Philosophy’s adversarial argumentation style is often noted as a factor contributing to the low numbers of women in philosophy. I argue that there is a level of adversariality peculiar to philosophy that merits specific feminist examination, yet doesn’t assume controversial gender differences claims. The dominance of the argument-as-war metaphor is not warranted, since this metaphor misconstrues the epistemic role of good argument as a tool of rational persuasion. This metaphor is entangled with the persisting narrative of embattled reason, which, (...) in turn, is linked to the sexism-informed narrative of the “man of reason” continually warding off or battling “feminine” unreason. (shrink)

This essay has two connected theses. First, that given the contrastivity of reasons, a form of dialectical adversariality of argument follows. This dialectical adversariality accounts for a broad variety of both argumentative virtues and vices. Second, in light of this contrastivist view of reasons, the primary objection to argumentative adversarialism, the winners-and-losers problem, can be answered.

Adversariality in argumentation is typically theorized as inhering in, and applying to, the interactional roles of proponent and opponent that arguers occupy. This paper considers the kinds of adversariality located in the conversational roles arguers perform while arguing—specifically listening. It begins by contending that the maximally adversarial arguer is an arguer who refuses to listen to reason by refusing to listen to another’s reasons. It proceeds to consider a list of lousy listeners in order to illustrate the variety of (...) ways that the conversational role of listener can be performed adversarially. Because conversational roles, while not adversarial by nature, can be enacted adversarially, arguers are properly subject to praise and blame for their performances of these roles. Thus, the paper concludes, argumentation theory stands in need of an articulated normative vocabulary and theory to codify, apply, explain, and justify the norms of listening governing, guiding, and appraising arguers’ performances of listening in argumentation. (shrink)

Our varied communities of discourse face a rhetorical future shaped by juridical styles reminiscent of the "adversary culture" postulated by post-war American critic Lionel Trilling. Itself the subject of litigious debate. the adversarial spirit today shows few signs of weakening, but its influence can be better understood and guided along certain tracks. To influence this adversarial style in coming decades, we need to explore the difference between evidencebased reasoning, which draws on the sensationalist logic ofinduction. and reflexive (...) reasoning, which draws on the second-order logic of presumption. Understanding the structures and dynamics of this reflexive style forces us to address our responsibilities as speakers, as we seek to shape our rhetorical future. Close examination of adversarial contlict may lead us toward useful consensus on how the new game should be played. (shrink)

Trudy Govier argues in The Philosophy of Argument that adversariality in argumentation can be kept to a necessary minimum. On her ac-count, politeness can limit the ancillary adversariality of hostile culture but a degree of logical opposition will remain part of argumentation, and perhaps all reasoning. Argumentation cannot be purified by politeness in the way she hopes, nor does reasoning even in the discursive context of argumentation demand opposition. Such hopes assume an idealized politeness free from gender, and (...) reasoners with inhuman or at least highly privileged capabilities and no need to learn from others or share understanding. (shrink)

Descriptors: coordination, autonomy, actions, beliefs Abstract Distributing authority among autonomous agents can induce inconsistency costs if the agents act as if they disagree. If we define an agent’s “marginal beliefs” to be the odds at which it is willing to make bets, we find that a betting market can induce agents to act as if they almost agree, not only with respect to the bets they offer but also other actions they take. In a particular “Mars mining” scenario, I explicitly (...) show how utility maximizing agents, who are autonomous and hence distrust each other, can discover a common consensus and take concrete physical actions as if they agreed with that consensus, lowering costs to the group as a whole. Though limited, the approach has also has many unexplored possibilities. A previous version of this paper was presented at the IJCAI-91 Workshop on Reasoning in Adversarial Domains (This version is missing some cites and the graphics.). (shrink)

Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students’ capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe’s and Rawls’s conceptions of democracy and politics. To this end (...) I take Eamonn Callan’s Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative approaches to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the “left” and “right.” I propose that a radical democratic citizenship education would be an education of political adversaries. (shrink)

This paper trials new experimental methods for the analysis of natural language reasoning and the development of critical ordinary language philosophy in the wake of J.L. Austin. Philosophical arguments and thought experiments are strongly shaped by default pragmatic inferences, including stereotypical inferences. Austin suggested that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are at the root of some philosophical paradoxes and problems, and that these can be resolved by exposing those verbal fallacies. This paper builds on recent efforts to empirically document inappropriate (...) stereotypical inferences that may drive philosophical arguments. We demonstrate that previously employed questionnaire-based output measures do not suffice to exclude relevant confounds. We then report an experiment that combines reading time measurements with plausibility ratings. The study seeks to provide evidence of inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance verbs that have been suggested to lie at the root of the influential ‘argument from illusion’. Our findings support a diagnostic reconstruction of this argument. They provide the missing component for proof of concept for an experimental implementation of critical ordinary language philosophy that is in line with the ambitions of current ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy. (shrink)

A Modern Legal Ethics proposes a wholesale renovation of legal ethics, one that contributes to ethical thought generally. Daniel Markovits reinterprets the positive law governing lawyers to identify fidelity as its organizing ideal. Unlike ordinary loyalty, fidelity requires lawyers to repress their personal judgments concerning the truth and justice of their clients' claims. Next, the book asks what it is like--not psychologically but ethically--to practice law subject to the self-effacement that fidelity demands. Fidelity requires lawyers to lie and to cheat (...) on behalf of their clients. However, an ethically profound interest in integrity gives lawyers reason to resist this characterization of their conduct. Any legal ethics adequate to the complexity of lawyers' lived experience must address the moral dilemmas immanent in this tension. The dominant approaches to legal ethics cannot. Finally, A Modern Legal Ethics reintegrates legal ethics into political philosophy in a fashion commensurate to lawyers' central place in political practice. Lawyerly fidelity supports the authority of adjudication and thus the broader project of political legitimacy. Throughout, the book rejects the casuistry that dominates contemporary applied ethics in favor of an interpretive method that may be mimicked in other areas. Moreover, because lawyers practice at the hinge of modern morals and politics, the book's interpretive insights identify--in an unusually pure and intense form--the moral and political conditions of all modernity. (shrink)

This special issue of Informal Logic brings together two important areas of philosophy that have shown significant development in the last three decades: informal logic and feminist philosophy. A significant innovation they both share is new thinking about practices of argumentation and related practices of reasoning. Feminist theorizing supporting social and political change foregrounds “reasoning for change” in a way that draws attention to the contextual and rhetorical dimensions of argument and thus connects with significant developments in informal (...) logic. (shrink)

In criminal cases at common law, juries are permitted to convict on wholly circumstantial evidence even in the face of a reasonable case for acquittal. This generates the highly counterintuitive—if not absurd—consequence that there being reason to think that the accused didn’t do it is not reason to doubt that he did. This is the no-reason-to-doubt problem. It has a technical solution provided that the evidence on which it is reasonable to think that the accused didn’t do it is a (...) different subset of the total evidence from that on which there is no reason to doubt that he did do it. It lies in the adversarial nature of criminal proceedings in the common law tradition that the subsets of the total evidence on which counsel base their opposing arguments are themselves different from and often incompatible with one another. While this solves the no-reason-to-doubt problem, it does so at the cost of triggering a second problem just as bad. It is the no-rival problem, according to which incompatible theories of the case based on incompatible subsets of the evidence cannot be rivals of one another. If neither party’s case contradicts the other’s then, by the burden of proof requirement, criminal convictions are impossible. Once having generated the dilemma, the object of the paper is to determine how it might be escaped. (shrink)

The most glamorous and even glorious moments in a legal system come when a high court recognizes an abstract principle involving, for example, human liberty or equality. Indeed, Americans, and not a few non-Americans, have been greatly stirred--and divided--by the opinions of the Supreme Court, especially in the area of race relations, where the Court has tried to revolutionize American society. But these stirring decisions are aberrations, says Cass R. Sunstein, and perhaps thankfully so. In Legal Reasoning and Political (...) Conflict, Sunstein, one of America's best known commentators on our legal system, offers a bold, new thesis about how the law should work in America, arguing that the courts best enable people to live together, despite their diversity, by resolving particular cases without taking sides in broader, more abstract conflicts. Sunstein offers a close analysis of the way the law can mediate disputes in a diverse society, examining how the law works in practical terms, and showing that, to arrive at workable, practical solutions, judges must avoid broad, abstract reasoning. Why? For one thing, critics and adversaries who would never agree on fundamental ideals are often willing to accept the concrete details of a particular decision. Likewise, a plea bargain for someone caught exceeding the speed limit need not--indeed, must not--delve into sweeping issues of government regulation and personal liberty. Thus judges purposely limit the scope of their decisions to avoid reopening large-scale controversies. Sunstein calls such actions incompletely theorized agreements. In identifying them as the core feature of legal reasoning--and as a central part of constitutional thinking in America, South Africa, and Eastern Europe-- he takes issue with advocates of comprehensive theories and systemization, from Robert Bork to Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, and Ronald Dworkin, who defends an ambitious role for courts in the elaboration of rights. Equally important, Sunstein goes on to argue that it is the living practice of the nation's citizens that truly makes law. For example, he cites Griswold v. Connecticut, a groundbreaking case in which the Supreme Court struck down Connecticut's restrictions on the use of contraceptives by married couples--a law that was no longer enforced by prosecutors. In overturning the legislation, the Court invoked the abstract right of privacy; the author asserts that the justices should have appealed to the narrower principle that citizens need not comply with laws that lack real enforcement. By avoiding large-scale issues and values, such a decision could have led to a different outcome in Bowers v. Hardwick, the decision that upheld Georgia's rarely prosecuted ban on sodomy. And by pointing to the need for flexibility over time and circumstances, Sunstein offers a novel understanding of the old ideal of the rule of law. Legal reasoning can seem impenetrable, mysterious, baroque. This book helps dissolve the mystery. Whether discussing the interpretation of the Constitution or the spell cast by the revolutionary Warren Court, Cass Sunstein writes with grace and power, offering a striking and original vision of the role of the law in a diverse society. In his flexible, practical approach to legal reasoning, he moves the debate over fundamental values and principles out of the courts and back to its rightful place in a democratic state: the legislatures elected by the people. (shrink)

The most glamorous and even glorious moments in a legal system come when a high court recognizes an abstract principle involving, for example, human liberty or equality. Indeed, Americans, and not a few non-Americans, have been greatly stirred--and divided--by the opinions of the Supreme Court, especially in the area of race relations, where the Court has tried to revolutionize American society. But these stirring decisions are aberrations, says Cass R. Sunstein, and perhaps thankfully so. In Legal Reasoning and Political (...) Conflict, Sunstein, one of America's best known commentators on our legal system, offers a bold, new thesis about how the law should work in America, arguing that the courts best enable people to live together, despite their diversity, by resolving particular cases without taking sides in broader, more abstract conflicts. Sunstein offers a close analysis of the way the law can mediate disputes in a diverse society, examining how the law works in practical terms, and showing that, to arrive at workable, practical solutions, judges must avoid broad, abstract reasoning. Why? For one thing, critics and adversaries who would never agree on fundamental ideals are often willing to accept the concrete details of a particular decision. Likewise, a plea bargain for someone caught exceeding the speed limit need not--indeed, must not--delve into sweeping issues of government regulation and personal liberty. Thus judges purposely limit the scope of their decisions to avoid reopening large-scale controversies. Sunstein calls such actions incompletely theorized agreements. In identifying them as the core feature of legal reasoning--and as a central part of constitutional thinking in America, South Africa, and Eastern Europe-- he takes issue with advocates of comprehensive theories and systemization, from Robert Bork to Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, and Ronald Dworkin, who defends an ambitious role for courts in the elaboration of rights. Equally important, Sunstein goes on to argue that it is the living practice of the nation's citizens that truly makes law. For example, he cites Griswold v. Connecticut, a groundbreaking case in which the Supreme Court struck down Connecticut's restrictions on the use of contraceptives by married couples--a law that was no longer enforced by prosecutors. In overturning the legislation, the Court invoked the abstract right of privacy; the author asserts that the justices should have appealed to the narrower principle that citizens need not comply with laws that lack real enforcement. By avoiding large-scale issues and values, such a decision could have led to a different outcome in Bowers v. Hardwick, the decision that upheld Georgia's rarely prosecuted ban on sodomy. And by pointing to the need for flexibility over time and circumstances, Sunstein offers a novel understanding of the old ideal of the rule of law. Legal reasoning can seem impenetrable, mysterious, baroque. This book helps dissolve the mystery. Whether discussing the interpretation of the Constitution or the spell cast by the revolutionary Warren Court, Cass Sunstein writes with grace and power, offering a striking and original vision of the role of the law in a diverse society. In his flexible, practical approach to legal reasoning, he moves the debate over fundamental values and principles out of the courts and back to its rightful place in a democratic state: the legislatures elected by the people. (shrink)

For a long time, it seemed that Aristotelians and Kantians had little to say to each other. When Kant the moralist was known in the English-speaking world primarily from his Groundwork and his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant's conceptual vocabulary of “duty,” “law,” “maxim,” and “morality” appeared quite foreign to Aristotle's “virtue,” “end,” “good,” and “character.” Yet ever since philosopher Mary Gregor's Laws of Freedom, published in 1963, made Kant's The Metaphysics of Morals central to the interpretation of his ethical (...) thought, it has become clear that such “Aristotelian” terms as virtue, end, good, happiness, and character are also central to Kant. Aristotelians and Kantians now see that they have plenty to say to each other, and they have gone from being adversaries to sharing a sometimes unprincipled urge to merge central aspects of Aristotle's and Kant's ethical thought. (shrink)

This dissertation develops a conception of reasonableness that can adequately respond to agonistic critiques of this concept. As an aspect of practical reason, reasonableness refers to the moral capacity of citizens to cooperate politically, especially in pluralistic societies. More specifically, the principles or rules of political association governing society ought to be acceptable to all reasonable members of that society. This relates, furthermore, to the idea of justification: the acceptability of fundamental political principles refers to their justifiability. Justification, in turn, (...) requires ideas of public reason and political deliberation: political deliberation, for example, facilitates the ability of citizens to determine what political principles are justifiable. The explication of justifiability in terms of universal acceptability (acceptable to all reasonable persons, for example) is indicative of a central concern of proponents of reasonableness (and public reason), namely, that politics at least at a fundamental level ought to be governed by consensus. However, this conception of reasonableness has been the target of critique by agonistic theories of democracy. These theorists deny that politics ought to be governed by such a consensus. Most importantly, this orientation toward consensus ignores, or at least underestimates, the antagonistic and hegemonic nature of the political. That is, the consensus orientation of proponents of reasonableness and public reason suggests that society can be given a non-hegemonic and rational foundation. This goal, in turn, leads to the suppression or exclusion of dissensus. Nonetheless, this dissertation affirms the importance of reasonableness to democratic theory and identifies an implicit commitment to reasonableness within agonistic democratic theory. This commitment is evident, for example, in the claim that that political participants must adhere to the basic principles and institutions of liberal democracy. Given this implicit commitment, this dissertation will formulate a middle ground between prominent proponents of reasonableness and their agonistic critics. The primary goal will be to construct an agonistic conception of reasonableness, or reasonable agonism, in light of agonistic critiques of this concept. The agonistic conception of reasonableness developed in this dissertation is understood primarily in terms of the deliberative relationships citizens form and maintain. This opposes accounts of reasonableness and justification that privilege the universal acceptability of political principles and related idealizations of practical reason (understood in terms of its capacity for determining universally acceptable reasons). The defining feature of an agonistic conception of reasonableness is not the universal acceptability of political principles or of the reasons offered in political deliberation, but rather the maintenance of adversarial deliberative relationships. This approach to reasonableness does not require a consensus orientation and it is more sensitive to the antagonistic nature of the political. That is, political participants are able to adhere (at one level) to a particular, partisan conception of justice, as long as (at another level) they remain committed to maintaining deliberative relationships with their political rivals. In this way, an agonistic conception of reasonableness combines the best features of reasonableness and agonism, while addressing the shortcomings involved in theories of both concepts. Additionally, this account of reasonableness has a related critical function, namely, the contestation of prevailing normative orders that can be viewed as illegitimate or unjustifiable by those excluded from such orders. (shrink)

Reasoners compare problems to prior cases to draw conclusions about a problem and guide decision making. All Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) employs some methods for generalizing from cases to support indexing and relevance assessment and evidences two basic inference methods: constraining search by tracing a solution from a past case or evaluating a case by comparing it to past cases. Across domains and tasks, however, humans reason with cases in subtly different ways evidencing different mixes of and mechanisms for these (...) components.In recent CBR research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), five paradigmatic approaches have emerged: statistically-oriented, model-based, planning/design-oriented, exemplar-based, and adversarial or precedent-based. The paradigms differ in the assumptions they make about domain models, the extent to which they support symbolic case comparison, and the kinds of inferences for which they employ cases. (shrink)

In his Farewell to Reason, Paul Feyerabend advocates radical pluralism in all intellectual endeavors and disputes the widely held belief that all issues can and should be resolved rationally. For Feyerabend, it is desirable that mutually incompatible approaches to scientific and scholarly research proliferate. Even an approach that one's favored school of thought dismisses as loony is likely to yield ideas and factual observations that its derogators will find of value and would otherwise have missed. To derive intellectual benefit from (...) an alternative tradition, one need not accept its premises and values; likewise, to ignore uncongenial ideas, one is not obliged to construct a refutation of than, which is just as well, since such a refutation usually can be constructed only by stacking the cards against adversaries about whom one is grossly ignorant. (shrink)

This article traces my own pedagogical journey to find strategies for teaching critical thinking that emphasize intellectual cooperation, empathy, and argument repair, a journey that found me frequently turning to sources outside of philosophy, including work in intergroup dialogue and pedagogical work in rhetoric and composition. Theoretically, the article showcases Maureen Linker’s notion of ‘cooperative reasoning’, sets it against the ‘adversary paradigm’ Janice Moulton critiques, and illustrates how Peter Elbow’s challenges to critical thinking as a ‘doubting game’ resonate with (...) Linker’s work. Practically, it illustrates the structure and the role of peer-to-peer dialogues in my own reasoning classroom, an enactment of a cooperative, belief-based approach to reasoning inspired by Linker and Elbow alike, while also learning from the methodologies of intergroup dialogue. (shrink)

Since contemporary societies are deeply multicultural and plural, the partisan ideological politics obviously animate conflict of opinions and hard bargains that brings coercion into play. Thus political power is exercised to establish legitimacy and stability in the polity. The use of public reason as a tool of public inquiry is considered as most effective in deciding upon the outcomes of laws and policies. The idea of public reason is one of the contemporary innovations of liberal thinking in democracy and has (...) gained a wider currency among the political theorists after John Rawls adoption of it into his political thinking. On this background, my concern is to see the feasibility of public reason alone into democratic outcomes through coercive use of power provided that this is widely accepted among the epistemic peers in a democracy. I propose that the exclusiveness of public reason is inadequate to arbitrate on fundamental questions of politics in situations where disagreement becomes acute because of the adversary positions held by citizens. And hence love and truth add to the rigorousness of reason as strong ideals to combat an insurgency of deadly disagreements. It is an attempt to engage love and truth to public reason to make public deliberations more productive in the arena of law making and policy outputs. The strengthening of this democratic process is pioneering effort of M. K. Gandhi. (shrink)

This article considers question‐begging's opposite fallacy. Instead of relying on my beliefs for my premises when I should be using my adversary's beliefs, I rely on my adversary's beliefs when I should rely on my own. Just as question‐begging emerges from egocentrism, its opposite emerges from other‐centrism. Stepping into the other person's shoes is an effective strategy for understanding him. But you must return to your own shoes when forming your beliefs. Evidence is agent centered. Other‐centric reasoning is most (...) striking when both parties partake simultaneously. We are then treated to the spectacle of each side using the other's premises to establish its conclusion. These remarkable debates arise regularly when there is open disagreement about whether a right‐conferring relationship has ended. Those who contend the relationship is abrogated will be tempted to stand on the rights persistently credited to them by their adversary. (shrink)

The received view of Martin Heidegger’s work is that he leaves little room for reason in the practice of philosophy or the conduct of life. Citing his much-scorned remark that reason is the “stiff-necked adversary of thought”, critics argue that Heidegger’s philosophy effectively severs the tie between reason and normativity, leaving anyone who adheres to his position without recourse to justifying reasons for their beliefs and actions. Transcending Reason is a collection of essays by leading Heidegger scholars that challenges this (...) view by exploring new ways to understand Heidegger’s approach to the relationship between reason, normativity, and the philosophical methodology that gives us access to these issues. The volume points to Heidegger’s novel approach to reason understood in terms of what he calls Dasein’s ‘transcendence’—the ability to occupy the world as a space of normatively structured meanings in which we navigate our striving to be. By examining the strengths and weaknesses of this new and innovative take on Heidegger’s philosophy, this collection considers the possibility that he does not sever but rather reconceives the relation between reason and normativity. -/- . (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, it seeks to provide a better understanding of lawyers’ ethics in practice in the field of publicly funded asylum law. It does so by examining Dutch asylum legal aid lawyers’ moral reasoning in respect of the ethically challenging issue of ‘the hopeless case’, employing a version of Christine Parker’s four approaches to moral reasoning in legal practice: adversarial advocacy, responsible lawyering, moral activism and relational lawyering. Second, it aims to (...) demonstrate the applicability of Parker’s taxonomy, developed in a common law country (Australia), to a civil law country (The Netherlands). This paper shows, in line with what Parker argued, that lawyers may apply a combination of approaches – different ethical considerations carry different in weight in different circumstances. It provides illustrations of situations in which approaches coexist and compete and the circumstances in which one prevails over the other in the area under review. (shrink)

This paper explores Locke’s thinking specifically about syllogisms and more generally about logic and proper logical method. Locke’s texts display a mixed attitude toward syllogisms. On the one hand, he was highly critical of syllogisms and their central role in Scholastic disputation. On the other hand, he sometimes allowed that syllogisms could effectively capture valid forms of inference and could be useful in certain contexts. This paper seeks to explain Locke’s mixed attitude by showing that he believed syllogisms were useful (...) in the context of explanation but not in the context of discovery. Syllogisms could help to formalize and evaluate arguments already constructed using informal psychologistic methods, but they would not help to generate new arguments or to make new discoveries. The second part of the paper examines substantial changes to the fourth edition of the Essay in which Locke expands his critical remarks on syllogisms and related topics. Evidence is presented that strongly suggests Locke made these changes to the Essay in response to works published by John Sergeant. This discovery is important because it indicates Locke’s willingness to consider the views of his adversaries and reformulate his own views accordingly. (shrink)

We analyse Irish managers' perceptions about the degree of wrongness of ten types of unethical conduct. In-person interviews with 348 managing directors of Irish-owned businesses who report their perceptions of the degree of wrongness of ten business ethics problems (the dependent variables) yield the data for our study. Predictors of managers' ratings include the existence of a business code of ethics, perceived frequency of occurrence of the given acts, company size and sector, union membership, Irish business ownership and independence (the (...) independent variables). Results indicate that approximately 75% of those sampled are independent Irish owned businesses but few (only 22% of this sample) have a formal business code. Regression analyses reveal that small firms with a code of ethics predict higher wrongness ratings for managers in regard to the practices of unfair pricing and delayed payments (unethical behavior involving firms) but managers also consider such acts the least wrong overall. Wrongness ratings on the eight remaining unethical acts are explained by the manufacturing sector. However, manufacturing firms in Ireland also have a high percentage of unionised workers indicating that unions influence managerial thinking about social and employee ethics (e.g., discrimination, insider trading). The traditional adversarial Industrial Relations model is useful in noting that unions are important in setting ethical standards for indigenous Irish-owned businesses. Given this reality, management in small, manufacturing firms should work with unions to create a more formal ethics code in order to guard against corruption and to remain competitive in the international marketplace. Those without strong unions might articulate their own organisational values. (shrink)

As Kant claimed in the Groundwork, and as the idea has been developed by Korsgaard 1997, Bratman 1987, and Broome 2002. This formulation is agnostic on whether reasons for ends derive from our desiring those ends, or from the relation of those ends to things of independent value. However, desire-based theorists may deny, against Hubin 1999, that their theory is a combination of a principle of instrumental transmission and the principle that reasons for ends are provided by desires. Instead, they (...) may say, there is just one principle, a principle of, if you will, instrumental transmutation: if one desires the end, then one has reason to take the means. See the discussion of General Production, in section 8, for a doubt about this. (shrink)

The 'no-supervenience' theorem (Reason, 2019; Reason and Shah, 2021) is a proof that no fully self-aware system can entirely supervene on any objectively observable system. I here present a simple, non-technical summary of the proof and demonstrate its implications for four separate theories of consciousness: the 'property dualism' theory of David Chalmers; the 'reflexive monism' of Max Velmans; Galen Strawson's 'realistic monism'; and the 'illusionism' of Keith Frankish. It is shown that all are ruled out in their current form by (...) the no-supervenience theorem, except for Chalmers' theory, which I show requires humans to behave irrationally. (shrink)

We offer a model of moral reform and regeneration that involves a wrong-doer making two movements: on the one hand, he identifies with himself as the one who did the act, while he also intentionally moves away from that self (or set of desires and intentions) and moves toward a transformed identity. We see this model at work in the formal practice of contrition and reform in Christian and Buddhist rites. This paper is part of a broader project we are (...) undertaking on the philosophy of forgiveness. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Reincarnation/Rebirth Karma Causality Problem of Evil Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility Karma and Release Transfer of Merit Recent Developments Works cited.

Conscious macrostates are usually assumed to be emergent from the underlying physical microstates comprising the brain and nervous system of biological organisms. However, a major problem with this assumption is that consciousness is essentially nonmeasurable unlike all other proven emergent properties of physical systems. In an earlier paper, using a no-go theorem, it was shown that conscious states cannot be comprised of processes that are physical in nature (Reason, 2019). Combining this result with another unrelated work on causal emergence in (...) physical systems (Hoel, Albantakis and Tononi, 2013), we show in this paper that conscious macrostates are not emergent from physical systems and they also do not supervene on physical microstates. An important implication of our work is that there must be some form of violation of energy conservation in biological systems that are conscious. (shrink)