A number of philosophers have recently argued that we should interpret the debate over moral responsibility as a debate over the conditions under which it would be “fair” to blame a person for her attitudes or conduct. What is distinctive about these accounts is that they begin with the stance of the moral judge, rather than that of the agent who is judged, and make attributions of responsibility dependent upon whether it would be fair or appropriate for a moral judge (...) to react to the agent in various (negative) ways. This is problematic, I argue, because our intuitions about whether and when it would be fair to react negatively to another are sensitive to a host of considerations that appear to have little or nothing to do with an agent’s responsibility or culpability for her attitudes or behavior. If this is correct, then theories which make attributions of responsibility dependent upon the appropriateness of our reactions as moral judges will turn out to be fundamentally misguided. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers have begun to question the commonly held view that choice or voluntary control is a precondition of moral responsibility. According to these philosophers, what really matters in determining a person’s responsibility for some thing is whether that thing can be seen as indicative or expressive of her judgments, values, or normative commitments. Such accounts might therefore be understood as updated versions of what Susan Wolf has called “real self views,” insofar as they attempt to ground (...) an agent’s responsibility for her actions and attitudes in the fact (when it is a fact) that they express who she is as a moral agent. As such, they seem to be open to some of the same objections Wolf originally raised to such accounts, and in particular to the objection that they cannot license the sorts of robust moral assessments involved in our current practices of moral responsibility. My aim in this paper is to try to respond to this challenge, by clarifying the kind of robust moral assessments I take to be licensed by (at least some) non-volitional accounts of responsibility and by explaining why these assessments do not in general require the agent to have voluntary control over everything for which she is held responsible. I also argue that the limited applicability of the distinction between “bad agents” and “blameworthy agents” on these accounts is in fact a mark in their favor. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt has recently become fashionable among those who write on questions of moral responsibility to distinguish two different concepts, or senses, of moral responsibility via the labels ‘responsibility as attributability’ and ‘responsibility as accountability’. Gary Watson was perhaps the first to introduce this distinction in his influential 1996 article ‘Two Faces of Responsibility’ , but it has since been taken up by many other philosophers. My aim in this study is to raise some questions and doubts about this distinction and (...) to argue that it has led to confusion rather than clarification in debates over moral responsibility. In place of the attributability/accountability distinction, I propose that there is a single concept of moral responsibility underlying our actual moral practices. This core notion of moral responsibility, which I call ‘responsibility as answerability’, is well positioned to explain thos.. (shrink)

International research, sponsored by for-profit companies, is regularly criticised as unethical on the grounds that it exploits research subjects in developing countries. Many commentators agree that exploitation occurs when the benefits of cooperative activity are unfairly distributed between the parties. To determine whether international research is exploitative we therefore need an account of fair distribution. Procedural accounts of fair bargaining have been popular solutions to this problem, but I argue that they are insufficient to protect against exploitation. I argue (...) instead that a maximin principle of fair distribution provides a more compelling normative account of fairness in relationships characterised by extreme vulnerability and inequality of bargaining potential between the parties. A global tax on international research would provide a mechanism for implementing the maximin account of fair benefits. This model has the capacity to ensure fair benefits and thereby prevent exploitation in international research. (shrink)

The concept of ‘ownership’ is increasingly central to debates, in the media, health policy and bioethics, about the appropriate management of clinical data. I argue that the language of ownership acts as a metaphor and reflects multiple concerns about current data use and the disenfranchisement of citizens and collectives in the existing data ecosystem. But exactly which core interests and concerns ownership claims allude to remains opaque. Too often, we jump straight from ‘ownership’ to ‘private property’ and conclude ‘the data (...) belongs to the patient’. I will argue here that private property is only one type of relevant relationship between people, communities and data. There are several reasons to doubt that conceptualising data as private property presents a compelling response to concerns about clinical data ownership. In particular I argue that clinical data are co-constructed, so a property account would fail to confer exclusive rights to the patient. A non-property account of ownership acknowledges that the data are ‘about the patient’, and therefore the patient has relevant interests, without jumping to the conclusion that the data ‘belongs to the patient’. On this broader account of ownership, the relevant harm is the severing of the connection between the patient and their data, and the solution is to re-engage and re-connect patients to the data research enterprise. (shrink)

In 2004 Emanuel et al. published an influential account of exploitation in international research, which has become known as the 'fair benefits account'. In this paper I argue that the thin definition of fairness presented by Emanuel et al, and subsequently endorsed by Gbadegesin and Wendler, does not provide a notion of fairness that is adequately robust to support a fair benefits account of exploitation. The authors present a procedural notion of fairness – the fair distribution of (...) the benefits of research is to be determined on a case-by-case basis by the parties involved in each study. The fairness of the distribution of benefits is not assessed against an independent normative standard. Emanuel et al.'s account of fairness provides a framework for objecting only to transactions that occur without the fully informed consent of the weaker party. As a result, a debate about exploitation collapses into a debate about consent. This is problematic because, as the proponents of the fair benefits framework acknowledge, neither the trial participants' consent nor the host community's consent preclude exploitation. Attempts to stipulate normative standards of fairness to protect research subjects in developing countries have been controversial and divisive, and it is therefore understandable that bioethicists would be tempted to develop accounts of exploitation that are independent of such prescriptive principles. I conclude, however, that the utility of the fair benefits model of exploitation as a policy tool will ultimately depend on whether a substantive principle of fairness can be developed to underpin it. (shrink)

Some mental states seem to be "of" or "about" things, or to "say" something. For example, a thought might represent that grass is green, and a visual experience might represent a blue cup. This is intentionality. The aim of this book is to explain this phenomenon. -/- Once we understand intentionality as a phenomenon to be explained, rather than a posit in a theory explaining something else, we can see that there are glaring empirical and in principle difficulties with currently (...) popular tracking and functional role theories of intentionality, which aim to account for intentionality in terms of tracking relations and functional roles. -/- This book develops an alternative theory, the phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT), on which the source of intentionality is none other than phenomenal consciousness, the subjective, felt, or qualitative aspect of mental life. While PIT avoids the problems that plague tracking and functional role theories, it faces its own challenges in accounting for the rich and complex contents of thoughts and the contents of nonconscious states. In responding to these challenges, this book proposes a novel version of PIT, on which all intentionality is phenomenal intentionality, though we in some sense represent many non-phenomenal contents by ascribing them to ourselves. This book further argues that phenomenal consciousness is an intrinsic feature of mental life, resulting in a view that is radically internalistic in spirit: Our phenomenally represented contents are literally in our heads, and any non-phenomenal contents we in some sense represent are expressly targeted by us. (shrink)

Causal accounts of scientific explanation are currently broadly accepted (though not universally so). My first task in this paper is to show that, even for a causal approach to explanation, significant features of explanatory practice are not determined by settling how causal facts bear on the phenomenon to be explained. I then develop a broadly causal approach to explanation that accounts for the additional features that I argue an explanation should have. This approach to explanation makes sense of several aspects (...) of actual explanatory practice, including the widespread use of equilibrium explanations, the formulation of distinct explanations for a single event, and the tight relationship between explanations of events and explanations of causal regularities. (shrink)

Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations, the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate methodologies to analyze a wider range of first-person accounts of AVH (...) at 3 contextual levels: cultural, social, and historical; experiential; and biographical. We go on to show that there are significant potential benefits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include informing the development and refinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientific enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences. (shrink)

I argue for the unity of imagination in two prima facie diverse contexts: experiences of beauty and achievements of understanding. I develop my argument in three steps. First, I begin by describing a type of aesthetic experience that is grounded in a set of imaginative activities on the part of the person having the experience. Second, I argue that the same set of imaginative activities that grounds this type of aesthetic experience also contributes to achievements of understanding. Third, I show (...) that my unified account of imagination has important implications: it sheds light on two puzzling phenomena, the aesthetic value of science and the cognitive value of art. (shrink)

This paper contends that a research ethics approach to the regulation of health data research is unhelpful in the era of population‐level research and big data because it results in a primary focus on consent (meta‐, broad, dynamic and/or specific consent). Two recent guidelines – the 2016 WMA Declaration of Taipei on ethical considerations regarding health databases and biobanks and the revised CIOMS International ethical guidelines for health‐related research involving humans – both focus on the growing reliance on health data (...) for research. But as research ethics documents, they remain (to varying degrees) focused on consent and individual control of data use. Many current and future uses of health data make individual consent impractical, if not impossible. Many of the risks of secondary data use apply to communities and stakeholders rather than individual data subjects. Shifting from a research ethics perspective to a public health lens brings a different set of issues into view: how are the benefits and burdens of data use distributed, how can data research empower communities, who has legitimate decision‐making capacity? I propose that a public health ethics framework – based on public benefit, proportionality, equity, trust and accountability – provides more appropriate tools for assessing the ethical uses of health data. The main advantage of a public health approach for data research is that it is more likely to foster debate about power, justice and equity and to highlight the complexity of deciding when data use is in the public interest. (shrink)

Scientific explanations must bear the proper relationship to the world: they must depict what, out in the world, is responsible for the explanandum. But explanations must also bear the proper relationship to their audience: they must be able to create human understanding. With few exceptions, philosophical accounts of explanation either ignore entirely the relationship between explanations and their audience or else demote this consideration to an ancillary role. In contrast, I argue that considering an explanation’s communicative role is crucial to (...) any satisfactory account of explanation. (shrink)

There is an apparent tension in our everyday moral responsibility practices. On the one hand, it is commonly assumed that moral responsibility requires voluntary control: an agent can be morally responsible only for those things that fall within the scope of her voluntary control. On the other hand, we regularly praise and blame individuals for mental states and conditions that appear to fall outside the scope of their voluntary control, such as desires, emotions, beliefs, and other attitudes. In order to (...) resolve this apparent tension, many philosophers appeal to a tracing principle to argue that agents are morally responsible for those attitudes whose existence can be traced back, causally, to a voluntary action or omission in the past. My aim in this article is to critically evaluate this tracing strategy and to argue that it gives us a misguided picture of when and why we are morally responsible for our attitudes. I argue that we should accept a ‘judgment sensitivity’ condition of moral responsibility rather than a ‘voluntary control’ condition, and defend this account against various objections. (shrink)

The fate of optimality modeling is typically linked to that of adaptationism: the two are thought to stand or fall together (Gould and Lewontin, Proc Relig Soc Lond 205:581–598, 1979; Orzack and Sober, Am Nat 143(3):361–380, 1994). I argue here that this is mistaken. The debate over adaptationism has tended to focus on one particular use of optimality models, which I refer to here as their strong use. The strong use of an optimality model involves the claim that selection is (...) the only important influence on the evolutionary outcome in question and is thus linked to adaptationism. However, biologists seldom intend this strong use of optimality models. One common alternative that I term the weak use simply involves the claim that an optimality model accurately represents the role of selection in bringing about the outcome. This and other weaker uses of optimality models insulate the optimality approach from criticisms of adaptationism, and they account for the prominence of optimality modeling (broadly construed) in population biology. The centrality of these uses of optimality models ensures a continuing role for the optimality approach, regardless of the fate of adaptationism. (shrink)

One of biology's fundamental aims is to generate understanding of the living world around—and within—us. In this chapter, I aim to provide a relatively nonpartisan discussion of the nature of explanation in biology, grounded in widely shared philosophical views about scientific explanation. But this discussion also reflects what I think is important for philosophers and biologists alike to appreciate about successful scientific explanations, so some points will be controversial, at least among philosophers. I make three main points: (1) causal relationships (...) and broad patterns have often been granted importance to scientific explanations, and they are in fact both important; (2) some explanations in biology cite the components of or processes in systems that account for the systems’ features, whereas other explanations feature large-scale or structural causes that influence a system; and (3) there can be multiple different explanations of a given biological phenomenon, explanations that respond to different research aims and can thus be compatible with one another even when they may seem to disagree. (shrink)

It is a common thought that mathematics can be not only true but also beautiful, and many of the greatest mathematicians have attached central importance to the aesthetic merit of their theorems, proofs and theories. But how, exactly, should we conceive of the character of beauty in mathematics? In this paper I suggest that Kant's philosophy provides the resources for a compelling answer to this question. Focusing on §62 of the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’, I argue against the common view (...) that Kant's aesthetics leaves no room for beauty in mathematics. More specifically, I show that on the Kantian account beauty in mathematics is a non-conceptual response felt in light of our own creative activities involved in the process of mathematical reasoning. The Kantian proposal I thus develop provides a promising alternative to Platonist accounts of beauty widespread among mathematicians. While on the Platonist conception the experience of mathematical beauty consists in an intellectual insight into the fundamental structures of the universe, according to the Kantian proposal the experience of beauty in mathematics is grounded in our felt awareness of the imaginative processes that lead to mathematical knowledge. The Kantian account I develop thus offers to elucidate the connection between aesthetic reflection, creative imagination and mathematical cognition. (shrink)

Locke’s theory of consciousness is often appropriated as a forerunner of present-day Higher-Order Perception (HOP) theories, but not much is said about it beyond that. We offer an interpretation of Locke’s account of consciousness that portrays it as crucially different from current-day HOP theory, both in detail and in spirit. In this paper, it is argued that there are good historical and philosophical reasons to attribute to Locke the view not that conscious states are accompanied by higher-order perceptions, but (...) rather that conscious states constitute perceptions of themselves. (shrink)

Can aesthetic judgements legitimately be linked to the success of scientific theories? I suggest that a satisfactory answer to this question should account for the persistent attraction that aesthetic considerations seem to have for scientists, while also explaining the apparent instability of the link between the beauty of a theory and its truth. I argue that two widespread tendencies in the literature, Pythagorean and subjectivist approaches, have difficulties meeting this twofold challenge. I propose a Kantian conception of aesthetic judgements (...) as second‐order considerations, related to our own intellectual capacities for making sense of the world, and argue that it fares better. (shrink)

The 1940s and 1950s were marked by intense debates over the origin of drug resistance in microbes. Bacteriologists had traditionally invoked the notions of ‘training’ and ‘adaptation’ to account for the ability of microbes to acquire new traits. As the field of bacterial genetics emerged, however, its participants rejected ‘Lamarckian’ views of microbial heredity, and offered statistical evidence that drug resistance resulted from the selection of random resistant mutants. Antibiotic resistance became a key issue among those disputing physiological vs. (...) genetic explanations of variation in bacteria. Postwar developments connected with the Lysenko affair gave this debate a new political valence.Proponents of the neo-Darwinian synthesis weighed in with support for the genetic theory. However, certain features of drug resistance seemed inexplicable by mutation and selection, particularly the phenomenon of ‘multiple resistance’—the emergence of resistance in a single strain against several unrelated antibiotics. In the late 1950s, Tsutomu Watanabe and his collaborators solved this puzzle by determining that resistance could be conferred by cytoplasmic resistance factors rather than chromosomal mutation. These R factors could carry resistance to many antibiotics and seemed able to promote their own dissemination in bacterial populations. In the end, the vindication of the genetic view of drug resistance was accompanied by a recasting of the ‘gene’ to include extrachromosomal hereditary units carried on viruses and plasmids. (shrink)

The tremendous philosophical focus on how to characterize explanatory metaphysical dependence has eclipsed a number of other unresolved issued about scientific explanation. The purpose of this paper is taxonomical. I will outline a number of other questions about the nature of explanation and its role in science—eight, to be precise—and argue that each is independent. All of these topics have received some philosophical attention, but none nearly so much as it deserves. Furthermore, existing views on these topics have been obscured (...) by not distinguishing among these independent questions and, especially, by not separating them from the question of what metaphysical dependence relation is explanatory. Philosophical analysis of scientific explanation would be much improved by attending more carefully to these, and probably still other, elements of an account of explanation. (shrink)

Concerns about exploitation pervade the literature on commercial cross-border reproductive care, particularly egg selling and surrogacy. But what constitutes exploitation, and what moral weight does it have? I consider the relationship between vulnerability, limited choice, consent, and mutually advantageous exploitation. To elucidate the difference between limited choice and consent, I draw on an account of relational autonomy. In the absence of a normative principle of fair distribution, it is unclear whether the providers of reproductive goods and services are treated (...) fairly in such contracts, and therefore whether they have been exploited. I finish with some pragmatic recommendations for minimizing risks and empowering egg sellers and surrogates. (shrink)

Michael Strevens offers an account of causal explanation according to which explanatory practice is shaped by counterbalanced commitments to representing causal influence and abstracting away from overly specific details. In this paper, I challenge a key feature of that account. I argue that what Strevens calls explanatory frameworks figure prominently in explanatory practice because they actually improve explanations. This suggestion is simple but has far-reaching implications. It affects the status of explanations that cite multiply realizable properties; changes the (...) explanatory role of causal factors with small effect; and undermines Strevens’ titular explanatory virtue, depth. This results in greater coherence with explanatory practice and accords with the emphasis that Strevens places on explanatory patterns. Ultimately, my suggestion preserves a tight connection between explanation and the creation of understanding by taking into account explanations’ role in communication. (shrink)

Presents an interpretation of David Hume's account of what a 'cause' is. This book emphasises on the connections between Hume's theories of cause, space and time, morals, and aesthetics.

Moods and emotions are sometimes thought to be counterexamples to intentionalism, the view that a mental state's phenomenal features are exhausted by its representational features. The problem is that moods and emotions are accompanied by phenomenal experiences that do not seem to be adequately accounted for by any of their plausibly represented contents. This paper develops and defends an intentionalist view of the phenomenal character of moods and emotions on which emotions and some moods represent intentional objects as having sui (...) generis affective properties, which happen to be uninstantiated, and at least some moods represent affective properties not bound to any objects. (shrink)

This article argues that resolutions are reason-giving: when an agent resolves to φ, she incurs an additional normative reason to φ. Resolution-making is therefore a normative power: an ability we have to alter our normative circumstances through sheer acts of will. I argue that the reasons we incur from forming resolutions are importantly similar to the reasons we incur from making promises. My account explains why it can be rational for an agent to act on a past resolution even (...) if temptation causes a shift in her preferences and even her judgment about what to do, and offers a response to a common objection to the normativity of resolutions known as the bootstrapping problem, on which if resolutions were reason-giving, they would problematically allow us to bootstrap any action into rationality simply by resolving to perform it. (shrink)

When we evaluate artworks, we often point to what an artist could have done or what a work could have been in order to say something about the work as it actually is. Call this counterfactual reasoning in art criticism. On my account, counterfactual claims about artworks involve comparative aesthetic judgments between actual artworks and hypothetical variations of those works. The practice of imagining what an artwork could have been is critically useful because it can help us understand how (...) artworks achieve specific aesthetic effects. I conclude by responding to an objection to my account on the basis that it violates the widely accepted acquaintance principle in aesthetics, on which aesthetic judgments must be based on firsthand perceptual encounters with their objects. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Poetics is the first philosophical account of an art form and is the foundational text in the history of aesthetics. The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics is an accessible guide to this often dense and cryptic work. Angela Curran introduces and assesses: Aristotle’s life and the background to the Poetics the ideas and text of the Poetics , including mimēsis ; poetic technē; the definition of tragedy; the elements of poetic composition; the Poetics’ recommendations (...) for tragic plot patterns; catharsis ; epic and comedy; the nature of our emotional response to drama; the proper pleasure of tragedy; and the role that art plays in a human life the relevance of Aristotle’s work in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and philosophical psychology to the Poetics a comparison of Plato and Aristotle on the value of mimetic art the continuing importance of Aristotle’s Poetics to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of film. (shrink)

In their response to ‘Public interest in health data research: laying out the conceptual groundwork’, Grewal and Newson critique us for inattention to the law and putting forward an impracticably broad conceptual understanding of public interest. While we agree more work is needed to generate a workable framework for Institutional Review Boards/Research Ethics Committees, we would contend that this should be grounded on a broad conception of public interest. This broadness facilitates regulatory agility, and is already reflected by some current (...) frameworks such as that found in the guidelines approved under Australia’s Privacy Act. It remains unclear which elements of our broad account Grewal and Newson would reject, or indeed where the substantive disagreement with our position lies. (shrink)

In his Kant on Laws, Eric Watkins presents an account of reason on which the principles of specification and continuity are regulative instructions to search for different kinds of the unconditioned. I suggest that we correct Watkins’ account in two ways. First, we need to complete Watkins’ claim to the plurality of the unconditioned: reason aims for three kinds of the unconditioned, associated with the lowest, next and highest concepts. Second, we need to look beyond reason’s search for (...) the unconditioned in order to properly understand the nature of the aim of reason. I argue that we construe reason’s aim as the systematic unity of cognition considered as a whole or, in Kant’s teleological terms, as the realization of an ‘idea’, or a ‘purposive unity’. (shrink)

In Calvin's doctrine of sanctification and in recent work on children's moral formation within developmental psychology, we find a surprising convergence. In both cases, moral formation or transformation takes place within the context of a parent's loving and unconditional commitment to a child. Although Reformed doctrines of sanctification have struggled to articulate how the graced change of sanctification is intelligible as a human process, a comparison between these two approaches shows that sanctification is both intelligible to the moral agent and (...) a genuinely human process. This comparison also highlights affective social acceptance as a condition for moral agency that is infrequently addressed in theoretical accounts of moral formation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Rights and Women's RightsAngela KnobelMainstream feminists insist, with a degree of unanimity that is sometimes surprising, that access to abortion is an essential precondition of female equality. That feminism, which is in other respects so flexible, inclusive, and uncategorizable, should be so unyielding with respect to this particular issue seems surprising to many. It is especially surprising to those who, while sympathetic to other feminist goals, also oppose (...) abortion.1 Why is access to abortion so important? Why must one's views about the equality of women stand or fall on one's views about the value of unborn human life? If feminism has to have a flagship issue, why must that issue be abortion? In this paper, I will propose that Pierre Manent's Natural Law and Human Rights offers a possible answer to this question. I will argue that, to the extent that mainstream feminism assumes the truth of what Manent calls the "philosophy of human rights," it cannot not advocate abortion access. Similarly, I will argue that pro-life feminist attempts to defend the contrary position—namely, that abortion is antithetical to feminism—invariably assume the natural law that the philosophy of human rights rejects. My argument, if correct, suggests the pivot point in discussions of abortion and feminism occurs much further back than many acknowledge: in our very understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.In what follows I will first briefly summarize Manent's account of what he calls the "philosophy of human rights." With this background in place, [End Page 275] I will consider the mainstream feminist claim that access to abortion is a necessary precondition of female equality. When "equality" is understood through the lens of the philosophy of human rights, I argue, the mainstream feminist insistence on access to abortion becomes coherent: a feminism that assumes the truth of the philosophy of human rights cannot not insist on access to abortion. The pro-life feminist reply that abortion harms and oppresses women, by contrast, is coherent only to the extent one assumes the framework of natural law.2Natural Law or Human Rights?To believe in natural law is to believe that nature itself sets the standard for human life. What the "law" commands is simply action necessary for the realization of the potential implicit in our nature. Under such a framework, Manent notes, "natural inclinations and natural differences, if they exist, constitute a kind of language of nature."3 The fact that human beings are naturally rational or naturally social, or that biological males are (typically) attracted to biological women, helps provide insight into nature's "law": "Natural law issued commands in the name of a teaching implicit in human nature, in a tendency of human nature to society and to knowledge, or in a natural difference among ages, sexes, and capacities, a tendency or difference that reason once made explicit and on the basis of which it founded its commandments and recommendations."4 Nature's laws can be and frequently are violated: cultures or individuals can choose to live up to nature's laws or not. For this reason, Manent says that, under the traditional framework of natural law, human beings are "free under the law."5 Natural law is something we freely choose to follow or freely choose to reject, but because it stems from our human nature, it does not cease to bind even those who reject it.The philosophy of human rights, by contrast, accepts the notion of freedom but rejects the notion of any overarching "law" against which our free choices are to be measured. While the philosophy of natural law is rooted in the language of nature, and thus sees human beings as free "under the law" of nature, the philosophy of human rights puts freedom prior to [End Page 276] law and recognizes law only as a means of preserving freedom.6 While the philosophy of natural law understands individual human beings in terms of their human nature, and thus in terms of their natural inclinations and natural differences, the philosophy of human rights rejects the language of "nature" in favor of an "impoverished common denominator," namely equality... (shrink)

Reliable misrepresentation is getting things wrong in the same way all the time. In Mendelovici 2013, I argue that tracking theories of mental representation cannot allow for certain kinds of reliable misrepresentation, and that this is a problem for those views. Artiga 2013 defends teleosemantics from this argument. He agrees with Mendelovici 2013 that teleosemantics cannot account for clean cases of reliable misrepresentation, but argues that this is not a problem for the views. This paper clarifies and improves the (...) argument in Mendelovici 2013 and response to Artiga's arguments. Tracking theories, teleosemantics included, really do need to allow for clean cases of reliable misrepresentation. (shrink)

Like many corporations, the Catholic Church in the United States and Ireland has tried to move beyond scandal. In this case, the scandal was the failure of church leaders to protect minors from clergy sexual abuse, particularly in Boston and Dublin. Like corporate leaders, church leaders have faced the challenge of restoring trust after scandal. Influenced by corporate trends toward codes of conduct, the archdioceses of both Boston and Dublin provide codes of conduct, but the differences between them are worth (...) noting. In 2015, the Catholic Church in both the United States and Ireland highlighted the need for a culture of accountability that does not succumb to complacency, and in the United States the bishops have once again been encouraged to learn from business. This paper will demonstrate that the Catholic Church is in dialogue with and learns from codes of conduct and cultural practices in business. At the same time, it will highlight that the Catholic Church must also be attentive to its own mission since a simple adoption of other corporations’ practices can be detrimental to sharing the Gospel. The appropriation of codes of conduct and cultural practices from business reflects the church’s attentiveness to the signs of the times, and this appropriation needs to be evaluated in the light of the church’s mission to share the Gospel with the world. (shrink)

Underlying the current debate between simulation theory and theory theory is the assumption that folk psychological explanations of behavior are causal. Simulationists Martin Davies, Tony Stone, and Jane Heal claim that folk psychological explanations are explanations that make sense of another person by citing the thoughts important to the determination of his behavior on a given occasion. I argue that it is unlikely these explanations will be causal. Davis et al. base their claim on the assumption that a certain isomorphism (...) obtains between the cognitive mechanisms of human beings. Investigation into the nature of the isomorphism required reveals that it is of a sort that is unlikely to obtain. I suggest that in order to maintain their challenge to theory theory, simulationists must either motivate and describe a non-causal simulation-based account of folk psychological explanation or else delineate a causal account that attributes a nonessential, heuristic role to simulation. (shrink)

According to intentionalism, phenomenal properties are identical to, supervenient on, or determined by representational properties. Intentionalism faces a special challenge when it comes to accounting for the phenomenal character of moods. First, it seems that no intentionalist treatment of moods can capture their apparently undirected phenomenology. Second, it seems that even if we can come up with a viable intentionalist account of moods, we would not be able to motivate it in some of the same kinds of ways that (...) intentionalism about other kinds of states can be motivated. In this article, I respond to both challenges: First, I propose a novel intentionalist treatment of moods on which they represent unbound affective properties. Then, I argue that this view is indirectly supported by the same kinds of considerations that directly support intentionalism about other mental states. (shrink)

In his recent book, In Praise of Blame, George Sher argues (among other things) that a bad act can reflect negatively on a person if that act results in an appropriate way from that person's "character," and defends a novel "two-tiered" account of what it is to blame someone. In these brief comments, I raise some questions and doubts about each of these aspects of his rich and thought-provoking account.

Ideological language is widespread in theoretical biology. Evolutionary game theory has been defended as a worldview and a leap of faith, and sexual selection theory has been criticized for what it posits as basic to biological nature. Views such as these encourage the impression of ideological rifts in the field. I advocate an alternative interpretation, whereby many disagreements between different camps of biologists merely reflect methodological differences. This interpretation provides a more accurate and more optimistic account of the state (...) of play in the field of biology. It also helps account for biologists' tendency to embrace ideological positions. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are two distinct kinds of senses, immediate senses and reflective senses. Immediate senses are what we are immediately aware of when we are in an intentional mental state, while reflective senses are what we understand of an intentional mental state's (putative) referent upon reflection. I suggest an account of immediate and reflective senses that is based on the phenomenal intentionality theory, a theory of intentionality in terms of phenomenal consciousness. My focus is on the (...) immediate and reflective senses of thoughts and the concepts they involve, but it also applies to other mental instances of intentionality. (shrink)

What is form? Why does form matter? In this imaginative and ambitious study, Angela Leighton assesses not only the legacy of Victorian aestheticism, and its richly resourceful keyword, 'form', but also the very nature of the literary. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, have returned to the idea of form as something which contains the secret of art itself. She tracks the development of the word from the Romantics to contemporary poets, and offers close readings of, (...) among others, Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, to show how form has provided the single most important way of accounting for the movements of literary language itself. She investigates, for instance, the old debate of form and content, of form as music or sound-shape, as the ghostly dynamic and dynamics of a text, as well as its long association with the aestheticist principle of being 'for nothing'. In a wide-ranging and inventive argument, she suggests that form is the key to the pleasure of the literary text, and that that pleasure is part of what literary criticism itself needs to answer and convey. (shrink)

We can observe a connection between some serious environmental problems caused by the overexploitation of environmental resources and the particular conceptions of property rights that are claimed to hold with regard to these resources. In this paper, I investigate whether Kant’s conception of property rights might constitute a basis for justifying property regimes that would overcome some of these environmental problems. Kant’s argument for the right to property, put forward in his Doctrine of right, is complex. In Section 2, I (...) attempt an interpretation. Section 3 works out the defining characteristics of the conception of property rights that Kant’s argument establishes and investigates their implications for determining property regimes in environmental resources. Kant proposes a minimalist notion of the right to property as a triadic relation between persons with regard to an object, justified only on the condition that it is universalizable in the given circumstances. I argue that this notion offers a promising account for determining property relations with regard to environmental resources. By way of illustration, in Section 4, I focus on an example of Kantian property rights in one type of environmental resource: the marine fisheries. (shrink)

Moods are sometimes thought to be counter-examples to intentionalism, the view that a mental state’s phenomenal features are exhausted by its representational features. The problem is that moods are accompanied by phenomenal experiences that do not seem to be adequately accounted for by any of their plausibly represented contents. This paper develops and defends an intentionalist view of the phenomenal character of moods on which moods represent intentional objects as having sui generis affective properties that are not bound to any (...) objects. (shrink)

Previous literature has documented the general issues psychologists often face while balancing their personal and professional lives. The struggle stems from attempting to satisfy the need to maintain a life outside of work while having the professional obligation to follow the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct to prevent their personal lives from interfering with their professional roles and relationships. The present article analyzes the subject of psychologists taking a public position on controversial public issues. (...) Although the APA Ethics Code does not restrict how psychologists conduct themselves during their personal time, taking a public stance on a controversial issue could potentially strain professional relationships and inadvertently reflect negatively on the profession. The present article examines ethical issues that should be taken into account before psychologists take a public position on a controversial issue and are in conflict with APA’s Ethics Code or current research. (shrink)

Although it is well known that Aquinas holds that infused versions of prudence and the other acquired virtues are bestowed on man along with habitual grace, there is no uniform and widely accepted account of how the infused and acquired virtues are related: some scholars interpret Aquinas to mean that the acquired virtues are ‘taken up’ into the infused virtues, while others credit him with the view that the infused and acquired virtues somehow coexist. This paper explores one common (...) way of maintaining that the Christian’s infused and acquired virtues ‘coexist’. I argue that while such an interpretation is able to accommodate some of Aquinas’s most fundamental claims about the infused and acquired virtues, it is also problematic in important respects. (shrink)

William Lycan is a notable early proponent of representationalism, which is, roughly, the view that a mental state's phenomenal features are nothing over and above its representational features (perhaps in addition to some further ingredients). Representationalism faces a challenge in accounting for perspectival experiences, which are, roughly, experiences that arise from our occupying a particular real or perceived perspective on the world. This paper presents representationalism, situating Lycan's version of representationalism within the representationalist landscape, and describes the challenge from perspectival (...) experiences. It considers three different representationalist treatments of perspectival experiences: the Layered View, which is developed by Lycan; the Relational Properties View, which Lycan eventually comes to endorse; and the Naive View, which, I will argue, combines elements from both views to achieve the best overall view. (shrink)

First, I raise two objections against Ginsborg’s interpretation of natural teleology. I argue that Ginsborg’s notion of primitive normativity is too thin to account for Kant’s more substantive conception of the organism. Furthermore, I question whether Kant has room for a notion of purposiveness that is entirely divorced from intentional activity. Second, I ask about the implications of Ginsborg’s account of the relationship between aesthetic judgement and cognition. I suggest that her reading can easily be extended to allow (...) for aesthetic pleasure in empirical reflection. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on de Beauvoir’s view and argue that, alongside an original account of existential freedom, she utilises a Marxist-inspired historical materialism as a methodological tool with which to analyse the social position of women. First, I discuss existential freedom and highlight de Beauvoir’s introduction of gender, whereby the concepts of material, social and situational conditions cohere to restrict the possibility of freedom and agency for women. Next, I explore Marx’s view on freedom and de Beauvoir’s (...) endorsement that in order to promote human flourishing, structural and material change is required. Although some tensions prevail, I conclude that by weaving together existentialism, phenomenology and Marxism in her unique way, Simone de Beauvoir offers a complex and nuanced approach to human freedom. (shrink)

David Hume is a constant, but underappreciated presence in John Rawls’ work. This paper attempts to uncover and explicate the core Humean elements in Rawls’ philosophy and advocates for the merits of a more Humean Rawls. Though Rawls’ familiarity with Hume is well known and his commentators frequently mention the importance of Hume’s circumstances of justice, the depth and range of the Humean influence has not been sufficiently understood. Commentators have been too quick to accept Rawls’ own account of (...) Hume as a largely negative influence superseded by justice as fairness’s formidable alternative to utilitarianism. This is a mistake, as Hume remains a powerful and positive historical influence in Rawls’ political philosophy. Moreover, recognition of Hume’s influence provides cogent ways of responding to some of Rawls’ most prominent critics. Rawls’ early essays and his lectures on the history of moral and political philosophy provide valuable material for understanding how Rawls saw the relation of his own work to that of his predecessors. Through an analysis of Rawls’ texts with emphasis on his early papers and lectures we seek to clarify his understanding of Hume and show how it impacts his work. In what follows, we show Hume’s influence on Rawls’ understanding of the circumstances of justice, the site of justice, the priority of the right, sympathy, the judicious spectator, and his methodology and approach to the problem of stability based on congruence between the good and the right. This illuminates Hume’s influence on contemporary political philosophy and provides a more balanced picture of the historical foundation of Rawls’ political philosophy. We end with some positive remarks on the benefits of embracing Rawls’ Humean side. (shrink)

Scientific realism is a thesis about the success of science. Most traditionally: science has been so successful at prediction and guiding action because its best theories are true (or approximately true or increasing in their degree of truth). If science is in the business of doing its best to generate true theories, then we should turn to those theories for explanatory knowledge, predictions, and guidance of our actions and decisions. Views that are popular in contemporary philosophy of science about scientific (...) modeling and the centrality of idealization create several challenges for this traditional form of scientific realism. Yet the basic idea behind scientific realism that science has been and will continue to be epistemically successful is deeply appealing. This chapter explores the challenges posed by idealization and scientific modeling to motivate a scientific realism fully divorced from the idea that science is in the business of generating true theories. On the resulting view, the objects of scientific knowledge are causal patterns, so this knowledge only ever provides partial, simplified accounts of a complex reality. This variety of selective realism better accommodates the nature of our present-day scientific successes and offers an interpretation of scientific progress that resists the antirealist’s pessimism. (shrink)