The philosophical tradition has given rise to many competing moral theories. Virtue ethics encourages the flourishing of the person, theories of justice and rights tell us to act according to principles, and consequentialist theories advise that we seek to bring about good ends. These varied theories highlight the morally relevant features of the problems that we encounter both in everyday personal interactions and on a broader social scale. When used together, they allow us to address moral conflicts by balancing a (...) plurality of reasons in order to reach nuanced ethical decisions. In _Ethical Reasoning: Theory and Application_, Andrew Kernohan guides the reader through the basics of these moral theories, showing their strengths and weaknesses and emphasizing the ways in which competing moral reasons can be collectively employed to guide decision-making. Throughout, the focus is on practical applications and on how each theory can play a role in solving problems and addressing issues. Numerous questions and exercises are provided to encourage active reflection and retention of information. (shrink)

Kearns and Star have previously recommended that we measure the degree to which a reason supports a conclusion, either about how to act or what to believe, as the conditional probability of the conclusion given the reason. I show how to properly formulate this recommendation to allow for dependencies and conditional dependencies among the considerations being aggregated. This formulation allows us to account for how considerations, which do not themselves favour a specific conclusion, can modify the strength of a reason (...) for that conclusion, and thus to explain the intensifiers and attenuators described by Dancy. The formulation also accounts for the workings of partial undercutters in epistemology. I then show how my account avoids the counterexamples that Brunero levied against probability-based theories of the strengths of reasons. My account supports the theory, suggested by Kearns and Star, that the strengths of reasons are measured by conditional probabilities. If my account is successful, then it will count in favour of the idea that the strengths of reasons are measured on the same scale as are conditional probabilities. (shrink)

Liberal political philosophy emphasizes the benefits of membership in a cultural group and, in the opinion of this challenging book, neglects its harmful, oppressive aspects. Andrew Kernohan argues that an oppressive culture perpetuates inegalitarian social meanings and false assumptions about who is entitled to what. Cultural pollution harms fundamental interests in self-respect and knowledge of the good and is diffuse, insidious, and unnoticed. This cultural pollution is analogous to environmental pollution, and though difficult to detect, is nonetheless just (...) as real. The book's conclusion is that a liberal state committed to the moral equality of persons must accept a strong role in reforming our cultural environment. (shrink)

A popular model of normative decision-making under uncertainty suggests choosing the option with the maximum expected moral choice-worthiness, where the choice-worthiness values from each moral theory, which are assumed commensurable, are weighted by credence and combined. This study adds descriptive uncertainty about the non-moral facts of a situation into the model by treating choice-worthiness as a random variable. When agents face greater descriptive uncertainty, the choice-worthiness random variable will have a greater spread and a larger standard deviation. MEC, as a (...) decision rule, is sensitive only to the expected value of the random variable and not to its standard deviation. For example, MEC is insensitive to cases where an option with a large degree of descriptive uncertainty may have a higher probability of being below some threshold of impermissibility than does an option with less dispersion, even though the latter has a higher expected choice-worthiness. When applied to the same situation, similar moral theories will have statistically correlated choice-worthiness values. This correlation affects the dispersion of the credence-weighted sum of the random variables but not its expected value. Thus, MEC is insensitive to aspects of the normative situation to which a good decision-rule should be sensitive. (shrink)

This book explains the basic concepts of environmental ethics and applies them to global environmental problems. The author concisely introduces basic moral theories, discusses how these theories can be extended to consider the non-human world, and examines how environmental ethics interacts with modern society’s economic approach to the environment. Online multiple-choice questions encourage the reader’s active learning.

This book aims to apply recent thinking in philosophy to the age-old problem of the meaning of life, and to do so in a way that is useful to atheists, agnostics, and humanists. The book reorients the search for meaning away from a search for purpose and toward a search for what truly matters, and criticizes our society's prevailing theory of value, the preference satisfaction theory of the economists. It next argues that emotions are our best guides to what matters (...) in life, and shows how emotional judgments about what matters can be true. Finally it discusses how a meaningful life can be lived, describes the role of justice, freedom, identity, and culture in its construction, and compares the meaningful with the happy life. Andrew Kernohan has a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Toronto and is an Adjunct Professor at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Liberalism, Equality, and Cultural Oppression (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and various articles in professional philosophy journals. (shrink)

When there is only one source of pollution, the language of rights is adequate for justifying solutions to pollution problems. However, pollution is often both a public and an accumulative harm. According to Feinberg, an accumulative harm is a harm to some person brought about by the actions of many people when the action of no single person is sufficient, by itself, to cause the harm. For example, although no single car emits enough exhaust to do any harm, the emissions (...) from many cars can accumulate to an unhealthy level. In this paper, I argue that rights, understood in terms of the will theory of Hart and the interest theories of Lyons and Raz, cannot justify protecting people from public, accumulative harms. I conclude that pollution regulation should focus not on protecting people’s rights, but on preventing harm to people’s interests. (shrink)

From the standpoint of libertarian ideology, capitalism is a form of liberation. In contrast to the slave, whose productive powers are wholly owned by his master, and the serf, whose productive powers are partially owned by his lord, the worker under capitalism is presented as possessing the fullest possible self-ownership. That capitalism fosters self-ownership is a false and stultifying myth. Exposing its errors from within capitalism's own conceptual framework requires a careful analysis of the concept of a person's “ownership” bodh (...) of his or her productive powers and of the means of exercising these productive powers. This analysis will show that, in certain plausible circumstances, the capitalist economic system can make full self-ownership impossible. Since capitalism's supposed nurturing of self-ownership provides one of the major justifications for its moral legitimacy, capitalist ideology has a serious internal inconsistency. (shrink)

In a recent series of papers, Donald Davidson has put forward a challenging and original philosophy of mind which he has called anomalous monism. Anomalous monism has certain similarities to another recent and deservedly popular position: functionalist cognitive psychology. Both functionalism, in its materialist versions, and anomalous monism require token-token psychophysical identities rather than type-type ones. Both deny that psychology can be translated into, or scientifically reduced to, neurophysiology. Both are mentalistic theories, allowing psychology to make use of intentional descriptions (...) in its theorizing. Anomalous monism uses a belief/desire/action psychology; cognitive science makes use of information-bearing states. But these similarities must not be allowed to conceal an essential difference between the two positions. Cognitive psychology claims to be a science, making interesting, lawlike generalizations for the purpose of explaining mental activity. Anomalous monism denies that psychology is a science by denying that psychological laws can be formulated. Davidson has other ideas for psychology connected with his work on meaning and truth. Hence, the title of one of his essays on anomalous monism is “Psychology as Philosophy”. (shrink)

In two passages of A Theory of Justice Rawls suggests that, as a consequence of his egalitarian theory, the natural talents of persons are common property.We see then that the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be. The two principles are equivalent, as I have remarked, to an undertaking to regard the distribution of natural (...) abilities as a collective asset so that the more fortunate are to benefit only in ways that help those who have lost out. (shrink)

_Business Ethics: An Interactive Introduction_ connects the academic to the practical, extracting the basic elements of rigorous philosophical ethics into a format that can be understood and applied in the business world. Concepts such as utility, duty, and sustainability are given practical value and connected to examples and methods familiar to business people. Classical ethical theories are surveyed, as are modern perspectives on justice, equality, and the environment. Where possible, quantitative examples and methods are used to show that ethics need (...) not be subjective or vague. Kernohan provides an overview of the basic tools of ethical decision-making and shows how each can be used to resolve moral problems in business environments. Readers are then invited to apply those tools by completing a series of online exercises, receiving immediate objective feedback on their success. The book and its accompanying exercises thus work in concert, offering a unique opportunity for interactive self-directed learning. (shrink)

How can we lead a good life in a world without God? This clear, concise book applies recent thinking in philosophy to the age-old question of what gives meaning to our lives. The prose is simple, the arguments precise, the ideas powerful and thought-provoking. The book deals with many questions: Why does death not destroy the possibility of meaning? In what way is the search for purpose misleading? Why is there not just one thing that is the meaning of life? (...) Why do pleasures and satisfied desires often seem meaningless? What role do our emotions play in discovering that which truly matters? What is the nature of truth? How do our choices and commitments play a part in leading a meaningful life? Is a meaningful life necessarily a happy one? (shrink)

When there is only one source of pollution, the language of rights is adequate for justifying solutions to pollution problems. However, pollution is often both a public and an accumulative harm. According to Feinberg, an accumulative harm is a harm to some person brought about by the actions of many people when the action of no single person is sufficient, by itself, to cause the harm. For example, although no single car emits enough exhaust to do any harm, the emissions (...) from many cars can accumulate to an unhealthy level. In this paper, I argue that rights, understood in terms of the will theory of Hart and the interest theories of Lyons and Raz, cannot justify protecting people from public, accumulative harms. I conclude that pollution regulation should focus not on protecting people’s rights, but on preventing harm to people’s interests. (shrink)

Recent proposals by Taylor, Bennett, Wright and Cohen to identify teleological systems as systems governed by teleological laws and teleological laws as laws of a certain logical form are discussed. Suggested logical forms are treated with both extensional and simple non-extensional models of nomic necessity and shown to generate problematic entailments not derivable from the causal form alone.

Liberal political philosophy emphasizes the benefits of membership in a cultural group and, in the opinion of this challenging book, neglects its harmful, oppressive aspects. Andrew Kernohan argues that an oppressive culture perpetuates inegalitarian social meanings and false assumptions about who is entitled to what. Cultural pollution harms fundamental interests in self-respect and knowledge of the good and is diffuse, insidious, and unnoticed. This cultural pollution is analogous to environmental pollution, and though difficult to detect, is nonetheless just (...) as real. The book's conclusion is that a liberal state committed to the moral equality of persons must accept a strong role in reforming our cultural environment. (shrink)

The first edition was awarded the '2005 Textbook Award of the Association of University Professors of Management (Verband der Hochschullehrer fur ...

How should politicians act? When should they try to lead public opinion and when should they follow it? Should politicians see themselves as experts, whose opinions have greater authority than other people's, or as participants in a common dialogue with ordinary citizens? When do virtues like toleration and willingness to compromise deteriorate into moral weakness? In this innovative work, Andrew Sabl answers these questions by exploring what a democratic polity needs from its leaders. He concludes that there are systematic, (...) principled reasons for the holders of divergent political offices or roles to act differently. Sabl argues that the morally committed civil rights activist, the elected representative pursuing legislative results, and the grassroots organizer determined to empower ordinary citizens all have crucial democratic functions. But they are different functions, calling for different practices and different qualities of political character. To make this case, he draws on political theory, moral philosophy, leadership studies, and biographical examples ranging from Everett Dirksen to Ella Baker, Frances Willard to Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr. to Joe McCarthy. Ruling Passions asks democratic theorists to pay more attention to the "governing pluralism" that characterizes a diverse, complex democracy. It challenges moral philosophy to adapt its prescriptions to the real requirements of democratic life, to pay more attention to the virtues of political compromise and the varieties of human character. And it calls on all democratic citizens to appreciate "democratic constancy": the limited yet serious standard of ethical character to which imperfect democratic citizens may rightly hold their leaders--and themselves. (shrink)

We all face death, but how many of us are actually ready for it? Whether our own death or that of a loved one comes first, how prepared are we, spiritually or practically? In Preparing to Die, Andrew Holecek presents a wide array of resources to help the reader address this unfinished business. Part One shows how to prepare one's mind and how to help others, before, during, and after death. The author explains how spiritual preparation for death can (...) completely transform our relationship to the end of life, dissolving our fear and helping us to feel open and receptive to letting go in the dying process. Daily meditation practices, the stages of dying and how to work with them, and after-death experiences are all detailed in ways that will be particularly helpful for those with an interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in Tibetan approaches to conscious dying. Part Two addresses the practical issues that surround death. Experts in grief, hospice, the funeral business, and the medical and legal issues of death contribute chapters to prepare the reader for every practical concern, including advance directives, green funerals, the signs of death, warnings about the funeral industry, the stages of grief, and practical care for the dying. Part Three contains heart-advice from twenty of the best-known Tibetan Buddhist masters now teaching in the West. These brief interviews provide words of solace and wisdom to guide the dying and their caregivers during this challenging time. Preparing to Die is for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for death from a Buddhist perspective, both spiritually and practically. It is also for those who want to learn how to help someone else who is dying, both during the time of illness and death as well as after death. (shrink)

A satisfactory theory of linguistic communication must explain how it is that, through the interpersonal exchange of auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli, the communicative preconditions for the acquisition of testimonial knowledge regularly come to be satisfied. Without an account of knowledge-yielding communication this success condition for linguistic theorizing is left opaque, and we are left with an incomplete understanding of testimony, and communication more generally, as a source of knowledge. This paper argues that knowledge-yielding communication should be modelled on knowledge (...) itself. It is argued that knowledge-yielding communication occurs iff interlocutors coordinate on truth values in a non-lucky and non-deviant way. This account is able to do significant explanatory work: it sheds light on the nature of referential communication, and it allows us to capture, in an informative way, the sense in which interlocutors must entertain similar propositions in order to communicate successfully. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the enkratic principle in its classic formulation may not be a requirement of rationality. The investigation of whether it is leads to some important methodological insights into the study of rationality. I also consider the possibility that we should consider rational requirements as a subset of a broader category of agential requirements.

This paper argues that the dominance of linear models has led many sociologists to construe the social world in terms of a "general linear reality." This reality assumes (1) that the social world consists of fixed entities with variable attributes, (2) that cause cannot flow from "small" to "large" attributes/events, (3) that causal attributes have only one causal pattern at once, (4) that the sequence of events does not influence their outcome, (5) that the "careers" of entities are largely independent, (...) and (6) that causal attributes are generally independent of each other. The paper discusses examples of these assumptions in empirical work, consider standard and new methods addressing them, and briefly explores alternative models for reality that employ demographic, sequential, and network perspectives. (shrink)

A Physicalist Manifesto is a full treatment of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so formulated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. Two concluding chapters argue (...) in detail that contemporary science provides no significant empirical evidence against physicalism and some considerable evidence for it. Written in a brisk, candid and exceptionally clear style, this 2003 book should appeal to professionals and students in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of science. (shrink)

This introduction to mathematical logic starts with propositional calculus and first-order logic. Topics covered include syntax, semantics, soundness, completeness, independence, normal forms, vertical paths through negation normal formulas, compactness, Smullyan's Unifying Principle, natural deduction, cut-elimination, semantic tableaux, Skolemization, Herbrand's Theorem, unification, duality, interpolation, and definability. The last three chapters of the book provide an introduction to type theory (higher-order logic). It is shown how various mathematical concepts can be formalized in this very expressive formal language. This expressive notation facilitates proofs (...) of the classical incompleteness and undecidability theorems which are very elegant and easy to understand. The discussion of semantics makes clear the important distinction between standard and nonstandard models which is so important in understanding puzzling phenomena such as the incompleteness theorems and Skolem's Paradox about countable models of set theory. Some of the numerous exercises require giving formal proofs. A computer program called ETPS which is available from the web facilitates doing and checking such exercises. Audience: This volume will be of interest to mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers in universities, as well as to computer scientists in industry who wish to use higher-order logic for hardware and software specification and verification. (shrink)

Kant holds that in order to have knowledge of an object, a subject must be able to “prove” that the object is really possible—i.e., prove that there is neither logical inconsistency nor “real repugnance” between its properties. This is (usually) easy to do with respect to empirical objects, but (usually) impossible to do with respect to particular things-in-themselves. In the first section of the paper I argue that an important predecessor of Kant’s account of our ignorance of real possibility can (...) be found in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In the middle sections I discuss the way in which our inability to prove the real possibility of things-in-themselves motivates Kant’s famous prohibition on certain kinds of knowledge-claims about them. In the final section I examine Hegel’s attempts to dissolve this problem of real repugnance and thereby remove an inherited obstacle to speculative knowledge of the supersensible. -/- . (shrink)

Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to (...) which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that a majority of people believe that time robustly passes, and that many also report that it seems to them, in experience, as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists deny that time robustly passes, and many contemporary non-dynamists—deflationists—even deny that it seems to us as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists, then, face the dual challenge of explaining why people have such beliefs and make such reports about their experiences. Several philosophers have suggested the stable-self explanation, according to which (...) what partly explains one or both of the explananda is that people believe themselves to have a stable persisting self which is imagined either as moving through time, or as being stationary, with time moving around it. This paper empirically investigates this explanation. We found, however, no evidential support for the stable-self explanation, leaving the non-dynamist but also, we will argue, the dynamist, with an extant explanatory challenge. (shrink)

This is a discussion of the state of discussion on pragmatic reasons for belief.

This book expounds the transcendental realist theory of science and critical naturalist social philosophy that have been developed by Bhaskar and are used by many contemporary social scientists. It defends Bhaskar's view that the possibility and necessity of experiment show that reality is structured and stratified, his use of this idea to develop a non-reductive explanatory account of human sciences, and his notion that to explain social structures can sometimes be to criticize them. After a discussion of the uses of (...) critical realism in controversial areas of social science, Bhaskar's optimism about the prospects of human sciences is criticized. (shrink)

Modern technology is more than a neutral tool: it is the framework of our civilization and shapes our way of life. Social critics claim that we must choose between this way of life and human values. Critical Theory of Technology challenges that pessimistic cliche. This pathbreaking book argues that the roots of the degradation of labor, education, and the environment lie not in technology per se but in the cultural values embodied in its design. Rejecting such popular solutions as economic (...) simplicity or spiritual renewal, Feenberg presents a compelling argument for broader democratic participation in technological choices. This book will be of special interest to scholars and students of philosophy, sociology, contemporary Marxism, and Critical Theory. (shrink)

This is the first book-length treatment of the relationship between citizenship and the environment. Andrew Dobson argues that ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in terms of the two great traditions of citizenship - liberal and civic republican - with which we have been bequeathed. He develops an original theory of citizenship, which he calls 'post-cosmopolitan', and argues that ecological citizenship is an example and an inflection of it. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and these (...) duties are owed non-reciprocally, by those individuals and communities who occupy unsustainable amounts of ecological space, to those who occupy too little. (shrink)

Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases. The epistemology of vagueness concerns attitudes we should have towards propositions we know to be borderline. On this basis Andrew Bacon develops a new theory of vagueness in which vagueness is fundamentally a property of propositions, explicated in terms of its role in thought.

This paper argues that underlying social biases are able to affect the processes underlying linguistic interpretation. The result is a series of harms systematically inflicted on marginalised speakers. It is also argued that the role of biases and stereotypes in interpretation complicates Miranda Fricker's proposed solution to epistemic injustice.

In this book, Andrew Inkpin considers the disclosive function of language—what language does in revealing or disclosing the world. His approach to this question is a phenomenological one, centering on the need to accord with the various experiences speakers can have of language. With this aim in mind, he develops a phenomenological conception of language with important implications for both the philosophy of language and recent work in the embodied-embedded-enactive-extended tradition of cognitive science. -/- Inkpin draws extensively on the (...) work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, showing how their respective conceptions of language can be combined to complement each other within a unified view. From the early Heidegger, Inkpin extracts a basic framework for a phenomenological conception of language, comprising both a general picture of the role of language and a specific model of the function of words. Merleau-Ponty’s views are used to explicate the generic “pointing out”—or presentational—function of linguistic signs in more detail, while the late Wittgenstein is interpreted as providing versatile means to describe their many pragmatic uses. Having developed this unified phenomenological view, Inkpin explores its broader significance. He argues that it goes beyond the conventional realism/idealism opposition, that it challenges standard assumptions in mainstream post-Fregean philosophy of language, and that it makes a significant contribution not only to the philosophical understanding of language but also to 4e cognitive science. (shrink)

Foucault is often thought to have a great deal to say about the history of madness and sexuality, but little in terms of a general analysis of government and the state.; This volume draws on Foucault's own research to challenge this view, demonstrating the central importance of his work for the study of contemporary politics.; It focuses on liberalism and neo- liberalism, questioning the conceptual opposition of freedom/constraint, state/market and public/private that inform liberal thought.