Online research in philosophy

This article describes a qualitative investigation of 20 student activists' resolutions to environmental dilemmas. Participants responded to an oral interview asking them to resolve 6 dilemmas involving the natural environment and to give justifications for their resolutions. Several major themes emerged. First, participants tended to be concerned with maintaining human self-determination and tolerating human diversity. They also resolved dilemmas by reference to 3rd parties, and attributions of responsibility and sacrifice were made according to several patterns. Both humans and nonhumans were considered in resolutions, and resolutions reflected concerns with procedural justice and fairness and context-based value hierarchies. These themes are discussed in terms of the difficulty of resolving such dilemmas and implications for studying values and moral choices in the environmental context.

Prisoner's dilemmas can lead rational people to interact in ways that lead to persistent inefficiencies. These dilemmas create a problem for institutional designers to solve: devise institutions that realign individual incentives to achieve collectively rational outcomes. I will argue that we do not always want to eliminate misalignments between individual incentives and efficient outcomes. Sometimes we want to preserve prisoner's dilemmas, even when we know that they systematically will lead to inefficiencies. No doubt, prisoner's dilemmas can create problems, but they also create opportunities to practice the cooperative norms that make market institutions possible in the first place. An ethical market culture, I argue, benefits from the presence of prisoner's dilemmas. I first consider standard approaches for solving prisoner's dilemmas. I then argue for the value of prisoner's dilemmas. Finally, I show the significance of this argument for advocating codes of business ethics.

In recent years the problem of moral dilemmas has received the attention of a number of philosophers. Some authors[i] argue that moral dilemmas are not conceptually possible because they are ruled out by certain valid principles of deontic logic. Other authors[ii] insist that moral dilemmas are conceptually possible, and argue that therefore the principles of deontic logic that rule them out must be rejected.

This paper concerns one of the undecided disputes of modern moral philosophy: the possibility of moral dilemmas. Whereas proponents of the possibility of moral dilemmas often appeal to moral experience, many opponents refer to ethical theory and deontic logic. My aim in this paper is to clarify some of the tension between moral experience and ethical theory with respect to moral dilemmas. In Part One I try to show that a number of logical arguments against the possibility of moral dilemmas, though apparently very different, turn out to be basically the same, as they are all based on the following concept of 'ought': if A ought to be done, doing B is impermissible and doing A itself is permissible. In Part Two I present an overview of several definitions of moral dilemmas that have been given by proponents of moral dilemmas: definitions that define moral dilemmas in terms of oughts and definitions that define them in terms of reasons. I conclude that, while 'reason' is to weak, 'ought' is too strong a concept to define moral dilemmas with. In this way, the arguments from Part One create a logical problem for proponents of the possibility of moral dilemmas to define moral dilemmas.

In recent years the question of whether moral dilemmas are conceptually possible has received a fair amount of attention. In arguing for or against the conceptual possibility of moral dilemmas authors have been almost exclusively concerned with obligation dilemmas, i.e., situations in which more than one action is obligatory. Almost no one has been concerned with prohibition dilemmas, i.e., situations in which no feasible actions is permissible. I argue that the two types of dilemmas are distinct, and that a much stronger case can be made against the conceptual possibility of obligation dilemmas than against the conceptual possibility of prohibition dilemmas.

At least since Locke, philosophers and psychologists have usually held that concepts arise out of sensory perceptions, thoughts are built from concepts, and language enables speakers to convey their thoughts to hearers. Christopher Gauker holds that this tradition is mistaken about both concepts and language. The mind cannot abstract the building blocks of thoughts from perceptual representations. More generally, we have no account of the origin of concepts that grants them the requisite independence from language. Gauker's alternative is to show that much of cognition consists in thinking by means of mental imagery, without the help of concepts, and that language is a tool by which interlocutors coordinate their actions in pursuit of shared goals. Imagistic cognition supports the acquisition and use of this tool, and when the use of this tool is internalized, it becomes the very medium of conceptual thought.

This paper concerns one of the undecided disputes of modern moral philosophy: the possibility of moral dilemmas. Whereas proponents of the possibility of moral dilemmas often appeal to moral experience, many opponents refer to ethical theory and deontic logic. My aim in this paper is to clarify some of the tension between moral experience and ethical theory with respect to moral dilemmas. In Part One I try to show that a number of logical arguments against the possibility of moral dilemmas, though apparently very different, turn out to be basically the same, as they are all based on the following concept of ought: if A ought to be done, doing B is impermissible and doing A itself is permissible. In Part Two I present an overview of several definitions of moral dilemmas that have been given by proponents of moral dilemmas: definitions that define moral dilemmas in terms of oughts and definitions that define them in terms of reasons. I conclude that, while reason is to weak, ought is too strong a concept to define moral dilemmas with. In this way, the arguments from Part One create a logical problem for proponents of the possibility of moral dilemmas to define moral dilemmas.

die). In recent years the problem of moral dilemmas has received the attention of a number of philosophers. Some authors1 argue that moral dilemmas are not conceptually possible (i.e., that they are incoherent, given the nature of the concepts involved) because they are ruled out by certain valid principles of deontic logic. Other authors2 insist that moral dilemmas are conceptually possible, and argue that therefore the principles of deontic logic that rule them out must be rejected. In arguing for or against the conceptual possibility of moral dilemmas authors have been almost exclusively concerned with obligation dilemmas, i.e., situations in which more than one action is obligatory. Almost no one has been explicitly concerned with prohibition dilemmas, i.e., situations in which no feasible action is permissible.3 I shall argue that the two types of dilemmas are distinct, and that a much stronger case can be made against the conceptual possibility of obligation dilemmas than against the conceptual possibility of prohibition dilemmas.

The network theory of conceptual development is the theory that conceptual developmentmay be represented as a process of constructing a network of linked nodes. The nodes of such a network represent concepts and the links between nodes represent relations between concepts. The structure of such a network is not determined by experience alone but must evolve in accordance with abstraction heuristics, which constrain the varieties of network between which experience must decide. This paper criticizes the network theory on the grounds that current proposals regarding these abstraction heuristics all fail, and further, that, given certain plausible assumptions, no viable account of these abstraction heuristics will be possible. Abstraction heuristics cannot be universal principles of rational thought because virtually no concept is intrinsically unsuitable for use in a true and useful representation of reality. Nor can they be species-specific natural conventions because in that case, it is argued, we would not be able even in principle to learn to understand the language of creatures who used different ones.