Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) is a theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty. It says that we ought to handle moral uncertainty in the way that Expected Value Theory (EVT) handles descriptive uncertainty. MEC inherits from EVT the problem of fanaticism. Roughly, a decision theory is fanatical when it requires our decision-making to be dominated by low-probability, high-payoff options. Proponents of MEC have offered two main lines of response. The first is that MEC should simply import whatever are the best solutions (...) to fanaticism on offer in decision theory. The second is to propose statistical normalization as a novel solution on behalf of MEC. This paper argues that the first response is open to serious doubt and that the second response fails. As a result, MEC appears significantly less plausible when compared to competing accounts of decision-making under moral uncertainty, which are not fanatical. (shrink)

According to comparativist theories of quantities, their intrinsic values are not fundamental. Instead, all the quantity facts are grounded in scale-independent relations like "twice as massive as" or "more massive than." I show that this sort of scale independence is best understood as a sort of metaphysical symmetry--a principle about which transformations of the non-fundamental ontology leave the fundamental ontology unchanged. Determinism--a core scientific concept easily formulated in absolutist terms--is more difficult for the comparativist to define. After settling on the (...) most plausible comparativist understanding of determinism, I offer some examples of physical systems that the comparativist must count as indeterministic although the relevant physical theory gives deterministic predictions. Several morals are drawn. In particular: comparativism is metaphysically contingent if true, and it is most natural for a comparativist to accept an at-at theory of motion. (shrink)

This article reviews the reasons scholars hold that driverless cars and many other AI equipped machines must be able to make ethical decisions, and the difficulties this approach faces. It then shows that cars have no moral agency, and that the term ‘autonomous’, commonly applied to these machines, is misleading, and leads to invalid conclusions about the ways these machines can be kept ethical. The article’s most important claim is that a significant part of the challenge posed by AI-equipped machines (...) can be addressed by the kind of ethical choices made by human beings for millennia. Ergo, there is little need to teach machines ethics even if this could be done in the first place. Finally, the article points out that it is a grievous error to draw on extreme outlier scenarios—such as the Trolley narratives—as a basis for conceptualizing the ethical issues at hand. (shrink)

Psychotherapy is provided by professionals, trained, supervised and certified by other professionals, all the way back to Freud and similar founding fathers. Even though methods and styles vary, pa...

This article explores the relationship between the bodily presence of other humans in the lived urban world and the experience of everyday architecture. We suggest, from the perspectives of phenomenology and architecture, that being in the company of others changes the way the built environment appears to subjects, and that this enables us to perform simple daily tasks while still attending to the built environment. Our analysis shows that in mundane urban settings attending to the environment involves a unique attentional (...) mode, which does not rely on concentrating on, or appreciating the architectural objects, but rather on social attention and on the subject’s kinesthesis in relation to the built environment. (shrink)

I argue against pessimistic readings of the Buddhist tradition on which unawakened beings invariably have lives not worth living due to a preponderance of suffering (duḥkha) over well-being.

Being in the bodily presence of others facilitates important perceptual, social, and informational advantages. For example, it enables direct access to other subjects’ embodied perspectives, motivates intersubjective engagements, and is involved in the construction of shared experiences and joint actions. These advantages are based on and gained through attending to and with others, i.e. they rely on social attention. It is no surprise, therefore, that a growing body of empirical data indicates that social attention is a special attentional state that (...) involves specific behavioral and neural-cognitive properties. Another important feature of the human capacity for social attention, which is highlighted in this article is that in everyday environments social attention considerably extends and enriches the subject’s attentional field. This idea draws on phenomenological considerations and on findings from cognitive science research that suggest that subjects can attend to more than in the center of their attention and that under normal conditions we can gain more features and more situations when attending to the movements, gestures, and facial expressions of others. The influence of others on the structure of our attentional field is evident from situations where others are absent from our daily surroundings. In these circumstances our attentional field narrows and the world transforms into an unfamiliar and sometimes uncanny place. Intriguingly, the same most likely occurs in social pathologies such as BPD and SAD, in which the bodily presence of others does not generate the emotional response we see in healthy humans even though the subject’s basic capacity for social attention is intact. (shrink)

The desire to minimize the number of individual new entities postulated is often referred to as quantitative parsimony. Its influence on the default hypotheses formulated by scientists seems undeniable. I argue that there is a wide class of cases for which the preference for quantitatively parsimonious hypotheses is demonstrably rational. The justification, in a nutshell, is that such hypotheses have greater explanatory power than less parsimonious alternatives. My analysis is restricted to a class of cases I shall refer to as (...) additive. Such cases involve the postulation of a collection of qualitatively identical individual objects which collectively explain some particular observed phenomenon. Especially clear examples of this sort occur in particle physics. 1 Introduction 2 Particle physics: a case study 3 Three kinds of simplicity 4 Explanatory power 5 Explanation and non-observation 6 Parsimony and scientific methodology 7 Conclusions. (shrink)

People reject ‘paradoxical’ inferences, such as: Luisa didn't play music; therefore, if Luisa played soccer, then she didn't play music. For some theorists, they are invalid for everyday conditionals, but valid in logic. The theory of mental models implies that they are valid, but unacceptable because the conclusion refers to a possibility inconsistent with the premise. Hence, individuals should accept them if the conclusions refer only to possibilities consistent with the premises: Luisa didn't play soccer; therefore, if Luisa played a (...) game then she didn't play soccer. Two experiments corroborated this prediction for three sorts of ‘paradox’, including a disjunctive paradox. (shrink)

Oblak et al. portray perceptual presence as an individually driven reflective operation. I question their account and suggest that PP involves a socially induced pre-reflective awareness of ….

People experience various negative emotions in their everyday lives. They feel anger toward aggressive drivers, shame for making a mistake at work, and guilt for hurting another person. When these...

Routledge 2015, 2016. 265pp. Hb. £73.99, ISBN 13: 9781409440123. Pb. £22.99. E-book £21.84, ISBN: 9781315576978.

This article focuses on the pendulum-like change in the way people read and use text, which was triggered by the introduction of new reading and writing technologies in human history. The paper argues that textual features, which characterized the ancient pre-print writing culture, disappeared with the establishment of the modern-day print culture and has been “revived” in the digital post-modern era. This claim is based on the analysis of four cases which demonstrate this textual-pendulum swing: (1) The swing from concrete (...) iconic-graphic representation of letters and words in the ancient alphabet to abstract phonetic representation of text in modern eras, and from written abstract computer commands “back” to the concrete iconic representation in graphic user interfaces of the digital era; (2) The swing from scroll reading in the pre-print era to page or book reading in the print era and “back” to scroll reading in the digital era; (3) The swing from a low level of authorship in the pre-print era to a strong authorship perception in the print era, and “back” to a low degree of authorship in the digital era; (4) The swing from synchronic representation of text in both visual and audio formats during the pre-print era to a visual representation only in print, and “back” to a synchronic representation in many environments of the digital era. We suggest that the print culture, which is usually considered the natural and preferred textual environment, should be regarded as the exception. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against the interpretive view that locates an “undifferentiated mode” – a mode in which Dasein is neither authentic nor inauthentic – in Being and Time. Where Heidegger seems to be claiming that Dasein can exist in an “undifferentiated mode”, he is better understood as discussing a phenomenon I call indifferent inauthenticity. The average everyday “Indifferenz” which is often taken as an indication of an “undifferentiated mode”, that is, is better understood as a failure to distinguish (...) between the possibilities of authentic and inauthentic self-understanding. Dasein's average everyday self-understanding is indifferent to this distinction, and I show that this is precisely what renders it inauthentic. Recognizing this distinction, however, is not enough to render Dasein authentic. Rather, it opens up the possibility of a non-indifferent inauthenticity and what Heidegger calls the possibility of “genuine failure”. To read an “undifferentiated mode” into Being and Time is to misunderstand its methodological progression from Dasein's average everyday, inauthentic self-understanding to its authenticity – “to the thing itself”. A select few passages may at first seem to indicate otherwise. However, Being and Time – like both being in general and Dasein itself – cannot be properly understood “without further ado”.\. (shrink)

We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural-language corpora. Given a stream of linguistic input, our model incrementally learns a grammar that captures its statistical patterns, which can then be used to parse or generate new data. The grammar constructed in this (...) manner takes the form of a directed weighted graph, whose nodes are recursively (hierarchically) defined patterns over the elements of the input stream. We evaluated the model in seventeen experiments, grouped into five studies, which examined, respectively, (a) the generative ability of grammar learned from a corpus of natural language, (b) the characteristics of the learned representation, (c) sequence segmentation and chunking, (d) artificial grammar learning, and (e) certain types of structure dependence. The model's performance largely vindicates our design choices, suggesting that progress in modeling language acquisition can be made on a broad front—ranging from issues of generativity to the replication of human experimental findings—by bringing biological and computational considerations, as well as lessons from prior efforts, to bear on the modeling approach. (shrink)

The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics is the first comprehensive scholarly account of the global history of medical ethics. Offering original interpretations of the field by leading bioethicists and historians of medicine, it will serve as the essential point of departure for future scholarship in the field. The volumes reconceptualize the history of medical ethics through the creation of new categories, including the life cycle; discourses of religion, philosophy, and bioethics; and the relationship between medical ethics and the state, (...) which includes a historical reexamination of the ethics of apartheid, colonialism, communism, health policy, imperialism, militarism, Nazi medicine, Nazi "medical ethics," and research ethics. Also included are the first global chronology of persons and texts; the first concise biographies of major figures in medical ethics; and the first comprehensive bibliography of the history of medical ethics. An extensive index guides readers to topics, texts, and proper names. (shrink)

In everyday life, we constantly encounter and deal with useful things without pausing to inquire about the sources of their intelligibility. In Div. I of Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes just such an inquiry. According to a common reading of Heidegger's analysis, the intelligibility of our everyday encounters and dealings with useful things is ultimately constituted by practical self-understandings. In this paper, I argue that while such practical self-understandings may be sufficient to constitute the intelligibility of the tools and equipment (...) specific to many practices, these “tools of the trade” are only a small portion of the things we encounter, use, and deal with on a daily basis. Practical self-understandings cannot similarly account for the intelligibility of the more mundane things—like toothbrushes and sidewalks—used in everyday life. I consider whether an anonymous self-understanding as “one,” “anyone,” or “no one in particular” —das Man—might play this intelligibility-constituting role. In examining this possibility, another type of self-understanding comes to light: cultural identities. I show that the cultural identities into which we are “thrown,” rather than practical identities or das Man, constitute the intelligibility of the abundance of mundane things that fill our everyday lives. Finally, I spell out how this finding bears on our understanding of Heidegger's notion of authenticity. (shrink)

The mental prosthesis model (Silvers and Francis 2009) suggests that interpersonal “prosthetic” thinking could support decision making for people with limited cognitive capacities, and positions th...

The American Medical Association enacted its Code of Ethics in 1847, the first such national codification. In this volume, a distinguished group of experts from the fields of medicine, bioethics, and history of medicine reflect on the development of medical ethics in the United States, using historical analyses as a springboard for discussions of the problems of the present, including what the editors call "a sense of moral crisis precipitated by the shift from a system of fee-for-service medicine to a (...) system of fee-for-system medicine, better known as 'managed care.'" The authors begin with a look at how the medical profession began to consider ethical issues in the 1800s and subsequent developments in the 1900s. They then address the sociological, historical, ethical, and legal aspects of the practice of medicine. Later chapters discuss current and future challenges to medical ethics and professional values. Appendixes display various versions of the AMA's Code of Ethics as it has evolved over time. Contributors: George J. Annas, J.D., M.P.H., Arthur Isak Applbaum, Ph.D., Robert B. Baker, Ph.D., Chester R. Burns, M.D., Ph.D., Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D., Alexander Morgan Capron, J.D., Christine K. Cassel, M.D., Linda L. Emanuel, M.D., Ph.D., Eliot L. Freidson, Ph.D., Albert R. Jonsen, Ph.D., Stephen R. Latham, J.D., Ph.D., Susan E. Lederer, Ph.D., Florencia Luna, Ph.D., Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D., Charles E. Rosenberg, Ph.D., Mark Siegler, M.D., Rosemary A. Stevens, Ph.D., Robert M. Tenery, Jr., M.D., Robert M. Veatch, Ph.D., John Harley Warner, Ph.D., Paul Root Wolpe, Ph.D. (shrink)

Heidegger's primary concern in Being and Time is the question of the meaning of being—a distinctly ontological concern. Yet, with discussions of death, guilt, conscience, anxiety, uncanniness, authenticity, and inauthenticity, Heidegger seems to end up in existential territory. The ontological import of these existential excursions is difficult to discern—indeed, it has not been identified in leading interpretations. In this paper, I aim to highlight the ontological import of Heidegger's analysis of anxiety—it manifests the inadequacy of Dasein's fallen and inauthentic self-understanding, (...) which is motivated by the inadequacy of Dasein's fallen and inauthentic, average understanding of being. In making this case, I will clarify the sense in which anxiety involves an experience of world-collapse and show how it functions to reveal the possibilities of authenticity and inauthenticity. (shrink)

We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural-language corpora. Given a stream of linguistic input, our model incrementally learns a grammar that captures its statistical patterns, which can then be used to parse or generate new data. The grammar constructed in this (...) manner takes the form of a directed weighted graph, whose nodes are recursively (hierarchically) defined patterns over the elements of the input stream. We evaluated the model in seventeen experiments, grouped into five studies, which examined, respectively, (a) the generative ability of grammar learned from a corpus of natural language, (b) the characteristics of the learned representation, (c) sequence segmentation and chunking, (d) artificial grammar learning, and (e) certain types of structure dependence. The model's performance largely vindicates our design choices, suggesting that progress in modeling language acquisition can be made on a broad front—ranging from issues of generativity to the replication of human experimental findings—by bringing biological and computational considerations, as well as lessons from prior efforts, to bear on the modeling approach. (shrink)

That testimony is one of the principle bases on which many people hold their religious beliefs is hard to dispute. Equally hard to dispute is that our world contains an array of mutually incompatible religious traditions each of which has been transmitted down the centuries chiefly by way of testimony. In light of this latter it is quite natural to think that there is something defective about holding religious beliefs primarily or solely on the basis of testimony from a particular (...) tradition. The present chapter takes up the question of what that defect consists in. I first consider whether religious diversity entails that a religious believer’s testimony-based beliefs are not formed in a suitably epistemically reliable manner even conditional upon the truth of her religion. After casting doubt on this thought I turn to look at the idea that testimony-based beliefs are subject to defeaters in light of awareness of religious diversity, and I suggest that many such beliefs are not obviously so. According to my diagnosis the problem, rather, is that believers who base their religious beliefs just on testimony will be very unlikely to have reflective (that is, second-order) knowledge even if they possess first-order knowledge, and I explain why this is a notable shortcoming. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 2 Seiten: 175-194.

While contemplative practices have emerged from wisdom-traditions, the rhetoric surrounding their justification in contemporary public educational settings has been substantially undergirded by the scientific evidence-based approach. This article finds the practice and construct of ‘attention’ to be the bridge between this peculiar encounter of science and wisdom traditions, and a vantage point from which we can re-examine the scope and practice of ‘education’. The article develops an educational typology based on ‘attention’ as a curricular deliberation point. Every pedagogical act rides (...) over a meta-pedagogical injunction of where to attend to find that which society deems worthwhile. The deep curricular teachings thus begin in the question where knowledge of most worth exists and precede content. It is at this hidden level in which our spatial-temporal disposition towards life-meaning can be shaped. Following this typology, the article will suggest that beyond what may be critiqued as instrumental mindfulness-based curricular ‘interventions’ that cater to an economic educational narrative, lurks the trajectory of a contemplative educational turn that may be outwitting over-instrumentalisation through wisdom-traditions. (shrink)

This article considers the contemporary effective altruism (EA) movement from a classical Indian Buddhist perspective. Following barebones introductions to EA and to Buddhism (sections one and two, respectively), section three argues that core EA efforts, such as those to improve global health, end factory farming, and safeguard the long-term future of humanity, are futile on the Buddhist worldview. For regardless of the short-term welfare improvements that effective altruists impart, Buddhism teaches that all unenlightened beings will simply be reborn upon their (...) deaths back into the round of rebirth (samsāra), which is held to be undesirable due to the preponderance of duhkha (unsatisfactoriness, dis-ease, suffering) over well-being that characterizes unenlightened existence. This is the samsāric futility problem. Although Buddhists and effective altruists disagree about what ultimately helps sentient beings, section four suggests that Buddhist-EA dialogue nonetheless generates mutually-instructive insights. Buddhists – including contemporaries, such as those involved in Socially Engaged Buddhism – might take from EA a greater focus on explicit prioritization research, which seeks knowledge of how to do the most good we can, given our finite resources. EA, for its part, has at least two lessons to learn. First, effective altruists have tended to assume that the competing accounts of welfare converge in their practical implications. The Buddhist conception of the pinnacle of welfare as a state free from duhkha and, correspondingly, the Buddhist account of the path that leads to this state weigh against this assumption. Second, contrasting Buddhist with effective altruist priorities shows that descriptive matters of cosmology, ontology, and metaphysics can have decisive practical implications. If EA wants to give a comprehensive answer to its guiding question – “how can we do the most good?” – it must argue for, rather than merely assume, the truth of secular naturalism. (shrink)

The expression ‘nonreductive materialism’ refers to a variety of positions whose roots lie in attempts to solve the mind-body problem. Proponents of nonreductive materialism hold that the mental is ontologically part of the material world; yet, mental properties are causally efficacious without being reducible to physical properties.s After setting out a minimal schema for nonreductive materialism (NRM) as an ontological position, I’ll canvass some classical arguments in favor of (NRM).1 Then, I’ll discuss the major challenge facing any construal of (NRM): (...) the problem of mental causation, pressed by Jaegwon Kim. Finally, I’ll offer a new solution to the problem of mental causation. (shrink)

Interpreters generally understand Heidegger's notion of finitude in one of two ways: as our mortality – that, in the end, we are certain to die; or the susceptibility of our self- and world-understanding to collapse – the fragility and vulnerability of human sense-making. In this paper, I put forward an alternative account of what Heidegger means by ‘finitude’: human self- and world-understanding is non-transparently grounded in a ‘final end.’ Our self- and world-understanding, that is, begins at the end, and authenticity (...) requires us to interpretively appropriate the full range of this understanding. After laying out this view of finitude, via an analogical appeal to the Socratic account of action and desire in the Gorgias, I discuss its relationship to the two leading views of finitude mentioned above. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In his article ‘Divine hiddenness and the demographics of theism’ (Religious Studies, 42 (2006), 177-191) Stephen Maitzen develops a novel version of the atheistic argument from divine hiddenness according to which the lopsided distribution of theistic belief throughout the world’s populations is much more to be expected given naturalism than given theism. I try to meet Maitzen’s challenge by developing a theistic explanation for this lopsidedness. The explanation I offer appeals to various goods that are intimately connected with the human (...) cognitive constitution, and in particular, with the way in which we depend upon social belief forming practices for our acquisition of much of our knowledge about the world – features about us that God would value but that also make probable a lopsided distribution of theistic belief, or so I argue. (shrink)

This book debates competing approaches to ethical decision-making for members of the armed forces of liberal-democratic states. In this volume, four prominent thinkers propose and debate competing approaches to ethical decision-making for military personnel. Deane-Peter Baker presents and expounds the 'Ethical Triangulation' model, an ethical decision-making method he has employed through much of his career as an applied military ethicist. Rufus Black advocates for a natural law-based approach, one which has heavily influenced the framework formally adopted by the Australian (...) Defence Force. Roger Herbert outlines the 'Moral Deliberation Roadmap', the moral reasoning framework recently adopted by the US Naval Academy. Iain King then sets out a model of quasi-utilitarian decision-making developed in several post-conflict settings and refined at the UK's Royal College of Defence Studies. After the opening chapters in which each author outlines their favoured decision-making approach, the four contributors then evaluate each other's proposals, often critically. Philosopher David Whetham offers some concluding thoughts in which he summarises areas of agreement between the authors, identifies key areas of difference, and suggests directions for future research. This book will be of great interest to students of military ethics, the ethics of war, moral philosophy, and International Relations, as well as military professionals. (shrink)

Deliberation often begins with the question ‘What do I want to do?’ rather than the question of what one ought to do. This paper takes that question at face value, as a question about which of one’s desires is strongest, which sometimes guides action. The paper aims to explain which properties of a desire make that desire strong, in the sense of ‘strength’ relevant to this deliberative question. Both motivational force and phenomenological intensity seem relevant to a desire’s strength; however, (...) accounting for the strength of a desire in these terms opens up significant indeterminacy about what we want. The paper argues that this indeterminacy is often resolved simply by posing the question ‘What do I want to do?’ to oneself: there is reason to believe that one’s answer will play a verdictive role, partially determining what the agent most wants. Self-reflective beliefs can play a self-fulfilling role, and surprisingly this seems to follow from basic platitudes about the belief-desire model. (shrink)

People reject ‘paradoxical’ inferences, such as: Luisa didn't play music; therefore, if Luisa played soccer, then she didn't play music. For some theorists, they are invalid for everyday conditionals, but valid in logic. The theory of mental models implies that they are valid, but unacceptable because the conclusion refers to a possibility inconsistent with the premise. Hence, individuals should accept them if the conclusions refer only to possibilities consistent with the premises: Luisa didn't play soccer; therefore, if Luisa played a (...) game then she didn't play soccer. Two experiments corroborated this prediction for three sorts of ‘paradox’, including a disjunctive paradox. (shrink)

By way of essays and a selection of primary sources in parallel text, Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing provides an introduction to a vast, significant, but neglected corpus of early modern literature: collective biography. It focuses especially on the various related strands of political, philosophical, and intellectual and cultural biography as well as on the intersection between biography, historiography, and philosophy. Individual texts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century are presented as examples of how the ancient collective biographical (...) tradition--as represented above all by Plutarch, Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Jerome--was received and transformed in the Renaissance and beyond in accordance with the needs of humanism, religious controversy, politics, and the development of modern philosophy and science"--Provided by publisehr. (shrink)

Beginning with the familiar -- The difference between families and political communities -- States of nature and social contracts -- Order, but not order alone -- On freedom (and liberty) -- Justice -- A brief attempt at describing good politics -- Focus on the Christian contribution -- Concluding thoughts.

Uchiyama et al. emphasize that culture evolves directionally and differentially as a function of selective pressures in different populations. Extending these principles to the level of families, lineages, and individuals exposes additional challenges to estimating heritability. Cultural traits expressed differentially as a function of the genetics whose influence they mask or unmask render inseparable the influences of culture and genetics.

It is no exaggeration to say that there has been an explosion of activity in the field of philosophical enquiry that is known as natural theology. Having been smothered in the early part of the twentieth century due to the dominance of the anti-metaphysical doctrine of logical positivism, natural theology began to make a comeback in the late 1950s as logical positivism collapsed and analytic philosophers took a newfound interest in metaphysical topics such as possibility and necessity, causation, time, the (...) mind-body problem, and God. This chapter begins by considering how we might characterise natural theology as a field of enquiry. It then proceeds to survey the landscape of contemporary natural theology, which has spawned a large and at times highly technical body of literature. Finally, consideration is given to two epistemological issues confronting the theist who wishes to appeal to natural theology, which could be termed the problem of the gap(s) and the problem of accessibility. (shrink)