The standard objection to dualist theories of mind is that they seemingly cannot account for the obvious fact that mental phenomena cause our behaviour. On the plausible assumption that all our behaviour is physically necessitated by entirely physical phenomena, there appears to be no room for dualist mental causation. Some argue that dualists can address this problem by making minimal adjustments in their ontology. I argue that no such adjustments are required. Given recent developments in philosophy of causation, it is (...) plausible that mental phenomena cause behaviour in standard dualist ontologies. (shrink)

“Fair and equitable benefit-sharing” is one of the objectives of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. In essence, benefit-sharing holds that countries, farmers, and indigenous communities that grant access to their plant genetic resources and/or traditional knowledge should share in the benefits that users derive from these resources. But what exactly is understood by “fair” and “equitable” in this context? Neither term is defined in the international treaties. (...) A complicating factor, furthermore, is that different motivations and perspectives exist with respect to the notion of benefit-sharing itself. This paper looks at six different approaches to benefit-sharing that can be extracted from the current debates on “Access and Benefit-Sharing.” These approaches form the basis of a philosophical reflection in which the different connotations of “fair and equitable” are considered, by analyzing the main principles of justice involved. Finally, the various principles are brought together in order to draw some conclusions as to how a fair and equitable benefit-sharing mechanism might best be realized. This results in several recommendations for policymakers. (shrink)

We live in a world of one-size-fits-all law. People are different, but the laws that govern them are uniform. "Personalized Law" - rules that vary person by person - will change that. Here is a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally-tailored law. "Reasonable person" standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own "reasonable you" rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care, (...) the most vulnerable consumers and employees would receive stronger protections, age restrictions for driving or for the consumption of alcohol would vary according the recklessness risk that each person poses, and borrowers would be entitled to personalized loan disclosures tailored to their unique needs and delivered in a format fitting their mental capacity. The data and algorithms to administer personalize law are at our doorstep, and embryos of this regime are sprouting. Should we welcome this transformation of the law? Does personalized law harbor a utopic promise, or would it produce alienation, demoralization, and discrimination? This book is the first to explore personalized law, offering a vision of law and robotics that delegates to machines those tasks humans are least able to perform well. It inquires how personalized law can be designed to deliver precision and justice and what pitfalls the regime would have to prudently avoid. (shrink)

As football clubs are facing different ethical challenges, many clubs are turning to ethical codes to counteract unethical behaviour. However, both in- and outside the sport field, uncertainty remains about the effectiveness of these ethical codes. For the first time, a longitudinal study design was adopted to evaluate code effectiveness. Specifically, a sample of non-professional football clubs formed the subject of our inquiry. Ethical code effectiveness was assessed by the measurement of the ethical climate. A repeated-measurements ANOVA revealed a positive (...) evolution of the ethical climate within the studied football clubs. This evolution could not be ascribed to the mere presence of an ethical code. However, several potential code effectiveness determining characteristics were also included in the research design. Some of these accounted partly for the evolution of the ethical climate of the football clubs. Results suggest that football clubs should incorporate their ethical code into a broader ethical programme, with attention for professionalization initiatives, stakeholder management, ethical leadership, and whistle-blowing protection. (shrink)

People often signal their membership in groups through their clothes, hairstyle, posture, and dialect. Most existing evolutionary models argue that markers label group members so individuals can preferentially interact with those in their group. Here we ask why people mark ethnic differences when interethnic interaction is routine, necessary, and peaceful. We asked research participants from three ethnic groups in southwestern Madagascar to sort photos of unfamiliar people by ethnicity, and by with whom they would prefer or not prefer to cooperate, (...) in a wage labor vignette. Results indicate that southwestern Malagasy reliably send and detect ethnic signals; they signal less in the marketplace, a primary site of interethnic coordination and cooperation; and they do not prefer co-ethnics as cooperation partners in novel circumstances. Results from a cultural knowledge survey and calculations of cultural FST suggest that these ethnic groups have relatively little cultural differentiation. We concur with Moya and Boyd that ethnicity is unlikely to be a singular social phenomenon. The current functions of ethnic divisions and marking may be different from those at the moment of ethnogenesis. Group identities may persist without group conflict or differentiation. (shrink)

Ever since the publication of Read’s The Politics of Transindividuality (2015), the academic interest in transindividuality has steadily mounted. In this conversation, Bram Wiggers and Jason Read discuss the current state of affairs around the concept of transindividuality. The conversation begins with a definition of transindividuality and discusses what sets the term apart from other philosophies of social individuation. Having defined the concept of transindividuality, the conversation then engages with the question of how transindividuality can be adopted as a (...) means of social-political critique. First, Bram and Jason discuss how transindividuality is evoked but not explicitly mentioned in the social-political critiques of Spinoza and Marx. Secondly, the conversation takes up the social-political critiques of Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler who make explicit use of transindividuality. Central to the later parts of the conversation is the complicated interrelation between the political and economic domains of individuation, as well as the tendency of collective modes of representation to be effaced and obscured by (neoliberal) individualism and the post-Fordist conditions of labor. Overall, the conversation highlights the relevance of transindividuality for social-political philosophical critique. (shrink)

A fact of life for farmers, hunter-gatherers, and fishermen in the rural parts of the world are that crops fail, wild resources become scarce, and winds discourage fishing. In this article we approach subsistence risk from the perspective of "coexistence thinking," the simultaneous application of natural and supernatural causal models to explain subsistence success and failure. In southwestern Madagascar, the ecological world is characterized by extreme variability and unpredictability, and the cosmological world is characterized by anxiety about supernatural dangers. Ecological (...) and cosmological causes seem to point to different risk minimizing strategies: to avoid losses from drought, flood, or heavy winds, one should diversify activities and be flexible; but to avoid losses caused by disrespected spirits one should narrow one's range of behaviors to follow the code of taboos and offerings. We address this paradox by investigating whether southwestern Malagasy understand natural and supernatural causes as occupying separate, contradictory explanatory systems (target dependence), whether they make no categorical distinction between natural and supernatural forces and combine them within a single explanatory system (synthetic thinking), or whether they have separate natural and supernatural categories of causes that are integrated into one explanatory system so that supernatural forces drive natural forces (integrative thinking). Results from three field studies suggest that (a) informants explain why crops, prey, and market activities succeed or fail with reference to natural causal forces like rainfall and pests, (b) they explain why individual persons experience success or failure primarily with supernatural factors like God and ancestors, and (c) they understand supernatural forces as driving natural forces, so that ecology and cosmology represent distinct sets of causes within a single explanatory framework. We expect that future cross-cultural analyses may find that this form of "integrative thinking" is common in unpredictable environments and is a cognitive strategy that accompanies economic diversification. (shrink)

In this paper I present and defend a highly demanding principle of justice in education that has not been seriously discussed thus far. According to the suggested approach, “all the way equality”, justice in education requires nothing short of equal educational outcome between all individual students. This means not merely between equally able children, or between children from different groups and classes, but rather between all children, regardless of social background, race, sex and ability. This approach may seem implausible at (...) first, due to the far-reaching implications it entails, primarily its requirement to deny better-off children their advantage for the sake of equality. However the paper argues that all-the-way-equality, in fact, does a better job realizing the goals of justice in education than alternative conceptions of justice. It is further argued that at least some of the principle’s most radical consequences, those that make it seem counterintuitive, can be mitigated by balancing all-the-way-equality with competing interests. (shrink)

Erdelyi's two key tenets – that repression may be conscious (“suppression”) and that it is context-sensitive – resonate well with findings on unipolar depression. Drawing from this field, I argue that (1) “oppression,” namely, pressure from significant others to refrain from attending to certain mental contents, influences individuals' repression/suppression; and that, (2) individuals actively create the very contexts that facilitate their repression/suppression.

Computer simulation of an epistemic landscape model, modified to include explicit representation of a centralized funding body, show the method of funding allocation has significant effects on communal trade-off between exploration and exploitation, with consequences for the community’s ability to generate significant truths. The results show this effect is contextual, and depends on the size of the landscape being explored, with funding that includes explicit random allocation performing significantly better than peer review on large landscapes. The article proposes a way (...) of incorporating external institutional factors in formal social epistemology, and offers a way of bringing such investigations to bear on current research policy questions. 1Introduction2Theoretical Background3Model Description4Simulation Details 4.1Simulating the epistemic landscape4.2Simulating agents4.3Simulating communal knowledge4.4Simulating funding strategies4.5Simulating merit dynamics5Results and Discussion 5.1Experiment 1: The winner-takes-it-all mechanism only5.2Experiment 2: All dynamic mechanisms5.3Experiment 3: Adding a new funding mechanism 5.4Experiment 4: Varying the degree of myopia5.5Experiment 5: Variability of individual epistemic gain5.6Experiment 6: Likelihood of renewal6Discussion7Conclusion. (shrink)

Computer simulation of an epistemic landscape model, modified to include explicit representation of a centralized funding body, show the method of funding allocation has significant effects on communal trade-off between exploration and exploitation, with consequences for the community’s ability to generate significant truths. The results show this effect is contextual, and depends on the size of the landscape being explored, with funding that includes explicit random allocation performing significantly better than peer-review on large landscapes. The paper proposes a way of (...) incorporating external institutional factors in formal social epistemology, and offers a way of bringing such investigations to bear on current research policy questions. (shrink)

Pluralism about scientific method is more-or-less accepted, but the consequences have yet to be drawn out. Scientists adopt different methods in response to different epistemic situations: depending on the system they are interested in, the resources at their disposal, and so forth. If it is right that different methods are appropriate in different situations, then mismatches between methods and situations are possible. This is most likely to occur due to method bias: when we prefer a particular kind of method, despite (...) that method clashing with evidential context or our aims. To explore these ideas, we sketch a kind of method pluralism which turns on two properties of evidence, before using agent-based models to examine the relationship between methods, epistemic situations, and bias. Based on our results, we suggest that although method bias can undermine the efficiency of a scientific community, it can also be productive through preserving a diversity of evidence. We consider circumstances where method bias could be particularly egregious, and those where it is a potential virtue, and argue that consideration of method bias reveals that community standards deserve a central place in the epistemology of science. (shrink)

Understanding lone actor grievance-fueled violence remains a challenge. We believe that the concept of grievance provides an opportunity to add an engaged, first-person perspective to the assessment of lone actor extreme violence. We propose an enactivist philosophical approach that can help to understand the why and how of the pathway from grievance to violent extremism. Enactivism sees grievance as a dynamic, interpersonal, and context-sensitive construct that indicates how offenders make sense of the world they live in and how under certain (...) circumstances it fuels violent behavior. Hence, grievance should not be understood as a given thing, but as an unfolding experience that involves sense-making through interaction with the environment. This relational and ecological understanding requires another approach than looking at demographic factors or life histories, only from an outsider’s perspective. Enactivism invites us to look at such risk factors as external indices of an ongoing process of active self-regulation and sense-making, and in some cases spiraling toward extreme violence. To understand the mindset of the offender we need to look more in depth at the processes that shape this mindset: why does this person, with this history, in this context, and at this point in time, proceed to use violence? The enactivist approach to the mind offers a complementary framework that may help us to understand the dynamics of grievance as a possible precursor to violent extremism. It also helps to appreciate why the relative unpredictability of the pathway toward lone actor extreme violence is not necessarily a sign of empirical weakness but a matter of principle due to the non-linearity of the processes involved. We end by summarizing how enactivism could contribute to the prevention of extremist violence and research and how it can help to avoid reinforcing stigmas and re-establishing a confirmation bias. (shrink)

In 2013 the Health Research Council of New Zealand began a stream of funding titled 'Explorer Grants', and in 2017 changes were introduced to the funding mechanisms of the Volkswagen Foundation 'Experiment!' and the New Zealand Science for Technological Innovation challenge 'Seed Projects'. All three funding streams aim at encouraging novel scientific ideas, and all now employ random selection by lottery as part of the grant selection process. The idea of funding science by lottery has emerged independently in several corners (...) of academia, including in philosophy of science. This paper reviews the conceptual and institutional landscape in which this policy proposal emerged, how different academic fields presented and supported arguments for the proposal, and how these have been reflected in actual policy. The paper presents an analytical synthesis of the arguments presented to date, notes how they support each other and shape policy recommendations in various ways, and where competing arguments highlight need for further analysis or more data. In addition, it provides lessons for how philosophers of science can engage in shaping science policy, and in particular highlights the importance of mixing complementary expertise: it takes a village to raise policy. (shrink)

On the 50th anniversary of the Willowbrook experiment's inception, in which Dr. Saul Krugman intentionally infected cognitively disabled children with hepatitis, it is worth reflecting on how our attitude toward research ethics of the past informs our current practices. In examining ethical violations in postwar medicine, we frequently turn to examples that shock and appall, thereby offering concomitant comfort as we measure their safe distance from our own medical context. And yet, which modern medical student has not heard a variation (...) of the phrase "This study would never have passed an ethics committee today" in reference to a classic experiment or a professor's very own work? Even with Nuremburg fresh in the .. (shrink)

There are now several proposals for introducing random elements into the process of funding allocation for research, and some initial implementation of this policy by funding bodies. The proposals have been supported on efficiency grounds, with models, including social epistemology models, showing random allocation could increase the generation of significant truths in a community of scientists when compared to funding by peer review. The models in the literature are, however, fairly abstract. This paper introduces some of the considerations that are (...) required to build on the modelling work towards a fully-fledged policy proposal, including issues of cost and fairness. (shrink)

According to the so-called 'proportionality principle', causes should be proportional to their effects: they should be both enough and not too much for the occurrence of their effects. This principle is the subject of an ongoing debate. On the one hand, many maintain that it is required to address the problem of causal exclusion and take it to capture a crucial aspect of causation. On the other hand, many object that it renders accounts of causation implausibly restrictive and often reject (...) the principle wholesale. I argue that there is exaggeration on both sides. While one half of the principle is overly demanding, the other half is unobjectionable. And while the unobjectionable half does not block exclusion arguments on its own, it provides a nuanced picture of higher-level causation, fits with recent developments in philosophy of causation, and motivates adjustments to standard difference-making accounts of causation. I conclude that at least half of the proportionality principle is worth taking seriously. (shrink)

This book is exceptional in the sense that it provides an introduction to law in general rather than the law of one specific jurisdiction, and it presents a unique way of looking at legal education. It is crucial for lawyers to be aware of the different ways in which societal problems can be solved and to be able to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different legal solutions. In this respect, being a lawyer involves being able to reason like a (...) lawyer, even more than having detailed knowledge of particular sets of rules. Introduction to Law reflects this view by focusing on the functions of rules and on ways of arguing the relative qualities of alternative legal solutions. Where 'positive' law is discussed, the emphasis is on the legal questions that must be addressed by a field of law, and on the different solutions which have been adopted by, for instance, the common law and civil law tradition. The law of specific jurisdictions is discussed to illustrate possible answers to questions such as when the existence of a valid contract is assumed. (shrink)

Deterrence means threatening to retaliate against an attack in order to deter it in the first place. The central problem with a policy of deterrence is that the threat of retaliation may not be credible if retaliation leads to a worse outcome - perhaps a nuclear holocaust - than a side would suffer from absorbing a limited first strike and not retaliating. - The optimality of deterrence is analyzed by means of a Deterrence Game based on Chicken, in which each (...) player chooses a probability (or level) of preemption, and of retaliation if preempted. The Nash equilibria, or stable outcomes, in this game are compared with those in a Star Wars Game, in which the preemption and retaliation levels are constrained by the defensive capabilities of each side. Unlike threats in the Deterrence Game, which can always stabilize the cooperative outcome, mutual preemption emerges as an equilibrium in the Star Wars Game, underscoring the problem - particularly if defensive capabilities are unbalanced - that deterrence will be subverted by the development of Star Wars. (shrink)

Many philosophers argue that exclusion arguments cannot exclude non-reductionist physicalist mental properties from being causes without excluding properties that are patently causal as well. List and Stoljar (2017) recently argued that a similar response to exclusion arguments is also available to dualists, thereby challenging the predominant view that exclusion arguments undermine dualist theories of mind. In particular, List and Stoljar maintain that exclusion arguments against dualism require a premise that states that, if a property is metaphysically distinct from the sufficient (...) cause of an effect, this property cannot be a cause of that effect. I argue that this premise is indeed likely to exclude patently causal properties, but that exclusion arguments against dualism do not require this premise. The relation that enables metaphysically distinct properties to cause the same effect in the relevant way turns out to be tighter than the relation typically posited between dualist conscious properties and their underlying physical properties. It is therefore still plausible that the latter causally exclude the former and that compelling exclusion arguments against dualism can be formulated by using a weaker exclusion premise. I conclude by proposing such a formulation. (shrink)

The importance of education and its profound effect on people's life make it a central issue in discussions of distributive justice. However, promoting distributive justice in education comes at a price: prioritising the education of some, as is often entailed by the principles of justice, inevitably has negative effects on the education of others. As a result, all theories of distributive justice in education face the challenge of balancing their requirements with conflicting interests. This article aims to contribute to developing (...) an account of conflicting interests by identifying a category of conflicting interests—non-positional conflicting interests—the realisation of which does not necessarily disrupt distributive justice. Non-positional conflicting interests include, for example, the interest in realising one's full potential and parents’ interest in familial relations. The article argues that the core dimensions of non-positional conflicting interests can usually be realised without upsetting distributive justice, and that actions that do upset distributive justice tend to be peripheral to these interests. Either way, there is no severe friction between distributive justice and non-positional conflicting interests: in the former cases, both are realised simultaneously. In the latter, tension exists; however, because the infringement on the conflicting interest is of relatively little weight, it is often justified, all things considered, in order to promote distributive justice. The conclusion is that while there are indeed cases in which distributive justice must retreat in the face of other interests, the friction between distributive justice and other interests is actually weaker than meets the eye. (shrink)

Scholars and lawmakers are familiar with a meta-narrative describing the liberal revolution of spousal law that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century, which further transformed marriage, already transformed from a Catholic religious sacrament into a public institution and legal status model in the nineteenth century, into a private contract at the end of the twentieth. This Article addresses the liberal transformation of spousal law. The goals of the discussion are threefold: First, the Article examines the liberalization as (...) a historical narrative and the sub-narratives contained therein. Secondly, it explores the liberalization as the normative framework for the current normative debates. Finally, the Article criticizes the existing school of thought and proposes principles for a new theory that would depart from the thought patterns imposed by the liberalization narrative. (shrink)

Summary This paper investigates the Athenian gymnasiarchy, an office that remains badly understood. Originally a festival liturgy, the gymnasiarchy was transformed into a magistracy at the end of the fourth century BC. This paper first examines the reasons for the shift and argues that it was connected to broader political currents in late Classical Athens. Secondly, it sheds new light on the nature of the office in the Hellenistic period. Whereas earlier scholars assumed that the Athenian gymnasiarch was a minor (...) official under the kosmetes, epigraphic and literary sources reveal that he was a fully-fledged gymnasium director, just as in other poleis. (shrink)

SummaryIn his doctoral dissertation—The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, finished in 1919 and published as a book in 1920—Walter Benjamin explores the epistemological and aesthetic foundations of the concept of criticism expounded by the early German Romantics Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Many of the themes in the dissertation recur in his later work, which has led scholars to believe that much of Benjamin's thought is directly influenced by the Romantics. However, a detailed investigation of the origins and development of (...) the dissertation reveals that the picture is much more complicated. Reading the dissertation alongside the biographical material now available, this article argues that the major themes which preoccupy Benjamin in The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, including his theories of language and knowledge as well as his messianic philosophy of history, in fact predate his study of the Romantics. As well as being a potential entry ticket to an academic career, the dissertation constitutes Benjamin's first sustained attempt to develop and consolidate his own epistemology and aesthetics in a more or less systematic way. He does so through a series of ‘judicious interpretations’ of the Romantics, whose work he reads selectively, anachronistically and creatively to provide a vehicle for his own thought. (shrink)

Some non-reductionists claim that so-called ‘exclusion arguments’ against their position rely on a notion of causal sufficiency that is particularly problematic. I argue that such concerns about the role of causal sufficiency in exclusion arguments are relatively superficial since exclusionists can address them by reformulating exclusion arguments in terms of physical sufficiency. The resulting exclusion arguments still face familiar problems, but these are not related to the choice between causal sufficiency and physical sufficiency. The upshot is that objections to the (...) notion of causal sufficiency can be answered in a straightforward fashion and that such objections therefore do not pose a serious threat to exclusion arguments. (shrink)

High-frequency oscillations emerged as a neural code for both positive affect and fluent attentional processing from evolutionary simulations with artificial neural networks. Visual 50 Hz flicker, which entrains neural oscillations in the gamma band, has been shown to foster attentional switching, but can it also elicit positive affect? A three-faces display was preceded by a 50, 25, or 0 Hz flicker on the position of the odd-one-out . Participants decided on the gender or on the subjective valence of this neutral (...) target in an approach-avoidance task, which served as an implicit affective measure. Only the detection of 25 Hz flicker, but not of 50 Hz flicker, was above chance . Faces primed by invisible 50 Hz flicker were explicitly evaluated more positively than with 25 Hz or 0 Hz. This gamma flicker also facilitated approach reactions, and inhibited avoidance reactions relative to 25 Hz and 0 Hz flicker in Blocks 1 and 2. Attentional switching was, moreover, enhanced by the 50 Hz flicker. According to the Affect–Gamma hypothesis, also in biological neural networks, high-frequency gamma oscillations may code for positive affect. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This commentary argues that one specific but central concept in Lewis's theory, circular causality, is fundamentally flawed and should be discarded – first, because it does not make theoretical sense, and, second, because it leads to problems in practice, such as confounding the interaction between different systems with the relationship between different levels of analysis of a single system.

The Greek hagiographic dossier concerning Maximus the Confessor consists of a number of different passiones and vitae, which all present basically the same information, frequently worded in a similar, if not identical way. In the present article an attempt is made to explain this situation by establishing the relationships between these texts. For the first time the passiones in the Synaxarium Constantinopolitanum and in Patmiacus 266 are taken into consideration. Moreover, the conclusions for the most famous vita may prove to (...) be important for our knowledge of Maximus' course of life. (shrink)

A framework is presented to better characterize the role of individual differences in information processing style and their interplay with contextual factors in determining decision making quality. In Experiment 1, we show that individual differences in information processing style are flexible and can be modified by situational factors. Specifically, a situational manipulation that induced an analytical mode of thought improved decision quality. In Experiment 2, we show that this improvement in decision quality is highly contingent on the compatibility between the (...) dominant thinking mode and the nature of the task. That is, encouraging an intuitive mode of thought led to better performance on an intuitive task but hampered performance on an analytical task. The reverse pattern was obtained when an analytical mode of thought was encouraged. We discuss the implications of these results for the assessment of decision making competence, and suggest practical directions to help individuals better adjust their information processing style to the situation at hand and make optimal decisions. (shrink)

In this book, Tal Ben-Shahar introduces a new interdisciplinary field of study that is dedicated to exploring happiness. The study of happiness ought not be left to psychologists alone. Philosophers, theologians, biologists, economists, and scholars from other disciplines have explored ways of attaining happiness, and to do justice to this important pursuit, we ought to listen to their words and experiment with their prescriptions. Not only does the field of happiness studies embrace different disciplines, it also approaches happiness as (...) a multifaceted and multidimensional variable that includes five parts which form the acronym SPIRE: Spiritual wellbeing Physical wellbeing Intellectual wellbeing Relational wellbeing Emotional wellbeing This book addresses each of these elements of happiness, explains them, and addresses practical ways for their cultivation. (shrink)