Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

Bush and Cheney lied and attempted to deceive the public in a number of their public statements before and during the Iraq War of 2003. I defend definitions of deception and lying. Roughly, deception is intentionally causing others to have false beliefs. My definition of lying has two noteworthy features. First, I reject the standard view that lying requires the intention to deceive others. Second, I claim that telling a lie involves warranting the truth of what one says. Then, (...) after summarizing some of the most well known cases in which it is alleged that Bush and Cheney lied or attempted to deceive the public, I argue that both Bush and Cheney are guilty of lying and deception, despite giving them every benefit of the doubt. In some of the cases it is clear that they tried to deceive the public, but unclear whether or not they lied. My view that lying involves giving a warranty or guarantee that what one says is true is salient in several of these cases and helps to show that Bush and Cheney lied and attempted to deceive the public—they strongly warranted the truth of claims that they knew were open to serious doubts. Their claims to the effect that it was certain that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” were particularly egregious. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes: Legacies of Postmodern Theory,Thomas LeddySpirits Hovering Over the Ashes: Legacies of Postmodern Theory, by H. L. Hix; x & 208 pp. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995, $16.95 paper.This intriguing, rich and witty book is a collection of twelve mainly previously published essays each of which is titled “Postmodern” something.“Postmodern Grief,” which first appeared in Philosophy and Literature (1993), is a wonderful and fun (...) deconstruction of the postmodernists themselves. Hix sees certain writings in terms of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The grief is over cultural losses (the ashes of which are referred to in the book’s title) in our electronic information age.Hix is dead right when he argues that Derrida exemplifies the strategy of denial in “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Derrida, as Hix puts it, addresses yesterday’s problem. Hix also plausibly fits writers like Eco and Bloom into the stage of anger. His interpretation of Lyotard as dealing with grief by bargaining (“if I let consensus go, will you let me keep justice?”) is brilliant. There is something pathetic about Lyotard’s belief that if we give all people free access to information technology then this will insure justice. Hix matches Baudrillard, who laments the loss of four-dimensionality in the electronic era, with depression. Finally, Ong exemplifies acceptance since, for Ong, electronic [End Page 511] technologies bring us to a new oral age which fosters a communal sense and concentrates on the present. Hix then calls for a new Socrates who will take us beyond lament to forge a new ideal.“Postmodern Beauty” argues, contra Lyotard, that beauty is still possible in our computer age since artworks are eternally created here and now. We can have aesthetic friendships with a visionary superior such as Van Gogh. However the Van Gogh we are speaking of is not the real historical one but a created proxy who only exists discursively. Still, the great artist is divine and gives us his (Hix’s examples are all male) blessing.“Postmodern Obscenity” presents Baudrillard’s view that obscenity is to be found not in desire’s triumph but rather in its defeat. In this postmodern age we lose sexuality because penetration is no longer possible, and that is so because of the collapse of the distinction between surface and depth. Hix then contrasts a photograph by Mapplethorpe with a Victoria’s Secret catalog. The catalog fits the postmodern conception of obscenity nicely. The Mapplethorpe, although obscene in the traditional sense, is not in the postmodern sense.“Postmodern Color” is my favorite chapter. Here, Hix deconstructs Derrida’s own analysis of metaphor and metaphysics. He shows how Derrida must use metaphors of opacity and depth to make his point. These metaphors also entail the very view Derrida opposes. It is here that Hix develops his theme of the postmodern replacement of metaphors of time with those of space. Prior to our postmodern era the Other which constitutes our selves was historical (for example, ancestors) while the Other which threatened us was spatial (for example, foreigners). By contrast, in the postmodern era we are constituted by the spatial Other and are threatened by the temporal Other. This explains something that has puzzled me in recent curriculum debates. As Hix puts it, reasonable people like Lynne Cheney and Louis Gates understand the humanities differently in terms of these competing metaphors. Cheney takes the traditional view, using temporal metaphors of origin and tradition, while Gates takes the postmodern view, using spacial metaphors of decentering and marginality.“Postmodern Love” and “Postmodern Sex” fit together. The first argues that although postmodernists claim we lack a language of love, they actually believe that love and language are one. More importantly, they know but repress the idea that love is something that transcends language. Here Hix calls on postmodernism to recognize that what structures language is outside language. The second argues that sex in our postmodern era has been transformed into discourse and discourse into sex. Each is in exchange for the other. Thus, whereas postmodern love is inexpressible, postmodern sex is nothing but talk.“Postmodern Virtue” begins by showing that... (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

It is somewhat misleading to think of the Franciscans as forming a “school” in ethics, since there was a fair bit of diversity among Franciscans. Nonetheless, one can identify certain characteristic tendencies of Franciscan moral thought, and certain “celebrity” Franciscans whose views in ethics and moral psychology are particularly noteworthy. I shall first offer an overview of the general character of Franciscan moral thought in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and then turn to a more detailed examination of (...) the thought of John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) and William Ockham (c. 1288-1347) on three central matters of debate: the nature of the virtues, the relationship between intellect and will, and the relationship between moral requirements and the divine will. (shrink)

In this book Thomas Wren uncovers and assesses the largely hidden philosophical assumptions about human motivation that have shaped contemporary psychological ...

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

The newly updated Right and Wrong 2nd Edition is an accessible introduction to the major traditions in western philosophical ethics, written in a lively and engaging style. It is designed for entry-level ethics courses and includes real-life ethical scenarios chosen to appeal directly to students. Greatly expanded and improved, this successful text introduces students to the major ethical traditions, and provides a simple methodology for resolving ethical dilemmas Treats teleological and deontological approaches to ethics as the two most important traditions, (...) but now includes chapters on virtue ethics and the ethics of care The very accessible writing style speaks directly to students’ own experience Draws examples from three types of real-life ethical scenarios submitted by students: academic dishonesty, partying, and personal relationships Provides a concise treatment of this notoriously complex subject, perfect for entry-level ethics and applied ethics courses. (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held in Apr. 2008 in Washington, D.C.

Father Williams explains how the conscience is formed through our training and experiences and informed by the Holy Spirit, making it an essential tool for daily living. He uses familiar and surprising characters to illustrate the positive choices conscience can direct--and the disaster that results when a conscience is undeveloped or ignored. Questions he tackles include "Is it more important to be smart or good?""Is there a morally right thing to do in every situation?" and "Is the Christian moral life (...) an exciting adventure, or a necessary burden?" Rich, provocative, and practical for everyday decision making, KNOWING RIGHT FROM WRONG is a must-read for all who hunger for personal holiness. (shrink)

For courses in Business Ethics A fresh approach to the assumptions that underlie business practices Two recent events — the 2008 economic meltdown and the ongoing concentration of the nation's wealth in the hands of a very small percentage of the population — have led many people to question a number of basic assumptions about business, corporations, and the workings of contemporary free-market capitalism in a global economy. Written as a dialogue between Socrates and a hypothetical contemporary CEO,Socrates Comes to (...) Wall Street leads students to think critically about perspectives and practices that are taken as “givens” in most American business schools and corporations. Employing this original and provocative approach, author Thomas White seeks to encourage the next generation of business leaders to be more astute about the implications of their actions, and to act more prudently and more fairly than we have seen in the recent past. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Personhood: A Start Are Dolphins Persons? Language and the Hand Personhood Redefined Conclusion: What Kind of Beings Are Dolphins?

Background Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) designed to screen for fetal genetic conditions, is increasingly being implemented as a part of routine prenatal care screening in the United States (US). However, these advances in reproductive genetic technology necessitate empirical research on the ethical and social implications of NIPT among populations underrepresented in genetic research, particularly Black women with sickle cell disease (SCD).Methods Forty (N = 40) semi-structured interviews were conducted virtually with Black women in the US (19 participants with SCD; 21 (...) participants without SCD) from June 2021 to January 2022. We employed a qualitative approach to examine the study participants’ perceptions of the potential advancement of NIPT for screening SCD in the fetus. Data were analyzed using NVivo 12 qualitative software.Results The themes revealed the complexities involving the intersectional lived experiences of SCD, prenatal care, lack of synergy among health providers, and NIPT decision-making. The results further revealed that even when Black women have shared commonalities in their lived experiences while navigating SCD and motherhood, their perceptions of NIPT screening technologies are divergent.Conclusion Expanding the ethical discourse on the social implications of NIPT is critical to fully elucidate how Black women perceive NIPT’s utility, particularly as NIPT advances to screen for SCD in the fetus. Neglecting to include Black women with genetic conditions in empirical studies on NIPT may contribute to ongoing health inequities and limit and constrain reproductive choices among Black women with and without SCD. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume questions one of the most fundamental tenets of social theory by focusing on detachment, an important but neglected aspect of social life. Going against the grain of recent theoretical celebrations of engagement, this book challenges us to re-think the relational basis of social theory. In so, doing it brings to light the productive aspects of disconnection, distance and detachment. Rather than treating detachment simply as the moral inversion of compassion and engagement, the volume brings together empirical studies (...) and theoretical comments by leading anthropologists, sociologists and science studies scholars. Taken together, these illustrate the range of contexts within which distance and disconnection can offer meaningful frameworks for action. Positioned at the cutting edge of social theory, this landmark volume will be of great interest to students and academics across the social sciences and humanities. (shrink)

In thePhaedo, Socrates warns his listeners, discouraged by the objections of Simmias and Cebes, against becoming haters oflogoi. I argue that the ‘misologists’ are presented as a type of proto-skeptic and that Socrates in fact shows covert sympathy for their position. The difference between them is revealed by the pragmatic argument for trust in the immortality of the soul that Socrates offers near the end of the passage: the misologists reject such therapeutic uses oflogos. I conclude by assessing the relationship (...) of the positions of Socrates and the misologists in thePhaedoto those of later ancient skeptics. (shrink)

Margaret Wise Brown's The Important Book, which is a childrens' picture book, provides an excellent opportunity to discuss metaphysics. The book opens up for our reflection the viability of a certain metaphysical account of the nature of objects. In making a distinction between the important feature or property of an object and all the others that it simply is or has, The Important Book operates with the assumption that all objects have what metaphysicians call an essential property. As the book (...) has it, while there are many things that are true of any object, only one is essential to it. These other things are accidents or non‐essential properties of the object. Essentialism is the metaphysical view that objects have one property — their essential property — that cannot change while the object remains the same thing. (shrink)

Shrek! focuses on an issue in the philosophy of language, a relatively new area of philosophical investigation that first emerged during the twentieth century. Some philosophers disagree with the claim that you cannot separate the descriptive and evaluative elements of linguistic statements. This is because they take descriptive statements to be the basic elements of language, to which our subjective attitudes get attached later in a contingent manner. At its most basic level language presents a symbolic picture of facts in (...) the world. Shrek! presents what philosophers call a thought experiment that purports to show that the descriptive and evaluative contents of sentences are really distinct. The chapter ends by suggesting how to discuss the philosophy of language with children. (shrink)

In Daniel Manus Pinkwater's quirkily illustrated book, The Big Orange Splot, a strange accident leads a man to change his life. The book presents an important claim that the existentialists and other philosophers have embraced: That the life of conformity is one that people ought to avoid, despite its attractiveness. Instead of living a life just like everyone else and fulfilling expectations that others have for us, our lives should resemble the transformed facades of all the homes on Mr. Plumbean's (...) street: reflections of our own, individual dreams. (shrink)

The chapter talks about Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, which is a favorite of many children, adults, and teachers. The story of a relationship between a boy and a tree is charming for, despite the vicissitudes of the relationship, the two end up together at the end, with the boy — now an old man — sitting contentedly on the tree — itself reduced to a mere stump. The book raises an important issue in the field of environmental ethics. It (...) asks us to recognize that between childhood and old age, people operating within the Western tradition of ethics are not mindful of the value that the non‐human beings in their environment have for them as well as for future generations. Harkening to such warnings, environmental ethicists have attempted to raise important issues about our relationship with the other beings that make up our world. (shrink)

Robert Mursch's picture book, The Paper Bag Princess, inverts many of the gender roles traditionally found in fairy tales: It's a prince (Roland) who gets abducted in this story, not a princess, though it's the princess (Elizabeth) who must come to the rescue and save him. Although these reversals are a source of the book's humor, they also underscore claims made in feminist philosophy, the specific branch of social and political philosophy considered in this chapter. Feminist philosophers and literary scholars (...) have pointed out that happy endings reassert harmful gender norms. Elizabeth's rejection of Roland marks her as a truly feminist hero, for she won't let him treat her in a demeaning manner even though she has staked her own life on saving him. With this story, you can hopefully steer children into a discussion of gender bias and oppression, and how traditional stories function to support it. (shrink)

The Sneetches by Theodor Geisel (otherwise known as Dr Seuss) is a satirical story that targets illicit discrimination. The book presents its parable about discrimination by depicting a society in which one group discriminates against another group because of an easily perceptible difference between them. The real irrationality of discrimination in both The Sneetches and real life is that it is based on the false claim that members of the discriminated‐against group are inferior to members of the discriminating group. The (...) book ends with all of the Sneetches playing with one another, paying no attention to the presence or absence of stars on their bellies. The lesson that children draw from The Sneetches is clear: Discriminating against people in a different social group is wrong. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Human Adaptations to the Water: An Exercise in Imagination Life in the ocean: the importance of other people Dolphin Intelligence in the Wild Dolphin Communication Social Intelligence and Group Cohesion Dolphins and Sex The Cognitive and Affective Skills Involved in Group Living Conclusion: Dolphin Intelligence.

This chapter contains section titled: “Human” Versus “Person” Human, Person and Ethics Philosophical Ethics Ethics and Nonhumans “Alien Intelligence” Two Questions.

This chapter contains section titled: “Interspecies ethics” The Dolphin/Tuna Controversy Dolphins in Captivity So What Do We Do? The Ethics of Human/Dolphin Contact: Two Final Thoughts.

Anselm on faith seeking understanding, "the reason of faith," and the Monologion and Proslogion arguments for the existence of God.

David Ekdahl (2023), in a constructive and thoughtful commentary, outlines both points of agreement with and suggestions for further research arising from our paper ‘Crossing the Fictional Line: Moral Graveness, the Gamer’s Dilemma, and the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far’ (Montefiore & Formosa, 2023).

Die einfache Entgegensetzung von Vernunft und Religion wirkt nach der Religionskritik des 19. Jahrhunderts und der Vernunftkritik des 20. Jahrhunderts philosophisch naiv und historisch unaufgeklart. Dadurch fallt aber ein neues Licht auf das Projekt der Gottesbeweise, die fur die Religion zentrale Gottesvorstellung dem Denken argumentativ zuganglich zu machen. Die Autoren der hier versammelten Uberlegungen beleuchten auf je eigene Weise die traditionellen und aktuellen Gottesbeweise mit dem leitenden systematischen Erkenntnisinteresse, ein neues Verstandnis von Vernunft und Religion zu gewinnen. Mit Beitragen von: (...) Svend Andersen, Thomas Buchheim, Markus Enders, Markus Gabriel, Jens Halfwassen, Friedrich Hermanni, Gunnar Hindrichs, Axel Hutter, Christian Illies, Anton Friedrich Koch, Armin Kreiner, John Leslie, Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Friedo Ricken SJ, Friedrike Schick, Rolf Schonberger, Christoph Schwobel, Robert Spaemann, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen. (shrink)

It is often presumed by those who use propositions in their theories that propositions are representational; that is, that propositions represent the world as being some way. This paper makes two claims against this presumption. First, it argues that it does not follow from the fact that propositions play the theoretical roles usually attributed to them that they are representational. This conclusion is reached by rebutting three arguments that can be made in support of the claim that propositions are representational. (...) This paper then advances the further claim that propositions are not representational. It considers several ways to overcome the difficulties traditionally associated with this claim, particularly how to account for falsity. (shrink)

Responsible innovation (RI), also termed Responsible Research and Innovation, has emerged due to increasing concern over how to integrate ethical and societal values into research and innovation policy and governance (Von Schomberg 2013), in response to questioning of the societal role of science as well as populist resurgence in some countries (Long and Blok 2017a). Within a RI approach, innovators must consider three dimensions of responsibility, including the dimensions of (1) ‘avoiding harm’ to people and the planet, (2) ‘doing good’ (...) through the offering of innovations that foster sustainable development, and (3) the development of facilitative global governance schemes (Voegtlin and Scherer 2017). (shrink)

In public reason liberalism, equal respect requires that conceptions of justice be publicly justifiable to relevant people in a manner that allocates to each an equal say. But all liberal public justification also excludes: e.g., it accords no say, or a lesser say, to people it deems unreasonable. Can liberal public justification be aligned with the equal respect that allegedly grounds it, if the latter calls for discursive equality? The chapter explores this challenge with a focus on Rawls-type political liberalism. (...) I suggest that political liberalism’s commitment to equal respect can cohere with the standing of the unreasonable in public justification if that standing is not impermissibly unequal in discursive purchase. I then consider one candidate view of the permissibility of purchase inequality. On this broadly sufficientarian view, purchase inequality is permissible provided relevant people have standing of enough purchase to be able to avoid relevant bads. A plausible variant of this view suggests that political liberalism’s commitment to equal respect does not cohere with the discursive standing of the unreasonable. It emerges that where liberal public justification accords actual people discursive respect but relevantly idealizes at least around its fringes, the permissibility of purchase inequality must be a central concern. (shrink)

Hobbes’s interpreters have struggled to find a plausible semantics for evaluative language in his writings. I argue that this search is misguided. Hobbes offers neither an account of the reference of evaluative terms nor a theory of the truth-conditions for evaluative statements. Rather, he sees evaluative language simply as having the non-representational function of prescribing actions and practical attitudes, its superficially representational appearance notwithstanding. I marshal the evidence for this prescriptivist reading of Hobbes on evaluative language and show how it (...) sidesteps various textual and philosophical problems that bedevil the traditional interpretations. (shrink)

Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...) the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it. I develop what Bernard Williams might call a vindicatory genealogy of envy, thereby allowing us to see that envy, rather than undermining egalitarian intuitions, can in fact play a distinct justificatory role (when it is fitting), which undermines the Envy Objection. (shrink)

Slippery slope argumentation features prominently in debates over assisted suicide. The jurisdiction of Oregon features prominently too, especially as regards parliamentary scrutiny of assisted suicide proposals. This paper examines Oregon’s public data (including certain official pronouncements) on assisted suicide in light of the two basic versions of the slippery slope argument, the empirical and moral-logical versions. Oregon’s data evidences some normatively interesting shifts in its assisted suicide practice which in turn prompts consideration of two elements of moral-logical slippage that are (...) not widely discussed. One is slippage from an initial autonomy-based public justification for assisted suicide which does not include burden-based concerns within its operative account of voluntariness to an evolved public justification that does. The other is an expansion of a terminal illness ground to include chronic illnesses effectively rendered terminal via a refusal of treatment. (shrink)

Studies the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and his influence on Protestant theology, philology, and on literary and philosophical history and criticism in Europe.