When a symbol is a marker of a primary bearer of value and, secondarily, a bearer of value itself, then it has symbolic value. Philosophers have long been suspicious of symbolic values, often regarding them as illusory or irrelevant. I suggest that arguments against symbolic values either overgeneralize or else require premises that can only be supported if the normative significance of some symbolic considerations is presupposed. Humans need symbols to represent identity facts to themselves and others. Symbolic values thereby (...) contribute to individuals’ control over their own agency. (shrink)

Being open to persuasion can help show respect for an interlocutor. At the same time, open-mindedness about morally objectionable claims can carry moral as well as epistemic risks. Our aim in this paper is to specify when there might be duty to be open to persuasion. We distinguish two possible interpretations of openness. First, openness might refer to a kind of mental state, wherein one is willing to revise or abandon present beliefs. Second, it might refer to a deliberative practice, (...) according to which one is willing to engage with opposing reasons. We suggest these two interpretations are conceptually and empirically distinct. Once disambiguated, we suggest that different contexts may make different forms of openness appropriate as expressions of respect. (shrink)

In ‘Rational Persuasion as Paternalism', George Tsai argues that providing another person with reasons or evidence can be a morally objectionable form of paternalism. I believe Tsai’s thesis is importantly correct, denying the widely accepted identification of rational persuasion with respectful treatment. In this comment, I disagree about what is centrally wrong with objectionable rational persuasion. Contrary to Tsai, objectionable rational persuasion is not wrong because it undermines the value of an agent’s life. It is wrong because it is contrary (...) to an agent’s will. (shrink)

There has been a recent surge of interest in the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch. One issue that has arisen is whether her view advocates a form of moral perception. In this paper I argue that her view does indeed advocate for a form of moral perception—what I call weak moral perception. In the process of moral reasoning weak moral perception plays a preparatory role for moral judgment, which means that moral judgment isn’t simply a matter of seeing what action (...) to perform, but that the right kind of perception is crucial to being able to make good moral decisions. One aspect of Murdoch’s account that has aroused special interest is her suggestion that the right kind of perception relies on the agent’s being in a state of love. I give what I think is the correct account of Murdochian love, which then allows me to defend her view against red herring-type objections raised recently by David Velleman and Charles Starkey. (shrink)

A common Christian belief is that God loves universally, and that the Christian believer ought, likewise, to love universally. On standard analyses of love, loving universally appears unwise, morally suspect, or even impossible. This essay seeks to understand how the Christian command to love could be both possible and morally desirable. It considers two scriptural examples: Matthew’s trilogy of parables, and the Feast of the Tabernacles in the Gospel of John. I argue that God shows love to humanity through revealed (...) disclosure of vulnerability. In particular, God is universally willing to engage in collaborative action with human agents. I suggest that the Christian command can be satisfied by adopting an analogous willingness to share intentional actions with others. (shrink)

Ralph Waldo Emerson is often seen as the early American prophet of autonomy. This essay suggests a perhaps surprising fellow traveler in this prophetic call: Joseph Smith. Smith opposed religious creeds for the same reason that Emerson denounced them, namely that creeds represent a threat to the autonomy of a person's beliefs. Smith and Emerson also forward similar defenses of individual autonomy in action. Furthermore, they encounter a shared problem: how can autonomy be possible in a society where other individuals (...) hold some kind of authority? I propose that each thinker resolves this tension through an insight with a Kantian echo. A suitably qualified version of authority can sometimes count as an expression of, rather than hindrance to, autonomy. I describe the overlap in Emerson and Smith as a “frontier” version of Kantianism. They favor determining one's own beliefs and actions in a way that looks forward to an open future of possibility. (shrink)

We can imagine agents who would have the moral status to demand contractualist justification but still lack an especially strong claim against interference. In contrast, agents who can conceive of their lives in a temporally unified way have a distinctive, strong interest in non‐interference. This contrast helps illuminate the moral importance of self‐authorship. The upshot is that ordinary persons have a more general and less variable right against interference than is often supposed. Self‐authorship can also help appreciate the sense in (...) which the value of persons may be characterized as ‘self‐existent’. (shrink)

Social egalitarianism holds that individuals ought to have equal power over outcomes within relationships. Egalitarian philosophers have argued for this ideal by appealing to features of political society. This way of grounding the social egalitarian principle renders it dependent on empirical facts about political culture. In particular, egalitarians have argued that social equality matters to citizens in political relationships in a way analogous to the value of equality in a marriage. In this paper, we show how egalitarian philosophers are committed (...) to psychological premises, and then illustrate how to test the social egalitarian’s empirical claims. Using a nationally representative survey experiment, we find that citizens will sometimes prioritize equality over competing values, but that the weight of social equality diminishes when moving from personal to political cases. These findings raise questions for thinking about how to explain the normative significance of social equality. (shrink)

The act of mindreading has been recognized to have great moral and epistemic value. Unfortunately, psychological research has shown that we are naturally inaccurate at mindreading, which should worry us quite a bit. It has also been shown that when motivated to mindread well, subjects become more accurate. In this paper I argue that some kinds of artwork—specifically, those utilizing dramatic irony—can educate us as to how valuable accurate mindreading is and motivate us to try to mindread well. The primary (...) example I discuss is Alfred Hitchcock’s film Notorious. (shrink)

In this article we outline the ways in which questions of language have both revealed problems with conceptions of knowledge and suggested constructive ways of addressing those problems. Having examined the limitations of instrumental notions of language, we outline some alternatives, especially those developed from the middle of the 19th and throughout the 20th century. We locate forceful and influential philosophical interventions in the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger and foundational revisions in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and his (...) structuralist inheritors. We also chart the parallel path of literary theory from Mallarmé through Blanchot and poststructuralism to deconstruction. We conclude, after making some observations about the politicization of language in the works of feminist and postcolonial theorists, with some remarks about how the question of language helps to problematize global knowledge. (shrink)

In this article we outline the ways in which questions of language have both revealed problems with conceptions of knowledge and suggested constructive ways of addressing those problems. Having examined the limitations of instrumental notions of language, we outline some alternatives, especially those developed from the middle of the 19th and throughout the 20th century. We locate forceful and influential philosophical interventions in the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger and foundational revisions in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and his (...) structuralist inheritors. We also chart the parallel path of literary theory from Mallarmé through Blanchot and poststructuralism to deconstruction. We conclude, after making some observations about the politicization of language in the works of feminist and postcolonial theorists, with some remarks about how the question of language helps to problematize global knowledge. (shrink)

This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard’s career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard’s sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. The consistency of Baudrillard’s arguments belies the many superficial judgements made about them, which were anyway often knowingly encouraged (...) by Baudrillard’s rhetorical strategies. (shrink)

The article examines the distinction between the state of emergency and the normal state and an inherent undecidability at the base of the distinction. We argue that states of emergency arise from strategic sovereign decisions to divide visible from invisible, enemy from ally, underground economy from above-ground, illegitimate war from legitimate war. The capacity to so divide is manifested, for instance, in the technology of air raid sirens in a way that indicates the momentum of the technicity that covertly underlies (...) sovereign power. The article, furthermore, shows how the distinction between the visible and the invisible can serve as a mystification, perpetuating the state of emergency by disguising the intrinsic connection between the two domains. (shrink)

Violence is spoken of in several senses but its most basic definition, as a force exerted by one thing on another, harbors serious problems, especially when it comes to a consideration of its source or cause. We begin this article by identifying some of the aporias of violence with reference to philosophical and religious discourses and then we go on to analyze how violence problematizes concepts of law and justice in world historical contexts. We examine several traditions including Indo-European mythology, (...) as well as Hindu, Taoist, and ancient Greek philosophy, before addressing the concept of violence in modern thought, as a revision of Christianity. We conclude with some discussion of epistemological violence and its critics. (shrink)

St. Paul writes, “whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10: 31 NABRE).” This essay employs the work of St. Thomas Aquinas and the recent philosophical work of Daniel Johnson (2020) on this command to investigate a series of questions that the command raises. What is glory? How does one properly act for glory and for the glory of another? How is it possible to do everything for the glory of God? I begin with Aquinas’ (...) account of glory and the pursuit of glory for God’s glory and Aquinas’s answers to some of the above questions that can be drawn from his discussion in De Malo. I defend Aquinas against criticisms from Daniel Johnson and present his own interpretation of the command. I advance the discussion through adding two additional interpretations that do not rely on a controversial assumption Johnson makes. Next, I address the puzzle of how we can intend everything for the glory of God using Aquinas’s three-fold account of intention. Finally, I discuss the relation between charity and the desire for God’s glory and how regular, actual intentions of one’s actions for the glory of God increases charity. (shrink)

Robert Roberts and Jay Wood criticize St Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between intellectual and moral virtues. They offer three objections to this distinction. They object that intellectual virtues depend on the will in ways that undermine the distinction, that the subject of intellectual virtues is not an intellectual faculty but a whole person, and that some intellectual virtues require that the will act intellectually. They hold that each of these is sufficient to undermine the distinction. I defend Aquinas’s distinction and respond (...) to each of their objections. I then briefly motivate why this is a distinction worth keeping. (shrink)

Leonardo Bruni’s well-known oration, the Laudatio Florentinae urbis, has long stood at the center of discussions on the emergence of the modern republican state. Recent historiographical trends have emphasized the degree to which Bruni’s oration represents a propagandistic attempt both to portray Florence as a territorial power of Northern Italy keen to impose its sovereign authority on neighboring polities and as a republic intent on fashioning an image of itself as a popular sovereignty. It is in this second element of (...) Bruni’s oration that we can discover his rhetorical purposes: he needed to give a distorted image of Florence as enjoying “popular” rule precisely because Florence was in fact moving in the opposite direction towards a more oligarchic concentration of political authority. The essay investigates the changes contemplated in revisions to Florence’s juridical codes at precisely the time of the oration’s composition, suggesting that when these two sources are juxtaposed, Bruni’s oration appears as a strongly ideological literary work the rhetorical gestures of which camouflage the actual historical and legal developments of Florence’s political life in the early fifteenth century. (shrink)

Robert Roberts and Jay Wood criticize St Thomas Aquinas’ distinction between intellectual and moral virtues. They offer three objections to this distinction. They object that intellectual virtues depend on the will in ways that undermine the distinction, that the subject of intellectual virtues is not an intellectual faculty but a whole person, and that some intellectual virtues require that the will act intellectually. They hold that each of these is sufficient to undermine the distinction. I defend Aquinas’ distinction and respond (...) to each of their objections. I then briefly motivate why this is a distinction worth keeping. (shrink)

Feminist standpoint epistemology suggests that women are cognitively privileged, since gender-specific forms of oppression produce insights systematically denied to men. Yet if many forms of oppression exist, what happens when they overlap? Some reject such theories as irredeemably essentialist, triumphalist, and relativist, but I argue that their original versions in Hegel and Lukács as supplemented by Sabina Lovibond generate both the strongest arguments for standpoint theories and a way through their deepest difficulties.

Robert Roberts and Jay Wood criticize St Thomas Aquinas’ distinction between intellectual and moral virtues. They offer three objections to this distinction. They object that intellectual virtues depend on the will in ways that undermine the distinction, that the subject of intellectual virtues is not an intellectual faculty but a whole person, and that some intellectual virtues require that the will act intellectually. They hold that each of these is sufficient to undermine the distinction. I defend Aquinas’ distinction and respond (...) to each of their objections. I then briefly motivate why this is a distinction worth keeping. (shrink)

Aquinas’s doctrine that infused virtues accompany sanctifying grace raises many questions. We examine one: how do the infused virtues relate to the acquired virtues? More precisely, can the person with the infused virtues possess the acquired virtues? We argue for an answer consistent with and informed by Aquinas’s writings, although it goes beyond textual evidence, as any answer to this question must. There are two plausible, standard interpretations of Aquinas on this issue: the coexistence view and transformation view. After explaining (...) the views, we present plausible reasons for and against each view. The evidence suggests, we argue, that the acquired virtues are both present and absent in the Christian. We then survey Aquinas’s account of virtual presence. Finally, we argue that the case of the presence of acquired virtues in the Christian is a good candidate for virtual presence. (shrink)

Because learning is a biological process, pedagogical approaches should conform to the ways the brain learns. One of the findings of brain-based pedagogical research is that context matters to learning. More specifically, the order of learning must be preserved: content should be introduced in a concrete context, followed by attempts to isolate abstract elements found in the case. There are better and worse strategies to preserve this order. In this paper I discuss the research and provide what I have found (...) to be a very successful way to preserve the natural order of learning: online discussion board assignments. (shrink)

In this paper, I construct an ethical-aesthetic account based on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Iris Murdoch, centered on the claims that motive matters to morality and that, specifically, acting from compassion—understood as a combination of cognitive empathy and concern—is necessary for making moral decisions. I present empirical evidence that we are naturally inaccurate when it comes to cognitive empathy, suggesting that many of our moral decisions are made in ignorance of the interests of others. We can improve our (...) empathic accuracy by becoming more adept at decentering on our own perspective and recentering on those of others. My account holds that aesthetic experience often requires us to decenter and that we can acquire what I have called imaginative flexibility through our engagement with certain kinds of art. Finally, I provide evidence supporting my claims that art has this value. (shrink)

We describe a novel affect-inspired mechanism to improve the performance of computational systems operating in dynamic environments. In particular, we designed a mechanism that is based on aspects of the fear response in humans to dynamically reallocate operating system-level central processing unit (CPU) resources to processes as they are needed to deal with time-critical events. We evaluated this system in the MINIX® and Linux® operating systems and in three different testing environments (two simulated, one live). We found the affect-based system (...) was not only able to react more rapidly to time-critical events as intended, but since the dynamic processes for handling these events did not need to use significant CPU when they were not in time-critical situations, our simulated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was able to perform even non-emergency tasks at a higher level of efficiency and reactivity than was possible in the standard implementation. (shrink)

Investigating the influence of perception on the control of visually guided action typically involves controlled experimentation within the laboratory setting. When appropriate, however, behavioral research of this nature may benefit from the use of methods that allow for remote data collection outside of the lab. This study tested the feasibility of using remote data collection methods to explore the influence of perceived target size on visually guided cursor movements using the Ebbinghaus illusion. Participants completed the experiment remotely, using the trackpad (...) of their personal laptop computers. The task required participants to click on a single circular target presented at either the left or right side of their screen as quickly and accurately as possible, or to emphasize speed or accuracy. On each trial the target was either surrounded by small or large context circles, or no context circles. Participants’ judgments of the targets’ perceived size were influenced by the illusion, however, the illusion failed to produce differences in click-point accuracy or movement time. Interestingly, the illusion appeared to affect participants’ movement of the cursor toward the target; more directional changes were made when clicking the Perceived Large version of the illusion compared to the Perceived Small version. These results suggest the planning of the cursor movement may have been influenced by the illusion, while later stages of the movement were not, and cursor movements directed toward targets perceived as smaller required less correction compared to targets perceived as larger. (shrink)

Recent results from two different studies show evidence of strong emotional engagement in moral dilemmas that require personal involvement or ethical problems that involve significant inter-personal issues. This empirical evidence for a connection between emotional engagement and moral or ethical choices is interesting because it is related to a fundamental survival mechanism rooted in human evolution. The results lead one to question when and how emotional engagement might occur in a professional ethical situation. However, the studies employed static dilemmas or (...) problems that offered only two choices whose outcome was certain or nearly so, whereas actual problems in professional ethics are dynamic and typically involve considerable uncertainty. The circumstances of three example cases suggest that increasing personal involvement and uncertainty could have been perceived as changes, threats, or opportunities and could therefore have elicited an emotional response as a way to ensure the reputation, integrity or success of oneself or a group to which one belongs. Such emotional engagement is only suggested and more studies and experiments are required to better characterize the role of emotional engagement in professional ethics. (shrink)

An apparent paradox concerning courageous activity is that it seems to require both fear and fearlessness – on the one hand, mastering one’s fear, and, on the other, eliminating fear. I resolve the paradox by isolating three phases of courageous activity: the initial response to the situation, the choice of courageous action, and the execution of courageous action. I argue that there is an emotion that is proper to each of these phases and that each emotion positively contributes to the (...) performance of courageous activity in each of its phases. More specifically, I argue that fear, hope, and daring are necessary for complete courageous activity. My model of courageous activity explains why courage is a virtue that requires excellent emotion dispositions and resolves the paradox concerning the apparent need for both fear and fearlessness. Fear is required in the first phase and fearless daring in the third phase of courageous activity. (shrink)

A familiar debate in first-past-the-post democracies is whether ideologically disenfranchised voters should cast their vote for minor party candidates. We argue that voting for minor party candidates will sometimes be the best strategic option for voters with non-mainstream ideologies. Major parties, as rational agents, will be ideologically responsive to genuine threats of defection. By voting for a minor party, voters can simultaneously punish major parties for unfairly “bargaining” with their voting bloc and also signal their ideological reasons for defecting.

Predictive information is a popular and promising family of information-based theories of biological communication. It is difficult to adjudicate between predictive information-based theories and influence-based theories of biological communication because the same acts seem to count as communicative on both theories. In this paper, I argue that predictive information theories and influence-based theories give importantly different descriptions of deceptive signals in some non-evolutionarily stable communicative systems by citing a novel case observed in nature. Moreover, predictive information gives a counter-intuitive description (...) to the case while some of its rival influence-based theories do not. I argue that there are no clear ways for defenders of predictive information to respond to this apparent problem without sacrificing important virtues of their theory or deflating the difference between the rival views. (shrink)

Predictive information is a popular and promising family of information-based theories of biological communication. It is difficult to adjudicate between predictive information-based theories and influence-based theories of biological communication because the same acts seem to count as communicative on both theories. In this paper, I argue that predictive information theories and influence-based theories give importantly different descriptions of deceptive signals in some non-evolutionarily stable communicative systems by citing a novel case observed in nature. Moreover, predictive information gives a counter-intuitive description (...) to the case while some of its rival influence-based theories do not. I argue that there are no clear ways for defenders of predictive information to respond to this apparent problem without sacrificing important virtues of their theory or deflating the difference between the rival views. (shrink)

In the opening episode of season four of the AMC network’s television show Breaking Bad, the attentive viewer reaches a point at which it’s difficult to see how the show’s heroes, Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, will escape death. The two are chemists and manufacturers of crystal methamphetamine for drug kingpin Gus Fring. At the end of the previous season they had picked up on Fring’s plans to kill them and replace them with another chemist, Gale Boetticher, who by then (...) had learned their development technique and could presumably produce the same high quality of drug. In response, Walt had Jesse race to Gale’s apartment and kill him, thus rendering Gus’s plan ineffective.The fourth season begins with Walt and... (shrink)

Political liberals, following Rawls, believe that justice should be ‘political’ rather than ‘metaphysical.’ In other words, a conception of justice ought to be freestanding from first-order moral and metaethical views. The reason for this is to ensure that the state’s coercion be justified to citizens in terms that meet political liberalism’s principle of legitimacy. I suggest that privileging a political conception of justice involves costs—such as forgoing the opportunity for political theory to learn from other areas of philosophy. I argue (...) that it is not clear that it provides any benefit in return. Whether a political conception of justice more adequately satisfies the liberal principle of legitimacy than a metaphysical conception of justice is an open question. To show this, I describe three ways in which political conceptions of justice have been developed within the literature. I then argue that while each might be helpful in finding reasons that reasonable citizens can accept, all face challenges in satisfying the liberal principle of legitimacy. Political conceptions of justice confront the same set of justificatory problems as ‘metaphysical’ conceptions. The question of whether a political conception is preferable should receive greater scrutiny. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 401-423 [Access article in PDF] Petrarch and the Genealogy of Asceticism W. Scott Blanchard The morality of thought lies in a procedure that is neither entrenched nor detached. --Theodor Adorno Perhaps no author within or outside of the canon of Western literature wrote as extensively on the topic of solitude as did Francesco Petrarch. While many of our modern associations (...) with the term may find some of their origins traceable as far back as Petrarch's career, the term "solitude" carried with it much different associations in his century than it does for us today, influenced as we are by the Romantic tradition and especially by Wordsworth's absorption with the idea of solitude as an ideal state for self-conscious reflection on the individual's personal history and its meaning. No less than three of Petrarch's major prose works--the De otio religioso, the De vita solitaria, and the Secretum--confront the topic of solitude directly, and we can also point to many letters, poems, and portions of his treatises that either directly or indirectly reflect Petrarch's virtual obsession with solitude. In Petrarch we are confronted with an author who was at once the most politically connected intellectual of his century--we are even tempted to call him a "public intellectual"--and yet who constantly invoked his desire for solitude, for an escape from the many distractions and seductions that the cities and courts of his society offered. For Petrarch these were invariably places where desire lurked and power held sway, so that the life of solitude was often invoked as an alternative--a counter-cultural locus, perhaps--where freedom from temptation and subjection was imagined as an escape from the negotium of worldly life. There is much in Petrarch's writings on the solitary life that is wishful and that we might characterize as merely compensatory in a life that was otherwise quite active and engaged, but there is also a [End Page 401] strain of thought in these works that indicates a certain intransigence beneath Petrarch's overdetermined attachment to the idea, if not the practice, of withdrawal and detachment. An inquiry into Petrarch's idealization of the solitary life may even yield a somewhat reactionary aspect of his complex mind, a conservative strain in an author who was in almost every other way the literary herald of a humanism that was at the center of the cultural avant-garde of the Trecento. Is the Petrarch that in so many accounts of his character is construed as the "first modern man" actually something else, a reluctant ascetic holdover from the Middle Ages? How did Petrarch use his unique understanding of the life of solitude, of ascesis, as a pose from which to construct his sense of himself as an author and intellectual? Or are we simply confronted in the figure of a worldly and an ascetic Petrarch with yet another set of contradictions so appropriate to the "immensely complex" author whose poetic signature was the oxymoron? 1"Asceticism" and "solitude" are of course not synonymous terms, but any examination of a number of Petrarch's works as they fall within what might be called a genealogy of asceticism must recognize from the start that Petrarch's brand of asceticism was somewhat unique, especially insofar as it was deeply influenced by ancient Stoicism as well as by his reading in authors from the early Christian era. The most useful expression for our purposes may be the medieval concept of the "contemplative life," since much of the analysis in what follows will focus on how Petrarch often used his self-proclaimed pose of detachment and withdrawal as a technique for carrying on what were otherwise quite engaged dialogues with those worldly formations of power and authority that are normally conceived of as belonging to the "active" sphere of human existence. 2 For despite Petrarch's participation in or association with a number of political and civic ventures during his long and productive career, he likely never would have freely chosen... (shrink)