The aim of this paper is to expand upon the conclusions reached by Orr and Genesen in their 1997 article , Requests for ‘inappropriate’ treatment based on religious beliefs.1 Assuming, with Orr and Genesen, that claims made in the name of religion are not absolute, I will propose some principles for determining when claims based on religious beliefs or cultural sensibilities “trump” other considerations and when they do not.

Particularists in ethics emphasize that the normative is holistic, and invite us to infer with them that it therefore defies generalization. This has been supposed to present an obstacle to traditional moral theorizing, to have striking implications for moral epistemology and moral deliberation, and to rule out reductive theories of the normative, making it a bold and important thesis across the areas of normative theory, moral epistemology, moral psychology, and normative metaphysics. Though particularists emphasize the importance of the holism of (...) the normative, however, it is not something that they have been able to explain. In this paper I’ll show how to use a small number of simple and, I’ll argue, independently compelling assumptions in order to both predict and explain the holistic features of the normative with respect to the non-normative. The basic idea of the paper is simple. It is that normative claims are holistic because they are general, rather than because they defy generalization. (shrink)

According to Stephen Finlay, ‘A ought to X’ means that X-ing is more conducive to contextually salient ends than relevant alternatives. This in turn is analysed in terms of probability. I show why this theory of ‘ought’ is hard to square with a theory of a reason’s weight which could explain why ‘A ought to X’ logically entails that the balance of reasons favours that A X-es. I develop two theories of weight to illustrate my point. I first look at (...) the prospects of a theory of weight based on expected utility theory. I then suggest a simpler theory. Although neither allows that ‘A ought to X’ logically entails that the balance of reasons favours that A X-es, this price may be accepted. For there remains a strong pragmatic relation between these claims. (shrink)

Faced with a choice between saving one stranger and saving a group of strangers, some people endorse weighted lotteries, which give a strictly greater chance of being saved to the group of strangers than the single stranger. In this paper I attempt to criticize this view. I first consider a particular version of the weighted lotteries, Frances Kamm's procedure of proportional chances, and point out two implausible implications of her proposal. Then, I consider weighted lotteries in general, and claim (1) (...) that the correct thing to distribute is not the chance of being saved but the good of being saved, (2) that assigning some chance to the single stranger is not the only way to give a positive (and equal) respect to the people concerned, and (3) that the weighted lottery appears to be deceptive since it would show the respect to the single stranger in a negligible way. (shrink)

Harmonic Grammar (HG) and Optimality Theory (OT) are closely related formal frameworks for the study of language. In both, the structure of a given language is determined by the relative strengths of a set of constraints. They differ in how these strengths are represented: as numerical weights (HG) or as ranks (OT). Weighted constraints have advantages for the construction of accounts of language learning and other cognitive processes, partly because they allow for the adaptation of connectionist and statistical models. HG (...) has been little studied in generative linguistics, however, largely due to influential claims that weighted constraints make incorrect predictions about the typology of natural languages, predictions that are not shared by the more popular OT. This paper makes the case that HG is in fact a promising framework for typological research, and reviews and extends the existing arguments for weighted over ranked constraints. (shrink)

Two prominent relational egalitarians, Elizabeth Anderson and Niko Kolodny, object to giving people in a democratic community differential voting weights on the grounds that doing so would lead to unequal relations between them. Their claim is that deviating from a “one-person, one-vote” scheme is incompatible with realizing relational egalitarian justice. In this article, I argue that they are wrong. I do so by showing that people can relate as moral, epistemic, social, and empirical equals in a scheme with differential voting (...) weights. I end the article by showing that from the perspective of relational egalitarianism, it is sometimes true that differential voting weights are more just than equal voting weights. (shrink)

Minimalists, such as Paul Horwich, claim that the notions of truth, reference and satisfaction are exhausted by some very simple schemes. Unfortunately, there are subtle difficulties with treating these as schemes, in the ordinary sense. So instead, minimalists regard them as illustrating one-place functions, into which we can input propositions (when considering truth) or propositional constituents (when considering reference and satisfaction). However, Bertrand Russell's Gray's Elegy argument teaches us some important lessons about propositions and propositional constituents. When applied to minimalism, (...) these lessons show us why we should abandon it. (shrink)

Another view has entered the metaethical debate—relaxed realism [Dworkin 1996; Parfit 2011; Scanlon 2014]. Relaxed realists claim that there are irreducible moral properties, but seek to avoid the...

Paragraph 50 of Wittgenstein'sPhilosophical Investigationsfamously says that there is one thing of which one can neither state that it is 1 m long nor that it isn't: the standard metre in Paris. Consensus appears to be that (1) exegetically speaking, Wittgenstein affirms this claim, and (2) systematically, whether or not one agrees with it, the practice of using a material artefact as a measurement standard has important philosophical consequences. In this paper, in contrast, we show that (1') Wittgenstein does not (...) affirm the standard metre claim and (2') historical facts about material length standards do not warrant deeper philosophical conclusions. References to material measurement standards in the literature gravely distort the actual metrological practices of developing and using such standards. (shrink)

In this article I criticize the non-consequentialist Weighted Lottery (WL) solution to the choice between saving a smaller or a larger group of people. WL aims to avoid what non-consequentialists see as consequentialism's unfair aggregation by giving equal consideration to each individual's claim to be rescued. In so doing, I argue, WL runs into another common objection to consequentialism: it is excessively demanding. WL links the right action with the outcome of a fairly weighted lottery, which means that an agent (...) can only act rightly if s/he has actually run the lottery. In many actual cases, this involves epistemic demands that can be almost impossible to meet. I argue that plausible moral principles cannot make such extreme epistemic demands. (shrink)

In the last decade, analytic epistemologists have engaged in a lively debate about Equal Weight, the claim that you should give the credences of epistemic peers the same consideration as your own credences. In this paper, I explore the implications of the debate about Equal Weight for how we should respond to religious disagreement found in the diversity of models of God. I first claim that one common argument against religious exclusivism and for religious pluralism can be articulated as an (...) Equal Weight argument. I then argue that to avoid this argument, religious exclusivists must reject Equal Weight. Next, I maintain that, while the exclusivist complaint that pluralism is self-undermining is incorrect, exclusivists can rightly object that the pluralist’s Equal Weight argument is self-undermining. Thus both exclusivists and pluralists have an interest in rejecting Equal Weight. My final discussion is speculative: I suggest that the goals of those of pluralist persuasion might be better met by religious permissivism, the view that some forms of both exclusivism and pluralism are rational responses to religious disagreement. (shrink)

Clarke and Beck discuss in their sections on congruency and confounds literature that has challenged the claim that the approximate number system represents numerical content. We argue that the propositions put forward by these studies aren't that far from the indirect model of number perception suggested by C&B.

This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members’ capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organizations thus use asketic language to conceal their implication in normalization.

Self-regarding acts are frequently classified as non-moral; even more frequently, they are assumed to have less moral weight than parallel other-regarding acts. I argue briefly against the first claim, and at greater length against the second. Our intuitions about the lesser moral weight of self-regarding acts arise from imperfectly recognized, and morally relevant, differences between acts which are ordinarily described in misleadingly parallel phrases. ‘Love of self,’ for instance, and ‘love of another’ are not symmetrical attitudes, in spite of the (...) symmetrical grammar. More obviously, one cannot steal from, lie to, nor force oneself in the same way one can do these things to others. I conclude, therefore, that difference in moral weight never stems merely from a difference in the person concerned, but rather from differences between the actions themselves; furthermore, that whatever it is wrong to do to a willing other, it is wrong to do to oneself. (shrink)

: This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members' capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organizations thus use asketic language to conceal their implication in normalization.

The case of Charlie Gard, an infant with a genetic illness whose parents sought experimental treatment in the USA, brought important debates about the moral status of parents and children to the public eye. After setting out the facts of the case, this article considers some of these debates through the lens of parental rights. Parental rights are most commonly based on the promotion of a child’s welfare; however, in Charlie’s case, promotion of Charlie’s welfare cannot explain every fact of (...) the case. Indeed, some seem most logically to extend from intrinsic parental rights, that is, parental rights that exist independent of welfare promotion. I observe that a strong claim for intrinsic parental rights can be built on arguments for genetic propriety and children’s limited personhood. Critique of these arguments suggests the scope of parental rights remains limited: property rights entail proper use; non-personhood includes only a small cohort of very young or seriously intellectually disabled children and the uniqueness of parental genetic connection is limited. Moreover, there are cogent arguments about parents’ competence to make judgements, and public interest arguments against allowing access to experimental treatment. Nevertheless, while arguments based on propriety may raise concerns about the attitude involved in envisioning children as property, I conclude that these arguments do appear to offer a prima facie case for a parental right to seek experimental treatment in certain limited circumstances. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 402-414 [Access article in PDF] Past's Weight, Future's Promise:Reading Electra William Junker I SOPHOCLES' Electrapresents as its main character a woman who is tortured by the remembrance of things past: Even my pitiful bed remembers, there in that dreadful house, my long night-watches grieving my unlucky father who found no foreign resting place in war but died when my mother and Aegisthus, her lover, (...) took an axe to his head as a woodman does a tree. (85-95) 1The story she tells is a familiar one. Her father, Agamemnon, having returned from the Trojan War, is murdered by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Clytemnestra's motives are complex and unclear, for Agamemnon had previously sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, in order to ensure military success, and it is an open question as to what extent maternal vengeance as opposed to romantic intrigue motivated [End Page 402] her action. After the murder, Electra rescues her brother Orestes from probable death by sending him abroad (Aegisthus fearing revenge would have killed the child) while she grows and lives as an outcast in her own home, awaiting the day when the grown Orestes will return and bring their father's murderers to justice.The story, and its ensuing consequences, had already been handled masterfully in Aeschylus' Oresteia; but in Sophocles' play there is considerably more interest shown in Electra herself. 2 This focus results in a magnification of Electra's mourning for her father along with a sustained meditation upon how this mourning results in her inability to live, in any full sense, with the knowledge of his death. She cannot escape the memory of the injustice done him, and this memory fuels her hopes for Orestes' return even as it renders her, for all practical purposes, incapacitated.Her character thus described draws continual attention during the course of the play, and in their first appearance the Chorus admonishes her: "When you go on too far with grief, / you come to endless anguish, and destroy yourself. / There is no salvation from your troubles here, / so why should you persist in suffering" (136-39). Electra herself views her persistent suffering as necessary and noble, a show of allegiance to her murdered father and a refusal to compromise with his killers. The Chorus and Chrysothemis, however, argue that by so carrying on Electra is in reality causing more damage to herself than her situation warrants. Her ragged appearance, quite noticeable stench, and public outcries do nothing to help redress her father's honor; they rather highlight her mania and point toward insanity. At one point Chrysothemis implies as much. To Electra's accusation that her position of political compromise is dishonorable, she rebuts: "There's honor in not letting madness defeat you" (395)—suggesting both a different conception of honor and a veiled appraisal of her sister's mental health. In the service of life and sanity, the Chorus and Chrysothemis seem to say, leave off your suffering. In the service of honor and the dead, Electra rejoins, I cannot. The movement of the play in fact continually juxtaposes the position of Electra with that of her critics, and this juxtaposition is one that calls for interpretive elucidation. 3An especially fertile way of adjudicating these issues in Electra is afforded us by Nietzsche, and, specifically, by his On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. This is the case because, as I want to suggest, Nietzsche's essay provides a framework which reconstructs, and in a unique way, the central problem of Electra. That problem is [End Page 403] essentially one of reconciling the conflicting claims of familial honor and memory with the claims of life. Through Nietzsche's exposition of history and its relation to life, this problem is both illumined and given greater subtlety—illumined, in that the potential agôn between history and life, while present in Sophocles' Electra, is not just obvious; and made subtle, in that Nietzsche's proposed solution to this agôn allows for a reading of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 402-414 [Access article in PDF] Past's Weight, Future's Promise:Reading Electra William Junker I SOPHOCLES' Electrapresents as its main character a woman who is tortured by the remembrance of things past: Even my pitiful bed remembers, there in that dreadful house, my long night-watches grieving my unlucky father who found no foreign resting place in war but died when my mother and Aegisthus, her lover, (...) took an axe to his head as a woodman does a tree. (85-95) 1The story she tells is a familiar one. Her father, Agamemnon, having returned from the Trojan War, is murdered by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Clytemnestra's motives are complex and unclear, for Agamemnon had previously sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, in order to ensure military success, and it is an open question as to what extent maternal vengeance as opposed to romantic intrigue motivated [End Page 402] her action. After the murder, Electra rescues her brother Orestes from probable death by sending him abroad (Aegisthus fearing revenge would have killed the child) while she grows and lives as an outcast in her own home, awaiting the day when the grown Orestes will return and bring their father's murderers to justice.The story, and its ensuing consequences, had already been handled masterfully in Aeschylus' Oresteia; but in Sophocles' play there is considerably more interest shown in Electra herself. 2 This focus results in a magnification of Electra's mourning for her father along with a sustained meditation upon how this mourning results in her inability to live, in any full sense, with the knowledge of his death. She cannot escape the memory of the injustice done him, and this memory fuels her hopes for Orestes' return even as it renders her, for all practical purposes, incapacitated.Her character thus described draws continual attention during the course of the play, and in their first appearance the Chorus admonishes her: "When you go on too far with grief, / you come to endless anguish, and destroy yourself. / There is no salvation from your troubles here, / so why should you persist in suffering" (136-39). Electra herself views her persistent suffering as necessary and noble, a show of allegiance to her murdered father and a refusal to compromise with his killers. The Chorus and Chrysothemis, however, argue that by so carrying on Electra is in reality causing more damage to herself than her situation warrants. Her ragged appearance, quite noticeable stench, and public outcries do nothing to help redress her father's honor; they rather highlight her mania and point toward insanity. At one point Chrysothemis implies as much. To Electra's accusation that her position of political compromise is dishonorable, she rebuts: "There's honor in not letting madness defeat you" (395)—suggesting both a different conception of honor and a veiled appraisal of her sister's mental health. In the service of life and sanity, the Chorus and Chrysothemis seem to say, leave off your suffering. In the service of honor and the dead, Electra rejoins, I cannot. The movement of the play in fact continually juxtaposes the position of Electra with that of her critics, and this juxtaposition is one that calls for interpretive elucidation. 3An especially fertile way of adjudicating these issues in Electra is afforded us by Nietzsche, and, specifically, by his On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. This is the case because, as I want to suggest, Nietzsche's essay provides a framework which reconstructs, and in a unique way, the central problem of Electra. That problem is [End Page 403] essentially one of reconciling the conflicting claims of familial honor and memory with the claims of life. Through Nietzsche's exposition of history and its relation to life, this problem is both illumined and given greater subtlety—illumined, in that the potential agôn between history and life, while present in Sophocles' Electra, is not just obvious; and made subtle, in that Nietzsche's proposed solution to this agôn allows for a reading of the... (shrink)

Much of the literature on the epistemology of disagreement focuses on the rational responses to disagreement, and to disagreement with an epistemic peer in particular. The Equal Weight View claims that in cases of peer disagreement each dissenting peer opinion is to be given equal weight and, in a case of two opposing equally-weighted opinions, each party should adopt the attitude which ‘splits the difference’. The Equal Weight View has been taken by both its critics and its proponents to (...) have quite drastic skeptical ramifications given contingent empirical facts that we are aware of regarding disagreements in philosophy, religion, science, and politics. In this paper,we begin by clarifying the central claims of the Equal Weight View (Section 2) and then examine two routes from the Equal Weight View to skepticism about such matters that have been explored in the literature. The first claims that our awareness of peers or experts who disagree with us about such issues requires that we abandon our beliefs on these issues (Section 3). The second claims that our awareness of merely possible peers or experts who disagree with us requires us to abandon our beliefs (Section 4). We find both routes from the Equal Weight View to a form of skepticism defective. However, there are nearby considerations, explored in Sections 5 and 6,which (for better or worse) do lead to at least some skeptical consequences for the Equal WeightView, albeit for different reasons. (shrink)

John Broome has proposed a theory of fairness according to which fairness requires that agents’ claims to goods be satisfied in proportion to the relative strength of those claims. In the case of competing claims for a single indivisible good, Broome argues that what fairness requires is the use of a weighted lottery as a surrogate to satisfying the competing claims: the relative chance of each claimant's winning the lottery should be set to the relative strength (...) of each claimant's claim. In this journal, James Kirkpatrick and Nick Eastwood have objected that the use of weighted lotteries in the case of indivisible goods is unacceptable. In this article, I explain why Kirkpatrick and Eastwood's objection misses its mark. (shrink)

When we quote Luther’s dictum, “Here I stand. I can do no other,” we refer to the composure of someone who experiences the necessity to follow a particular course of action against all odds. The incapacity of alternative action is not regarded as a deficit; in such cases, it seems to “lend some added weight” to the decision. This paper deals with the question what kind of value is attributed to experiences of practical necessities or incapacities, in particular, if these (...) derive from an individual’s psychological “structure” and the limits of someone’s personality. Finally, it distinguishes between different types of added weight that are related to different forms of personal and normative necessities. This weight can be legitimately attributed to the virtue of standing for something and being an example of what everybody should do, but it can also be attributed to the valid claim of standing by the demarcation line of one’s personality and defending it against the threat of losing oneself. (shrink)

This is a book about the moral-existential nature of, and the desire inscribed in, the deadlocks generated by our attempts to ground and exhaustively explain the concerns that provoke philosophical reflection. While the book argues that these deadlocks are symptomatic of an impossibility internal to the very enterprise of grounding and explanation, it does not, however, declare any substantial groundlessness. Rather, the book shows that the choice between secure ground and groundlessness, or between final explanations and the inexplicable, is ultimately (...) arbitrary. Instead, through readings of the so-called hard problem of consciousness, of Descartes’ first principle of philosophy, of Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, and of Lacan and Wittgenstein, Toivakainen argues that the actual point of significance, the sense of the impossibility or deadlock, must be traced back to the claims of desire that inform the very movement of grounding and explanation, a desire that is inscribed in a constitutive and inescapable address between self and other. In short, the book translates and rewrites points of structural deadlock into their (original) moral-existential landscapes by following traces of desire. (shrink)

This paper is not so much concerned with the question under which circumstances self-defense is justified, but rather with other normative features of self-defense as well as with the source of the self-defense justification. I will argue that the aggressor’s rights-forfeiture alone – and hence the liberty-right of the defender to defend himself – cannot explain the intuitively obvious fact that a prohibition on self-defense would wrong victims of attack. This can only be explained by conceiving of self-defense also as (...) a claim-right. However, I will also argue that a claim-right cannot ground the self-defense justification either. Rather, what grounds the self-defense justification and its particular strength and scope is the fact that self-defense is an act-specific agent-relative prerogative: a defender is allowed to give particularly grave weight to his interest in engaging in self-defense, which distinguishes self-defense from most other acts. This is not the same as saying that he has a right or a liberty to engage in self-defense. Thus, self-defense, understood as a normative concept, is a claim-right, a liberty-right, and an act-specific agent-relative prerogative. (shrink)

The following is a defense of Jurgen Habermas' argumentational consensual procedure against Keith Lehrer and Carl Wagner's weighted averaging consensual procedure (and, I tentatively claim, against any weighted averaging consensual procedure). The argument is twofold: if Lehrer and Wagner intend, implicity, to replace what is for Habermas the metatheoretical stage of a discussion with the aggregation of judgments of respect, then their procedure fails to make use of all available information and the participants are not committed to the weighted average (...) position on these grounds; if, on the other hand, they do not intend to replace metatheoretical discussion by aggregation, then the conditions under which the discussion could conceivably have come to a halt are such as to provide no support for the claim that it is rational to aggregate, rather than to consider the discussion unresolved until more information is available. (shrink)

Many philosophers and jurists believe that individuals should sometimes be granted religiouslygrounded exemptions from laws or rules. To determine whether an exemption is merited in a particular case, the religious claim must be weighed against the countervailing values that favour the uniform application of the law or rule. This paper develops and applies a framework for assessing the weight of religious claims to exemption, across two dimensions. First, the importance of the burdened religious practice, which is determined by its (...) level of obligatoriness and centrality, according to the beliefs of the individual claimant. Second, the extent of the burden on the practice, which depends on the cost the individual bears if she both undertakes the religious practice and obeys the law or rule, where costs are assessed using an impartial account of individual interests. Exemptions should be granted when claims are weighty on either of these dimensions and the countervailing value is relatively weak. The final section of the paper responds to an important objection to this approach, which concerns administrability. (shrink)

Studies on difficulties in understanding scientific terms have shown that the problem is more serious among non-Western learners. The main reasons for this are the learners' pre-existing knowledge of scientific terms, their native language incommensurability with Western languages, and the polysemy of the words used to denote scientific concepts. The current study is an analysis of the conceptualisation of scientific concepts in two culturally different languages, i.e. Arabic and French, which represent a non-Western language and a Western language respectively. Physics (...) concepts which are considered as some of the most challenging concepts for non-Western languages (Loo 2005; Aranador 2005) were selected for analysis. To this end, the terms that refer to two physics concepts, "weight" and "mass" in Arabic وَزْن (wazn) and كُتْلَة (kutla) and in French poids and masse were semantically analysed. The analysis of the concepts in both languages is informed by the prototype theory by Rosch (1973; 1975), idealised cognitive models (ICMs) by Lakoff (1987), and conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy by Lakoff and Johnson (2003). The data for analysis were retrieved from two comparable Arabic and French corpora, namely the ArabiCorpus and the Concordancier-Corpus Français. The results suggest that there are both similarities and differences between the Arabic and French concepts in terms of meanings, prototypes, and metaphorical as well as metonymic semantic extensions. These findings support the argument that the human conceptual system is related to our environmental and cultural experiences and also importantly, validate previous claims on the need for educators to be cognizant of the culturally relevant meanings of scientific words found in everyday language that may impede learners' understanding of scientific concepts. (shrink)

If a colleague of mine, whose opinion I respect, disagrees with me about some claim, this might give me pause regarding my position on the matter. The Equal Weight view proposes that in such cases of peer disagreement I ought to give my colleague’s opinion as much weight as my own, and decrease my certainty in the disputed claim. One prominent criticism of the Equal Weight view is that treating higher-order (indirect) evidence in this way invariably swamps first-order (direct) evidence. (...) While the opinions of our peers matter in our deliberations, the Equal Weight view counter-intuitively requires that evidence of mere disagreement is more important than standard kinds of evidence. I offer a proposal for how we should idealize epistemic agents that identifies the variable feature of disagreements that accounts for the shifting significance of direct and indirect evidence in different disagreement contexts. Specifically, by idealizing epistemic agents as deriving functions that characterize the non-subjective relationship between a body of evidence and the reasonableness of believing the various propositions supported by that evidence, we can accommodate the intuition to compromise that motivates the Equal Weight view, without accepting the counter-intuitive results. (shrink)

John Broome argues that fairness requires that claims are satisfied in proportion to their strength. Broome holds that, when distributing indivisible goods, fairness requires the use of weighted lotteries as a surrogate to satisfy proportionally each candidate's claims. In this article, we present two arguments against Broome's account of fairness. First, we argue that it is almost impossible to calculate the weights of the lotteries in accordance with the requirements of fairness. Second, we argue that Broome rules out (...) those methods whose use might provide some resolution to this problem. From these arguments, we conclude that, contra Broome, fairness does not require the proportional satisfaction of claims. (shrink)

In his restriction of prioritarianism to cases in which the same people would exist in all the possible outcomes, Parfit stakes out an unstable position, both for himself and more generally. There is no plausible rationale for a prioritarianism that is so restricted, which is consistent with the key features of Parfit’s elaboration and defence of this view and his other commitments. The principles that might be appealed to, in an attempt to justify such a restriction, give rise to a (...) different view—one that is sensitive to the presence or absence of the competing claims of different individuals, where both the existence and the magnitude of these claims are determined by gains and losses to individuals in a manner that is not fully captured by Parfit’s prioritarian weighting. (shrink)

Since the Restitution of Land Rights Act 22 of 1994 came into operation, courts have come to attach considerable significance to historian expert testimony when ruling on land claims that made it to court. Therefore, a universal approach had to be adopted. Over the years the Supreme Court of Appeal and Constitutional Court have developed tried and tested methodologies to aid the courts in determining the weight and admissibility of a witness' testimony. In the Salem Commonage case, both the (...) Land Claims Court and the majority of the Supreme Court of Appeal deviated from these precedents by adopting arguably a broader interpretation of the Act than intended. The case is unique in the sense that the dispute involves a commonage that was subdivided via a court order in 1940, resulting in the removal of the remaining black African population from that land. The question therefore was whether or not this group of people fulfilled the requirements for a valid claim as set out in the Act. The Land Claims Court and Supreme Court of Appeal felt that it had. The landowners applied for leave to appeal to the Constitutional Court. The application was granted, but in his judgment, Edwin Cameron agreed with the rationale of both courts, and held that there was a valid claim. This was despite the fact that the testimony of the claimants' 'star witness', Msile Nondzube, was heavily criticised by the landowners as well as a Supreme Court of Appeal judge. The Constitutional Court emphasised that the Act was an extraordinary piece of legislation and had to be interpreted in such a way so as to address the injustices of the past. This included provisions of the Act which dealt with how oral and expert evidence would be dealt with. (shrink)

By virtue of the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959, the territorial claims to Antarctica of seven of the original signatories were held in abeyance or “frozen.” Considered by many as an exemplar of international law, the Antarctic Treaty System has come to be increasingly questioned, however, in a very much changed global scenario that presents new challenges to the governance of the White Continent. In this context, it is necessary to gain a clearer understanding of the moral weight of (...) those initial claims, which stand as a cornerstone of the treaty. The aim of this article is to offer an appraisal of such claims, which may be divided into two main kinds: those grounded on some relevant link to the territory, and those grounded on official documents and geographical doctrines. After pointing to the limitations and challenges that they face, I conclude with some remarks about how this assessment ought to serve as a starting point to rethink the territorial status of Antarctica. (shrink)

The article analyses the necessary conditions an argument for popular punishment would need to meet, and argues that it faces the challenge of a dilemma of reasonableness: either popular views on punishment are unreasonable, in which case they should carry no weight, or they are reasonable, in which case the reasons that support them, not the views, should carry weight. It proceeds to present and critically discuss three potential solutions to the dilemma, arguing that only an argument for the beneficial (...) effects of coherence between popular views and penal policy is persuasive, but that it makes popular punishment less important than proponents claim, and offers a justification proponents will find it difficult to advance. (shrink)

Most of us have certain intuitions about moral rights, at least partially captured by the ideas that: (A) rights carry special weight in moral argument; (B) persons retain their rights even when they are legitimately infringed; although (C) rights undoubtedly do conflict with one another, and are sometimes overridden as well by nonrights considerations. I show that Dworkin's remarks about rights allow us to affirm (A), (B), and (C), yet those remarks are extremely vague. I then argue that Feinberg's more (...) comprehensive and precise theory, designed to do justice to all three theses, cannot assure us of (A), that rights are not merely one consideration to be weighed in the balance with heterogeneous others. I show how Feinberg accepts (C) despite being drawn toward an alternative absolutist theory of rights and commits himself to (B) through his rejection of prima facie rights. But his promising distinction between recognition and enforcement of a right, which helps give some sense to (B) despite its tension with (C), undermines the force of rights in moral argument apparently intended by (A). We thus learn that Feinberg's and Dworkin's accounts of rights are incompatible, though each is correct in important ways. Contrasting their views allows us to clarify the implications and consistency of alternative theses about rights, one step toward meeting the challenge of developing a theory which shows more adequately how respect for rights is to be combined with other intuitions about rights and their relation to other values. (shrink)

The rule of rescue holds that special weight should be given to protecting the lives of assignable individuals in need, implying that less weight is given to considerations of cost-effectiveness. This is sometimes invoked as an argument for funding or reimbursing life-saving treatment in public healthcare even if the costs of such treatment are extreme. At first sight one might assume that an individualist approach to ethics—such as Scanlon’s contractualism—would offer a promising route to justification of the rule of rescue. (...) In this chapter I argue that contractualism cannot endorse the rule of rescue, whereas a collectivist approach that appeals to group solidarity would offer support for rescue cases. The argument, however, has its limitations, and though solidarity is of central concern in shaping public healthcare, there are good reasons for not endorsing the rule of rescue as a moral basis for allocating scarce resources in clinical care. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson recently argued that it is impermissible for a bystander to turn a runaway trolley from five onto one. But she also argues that a trolley driver is required to do just that. We believe that her argument is flawed in three important ways. She fails to give proper weight to (a) an agent¹s claims not to be required to act in ways he does not want to, (b) impartiality in the weighing of competing patient-claims, and (...) (c) the role of patient-claims in determining agent-duties. All three of these failures can be understood in terms of what we call the Mechanics of Claims, an approach we develop for identifying and balancing competing claims in determining rights. Using that framework, one can see both why Thomson's most recent argument is mistaken, and how to think more clearly about deontological choices generally. (shrink)

I have claimed that risk-weighted expected utility maximizers are rational, and that their preferences cannot be captured by expected utility theory. Richard Pettigrew and Rachael Briggs have recently challenged these claims. Both authors argue that only EU-maximizers are rational. In addition, Pettigrew argues that the preferences of REU-maximizers can indeed be captured by EU theory, and Briggs argues that REU-maximizers lose a valuable tool for simplifying their decision problems. I hold that their arguments do not succeed and that my (...) original claims still stand. However, their arguments do highlight some costs of REU theory. (shrink)

This article argues that Lara Buchak’s risk-weighted expected utility (REU) theory fails to offer a true alternative to expected utility theory. Under commonly held assumptions about dynamic choice and the framing of decision problems, rational agents are guided by their attitudes to temporally extended courses of action. If so, REU theory makes approximately the same recommendations as expected utility theory. Being more permissive about dynamic choice or framing, however, undermines the theory’s claim to capturing a steady choice disposition in the (...) face of risk. I argue that this poses a challenge to alternatives to expected utility theory more generally. (shrink)

Long claimed to be the dominant conception of practical reason, the Humean theory that reasons for action are instrumental, or explained by desires, is the basis for a range of worries about the objective prescriptivity of morality. As a result, it has come under intense attack in recent decades. A wide variety of arguments have been advanced which purport to show that it is false, or surprisingly, even that it is incoherent. Slaves of the Passions aims to set the record (...) straight, by advancing a version of the Humean theory of reasons which withstands this sophisticated array of objections. Schroeder defends a radical new view which, if correct, means that the commitments of the Humean theory have been widely misunderstood. Along the way, he raises and addresses questions about the fundamental structure of reasons, the nature of normative explanations, the aims of and challenges facing reductive views in metaethics, the weight of reasons, the nature of desire, moral epistemology, and most importantly, the relationship between agent-relational and agent-neutral reasons for action. (shrink)

Galileo claimed inconsistency in the Aristotelian dogma concerning falling bodies and stated that all bodies must fall at the same rate. However, there is an empirical situation where the speeds of falling bodies are proportional to their weights; and even in vacuo all bodies do not fall at the same rate under terrestrial conditions. The reason for the deficiency of Galileo’s reasoning is analyzed, and various physical scenarios are described in which Aristotle’s claim is closer to the truth than is (...) Galileo’s. The purpose is not to reinstate Aristotelian physics at the expense of Galileo and Newton, but rather to provide evidence in support of the verdict that empirical knowledge does not come from prior philosophy.Author Keywords: Author Keywords: Aristotle; Galileo; Thought experiments; Falling bodies. (shrink)

This chapter examines the case for health care policies aimed at holding obese individuals responsible for their weight and for obesity-related health issues. In particular, it considers the merits of two arguments for policies that would seek to make obese individuals bear some of the higher health care costs associated with being that way. On the fairness argument, it is claimed that such policies would serve the interests of fairness by holding obese individuals to account for irresponsible lifestyle choices that (...) are linked to their higher weight and its associated health risks. On the public health promotion argument, it is claimed that adopting such policies could produce impressive public health benefits: encouraging people to make healthier lifestyle choices, reducing obesity rates, and reducing obesity-related health care spending. Both arguments face serious objections. Contrary to the fairness argument, policies aimed at holding obese individuals responsible for their weight or for related health problems would neither treat people as they deserve to be treated nor make the distribution of health care resources fairer. And contrary to the public health promotion argument, those policies would not produce better health outcomes for society at large. Indeed, they would tend to do just the opposite. Reflection on the shortcomings of those arguments reveals that their conclusion is false: society should not adopt policies aimed at holding obese individuals responsible for their weight or for obesity-related health problems. (shrink)

This article considers the prospects of inference to the best explanation as a method of confirming causal claims vis-à-vis the medical evidence of mechanisms. I show that IBE is actually descriptive of how scientists reason when choosing among hypotheses, that it is amenable to the balance/weight distinction, a pivotal pair of concepts in the philosophy of evidence, and that it can do justice to interesting features of the interplay between mechanistic and population level assessments.

An objection that has been raised to the conciliatory stance on the epistemic significance of peer disagreement known as the Equal Weight View is that it is self-defeating, self-undermining, or self-refuting. The proponent of that view claims that equal weight should be given to all the parties to a peer dispute. Hence, if one of his epistemic peers defends the opposite view, he is required to give equal weight to the two rival views, thereby undermining his confidence in the (...) correctness of the Equal Weight View. It seems that the same objection could be leveled against those who claim to suspend judgment in the face of pervasive unresolvable disagreements, as do the Pyrrhonian skeptics. In this paper, I explore the kind of response to the objection that could be offered from a neo-Pyrrhonian perspective, with the aim of better understanding the intriguing character of Pyrrhonian skepticism. (shrink)

In this article, I claim that the treatise known as περὶ πνεύματος/De spiritu (481a-486b Bekker) was written by Theophrastus. My overall argument unfolds in three stages: first, I briefly summarize the arguments against De spiritu’s authenticity in Aristotle’s corpus. This summary will lead to my first argument which uses the very same reasons that prove the non-Aristotelian authorship to claim the Theophrastean one, in particular linguistic aspects of the text (§2). Next, I will focus on chronology, by discussing the mention (...) of one Aristogenes to show that Aristotle could not have known this individual (§3). Third and last, I will examine various aspects of the work that demonstrate stylistic and argumentative connections (§4), as well as doctrinal affinities with the works of Theophrastus, although some have attributed it to Strato (§5). On the basis of these arguments, I conclude that the weight of the evidence makes On Breath a work by Theophrastus (or his circle) rather than one composed by Aristotle. (shrink)