What would it be for a process to happen backwards in time? Would such a process involve different causal relations? It is common to understand the time-reversal invariance of a physical theory in causal terms, such that whatever can happen forwards in time can also happen backwards in time. This has led many to hold that time-reversal symmetry is incompatible with the asymmetry of cause and effect. This article critiques the causal reading of time reversal. First, I argue that the (...) causal reading requires time-reversal-related models to be understood as representing distinct possible worlds and, on such a reading, causal relations are compatible with time-reversal symmetry. Second, I argue that the former approach does, however, raise serious sceptical problems regarding the causal relations of paradigm causal processes and as a consequence there are overwhelming reasons to prefer a non-causal reading of time reversal, whereby time reversal leaves causal relations invariant. On the non-causal reading, time-reversal symmetry poses no significant conceptual nor epistemological problems for causation. _1_ Introduction _1.1_ The directionality argument _1.2_ Time reversal _2_ What Does Time Reversal Reverse? _2.1_ The B- and C-theory of time _2.2_ Time reversal on the C-theory _2.3_ Answers _3_ Does Time Reversal Reverse Causal Relations? _3.1_ Causation, billiards, and snooker _3.2_ The epistemology of causal direction _3.3_ Answers _4_ Is Time-Reversal Symmetry Compatible with Causation? _4.1_ Incompatibilism _4.2_ Compatibilism _4.3_ Answers _5_ Outlook. (shrink)

Experiences of motion and change are widely taken to have a ‘flow-like’ quality. Call this ‘temporal qualia’. Temporal qualia are commonly thought to be central to the question of whether time objectively passes: (1) passage realists take temporal passage to be necessary in order for us to have the temporal qualia we do; (2) passage antirealists typically concede that time appears to pass, as though our temporal qualia falsely represent time as passing. I reject both claims and make the case (...) that passage-talk plays no useful explanatory role with respect to temporal qualia, but rather obfuscates what the philosophical problem of temporal qualia is. I offer a ‘reductionist’ account of temporal qualia that makes no reference to the concept of passage and argue that it is well motivated by empirical studies in motion perception. (shrink)

“The universe is expanding, not contracting.” Many statements of this form appear unambiguously true; after all, the discovery of the universe’s expansion is one of the great triumphs of empirical science. However, the statement is time-directed: the universe expands towards what we call the future; it contracts towards the past. If we deny that time has a direction, should we also deny that the universe is really expanding? This article draws together and discusses what I call ‘C-theories’ of time — (...) in short, philosophical positions that hold time lacks a direction — from different areas of the literature. I set out the various motivations, aims, and problems for C-theories, and outline different versions of antirealism about the direction of time. (shrink)

Motivational externalists and internalists of various sorts disagree about the circumstances under which it is conceptually possible to have moral opinions but lack moral motivation. Typically, the evidence referred to are intuitions about whether people in certain scenarios who lack moral motivation count as having moral opinions. People’s intuitions about such scenarios diverge, however. I argue that the nature of this diversity is such that, for each of the internalist and externalist theses, there is a strong prima facie reason to (...) reject it. That much might not be very controversial. But I argue further, that it also gives us a strong prima facie reason to reject all of these theses. This is possible since there is an overlooked alternative option to accepting any of them: moral motivation pluralism , the view that different internalist and externalist theses correctly accounts for different people’s concepts of moral opinions, respectively. I end the paper with a discussion of methodological issues relevant to the argument for moral motivation pluralism and of the consequences of this view for theories about the nature of moral opinions, such as cognitivism and non-cognitivism. (shrink)

Uncivil behavior by leaders may be viewed as an effective way to motivate employees. However, supervisor incivility, as a form of unethical supervision, may be undercutting employees’ ability to do their jobs. We investigate linkages between workplace incivility and perceived work ability, a variable that captures employees’ appraisals of their ability to continue working in their jobs. We draw upon the appraisal theory of stress and social identity theory to examine incivility from supervisors as an antecedent to PWA, and to (...) investigate job involvement and grit as joint moderators of this association. Results from data collected in two samples of working adults provided evidence for three-way interactions in relation to PWA. Among employees with high levels of grit, there was no significant relation between supervisor incivility and PWA, regardless of employee job involvement. However, we found some evidence that for those low in grit, having high job involvement was associated with a stronger relationship between supervisor incivility and PWA. Findings attest to the importance of unethical supervisor behavior, showing the potential for supervisor incivility to erode PWA, as well as the importance of grit as a potential buffer. (shrink)

Recently a number of writers have argued that a new form of relativism involves a form of semantic context-dependence which helps it escape the perhaps most common objection to ordinary contextualism; that it cannot accommodate our intuitions about disagreement. I argue: (i) In order to evaluate this claim we have to pay closer attention to the nature of our intuitions about disagreement. (ii) We have different such intuitions concerning different questions: we have more stable disagreement intuitions about moral disputes than (...) about, say, disputes about matters of taste. (iii) The new form of relativism does not vindicate the stable intuitions about disagreement. (iv) It does a better job explaining the unstable intuitions than contextualism. But, pace some relativists, it is not clear that assertion-truth rather than just proposition-truth has to be relativized to accomplish this. (shrink)

Modern physics has provided a range of motivations for holding time to be fundamentally undirected. But how does a temporally adirectional metaphysics, or ‘C-theory’ of time, fit with the time of experience? In this chapter, I look at what kind of problem human time poses for C-theories. First, I ask whether there is a ‘hard problem’ of human time: whether it is in principle impossible to have the kinds of experience we do in a temporally adirectional world. Second I consider (...) the ‘easy problem’: how specific directed aspects of our temporal experience are to be explained by C-theorists. This leads to a greater issue: is there such a thing as an experience of time direction at all to even be explained? I show how the kinds of experience we have that we typically associate with the idea of time being directed can be accommodated within a directionless picture of time. (shrink)

Today's medicine is spiritually deflated and morally adrift; this book explains why and offers an ethical framework to renew and guide practitioners in fulfilling their profession to heal. What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? Answers to these questions are essential both to the practice of medicine and to understanding the moral norms that shape that practice. The Way of Medicine articulates and defends an account of medicine and medical ethics (...) meant to challenge the reigning provider of services model, in which clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a patient and instead offer an array of "health care services" for the sake of the patient's subjective well-being. Against this trend, Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen call for practitioners to recover what they call the Way of Medicine, which offers physicians both a path out of the provider of services model and also the moral resources necessary to resist the various political, institutional, and cultural forces that constantly push practitioners and patients into thinking of their relationship in terms of economic exchange. Curlin and Tollefsen offer an accessible account of the ancient ethical tradition from which contemporary medicine and bioethics has departed. Their investigation, drawing on the scholarship of Leon Kass, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Finnis, leads them to explore the nature of medicine as a practice, health as the end of medicine, the doctor-patient relationship, the rule of double effect in medical practice, and a number of clinical ethical issues from the beginning of life to its end. In the final chapter, the authors take up debates about conscience in medicine, arguing that rather than pretending to not know what is good for patients, physicians should contend conscientiously for the patient's health and, in so doing, contend conscientiously for good medicine. The Way of Medicine is an intellectually serious yet accessible exploration of medical practice written for medical students, health care professionals, and students and scholars of bioethics and medical ethics. (shrink)

This thesis introduces and defends a ‘C theory’ of time. The metaphysics of time literature is primarily concerned with the distinction between the A and B theories of time, with the disagreement concerning whether the passage of time is an objective feature of reality. I argue that the distinction between the B and C theories—in terms of whether time has a ‘privileged’ direction—is of more obvious relevance to the philosophy of physics than is the distinction between the A and B (...) theories. The thesis has three main contentions. (1) In order to maintain a substantial metaphysical dispute between the different theories of time, they must be defined in terms of structural properties, and the naturalistic metaphysics of time direction involves the assessment of these structures in light of contemporary physics. (2) The A theory of time requires a model with two temporal dimensions, and although such a model provides a resolution to a number of problems faced by standard A theories, it is not motivated by physical theory. (3) The dispute between the B and C theories of time is of direct relevance to the philosophy of physics: the B theorist’s assumption of the existence of a privileged temporal direction is of explanatory relevance to physics; and a comparison between unidirectional and adirectional explanations in physics can in principle shed light on whether time is B- or C-theoretic. (shrink)

Whenever A judges that x-ing is morally wrong and B judges that x-ing is not morally wrong, we think that they disagree. The two standard types of accounts of such moral disagreements both presuppose that the class of moral wrong-judgments is uniform, though in different ways. According to the belief account, the disagreement is doxastic: A and B have beliefs with conflicting cognitive contents. This presupposes “belief-uniformity”: that the content of moral concepts is invariant in such a way that, whenever (...) A believes that x-ing is morally wrong and B believes that x-ing is not morally wrong, their beliefs have mutually inconsistent contents. According to the attitude account, moral disagreements are non-doxastic: A and B have clashing practical attitudes. This presupposes “attitude-uniformity”: that moral judgments are always accompanied by, or consist of, desire-like attitudes. Consequently, neither account is available if both uniformity-claims are rejected – as e.g., various forms of content-relativism do. This paper presents a new non-doxastic account of deontic moral disagreement, consistent with the rejection of both uniformity-claims. I argue first, that even if deontic moral judgments are not desires, and are not always accompanied by desires, they have practical direction in the same sense as desires: they are attitudes that one can act in accordance or discordance with. Second: deontic moral disagreement can be understood as clashes in practical direction: roughly, A and B morally disagree if, and only if, some way of acting is in accordance with A’s judgment but in discordance with B’s. (shrink)

It is common wisdom that today’s medicine focuses too much on treating those who are sick and too little on preventing the sickness in the first place. This essay proposes that Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount challenges that assumption and the preventive medicine to which it has given rise. In light of Jesus’ teaching, the essay identifies four apparent problems with much of preventive medicine. It then offers four heuristics that might form a basic Christian logic for (...) medicalizing risk—for discerning when and why it would be fitting, wise, and faithful for Christians to make use of medicine to avoid future illness and death. (shrink)

In what sense is the direction of time a matter of convention? In 'The Direction of Time', Hans Reichenbach makes brief reference to parallels between his views about the status of time’s direction and his conventionalism about geometry. In this article, I: (1) provide a conventionalist account of time direction motivated by a number of Reichenbach’s claims in the book; (2) show how forwards and backwards time can give equivalent descriptions of the world despite the former being the ‘natural’ direction (...) of time; and (3) argue that this offers an important middle-ground position between existing realist and antirealist accounts of the direction of time. (shrink)

For most of the past generation, clinicians have been taught to treat patients' pain until the patient says it is relieved. The opioid crisis has forced both clinicians and patients to reconsider that approach. This essay considers how Christians in particular might assume and seek to overcome their experiences of persistent pain. Wise and faithful responses to pain, especially chronic pain, can take their bearings from how early Christians made sense of the place of both medicine and suffering in a (...) faithful life. This results in not asking medicine to resolve persistent pain, especially not through the use of opioids. Resisting the impulse to medicalize chronic pain will require patience on the part of those who suffer, and both patience and fortitude on the part of the clinicians to whom they present. (shrink)

It is sometimes observed that the debate between internalists and externalists about moral motivation seems to have reached a deadlock. There are those who do, and those who don’t, recognize the intuitive possibility of amoralists: i.e. people having moral opinions without being motivated to act accordingly. This makes Sigrun Svavarsdóttir’s methodological objection to internalism especially interesting, since it promises to break the deadlock through building a case against internalism (construed as a conceptual thesis), not on such intuitions, but on a (...) methodological principle for empirical investigations. According to the objection, internalists incur the burden of argument, since they have to exclude certain explanations of the (verbal and non-verbal) behavior of apparent amoralists, while externalists don’t. In this paper I argue that the objection fails: the principle for empirical investigations is plausible, but Svavarsdóttir’s application of it to internalism is not. Once we clearly distinguish between the conceptual and the empirical aspects of the internalist and externalist explanations of apparent amoralists, we see that these views incur an equal burden of explanation. I end the paper with a positive suggestion to the effect that there is a third alternative, a view that involves accepting neither internalism nor externalism, which does not incur an explanatory burden of the relevant sort. (shrink)

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a parallel crisis emerged in the form of an “infodemic,” where misinformation proliferated through social media at an unprecedented scale. This article delves into the evolving landscape of reliable and misinformation sources reporting on the pandemic, examining their communication dynamics. Leveraging a comprehensive data set encompassing 437,832 news published online by media organizations from January 2020 to December 2021, I employ structural change analysis and network-based natural language processing to explore these dynamics. The findings illuminate the (...) contrasting approaches adopted by reliable sources, which prioritize scientific discourse, and misinformation, which exhibits high topic volatility—rapid change in the focus—suggesting that misinformation sources frequently shift their attention to different topics. Notably, this highlights a deliberate strategy employed by misinformation purveyors, that is, creating false crises without authoritative resolutions, thereby fostering a sense of lack of control, chaos, and uncertainty. Furthermore, the sentiment and morality analysis of COVID-19 news reveal that reliable news tends to maintain a balanced and neutral tone, while misinformation often exhibits a highly negative and morally charged narrative. These results carry significant implications for devising effective social countermeasures against misinformation at various stages of the pandemic. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the plausibility of metaethical relativism, or more specifically, what I call “moral truth-value relativism”: the idea that the truth of a moral statement or belief depends on who utters or has it, or who assesses it. According to the most prevalent variants of this view in philosophical literature – “standard relativism” – the truth-values are relative to people’s moralities, often understood as some subset of their affective or desirelike attitudes. Standard relativism has two main contenders: absolutism – (...) the view that the truth-values of moral statements and beliefs do not vary in that way – and non-cognitivism – the view that moral judgements do not have truth-values, since they express affective or desire-like attitudes rather than beliefs. Almost the entire dissertation concerns the plausibility of standard relativism in contrast to absolutism. Part 1 examines first the two main arguments for standard relativism: that it accounts for the connection between moral judgements and motivation (chapter 2), and for the prevalence of diversity of moral opinion (chapter 3). Then the most common objection is considered: that it is inconsistent with the existence of genuine moral disagreements (chapter 4). I argue that these arguments are inconclusive. Both relativism and absolutism can account for the features discussed. Part 2 focuses on the fact that different people have different strongly held intuitions about the relative or absolute nature of morality. I argue that given a common methodological approach in philosophy and metaethics, which takes such intuitions as evidence of correct analyses, this difference in intuitions suggests that neither a relativist nor absolutist analysis can be correct for everyone’s moral judgements. I argue that this result holds both given semantic internalism (chapter 6) and given semantic externalism (chapter 7). To get one single analysis of everyone’s moral judgements we would have to abandon the intuitionbased methodology. In chapter 8, however, I argue that we can maintain this methodology if we accept analysis pluralism, the view that different analyses hold for different people’s moral judgements. (shrink)

Motivational internalism and externalism – that is, theories about moral motivation – have played central roles in meta‐ethical debate mainly because they have been thought to have implications for the constitutive nature of moral judgements. Thus, internalism and externalism have been adduced in favour of and against various versions of cognitivism and non‐cognitivism. This article aims to question a fundamental presupposition behind such arguments. It has standardly been assumed (i) that if motivational internalism is true then moral judgements must consist (...) of attitudes that cannot be had without the relevant motivation, and (ii) that if motivational externalism is true, then moral judgements must consist of attitudes that one can have without being motivated. Against the background of a recent argument to the effect that the first of these assumptions is false, this article develops a parallel argument against the second. If this argument is correct, then motivational externalism is consistent with moral judgements being attitudes that one cannot have without being motivated. Together with the parallel argument concerning internalism, this means that the meta‐ethical significance of internalism and externalism must be reconsidered. (shrink)

A survey of a wide range of social?scientific disciplines reveals a definite convergence of theoretical interest in human cognition and communication as situated, concerned, and embedded in social commitment. Recent contributions within situation semantics and cognitive science explicitly reject some of the constraints inherent in their shared philosophical heritage and prepare novel ground for dialogues between fields as far apart as formal semantics and ?dialogical? text theory. Issues such as purely cognitive versus motivational aspects of human situatedness, and the relationship (...) between models of individual information processing, on the one hand, and hermeneutic?dialectic assumptions about social and collective features of meaning and mind, on the other, are thus made topics of cross?disciplinary discussions. These are some of the many problems in need of further clarification if we want to explore the possibility of bridging and/or transcending the gulf between analytic?rationalist and hermeneutic?dialectic contributions to our insight into human cognition and communication. (shrink)

According to moral non-naturalism, the kind of genuine or robust normativity that is characteristic of moral requirements cannot be accounted for within a wholly naturalistic worldview, but requires us to posit a domain of non-natural properties and facts. The main argument for this core non-naturalist claim appeals to what David Enoch calls the 'just-too-different intuition'. According to Enoch, robust normativity cannot be natural, since it is just too different from anything natural. Derek Parfit makes essentially the same claim under the (...) heading of 'the normativity objection', and several other non-naturalists have said similar things. While some naturalists may be tempted to reject this argument as methodologically or dialectically illegitimate, we argue instead that there are important limits to what the just-too-different intuition can show, even setting all other worries aside. More specifically, we argue that the just-too-different argument will backfire on any positive, independent specification of the distinction between the natural and the non-natural. The upshot is that the just-too-different argument can show significantly less than non-naturalists have suggested. (shrink)

Practitioners of palliative medicine frequently encounter patients suffering distress caused by uncontrolled pain or other symptoms. To relieve such distress, palliative medicine clinicians often use measures that result in sedation of the patient. Often such sedation is experienced as a loss by patients and their family members, but sometimes such sedation is sought as the desired outcome. Peace is wanted. Comfort is needed. Sedation appears to bring both. Yet to be sedated is to be cut off existentially from human experience, (...) to be made incapable of engaging self-consciously in any human action. To that extent, it seems that to lose consciousness is to lose something of real value. In this paper, I describe how sedation and the question of intentionally bringing about sedation arise in the care of patients with advanced illness, and I propose heuristics to guide physicians, including Christian physicians, who seek to relieve suffering without contradicting their profession to heal. (shrink)

In the two feature articles for this volume, Gruber et al and Buonomano & Rovelli focus on what the former call the 'two-times problem', in short, the apparent lack of fit between time as described by physical science and our own temporal experience, where 'experience' involves things like memory, anticipation, and perception of change and motion. In this short note I'll make the case that the twotimes problem is less serious than it is often made out to be in the (...) specific case of features like 'passage ' and 'presentness' that are central to the 'A-theory' of time ---the theory that holds time to be composed of dynamic regions of 'past', 'present' and future', and for time to genuinely flow or pass.My contention is three-fold: (1) the two-times problem is better understood as a three-times problem: rather than a conflict between 'physical' and 'manifest' time, what we have in the case of time is differences between the time of physics, the time of experience, and the 'folk' concept of time. (2) Understanding the problem in this way helps deflate certain problems about the relationship of these three pictures; the time of experience and the time of physics are less obviously in a problematic conflict than often supposed; and the folk concept of time is what brings in problematic features of time hard to fit with either the time of physics of experience. (3) Understanding the time of experience as independent from the folk concept of time better fits the actual aims of the... (shrink)

Market metaphors have come to dominate discourse on medical practice. In this essay, we revisit Peter Berger and colleagues’ analysis of modernization in their book The Homeless Mind and place that analysis in conversation with Max Weber’s 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation” to argue that the rise of market metaphors betokens the carry-over to medical practice of various features from the institutions of technological production and bureaucratic administration. We refer to this carry-over as the product presumption. The product presumption (...) foregrounds accidental features of medicine while hiding its essential features. It thereby confounds the public understanding of medicine and impedes the professional achievement of the excellences most central to medical practice. In demonstrating this pattern, we focus on a recent article, “Physicians, Not Conscripts—Conscientious Objection in Health Care,” in which Ronit Stahl and Ezekiel Emanuel decry conscientious refusals by medical practitioners. We demonstrate that Stahl and Emanuel’s argument depends on the product presumption, ignoring and undermining central features of good medicine. We conclude by encouraging conscientious resistance to the product presumption and the language it engenders. (shrink)

Abstract During the last decades it has become widely accepted that scientific observations are ?theory?laden?. Scientists ?see? the world with their theories or theoretical presuppositions. In the present paper it is argued that they ?see? with their scientific instruments as well, as the uses of scientific instruments is an important characteristic of modern natural science. It is further argued that Euclidean geometry is intimately linked to technology, and hence that it plays a fundamental part in the construction and operation of (...) scientific instruments. Finally, Euclidean geometry is compared to fractal geometry, and the question of its a priori status is raised. Although the position that Euclidean geometry is a priori in the original Kantian sense is untenable, the paper concludes that in some restricted sense Euclidean geometry may be said to be a priori. (shrink)

On a simple and neat view, sometimes called the Relational Analysis of Attitude Ascriptions, a belief ascription on the form ‘S believes that x is F’ is correct if, and only if, S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition designated by ‘that x is F’, i.e., the proposition that x is F. It follows from this view that, for a person to believe, say, that x is a boat, there is one unique proposition that she has to believe. This (...) paper argues against this view. It fails, I contend, to make sense of peripheral concept variation. As we attribute and individuate concepts, two people’s concepts C1 and C2 count as e.g., concepts of boats even if their concepts have different extensions in peripheral, or borderline, cases of boats. Thus, A and B can believe that x is a boat through believing peripherally different propositions. It follows that there is no unique proposition that a person has to believe in order to believe e.g., that x is a boat. (shrink)

Over the past decade, scores of articles have been published debating whether and when it is ethical for physicians to refuse requests from patients for legal, professionally permitted interventions. Numerous voices have condemned "conscientious refusals" for obstructing patients' access to needed and "standard" health-care services, for imposing physicians' personal ideologies on patients, and for contradicting physicians' professional ethical obligations. Conversely, other voices argue that conscientious refusals are essential for maintaining the integrity of clinicians as moral agents, for assuring the renown (...) of the broader medical profession, and for preventing the imposition of moral viewpoints onto minorities... (shrink)

Over the past 25 years, migrant detention and criminalisation has steadily increased in the United States. This state of affairs has triggered social workers to advocate through policy and service on behalf of migrants. In order to evaluate contemporary practice, a critical position is generated through a genealogy of social work practice with migrants where the colonial archeology of contemporary social work practice is found in the history of the settlement movement. Here, an irony becomes apparent within social work. Social (...) work practice is a settler colonialism paralleled by Gayatri Spivak's reading of colonial discourses resulting in the subaltern condition. Following Spivak's analysis, social work advocacies affirm migrant subalternity by re-presenting the migrant as an image of nonagentive victimhood while simultaneously representing migrants through political advocacies on their behalf. As a liberation ethics counter to the colonial discourses, Spivak's exit of subalternity as the road to hegemony is drawn for social work practice. In this effort, Indigenous Action Media's distinction between allies and accomplices is central to develop a social work practice as an ethics of liberation. Social workers thus become accomplices with criminalised and detained migrants on the road to hegemony. (shrink)

The traditional approach of the academy to research requires the practitioner to locate their inquiries in an academic discipline, inevitably restricting the study to a limited aspect of the challenges of practice and requiring an objectivity that removes the researcher from the action. This paper describes a fresh response to this question – a Post-graduate Programme in Professional Practice. The programme, offered by the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, draws on work-based learning and reflective practice and facilitates a process of (...) critical inquiry and transformative action in the scholar-practioner's own context. (shrink)

While science is taken to differ from non-scientific activities in virtue of its methodology, metaphysics is usually defined in terms of its subject matter. However, many traditional questions of metaphysics are addressed in a variety of ways by science, making it difficult to demarcate metaphysics from science solely in terms of their subject matter. Are the methodologies of science and metaphysics sufficiently distinct to act as criteria of demarcation between the two? In this chapter we focus on several important overlaps (...) in the methodologies used within science and metaphysics in order to argue that focusing solely on methodology is insufficient to offer a sharp demarcation between metaphysics and science, and consider the consequences of this for the wider relationship between science and metaphysics. (shrink)