The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of avatar sex, salience of avatar sex, and player sex-type on less conscious embodied emotional arousal and valence vs. consciously perceived emotional arousal and valence elicited by a gaming experience. The experiment conducted a 2 avatar sex × 2 salience of avatar sex × 2 player sex-type mixed model factorial design. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two gameplay conditions and then played two 15-min sessions of a video game—one (...) session playing the game as a male avatar and one session playing the game as a female avatar. The order in which participants played as either a male or female avatar was randomized. Psychophysiological indicators of arousal and valence were recorded during gameplay. Self-report measures of arousal and valence were obtained immediately after each 15-min session of gameplay. Data analysis tested hypotheses concerning the effects of avatar sex, salience of avatar sex, and player sex-type separately on real-time embodied variation in arousal and valence as revealed through physiological indicators and conscious perception of arousal and valence obtained through self-report measures. (shrink)

The concept of selecting for a disability, and deafness in particular, has triggered a controversial and sometimes acrimonious debate between key stakeholders. Previous studies have concentrated on the views of the deaf and hard of hearing, health professionals and ethicists towards reproductive selection for deafness. This study, however, is the first of its kind examining the views of hearing children of deaf adults towards preimplantation genetic diagnosis and prenatal diagnosis to select for or against deafness. Hearing children of deaf adults (...) straddle both the deaf and hearing worlds, and this dual perspective makes them ideally placed to add to the academic discourse concerning the use of genetic selection for or against deafness. The study incorporated two complementary stages, using initial, semistructured interviews with key informants as a means to guide the subsequent development of an electronic survey, completed anonymously by 66 individuals. The participants shared many of the same views as deaf individuals in the D/deaf community. The similarities extended to their opinions regarding deafness not being a disability, their ambivalence towards having hearing or deaf children and their general disapproval of the use of genetic technologies to select either for or against deafness. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an account of our knowledge of other minds based on V. C. Aldrich's account of aesthetic perception, according to which there is a sense in which we literally see other minds.

This paper explores the prospects for safety-based theories of knowledge in the light of some recent objections.

ABSTRACTThe standard view in philosophy of mind is that the way to understand the difference between perception and misperception is in terms of accuracy. On this view, perception is accurate while...

Grey zone attacks tend to paralyze response for two reasons. First, they present us with choice scenarios of inherently dilemmatic structure, e.g., Prisoners’ Dilemmas and games of chicken, complicated by difficult conditions of choice, such as choice under risk or amid vagueness. Second, they exploit our uncertainty about how much we do or should care about the things under attack¬—each attack is small in effect, but their effects accumulate: how should we decide whether to treat a given attack as something (...) meriting a serious response rather than a mere irritation to be ignored? This chapter brings standard decision theoretic tools to bear on the issues, tools such as the maximization of expected utility principle, and the precautionary principle. But it also develops three innovations. It shows that seeing it as possible to make choices not just of actions given our values, but also choices of values themselves, can extricate us from certain kinds of decision paralysis. It shows how we can rationally regard ourselves as having bright decision lines even when nothing in the circumstance of choice has these lines in its structure. And it shows how certain conflict escalation risks from the former two strategies can be managed by both parties seeing that cooperation can yield a sharable surplus of goods, and that cooperation can be rational upon a rationally defensible change in their values so that each comes to derive utility from the success of both parties. This yields cooperative solutions to what amount to Prisoners’ Dilemmas. The Cold War was prosecuted on the logic of strategic rationality and that part of game theory that is deterrence theory. We need a new logic from decision theorists for the games that constitute grey zone conflict. (shrink)

In cases of identity crowding, a subject consciously sees items in a figure, even though they are presented too closely together for her to shift attention to each item. Block uses such cases to challenge the view that attention is necessary for consciousness. I argue that in identity crowding cases, subjects really do attend to the items. Specifically, they attend to the figure as a global object that contains the individual items as parts. To support this view, I provide evidence (...) that attention can be directed to a global object or a local object. My response helps to defend the view that attention is necessary for conscious perception. (shrink)

The status of boundaries and borders, questions of global poverty and inequality, criteria for the legitimate uses of force, the value of international law, human rights, nationality, sovereignty, migration, territory, and citizenship: debates over these critical issues are central to contemporary understandings of world politics. Bringing together an interdisciplinary range of contributors, including historians, political theorists, lawyers, and international relations scholars, this is the first volume of its kind to explore the racial and imperial dimensions of normative debates over global (...) justice. (shrink)

This article defends a theory of diffuse attention and distinguishes it from focal attention. My view is motivated by evidence from psychology and neuroscience, which suggests that we can deploy visual selective attention in at least two ways: by focusing on a small number of items, or by diffusing attention over a group of items taken as a whole. I argue that diffuse attention is selective and can be object‐based. It enables a subject to select an object to guide behavior, (...) albeit in a different way than focusing does. (shrink)

This paper surveys attempts in the recent literature to offer a modal condition on knowledge as a way of resolving the problem of scepticism. In particular, safety-based and sensitivity-based theories of knowledge are considered in detail, along with the anti-sceptical prospects of an explicitly anti-luck epistemology.

Attention seems to raise a problem for pure representationalism, the view that phenomenal content supervenes on representational content. The problem is that shifts of attention sometimes seem to bring about a change in phenomenal content without a change in representational content. I argue that the representationalist can meet this challenge, but that doing so requires a new view of the representational content of perception. On this new view, the representational content of perception is always relative to a way of attending. (...) I call this the attention-indexed view of perceptual content. (shrink)

A common criticism of the use of algorithms in criminal justice is that algorithms and their determinations are in some sense ‘opaque’—that is, difficult or impossible to understand, whether because of their complexity or because of intellectual property protections. Scholars have noted some key problems with opacity, including that opacity can mask unfair treatment and threaten public accountability. In this paper, we explore a different but related concern with algorithmic opacity, which centers on the role of public trust in grounding (...) the legitimacy of criminal justice institutions. We argue that algorithmic opacity threatens the trustworthiness of criminal justice institutions, which in turn threatens their legitimacy. We first offer an account of institutional trustworthiness before showing how opacity threatens to undermine an institution’s trustworthiness. We then explore how threats to trustworthiness affect institutional legitimacy. Finally, we offer some policy recommendations to mitigate the threat to trustworthiness posed by the opacity problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I do three things. First, I offer an overview of an anti- luck epistemology, as set out in my book, Epistemic Luck. Second, I attempt to meet some of the main criticisms that one might level against the key theses that I propose in this work. And finally, third, I sketch some of the ways in which the strategy of anti- luck epistemology can be developed in new directions.

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways in political thought and social science. This essay challenges how the liberal tradition is typically understood. I start by delineating different types of response—prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory—that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. Liberalism, on this account, is best characterised as the sum of the (...) arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time and space. In the remainder of the article, I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how Locke came to be characterised as a liberal. I argue that the scope of the liberal traditionexpanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious understanding of liberalism was a product of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it. (shrink)

In this article, I explore recent work on realist political theory and international politics. I discuss how scholarship on the topic emanates from two different fields—International Relations and political philosophy—and argue that there is a good case for greater engagement between them. I open by delineating various kinds of realism, showing that the term covers a wide variety of methodological and political approaches. In particular, I suggest, it is important to recognize the difference between liberal and radical approaches. The remainder (...) of the essay examines assorted examples of realist international political theorizing, work that ranges from attempts to rewrite the canon of 20th century political thought to contributions to the vibrant global justice debates. (shrink)

A certain construal of the Gettier problem is offered, according to which this problem concerns the task of identifying the anti-luck condition on knowledge. A methodology for approaching this construal of the Gettier problem—anti-luck epistemology—is set out, and the utility of such a methodology is demonstrated. It is argued that a range of superficially distinct cases which are meant to pose problems for anti-luck epistemology are in fact related in significant ways. It is claimed that with these cases properly understood, (...) anti-luck epistemology is able to offer a suitable diagnosis of them which doesn’t threaten the necessity of the anti-luck condition for knowledge. (shrink)

When this work was first published in 1960, it immediately filled a void in Kantian scholarship. It was the first study entirely devoted to Kant's _Critique of Practical Reason_ and by far the most substantial commentary on it ever written. This landmark in Western philosophical literature remains an indispensable aid to a complete understanding of Kant's philosophy for students and scholars alike. This _Critique_ is the only writing in which Kant weaves his thoughts on practical reason into a unified argument. (...) Lewis White Beck offers a classic examination of this argument and expertly places it in the context of Kant's philosophy and of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Much of the recent debate regarding scepticism has focussed on a certain template sceptical argument and a rather restricted set of proposals concerning how one might deal with that argument. Throughout this debate the ‘Moorean’ response to scepticism is often cited as a paradigm example of how one should not respond to the sceptical argument, so conceived. As I argue in this paper, however, there are ways of resurrecting the Moorean response to the sceptic. In particular, I consider the prospects (...) for three such proposals in this regard: a classical epistemic internalist neo-Mooreanism, a classical epistemic externalist neo-Mooreanism, and a non-classical McDowellian epistemic internalist neo-Mooreanism, and maintain that the last two of these proposals (both of which make appeal to a disjunctivist account of perception, broadly conceived) merit further exploration. Indeed, I claim that a suitably qualified version of neo-Mooreanism would actually sit quite well with the general philosophical motivations behind other key anti-sceptical views and I argue that given this fact neo-Mooreanism is actually at a dialectical advantage relative to other views when it comes to dealing with the sceptical problem as it is typically conceived. (shrink)

The idea of a returning golden age is widely understood and commonly presented both as a staple of Augustan propaganda and as a pervasive aspiration of Augustan society. TheCarmen Saeculare—an official commission for a public festival—is presented as a means by which the regime proclaimed to an enthusiastic populace the imminent renascence of the golden race. The aim of this article is to draw attention both to thefailureof theCarmen Saeculareexplicitly to proclaim the renascence of the race, and to the critique (...) implicit in the poem of the very idea of a renascence. The golden race, according to this reading, might be undesirable on account of its very goldenness. The golden race was the subject of a complex myth at the centre of a complex discourse: neither the ‘official’ nor the popular response to the idea of its return can have been as simple as they are frequently portrayed. (shrink)

In this article I pursue two main lines of argument. First, I seek to delineate two distinctive modes of justifying imperialism found in nineteenth-century political thought (and beyond). The 'liberal civilizational'li model, articulated most prominently by John Stuart Mill, justified empire primarily in terms of the benefits that it brought to subject populations. Its proponents sought to 'civilize'lthe 'barbarian'. An alternative `republican' model focused instead on the benefits - glory, honour and power above all - that accrued to the imperial (...) state. Less concerned with spreading civilization, its proponents concentrated on fortifying the imperial polity. Second, I offer a 'republican' interpretation of the writings of the historian and public moralist J.A. Froude (1818-94), arguing that he both diagnosed the problems of modern Britain and prescribed imperial solutions to those problems, based on his reading of the fate of the Roman republic. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Support is canvassed for a new approach to epistemology called anti-risk epistemology. It is argued that this proposal is rooted in the motivations for an existing account, known as anti-luck epistemology, but is superior on a number of fronts. In particular, anti-risk epistemology is better placed than anti-luck epistemology to supply the motivation for certain theoretical moves with regard to safety-based approaches to knowledge. Moreover, anti-risk epistemology is more easily extendable to epistemological questions beyond that in play in the theory (...) of knowledge specifically. A key advantage of the view, however, is that anti-risk epistemology fares much better than anti-luck epistemology when it comes to accounting for the phenomenon of negative epistemic dependence. In particular, anti-risk epistemology is ideally placed to explain why such epistemic dependence is incompatible with knowledge, even when the negative epistemic dependence in play is of a purely modal variety. (shrink)

The book opens with a discussion of different methods and approaches employed to study the subject, including analytical political theory, post-structuralism and critical theory.

By bringing together the insights of ecclesial ethics, an approach that emphasizes the distinctive nature of the church as the community that forms its mind and character after its reading of Scripture, with the theory and practice of restorative justice, a way of conceiving justice-making that emerged from the Mennonite-Anabaptist tradition, this book shows why a theological account of the theory and practice of restorative justice is fruitful for articulating and clarifying the witness of the church, especially when faced with (...) conflict or wrongdoing. This can help extend the church's imagination as to how it might better become God's community of restoration as it reflects on the ways in which the justice of God is taking shape in its own community. “How does an ecclesial context shape the theological apprehension and praxis of justice?” This question orientates the book. In particular, it asks how, in view of its members having been admitted into God's restoring justice in Christ, the church might embody in the world this same justice of restoring right relationships. While Christian reflection on the nature of justice has tended to favour a judicial and retributive conception of justice, it will be argued that the biblical understanding of the justice of God is best understood as a saving, liberating, and restorative justice. It is this restorative conception that ought to guide the community that reads Scripture so that it might be embodied in life. (shrink)

This essay honors Lyman Tower Sargent's cumulative work on utopian genres by offering a brief provocation about genre in general. Beneath the evolving faces of utopianism, it proposes that we focus on a different aspect of genre: the indeterminate number n of embodied labors at particular sites and times where people applied the conceptual and material tools at hand to the work of interacting with particular aspects of lived experience. It argues that much of the work of genre—the work of (...) genre deploying, genre undoing, genre becoming, or genre aspiring to become—happens at unique sites of labor, past, present, and future. Following McKenzie Wark, it refers to this as a labor point of view toward genre. (shrink)

As a contribution to a wider discussion on moral discernment in theological anthropology, this paper seeks to answer the question “What is the impact of mental illness on an individual’s ability to make moral decisions?” Written from a clinical psychiatric perspective, it considers recent contributions from psychology, neuropsychology and imaging technology. It notes that the popular conception that mental illness necessarily robs an individual of moral responsibility is largely unfounded. Most people who suffer from mental health problems do not lose (...) the capacity to make moral decisions, and mental illness on its own rarely explains anti-social or criminal behaviour. Moreover, the assumptions of some scientists, that recent developments in neuropsychology and brain imaging suggest biological determinism, must be treated with caution. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on John Stuart Mill has illuminated his arguments about the normative legitimacy of imperial rule. However, it has tended to ignore or downplay his extensive writings on settler colonialism: the attempt to create permanent "civilized" communities, mainly in North America and the South Pacific. Mill defended colonization throughout his life, although his arguments about its character and justification shifted over time. While initially he regarded it as a solution to the "social problem" in Britain, he increasingly came to (...) argue that its legitimacy resided in the universal benefits—civilization, peace, and prosperity—it generated for humanity. In the final years of his life Mill seemed to lose faith in the project. Finally recognizing the prevalence of colonial violence and the difficulty of realizing his grand ambitions, yet refusing to give up on colonization altogether, his colonial romance gave way to a form of melancholia. (shrink)

Discussing authorial power, landscape metaphor and the notions of community and sense of place, this explores the ways in which spatial and cultural analysis have found much common ground in making sense of ourselves and the landscape we inhabit.

This article engages in debates about the potential for aesthetics to be a positive, ethical, and moral frame for relating to the environment. Human‐environment relations are increasingly tied up with aesthetics. We problematize this trend by contending that aesthetics is an insufficient paradigm to motivate and shape environmentalism because it exceptionalizes some landscapes while devaluing others. This article uses four illustrative case studies to complicate aesthetic environmentalist frames. These case studies indicate that even when positive aesthetic qualities are deployed in (...) environmentalist advocacy, their usefulness is mitigated by a range of factors including: sensationalization, obfuscation, and further degradation. (shrink)

The kind of empathy that is communicated through expressions like “I feel your pain” or “I share your sadness” is important, but peculiar. For it seems to require something perplexing and elusive: sharing another’s experience. It’s not clear how this is possible. We each experience the world from our own point of view, which no one else occupies. It’s also unclear exactly why it is so important that we share others' pains. If you are in pain, then why should it (...) matter, and be a good thing, that I am also in the same pain? Our goal in this paper is to address these questions. Specifically, our goal is to clarify how empathy, in the regimented sense of sharing another’s pain, is possible and why it is important. Central to our account is the concept of being acquainted with—that is, directly aware of—pain. When I feel my own pain, and am acquainted with it, I want the pain to stop, and I’m moved—sometimes compelled—to stop it. My acquaintance with the pain is what reveals that it is no good, to be gotten rid of, and to be avoided in the future. Acquaintance also appears to be implicated in our understanding of, and motivation to relieve, others’ pains. When I say “I feel your pain” I express an awareness of your pain, a direct appreciation of its noxious qualities, and, as with my own pain, an understanding of why it ought to be eased. Explaining how empathy is both possible and important therefore involves clarifying the nature of acquaintance: its limits, epistemic role, and motivational significance. What our analysis reveals is that agents have both epistemic and moral reasons to share other people’s pain because pain-sharing is the source of a species of character-building knowledge that we have no other way of accessing except through direct acquaintance with pain. (shrink)