Ethical beliefs are not justified by familiar methods. We do not directly sense ethical properties, at least not in the straightforward way we sense colors or shapes. Nor is it plausible to think – despite a tradition claiming otherwise – that there are self-evident ethical truths that we can know in the way we know conceptual or mathematical truths. Yet, if we are justified in believing anything, we are justified in believing various ethical propositions e.g., that slavery is wrong. If (...) ethical beliefs are not justified in these familiar ways, how are they justified? -/- In her widely read, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” and in her short complimentary paper, “On Brute Facts,” G.E.M. Anscombe answers this question with a compelling and unorthodox account of justification in ethics. Because of her polemical tone and because “Modern Moral Philosophy” does so much else besides, this contribution is easy to overlook. But her account is worth taking seriously, since (a) it is an underappreciated yet plausible account that sidesteps traditional controversies, (b) it offers rich conceptual tools for interpreting and critiquing ethical theories, (c) it suggests an appealing account of the place of ethical theory in ethical knowledge and, (d) it provides useful guidance for doing applied ethics. (shrink)

Brennan and Jaworski (2018) accuse me of misunderstanding their thesis and failing to produce a counterexample to it. In this Response, I clarify my central argument in “Can’t Buy Me Love,” explain why I used prostitution as an example, and work to advance the debate.

As we build increasingly intelligent machines, we confront difficult questions about how to specify their objectives. One approach, which we call human-centered, tasks the machine with the objective of learning and satisfying human objectives by observing our behavior. This paper considers how human-centered AI should conceive the humans it is trying to help. We argue that an Aristotelian model of human agency has certain advantages over the currently dominant theory drawn from economics.

This chapter develops Moral Occasionalism, according to which moral facts are grounded in certain natural facts, which are called sub-moral grounds, and these sub-moral grounds influence us in such a way as to induce largely correct moral beliefs. Moral Occasionalism is designed to explain the correlation of moral beliefs with the moral facts—and to do so in a way that is consistent with non-interactionist views, according to which moral facts neither influence nor are influenced by moral beliefs. It is argued (...) that moral non-naturalists and others who are committed to non-interactionist views ought to be in the business of defending Moral Occasionalism. The chapter shows that Moral Occasionalism has major advantages over its chief non-interactionist rival, namely David Enoch’s “godless pre-established harmony” view. The chapter anticipates and responds to several objections. (shrink)

Critics of commodification often claim that the buying and selling of some good communicates disrespect or some other inappropriate attitude. Such semiotic critiques have been leveled against markets in sex, pornography, kidneys, surrogacy, blood, and many other things. Brennan and Jaworski (2015a) have recently argued that all such objections fail. They claim that the meaning of a market transaction is a highly contingent, socially constructed fact. If allowing a market for one of these goods can improve the supply, access or (...) quality of the good, then instead of banning the market on semiotic grounds, they urge that we should revise our semiotics. In this reply, I isolate a part of the meaning of a market transaction that is not socially constructed: our market exchanges always express preferences. I then show how cogent semiotic critiques of some markets can be constructed on the basis of this fact. (shrink)

Many take the claim that you cannot ‘get’ an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ to imply that non- moral beliefs are by themselves incapable of justifying moral beliefs. I argue that this is a mistake and that the position that moral beliefs are justified exclusively by non-moral beliefs—a view that I call moral inferentialism—presents an attractive non-sceptical moral epistemology.

Colorado has consistently had one of the highest rates of suicide in the United States, and El Paso County has the highest number of suicide and firearm-related suicide deaths within the state. Community-based solutions like those of the Suicide Prevention Collaborative of El Paso County may be more effective in preventing suicide as they are specific to local issues, sensitive to local culture, and informed by local data, community members, and stakeholders.

You might bear witness to some injustice, but can you witness the injustice itself? At first glance, it’s tempting to say “yes.” Sometimes we see things that provoke an immediate judgement that some act is wrong just as we sometimes see things that provoke the immediate judgement that e.g. the book is red or that our friend is angry. It seems like we perceive the injustice just as we perceive the redness or the anger. Natural as that position is, I (...) argue that it is a mistake and that those who have adopted it often confuse the perception of moral properties with the perception of morally relevant properties. (shrink)

James Stacey Taylor claims that my argument in “Can’t Buy Me Love” is both incomplete and doomed to fail. I grant some of Taylor’s points, but remind him that semiotic objections to the commodification of certain goods are strongest when we think not about individual market transactions, but about what it means for a society to support the market in question.

It is a common assumption that medical institutions may permissibly use the force of law to seek remuneration for costs incurred in medical intervention done without patient consent. In this paper, we challenge that assumption. Specifically, we claim that: Generally, when patients who lack capacity are given medical treatment without their consent, those practitioners who treated them are wrong to use legal mechanisms to secure remuneration for that treatment.

Using automated systems to avoid the need for human discretion in government contexts – a scenario we call ‘rule by automation’ – can help us achieve the ideal of a free and equal society. Drawing on relational theories of freedom and equality, we explain how rule by automation is a more complete realization of the rule of law and why thinkers in these traditions have strong reasons to support it. Relational theories are based on the absence of human domination and (...) hierarchy, which automation helps us achieve. Nevertheless, there is another understanding of relational theories where what matters is the presence of valuable relationships with those in power. Exploring this further might help us see when and why we should accept human discretion. (shrink)

In the beginning of the COVID pandemic, researchers and bioethicists called for human challenge trials to hasten the development of a vaccine for COVID. However, the fact that we lacked a specific, highly effective treatment for COVID led many to argue that a COVID challenge trial would be unethical and we ought to pursue traditional phase III testing instead. These ethical objections to challenge trials may have slowed the progress of a COVID vaccine, so it is important to evaluate their (...) merit. One common way of doing so is to make an analogy to other social practices that are relevantly similar and which we currently sanction. We submit that non-directed live organ donation (NDLOD) is a promising analogy. After arguing that the risks to volunteers for each activity appear similar, we explore potential disanalogies that would undermine the comparison. We note that there are differences in both the kind and certainty of benefit secured by NDLOD compared to challenge trials. We conclude these differences are insufficient to make NDLOD permissible and challenge trials impermissible. Ultimately, if we think the risks associated with NDLOD are ethically permissible, then we should think the same of the risks associated with COVID challenge trials. (shrink)

_Teaching in a democracy is challenging and filled with dilemmas that have no easy answers._ For example, how do educators meet their responsibilities of teaching civic norms and dispositions while remaining nonpartisan? _Democratic Discord in Schools_ features eight normative cases of complex dilemmas drawn from real events designed to help educators practice the type of collaborative problem solving and civil discourse needed to meet these challenges of democratic education. Each of the cases also features a set of six commentaries written (...) by a diverse array of scholars, educators, policy makers, students, and activists with a range of political views to spark reflection and conversation. Drawing on research and methods developed in the Justice in Schools project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), _Democratic Discord in Schools_ provides the tools that allow educators and others to practice the deliberative skills they need in order to find reasonable solutions to common ethical dilemmas in politically fraught times. (shrink)

Josiah Royce’s philosophical interest in religion can be traced to his earliest days, when hymn singing and reading the Bible were constant practices in the fervently evangelical household of Josiah, Sr., and Sarah Royce in Grass Valley, California.1 Royce’s mother, Sarah, in particular, was a profound influence. She burned with the Holy Spirit, sparked by the fire-and-brimstone revivalism of the Second Great Awakening in New England, where she grew up. Educated at Phipps Union Female Seminary in Albion, New York, Mrs. (...) Royce treasured the scriptures, and was an elegant and thorough interpreter of them for Josiah and his three sisters.In spite of his delight in the reading and study of scripture at home, young.. (shrink)

Investigation into the history of the Talmud was sparked by the Karaite rebellion against the authority of the Talmud at the beginning of the eighth century. The most influential work of Talmudic chronology is the Iggeret de-Rav Sherira Gaon , composed in 986, which sought to explain how the Mishnah and the Talmud were compiled, and demonstrate the unbroken chain of the tradition. Maimonides gives a summary of the history of the tradition in his Commentary to the Mishnah. Although Maimonides' (...) reconstruction is an artificial one, with no attempt to verify sources or test their reliability, he stated that the Babylonian Talmud was compiled about one hundred years after the Jerusalem Talmud; in cases of disagreement, therefore, the rulings of the Babylonian Talmud were the ones adopted by the post-Talmudic Halakhah. The French glossators, or Tosafists, argued that a law in the Talmud could be changed when the original circumstances in which it was promulgated were no longer evident. More objective, critical historical accounts have been given by more modern scholars, particularly Yon Tov Lippmann Heller, Jeheil Heilprin, and Hayyim Joseph David Agulai. (shrink)

According to the Generality Constraint, mental states with conceptual content must be capable of recombining in certain systematic ways. Drawing on empirical evidence from cognitive science, I argue that so-called analogue magnitude states violate this recombinability condition and thus have nonconceptual content. I further argue that this result has two significant consequences: it demonstrates that nonconceptual content seeps beyond perception and infiltrates cognition; and it shows that whether mental states have nonconceptual content is largely an empirical matter determined by the (...) structure of the neural representations underlying them. (shrink)

I present a new argument for the repugnant conclusion. The core of the argument is a risky, intrapersonal analogue of the mere addition paradox. The argument is important for three reasons. First, some solutions to Parfit’s original puzzle do not obviously generalize to the intrapersonal puzzle in a plausible way. Second, it raises independently important questions about how to make decisions under uncertainty for the sake of people whose existence might depend on what we do. And, third, it suggests various (...) difficulties for leading views about the value of a person’s life compared to her nonexistence. (shrink)

The standard view of "believes" and other propositional attitude verbs is that such verbs express relations between agents and propositions. A sentence of the form “S believes that p” is true just in case S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition that p; this proposition is the referent of the complement clause "that p." On this view, we would expect the clausal complements of propositional attitude verbs to be freely intersubstitutable with their corresponding proposition descriptions—e.g., "the proposition that p"—as (...) they are in the case of "believes." In many cases, however, intersubstitution of that-clauses and proposition descriptions fails to preserve truth value or even grammaticality. These substitution failures lead some philosophers to reject the standard view of propositional attitude reports. Others conclude that propositional attitude verbs are systematically ambiguous. I reject both these views. On my view, the that-clause complements of propositional attitude verbs denote propositions, but proposition descriptions do not. (shrink)

I defend the view that a reason for someone to do something is just a reason why she ought to do it. This simple view has been thought incompatible with the existence of reasons to do things that we may refrain from doing or even ought not to do. For it is widely assumed that there are reasons why we ought to do something only if we ought to do it. I present several counterexamples to this principle and reject some (...) ways of understanding "ought" so that the principle is compatible with my examples. I conclude with a hypothesis for when and why the principle should be expected to fail. (shrink)

According to asymmetric comparativism, it is worse for a person to exist with a miserable life than not to exist, but it is not better for a person to exist with a happy life than not to exist. My aim in this paper is to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. My account of asymmetric comparativism begins with a different asymmetry, regarding the (dis)value of early death. I offer an account of this early death asymmetry, appealing to the (...) idea of conditional goods, and generalize it to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. I also address the objection that asymmetric comparativism has unacceptably antinatalist implications. (shrink)

Formal principles governing best practices in classification and definition have for too long been neglected in the construction of biomedical ontologies, in ways which have important negative consequences for data integration and ontology alignment. We argue that the use of such principles in ontology construction can serve as a valuable tool in error-detection and also in supporting reliable manual curation. We argue also that such principles are a prerequisite for the successful application of advanced data integration techniques such as ontology-based (...) multi-database querying, automated ontology alignment and ontology-based text-mining. These theses are illustrated by means of a case study of the Gene Ontology, a project of increasing importance within the field of biomedical data integration. (shrink)

The Meno, one of the most widely read of the Platonic dialogues, is seen afresh in this original interpretation that explores the dialogue as a theatrical presentation. Just as Socrates's listeners would have questioned and examined their own thinking in response to the presentation, so, Klein shows, should modern readers become involved in the drama of the dialogue. Klein offers a line-by-line commentary on the text of the Meno itself that animates the characters and conversation and carefully probes each significant (...) turn of the argument. "A major addition to the literature on the Meno and necessary reading for every student of the dialogue."--Alexander Seasonske, Philosophical Review "There exists no other commentary on Meno which is so thorough, sound, and enlightening."-- Choice Jacob Klein was a student of Martin Heidegger and a tutor at St. John's College from 1937 until his death. His other works include Plato's Trilogy: Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, also published by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

DISCOURSE; EXPRESSION (i) 'Discourse' is a word with a variety of meanings. One of the more useful is as an omnibus word covering both thought and talk. ...

According to the person-affecting restriction, one distribution of welfare can be better than another only if there is someone for whom it is better. Extant problems for the person-affecting restriction involve variable-population cases, such as the nonidentity problem, which are notoriously controversial and difficult to resolve. This paper develops a fixed-population problem for the person-affecting restriction. The problem reveals that, in the presence of incommensurable welfare levels, the person-affecting restriction is incompatible with minimal requirements of impartial beneficence even in fixed-population (...) contexts. (shrink)

Matthew Adler's Measuring Social Welfare is an introduction to the social welfare function (SWF) methodology. This essay questions some ideas at the core of the SWF methodology having to do with the relation between the SWF and the measure of well-being. The facts about individual well-being do not single out a particular scale on which well-being must be measured. As with physical quantities, there are multiple scales that can be used to represent the same information about well-being; no one scale (...) is special. Like physical laws, the SWF and its ranking of distributions cannot depend on exactly which of these scales we use. Adler and other theorists in the SWF tradition have used this idea to derive highly restrictive constraints on the shape of the SWF. These constraints rule out seemingly plausible views about distributive justice and population ethics. I argue, however, that these constraints stem from a simple but instructive mistake. The SWF should not be applied to vectors of numbers such as 1 and 2, but rather to vectors of dimensioned quantities such as 1 util and 2 utils. This seemingly pedantic suggestion turns out to have far-reaching consequences. Unlike the orthodox SWF approach, treating welfare levels as dimensioned quantities lets us distinguish between real changes in well-being and mere changes in the unit of measurement. It does this without making the SWF depend on the scale on which welfare is measured, and in a way that avoids the restrictive constraints on the shape of the SWF. (shrink)

The public discourse surrounding sex and severe disability over the past 40 years has largely focused on protecting vulnerable populations from abuse. However, health professionals and activists are increasingly recognising the inherent sexuality of disabled persons and attempting to find ways to accommodate their intimacy needs. This essay explores several ethical issues arising from such efforts.

Are there key respects in which character and character defects are voluntary? Can agents with serious vices be rational agents? Jonathan Jacobs answers in the affirmative. Moral character is shaped through voluntary habits, including the ways we habituate ourselves, Jacobs believes. Just as individuals can voluntarily lead unhappy lives without making unhappiness an end, so can they degrade their ethical characters through voluntary action that does not have establishment of vice as its end. Choosing Character presents an account of ethical (...) disability, expanding the domain of responsibility and explicating the role of character in ethical cognition. Jacobs contends that agents become ethically disabled voluntarily when their habits impair their ability to properly appreciate ethical considerations. Such agents are rational, responsible individuals who are yet incapable of virtuous action. The view develops and modifies Aristotelian claims concerning the fixity of character. Jacobs' interpretation is developed in contrast to the overlooked work of Maimonides, who also used Aristotelian resources but argued for the possibility of character change. The notion of ethical disability has profound ramifications for ethics and for current debates about blame and punishment. (shrink)

Ethical or socially responsible investment is one of the most rapidly growing areas of finance. New government regulations mean that all pension funds are obliged to take such considerations into account. However, this phenomenon has received little critical attention from business ethicists, and a clear conceptual framework is lacking. This paper, by a practitioner in the field, attempts to fill this analytical gap. It considers what difference, if any, lies between the terms ‘ethical’, ‘green’, or ‘socially responsible’. It also tackles (...) the difficult question of how any public form of investment can be called ‘ethical’ in an overtly pluralistic society. The paper provides an account of the historical development of ethical investment, and traces the evolution of the varying terms used to describe it. This is followed by a conceptual analysis of these terms, and a description of ethical decision‐making in this context. The paper ends by considering the role of shareholder action within ethical investment, and assesses the utility of the stakeholder model as a theoretical justification. (shrink)

Lara Buchak argues for a version of rank-weighted utilitarianism that assigns greater weight to the interests of the worse off. She argues that our distributive principles should be derived from the preferences of rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance, who ought to be risk averse. I argue that Buchak’s appeal to the veil of ignorance leads to a particular way of extending rank-weighted utilitarianism to the evaluation of uncertain prospects. This method recommends choices that violate the unanimous preferences of (...) rational individuals and choices that guarantee worse distributions. These results, I suggest, undermine Buchak’s argument for rank-weighted utilitarianism. (shrink)

I argue that, on Husserl's account, affectivity, along with the closely related phenomenon of association, follows a form of sui generis lawfulness belonging to the domain of what Husserl calls motivation, which must be distinguished both (1) from the causal structures through which we understand the body third-personally, as a material thing; and also (2) from the rational or inferential structures at the level of deliberative judgment traditionally understood to be the domain of epistemic import. In effect, in addition to (...) recognizing a “space of causes” and a “space of reasons,” Husserl’s account of affectivity and the epistemology of passive synthesis in which it is situated suggest that we should recognize a separate “space of motivations.” Within this space, on Husserl’s phenomenological picture, we can isolate two different sorts of epistemic import, one belonging directly to the passive-synthetic content of experience, as explained in Husserl’s account of association and his closely aligned notion of nonlinguistic sense, and a second—my primary focus—affectivity, which is still relevant for that content, albeit indirectly, and holds epistemic import in its determination not of what that content is but of how it comes to matter for us. (shrink)

Building on Christopher Peacocke’s account of analog perceptual contentand my own account of analog perceptual vehicles, I defend three claims: that theperception of magnitudes often has analog contents; that the perception of magni-tudes often has analog vehicles; and that the first claim is true in virtue of the second—that is, the analog vehicles help to ground the analog contents.

According to Rosenthal's higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, one is in a conscious mental state if and only if one is aware of oneself as being in that state via a suitable HOT. Several critics have argued that the possibility of so-called targetless HOTs—that is, HOTs that represent one as being in a state that does not exist—undermines the theory. Recently, Wilberg (2010) has argued that HOT theory can offer a straightforward account of such cases: since consciousness is a (...) property of mental state tokens, and since there are no states to exhibit consciousness, one is not in conscious states in virtue of targetless HOTs. In this paper, I argue that Wilberg's account is problematic and that Rosenthal's version of HOT theory, according to which a suitable HOT is both necessary and sufficient for consciousness, is to be preferred to Wilberg's account. I then argue that Rosenthal's account can comfortably accommodate targetless HOTs because consciousness is best understood as a property of individuals, not a property of states. (shrink)

A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor--and self-professed Nazi. Despite their unlikely association, Taubes and Schmitt shared an abiding interest in the fundamental problems of political theology, believing the great challenges of modern political theory were ancient in pedigree and, in many cases, anticipated the works of Judeo-Christian eschatologists. In this collection of Taubes's writings on Schmitt, the (...) two intellectuals work through ideas of the apocalypse and other central concepts of political theology. Taubes acknowledges Schmitt's reservations about the weakness of liberal democracy yet distances himself from his prescription to rectify it, arguing the apocalyptic worldview requires less of a rigid hierarchical social ordering than a community committed to the importance of decision making. In these writings, a sharper and more nuanced portrait of Schmitt's thought emerges, as well as a more complicated understanding of Taubes, who has shaped the work of Giorgio Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk, and other major twentieth-century theorists. (shrink)

Tsui and Weymark (Economic Theory, 1997) have shown that the only continuous social welfare orderings on the whole Euclidean space which satisfy the weak Pareto principle and are invariant to individual-specific similarity transformations of utilities are strongly dictatorial. Their proof relies on functional equation arguments which are quite complex. This note provides a simpler proof of their theorem.

In the 1980s, a number of philosophers argued that perception is analog. In the ensuing years, these arguments were forcefully criticized, leaving the thesis in doubt. This paper draws on Weber’s Law, a well-entrenched finding from psychophysics, to advance a new argument that perception is analog. This new argument is an adaptation of an argument that cognitive scientists have leveraged in support of the contention that primitive numerical representations are analog. But the argument here is extended to the representation of (...) non-numerical magnitudes, such as luminance and distance, and shown to apply to perception and not just cognition. The relevant sense of ‘analog’ is also clarified, and two powerful objections are addressed. Finally, the question whether perception’s analog vehicles are located in conscious experience is explored and related to a well-known controversy within psychophysics. (shrink)

The animal agriculture industry causes animals a tremendous amount of pain and suffering. Many ethical vegans argue that we therefore have an obligation to abstain from animal products in order to reduce this suffering. But this argument faces a challenge: thanks to the size and structure of the animal agriculture industry, any individual’s dietary choices are overwhelmingly unlikely to make a difference. In this paper, we criticize common replies to this challenge and develop an alternative argument for ethical veganism. Specifically, (...) we argue that individuals should abstain from animal products because vegans, as a group, successfully reduce animal suffering, and individuals are obligated to participate in, rather than free ride on, this collective endeavor. Or, at the very least, individuals have strong reasons to purchase fewer inhumanely raised animal products—even if they are not obligated to go vegan per se. (shrink)

On Zeno Beach there are infinitely many grains of sand, each half the size of the last. Supposing Aristotle denied the possibility of Zeno Beach, did he have a good argument for the denial? Three arguments, each of ancient origin, are examined: the beach would be infinitely large; the beach would be impossible to walk across; the beach would contain a part equal to the whole, whereas parts must be lesser. It is attempted to show that none of these arguments (...) was Aristotle’s. Indeed, perhaps Aristotle’s finitism applied to magnitude only, not plurality. (shrink)

Jacobs' interpretation is developed in contrast to the overlooked work of Maimonides, who also used Aristotelian resources but argued for the possibility of ...

Panpsychism is a solution to the mind-body problem that presumes that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality instead of a product or consequence of physical processes (i.e., brain activity). Panpsychism is an elegant solution to the mind-body problem: it effectively rids itself of the explanatory gap materialist theories of consciousness suffer from. However, many theorists and experimentalists doubt panpsychism can ever be successful as a scientific theory, as it cannot be empirically verified or falsified. In this paper, I present (...) a panpsychist model based on the controversial idea that consciousness may be a so called higher physical dimension. Although this notion seems outrageous, I show that the idea has surprising explanatory power, even though the model (as most models) is most likely wrong. Most importantly, though, it results in a panpsychist model that yields predictions that can be empirically verified or falsified. As such, the model's main purpose is to serve as an example how a metaphysical model of consciousness can be specified in such a way that they can be tested in a scientifically rigorous way. (shrink)

Aristotle is said to have held that any kind of actual infinity is impossible. I argue that he was a finitist (or "potentialist") about _magnitude_, but not about _plurality_. He did not deny that there are, or can be, infinitely many things in actuality. If this is right, then it has implications for Aristotle's views about the metaphysics of parts and points.

Philosophy, scientific psychology, and common sense all distinguish perception from cognition. While there is little agreement about how the perception–cognition boundary ought to be drawn, one prominent idea is that perceptual states are dependent on a stimulus, or stimulus-dependent, in a way that cognitive states are not. This paper seeks to develop this idea in a way that can accommodate two apparent counterexamples: hallucinations, which are prima facie perceptual yet stimulus-independent; and demonstrative thoughts, which are prima facie cognitive yet stimulus-dependent. (...) The payoff is not only a specific proposal for marking the perception–cognition boundary, but also a deeper understanding of the natures of hallucination and demonstrative thought. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds considerable promise for transforming clinical diagnostics. While much has been written both about public attitudes toward the use of AI tools in medicine and about uncertainty regarding legal liability that may be delaying its adoption, the interface of these two issues has so far drawn less attention. However, understanding this interface is essential to determining how jury behaviour is likely to influence adoption of AI by physicians. One distinctive concern identified in this paper is a ‘negative (...) outcome penalty paradox’ (NOPP) in which physicians risk being penalised by juries in cases with negative outcomes, whether they overrule AI determinations or accept them. The paper notes three reasons why AI in medicine is uniquely susceptible to the NOPP and urges serious further consideration of this complex dilemma. (shrink)

Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, _Oresteia_, Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's first (...) wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's _Oresteia_, Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example. Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text, Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm. By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront, Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology. (shrink)

John Morrison has argued that confidences are assigned in perceptual experience. For example, when you perceive a figure in the distance, your experience might assign a 55-percent confidence to the figure’s being Isaac. Morrison’s argument leans on the phenomenon of ‘completely trusting your experience’. I argue that Morrison presupposes a problematic ‘importation model’ of this familiar phenomenon, and propose a very different way of thinking about it. While the article’s official topic is whether confidences are assigned in perceptual experience, it (...) is also about two more general issues: how we can determine which properties are assigned in perceptual experience; and how we transition from perception to belief. (shrink)

Business ethics, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, values-driven management, corporate governance, and ethical leadership are necessary ...

In The Border between Seeing and Thinking, Ned Block argues that the distinction between perception and cognition should be grounded in representational format. I object that cognition is multifaceted, and includes representations with the same format as some perceptual representations. We can save Block’s view by interpreting it as concerning the border between one elite species of cognition—namely, propositional thought—and everything below it, including perception. But that leaves the border between perception and cognition in general unexplained. To fill this gap, (...) I recommend my stimulus-dependence account of the border and reply to objections Block raises against it. This brings into relief a category of mind that is crucial to understanding human infants and nonhuman animals—namely, nonpropositional cognition, which sits between perception and propositional thought. (shrink)