Very diverse societies pose real problems for Rawlsian models of public reason. This is for two reasons: first, public reason is unable accommodate diverse perspectives in determining a regulative ideal. Second, regulative ideals are unable to respond to social change. While models based on public reason focus on the justification of principles, this book suggests that we need to orient our normative theories more toward discovery and experimentation. The book develops a unique approach to social contract theory that focuses on (...) diverse perspectives. It offers a new moral stance that author Ryan Muldoon calls, "The View From Everywhere," which allows for substantive, fundamental moral disagreement. This stance is used to develop a bargaining model in which agents can cooperate despite seeing different perspectives. Rather than arguing for an ideal contract or particular principles of justice, Muldoon outlines a procedure for iterated revisions to the rules of a social contract. It expands Mill's conception of experiments in living to help form a foundational principle for social contract theory. By embracing this kind of experimentation, we move away from a conception of justice as an end state, and toward a conception of justice as a trajectory. (shrink)

In this article, I present a novel argument against abortion. In short, what makes it wrong to kill someone is that they are a counterfactual person; counterfactual persons are individuals such that, were they not killed, they would have been persons. My view accommodates two intuitions which many views concerning the wrongness of killing fail to account for: embryo rescue cases and the impermissibility of infanticide. The view avoids embryo rescue cases because embryos in the rescue scenarios are not counterfactual (...) people: they are not counterfactual people because it is false to say that, were they not killed, they would have been persons. As a result, it does not follow from my account that there is a prohibition against allowing embryos to die. On the other hand, infants are counterfactual people: an infant is an individual such that, were she not killed, she would have been a person. (shrink)

In this article, I describe a novel position on the semantics of artificial intelligence. I present a problem for the current artificial neural networks used in machine learning, specifically with relation to natural language tasks. I then propose that from a metasemantic level, meaning in machines can best be interpreted as radically contextualist. Finally, I consider what this might mean for human‐level semantic competence from a comparative perspective.

Deep brain stimulation is an experimental procedure for treatment-resistant depression. Some results show promise, but blinded trials had limited success. Ethical questions center on vulnerability: especially on whether depressed patients can weigh the risks and benefits effectively, whether depression causes “desperation,” and whether media portrayals create unrealistic hopes. We interviewed 24 psychiatric inpatients with treatment-resistant depression, qualitatively analyzing their comments. Most had minimal interest in deep brain stimulators. Some might consider them if their depression worsened, if alternatives were exhausted, or (...) if the evidence were stronger. Fears focused on the surgery, adverse effects, and the novelty of the device. Patients felt the depression interfered with their ability to weigh the risks and benefits. Patients seemed highly attuned to the risks, and were skeptical that the treatment would be effective. We conclude that ethical concerns about vulnerability remain, yet patients with treatment-resistant depression were thoughtful and cautious about trying a novel therapy. (shrink)

Business and Economic textbooks warn against committing the Sunk Cost Fallacy: you, rationally, shouldn't let unrecoverable costs influence your current decisions. In this paper, I argue that this isn't, in general, correct. Sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to wish to carry on with a project because of the resources you've already sunk into it. The reason? Given that we're social creatures, it's not unreasonable to care about wanting to act in such a way so that a plausible story can be told (...) about you according to which your diachronic behavior doesn't reveal that you've suffered, what I will call, diachronic misfortune. Acting so as to hide that you've suffered diachronic misfortune involves striving to make yourself easily understood while disguising any shortcomings that might damage your reputation as a desirable teammate. And making yourself easily understood to others while hiding your flaws will, sometimes, put pressure on you to honor sunk costs. (shrink)

Let’s say that you regard two things as on a par when you don’t prefer one to other and aren’t indifferent between them. What does rationality require of you when choosing between risky options whose outcomes you regard as on a par? According to Prospectism, you are required to choose the option with the best prospects, where an option’s prospects is a probability-distribution over its potential outcomes. In this paper, I argue that Prospectism violates a dominance principle—which I call The (...) Principle of Predominance—because it sometimes requires you to do something that’s no better than the alternatives and might be worse. I argue that this undermines the strongest argument that’s been given in favor of Prospectism. (shrink)

Civility is a nice idea. While we find common ground with the aspirations of a civility-based professional culture in healthcare and acknowledge the potential impacts of incivility on staff and patients, we should be careful in dismissing it entirely, as McCullough et al 1 do. As we will argue below, appeals to civility, when understood alongside power, could serve to stifle and mask legitimate dissent, limiting genuine criticism and progress. Crucially, we contend that incivility itself may serve instrumental and communicative (...) purposes that draw attention to injustice or inequity. Our aim is not to defend every act of incivility but to caution calls for its prevention. By focusing on intentional acts of incivility and by emphasising the political, we hope to show that ‘being polite is not the same as being a good citizen’2 and the absence of tension is not the same as the presence of justice (King, 1963).3 We go on to discuss the implications of this approach to addressing ‘uncivil’ behaviour, arguing that incivility is a by-product of institutions that dismiss genuine grievances and maintain inequitable conditions. When we …. (shrink)

I argue that any plausible decision theory for agents with incomplete preferences which obeys the Never Worse Principle will violate Transitivity. The Never Worse Principle says that if one option never does worse than another, you shouldn’t disprefer it. Transitivity says that if you prefer X to Y and you prefer Y to Z, then you should prefer X to Z. Violating Transitivity allows one to be money pumped. Although agents with incomplete preferences are already, in virtue of having incomplete (...) preferences, vulnerable to being money pumped, I argue that the money pump argument for Transitivity is more serious than the one for Completeness. (shrink)

When you are indifferent between two options, it’s rationally permissible to take either. One way to decide between two such options is to flip a fair coin, taking one option if it lands heads and the other if it lands tails. Is it rationally permissible to employ such a tie-breaking procedure? Intuitively, yes. However, if you are genuinely risk-averse—in particular, if you adhere to risk-weighted expected utility theory (Buchak in Risk and rationality, Oxford University Press, 2013) and have a strictly (...) convex risk-function—the answer will often be no: the REU of deciding by coin-flip will be lower than the REU of choosing one of the options outright (so long as at least one of the options is a nondegenerate gamble). This turns out to be a significant worry for risk-weighted expected utility theory. I argue that it adds real bite to established worries about diachronic consistency afflicting views, like risk-weighted expected utility theory, that violate Independence. And that, while these worries might be surmountable, surmounting them comes at a price. (shrink)

Complete translations of Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates' Defense (aka Apology) and Crito, along with the death scene from Phaedo.

This essay argues that the Phaedrus’s Palinode articulates an account of love (erōs) in which the experience of love can morally and intellectually transform both lover and beloved. After situating this account of love within the dialogue’s thematization of soul-leading (psuchagōgia), I show how Socrates’s account of love makes an intervention into typical Greek thought on pederasty and argue against Jessica Moss’s contention that soul-leading love suffers severe limitations in its soul-leading capacity, showing that Moss is wrong to think that (...) love can only efficaciously lead souls that are already well-formed. By contrast, the Palinode portrays the moral and intellectual formation of the lover, who first approaches the beloved in the spirit of rapacity only to be turned by his experience of beauty toward genuine service, ordered to the beloved’s benefit. The beloved likewise undergoes such a transformation as a result of his nascent return-love (anterōs). (shrink)

Some interpreters have ascribed to Wittgenstein the view that mathematical statements must have an application to extra-mathematical reality in order to have use and so any statements lacking extra-mathematical applicability are not meaningful (and hence not bona fide mathematical statements). Pure mathematics is then a mere signgame of questionable objectivity, undeserving of the name mathematics. These readings bring to light that, on Wittgenstein’s offered picture of mathematical statements as rules of description, it can be difficult to see the role of (...) mathematical statements which relate to concepts that are not employed in empirical propositions e.g. set-theoretic concepts. I will argue that Wittgenstein’s picture is more flexible than might at first be thought and that Wittgenstein sees such statements as serving purposes not directly related to empirical description. Whilst this might make such systems fringe cases of mathematics, it does not bring their legitimacy as mathematical systems into question. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, a growing philosophical literature has subjected virtue ethics to empirical evaluation. Drawing on results in social psychology, a number of critics have argued that virtue ethics depends upon false presuppositions about the cross‐situational consistency of psychological traits. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue has been a prime target for the situationist critics. This essay assesses the situationist critique of MacIntyre’s account of virtue. It argues that MacIntyre’s social teleological account of virtue is not what his situationist critics (...) take it to be. Virtues, for MacIntyre, are not reducible to psychological traits. They are qualities of one’s socially constituted character, and their intelligibility as virtues derives from their role in the narrative of one’s life. Recognizing this both clarifies and complicates debates about the implication of situationist social psychology for virtue ethics. It also grants a new significance to MacIntyre’s attention to the socio‐historical context of virtue, a significance that should be especially interesting to religious ethicists. (shrink)

Although trauma has been an explicit topic of psychological interest since at least the late 19th century, as a phenomenon it has largely evaded deeper analyses that might other reframe the way the condition is perceived and understood. A Theory of Trauma attempts to address the exigence of trauma-based research, first, by approaching the matter using phenomenological, philological and hermeneutical methods in an attempt to extract an ontological understanding of trauma from the otherwise ontical body of work that characterizes both (...) historical and contemporary psychological works surrounding the matter. The second half of the text is dedicated to reorienting the reader in terms of the nature of thought itself, an effort grounded by one of Heidegger's later works, What is Called Thinking?, in terms of the reasoning people have for considering matters as deep-rooted as trauma, and finally, in practical terms, to wit, identifying manifest forms of trauma by way of anecdotal vignettes. (shrink)

According to an argument that I will call the argument from loose lips, we can safely reject certain notorious conspiracy theories because they posit conspiracies that would be nearly impossible to keep secret. I distinguish between three versions of this argument: the epistemic argument, the alethic argument, and the statistical argument. I, then, discuss several limitations of the argument from loose lips. The first limitation is that only the statistical argument can be applied to new conspiracy theories. The second limitation (...) is that no version of the argument suffices to rule out the existence of small initial conspiracies that have no need to add further conspirators. The third limitation is that no version of the argument is dialectically efficacious in the context of arguing with the relevant conspiracy theorists because nothing is said to address the alleged evidence that they cite. (shrink)

This second volume explores Jung’s understanding of synchronicity and argues that it offers an important contribution to contemporary science. Whilst the scientific world has often ignored Jung’s theories as being too much like mysticism, Haule argues that what the human psyche knows beyond sensory perception is extremely valuable. Divided into two parts, areas of discussion include: shamanism and mastery border zones of exact science meditation, parapsychology and psychokinesis _Jung in the 21 st Century Volume Two: Synchronicity and Science_ will, like (...) the first volume, be an invaluable resource for all those in the field of analytical psychology, including students of Jung, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists with an interest in the meeting of Jung and science. (shrink)

Does vagueness exclude knowledge? After arguing for an affirmative answer to this question, I consider a fascinating objection. Barnett offers purported counterexamples to the following: Vagueness as to whether p entails that nobody knows whether p. These putative counterexamples, were they successful, would establish that standard accounts of vagueness are mistaken. I defend three central theses: First, whenever it is vague whether p competent speakers would be ambivalent about whether p when considering whether p, and such ambivalence would exclude knowledge (...) of whether p. Second, it is impossible for there to be vagueness regarding which of two polar opposite mental states obtains when only one of such states obtains. Finally, this type of impossibility constitutes evidence for dualism; i.e., the thesis that mental states are neither identical to physical states nor obtain in virtue of the obtaining of physical states. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between two rationalist readings of Either/Or: the Rational Argument Interpretation, according to which the aim of the book is ultimately to offer a rational argument in favor of living ethically, and the Rational Presupposition Interpretation, according to which the pseudonymous authors presuppose that it is rational to live ethically. The paper argues in favor of . In particular, it argues that the fundamental presuppositions of Either/Or are those of Kant’s moral philosophy and rational religion. At the heart (...) of Kant’s arguments for the practical postulates lies an “existential moment”: Kant’s practical arguments are subjectively valid in virtue of the personal decision of the individual to do his duty. According to the Rational Presupposition Interpretation advanced here, Either/Or is best understood as an attempt to communicate indirectly and to confront the reader with the significance of personal choice for inhabiting a hopeful moral life-view. (shrink)

When we raise children what we are typically aiming for is a kind of flourishing; we want children to live well as children, and to grow to become adults who live well too. Undoubtedly, part of what we are aiming for when we aim for a child’s flourishing is that they meet their developmental milestones well, and that they succeed among their peers. We are also generally interested in how a child regards themselves; we want children to believe that they (...) have value, and that what they care about has value too. We also typically want children to have an appreciation for their relative value among others; that they are important among many other important beings, and we want them to act well in that knowledge. Of course, not all persons who raise children aim for those ends. Some do not care for how a child conceives of themselves, or whether the child flourishes at all. Others care for their children, and how they conceive of themselves, but aim poorly. As result, some children come to believe that they only deserve love and kindness when they succeed at meeting a caregiver’s ends. Some children come to believe that they have no worth at all. And yet other children, rather than believing they are unworthy, come to regard themselves as of superior worth; as children, for example, who bully and sneer at other children for being a different race, a different class, gender, ability, etc. may. When a child comes to understand themselves in these terms, we typically see it at best as morally problematic, and at worst as a tragedy. Despite our interest in children’s self-conceptions, and the vast literature on how to conceive of and regard children, there is relatively little regarding how children should conceive of and regard themselves. In order to explain how children should conceive of themselves it is my contention that a new account of self-respect is needed for the context of childhood; one that is responsive to the moral value of children, as well as their developmental capacities to recognize that value. Given that developmental psychology is complex and subject to significant variation as children develop, my aim in this paper is to offer a snapshot of what I take self-respect to amount to in early childhood. In particular, I focus on an account fitting for children between three to six years of age. (shrink)

Luck egalitarians argue that distributive justice should be understood in terms of our capacity to be responsible for our choices. Both proponents and critics assume that the theory must rely on a comprehensive conception of responsibility. I respond to luck egalitarianism’s critics by developing a political conception of responsibility that remains agnostic on the metaphysics of free choice. I construct this political conception by developing a novel reading of John Rawls’ distinction between the political and the comprehensive. A surprising consequence (...) is that many responsibility-based objections to luck egalitarianism turn out to be objections to Rawls’ political liberalism as well. (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)

The negative emotions generated following stressful life events can increase one’s risk of depressive symptoms and promote higher levels of perceived stress. The process model of emotion regulation can help distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies to determine who may be at the greatest risk of worse psychological health across the lifespan. Heart rate variability may affect these relationships as it indexes aspects of self-regulation, including emotion and behavioral regulation, that enable an individual to dynamically adapt to the (...) changing demands of both internal and external environments. In this study, we expected individual differences in resting vagally mediated HRV to moderate the influence of emotion regulatory strategies among our sample of 267 adults. We found support for the hypothesis that higher vagally mediated HRV buffers against the typical adverse effects of expressive suppression when evaluating depressive symptoms and found weak support when considering perceived stress. There was no evidence for an interaction between cognitive reappraisal and vagally mediated HRV but there was a significant, negative association between cognitive reappraisal and depressive symptoms and perceived stress. Future work may determine if intervening on either emotion regulation strategies or HRV may change these within-persons over time. (shrink)

How should you evaluate your choices when you’re unsure what their outcomes will be? One popular answer is to rank your options in terms of their expected utilities. But what should you do when you think that the value of their respective outcomes might be incommensurable? In the face of incommensurable values, it no longer makes sense to speak of ranking your options according to expected utility. Are there any general principles to guide us when facing decisions of this kind? (...) If only! This chapter develops an impossibility result: it holds that there are a handful of independently plausible constraints that no such decision theory can jointly satisfy. The result, while depressing, can be used to helpfully classify extant approaches based on which of the constraints they violate. (shrink)

This investigation looks into important questions in a postpandemic world. Humans are resilient beings who have overcome great catastrophes in the past. In this Covid-19 pandemic, I happen to visit a depressed community in Sitio Malipayon in which people seem to go on with their lives even with the existential threat from the pandemic. At the outset, the prejudices against the poor point to a lack of discipline. Yet, it is critical to understand that a return into the ordinariness of (...) human life may possess the answers that can save modern society in a post-pandemic world. The Plague, written by Albert Camus, is considered as “a kind of laboratory for studying attitudes towards itself.” This observation is demonstrated in the attitude of the priest, who sees the disease as a “punishment of God againstthe wickedness of modern life”; of Rambert, who has been separated “from the woman he loves”; and of Tarrou, “for whom it becomes the occasion of realizing his passion to correct an injustice at the center of society.” Perhaps, the present pandemic may not end modern society as it is, but it makes obvious what modern society actually lacks. The coronavirus pandemic, which has infected 13,238,448 and taken the life of 575,547 as of July 14, 202029, stirs fear among the people, especially in developing countries such as the Philippines. But what people dread does not come from the virus itself. It is the fear of the lack of clarity in terms of what the government wants to do given the circumstances millions are in. Some reports reveal a mismanagement of data. People are facing a bleak and an uncertain future as there are no guarantees in terms of the return to the normal states of affairs. The experience of stress and boredom, the loss of a job or source of income, have a negative impact in the lives of the people. (shrink)

I argue, contra Mohan Matthen, that at least some aesthetic pleasures arising from the appreciation of aesthetic features of artworks are what he calls ‘r-pleasures’ as opposed to ‘f-pleasures’—and moreover, that the paradigm aesthetic pleasure appears to be an r-pleasure on Matthen's terms. I then argue that talk of r- and f-pleasures does not distinguish different kinds, but two different features of pleasure; so this supposed distinction cannot be used to characterize a sui generis aesthetic pleasure.

Central to the social membership model of animal rights is the claim that relations with nonhuman animals should be reorganized such that domesticated animals are recognized as members of our shared societies. Though some elements of the membership model remain contested, the core of the membership model is that domesticated animals have a claim on, and a direct entitlement to, the benefits of cooperative relations. For many political theorists, however, distributive justice considerations apply only to a certain kind of cooperative (...) relationship. The community of justice recipients is thought to be limited by what Brian Berkey calls the Contribution/Capacity Basis of Entitlement. Accordingly, justice considerations apply to a scheme of cooperation and a conception of justice “entail[s] direct entitlements only for those who are contributors, or, alternatively, those who at least possess the capacities that are necessary to be capable of contributing to such a scheme”. This thesis – referred to as ‘contributionism’ – has typically been utilized to exclude nonhuman animals from justice considerations. The paper argues that contributionism is not fundamentally at odds with justice for domesticated animals, and conversely that contributionism remains a useful conceptual tool for explaining resource sharing with these nonhuman animals. (shrink)

When deciding what to do, is it best to treat one's own interests as more important than the interests of others, others' interests as more important than one's own, or one's own and others' interests as equally important? This book develops an account of others-centeredness, a way of putting others first in the process of deciding what to do. Over the course of six chapters, Putting Others First investigates other-centeredness by drawing upon a wide range of academic disciplines including biblical (...) studies, feminist scholarship, philosophy, psychology, and theology. The author begins by explaining the nature of others-centeredness as a character trait in detail and connecting it with other contemporary projects in virtue theory. He argues that foundational texts of the New Testament can be plausibly read as advocating for others-centeredness. He then develops a provisional case for the value of others-centeredness from the perspective of each of the three major approaches to normative ethics: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Next, the author confronts challenging questions about the value of others-centeredness, including whether others-centeredness requires an impossibly strong sort of altruism, whether it leads its possessors into self-destructive relationships, and whether it leads to offering help that hurts others. Finally, he examines the place of others-centeredness within a person's moral psychology by considering the relationship between it and other virtues and vices, and reviews relevant scientific findings that illuminate the value and causal role of others-centeredness. (shrink)

This article outlines the features and application of a set of model curriculum materials that utilize eco-democratic principles and humanities-based content to cultivate critical analysis of the cultural foundations of socio-environmental problems. We first describe the goals and components of the materials, then discuss results of their use in two different types of classrooms: an undergraduate humanities seminar at a mid-sized four-year college, and a developmental writing course at a community college.

Understanding Curriculum is a critical introduction to contemporary curriculum theory and practice. Substantially revised, the second edition includes more detailed consideration of the ideological underpinnings of curriculum development, features new chapters on assessment and reporting, and updated vignettes and extracts. These features, combined with all the elements of the previous edition, encourages readers to reflect on how curriculum theory can inform and enhance classroom practice.

I offer an explanation for why certain sequences of decisions strike us as irrational while others do not. I argue that we have a standing desire to tell flattering yet plausible narratives about ourselves, and that cases of diachronic behavior that strike us as irrational are those in which you had the opportunity to hide something unflattering and failed to do so.

Conscientious objection among physicians is a perennial hot topic on both sides of the Atlantic. Sven Nordstrand's survey of Norwegian medical students adds fresh data to this ongoing debate.1Their starting point, whether doctors should be allowed to refuse any procedure to which they object on cultural, moral or religious grounds, is truly at the heart of the debate. Their finding that only 20.8% of students endorse this position is striking as it is less than half the number reported by Sophie (...) Strickland in her survey of medical students in the UK.2 It also suggests much less support for conscientious objection than was found among USA primary care physicians, where 78% agreed that “A physician should never do what he or she believes is morally wrong, no matter what experts say.”3These data invite speculation about why there is such dramatic variation between countries. Much can be made of Nordstrand's comments that in Norway “each citizen is assigned a particular general practitioner” and “In the Norwegian healthcare system the general practitioner has a crucial role as …. (shrink)

The Trump Administration's governance of COVID-19 racial health disparities data has become a key front in the viral war against the pandemic and racial health injustice. In this paper, I analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic joins an already ongoing racial spectacle and system of structural gaslighting organized around “racial health disparities” in the United States and globally. The field of racial health disparities has yet to question the domain assumptions that uphold its field of investigation; as a result, the entire (...) reform program called for by racial health disparities science is already featured on the menu of the white supremacist power structure. The societal infrastructure that produces scientific knowledge about patterns of health and disease in the human population needs to confront its structural position as part of the racial spectacle organized around racial health disparities in the United States. This paper offers an interpretation of racial antimatter to explain why the data will not save us in the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on articulations of racial spectacle and structural gaslighting within critical race theory and Afropessimist thought. By positioning events in the COVID-19 pandemic together within the same racially speculative frame, I show how the collection of racial health disparities data came up against white supremacists’ political ambitions in a time-space where the demand for human life to matter and the iterative regeneration of racial antimatter collided. This paper highlights the need for ongoing analysis of the unfolding and future spectacles organized around racial health disparities. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that sensibility‐invariantism about ‘funny’ is defensible, not just as a descriptive hypothesis, but, as a normative position as well. What I aim to do is to make the realist commitments of the sensibility‐invariantist out to be much more tenable than one might initially think them to be. I do so by addressing the two major sources of discontent with sensibility‐invariantism: the observation that discourse about comedy exhibits significant divergence in judgment, and the fact that disagreements (...) about comedy, unlike disagreements about, say, geography, often strike us as fundamentally intractable. (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)