We prove that the classes of UHF algebras and AF algebras, while not axiomatizable, can be characterized as those C*-algebras that omit certain types in the logic of metric structures.

David Enoch develops, argues for, and defends a strongly realist and objectivist view of ethics and normativity more broadly. This view--according to which there are perfectly objective, universal, moral and other normative truths that are not in any way reducible to other, natural truths--is familiar, but this book is the first in-detail development of the positive motivations for the view into reasonably precise arguments. And when the book turns to defend Robust Realism against traditional objections, it mobilizes the original (...) positive arguments for the view to help with fending off the objections. (shrink)

People are often offended by beliefs, expect apologies for beliefs, apologize for their own beliefs. In many mundane cases, people are morally criticized for their beliefs. Intuitively, then, beliefs seem to sometimes wrong people. Recently, the philosophical literature has picked up on this theme, and has started to discuss it under the heading of doxastic wrongdoing. In this paper we argue that despite the strength of such initial intuitions, at the end of the day they have to be rejected. If (...) it can be ever truthfully asserted that beliefs wrong, this is always derivative – beliefs wrong only in virtue of other things (like evidence-gathering actions) wronging. We distinguish between modest and ambitious doxastic wrongdoing theories (the former deny, while the latter accept, the possibility of a morally wrong yet epistemically permissible belief); we argue that each of these options faces insurmountable problems; and we offer partly debunking explanations of the intuitions purportedly supporting doxastic wrongdoing. (shrink)

In his paper ‘Ethical problems with kindness in healthcare’, Jesudason sets out an interesting examination of the concept of kindness, arguing that it poses significant ethical challenges due to its discretionary nature. I suggest that kindness, a concept difficult to define, may still have a role to play in healthcare. Different treatments of kindness show us that it need not be discretionary, and that kind care can be provided to all. Finally, curiosity may also have a role to play in (...) medicine to help promote inclusiveness. (shrink)

There is a fairly widespread—and very infl uential—hope among philosophers interested in the status of normativity that the solution to our metaethical and, more generally, metanormative problems will emerge from the philosophy of action. In this essay, I will argue that these hopes are groundless. I will focus on the metanormative hope, but—as will become clear—showing that the solution to our metanormative problems will not come from what is constitutive of action will also devastate the hope of gaining significant insight (...) into first-order, normative truths by focusing on what is constitutive of action. (shrink)

This essay first discusses the three major arguments in favor of euthanasia and physician-assisted-suicide in contemporary Western society, viz ., the arguments of mercy, preventing indignity, and individual autonomy. It then articulates both Confucian consonance and dissonance to them. The first two arguments make use of Confucian discussions on suicide whereas the last argument appeals to Confucian social-political thought. It concludes that from the Confucian moral perspectives, none of the three arguments is fully convincing.

In this paper, we present an account of in virtue of what thinkers are justified in employing certain basic belief‐forming methods. The guiding idea is inspired by Reichenbach’s work on induction. There are certain projects in which thinkers are rationally required to engage. Thinkers are epistemically justified in employing a belief‐forming method that is indispensable for successfully engaging in such a project. We present a detailed account based on this intuitive thought, and address objections to it. We conclude by commenting (...) on the implications that our account may have for other important epistemological debates. (shrink)

The present study takes Confucian entrepreneurs as an entry point to portray the dynamics and problems involved in the process of putting moral precepts into practice, a central issue in business ethics. Confucian entrepreneurs are defined as the owners of manufacturing or business firms who harbor the moral values of Confucianism. Other than a brief account of their historical background, 41 subjects from various parts of Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur were selected for in-depth interviews. By (...) studying the moral choices they made in the market, it was discovered that, contrary to the prevalent mode of inquiry in economics either to reduce all social phenomena to rational calculations or to consider moral actions in terms of utilitarian values, their economic action cannot be accounted for by the postulate of utility maximization, and that the efforts to do business according to their moral principles can be very costly. The study also attempts to document how these Confucian entrepreneurs reconciled the conflict between the moral values they cherished and the instrumental goals they pursued, and will seek to uncover how they responded when faced with this dilemma. (shrink)

Background: Biological products are widely used in the treatment of burns, chronic wounds, and other forms of acute injury. However, the religious and ethical issues, including consent, arising from their use have never been addressed in the medical literature.Aims: This study was aimed to ascertain the views of religious leaders about the acceptability of biological products and to evaluate awareness among healthcare professionals about their constituents.Methods: The religious groups that make up about 75% of the United Kingdom population were identified (...) and a questionnaire on 11 biological products was sent to its leaders. Another questionnaire concerning 17 products was sent to 100 healthcare professionals working in seven specialist units in the UK.Results: All religious leaders replied, some after consultation with international bodies. Among them, 77% said that patients should be informed of the constituents of the biological products and consent obtained. Some leaders expressed concerns about particular products including the transmission of viral and prion diseases, cruelty to animals, and material derived from neonates. None of the healthcare professionals surveyed knew the constituents of all the products correctly.Conclusion: Ignoring religious sensitivities and neglecting consent in the usage of biological products could have very serious implications, including litigation. Hospitals and manufacturers should take immediate measures to enlighten healthcare professionals of the constituents of these products so that they can obtain informed consent from patients. (shrink)

I am writing a mediocre paper on a topic you are not particularly interested in. You don't have, it seems safe to assume, a (normative) reason to read my draft. I then ask whether you would be willing to have a look and tell me what you think. Suddenly you do have a (normative) reason to read my draft. By my asking, I managed to give you the reason to read the draft. What does such reason-giving consist in? And how (...) is it that we can do it? In this paper, I characterize what I call robust reason giving, the kind present in requests. I distinguish it from epistemic and merely triggering reason-giving, I discuss in detail the phenomenology of robust reason-giving, and I offer an analysis of robust reason-giving in terms of the complex intentions of the reason-giver and of the normative background. (shrink)

Metaethical—or, more generally, metanormative— realism faces a serious epistemological challenge. Realists owe us—very roughly speaking—an account of how it is that we can have epistemic access to the normative truths about which they are realists. This much is, it seems, uncontroversial among metaethicists, myself included. But this is as far as the agreement goes, for it is not clear—nor uncontroversial—how best to understand the challenge, what the best realist way of coping with it is, and how successful this attempt is. (...) In this paper I try, first, to present the challenge in its strongest version, and second, to show how realists—indeed, robust realists—can cope with it. The strongest version of the challenge is, I argue, that of explaining the correlation between our normative beliefs and the independent normative truths. And I suggest an evolutionary explanation as a way of solving it. (shrink)

For many years, moral philosophers have been debating the conceptual and moral status of the distinction between intending harm and foreseeing harm. In this paper, after surveying some of the objections to the moral significance of this distinction in general, I focus on the special case of state action, arguing that whatever reasons we have to be suspicious about the distinction's moral significance in general, we have very good reasons to believe it lacks intrinsic moral significance when applied to state (...) action. After arguing for this claim, I pursue in a preliminary way some of its implications. (shrink)

Because of the importance of Confucian doctrines in shaping ethical business practices under Chinese leadership, revealing the roles of other Chinese ethical doctrines in modern Chinese leadership is informative. A thorough understanding of the ethical foundations of Chinese leadership is necessary for fruitful interaction with Chinese leaders, according to cultural fit theory. The present study illustrates the philosophical foundations of business management, based on dialogues with five eminent corporate executive officers. It reveals that the CEOs practice a style of Chinese (...) leadership synthesizing Confucian, Daoist, Mohist, and Legalist doctrines. The Confucian doctrines advocate benevolence, harmony, learning, loyalty, righteousness, and humility. They are the most prevalent tenets that support paternalism and collectivism. The Daoist doctrines emphasize flexibility and reversion. They bolster the leader's forbearance. The Mohist doctrines underpin thrift and working with the masses whereas the Legalist doctrines inculcate self-control and innovativeness. Hence, contemporary Chinese leadership does not rely exclusively on Confucian ethics and this reflects evolution over 1000s of years. (shrink)

More and more people seem to think that constructivism - in political philosophy, in moral philosophy, and perhaps in practical reasoning most generally - is the way to go. And yet it is surprisingly hard to even characterize the view. In this paper, I go to some lengths trying to capture the essence of a constructivist position - mostly in the realm of practical reason - and to pinpoint its theoretical attractions. I then give some reason to suspect that there (...) cannot be a coherent constructivist view about practical reason as a whole, at least not if it is to be interestingly constructivist, in a sense I make reasonably precise. (shrink)

You may think that you're a moral relativist or subjectivist - many people today seem to. But I don't think you are. In fact, when we start doing metaethics - when we start, that is, thinking philosophically about our moral discourse and practice - thoughts about morality's objectivity become almost irresistible. Now, as is always the case in philosophy, that some thoughts seem irresistible is only the starting point for the discussion, and under argumentative pressure we may need to revise (...) our relevant beliefs. Still, it's important to get the starting points right. So it's important to understand the deep ways in which rejecting morality's objectivity are unappealing. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an account of the justification thinkers have for employing certain basic belief-forming methods. The guiding idea is inspired by Reichenbach's work on induction. There are certain projects in which thinkers are rationally required to engage. Thinkers are epistemically justified in employing any belief-forming method such that "if it doesn't work, nothing will" for successfully engaging in such a project. We present a detailed account based on this intuitive thought and address objections to it. We conclude (...) by commenting on the implications that our account may have for other important epistemological issues and debates. (shrink)

Is there a difference in moral blameworthiness between a murderer and an attempted murderer? Should there be a legal difference between them? These questions are particular instances of the question of moral luck and legal luck (respectively). In this paper, I survey and explain the main argumentative moves within the general philosophical discussion of moral luck. I then discuss legal luck, and the different ways in which this discussion may be related to that of moral luck.

Suppose someone is brought up as an orthodox Jew, and so only eats kosher, is very conservative sexually, etc. Suppose they then find out that this Judaism stuff is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the shrimp they could have eaten, all the sex!, this makes perfect sense. Not so, however, if someone finds out that moral realism is false, and they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people’s feeling, etc. Even if (...) this does make sense, there’s a strong disanalogy between the moral and the religious case. This asymmetry, on a realist picture of morality, calls for explanation. This chapter tries to explain it. The discussion engages some topics familiar from objections to Robust realism—the why-be-moral challenge, the status of de-dicto moral motivation, and whether and why we should care about the moral properties, robustly realistically understood. (shrink)

1. The Shmagency Challenge to Constitutivism In metaethics – and indeed, meta-normativity – constitutivism is a family of views that hope to ground normativity in norms, or standards, or motives, or aims that are constitutive of action and agency. And mostly because of the influential work of Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman, constitutivism seems to be gaining grounds in the current literature. The promises of constitutivism are significant. Perhaps chief among them are the hope to provide with some kind of (...) answer to the skeptic about morality or perhaps practical reason, and the hope to secure for practical reason a kind of objectivity that is consistent with its practical, motivationally engaged nature. The former philosophical motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in much of Korsgaard’s relevant work[1] – relies on the fact that constitutive norms seem to be less mysterious than not-clearly-constitutive norms. There arguably is nothing mysterious about, say, the norms of certain reasonably-well-defined activities, like building a house, or playing chess. And challenges by the relevant skeptic – the one asking "Why should I make sure the house I’m building can shelter people from the weather?" or "Why should I not castle when my king is checked?" – seem very rare, barely intelligible, and anyway remarkably easy to cope with. We should explain to the misguided skeptic that if he doesn’t even try to build something that can protect people from the weather, he’s not in the business of building a house at all; that if she doesn’t even try to play by the rules of chess, she’s not in the business of playing chess at all; and so on. It would be nice, the constitutivist hope seems to go, if we had something equally powerful by way of a response to the skeptic asking "Why be moral?". The other main motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in David Velleman’s relevant work[2] – starts from a commitment to some rather strong kind of existence-internalism about reasons: An agent has a reason to?, according to such views ), only if she can come to?, or at least to be motivated to?, by sound deliberation starting from her actual motivational set. (shrink)

Locality is a key concept not only in linguistic theorizing, but in explaining pattern of acquisition and patterns of recovery in garden path sentences, as well. If syntax relates sound and meaning over an infinite domain, syntactic dependencies and operations must be restricted in such a way to apply over limited, finite domains in order to be detectable at all. The theory of what these finite domains are and how they relate to the fundamentally unbounded nature of syntax is the (...) theory of locality. The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory, and, more specifically, describe and analyze the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made to this area over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all eminent linguists in generative syntax who have collaborated with Rizzi closely, and in eleven chapters, they explore locality in both pure syntax and psycholinguistics. This collection is essential reading for students and scholars of linguistic theory, generative syntax, and comparative syntax. (shrink)

In their influential paper “The extended mind”, Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue for the possibility of the extended mind. Based on Clark and Chalmers’s views, Stephen Hetherington argues in his paper “The extended knower” that there are extended knowers, provided epistemic externalism holds. He also uses the argument and its conclusion to criticize Baron Reed’s scepticism in the paper “The long road to skepticism” : 236–262, 2007). In this chapter, I argue that both Hetherington’s notion of the extended knower (...) and his argument are problematic. This is because the conceptual intelligibility of his notion of the extended knower entails the highly counterintuitive consequence that, in some cases, some negative entities would have to be constitutive of the extended knower. I also show that Hetherington’s criticism of Reed’s scepticism is not successful, and that there is no reason to believe that Clark and Chalmers would hold that there is the extended knower in Hetherington’s sense. (shrink)

Everyone agrees, I think, that there is something fishy about moral deference and expertise, but that's where consensus ends. This paper has two aims – the first is to mount a defense of moral deference, and the second is to offer a (non-debunking) diagnosis of its fishiness. I defend moral deference by connecting the discussion of moral deference to the recent discussion of the appropriate response to uncertainty. It is, I argue, morally obligatory to minimize the risk of one's wrongdoing (...) (at least when all other things are held equal), and this moral requirement entails that deferring to a moral expert is sometimes not just morally permissible but also admirable, and indeed morally required. If moral deference is often justified, why is it fishy? I offer an explanation in terms of the emotions moral judgments are often related to, and their nature (roughly speaking) as directed at the good or bad, right or wrong, de re rather than de dicto. The combination of this vindication of moral deference and diagnosis of its fishiness nicely accommodates, I argue, some related phenomena, like the (neglected) fact that our uneasiness with moral deference is actually a particular instance of uneasiness with opaque evidence in general when it comes to morality, and the (familiar) fact that the scope of this uneasiness is wider than the moral as it includes other normative domains. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the impacts of index inclusions and exclusions on corporate sustainable firms by studying a sample of US stocks that are added to or deleted from the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index over the period 2002-2008. The impacts are measured in terms of stock return, risk and liquidity. We cannot find any strong evidence that announcement per se has any significant impact on stock return and risk. However, on the day of change, index inclusion (exclusion) stocks experience a (...) significant but temporary increase (decrease) in stock return. Liquidity deteriorates after the announcement day and bounces back significantly near the day of change. Systematic risk shows little change after announcements. But, idiosyncratic risk is higher after announcements. The overall results support Harris and Eitan's (The Journal of Finance 41(4), 815-829, 1986) price pressure hypothesis, which posits that event announcement does not carry information and any shift in demand (and hence the corresponding price change and liquidity change) is temporary. (shrink)

The law views with suspicion statistical evidence, even evidence that is probabilistically on a par with direct, individual evidence that the law is in no way suspicious of. But it has proved remarkably hard to either justify this suspicion, or to debunk it. In this paper, we connect the discussion of statistical evidence to broader epistemological discussions of similar phenomena. We highlight Sensitivity – the requirement that a belief be counterfactually sensitive to the truth in a specific way – as (...) a way of epistemically explaining the legal suspicion towards statistical evidence. Still, we do not think of this as a satisfactory vindication of the reluctance to rely on statistical evidence. Knowledge – and Sensitivity, and indeed epistemology in general – are of little, if any, legal value. Instead, we tell an incentive-based story vindicating the suspicion towards statistical evidence. We conclude by showing that the epistemological story and the incentive-based story are closely and interestingly related, and by offering initial thoughts about the role of statistical evidence in morality. (shrink)

A spectre is haunting legal positivists – and perhaps jurisprudes more generally – the spectre of the normativity of law. Whatever else law is, it is sometimes said, it is normative, and so whatever else a philosophical account of law accounts for, it should account for the normativity of law[1]. But law is at least partially a social matter, its content at least partially determined by social practices. And how can something social and descriptive in this down-to-earth kind of way (...) be normative?[2] This is presumably a problem for any theory of law, but it is especially acute for legal positivism, according to which (roughly speaking) all there is to facts about legality are such descriptive social facts. If this is so, the thought goes, the task of accommodating the law’s normativity immediately becomes both more daunting, and more urgent[3]. Unfortunately, though, it is entirely unclear what the problem of the normativity of law is supposed to be. Indeed, I suspect that there is no one problem here, as different people seem to have in mind different problems when they use this unhelpful phrase[4]. At least one family of issues people seem to have in mind when they talk about the normativity of law is a host of issues pertaining to the reason-giving force of the law. The law, it is sometimes said, gives reasons for action, and a theory of law should accommodate this obvious fact. But even when we focus just on questions regarding the reason-giving force of the law (and from now on I will restrict myself to just those, leaving other things people may have in mind when they talk about the normativity of law for another occasion), it is still not clear what the problem is. Indeed, my main purpose in this paper is to make some progress in understanding the relevant question here. And my conclusion is going to be somewhat skeptical: Once we are clear on what reason-giving in general consists in, and on what reason-giving powers the law actually has, there is not much by way of a problem here that needs to be solved, not a deep and interesting phenomenon here that theories of law need to accommodate, and that therefore places adequacy constraints on plausible theories of the nature of law.. (shrink)

How should you update your (degrees of) belief about a proposition when you find out that someone else — as reliable as you are in these matters — disagrees with you about its truth value? There are now several different answers to this question — the question of `peer disagreement' — in the literature, but none, I think, is plausible. Even more importantly, none of the answers in the literature places the peer-disagreement debate in its natural place among the most (...) general traditional concerns of normative epistemology. In this paper I try to do better. I start by emphasizing how we cannot and should not treat ourselves as `truthometers' — merely devices with a certain probability of tracking the truth. I argue that the truthometer view is the main motivation for the Equal Weight View in the context of peer disagreement. With this fact in mind, the discussion of peer disagreement becomes more complicated, sensitive to the justification of the relevant background degrees of belief (including the conditional ones), and to some of the most general points that arise in the context of discussions of scepticism. I argue that thus understood, peer disagreement is less special as an epistemic phenomenon than may be thought, and so that there is very little by way of positive theory that we can give about peer disagreement in general. (shrink)

In "Moral Luck" Bernard Williams famously drew on our intuitive judgments about agent-regret – mostly, on our judgment that agent-regret is often appropriate – in his argument about the role of luck in rational and moral evaluation. I think that Williams is importantly right about the appropriateness of agent-regret, but importantly wrong about the implications of this observation. In this paper, I suggest an alternative understanding of the normative judgment Williams is putting forward, the one about the appropriateness of agent-regret. (...) I distinguish between being responsible and taking responsibility. The judgment about the appropriateness of agent-regret, I argue, is better understood as a judgment about the (forward-looking) moral duty to take responsibility than about the (backward-looking) fact of being responsible. The distinction between being responsible and taking responsibility is wider in scope, though, than the discussion of agent-regret, and in this paper I go to some lengths elaborating on this distinction and its theoretical usefulness. Thus, I distinguish different senses of taking responsibility (forward- and backward-looking; just acknowledging responsibility that is already there vs. making it the case that one is responsible); I argue against initial doubts about the very coherence of this stronger understanding of taking-responsibility; and I specify the background conditions for the possibility of taking responsibility in this strong sense. The discussion of the normative background conditions necessary for the possibility of taking responsibility in the strong sense leads to a discussion of an intuitive notion of penumbral agency. Thus, I cannot take responsibility for Jefferson's owning slaves – the relevant actions and events are just too far from my agency to allow for me to take responsibility over them. Of course, I can issue statements that sound like an attempt to take responsibility. But I cannot thereby become responsible. It is just not within my power to make it the case that I am responsible for Jefferson's slave-ownership. At the other extreme, for some things I do not need to take responsibility in order to be responsible. For my actions – or perhaps intentions, or some such – I am already responsible, independently of whether I ever take (or even acknowledge) responsibility. These things are within the core of my agency, and I am responsible for them regardless of whether I take responsibility for them. But we should acknowledge the fact that there is more to this spectrum than just the extremes. Some actions and events are not within my core agency, but nor are they too far to allow me to take responsibility for them (thereby becoming responsible for them). Possible examples include the actions of my country, the actions of my rather young children, and – now getting back to Williams's discussion – the uncontrolled consequences of my actions. In these cases of penumbral agency, I argue, we are not responsible, but we can become responsible by taking responsibility. Furthermore, we may have a moral duty to take responsibility. Thus, the distinction between being responsible and taking responsibility is theoretically useful in accounting for our intuitively problematic and ambivalent responsibility-judgments. In the case of my country's actions, for instance, we want to say both that I am not responsible for them (given my very limited power to influence them); but we also want to say that there's something wrong about my refusing to accept responsibility for my country's actions, or about my just noting that I am not responsible for those actions. Utilizing the distinction between being responsible and taking responsibility, we can say that while I am not responsible for my country's actions, I am under a moral duty to take (some) responsibility for them. In the case of agent-regret and moral luck, this distinction allows us – vis-à-vis Williams – to have our cake and eat it too. True, agent-regret is often appropriate. But this shows nothing directly about responsibility. Rather, it shows something about our moral duties to take responsibility. And that these duties are sensitive to lucky circumstances is not more mysterious or paradoxical than the circumstances-sensitivity of pretty much all of our other moral duties. In other words, thus understood, the appropriateness of agent-regret is perfectly compatible with the denial of moral luck. (shrink)

The combination of this vindication of moral deference and diagnosis of its fishiness nicely accommodates, I argue, some related phenomena, like the (neglected) fact that our uneasiness with moral deference is actually a particular instance of uneasiness with opaque evidence in general when it comes to morality, and the (familiar) fact that the scope of this uneasiness is wider than the moral as it includes other normative domains.

In the literature, the term code-mixing/switching refers to instances of language mixing in which speakers/signers combine properties of two or more languages in their utterances. Such a linguistic behavior is typically discussed in the context of multilinguals, and experts commonly focus on the form of language mixing/switching and its cross-linguistic commonalities. Not much is known, however, about how the knowledge of code-mixing comes about. How come any speaker/signer having access to more than one externalization channel (spoken or signed) code-mixes spontaneously? (...) Likewise, why do both neurotypical speakers/signers and certain neuro-atypical speakers/signers produce structurally similar mixing types? This paper offers some answers to these questions arguing that the cognitive process underlying code-mixing is a basic property of the human learning device: recombination, a fully automated cognitive process. Recombination is innate: it allows learners to select relevant linguistic features from heterogeneous inputs, and recombine then into new syntactic objects as part of their mental grammars whose extensions, arguably individual idiolects, represents what Aboh (2015a, 2019a, b) characterizes as hybrid grammars. (shrink)

Do biological species have essences? The debate over this question in philosophy of biology exhibits fundamental confusion both between and within authors. In What to Salvage from the Species Essentialism Debate, I argue that the best way forward is to drop the question and its terms in order to make progress on two issues: how to individuate species taxa; and how to make sense of changes in explanatory frameworks across the Darwinian historical divide. I further argue that a primary motivation (...) for anti-essentialism, biological variation, matters differently to each project. Anti-essentialism in the philosophy of biology has inspired influential rejections of the idea that there is such a thing as human nature. In More Bark than Bite, I show that the arguments are significantly weaker than supposed. Moreover, none of the weighty consequences thought to follow from any genuine sense in which there is no human nature, actually do follow. The evolution-based denial of human nature has little to contribute to inquiries into the human condition, both philosophical and scientific. Decisions about whether to undergo experiences that could change the very preference-base on which the choice is made are “transformative”. L. A. Paul argues that transformative decisions present a problem for standard decision theory when approached in a way that leans on evaluations of the experiential consequences of the choices. Her solution proposes that we approach such decisions by asking ourselves how much we value the kind of discovery involved in transformative experience. In Shifting Attention on Transformative Choice, I present two problems for her solution and offer an alternative. Transformative decisions may be rationally approached by asking ourselves how much we judge the activities on the other side of transformation to be worthwhile. This proposal helps make better sense of our relationship to experiential consequences of transformation, which is more flexible than Paul acknowledges. (shrink)

For lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth, identity development is one of the most critical developmental task. LGBTQ youth are shown to be at risk for a variety of risk factors including depression and suicidal ideation and attempts due to how their identities are appraised in heteronormative societies. However, most LGBTQ educational psychology research have highlighted protective factors that are primarily relevant to support LGBTQ white-youth. One of the major developmental theories, Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, has identified adolescence (...) as the period where identity development occurs. However, through an intersectional lens, identity development appears to encompass more than adolescence but also emerging adulthood, a developmental stage not accounted for by Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. The primary goal of this study is to seek to understand and question Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development through an intersectional lens of an autoethnography of my LGBTQ experiences. An autoethnographic approach [diary entries, conversations, interview, social media websites and blogs, and drawing ] is used to understand my LGBTQ-person of color experiences of “coming out” or self-disclosure during my adolescence through emerging adulthood. Data was collected on April 2020 and spanned from 2006 through 2020 to account for the developmental period of adolescence and emerging adulthood. Thematic analysis revealed four themes across the two developmental periods: confusion and conflict between my gay and ethnic identity as a closeted adolescent, my first “coming out” as a gay adolescent and “it got better,” frustration arising from the internal conflict between my gay and POC identity as an emerging adult, and frustration arising from external experiences with the flaws of LGBTQ community inclusivity. Results reflected a continuous theme of identity exploration and struggle through both adolescence and emerging adulthood, highlighting the need for future research to replicate similar experiences from other intersectional individuals during emerging adulthood stage, a developmental stage that is considered in between Erikson’s adolescent and young adulthood developmental stage. (shrink)

The starting point regarding consent has to be that it is both extremely important, and that it is often suspicious. In this article, the author tries to make sense of both of these claims, from a largely liberal perspective, tying consent, predictably, to the value of autonomy and distinguishing between autonomy as sovereignty and autonomy as nonalienation. The author then discusses adaptive preferences, claiming that they suffer from a rationality flaw but that it's not clear that this flaw matters morally (...) or politically. What matters is whether they suffer from an autonomy flaw. To answer this question, the author develops an account of autonomy failure, according to which a preference is nonautonomous if an injustice played an appropriate role in its causal history. The author then discusses the moral implications—and in an initial way, the political ones as well—of proclaiming a preference, or consent based on it, nonautonomous in this way. (shrink)

In eighteenth-century French natural history, the notion of preformation was not only a model for a small preexisting embryo that gradually extended its shape through the influx of particles, but also for an order that coordinated the dynamic relation between organic parts. Preformation depended therefore also on a hidden order behind the continuity of visible forms. Louis Bourguet, Charles Bonnet, and Georges Cuvier distinguished three organizational levels: First, the synchronic or functional order of organic systems; second, the diachronic order of (...) the initiation of mechanical processes; and third, the hierarchical order that regulates the interaction of organic parts. In this essay, I reconstruct and compare the three organizational levels in the writings of Bourguet, Bonnet and Cuvier, relate their models of organic unity to the principle of perfection, and contrast these models with Georges Buffon's critique of system theories. (shrink)

Some of the recent philosophical literature on moral luck attempts to make headway in the moral-luck debate by employing the resources of empirical psychology, in effect arguing that some of the intuitive judgments relevant to the moral-luck debate are best explained - and so presumably explained away - as the output of well-documented cognitive biases. We argue that such attempts are empirically problematic, and furthermore that even if they were not, it is still not at all clear what philosophical significance (...) they would have. (shrink)