue, is for courts to be quicker to scrutinize claims of religious sincerity. (...) In this article, I consider another possibility—namely, that current sociopolitical partisanship in the United States has eroded a clear distinction between political ideology and religious conviction for plaintiffs in cases like Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. If this theory is correct, it is far less obvious what the proper remedy is. I consider and reject the view that newly formed religious convictions with political origins should be treated as less than sincere on those grounds. However, I do argue that whether a religious conviction seems to have been newly generated by political circumstances should be taken into account when deciding religious free exercise cases. I suggest that this could best be accounted for if the courts adopted a balanced interests approach instead of the winner-takes-all “checklist” approaches that have developed under Employment Division v. Smith and RFRA. (shrink)

Received wisdom has it that a plausible explanation or theodicy for Gods permission of at least some instances of natural evil is not beyond the reach of the theist. In this paper I challenge this assumption, arguing instead that theism fails to account for any instance, kind, quantity, or distribution of natural evil found in the world. My case will be structured around a specific but not idiosyncratic conception of natural evil as well as an examination of three prominent (...) theodicies for natural evil. In contrast, however, to much contemporary discussion, my assessment of these theodicies will be grounded in the prior conviction that a successful theodicy for moral evil is available. (shrink)

The current debate on closed-loop brain devices (CBDs) focuses on their use in a medical context; possible criminal justice applications have not received scholarly attention. Unlike in medicine, in criminal justice, CBDs might be offered on behalf of the State and for the purpose of protecting security, rather than realising healthcare aims. It would be possible to deploy CBDs in the rehabilitation of convicted offenders, similarly to the much-debated possibility of employing other brain interventions in this context. Although such use (...) of CBDs could in principle be consensual, there are significant differences between the choice faced by a criminal offender offered a CBD in the context of criminal justice, and that faced by a patient offered a CBD in an ordinary healthcare context. Employment of CBDs in criminal justice thus raises ethical and legal intricacies not raised by healthcare applications. This paper examines some of these issues under three heads: autonomy, human rights, and accountability. (shrink)

A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Ernest Sosa (2009; 2015; 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully (...) applied to belief, my objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals. (shrink)

In this book I argue for an approach that conceives human rights as both moral and legal rights. The merit of such an approach is its capacity to understand human rights more in terms of the kind of world free and reasonable beings would like to live in rather than simply in terms of what each individual is legally entitled to. While I acknowledge that every human being has the moral entitlement to be granted living conditions that are conducive to (...) a dignified life, I maintain, at the same time, that the moral and legal aspects of human rights are complementary and should be given equal weight. The legal aspect compensates for the limitations of moral human rights the observance of which depends on the conscience of the individual, and the moral aspect tempers the mechanical and inhumane application of the law. Unlike the traditional or orthodox approach, which conceives human rights as rights that individuals have by virtue of their humanity, and the political or practical approach, which understands human rights as legal rights that are meant to limit the sovereignty of the state, the moral-legal approach reconciles law and morality in human rights discourse and underlines the importance of a legal framework that compensates for the deficiencies in the implementation of moral human rights. It not only challenges the exclusively negative approach to fundamental liberties but also emphasizes the necessity of an enforcement mechanism that helps those who are not morally motivated to refrain from violating the rights of others. Without the legal mechanism of enforcement, the understanding of human rights would be reduced to simply framing moral claims against injustices. From the moral-legal approach, the protection of human rights is understood as a common and shared responsibility. Such a responsibility goes beyond the boundaries of nation-states and requires the establishment of a cosmopolitan human rights regime based on the conviction that all human beings are members of a community of fate and that they share common values which transcend the limits of their individual states. In a cosmopolitan human rights regime, people are protected as persons and not as citizens of a particular state. (shrink)

A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Sosa, in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to belief, my (...) objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals. (shrink)

In a dissonance case, a person sincerely and with conviction asserts that P, while his/her overall automatic behavior suggests that he/she believes that not-P. According to Schwitzgebel, this is a case of in-between believing. This article raises several concerns about Schwitzgebel's account and proposes an alternative view. I argue that the in-between approach yields incorrect results in belief self-ascriptions and does not capture the psychological conflict underlying the individual's dissonance. I advance the view that in relevant cases the (...) dissonant individual has two mutually contradictory beliefs. (shrink)

The development of genetic phenomenology marks a change in Husserl's thinking which occurred between 1917 and 1921. Much of the second half of his philosophical life was devoted to genetic phenomenology as a supplement to the static phenomenology of his earlier writings. I argue that the development of genetic phenomenology, which involves a regressive inquiry into the genesis of the ego and of meaning, coincided with and made possible a greater emphasis on ethical and intersubjective positions in Husserl's later writings. (...) ;I trace the development of three prominent themes in Husserl's thought: time-consciousness, intersubjectivity, and ethics. In each case it is possible to see that prior to 1917 Husserl's phenomenology was not equipped to address such topics with the complexity they require. Static phenomenology has a rigid structure focusing on complete constitution of meaning by an already fully active ego. This position lacks the framework for investigating the development of the ego itself and of the transformation of meaning through time. In moving his thought beyond that rigid structure and addressing questions of historicity, Husserl began to incorporate an understanding of intersubjectivity based on the sedimentation of meanings built up through successive generations. Such an approach provides a way to think plurality in community without either the elimination of ethical foundations or the elimination of the importance of inherited convictions. The same sensitivity to the historical development of meaning made possible the later Husserl's theory of renewal and critique of history and tradition. ;This study concludes that Husserl's static phenomenological investigation into essences in combination with his genetic inquiry into origins provides a model of philosophical thinking that offers a balanced account both of individual freedom and of historical and traditional context. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that Husserl's later understanding of the human being as inheritor of an ethical tradition, but as still responsible for the taking-up of that tradition, would not have been possible had he not developed genetic phenomenology as an explanatory supplement to static phenomenology. (shrink)

In these brief remarks, I sketch Aquinas’s account of humility, courage, and magnanimity. The nature of humility for Aquinas emerges nicely from his account of pride, and it also illuminates Aquinas’s view of magnanimity. For Aquinas, pride is the worst of the vices, and it comes in four kinds. The opposite of all these kinds of pride in a person is his disposition to accept that the excellences he has are all gifts from a good God and are (...) all meant to be given back by being shared with others. Aquinas believes that all the virtues come together as a set. Consequently, a person who has humility also has courage. Aquinas takes the deepest kind of courage as a gift of the Holy Spirit. On his view, taken as a gift, courage manifests itself in a disposition to act on the settled conviction that one will be united to God in heaven when one dies. It is not easy to see how magnanimity could be a virtue if humility is. The solution is to see that for Aquinas the honor for the Christian virtue of magnanimity is not honor from human beings but honor from God. A person can have the virtue of humility and still strive for the greatest honors, as Aquinas sees it. The conclusion of Aquinas’s account of humility, courage, and magnanimity is this: it is morally obligatory to go for glory, because glory is a matter of being honored by God as faithful. (shrink)

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine. Only the mediation of another can establish an individual as an Other. In so far as he exists for himself, the child would not be able to understand himself as sexually differentiated. In girls as in boys (...) the body is first of all the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that accomplishes the comprehension of the world: it is through the eyes, the hands, and not through the sexual parts that children apprehend the universe." -/- My aim is to develop an interpretation of this passage, which starts with one of the most iconic sentences in the history of feminist thought. Beauvoir asserts that only in virtue of the significance others attribute to their sexual parts do children come to understand themselves as sexually differentiated. This is the phenomenon Beauvoir refers to when she speaks of “the mediation of another.” Her claim here, I argue, is that becoming a woman is predicated on developing such a self-understanding. -/- Many readers have argued that this passage epitomizes Beauvoir’s conviction that there is an important difference between sex and gender. On such a reading, Beauvoir might be said to describe the transition between two states: the state of the newborn who has a sex but no gender identity yet (“who is not a woman”) and that of the grown person who has both a sex and a gender identity (“who has become a woman”). I argue that this reading is untenable, and for two reasons. First, there is no evidence in The Second Sex that Beauvoir means to establish a distinction between a person’s biological properties and her social identities. Second, this distinction does not make sense of Beauvoir’s understanding of the body as a situation. Being a woman, I will argue, is an aspect of the body-as-a-situation. The body-as-a-situation is the instrument through which freedom is exercised, and it is shaped by the social significance of bodily features. By contrast, biological properties cannot be predicated of the body-as-a-situation. As such, they are not properly speaking attributes of the self. In other words, Beauvoir does not theorize a nature/culture distinction, but aims to describe the social significance of bodies and constraints on women’s freedom. (shrink)

In this essay I will try to develop a natural law justification of welfare rights. The justification I will undertake is from the perspective of Catholic natural law, that is, the strand of natural law that has been developed theoretically by Roman Catholic canonists, theologians, and philosophers since Aquinas, and affirmed by Catholic teachers as the basis for most moral obligations. Catholic natural law is, therefore, natural law as developed and understood by Catholics or others respecting Catholic traditions of inquiry. (...) It is not, however, primarily or exclusively natural law for Catholics, since the very idea of natural law includes the conviction that it is accessible in principle to anyone.Footnotes* I wish to thank the other contributors to this volume for their helpful comments on a presentation of an earlier draft of this essay. I am also grateful to John Finnis, Germain Grisez, James Murphy, Ellen Frankel Paul, and Michael Vertin for written comments on the earlier draft, which revealed many errors and suggested significant improvements. (shrink)

The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (Noûs, forthcoming) report that a non-trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, we add further fuel to the fire, presenting the results of four new studies. Based on our results, we argue that the entailment thesis does not (...) deserve the default status that it is typically granted. We conclude by considering the alternative account of knowledge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel propose to explain their results, arguing that it does not explain ours. In its place we offer a different explanation of both sets of findings—the conviction account, according to which belief, but not knowledge, requires mental assent. (shrink)

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

Alfred Mele's deflationary account of self-deception has frequently been criticised for being unable to explain the “tension” inherent in self-deception. These critics maintain that rival theories can better account for this tension, such as theories which suppose self-deceivers to have contradictory beliefs. However, there are two ways in which the tension idea has been understood. In this article, it is argued that on one such understanding, Mele's deflationism can account for this tension better than its rivals, but (...) only if we reconceptualize the self-deceiver's attitude in terms of unwarranted degrees of conviction rather than unwarranted belief. This new way of viewing the self-deceiver's attitude will be informed by observations on experimental work done on the biasing influence of desire on belief, which suggests that self-deceivers don’t manage to fully convince themselves of what they want to be true. On another way in which this tension has been understood, this account would not manage so well, since on this understanding the self-deceiver is best interpreted as knowing, but wishing to avoid, the truth. However, it is argued that we are under no obligation to account for this since it is a characteristic of a different phenomenon than self-deception, namely, escapism. (shrink)

Epistemic rationality seems to permit a more steadfast response to disagreements over our fundamental convictions than it does for our ordinary beliefs. Why is this? This essay explores three answers to this question: web-of-belief conservatism, moral encroachment, and hinge theories, and argues that hinge theories do a better job than the alternatives at vindicating the intuition that there is a rationally permissible asymmetry in our responses to disagreements over ordinary beliefs and fundamental convictions. The essay also shows how hinge theorists (...) can explain the existence of moral hinge propositions, which enables them to account for the rational permissibility of being steadfast in response to disagreements over fundamental moral convictions. (shrink)