Joel Feinberg : In Memoriam. Preface. Part I: INTRODUCTION TO THE NATURE AND VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1. Joel Feinberg: A Logic Lesson. 2. Plato: "Apology." 3. Bertrand Russell: The Value of Philosophy. PART II: REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 1. The Existence and Nature of God. 1.1 Anselm of Canterbury: The Ontological Argument, from Proslogion. 1.2 Gaunilo of Marmoutiers: On Behalf of the Fool. 1.3 L. Rowe: The Ontological Argument. 1.4 Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Five Ways, from Summa Theologica. (...) 1.5 Samuel Clarke: A Modern Formulation of the Cosmological Argument. 1.6 William L. Rowe: The Cosmological Argument. 1.7 William Paley: The Argument from Design. 1.8 Michael Ruse: The Design Argument. 1.9 David Hume: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 2. The Problem of Evil. 2.1 Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Rebellion. 2.2 J. L. Mackie: Evil and Omnipotence. 2.3 Peter van Inwagen: The Argument from Evil. 2.4 Michael Murray and Michael Rea: The Argument from Evil. 2.5 B. C. Johnson: God and the Problem of Evil. 3. Reason and Faith. 3.1 W. K. Clifford: The Ethics of Belief. 3.2 William James: The Will to Believe. 3.3 Kelly James Clark: Without Evidence or Argument. 3.4 Blaise Pascal: The Wager. 3.5 Lawrence Shapiro: Miracles and Justification. 3.6 Simon Blackburn: Infini-Rien. Part III. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE: ITS GROUNDS AND LIMITS. 1. Skepticism. 1.1 John Pollock: A Brain in a Vat. 1.2 Michael Huemer: Three Skeptical Arguments. 1.3 Robert Audi: Skepticism. 2. The Nature and Value of Knowledge. 2.1 Plato: Knowledge as Justified True Belief. 2.2 Edmund Gettier: Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? 2.3 James Cornman, Keith Lehrer, and George Pappas: An Analysis of Knowledge. 2.4 Gilbert Ryle: Knowing How and Knowing That. 2.5 Plato: "Meno". 2.6 Linda Zagzebski, Epistemic Good and The Good Life. 3. Our Knowledge of the External World. 3.1 Bertrand Russell: Appearance and Reality and the Existence of Matter. 3.2 René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy. 3.3 John Locke: The Causal Theory of Perception. 3.4 George Berkeley: Of the Principles of Human Knowledge. 3.5 G. E. Moore: Proof of an External World. 4. The Methods of Science. 4.1 David Hume: An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 4.2 Wesley C. Salmon: An Encounter with David Hume. 4.3 Karl Popper: Science: Conjectures and Refutations. 4.4 Philip Kitcher: Believing Where We Cannot Prove. Part IV: MIND AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE. 1. The Mind-Body Problem. 1.1 Brie Gertler: In Defense of Mind--Body Dualism. 1.2 Frank Jackson: The Qualia Problem. 1.3 David Papineau: The Case for Materialism. 1.4 Paul Churchland: Functionalism and Eliminative Materialism. 2. Can Non-Humans Think? 2.1 Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence. 2.2 John R. Searle: Minds, Brains, and Programs. 2.3 William G. Lycan: Robots and Minds. 3. Personal Identity and the Survival of Death. 3.1 John Locke: The Prince and the Cobbler. 3.2 Thomas Reid: Of Mr. Locke’s Account of Our Personal Identity. 3.3 David Hume: The Self. 3.4 Derek Parfit: Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons. 3.5 Shelly Kagan: What Matters. 3.6 John Perry: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Part V: DETERMINISM, FREE WILL, AND RESPONSIBILITY. 1. Libertarianism: The Case for Free Will and Its Incompatibility with Determinism. 1.1 Roderick M. Chisholm: Human Freedom and the Self. 1.2 Robert Kane: Free Will: Ancient Dispute, New Themes. 2. Hard Determinism: The Case for Determinism and its Incompatibility with Its Incompatibility with Any Important Sense of Free Will. 2.1 James Rachels: The case against Free Will. 2.2 Derk Pereboom: Why We Have No Free Will and Can Live Without It. 3. Compatibilism: The Case for Determinism and Its Compatibility with the Most Important Sense of Free Will. 3.1 David Hume: Of Liberty and Necessity. 3.2 Helen Beebee: Compatibilism and the Ability to do Otherwise. 4. Freedom and Moral Responsibility. 4.1 Galen Strawson: Luck Swallows Everything. 4.2 Harry Frankfurt: Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. 4.3 Thomas Nagel: Moral Luck. 4.4 Susan Wolf: Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility. Part VI: MORALITY AND ITS CRITICS. 1. Changes to Morality. 1.1 Joel Feinberg: Psychological Egoism. 1.2 Plato: The Immoralist’s Challenge. 1.3 Friedrich Nietzche: Master and Slave Morality. 1.4 Richard Joyce: The Evolutionary Debunking of Morality. 2. Proposed Standards and Right of Conduct. 2.1 Russ Shafer-Landau: Ethical Subjectivism. 2.2 Mary Midgley: Trying Out One’s New Sword. 2.3 Aristotle: Virtue and the Good Life. 2.4 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. 2.5 Plato: Euthyphro. 2.6 Immanuel Kant: The Good Will and the Categorical Imperative. 2.7 J.S. Mill: Utilitarianism, Chapters 2 and 4. 2.8 W. D. Ross: What Makes Right Acts Right? 2.9 Hilde Lindemann: What Is Feminist Ethics? 3. Ethical Problems. 3.1 Kwame Anthony Appiah: What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For? 3.2 Peter Singer: Famine, Affluence and Morality. 3.3 John Harris: The Survival Lottery. 3.4 James Rachels: Active and Passive Euthanasia. 3.5 Mary Anne Warren: The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. 3.6 Don Marquis: Why Abortion Is Immoral. 4. The Meaning of Life. 4.1 Epicurus: Letter to Menoeceus. 4.2 Richard Taylor: The Meaning of Life. 4.3 Richard Kraut: Desire and the Human Good. 4.4 Leo Tolstoy: My Confession. 4.5 Susan Wolf: Happiness and Meaning. 4.6 Thomas Nagel: The Absurd. (shrink)

We introduce an analogue of the theory of Borel equivalence relations in which we study equivalence relations that are decidable by an infinite time Turing machine. The Borel reductions are replaced by the more general class of infinite time computable functions. Many basic aspects of the classical theory remain intact, with the added bonus that it becomes sensible to study some special equivalence relations whose complexity is beyond Borel or even analytic. We also introduce an infinite time generalization of the (...) countable Borel equivalence relations, a key subclass of the Borel equivalence relations, and again show that several key properties carry over to the larger class. Lastly, we collect together several results from the literature regarding Borel reducibility which apply also to absolutely $\Delta^1_2$ reductions, and hence to the infinite time computable reductions. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

The agro-food domain in Europe is characterized by the appearance of recurrent unwanted surprises. These events, although causing obvious physical consequences, in essence depart from the expectations of the society. We argue that this unstable situation is best understood as an identity crisis of agriculture rather than as a contingent crisis of a specific economic sector. Thus the present agro-food crisis is in fact a crisis of identity. This is clearly reflected by the cohabitation within the agro-food policy domain of (...) different, often contradictory, policy discourses, namely: free tradism, multifunctionality, and agroecology. All of them try to impose their particular visions. All of them struggle to issue the policy measures they conceive as appropriate. (shrink)

Ethical training in graduate programs is an important part of the professional development process. Such training has taken a position of prominence in both counseling and clinical psychology but seems to be lagging behind in the field of sport psychology. A debate exists about whether such training is necessary and, if so, how it should be provided. An important step in better understanding these issues is to identify how such training is currently taking place. This study surveyed the program directors (...) of sport psychology programs listed in the Directory of Graduate Programs in Applied Sport Psychology (Burke, Sachs, & Schrader, 2002) about the ethical training that takes place in their programs and their perceptions of the preparedness of the students in their programs. Of those contacted, 54% (n = 47) responded to the e-mail based survey. The results from these respondents indicated that 64.4% of programs require training in ethics and that the training was most commonly integrated into other nonethics courses. Overall, respondents did not feel as if students were completely prepared for either the ethical or legal issues that they will face in their professional careers. The importance of ethical training and suggestions for improving ethical training are discussed. (shrink)

How can intuitions be used to validate or invalidate a philosophical theory? An intuition about a case seems to be a basic evidential source for the truth of that intuition, i.e., for the truth of the claim that a particular example is or isn’t an instance of a philosophically interesting kind, concept, or predicate. A mental‐state type is a basic evidential source only if its tokens reliably indicate the truth of their contents. The best way to account for intuitions being (...) a basic evidential source is to interpret their subject matter in psychologistic terms. Intuitions provide evidence about the contents of the intuiter's concept, where “concept” is understood as a psychological structure. (shrink)

Mintz examines seventeenth-century reactions to the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

The agro-food domain in Europe is characterized by the appearance of recurrent unwanted surprises. These events, although causing obvious physical consequences, in essence depart from the expectations of the society. We argue that this unstable situation is best understood as an identity crisis of agriculture rather than as a contingent crisis of a specific economic sector. Thus the present agro-food crisis is in fact a crisis of identity. This is clearly reflected by the cohabitation within the agro-food policy domain of (...) different, often contradictory, policy discourses, namely: free tradism, multifunctionality, and agroecology. All of them try to impose their particular visions. All of them struggle to issue the policy measures they conceive as appropriate. (shrink)

Public health and service delivery programmes, interventions and policies are typically developed and implemented for the primary purpose of effecting change rather than generating knowledge. Nonetheless, evaluations of these programmes may produce valuable learning that helps determine effectiveness and costs as well as informing design and implementation of future programmes. Such studies might be termed ‘opportunistic evaluations’, since they are responsive to emergent opportunities rather than being studies of interventions that are initiated or designed by researchers. However, current ethical guidance (...) and registration procedures make little allowance for scenarios where researchers have played no role in the development or implementation of a programme, but nevertheless plan to conduct a prospective evaluation. We explore the limitations of the guidance and procedures with respect to opportunistic evaluations, providing a number of examples. We propose that one key missing distinction in current guidance is moral responsibility: researchers can only be held accountable for those aspects of a study over which they have control. We argue that requiring researchers to justify an intervention, programme or policy that would occur regardless of their involvement prevents or hinders research in the public interest without providing any further protections to research participants. We recommend that trial consent and ethics procedures allow for a clear separation of responsibilities for the intervention and the evaluation. (shrink)

Modal Platonism utilizes "weak" logical possibility, such that it is logically possible there are abstract entities, and logically possible there are none. Modal Platonism also utilizes a non-indexical actuality operator. Modal Platonism is the EASY WAY, neither reductionist nor eliminativist, but embracing the Platonistic language of abstract entities while eliminating ontological commitment to them. Statement of Modal Platonism. Any consistent statement B ontologically committed to abstract entities may be replaced by an empirically equivalent modalization, MOD(B), not so ontologically committed. This (...) equivalence is provable using Modal/Actuality Logic S5@. Let MAX be a strong set theory with individuals. Then the following Schematic Bombshell Result (SBR) can be shown: MAX logically yields [T is true if and only if MOD(T) is true], for scientific theories T. The proof utilizes Stephen Neale's clever model-theoretic interpretation of Quantified Lewis S5, which I extend to S5@. (shrink)

This is a complete exposition of a tight version of a fundamental theorem of computational complexity due to Levin: The inherent space complexity of any partial function is very accurately specifiable in a Π1 way, and every such specification that is even Σ2 does characterize the complexity of some partial function, even one that assumes only the values 0 and 1.

Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2020, Page 114-130.

Scholars discuss the nature of semantics, the problems and characteristics of contemporary communication, and man's linguistic behavior. Bibliogs.

. In this paper, I attempt to dissolve the theism/atheism boundary. In the first part, I consider last things, according to mainstream science. In the second part, I define the Natural God as the Force of Nature—evolving, unifying, maximizing—and consider Its relation to last things. Finally, I discuss our knowledge of the Natural God and Its relevance to our personal lives. I argue that we can know the Natural God through scientific reason combined with global intuition, and that this knowledge, (...) from the perspective of last things, may help us achieve universal love, ethical action, and personal salvation. (shrink)

In spite of the work of Gödel and Cohen, which showed the undecidability of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis from the axioms of set theory, the problem still remains to decide GCH on the basis of new axioms. It is almost 100 years since Cantor first conjectured the Continuum Hypothesis, yet we seem to be no closer to determining its truth. Nevertheless, it is a sound methodological principle that given any undecidable set-theoretical statement, we should search for “other axioms of set (...) theory which a more profound understanding of the concepts underlying logic and mathematics would enable us to recognize as implied by these concepts”. (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on the massive modularity hypothesis defended by evolutionary psychologists---the hypothesis that the human mind is composed largely or perhaps even entirely of special purpose information processing organs or "modulees" that have been shaped by natural selection to handle the sorts of recurrent information processing problems that confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears. ;In discussing MMH, I have three central goals. First, I aim to clarify the hypothesis and develop theoretically useful notions of "module" and "domain-specificity" that can play the (...) roles required of them by evolutionary psychology. Second, I aim to evaluate the plausibility MMH in the light of the broad range of arguments that have been developed and defended in the literature. I argue that all the main, general arguments both for and against MMH are unsatisfactory. Moreover, I suggest that if the case for MMH is to be made, it will only result from the successive accumulation of specific, empirical evidence for the existence of particular modules. ;Finally, I address a range of issues that arise from evolutionary psychological approaches to reasoning and rationality. Much of what evolutionary psychologists have said about human reasoning is in response to a widely discussed "pessimistic" interpretation that has been developed and defended by Kahneman, Tversky and their followers. According to this view, human beings are prone to systematic deviations from appropriate norms of rationality because they lack the underlying competence to handle a wide array of reasoning tasks. Evolutionary psychologists appear to reject this pessimistic interpretation in favor of the view that we possess a wide range of reasoning modules that employ rational rules of inference. I argue, however, that there is no genuine disagreement between evolutionary psychologists and their opponents over the extent to which human beings are rational. I also discuss the distinction between competence efforts and performance efforts. Although this distinction has played a central role in recent discussions of human rationality, I argue that if MMH is true, then we face insurmountable problems in trying to draw the performance error/competence error distinction. (shrink)

[Samuel Scheffler] Some egalitarian liberals have proposed a division of moral labour between social institutions and individual agents, but the division-of-labour metaphor has been understood in different ways. This paper aims to disentangle some of these different understandings, with an eye to clarifying the appeal of the egalitarian-liberal project and the challenges that it faces. The idea of a division of moral labour is best understood as the expression of a strategy for accommodating diverse values. It is not an (...) apology for economic self-interest or a device for justifying personal acquisitiveness. /// [Véronique Munoz-Dardé] Are there distinctively political values? Certain egalitarians seem to think that equality is one such value. Scheffler's contribution to the symposium seeks to articulate a division of moral labour between norms of personal morality and the principles of justice that regulate social institutions, and using this suggests that the egalitarian critique of Rawls can be deflected. In this paper, instead, I question the status of equality as an intrinsic value. I argue that an egalitarianism which focuses on the status of equality as valuable in itself embraces a theory of value with the worst elements of utilitarianism while leaving behind any of the intuitive appeal that utilitarianism has. In its place I press that we need a political conception of egalitarianism which stresses the role we engage beyond those found in the norms of personal morality. (shrink)

This paper focuses on how African national leaders can make global democracy relevant to sustainable development in Africa. Seeing the problem of sustainable development in Africa from the structural and functional angles, this paper begins with an introduction and a clarification of terms such as ‘democracy’, ‘globalization’ and ‘development’. It then analyzes the underlying foundations of global democracy and its implications to cultures of the African peoples. This paper tries to place the impact of global democracy on Africa in perspectives (...) by weighing the pros and cons of global democracy. Tracing the genesis of functional and developmental problems in the post-colonial Africa to structural problems occasioned by Africa’s colonial experience, this paper however strongly contends that the main problem militating against sustainable development in the post-colonial Africa is bad politics and mismanagement of national resources. African peoples need to be taught that some of the African national leaders are responsible for the bad condition of underdevelopment in the global period because of bad political governance ranging from the inability of African leaders to calculate all the relevant factors in the making of their policies as well as failing to provide effective technologies and competent staff to deal with rigging of elections and other electoral problems in addition to corruption and mismanagement of public funds. There is no way for the African nations to survive without production of goods and services in terms of farming, agriculture and diversification of their revenue base. National leaders of the various African nations cannot avoid policies that enable the industrialization of African nations through the provision of the basic infrastructures and viable amenities for social, economic, and political development. They should however be wary of debt traps of International Monetary Fund and World Bank because borrowing nations are often given difficult conditions that often make it difficult for them to obtain the desired benefits in terms of sustainable development. The study recommends that for sustainable development to take place in Africa there is need for national leaders to embrace good political governance that places the people at the centre of development to be manifested in guileless electoral process and effective management of the resources. This paper contends that the realization of sustainable development in African nations requires moral, political, and economic integration. It concludes with perspectives for further research on the issue. (shrink)

In a recent issue of Journal of Medical Ethics, we discussed the ethical review of evaluations of interventions that would occur whether or not the evaluation was taking place. We concluded that standard research ethics frameworks including the Ottawa Statement, which requires justification for all aspects of an intervention and its roll-out, were a poor guide in this area. We proposed that a consideration of researcher responsibility, based on the consequences of the research taking place, would be a more appropriate (...) way delineate the scope of research ethics review. Weijer and Taljaard present a counterargument to our proposal, which we address in this reply. They claim that a focus on researcher responsibility will weaken the protection of research participants and link it to ‘unethical research’ and a ‘government experimenting on its own people’. However, the moral responsibility of researchers is defined in terms of the consequences of the research on human welfare and harm, not in opposition to it. Weijer and Taljaard argue that researchers must justify what they are studying whether or not they have any control over it and that governments must justify their programmes, including by demonstrating equipoise, to a research ethics committee if they implement them in a randomised way. We strongly disagree that this is a defensible way to define the scope of research ethics review and argue that this provides no further protections to research participants beyond what we propose, but places a potential barrier to learning from government programmes. (shrink)

There is growing philosophical interest in “affective injustice”: injustice faced by individuals specifically in their capacity as affective beings. Current debates tend to focus on affective injustice at the psychological level. In this paper, I argue that the built environment can be a vehicle for affective injustice — specifically, what Wildman et al. (2022) term “affective powerlessness”. I use resources from ecological psychology to develop this claim. I consider two cases where certain kinds of bodies are, either intentionally or unintentionally, (...) deprived of access to goods affording the development and maintenance of their subjective well-being: hostile architecture and masking practices in autism. This deprivation, I argue further, leads to a significant weakening and diminishment of their spatial agency, hinders their well-being, and in so doing gives rise to a pervasive experience of affective powerlessness. By drawing attention to these themes, I show that an ecological approach helpfully supplements existing approaches. It highlights how affective injustice can emerge via the way bodies are positioned in space, and the central role that built environments play in determining this positioning. (shrink)

Some recent developments in Artificial Intelligence—especially the use of machine learning systems, trained on big data sets and deployed in socially significant and ethically weighty contexts—have led to a number of calls for “transparency”. This paper explores the epistemological and ethical dimensions of that concept, as well as surveying and taxonomising the variety of ways in which it has been invoked in recent discussions. Whilst “outward” forms of transparency may be straightforwardly achieved, what I call “functional” transparency about the inner (...) workings of a system is, in many cases, much harder to attain. In those situations, I argue that contestability may be a possible, acceptable, and useful alternative so that even if we cannot understand how a system came up with a particular output, we at least have the means to challenge it. (shrink)

In this article, I explicate Kant’s position on the wide right to abortion. That is, I explore the extent to which, according to Kant’s practical philosophy, abortion is punishable, even if it involves an unjust infringement of the right to life. By focusing on the state’s right to punish, rather than the right to life or the onset of personhood, I use Kant to expose a novel range of issues and questions about the legal status of abortion (and criminal punishment (...) more generally). The article is divided into four sections. In the first, I lay the groundwork for Kant’s theory of rights and briefly canvass some of the literature on Kantian approaches to abortion. In the second, I look at Kant’s discussion of equivocal rights. In the third, I turn to Kant’s discussions of capital punishment and suicide. In the fourth, I examine Kant on honor killings, and I use his position on infanticide in order to extrapolate and explain his ideas about the right to punish in the context of abortion. (shrink)