ABSTRACT Relativism and discussions of the relativity of human judgment have played an important role in philosophy since the 1950s. Such claims are regarded by many as the enemy of realism, the view that human judgments can be valid with respect to their objects as those objects obtain independent of the judgments. Most relativisms assert the relativity of human judgment to some trait of the judge, hence are anthropic. But there is another kind: objective relativism. It was espoused by some (...) of the American pragmatists of the early to mid-twentieth century. Their hope was that objective relativism was compatible with realism while avoiding dualism and idealism. It claimed things themselves are relative. The view eventually disappeared. This article examines this neglected doctrine, not to determine its truth, but its nature. What kind of theory was it, what could it claim to accomplish, and what could it not? Some of its proponents regarded it as a naturalistic metaphysics, but this is problematic. This topic is suggestive for the formulation of a naturalism that rejects physicalism yet is compatible with science and realism. (shrink)

Cottingham : Western philosophy : an anthology (second edition) -- Cahoone : from modernism to postmodernism : an anthology (expanded -- Second edition) -- Lafollette : ethics in practice : an anthology (third edition) -- Goodin and Pettit: contemporary political philosophy: an anthology (second -- Edition) -- Eze: african philosophy : an anthology -- McNeill and Feldman : continental philosophy : an anthology -- Kim and Sosa : metaphysics : an anthology -- Lycan and Prinz : mind and cognition (...) : an anthology (third edition) -- Kuhse and Singer : bioethics : an anthology (second edition) -- Cummins and Cummins : minds, brains, and computers : the foundations of -- Cognitive science : an anthology -- Sosa, Kim, Fantl, and McGrath epistemology : an anthology (second edition) -- Kearney and Rasmussen : continental aesthetics, romanticism to -- Postmodernism : an anthology -- Martinich and Sosa : analytic philosophy : an anthology -- Jacquette : philosophy of logic : an anthology -- Jacquette : philosophy of mathematics : an anthology -- Harris, Pratt, and Waters : American philosophies : an anthology -- Emmanuel and Goold: modern philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche : an anthology -- Scharff and Dusek : philosophy of technology ; the technological condition : an anthology -- Light and Rolston : environmental ethics : an anthology -- Taliaferro and Griffiths : philosophy of religion : an anthology -- Lamarque and Olsen : aesthetics and the philosophy of art; the analytic -- Tradition : an anthology -- John and Lopes : philosophy of literature ; contemporary and classic -- Readings : an anthology -- Cudd and Andreasen : feminist theory : a philosophical anthology -- Carroll and Choi : philosophy of film and motion pictures : an anthology -- Lange : philosophy of science : an anthology -- Shafer-Landau and Cuneo : foundations of ethics : an anthology -- Curren : philosophy of education : an anthology -- Shafer-Landau : ethical theory : an anthology -- Cahn and Meskin : aesthetics : a comprehensive anthology -- McGrew, Alspector-Kelly and Allhoff : the philosophy of science : an historical -- Anthology -- May and Brown : the philosophy of law : classic and contemporary readings -- Forthcoming -- Rosenberg and ARP : philosophy of biology : an anthology. (shrink)

Sexual lust – understood as a feeling of sexual attraction towards another – has traditionally been viewed as a sort of desire or at least as an appetite akin to hunger. I argue here that this view is, at best, significantly incomplete. Further insights can be gained into certain occurrences of lust by noticing how strongly they resemble occurrences of “attitudinal” (“object-directed”) emotion. At least in humans, the analogy between the object-directed appetites and attitudinal emotions goes well beyond their psychological (...) structure to include similar ways in which their occurrence can be introspectively recognized, resulting in similar extensions of their functionality and meaningfulness to the subject. I conclude that although further research is needed, given the strength of the analogy, the ability of lust to satisfy some general requirements for being an emotion, and perhaps certain neurological findings, lust may somewhat uniquely straddle the line between appetite and emotion. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Hannah Arendt’s account of “totalitarianism” in light of the climate catastrophe and the apparent inability of our political-economic system to respond to it adequately. In the last two chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt focuses on the “ideology” of totalitarian regimes: a pathological denial of reality, a privileging of the ideological system over empirical evidence, and a simultaneous feeling of total impotence and total omnipotence—an analysis that maps remarkably well onto the climate zeitgeist. Thus, while Arendt (...) used the concept of “totalitarianism” to foreclose alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy, the climate impasse suggests that the totalitarian label more properly belongs to the prevailing system itself. (shrink)

In choosing between moral alternatives -- choosing between various forms of ethical action -- we typically make calculations of the following kind: A is better than B; B is better than C; therefore A is better than C. These inferences use the principle of transitivity and are fundamental to many forms of practical and theoretical theorizing, not just in moral and ethical theory but in economics. Indeed they are so common as to be almost invisible. What Larry Temkin's book (...) shows is that, shockingly, if we want to continue making plausible judgments, we cannot continue to make these assumptions. Temkin shows that we are committed to various moral ideals that are, surprisingly, fundamentally incompatible with the idea that "better than" can be transitive. His book develops many examples where value judgments that we accept and find attractive, are incompatible with transitivity. While this might seem to leave two options -- reject transitivity, or reject some of our normative commitments in order to keep it -- Temkin is neutral on which path to follow, only making the case that a choice is necessary, and that the cost either way will be high. Temkin's book is a very original and deeply unsettling work of skeptical philosophy that mounts an important new challenge to contemporary ethics. (shrink)

In this article, I present some worries about the possible impact of global efforts to aid the needy in some of the world’s most desperate regions. Among the worries I address are possible unintended negative consequences that may occur elsewhere in a society when aid agencies hire highly qualified local people to promote their agendas; the possibility that foreign interests and priorities may have undue influence on a country’s direction and priorities, negatively impacting local authority and autonomy; and the related (...) problem of outside interventions undermining the responsiveness of local and national governments to their citizens. -/- Another issue I discuss is the possibility that efforts to aid the needy may involve an Each-We Dilemma, in which case conflicts may arise between what is individually rational or moral, and what is collectively rational or moral. Unfortunately, it is possible that if each of us does what we have most reason to do, morally, in aiding the needy, we together will bring about an outcome which is worse, morally, in terms of its overall impact on the global needy. -/- The article ends by briefly noting a number of claims and arguments that I made in my 2017 Uehiro Lectures regarding how good people should respond in a world of need. As I have long argued, I have no doubt that those who are well off are open to serious moral criticism if they ignore the plight of the needy. Unfortunately, however, for a host of both empirical and philosophical reasons, what one should do in light of that truth is much more complex, and murky, than most people have realized. (shrink)

I begin my analysis of consent by agreeing with Professor Hurd that consent functions as a “moral transformative” by altering the obligations and permissions that determine the Tightness of others' actions. I further agree with her that consent is intimately related to the capacity for autonomous action; one who cannot alter others' obligations through consent is not fully autonomous. I cannot improve on her elaboration of these points.

In this article I defend what Mark Greenberg has labeled the standard picture of law against the attack on it by Greenberg and Scott Hershovitz. I point out that law on the standard picture’s conception of it has moral virtues that Greenberg's own moral impact theory and Hershovitz’s similar theory lack. Moreover, it avoids a vicious circularity that bedevils Greenberg’s theory.

This piece is a review essay on Victor Tadros’s The Ends of Harm. Tadros rejects retributive desert but believes punishment can be justified instrumentally without succumbing to the problems of thoroughgoing consequentialism and endorsing using people as means. He believes he can achieve these results through extension of the right of self-defense. I argue that Tadros fails in this endeavor: he has a defective account of the means principle; his rejection of desert leads to gross mismatches of punishment and culpability; (...) and he cannot account for punishment of inchoate crimes. (shrink)

The main aim of this essay is to propose and develop a product?oriented, non?psychologistic, approach to scientific and artistic creativity. I first argue that the central problem is that of answering the question: how is creativity possible? Traditional approaches to this question tend to locate creativity primarily in some special psychological processes or traits, or in some special creative act. Some general arguments against such an approach are developed, and it is suggested that creativity ought primarily to be located in (...) scientific and artistic products. I then investigate the question ?what aspects of such products lead us to evaluate them as creative?? and use the results of this inquiry as a set of desiderata against which to evaluate various general views as to the nature of the creative process itself. The upshot of this procedure is the development of a kind of ?Darwinian? model whose novel feature lies in the suggestion that the process of production has, in effect, been controlled (plastically) by those very factors which can enable the product to be a creative one. (shrink)

In the moral realm, our deontic judgments are usually (always?) binary. An act (or omission) is either morally forbidden or morally permissible. 1 Yet the determination of an act's deontic status frequently turns on the existence of properties that are matters of degree. In what follows I shall give several examples of binary moral judgments that turn on scalar properties, and I shall claim that these examples should puzzle us. How can the existence of a property to a specific degree (...) demarcate a boundary between an act's being morally forbidden and its not being morally forbidden? Why aren't our moral judgments of acts scalar in the way that the properties on which those judgments are based are scalar, so that acts, like states of affairs, can be morally better or worse rather than right or wrong? I conceive of this inquiry as operating primarily within the realm of normative theory. Presumably it will give aid and comfort to consequentialists, who have no trouble mapping their binary categories onto scalar properties. For example, a straightforward act utilitarian, for whom one act out of all possible acts is morally required (and hence permissible) and all others morally forbidden, can, in theory at least, provide an answer to every one of the puzzles I raise. And, in theory, so can all other types of act and rule consequentialists. They will find nothing of interest here beyond embarrassment for their deontological adversaries. The deontologists, however, must meet the challenges of these puzzles. And for them, the puzzles may raise not just normative questions, but questions of moral epistemology and moral ontology. Just how do we know that the act consequentialist's way of, say, trading off lives against lives is wrong? For example, do we merely intuit that taking one innocent, uninvolved person's life to save two others is wrong? Can our method of reflective equilibrium work if we have no theory by which to rationalize our intuitions? And what things in the world make it true, if it is true, that one may not make the act consequentialist's tradeoff? I do not provide any answers to these questions any more than I provide answers to the normative ones. But they surely lurk in the background. (shrink)

"This book maps the moral terrain in the grounded reality of human experience without relying on theories or systems of ethics as the primary orienting strategy. Moral awareness needs first to be appreciated for what it is before it is made to conform to theories or systems. And moral consciousness is not a steady or stable set of perceptions; as we change so do the moral challenges that most concern us"--.

In this essay, I attempt to measure various prevailing democratic theories against an argument that Carl Schmitt advances in the first chapter of his ‘Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy’. In practice, he claims there, democratic politics is compelled to introduce a distinction between ‘the will of the people’ and the behaviour of the empirical people, thus justifying the bracketing and unlimited suspension of the latter in the name of the former, even to the point of dictatorship. I argue that no contemporary (...) approach to democracy as a fundamental value is able to mount a compelling response to this critique and that we should therefore reconsider the status of democracy as a normative commitment. I proceed by carefully and closely reading Schmitt’s chapter and then by juxtaposing various currents of democratic theory (including liberal, deliberative, epistemic and various hybrids thereof) with the trajectory of Schmitt’s argument. This essay is therefore less of a contribution to Schmitt scholarship, in the sense that it does not take a panoramic view of his corpus to determine his final stance on democracy, and more of an intervention into contemporary democratic theory using Schmitt’s argument as a kind of lever. (shrink)

This essay, as will become obvious, owes a huge debt to Mark Kelman, particularly to his article “Interpretative Construction in the Substantive Criminal Law.” That debt is one of both concept and content. There is rich irony in my aping Kelman's deconstructionist enterprise, for I do not share his enthusiasm for either the “insights” or the political agenda of the Critical Legal Studies movement. I do not believe that either the law in general or the criminal law in particular is (...) radically indeterminate, rife with internal contradictions, or an expression of the interests of a dominant economic class. And although, like Kelman, I believe that the freedom/determinism, act/character, and rule/principle dichotomies must ultimately be dealt with in order to have a completely satisfactory account of criminal law, I also believe that these dichotomies loom just as large in other areas of law and in normative theory generally. They are problems for Crits as well as for liberal-legalists. In any event, my intentions in undertaking this deconstructionist enterprise are modestly reformist, not revolutionary. I do not intend to shift any paradigms, but to work with well-established ones. I will assume that criminal law seeks to accomplish some blend of retributive response to and deterrence of culpable choices, choices to defy moral norms that are also legal norms. I will also assume that a culpable choice is one that reflects negatively on the values held by the chooser. Beyond these quite modest assumptions, I need not and will not venture in this paper, realizing, of course, that much has and can be written about the proper aims of punishment and the proper account of culpability. (shrink)

Although discussions of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice generally refer to Rawls’ two principles of justice, and although Rawls himself labels his principles “the two principles of justice”, Rawls actually sets forth three distinct principles in the following lexical order: the liberty principle, the fair equality of opportunity principle, and the difference principle. Rawls argues at some length for the priority of the liberty principle over the other two. On the other hand, Rawls offers hardly any argument at all (...) for the priority of the fair equality of opportunity principle over the difference principle. In this article I will argue that making the fair equality of opportunity principle separate from and lexically prior to the difference principle is both intuitively unattractive and inconsistent with Rawls’ method of deriving principles of justice from the choices of rational contractors in the original position. (shrink)

Freedom of association, as I understand it, refers to the liberty a person possesses to enter into relationships with others—for any and all purposes, for a momentary or long-term duration, by contract, consent, or acquiescence. It likewise refers to the liberty to refuse to enter into such relationships or to terminate them when not otherwise compelled by one's voluntary assumption of an obligation to maintain the relationship. Freedom of association thus is a quite capacious liberty.

In this paper I argue that punishment should be proportional to desert; that desert turns solely on culpability and not on results: that culpability is a function of what the actor perceives are the risks of his act to others’ interests and the reasons he perceives that might justify, excuse, or aggravate taking those risks; that because culpability is a complex function, ordinally ranking acts in terms of culpability is quite difficult; that converting the ordinal ranking into cardinal measures of (...) deserved punishment must perforce be controversial; and that deserved punishment, which is deserved suffering, must somehow deal with the fact that the actor may have already suffered undeservedly. (shrink)

Epistemology as traditionally conceived seems to have fallen upon hard times. Not only has the cry arisen from diverse philosophical quarters that epistemology is dead, but we have even been offered a plethora of suggestions as to how best fill the vacuum left by her sudden demise. Thus Quine, for example, has recently urged that epistemology be “naturalized” and replaced by empirical psychology and an empirical semantics. Others suggest that epistemology be “historicized” and replaced by a study of the history (...) of ideas, and especially by a study of the history of science. Still others have argued that epistemology be “sociologized” and replaced by a sociology of scientific knowledge and/or a sociology of the scientific community. Finally, we have even been told, in a rather delightful Viennese manner, that epistemology must be “radicalized” and replaced by a kind of opportunistic anarchism, marching under the banner of “Anything Goes!” to the tune of a Dadaist waltz. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Criminal Law collects 17 of Doug Husak’s articles on legal theory, 16 of which have been previously published, spanning a period of over two decades. In sum, these 17 articles make a huge and lasting contribution to criminal law theory. There is much wisdom contained in them; and I find surprisingly little to disagree with, making my job as a critical reviewer quite challenging. Most of the points on which Doug and I disagree can be found in (...) my other published work in this field, so I will have little to say about them, except where they illuminate those few points of disagreement that arise in the particular essays I discuss. Most of what I will say will be in accord with Doug’s views and will principally explore their wider implications. The 17 essays in the book cover too many and too varied topics for one review essay. Therefore, I will focus on just three of them: “Rapes Without Rapists: Consent and Reasonable Mistake” ; “Mistakes of Law and Culpability”; and “Already Punished Enough.” Although I generally agree with the upshots of Doug’s arguments in these chapters, I think the issues they raise are worth further exploration. (shrink)

Necessity is a notoriously dangerous and slippery concept-dangerous because it contemplates virtually unrestrained killing in warfare and slippery when used in conflicting ways in different areas of international law. Jens David Ohlin and Larry May untangle these confusing strands and perform a descriptive mapping of the ways that necessity operates in legal and philosophical arguments in jus ad bellum, jus in bello, human rights, and criminal law. Although the term "necessity" is ever-present in discussions regarding the law and ethics (...) of killing, its meaning changes subtly depending on the context. It is sometimes an exception, at other times a constraint on government action, and most frequently a broad license in war that countenances the wholesale killing of enemy soldiers in battle. Is this legal status quo in war morally acceptable? Ohlin and May offer a normative and philosophical critique of international law's prevailing notion of jus in bello necessity and suggest ways that killing in warfare could be made more humane-not just against civilians but soldiers as well. Along the way, the authors apply their analysis to modern asymmetric conflicts with non-state actors and the military techniques most likely to be used against them. Presenting a rich tapestry of arguments from both contemporary and historical Just War theory, Necessity in International Law is the first full-length study of necessity as a legal and philosophical concept in international affairs. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 7, Page 15-16, July 2011.

The hallmark of modern liberalism is its embrace of the Millian harm principle and its antipathy to legal moralism. In this article I consider whether aesthetic regulations can be justified under the harm principle as that principle has been elaborated by Joel Feinberg. I conclude that aesthetic and other regulations that most liberals regard as unproblematic are actually instances of legal moralism.

Are our rights—to our bodily integrity, to our possessions, to the goods and services promised us, and so on—matters of fact, or are our rights functions of others’ beliefs about how their acts will affect our rights? The conventional view states that subjective oughts—based on what we believe—determine culpability, whereas objective oughts—based on the facts—determine permissibility. After all, the idea that our beliefs about how our acts would affect others’ rights might affect the contours of those rights themselves appears deeply (...) paradoxical. For how can others’ rights be based on our beliefs when those beliefs have as their objects not themselves but others’ rights? Nonetheless, paradoxical as that position may appear, a strong case can be mounted in its defense, not by focusing on the rights themselves, but by focusing on the acts that imperil those rights. It is the burden of this essay to make a case for the belief-relativity rather than the fact-relativity of rights. (shrink)

Existing and proposed provisions of the Model Penal Code refer to believing something “recklessly.” In this chapter, we examine the notion of reckless beliefs and determine what that notion cannot be and what it might be.

Orthodox criminal law doctrine treats mistakes of law and mistakes of fact differently for purposes of both exculpation and inculpation. Kenneth Simons’ paper in general defends this orthodoxy. I have earlier criticized the criminal law’s attempt to distinguish mistakes of law from mistakes of fact, and I continue to maintain, in opposition to Simons, that the distinction is problematic.

Charles Mills adhered to the highest standards of philosophical scholarship, while seeing his work firmly as a contribution to the cause of social justice. He had a deep appreciation for historical context and a history of ideas approach to racial/philosophical questions. He was one of the foremost Rawls interpreters or our time, though only a few years before his passing was he so recognized. He channeled his analytic training in his habit of demonstrating how a view is strengthened when an (...) author shows how objections can be systematically replied to. I wish he had tried to integrate class and race into a larger theoretical system, of both an explanatory and normative character. Class is sometimes an unnoted presence in his explanation of white supremacy. Charles saw himself contributing to a collective scholarly social justice project and was happy to acknowledge the greater expertise of others in allied areas to his. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 3, Page 368-378, September 2021.

Lauris Kaldjian makes a strong case for respecting the role of conscience in the practice of medicine. His excellent book, Practicing Medicine and Ethics, presents an historically informed and carefully crafted explication of the role of conscience in Western ethics and its relevance for medical practitioners. The essay that initiates the discussion in this issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine is an equally well-written and lucid account of this important component of morality. But it is also worrisome in its (...) implications for insulating conscience from the other facets of moral thinking and feeling. The reasons Kaldjian's account is not finally compelling stem from his tethering conscience too... (shrink)

Our culture is well on its way to reducing medical ethics to legal requirements, general citizen ethics, or personal values. A distinctive ethic for medicine provides critical distance and moral meaning for the profession and an enriched societal ethic.

Self-defense and other-defense are uses of force against another person—an attacker—for the purpose of preventing the attacker from harming a victim. When such force is exercised by the victim, it is self-defense; when by a third party, other-defense. Self-defense and other-defense are preemptive uses of force because they occur before the acts they are intended to prevent occur. Thus, they operate in the realm of epistemic uncertainty. Victims and third parties can never be certain the feared acts will occur. They (...) can never be certain of what their consequences will be if the acts occur. They can never be certain what alternative exists to self-defense and other-defense for averting the feared harms. And they can never be certain what the status of the presumed attacker is—that is, whether the presumed attacker is culpable or nonculpable. Such epistemic points are addressed in this chapter. (shrink)

In this chapter I analyze two fundamental hallmarks of liberalism—freedom of religion and freedom of expression. No society can rightly be called “liberal” if it does not endorse those freedoms. Yet, what are those freedoms, and are they realizable? I conclude that neither freedom can be given a principled elaboration. The approach to them must be pragmatic and reflect a contingent modus vivendi rather than an accommodation demanded by principle.

Edmund Pellegrino claims that medical ethics must be derived from a perception of the patient's damaged humanity, rather than from the self-imposed duties of professionals. This essay explores the meaning and examines the challenges to this patient-centered ethic. Social scientific and bioethical interpretations of medicine constitute one kind of challenge. A more pervasive challenge is the ascendancy of managed care, and especially investor-owned, for-profit managed care. A list of questions addressed to patients, physicians and organizations is offered as one means (...) of assessing this threat and moving toward morally trustworthy relationships. (shrink)