This essay undertakes an examination that combines a reconstruction of Hegel’s system of needs with a critical analysis of that system. The reconstruction begins by unraveling the philosophical framework Hegel uses in his Philosophy of Right. It presents the evolution of abstract right and morality towards an ethical life and explains why a civil society becomes nec-essary. Furthermore, it explores the interconnectedness of individuals in the system of needs and how freedom may actualize in civil society based on Hegel’s work. (...) Following the recon-struction and the moments of reason in a free-market society, the paper takes a critical point of view upon the system presented by Hegel. It predominantly follows the critique of Marx and demonstrates how, in a free-market society, the freedom provided is only a formal one. In the second part of the critique, the scope of the paper opens up to further points of criticism against a system of needs, especially how sustainability and global inequality may develop on a international scale without any limitations in a globalized market. The essay ties back said points of criticism into Hegel’s philosophy and presents where they were already indicated in Hegel’s philosophy and how they stay relevant all the way up until modern times. In conclusion the paper shows that the exploration of Hegel’s system of needs remains a compelling discourse, regarding freedom and social equality. (shrink)

Individual differences in effortful control, a component of temperament, reflecting the ability to use attention and other cognitive processes to self-regulate emotion and behavior, contribute to child academic adjustment, social competence, and wellbeing. Research has linked excessive screen time in early childhood to reduced self-regulation ability. Furthermore, research suggests that parents are more likely to use screens with children who have more challenging temperaments, such as low levels of effortful control. Since screen time by children between the ages of 0 (...) and 18 has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains timely to investigate the developmental pattern of association between child screen media use and effortful control. We hypothesize that higher levels of screen media intake at age 3.5 will be associated with lower effortful control at age 4.5 and that lower effortful control at 3.5 will contribute to more screen media intake at age 4.5. This study draws on participants followed longitudinally over the span of 2-years for an investigation of Canadian preschoolers’ screen media use during the pandemic. A follow-up with this sample was completed in 2021. Analyses using a cross-lagged panel model revealed stability in child screen time and effortful control between the ages of 3.5 and 4.5. Child screen time at age 3.5 significantly contributed to decreased effortful control scores at the age of 4.5, whereas effortful control at age 3.5 did not contribute to screen time at age 4.5. Our results partially confirmed our hypothesis and indicated that higher levels of screen time intake were detrimental to the development of effortful control. These results suggest that screen media use, an exceedingly frequent activity, may play an enduring role in development by shaping young children’s temperaments. (shrink)

Noires ou métisses, Africaines, Antillaises ou Américaines, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita et Eslanda Robeson sont les protagonistes de ce livre novateur, riche et stimulant. Leur point commun : s’être engagées, à différents titres, pour contester la domination coloniale dans la seconde moitié du xxe siècle. Le destin de certaines (Suzanne Césaire, Eugénie Eboué-Tell, Eslanda Robeson), souvent associé à celui de leur mari, est plus...

Hans-Georg GADAMER, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze ; Pascal MICHON, Poétique d’une anti-anthropologie: l’herméneutique deGadamer ; Robert J. DOSTAL, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer ; Denis SERON, Le problème de la métaphysique. Recherches sur l’interprétation heideggerienne de Platon et d’Aristote ; Henry MALDINEY, Ouvrir le rien. L’art nu ; Dominique JANICAUD, Heidegger en France, I. Récit; II. Entretiens ; Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Fenomenologia percepţiei ; Trish GLAZEBROOK, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science ; Richard WOLIN, Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans (...) Jonas and Herbert Marcuse ; Ivo DEGENNARO, Logos – Heidegger liest Heraklit ; O. K. WIEGAND, R. J. DOSTAL, L. EMBREE, J. KOCKELMANS and J. N. MOHANTY, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic ; James FAULCONER and Mark WRATHALL, Appropriating Heidegger. (shrink)

In the texts of Pascal and Spinoza we can find a contradictionaccording to which the imagination leads to error, but it is not reducedto that. In view of this, the primordial question of this article is how tounderstand this tension: why the imagination in Pascal and in Espinosais led to error? In which sense can the effects of the deceptive powerin Pascal also result in something positive? Why in Spinoza the act ofimagining remains unscathed, in spite of (...) the articulations that makethe imaginative perception prone to error? We will examine the reasonswhy Pascal and Spinoza place the imagination under this contradiction,evaluating comparatively its general implications. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Mohism has been called the most religious of all Chinese philosophies. Living up to that name, it developed unique proofs for the existence of the spiritual realm within a distinctly Chinese context. The Mozi uses testimonies from China’s mythic history to prove the existence of spirits. But beyond these cultural proofs, the Mozi also introduces a logical argument that is very similar to Pascal’s wager. Beyond these four explicit arguments, the Mozi also contains a fifth proof based on (...) the existence of a supernatural order that exists in the structure of the world. (shrink)

L'homme problématique. Les questions fondamentales sur l'essence ou sur la destinée de l'homme, auxquelles la science ne peut apporter aucune réponse, seraient-elles insolubles, ou même dénuées de sens? Il appartient à la liberté humaine de se libérer en quelque sorte d'elle-même, c'est-à-dire de sa disposition perverse à affirmer sa propre autosuffisance. L'inquiétude humaine : chez St Augustin, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Goethe. Angoisse - paralysie ; inquiétude - aiguillon, principe de dépassement, chemin que nous avons à gravir pour accéder (...) à la paix véritable. Position et approches concrètes du mystère ontologique. Le texte fondamental, le " discours de la méthode " de Gabriel Marcel. (shrink)

Espinosa e Pascal, respectivamente no proêmio do Tratado da Emenda do Intelecto e no opúsculo Sobre a conversão do pecador, colocam em cena a explicação de um processo que implica a instituição de um novo modo de vida e que representa, para a alma ou para a mente humana, uma profunda renovação de valores. Nessa explicação, ambos os autores abordam temas como a consideração por um bem verdadeiro, a perturbação entre tal consideração e a estima pelo que até então (...) era objeto de deleite, a firme resolução e o desejo de buscar um bem verdadeiro e, por fim, a re fl exão sobre os meios para alcançá-lo. Entretanto, o solo no qual esse processo se desenvolve parece separ á-los, pois em Espinosa a resolução de buscar o bem verdadeiro é inerente ao esforço re fl exivo, ao passo que em Pascal a conversão do pecador não se realiza sem a intervenção da graça. A questão que então se coloca é a de compreender o fundamento da instituição de um novo modo de vida cujo processo, se não parece se originar simplesmente de uma decisão voluntária, não é contudo equivalente para tais autores. (shrink)

Hans-Georg GADAMER, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze ; Pascal MICHON, Poétique d’une anti-anthropologie: l’herméneutique deGadamer ; Robert J. DOSTAL, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer ; Denis SERON, Le problème de la métaphysique. Recherches sur l’interprétation heideggerienne de Platon et d’Aristote ; Henry MALDINEY, Ouvrir le rien. L’art nu ; Dominique JANICAUD, Heidegger en France, I. Récit; II. Entretiens ; Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Fenomenologia percepţiei ; Trish GLAZEBROOK, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science ; Richard WOLIN, Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans (...) Jonas and Herbert Marcuse ; Ivo DEGENNARO, Logos – Heidegger liest Heraklit ; O. K. WIEGAND, R. J. DOSTAL, L. EMBREE, J. KOCKELMANS and J. N. MOHANTY, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic ; James FAULCONER and Mark WRATHALL, Appropriating Heidegger. (shrink)

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

Pascal, the mathematical genius, intellectually explored the curious notion of the mathematically infinite, and Pascal, the saintly mystic, experienced passionately the ineffable presence of the existentially infinite, God. In this ingenious essay, Gabriel Mony traces Pascal’s movement from one infinite to the other. The before and after for Pascal is divided by his “Night of Fire.” Mony argues that before Pascal was tempted by the rationalist vision of understanding all nature through mathematical reasoning. Since (...) God designed the universe mathematically, the human intellect, if it pressed its theorems far enough, might equal God’s understanding. (shrink)

Pascal, the mathematical genius, intellectually explored the curious notion of the mathematically infinite, and Pascal, the saintly mystic, experienced passionately the ineffable presence of the existentially infinite, God. In this ingenious essay, Gabriel Mony traces Pascal’s movement from one infinite to the other. The before and after for Pascal is divided by his “Night of Fire.” Mony argues that before Pascal was tempted by the rationalist vision of understanding all nature through mathematical reasoning. Since (...) God designed the universe mathematically, the human intellect, if it pressed its theorems far enough, might equal God’s understanding. (shrink)

The principal aim of Wetsel's study is to identify the potential interlocutor for whom Pascal intended his Pensées. Wetsel begins by stating his belief that, despite the fragmentary state of the Pensées, Pascal had clearly intended to revise and organize his thoughts into a "finished apology of the Christian religion". Those unfamiliar with the current state of Pascalian studies in North America will be surprised to learn how controversial is such a thesis. In this Derridian era, with its (...) endless fascination with discontinuity and fragmentation, a practically subatomic reading of the Pensées has become de rigueur. Wetsel's book is an unabashed return to the historicocritical tradition. Chapter 1 exposes the principal anti-Christian theses current in midseventeenth-century Paris, centering on the works of philosophes libertins such as La Mothe le Vayer and Gabriel Naud. More radical atheistic works, such as those of Cyrano de Bergerac, are also discussed at length. Wetsel attempts to demonstrate that Pascal is not addressing these libertins érudits, whose arguments against Christianity leave hardly any trace in the Pensées. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the "skeptical religion" popular in seventeenth-century France. Wetsel maintains that this deism with neo-Pelagian elements, essentially the religion of the honnête homme, is the disbelief of those whom Pascal wishes to convert. The following chapter deals with the most important of the unorthodox versions of the Genesis story advanced during the Classical period in France, the works of Isaac de la Peyrère. Wetsel does not propose that Pascal, though familiar with the Pre-Adamite theory of La Peyrère, intended a specific refutation of this author. Rather he believes that a general examination of seventeenth-century heterodoxy provides the fundamental historical context essential for understanding Pascal's defense of orthodoxy. (shrink)

Is it tautological to call an action "wrongful discrimination?" Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term "discrimination" is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that "discrimination" usually conveys the action’s moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone (...) a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of "discriminatory" is a thing of the past. (shrink)

Does the ‘Zeitenwende’ herald the beginning of a new and as yet undefined open society realism? The present essay argues this question requires critical discussion of nature and value of realist political theory, particularly at a time where international society is accelerating to somewhere which is itself as yet unclear. Adding to revisionist research on political realism in International Relations (IR) theory I sketch how a political vision I call open society realism may be developed out of Classical realism, in (...) sharp distinction to academic IR neorealism for methodological and political reasons. To strip foreign policy realism from Continental philosophy, law, and history risks that we become what political liberalism ought to avoid: a closed society with a good conscience retreating from world politics, hiding behind the ‘national’ interest as if strategic great power management is a methodic function of structure rather than the politics of an ethically conscious diplomacy. (shrink)

Organizations that develop and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) systems need to manage the associated risks—for economic, legal, and ethical reasons. However, it is not always clear who is responsible for AI risk management. The three lines of defense (3LoD) model, which is considered best practice in many industries, might offer a solution. It is a risk management framework that helps organizations to assign and coordinate risk management roles and responsibilities. In this article, I suggest ways in which AI companies could (...) implement the model. I also discuss how the model could help reduce risks from AI: it could identify and close gaps in risk coverage, increase the effectiveness of risk management practices, and enable the board of directors to oversee management more effectively. The article is intended to inform decision-makers at leading AI companies, regulators, and standard-setting bodies. (shrink)

Classical realism is enjoying a renaissance in the study of international relations. It is well known that the analytical and normative international-political thought of early 20th-century classical realists is based on assumptions about human nature. Yet current knowledge of these assumptions remains limited. This article therefore revisits and examines the nature and intellectual roots of the human nature assumptions of three truly consequential classical realists. The analysis shows — similar to the causa Hans J. Morgenthau — that the human nature (...) assumptions of George F. Kennan, Walter Lippmann and E. H. Carr are — to varying degrees — Freudian. Unless this hitherto neglected dimension is recognized, an understanding of their international-political thought and of the political philosophy of realism remains incomplete. Two conclusions are presented. First, current criticism of classical realism’s human nature assumptions is unjustified. Second, any (re-) engagement with classical realism must recognize its human nature baggage. Realist international-political theorizing is necessarily human nature-based international-political theorizing. (shrink)

What is the connection between causation and responsibility? Is there a best way to theorize philosophically about causation? Which factors determine and influence what we judge to be the cause of something? Bringing together interdisciplinary research from experimental philosophy, traditional philosophy and psychology, this collection showcases the most recent developments and approaches to questions about causation. Chapters discuss the diverse theoretical ramifications of empirical findings in experimental philosophy of causation, providing a comprehensive survey of key issues such as the perception (...) and learning of causal relations, omission, normative considerations, mechanism, voluntariness and legal theories of causation. With novel contributions from both experts and rising stars, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation demonstrates the value of empirical work and opens new domains of inquiry at the cutting edge of the field. (shrink)

The article unveils the intellectual indebtedness of Hans J. Morgenthau's realist theory of international power politics to Freudian meta- and group psychology. It examines an unpublished Morgenthau essay about Freudian anthropology written in 1930, placing this work within the context of Morgenthau's magna opera, the 1946 Scientific Man vs. Power Politics and the 1948 Politics among Nations. The article concludes that Morgenthau's international theory is ultimately based on the early instinct theory of Sigmund Freud. Freud is thus to be seen (...) as one of Morgenthau's intellectual fathers. A second main argument refers to the theoretical tradition that Morgenthau has founded within International Relations (IR), namely: political realism. By investigating its core principles, it is argued that realism also may be rooted in Freudian thought. Throughout, the article calls upon IR, Morgenthau scholarship, and international-political theory to take Freud seriously. (shrink)

Multiple studies show that periodic reanalysis of genomic test results held by clinical laboratories delivers significant increases in overall diagnostic yield. However, while there is a widespread consensus that implementing routine reanalysis procedures is highly desirable, there is an equally widespread understanding that routine reanalysis of individual patient results is not presently feasible to perform for all patients. Instead, researchers, geneticists and ethicists are beginning to turn their attention to one part of reanalysis—reinterpretation of previously classified variants—as a means of (...) achieving similar ends to large-scale individual reanalysis but in a more sustainable manner. This has led some to ask whether the responsible implementation of genomics in healthcare requires that diagnostic laboratories routinely reinterpret their genomic variant classifications and reissue patient reports in the case of materially relevant changes. In this paper, we set out the nature and scope of any such obligation, and analyse some of the main ethical considerations pertaining to a putative duty to reinterpret. We discern and assess three potential outcomes of reinterpretation—upgrades, downgrades and regrades—in light of ongoing duties of care, systemic error risks and diagnostic equity. We argue against the existence of any general duty to reinterpret genomic variant classifications, yet we contend that a suitably restricted duty to reinterpret ought to be recognised, and that the responsible implementation of genomics into healthcare must take this into account. (shrink)

This volume... systematically considers the nature of the state, the concept of sovereignty and the challenges globalisation and cosmopolitanism.--Provided by publisher.

The use of genomic testing in pregnancy is increasing, giving rise to questions over how the information that is generated should be offered and returned in clinical practice. While these tests provide important information for prenatal decision-making, they can also generate information of uncertain significance. This paper critically examines three models for approaching the disclosure of variants of uncertain significance (VUS), which can arise from forms of genomic testing such as prenatal chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA). Contrary to prevailing arguments, we (...) argue that respect for reproductive autonomy does not justify adopting a model on which an offer to disclose VUS is a routine part of genetic counselling. Instead, we contend that a commitment both to solidarity between healthcare providers and pregnant women and to the acceptance of a novel principle of caution under normative uncertainty means that we should instead adopt a model of VUS disclosure that imposes a strong presumption against offering to disclose VUS. The upshot of this is that it should be standard practice to only offer to disclose VUS when this is requested by the woman undergoing CMA. We defend our position against claims that arise from an alleged right to such information and that a presumption against an offer will lead to inequity. (shrink)

What are the main features that influence our attribution of moral responsibility? It is widely accepted that there are various factors which strongly influence our moral judgments, such as the agent’s intentions, the consequences of the action, the causal involvement of the agent, and the agent’s freedom and ability to do otherwise. In this paper, we argue that this picture is incomplete: We argue that social roles are an additional key factor that is radically underestimated in the extant literature. We (...) will present an experiment to support this claim. (shrink)

In recent years, many disciplines have become interested in the scientific study of morality. However, a conceptual framework for this work is still lacking. In The Moral Background, Gabriel Abend develops just such a framework and uses it to investigate the history of business ethics in the United States from the 1850s to the 1930s. According to Abend, morality consists of three levels: moral and immoral behavior, or the behavioral level; moral understandings and norms, or the normative level; and (...) the moral background, which includes what moral concepts exist in a society, what moral methods can be used, what reasons can be given, and what objects can be morally evaluated at all. This background underlies the behavioral and normative levels; it supports, facilitates, and enables them. Through this perspective, Abend historically examines the work of numerous business ethicists and organizations--such as Protestant ministers, business associations, and business schools--and identifies two types of moral background. "Standards of Practice" is characterized by its scientific worldview, moral relativism, and emphasis on individuals' actions and decisions. The "Christian Merchant" type is characterized by its Christian worldview, moral objectivism, and conception of a person's life as a unity. The Moral Background offers both an original account of the history of business ethics and a novel framework for understanding and investigating morality in general. (shrink)

Some philosophers of religion have argued that moral anti-theodicy begs the question. This paper evaluates the arguments from two such philosophers, writing a decade apart—Robert Mark Simpson, and Lauri Snellman. Simpson argues that any global argument against theodicy must allow for the possibility of there existing a plausible theodicy, and that anti-theodical arguments (the argument from insensitivity, the argument from detachment, and the argument from harmful consequences) all implicitly discount this possibility, thus ending up begging the question. Snellman argues that (...) moral anti-theodicies presuppose that some evils cannot be justified, which would presuppose that theodicy is false from the start, which in turn would beg the question against theodicy. The author of the paper argues that Simpson’s arguments rest on an erroneous assumption regarding the nature of anti-theodicy, and that one of Simpson’s arguments sets a problematic standard for argumentation that the author argues we should not accept. It is also argued that Snellman’s argument relies on an unsupported claim from Toby Betenson. Therefore, the author concludes that Simpson and Snellman have not managed to show that moral anti-theodicies beg the question. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become nearly ubiquitous in modern society, from components of mobile applications to medical support systems, and everything in between. In societally impactful systems imbued with AI, there has been increasing concern related to opaque AI, that is, artificial intelligence where it is unclear how or why certain decisions are reached. This has led to a recent boom in research on “explainable AI” (XAI), or approaches to making AI more explainable and understandable to human users. In the (...) military domain, numerous bodies have argued that autonomous and AI-enabled weapon systems ought not incorporate unexplainable AI, with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United States Department of Defense both explicitly including explainability as a relevant factor in the development and use of such systems. In this article, I present a cautiously critical assessment of this view, arguing that explainability will be irrelevant for many current and near-future autonomous systems in the military (which do not incorporate any AI), that it will be trivially incorporated into most military systems which do possess AI (as these generally possess simpler AI systems), and that for those systems with genuinely opaque AI, explainability will prove to be of more limited value than one might imagine. In particular, I argue that explainability, while indeed a virtue in design, is a virtue aimed primarily at designers and troubleshooters of AI-enabled systems, but is far less relevant for users and handlers actually deploying these systems. I further argue that human–machine teaming is a far more important element of responsibly using AI for military purposes, adding that explainability may undermine efforts to improve human–machine teamings by creating a prima facie sense that the AI, due to its explainability, may be utilized with little (or less) potential for mistakes. I conclude by clarifying that the arguments are not against XAI in the military, but are instead intended as a caution against over-inflating the value of XAI in this domain, or ignoring the limitations and potential pitfalls of this approach. (shrink)

While some countries are moving toward legalization, euthanasia is still criticized on various fronts. Most importantly, it is considered a violation of the medical ethics principle of non-maleficence, because it actively seeks a patient’s death. But, medical ethicists should consider an ethical alternative to euthanasia. In this article, we defend cryocide as one such alternative. Under this procedure, with the consent of terminally-ill patients, their clinical death is induced, in order to prevent the further advance of their brain’s deterioration. Their (...) body is then cryogenically preserved, in the hope that in the future, there will be a technology to reanimate it. This prospect is ethically distinct from euthanasia if a different criterion of death is assumed. In the information-theoretic criterion of death, a person is not considered dead when brain and cardiopulmonary functions cease, but rather, when information constituting psychology and memory is lost. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that normative considerations play an important role in causal cognition. For instance, when an agent violates a moral rule and thereby produces a negative outcome, she will be judged to be much more of a cause of the outcome, compared to someone who performed the same action but did not violate a norm. While there is a substantial amount of evidence reporting these effects, it is still a matter of debate how this evidence is to (...) be interpreted. In this paper, we engage with the three most influential classes of explanations, namely, (a) the Norm‐Sensitive Cognitive Process View, (b) the Normative Concept View, and (c) the Pragmatics View. We will outline how these theories explain the empirical results and in what ways they differ. We conclude with a reflection on how well these strategies do overall and what questions they still leave unanswered. (shrink)

Moral philosophers draw an important distinction between two kinds of moral responsibility. An agent can be directly morally responsible, or they can be derivatively morally responsible. Direct moral responsibility, so many believe, presupposes that the agent could have behaved differently. However, in some situations, we hold agents responsible even though they could not have behaved differently, such as when they recklessly cause an accident or do not take adequate precautions to avoid harmful consequences. Moral philosophers typically argue that what we (...) ascribe in these cases is derivative moral responsibility. In this paper, I apply this conceptual distinction to the experimental debate about so-called folk-compatibilism. I argue that experimental philosophers have failed to consider this distinction when designing experiments and interpreting their results. I demonstrate that while compatibilism requires judgments of direct moral responsibility, participants in some of the most influential studies ascribed derivative moral responsibility. For this reason, these studies do not speak in favour of compatibilism at all. (shrink)

In international law and the ethics of war, there are a variety of actions which are seen as particularly problematic and presumed to be always or inherently wrong, or in need of some overwhelmingly strong justification to override the presumption against them. One of these actions is assassination, in particular, assassination of heads of state. In this essay I argue that the presumption against assassination is incorrect. In particular, I argue that if in a given scenario war is justified, then (...) assassination of the enemy state's leader is also justified, and in fact ought to be pursued as a means short of war. I defend this position on both consequential and deontic grounds, arguing that assassination is both more discriminate than war and serves to harm only those most responsible for the situation which justifies war in the first place. I conclude by arguing that a norm of assassination, far from being a destabilizing force, as some have argued, would in fact serve to reinforce international norms of rights and respect for persons by making clear that tyrants and would-be oppressors cannot hide behind military forces or notions of sovereignty to protect themselves from judgment and retribution. (shrink)

The doxastic zoo contains many animals: belief, acceptance, belief in, belief that, certainty, conjecture, guess, conviction, denial, disbelief in, disbelief that, judgment, commitment, etc. It also contains belief’s “strange bedfellows”: credences, partial beliefs, tacit beliefs, subdoxastic states, creedal feelings, feelings of knowing, in-between believings, pathological beliefs, phobias, aliefs, delusions, biases, besires. How to order the zoo? I propose to distinguish doxastic attitudes from non-doxastic epistemic attitudes. The criterion is the existence of correctness conditions. Most bedfellows do not have such normative (...) conditions. So they should not be allowed in the Doxastic Club. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell (...) out this difference by investigating laypeople’s conceptualisation of absences of actions in four experiments. In languages such as German, French, Italian, or Polish, people consider a friend’s not coming an omission. Any other person’s not coming, in contrast, is not considered an omission at all, but just a mere nothing. This use of the term omission differs from the usage in English, where ‘omission’ refers to all kinds of absences. In addition, ‘omission’ is not even an everyday term, but invented by philosophers for the sake of philosophical investigation. In other languages, ‘omission’ is part of an everyday vocabulary. Finally, I will discuss how this folk concept of omission could be made fruitful for philosophical questions. (shrink)

Anger and disgust may have distinct roles in sexual morality; here, we tested hypotheses regarding the distinct foci, appraisals, and motivations of anger and disgust within the context of sexual offenses. We conducted four experiments in which we manipulated whether mutual consent (Studies 1–3) or desire (Study 4) was present or absent within a counter-normative sexual act. We found that anger is focused on the injustice of non-consensual sexual acts, and the transgressor of the injustice (Studies 1 and 3). Furthermore, (...) the sexual nature of the act was not critical for the elicitation of anger—as anger also responded to unjust acts of violence (Study 3). By contrast, we hypothesised and found that disgust is focused on whether or not a person voluntarily engaged in, desired or consented to a counter-normative sexual act (Studies 2–4). Appraisals of abnormality and degradation were the primary appraisals of disgust, and the sexual nature of the act was a critical elicitor of disgust (Study 3). A final study ruled out victimisation as the mechanism of the effect of consent on disgust and indicated that the consenter's sexual desire was the mechanism (Study 4). Our results reveal that anger and disgust have differential roles in consent-related sexual offenses due to the distinct appraisals and foci of these emotions. (shrink)

"I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time."—T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Pensees Intended to prove that religion is not contrary to reason, Pascal's Pensees rank among the liveliest and most eloquent defenses of Christianity. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) had intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. His untimely death prevented the work's completion, (...) but the fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Pensees remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. W. F. Trotter translation. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. (shrink)

Sociologists often ask why particular groups of people have the moral views that they do. I argue that sociology’s empirical research on morality relies, implicitly or explicitly, on unsophisticated and even obsolete ethical theories, and thus is based on inadequate conceptions of the ontology, epistemology, and semantics of morality. In this article I address the two main problems in the sociology of morality: (1) the problem of moral truth, and (2) the problem of value freedom. I identify two ideal–typical approaches. (...) While the Weberian paradigm rejects the concept of moral truth, the Durkheimian paradigm accepts it. By contrast, I argue that sociology should be metaphysically agnostic, yet in practice it should proceed as though there were no moral truths. The Weberians claim that the sociology of morality can and should be value free; the Durkheimians claim that it cannot and it should not. My argument is that, while it is true that factual statements presuppose value judgments, it does not follow that sociologists are moral philosophers in disguise. Finally, I contend that in order for sociology to improve its understanding of morality, better conceptual, epistemological, and methodological foundations are needed. (shrink)