A great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to coercion. Less attention has been paid to what might be a more pervasive form of influence: manipulation. The essays in this volume address this relative imbalance by focusing on manipulation, examining its nature, moral status, and its significance in personal and social life.

Is it allowable for your government, or anyone else, to influence or coerce you 'for your own sake'? This is a question about paternalism, or interference with a person's liberty or autonomy with the intention of promoting their good or averting harm, which has created considerable controversy at least since John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Mill famously decried paternalism of any kind, whether carried out by private individuals or the state. In this volume of new essays, leading moral, political and (...) legal philosophers address how to define paternalism, its justification, and the implications for public policy, professional ethics and criminal law. So-called 'libertarian' or non-coercive paternalism receives considerable attention. The discussion addresses the nature of freedom and autonomy and the relation of individuals to law, policy and the state. The volume will interest a wide range of readers in political philosophy, public policy and the philosophy of law. (shrink)

I first argue that there are many true claims of the form: Φ-ing would be morally required, if anything is. I then explain why the following conditional-type is true: If φ-ing would be morally required, if anything is, then anything is actually morally required. These results allow us to construct valid proofs for the existence of some substantive moral facts—proofs that some particular acts really are morally required. Most importantly, none of my argumentation presupposes any substantive moral claim; I use (...) only plausible claims that most moral skeptics and error theorists can and do accept. The final section diagnoses why my arguments work. Here, I offer an explanation for the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral that may help those worried that the strategy is a sophisticated trick. I conclude by considering two objections. In replying to these objections, I explain why the strategy may allow us to demonstrate more than “obvious” moral truths, and why it may also address a stronger version of error theory, according to which, moral truths are not possible. (shrink)

The fifteen new essays collected in this volume address questions concerning the ethics of self-defense, most centrally when and to what extent the use of defensive force, especially lethal force, can be justified. Scholarly interest in this topic reflects public concern stemming from controversial cases of the use of force by police, and military force exercised in the name of defending against transnational terrorism. The contributors pay special attention to determining when a threat is liable to defensive harm, though doubts (...) about this emphasis are also raised. The legitimacy of so-called "stand your ground" policies and laws is also addressed. This volume will be of great interest to readers in moral, political, and legal philosophy. (shrink)

We argue that the dead donor rule, which states that multiple vital organs should only be taken from dead patients, is justified neither in principle nor in practice. We use a thought experiment and a guiding assumption in the literature about the justification of moral principles to undermine the theoretical justification for the rule. We then offer two real world analogues to this thought experiment, voluntary active euthanasia and capital punishment, and argue that the moral permissibility of terminating any patient (...) through the removal of vital organs cannot turn on whether or not the practice violates the dead donor rule.Next, we consider practical justifications for the dead donor rule. Specifically, we consider whether there are compelling reasons to promulgate the rule even though its corresponding moral principle is not theoretically justified. We argue that there are no such reasons. In fact, we argue that promulgating the rule may actually decrease public trust in organ procurement procedures and medical institutions generally – even in states that do not permit capital punishment or voluntary active euthanasia.Finally, we examine our case against the dead donor rule in the light of common arguments for it. We find that these arguments are often misplaced – they do not support the dead donor rule. Instead, they support the quite different rule that patients should not be killed for their vital organs. (shrink)

In “Vindicating the Normativity of Rationality,” Nicholas Southwood proposes that rational requirements are best understood as demands of one’s “first-personal standpoint.” Southwood argues that this view can “explain the normativity or reason-giving force” of rationality by showing that they “are the kinds of thing that are, by their very nature, normative.” We argue that the proposal fails on three counts: First, we explain why demands of one’s first-personal standpoint cannot be both reason-giving and resemble requirements of rationality. Second, the proposal (...) runs headlong into the now familiar “bootstrapping” objection that helped illuminate the need to vindicate the normativity of rationality in the first place. Lastly, even if Southwood is right—the demands of rationality just are the demands or our first-personal standpoints—the explanation as to why our standpoints generate reasons will entail that we sometimes have no reason at all to be rational. (shrink)

What do we mean when we refer to people as being equal by nature? In the first book devoted to human equality as a fact rather than as a social goal or a legal claim, John Coons and Patrick Brennan argue that even if people possess unequal talents or are born into unequal circumstances, all may still be equal if it is true that human nature provides them the same access to moral self-perfection. Plausibly, in the authors' view, such (...) access stems from the power of individuals to achieve goodness simply by doing the best they can to discover and perform correct actions. If people enjoy the same degree of natural capacity to try, all of us are offered the same opportunities for moral self-fulfillment. To believe this is to believe in equality. This truly interdisciplinary work not only proposes the authors' own rationale but also provides an effective deconstruction of several other contemporary theories of equality, while it engages historical, philosophical, and Christian accounts as well. Furthermore, by divorcing the "best" from the "brightest," it shows how descriptive equality acquires practical significance. Among other accomplishments, By Nature Equal offers communitarians a core principle that has until now eluded them, rescues human dignity from the hierarchy of intellect, identifies racism in a new way, and shows how justice can be freshly grounded in the conviction that every rational person has the same capacity for moral excellence. (shrink)

We study the wisdom of the crowd in three sequential decision‐making tasks: the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), optimal stopping problems, and bandit problems. We consider a behavior‐based approach, using majority decisions to determine crowd behavior and show that this approach performs poorly in the BART and bandit tasks. The key problem is that the crowd becomes progressively more extreme as the decision sequence progresses, because the diversity of opinion that underlies the wisdom of the crowd is lost. We also (...) consider model‐based approaches to each task. This involves inferring cognitive models for each individual based on their observed behavior, and using these models to predict what each individual would do in any possible task situation. We show that this approach performs robustly well for all three tasks and has the additional advantage of being able to generalize to new problems for which there are no behavioral data. We discuss potential applications of the model‐based approach to real‐world sequential decision problems and discuss how our approach contributes to the understanding of collective intelligence. (shrink)

This paper maps out various options for thinking about two issues: the structural relationship between practical wisdom and the moral virtues, and the various functions of practical wisdom. With the help of a case study of the virtue of honesty, three main concerns are raised for what I call the Standard Model of practical wisdom. Two other models, the Socratic Model and the Fragmentation Model, are also critically evaluated. I end by taking seriously an eliminativist approach according to which the (...) trait of practical wisdom does not exist. (shrink)

Humean Laws for Human Agents presents cutting-edge research by leading experts on the Humean account of laws, chance, possibility, and necessity. A central question in metaphysics and philosophy of science is: What are laws of nature? Humeans hold that laws are not sui generis metaphysical entities but merely particularly effective summaries of what actually happens. The most discussed recent work on Humeanism emphasizes the laws' usefulness for limited agents and uses pragmatic considerations to address fundamental and long-standing problems. The current (...) volume develops and critically examines pragmatic Humean accounts, with innovative new work on the epistemology of laws and chance, the problem of induction, counterfactuals, special science laws, and a Humean account of essence. Taken together, the papers provide a roadmap for developing pragmatic Humeanism and connate views, setting the agenda for future research. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Most people who are regular consumers of psychoactive drugs are not drug addicts, nor will they ever become addicts. In neurobiological theories, non-addictive drug consumption is acknowledged only as a “necessary” prerequisite for addiction, but not as a stable and widespread behavior in its own right. This target article proposes a new neurobiological framework theory for non-addictive psychoactive drug consumption, introducing the concept of “drug instrumentalization.” Psychoactive drugs are consumed for their effects on mental states. Humans are able to learn (...) that mental states can be changed on purpose by drugs, in order to facilitate other, non-drug-related behaviors. We discuss specific “instrumentalization goals” and outline neurobiological mechanisms of how major classes of psychoactive drugs change mental states and serve non-drug-related behaviors. We argue that drug instrumentalization behavior may provide a functional adaptation to modern environments based on a historical selection for learning mechanisms that allow the dynamic modification of consummatory behavior. It is assumed that in order to effectively instrumentalize psychoactive drugs, the establishment of and retrieval from a drug memory is required. Here, we propose a new classification of different drug memory subtypes and discuss how they interact during drug instrumentalization learning and retrieval. Understanding the everyday utility and the learning mechanisms of non-addictive psychotropic drug use may help to prevent abuse and the transition to drug addiction in the future. (shrink)

A pioneer in the field, Christian Metz applies insights of structural linguistics to the language of film. "The semiology of film . . . can be held to date from the publication in 1964 of the famous essay by Christian Metz, 'Le cinema: langue ou langage?'"--Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Times Literary Supplement "Modern film theory begins with Metz."--Constance Penley, coeditor of Camera Obscura "Any consideration of semiology in relation to the particular field signifying practice of film passes inevitably through a (...) reference to the work of Christian Metz. . . . The first book to be written in this field, [ Film Language ] is important not merely because of this primacy but also because of the issues it raises . . . issues that have become crucial to the contemporary argument."--Stephen Heath, Screen. (shrink)

Christian Georg Martin offers an argumentative reconstruction of the whole work, reading it as a critical ontology, namely as the attempt to abstract from all presuppositions and to immanently unfold conceptual determinations characterizing ...

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

"Man ist nicht umsonst Philologe gewesen, man ist es vielleicht noch" - Nietzsches Bekenntnisse zur Philologie sind zahlreich. Auf der Grundlage von Quellenstudien beschreibt die Abhandlung Nietzsches tiefe Prägung durch die historisch-kritische Methode der Bonner Schule. Um Philosoph zu werden, musste er sich nicht, wie bisher angenommen, von der Philologie lösen, sondern sprach ihr gerade im Spätwerk eine zentrale Rolle zu. Diese Einsicht führt zur Neubestimmung von Begriffen wie Text, Genealogie, Interpretation, Perspektivismus und zur Zurückweisung herrschender Auffassungen der Wissenschaftsgeschichte, der (...) Hermeneutik und des Dekonstruktivismus. Die Studie endet mit einem von Nietzsche ausgehenden, historisch begründeten Plädoyer für die skeptisch-philologische Literaturwissenschaft. (shrink)

This collection provides the first in-depth introduction to the theory of the religious imagination put forward by renowned philosopher Douglas Hedley, from his earliest essays to his principal writings. Featuring Hedley's inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 2018, the book sheds light on his robust concept of religious imagination as the chief power of the soul's knowledge of the Divine and reveals its importance in contemporary metaphysics, ethics and politics. Chapters trace the development of the religious imagination in (...) class='Hi'>Christian Platonism from Late Antiquity to British Romanticism, drawing on Origen, Henry More and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before providing a survey of alternative contemporary versions of the concept as outlined by Karl Rahner, René Girard and William P. Alston, as well as within Indian philosophy. By bringing Christian Platonist thought into dialogue with contemporary philosophy and theology, the volume systematically reveals the relevance of Hedley's work to current debates in religious epistemology and metaphysics. It offers a comprehensive appraisal of the historical contribution of imagination to religious understanding and, as such, will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians and historians alike. (shrink)