: Recently, Erik Wielenberg has developed a novel objection to divine command meta-ethics. The objection that DCM "has the implausible implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations and hence their evil acts, no matter how evil, are morally permissible". This article criticizes Wielenberg's argument. Section 1 will expound Wielenberg's new "psychopath" argument in the context of the recent debate over the Promulgation Objection. Section 2 will discuss two ambiguities in the argument; in particular, Wielenberg’s formulation is ambiguous between whether Wielenberg (...) uses the word "obligation" in an objective or subjective sense. Section 3 will argue that this ambiguity undercuts the argument. If Wielenberg is using the word obligation in a subjective sense, his arguments do not show that that psychopaths "have no moral obligations". By contrast, if Wielenberg is using the word obligation in an objective sense, his arguments do not show that Divine command theorists are committed to denying psychopaths have obligations. (shrink)
On November 14, 1990, David Gray’s twenty-two hour shooting spree ended when the New Zealand Anti-Terrorist Squad shot Gray dead. In this paper I argue that Christians should support the existence of state agencies like the ATS who are authorized to use lethal force. Alongside the duty we as Christians have to love our neighbors, live at peace with others and to not repay evil for evil, God has authorized the government to use force when necessary to uphold a just (...) peace within the geographical area over which it has jurisdiction. (shrink)
Essentially all companies exploring for oil and gas should perform a risk analysis to understand the uncertainties in their interpretations and to properly value order prospects in a company’s drilling portfolio. For conventional exploration in clastic environments, primarily sands encased in shales, a key component of the risk analysis process is evaluating direct hydrocarbon indicators, which can have a significant impact on the final risk value. We investigate the role AVO plays in the risk assessment process as a portion of (...) a comprehensive and systematic DHI evaluation. Documentation of the geologic context and quantification of data quality and DHI characteristics, including AVO characteristics, is necessary to properly assess a prospect’s risk. A DHI consortium database of over 230 drilled prospects provides statistics to determine the importance of data quality elements, primarily in class 2 and 3 geologic settings. The most important AVO interpretation characteristics are also identified based on statistical results and correlated with well success rates. A significant conclusion is the relevance of AVO in risk analysis when it is the dominant component in the DHI portion of the risk. Critical in the risk assessment process is understanding the role AVO and DHI analysis play when prospects approach class 1 geologic settings. The impact that hydrocarbons have on the seismic response is significantly diminished in this setting versus the other AVO classes. All of these observations confirm the necessity of properly evaluating a prospect’s geologic setting and implementing a consistent and systematic risk analysis process including appropriate DHI and AVO components. (shrink)
In his monograph, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism, Erik Wielenberg offers arguably one of the most sophisticated defenses of the autonomy thesis to date. Wielenberg argues that the divine command theory is problematic because it cannot account for the moral obligations of reasonable unbelievers; Godless normative robust realism can be formulated in a way that avoids the standard objections to the autonomy thesis; and GRNR provides a better account of intrinsic value. In this paper, I (...) will argue Wielenberg’s defenses of the autonomy thesis fails. I will argue that his objection to divine command theories fails, that he fails to address two standard challenges to the autonomy thesis adequately, and, finally, that Wielenberg fails to show that GRNR better accounts for the intuition that certain things are intrinsically good than various forms of theistic alternatives. (shrink)
In many of his addresses and debates, William Lane Craig has defended a Divine Command Theory of moral obligation (DCT). In a recent article and subsequent monograph, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has criticized Craig’s position.1 Armstrong contended that a DCT is subject to several devastating objections and further contended that even if theism is true a particular form of ethical naturalism is a more plausible account of the nature of moral obligations than a DCT is. This paper critiques Armstrong’s argument. I will (...) argue Armstrong’s objections do not refute a DCT and the ethical naturalism he defends is not more plausible than Craig’s ethical supernaturalism. (shrink)
A common objection to divine command meta-ethics is the horrendous deeds objection. Critics object that if DCM is true, anything at all could be right, no matter how abhorrent or horrendous. Defenders of DCM have responded by contending that God is essentially good: God has certain character traits essentially, such as being loving and just. A person with these character traits cannot command just anything. In recent discussions of DCM, this ‘essential goodness response’ has come under fire. Critics of DCM (...) have offered various objections to the essential goodness response. This paper responds to these critics. I examine and refute six such objections: the objection from counterpossibles, the objection from omnipotence, the objection from requirements of justice, the objection from God’s moral grounding power, the objection from evil and indifferent deities, and the epistemological objection. I will maintain that despite all that has been said about the horrendous deeds objection in recent analytic philosophy, the horrendous deeds argument is still a bad argument. (shrink)
This study defines the relationship between humanism and liberalism by comparing the two Victorian figures who were most concerned with the preservation of humanistic values in a free and democratic society: Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill. The book sets apart Arnold and Mill from their contemporaries and points out their similarities to one another in discussions of their theories of history, poetry, their celebration of the contemplative life and their willingness to welcome democracy. At the same time it (...) examines the differences between the two men, which he uses to create a dialogue between humanism and liberalism on the question of how a high cultural ideal can be realized in democratic society. (shrink)
In recent years, a number of philosophers have conducted empirical studies that survey people's intuitions about various subject matters in philosophy. Some have found that intuitions vary accordingly to seemingly irrelevant facts: facts about who is considering the hypothetical case, the presence or absence of certain kinds of content, or the context in which the hypothetical case is being considered. Our research applies this experimental philosophical methodology to Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous Loop Case, which she used to call into question (...) the validity of the intuitively plausible Doctrine of Double Effect. We found that intuitions about the Loop Case vary according to the context in which the case is considered. We contend that this undermines the supposed evidential status of intuitions about the Loop Case. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for philosophers who rely on the Loop Case to make philosophical arguments and for philosophers who use intuitions in general. (shrink)
We raise three issues for Philip Kitcher's "Ethical Project" (2011): First, we argue that the genealogy of morals starts well before the advent of altruism-failures and the need to remedy them, which Kitcher dates at about 50K years ago. Second, we challenge the likelihood of long term moral progress of the sort Kitcher requires to establish objectivity while circumventing Hume's challenge to avoid trying to derive normative conclusions from positive ones--'ought' from 'is'. Third, we sketch ways in which Kitcher's metaethical (...) opponents could respond to his arguments against them. (shrink)
A structure is automatic if its domain, functions, and relations are all regular languages. Using the fact that every automatic structure is decidable, in the literature many decision problems have been solved by giving an automatic presentation of a particular structure. Khoussainov and Nerode asked whether there is some way to tell whether a structure has, or does not have, an automatic presentation. We answer this question by showing that the set of Turing machines that represent automata-presentable structures is ${\rm{\Sigma (...) }}_1^1 $-complete. We also use similar methods to show that there is no reasonable characterisation of the structures with a polynomial-time presentation in the sense of Nerode and Remmel. (shrink)
This study surveys the career and political philosophy of Alexander Raven Thomson, one of Sir Oswald Mosley's lieutenants in the British Union of Fascists (BUF), the largest party on the extreme right in Britain in the interwar era. It explores key issues relating to the BUF, such as: What type of society did Thomson and the Blackshirts wish to establish in Britain? Who were some of the major domestic and international intellectual influences on him and the BUF? Was the (...) BUF essentially a homegrown movement or was it, as critics argued, an imitation of Italian and German fascism? What does Thomson's career reveal about the inner politics of the movement? The aim of this article is to provide a better understanding of Thomson, one of the lesser-studied BUF officials, and of the movement to which he devoted his life. (shrink)
We translate sentence generation from TAG grammars with semantic and pragmatic information into a planning problem by encoding the contribution of each word declaratively and explicitly. This allows us to exploit the performance of off-the-shelf planners. It also opens up new perspectives on referring expression generation and the relationship between language and action.
We study the uniform computational content of different versions of the Baire category theorem in the Weihrauch lattice. The Baire category theorem can be seen as a pigeonhole principle that states that a complete metric space cannot be decomposed into countably many nowhere dense pieces. The Baire category theorem is an illuminating example of a theorem that can be used to demonstrate that one classical theorem can have several different computational interpretations. For one, we distinguish two different logical versions of (...) the theorem, where one can be seen as the contrapositive form of the other one. The first version aims to find an uncovered point in the space, given a sequence of nowhere dense closed sets. The second version aims to find the index of a closed set that is somewhere dense, given a sequence of closed sets that cover the space. Even though the two statements behind these versions are equivalent to each other in classical logic, they are not equivalent in intuitionistic logic, and likewise, they exhibit different computational behavior in the Weihrauch lattice. Besides this logical distinction, we also consider different ways in which the sequence of closed sets is “given.” Essentially, we can distinguish between positive and negative information on closed sets. We discuss all four resulting versions of the Baire category theorem. Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out that the difference in providing the input information can also be expressed with the jump operation. Finally, we also relate the Baire category theorem to notions of genericity and computably comeager sets. (shrink)
This paper treats the formulation of the gravitational field variables and the equations obeyed by them at spatial infinity. The variables consist of a three-dimensional tensor and a scalar, which satisfy separate field equations, which in turn can be obtained from two distinct Lagrangians. Aside from Lorentz rotations, the symmetry operations include an Abelian gauge group and an Abelian Lie group, leading to a number of conservation laws and to differential identities between the field equations.
In preparation for the treatment of the gravitational field at spatial infinity, this paper deals with the electromagnetic field at spatial infinity. The field equations on this three-dimensional(1+2) manifold can be obtained from an action principle, which in turn lends itself to a Hamiltonian formulation. Quantization is formally straightforward, but some thought is given to the physical interpretation of the results.
The framework proposed by Dupras and Bunnik was developed in response to their recognition that standard regulations are increasingly inadequate to address the complex privacy issues created by the...
Porosity and permeability are key variables that link the thermal-hydrologic, geomechanical, and geochemical behavior in rock systems and are thus important input parameters for transport models. Neutron scattering studies indicate that the scales of pore sizes in rocks extend over many orders of magnitude from nanometer-sized pores with huge amounts of total surface area to large open fracture systems. However, despite considerable efforts combining conventional petrophysics, neutron scattering, and electron microscopy, the quantitative nature of this porosity in tight gas shales, (...) especially at smaller scales and over larger rock volumes, remains largely unknown. Nor is it well understood how pore networks are affected by regional variation in rock composition and properties, thermal changes across the oil window, and, most critically, hydraulic fracturing. To improve this understanding, we have used a combination of small- and ultrasmall-angle neutron scattering SANS with scanning electron microscope /backscattered electron imaging to analyze the pore structure of clay- and carbonate-rich samples of the Eagle Ford Shale. This formation is hydrocarbon rich, straddles the oil window, and is one of the most actively drilled oil and gas targets in the United States. Several important trends in the Eagle Ford rock pore structure have been identified using our approach. The SANS results reflected the connected and unconnected porosity, as well as the volume occupied by organic material. The latter could be separated using total organic carbon data and, at all maturities, constituted a significant fraction of the apparent porosity. At lower maturities, the pore structure was strongly anisotropic. However, this decreased with increasing maturity, eventually disappearing entirely for carbonate-rich samples. In clay- and carbonate-rich samples, a significant reduction in total porosity occurred at SANS scales, much of it during initial increases in maturity. This apparently contradicted SEM observations that showed increases in intraorganic porosity with increasing maturity. Organic-rich shales are, however, a very complex material from the point of view of scattering studies, and a more detailed analysis is needed to better understand these observations. (shrink)
Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)
We study computable Polish spaces and Polish groups up to homeomorphism. We prove a natural effective analogy of Stone duality, and we also develop an effective definability technique which works up to homeomorphism. As an application, we show that there is a $\Delta ^0_2$ Polish space not homeomorphic to a computable one. We apply our techniques to build, for any computable ordinal $\alpha $, an effectively closed set not homeomorphic to any $0^{}$-computable Polish space; this answers a question of Nies. (...) We also prove analogous results for compact Polish groups and locally path-connected spaces. (shrink)
We report on a study of the religious correlates of generalized trust. Our critical frame leads us to explore novel questions about how nonreligion may encourage social trust. We find that those who believe the bible to be a book of fables are more trusting than those with other beliefs about the text, and that nontheists report a greater willingness to trust. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research about religious belief and generalized trust.
Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)
We introduce a dynamic model for evolutionary games played on a network where strategy changes are correlated according to degree of influence between players. Unlike the notion of stochastic stability, which assumes mutations are stochastically independent and identically distributed, our framework allows for the possibility that agents correlate their strategies with the strategies of those they trust, or those who have influence over them. We show that the dynamical properties of evolutionary games, where such influence neighborhoods appear, differ dramatically from (...) those where all mutations are stochastically independent, and establish some elementary convergence results relevant for the evolution of social institutions. (shrink)
