A punches B in the face and B subsequently develops a black eye. There seems to be little doubt that there is a causal relation here between A‟s punch and B‟s injury. However, what happens when there is no positive physical connection between A and B such as the punch? Can an omission, which is essentially an absence of positive physical action, ever be considered a cause of some particular effect? There are certain cases in which we intuit a clear (...) causal relation between an omission and an effect, yet there are cases in which, equally clearly, an omission is not causal. In this paper I investigate the notion of omissions acting as causes, in an attempt to ascertain whether causes can be considered genuine causes within a coherent theory of causation. (shrink)

Abstract:The organization is importantly different from both the nation-state and the individual and hence needs its own ethical models and theories, distinct from political and moral theory. To develop a case for organizational ethics, this paper advances arguments in three directions. First, it highlights the growing role of organizations and their distinctive attributes. Second, it illuminates the incongruities between organizations and moral and political philosophy. Third, it takes these incongruities, as well as organizations’ distinctive attributes, as a starting point for (...) suggesting an agenda for an ethics of organizations. (shrink)

This paper calls into question the idea that moral disgust is usefully regarded as a form of genuine disgust. This hypothesis is questionable even if, as some have argued, the spread of moral norms through a community makes use of signaling mechanisms that are central to core disgust. The signaling system is just one part of disgust, and may well be completely separable from it. Moreover, there is plausibly a significant difference between the cognitive scientist’s concept of an emotion and (...) the everyday notion of that emotion. Finally, even if, as this paper contests, some form of disgust were directly elicited by the moral wrongness of certain kinds of behavior, research on the socio-moral elicitors of the disgust mechanism would still be unlikely to shed much direct light on the nature or content of morality. (shrink)

Materialist metaphysicians want to side with physics, but not to take sides within physics.If we took literally the claim of a materialist that his position is simply belief in the claim that all is matter, as currently conceived, we would be faced with an insoluble mystery. For how would such a materialist know how to retrench when his favorite scientific hypotheses fail? How did the 18th century materialist know that gravity, or forces in general, were material? How did they know (...) in the 19th century that the electromagnetic field was material, and persisted in this conviction after the aether had been sent packing?The doctrine of physicalism casts a long shadow in contemporary philosophy, configuring all kinds of philosophical issues and projects. Unsurprisingly, its proponents argue that physicalism has all the obvious features necessary for a scientific hypothesis to be in what we will call ‘good standing,’ i.e. being worthy of serious scientific investigation. In fact, many claim much more, arguing that physicalism is a well-confirmed hypothesis and possibly amongst the best of our theories. But, as our second opening passage makes clear, a persistent worry has been that physicalism, or ‘materialism’ as van Fraassen terms it, is an edifice built on sand. For many philosophers question whether the ‘physical’ can be specified at all, or at least in a manner that will produce a physicalism that would be in good standing. (shrink)

There are two principal philosophical conceptions of socialism, corresponding to two interpretations of the notion of a rational society. The first conception corresponds to an instrumental view of social rationality. Captured by the image of socialism as “one big workshop,” the instrumental view holds that social ownership of the means of production is rational because it promotes the optimal development of the productive forces. Social ownership is optimal because it eliminates the costs of coordination imposed by the conduct of economic (...) activities in formally independent enterprises, and, more generally, overcomes fetters on development that result from the control of resources by individuals whose particular interests imperfectly correspond to a general interest in productive advance. (shrink)

We ordinarily think that, keeping all else equal, a life that improves is better than one that declines. However, it has proven challenging to account for such value judgments: some, such as Fred Feldman and Daniel Kahneman, have simply denied that these judgments are rational, while others, such as Douglas Portmore, Michael Slote, and David Velleman, have proposed justifications for the judgments that appear to be incomplete or otherwise problematic. This article identifies problems with existing accounts and suggests a novel (...) alternative theory: what best accounts for our preference for an uphill over a downhill life (and many other episodes) is that losses of momentary value are themselves bad and gains in momentary value are themselves good. (shrink)

Deliberation and democratic legitimacy -- Moral pluralism and political consensus -- Associations and democracy (with Joel Rogers) -- Freedom of expression -- Procedure and substance in deliberative democracy -- Directly-deliberative polyarchy (with Charles Sabel) -- Democracy and liberty -- Money, politics, political equality -- Privacy, pluralism, and democracy -- Reflections on deliberative democracy -- Truth and public reason.

In this paper, I examine the claim that self-consciousness is highly morally significant, such that the fact that an entity is self-conscious generates strong moral reasons against harming or killing that entity. This claim is apparently very intuitive, but I argue it is false. I consider two ways to defend this claim: one indirect, the other direct. The best-known arguments relevant to self-consciousness's significance take the indirect route. I examine them and argue that in various ways they depend on unwarranted (...) assumptions about self-consciousness's functional significance, and once these assumptions are undermined, motivation for these arguments dissipates. I then consider the direct route to self-consciousness's significance, which depends on claims that self-consciousness has intrinsic value or final value. I argue what intrinsic or final value self-consciousness possesses is not enough to generate strong moral reasons against harming or killing. (shrink)

Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, and T. M. S canlon, among others, all hold that reasons for action are provided by facts about those actions. They also hold that the fact that an action would promote or achieve the object of an agent's desire is not one of the relevant facts, and does not provide a reason. Rather, the facts that provide reasons are typically facts about valuable states of affairs that the action is likely to bring about, or valuable properties (...) that the action itself will instantiate. For this reason it is appropriate to call Parfit, Raz, and Scanlon "value-based" theorists about reasons for action. In contrast to value-based theorists, there is a strong current of contemporary theorizing, starting with Bernard Williams, that can be called "desire-based." Desire-based theorists argue that practical reasons should be understood in terms of the desires of the agents who are said to have those reasons. (shrink)

Vaccines are a powerful measure to protect the health of individuals and to combat outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. An ethical dilemma arises when one effective vaccine has been successfully developed against an epidemic disease and researchers seek to test the efficacy of another vaccine for the same pathogen in clinical trials involving human subjects. On the one hand, there are compelling reasons why it would be unethical to trial a novel vaccine when an effective product exists already. First, (...) it is a firm principle of medical ethics that an effective treatment or vaccine should not be withheld from patients if their life may depend on it. Second, since epidemic outbreaks often emerge in settings with less-resourced health systems, there is a pronounced risk that any trial withholding an effective vaccine would disproportionately affect the vulnerable populations that historically have been exploited for biomedical research. Third, clinical trials for novel vaccines may be at odds with efforts to control active outbreaks. On the other hand, it may be justified to conduct a trial for a candidate vaccine if it is expected to have certain advantages compared with the existing product. This essay discusses key factors for comparing vaccines against epidemic pathogens, including immunological, logistical and economic considerations. Alongside a case study of the development of vaccines for Ebola, the essay seeks to establish a general framework that should be expanded and populated by immunologists, epidemiologists, economists and bioethicists, and ultimately could be applied to the case of COVID-19 vaccines. (shrink)

Intuitively, vagueness involves some sort of indeterminacy: if Plato is a borderline case of baldness, then there is no fact of the matter about whether or not he’s bald—he’s neither bald nor not bald. The leading formal treatments of such indeterminacy—three valued logic, supervaluationism, etc.—either fail to validate the classical theorems, or require that various classically valid inference rules be restricted. Here we show how a fully classical, yet indeterminist account of vagueness can be given within natural semantics, an alternative (...) semantics for classical proof theory. The key features of the account are: there is a single notion of truth—definite truth—and a single notion of validity; sentences can be true, false, or undetermined; all classical theorems and all classical inference rule are valid; the sorites argument is unsound; ‘definitely’ is treated as a meta-language predicate; higher-order vagueness is handled via semantic ascent. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDuncan Pritchard proposes a biscopic solution to the problem of radical skepticism, which consists in epistemological disjunctivism and a theory about the limits of rational evaluation inspired by Wittgenstein's On Certainty. According to the latter theory, we cannot have rationally grounded knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses, a consequence that Pritchard finds attractive insofar as he thinks that claims to know the falsity of radical skeptical hypotheses are epistemically immodest. I argue that there is room for a neo-Moorean (...) to dispute Pritchard's argument for the Wittgensteinian proposal and I raise some doubts about its underlying motivation. Finally, I put forward an alternative, which I call “moderate neo-Moorean epistemological disjunctivism.” While this theory contends that we possess rationally grounded anti-skeptical knowledge, it also allows for a degree of epistemic modesty, by conceding that perceptual knowledge never amounts to knowledge that is absolutely certain. (shrink)

Drawing on the writings of the Jewish thinker, Abraham Joshua Heschel, I defend a partial response to the problem of divine hiddenness. A Jewish approach to divine love includes the thought that God desires meaningful relationship not only with individual persons, but also with communities of persons. In combination with John Schellenberg’s account of divine love, the admission of God’s desire for such relationships makes possible that a person may fail to believe that God exists not because of any (...) individual failing, but because the individual is a member of a larger community that itself is culpable. (shrink)

Does an affirmation of theistic evolution make the task of theodicy impossible? In this article, I will review a number of ancient and contemporary responses to the problem of evil as it concerns animal suffering and suggest a possible way forward which employs the ancient Jewish insight that evil—as resistance to God's will that results in suffering and alienation from God's purposes—precedes the arrival of human beings and already has a firm foothold in the nonhuman animal world long before humans (...) are ever tempted to go astray. This theological intuition is conferred renewed relevance in light of the empirical reality of evolutionary gradualism and continuity and in view of the recent findings of cognitive ethology. Consequently, I suggest that taking biological evolution seriously entails understanding “moral evil” as a prehuman phenomenon that emerges gradually through the actions and intentions of “free creatures” which—as evolutionary history unfolded—increasingly possessed greater levels of freedom and degrees of moral culpability. (shrink)

There has recently been a renewed interest in the “force” interpretation of evolutionary biology. In this article, I present the general structure of the arguments for the force interpretation and identify a problem in its overly permissive conditions for being a Newtonian force. I then attempt a solution that (1) helps to illuminate the difference between forces and other types of causes and (2) makes room for random genetic drift as a force. In particular, I argue that forces are not (...) different in kind from other types of causes but rather that forces are situated on a continuum of causes distinguished by their unifying power. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, Madison, WI 53706; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Ellen Fox and collaborators have produced the most detailed description of healthcare ethics practices in the United States available. Some findings are shocking for anyone committed to promoting q...

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard presents and defends a neo-Kantian theory of normativity. Her initial account of reasons seems to make them dependent upon the practical identity of the agent, and upon the value the agent must place on her own humanity. This seems to make all reasons agent-relative. But Korsgaard claims that arguments similar to Wittgenstein’s private-language argument can show that reasons are in fact essentially agent-neutral. This paper explains both of Korsgaard’s Wittgensteinian arguments, and shows why (...) neither of them work. The paper also provides a brief sketch of a different Wittgensteinian account of reasons that distinguishes the normative role of justification from that of requirement. On this account, the real agent-neutrality of reasons applies to their justificatory role, but not to their requiring role. (shrink)

Critics of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have advanced an adaptationists-as-right-wing-conspirators (ARC) hypothesis, suggesting that adaptationists use their research to support a right-wing political agenda. We report the first quantitative test of the ARC hypothesis based on an online survey of political and scientific attitudes among 168 US psychology Ph.D. students, 31 of whom self-identified as adaptationists and 137 others who identified with another non-adaptationist meta-theory. Results indicate that adaptationists are much less politically conservative than typical US citizens and no more (...) politically conservative than non-adaptationist graduate students. Also, contrary to the “adaptationists-as-pseudo-scientists” stereotype, adaptationists endorse more rigorous, progressive, quantitative scientific methods in the study of human behavior than non-adaptationists. (shrink)

Financial ties between physicians and pharmaceutical companies are pervasive and controversial. However, little is known about how patients perceive such ties. This paper describes an experiment examining how a national sample of U.S. adults perceived a variety of financial relationships between physicians and drug companies. Each respondent read a single scenario about a hypothetical physician and his financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry; scenarios varied in terms of payment type of and amount. Respondents then evaluated the physician on several dimensions (...) . Findings revealed that perceptions of the physician were more strongly influenced by payment type than by payment amount. Specifically, respondents were quite critical of doctors who owned drug company stock or received industry payments for meals and lodging, but were more forgiving of physicians who received free drug samples or consulting fees . Interestingly, physicians who received no payments, while seen as honest, were also viewed by some respondents as inexperienced or uninformed about new treatments. Implications for public policy and future research are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, I consider how recent work on the philosophy of group-agency and shared-agency can help us to understand what it is for a church to act in worship. I argue that to assess a model’s suitability for providing such an account, we must consider how well it handles cases of non-paradigm participants, such as those with autism spectrum disorder and young infants. I suggest that whilst a shared-agency model helps to clarify how individuals coordinate actions in cases of (...) reading or singing liturgy, it does not handle non-paradigm cases well and so cannot be considered a suitable model of group liturgical action. Instead, I suggest that a model of groupagency, in which a plurality of action types can contribute to the actions of a group as a whole, is better suited to explaining a church’s actions in worship. (shrink)

BackgroundThe U.S. Food and Drug Administration traditionally has kept confidential significant amounts of information relevant to the approval or non-approval of specific drugs, devices, and biologics and about the regulatory status of such medical products in FDA’s pipeline.ObjectiveTo develop practical recommendations for FDA to improve its transparency to the public that FDA could implement by rulemaking or other regulatory processes without further congressional authorization. These recommendations would build on the work of FDA’s Transparency Task Force in 2010.MethodsIn 2016-2017, we convened (...) a team of academic faculty from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Yale Medical School, Yale Law School, and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to develop recommendations through an iterative process of reviewing FDA’s practices, considering the legal and policy constraints on FDA in expanding transparency, and obtaining insights from independent observers of FDA.ResultsThe team developed 18 specific recommendations for improving FDA’s transparency to the public. FDA could adopt all these recommendations without further congressional action.FundingThe development of the Blueprint for Transparency at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. (shrink)

Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God illustrates a distinctive way of understanding the relationship between ideas and history, while posing several connected questions. Among these are how the human condition of alienation may be overcome in a way that is ethically and intellectually defensible; how the search for reconciliation may generate, paradoxically, further alienation, and inspire terrible inhumanity; and whether a meaningful and good human life can be lived without the assurance of future justice—or, indeed, future existence. Rosen evokes the (...) emotional pull of the quest for reconciliation, and reveals the argumentative richness it has generated; yet reflection on human evil and suffering should chasten our aspirations to attain historical reconciliation or rational understanding. We may have good reason to turn away from both the project of theodicy, and the tendency to identify human value in something detached from living individuals, in favor of a reaffirmation of the value of the personal. Rosen’s own work illustrates how a reaffirmation of the personal, and respect for the freedom of others, may be practiced in and through the history of ideas. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough Schmitt’s enthusiastic conversion to National Socialism is well known, his short history of the German Kaiserreich, published in 1934, remains neglected in Anglophone scholarship. This article contextualizes Schmitt’s narrative through the National Socialist conception of history and its accompanying teleology leading to the formation of the Third Reich. By placing Schmitt’s historical text in conversation with his earlier Staat, Bewegung, Volk, this article argues that Schmitt appropriated the history of the Kaiserreich to construct liberalism as a social pathology which (...) could only be cured through the ‘concrete state theory’ he outlined in Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Furthermore, this article argues that Schmitt’s history relied heavily on propagandistic clichés of the Third Reich and thereby functioned as a rhetorical legitimation of Hitler’s rise to power. (shrink)

One of the contentious philosophical issues surrounding the cognitive science of religion (CSR) is whether well-confirmed CSR theories would debunk religious beliefs. These debates have been contentious in part because of criticisms of epistemic principles used in debunking arguments. In this paper I use Ernest Sosa’s respected theory of knowledge as fully apt belief—which avoids objections that have been leveled against sensitivity and safety principles often used in debunking arguments—to construct a plausible debunking argument for religious belief on the assumption (...) that religious belief is formed simply through processes theorized by CSR. But, in fact, most believers also rely on arguments of various sorts, and their beliefs are not debunked. (shrink)

Several states have recently adopted more restrictive abortion policies yet permit fertility clinics to create surplus IVF embryos. This essay examines this issue: Is it morally inconsistent to prohibit abortion yet permit surplus embryos to be used in fertility medicine? I consider various arguments that try to reconcile this tension. None succeed. Either one holds that embryos have full moral status, and opposes both abortion and surplus embryos, or one denies that embryos have full moral status, which would permit surplus (...) embryos to be used but would entail that some abortions should be permissible as well. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 52-54.

Tenseless theories of time entail that earlierthan, later than and simultaneous with (i.e.,McTaggart's `B-series') are the only temporalproperties exemplified by events. Such theories oftencome under attack for being unable to satisfactorilyaccount for tensed language. In this essay I arguethat tenseless theories of time are capable of twofeats that critics, such as Quentin Smith, argue arebeyond their grasp: (1) They can coherently explainthe impossibility of translating all tensed sentencesby tenseless counterparts; (2) They can account forcertain obviously valid entailment relations betweentensed sentence (...) types. In analyzing tensed entailmentrelations tenselessly, I favor a date analysis oftensed language over a token-reflexive theory. Theupshot is that tenseless theories of time are notundermined by the linguistic facts. (shrink)

This paper aims to uncover the explanatory profile of an idealized version of Karl Ernst von Baer’s notion of individuation, wherein the special develops from the general. First, because such sequences can only be exemplified by a multiplicity of causally-related events, they should be seen as the topics of historical why-questions, rather than initial condition why-questions. Second, because historical why-questions concern the diachronic unity or genidentity of the events under consideration, I argue that the von Baerian pattern elicits a distinctive (...) response to such questions, wherein we are inclined to simultaneously affirm and reject the temporal unity of these events. I buttress this claim by considering non-biological expressions of the von Baerian principle, drawn from institutional history and literature. In the second half of the paper, I consider the implications of my findings for ontogenetic and phylogenetic sequences. I argue that the explanatory profile of von Baer’s principle neatly describes the distinctive speciation events that characterize deep metazoan phylogeny, as described by Stuart Newman. I also argue that parallel considerations should move us to accept a sense in which ontogenetic stages are not diachronically unified. (shrink)

Forgiveness has traditionally been characterized an affective response to a wrongdoing, i.e. a psychological process that involves ridding oneself of resentment or other negative reactive attitudes. In contrast to the prevailing model, this paper advocates for the emerging position that forgiveness should be understood as a normative power akin to a promise. In particular, I argue that forgiveness involves surrendering the right to discount the interests of a perpetrator (a special permission the victim acquires in virtue of having been wronged). (...) I argue that this model fits and/or explains important features of forgiveness, such as the idea that forgiveness is a personal response to a blameworthy wrong, that forgiveness re-establishes a relation of equality, and that forgiveness is ‘normatively significant’. I further develop the position by showing how it can provide a unified case of paradigmatic forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and third-party forgiveness—this explanatory power distinguishes the view from previous articulations of the idea that forgiveness is a normative power. The final section further explores these distinctions by delimiting the scope of forgiveness to exclude powers related to apologies, compensation, or ‘redemption’. (shrink)

Definitions of death are often referred to as legal fictions since brain death was conceived in the mid-twentieth century. Reference to legal fiction is generally paired with bioethicists’ concern that it facilitates post-mortem tissue donation and the health system generally, by determining death earlier on the continuum of dying and availing more viable tissue and therapeutic resources for others. The author argues that spatio-legal theory, drawing from legal geography, can account for the heterogeneity of effects that the fiction has in (...) spatially managing bodies (e.g., physicians, patient, family) at the bedside. The legal fiction is produced in physicians’ socio-legal practices, coordinating decision-making according to geographies of scarcity and severable, self-contained live- and dead-bodies. The determination liminally exists between private and public, enacting a sterile, affectless ordering of bodies but administered in the spectacle of sovereign death-making, conveying authority whilst managing patient’s and family’s consents. Spatialising traces of anatamo-politics and biopolitics thereby congeal and are enacted heterogeneously in and through the legal form of the fiction, securing preferred constructions of the body in the management of mortality. These spatio-legal features of the legal fiction are described from their collision with case law and literature that document competing nomoi produced from or secreted by antinomian bodies. (shrink)

Burnout among health professionals is at epidemic proportions. In response, many health institutions have emphasised the importance of self-care, relying particularly on the idea that doctors who are burned out provide worse care for their patients. Although not made explicit, this suggests that doctors might have a responsibility to their patients (and perhaps others) to practice self-care. This chapter explores the potential grounds for such an obligation. We suggest that while there is potential for a limited obligation of self-care, institutional (...) emphasis on this risks instrumentalising doctors' well-being, minimising institutional responsibilities and workers' rights, and being excessively demanding for individuals. (shrink)