This chapter contains sections titled: An Environmental Ethic for Non‐Tree Huggers Considering the Environment by Riding a Bike Cycles of Climate Change Pollution The Cycling Solution The End of a (Subaru) Legacy Notes.

It appears that utilitarian arguments in favor of moral vegetarianism cannot justify a complete prohibition of eating meat. This is because, in certain circumstances, forgoing meat will prevent no pain, and so, on utilitarian grounds, we should be opportunistic carnivores rather than moral vegetarians. In his paper, ‘Puppies, pigs, and people: Eating meat and marginal cases,’ Alastair Norcross argues that causal impotence arguments like these are misguided. First, he presents an analogous situation, the case of chocolate mousse a-la-bama, in order (...) to argue that we, individually, are not causally impotent. Second, Norcross offers a threshold argument in which he argues that while we may individually be causally impotent, when we adopt moral vegetarianism in concert with others, we become causally potent in preventing harms by factory farming. We argue that Norcross's responses ultimately fail to address the causal impotence objection. The former argument fails because it vastly oversimplifies the world in which we find ourselves. Given the size of factory farming, the reasonable conclusion is that we are in fact powerless to prevent harms to animals in factory farms in many or most cases. The latter argument fails because even if collective action will have an impact on factory farming, this does not provide us with an argument against being carnivores in certain circumstances. (shrink)

In a random process, later events seem to be loosely attached to earlier ones; in other words, a substantial or tight relationship between the two is missing. This relationship is sometimes held to be the relation of cause and effect, so that random events are not caused by what preceded them. Richard Johns, however, adopts the original stance that random events are fully caused and lack only determination by their causes; according to his causal theory of chance, the physical chance (...) of an event is the degree to which the event is determined by its causes. -/- A Theory of Physical Probability addresses an important and, until now, poorly comprehended topic: chance, or physical probability. It puts forth Johns's theory of physical chance and demonstrates the implications of this theory in various areas of physics. Johns's is a novel approach to a fundamental topic in such disciplines as philosophy, philosophy of science, and physics, and it will be widely admired by scholars for its clarity and accessibility. (shrink)

A theory of objective, single-case chances is presented and defended. The theory states that the chance of an event E is its epistemic probability, given maximal knowledge of the possible causes of E. This theory is uniquely successful in entailing all the known properties of chance, but involves heavy metaphysical commitment. It requires an objective rationality that determines proper degrees of belief in some contexts.

The term “spontaneous self-organisation” (SSO for short) is used to describe the emergence of an object or structure “by itself” within a dynamical system. While usage of the term will no doubt vary somewhat, in this paper I will take it to have three key features: 1. The appearance of the object does not require a special, “fine-tuned” initial state. 2. There is no need for interaction with an external system. 3. The object is likely to appear in a reasonably (...) short time. The first two conditions say that the object arises from the dynamics of the system alone, without any help. The third condition says that, for an object s to appear by spontaneous self-organisation, its appearance should not just a matter of dumb luck (e.g. a monkey with a typewriter just happening to produce Hamlet), nor just from waiting long enough (e.g. a monkey typing for long enough that Hamlet was likely to appear), or any combination of the two. What is “reasonably short” in this context? The time needed for spontaneous self-organisation should be much shorter than the expected time required to assemble the object purely at random from its components. Note that, for very large and intricate systems, the random-assembly time will be unimaginably vast, so that the appearance of such objects in merely billions of years will count as spontaneous self-organisation. (shrink)

There is a long history of philosophical intuition that the human mind must be more than physical or mechanical. I argue that this intuition arises from the perfect “transparency” of physical and mechanical states, in the sense that such states have no obscure or occult elements, but are fully intelligible in mathematical terms. In the paper, I derive a contradiction from the claim that such a physical system has genuine intentionality, comparable with an intelligent human. The contradiction arises from the (...) fact that, according to physicalism, the physical properties of a brain state determine the narrow propositional content of any conscious thought occurring in that state. This fact allows a physical property of brain states to be defined using Cantor’s diagonal construction, and then a contradiction results if a physical system is assumed to form thoughts involving that property. (shrink)

Rene Descartes's motto challenges his would-be historians: "He lives well who hides well." He hid even in the Discourse on Method, where he professed to recount the story of his "entire life, " but said almost nothing about his childhood and youth. He mentioned neither family nor friends, and he boasted a total freedom from irrational passions. In the Discourse, which presented a new way of achieving certain truth through mathematical reason, Descartes stressed just one event, a day of thinking (...) at the beginning of winter, 1619. Tucked away in an unpublished notebook, however, Descartes also left the Olympica, which documented the wildly irrational dreams he had the night of November 10, 1619, and gave his own enthusiastic interpretations. Embarrassed scholars have tried to reason away this record and even the dreams themselves. Adapting clinical methods to historical research, John Cole offers the first systematic interpretation of the Olympian dreams. He argues that they expressed and masked Descartes's unresolved conflicts: his guilt at having rejected the law career for which he had been trained and which his lawyer father had wanted him to pursue, and his shame over early failures to satisfy the high expectations of his friend and mentor, Isaac Beeckman. Cole shows us how a critical historian can make sense of such irrational material and lets us see the creation of an egocentric and rationalist philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a mathematical basis for the plausible idea that regular dynamical laws can only produce (quickly and reliably) regular structures. Thus the actual laws, which are regular, can only produce regular objects, like crystals, and not irregular ones, like living organisms.

Epistemic theories of objective chance hold that chances are idealised epistemic probabilities of some sort. After giving a brief history of this approach to objective chance, I argue for a particular version of this view, that the chance of an event E is its epistemic probability, given maximal knowledge of the possible causes of E. The main argument for this view is the demonstration that it entails all of the commonly-accepted properties of chance. For example, this analysis entails that chances (...) supervene on the physical facts, that the chance function is an expert probability, that the existence of stable frequencies results from invariant chances in repeated experiments, and that chances are probably close to long-run relative frequencies in repeated experiments. Despite these virtues, epistemic approaches to chance have been neglected in recent decades, on account of their conflict with accepted views about closely related topics such as causation, laws of nature, and epistemic probability. However, existing views on these topics are also very problematic, and I believe that the epistemic view of chance is a key piece of this puzzle that, once in place, allows all the other pieces to fit together into a new and coherent way. I also respond to some criticisms of the epistemic theory that I favour. (shrink)