In this chapter, we consider the plausibility and consequences of the use of the term “honest errors” to describe the accidental killings of civilians resulting from the US military’s drone campaigns in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. We argue that the narrative of “honest errors” unjustifiably excuses those involved in these killings from moral culpability, and reinforces long-standing, pernicious assumptions about the moral superiority of the US military and the inevitability of civilian deaths in combat. Furthermore, we maintain that, given (...) the knowledge-distorting practices within the US military’s organizational structure, few if any civilian deaths from drone strikes meet the criteria of a genuinely morally excusing “honest mistake”. Instead, these accidental killings often reflect objectionable attitudes of relative disregard for the safety of civilians. These attitudes are, we argue, sufficient to warrant the attribution of blame and moral responsibility, both with respect to certain individual actions and with respect to the US military as an institution. In light of this, we propose incorporating a Principle of the Moral Equality of Non-combatants into military assessments of what counts as “acceptable risk” to civilians. This would go some way, we argue, to redressing the ongoing injustice inflicted on the victims of civilian killings by the failure of the US military and US political leadership to take moral responsibility for unjustified civilian deaths. (shrink)

Why do war crimes occur? Are perpetrators of war crimes always blameworthy? In an original and challenging thesis, this book argues that war crimes are often explained by perpetrators' beliefs, goals, and values, and in these cases perpetrators may be blameworthy even if they sincerely believed that they were doing the right thing.

I argue that wrongdoers may be open to moral blame even if they lacked the capacity to respond to the moral considerations that counted against their behavior. My initial argument turns on the suggestion that even an agent who cannot respond to specific moral considerations may still guide her behavior by her judgments about reasons. I argue that this explanation of a wrongdoer’s behavior can qualify her for blame even if her capacity for moral understanding is impaired. A second argument (...) is based on the observation that even when a blameworthy wrongdoer could have responded to moral considerations, this is often not relevant to her blameworthiness. Finally, I argue against the view that because blame communicates moral demands, only agents who can be reached by such communication are properly blamed. I contend that a person victimized by a wrongdoer with an impaired capacity for moral understanding may protest her victimization in a way that counts as a form of moral blame even though it does not primarily express a moral demand or attempt to initiate moral dialogue. (shrink)

This chapter describes the attributionist approach to moral responsibility. Works by Pamela Hieronymi, T.M. Scanlon, Angela Smith, and Matthew Talbert are taken to representative of this approach. On the interpretation given here, attributionism is committed to the following: assessments of moral responsibility are, and ought to be, centrally concerned with the morally significant features of an agent’s orientation toward others that are attributable to her, and an agent is eligible for moral praise or blame solely on the basis (...) of these attributions. Attributionism is presented as rejecting the claim that agents are morally responsible only for what is under their voluntary control, as well as the claim that agents are responsible for wrongdoing only if they could have responded to the moral considerations that spoke against your behavior. These supposed conditions on moral responsibility are rejected for the same reason: agents may reveal features of their selves, in a way that is sufficient for moral responsibility, even in cases in which these conditions are not met. (shrink)

I argue against the claim that morally ignorant wrongdoers are open to blame only if they are culpable for their ignorance, and I argue against a version of skepticism about moral responsibility that depends on this claim being true. On the view I defend, the attitudes involved in blame are typically responses to the features of an action that make it objectionable or unjustifiable from the perspective of the one who issues the blame. One important way that an action can (...) appear objectionable to us is that it expresses a judgment with which we disagree about the significance of the interests of those affected by the action. A morally ignorant wrongdoer’s actions may express such judgments even if it is not her fault that she is unaware of the moral status of her behavior, and even if it would be unreasonable to expect her to be aware of its status. (shrink)

Those who advocate a “historicist” outlook on moral responsibility often hold that people who unwillingly acquire corrupt dispositions are not blameworthy for the wrong actions that issue from these dispositions; this contention is frequently supported by thought experiments involving instances of forced psychological manipulation that seem to call responsibility into question. I argue against this historicist perspective and in favor of the conclusion that the process by which a person acquires values and dispositions is largely irrelevant to moral responsibility. While (...) the thought experiments introduced by historicists raise perplexing questions about personal identity and involve clear instances of moral wrongs done to the manipulated subjects, neither of these considerations bear on the question of moral responsibility. Rather, questions about moral responsibility in manipulation cases should be answered, I argue, by considering whether a manipulated agent is capable of expressing through her actions the objectionable attitudes that make blame appropriate in normal cases of wrongdoing. (shrink)

‘Reasonable wrongdoers’ reasonably, but wrongly, take themselves to act permissibly. Many responsibility theorists assume that since we cannot reasonably expect these wrongdoers to behave differently, they are not blameworthy. These theorists impose a Reasonable Expectation Condition on blame. I argue that reasonable wrongdoers may be blameworthy. It is true that we often excuse reasonable wrongdoers, but sometimes this is because we do not regard their behavior as objectionable in a way that makes blame appropriate. As such, these cases do not (...) support the proposition that wrongdoers are excused just because they reasonably take themselves to act permissibly. For the relevant support, we should consider cases in which a reasonable wrongdoer’s behavior is unambiguously objectionable by our moral lights. But here again we fail to find decisive support for the Reasonable Expectation Condition since it is not obvious—independent of a prior commitment to this condition—that such wrongdoers are not blameworthy. After laying out the above argument, as well as offering a positive account of why reasonable wrongdoers are sometimes blameworthy, I turn to consider objections. The most important of these is that it is simply unfair to blame those who reasonably take themselves to behave unobjectionably and who cannot be expected to behave otherwise. (shrink)

The influential account of contractualist moral theory offered recently by T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other is not intended to account for all the various moral commitments that people have; it covers only a narrow—though important—range of properly moral concerns and claims. Scanlon focuses on what he calls the morality of right and wrong or, as he puts it in his title, what we owe to each other. The question arises as to whether nonhuman animals can (...) be wronged in the narrow sense of a moral wrong with which contractualism is concerned. Can we owe things to nonhuman animals? Scanlon is sensitive to the importance of this question, but he ultimately favors an account in which the perspectives of nonhuman animals are not explicitly included in contractualist theorizing. Nevertheless, it appears that contractualism, largely as Scanlon conceives it, can accommodate duties to nonhuman animals. Moreover, if contractualism cannot make this accommodation, then its status as a theory that answers to important common-sense moral intuitions becomes questionable in ways that extend beyond its failure to live up to intuitions many share about the status of nonhuman animals. (shrink)

About a year after the start of the Iraq War, a story broke about the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison. Editorialists and science writers noted affinities between what happened at Abu Ghraib and Philip Zimbardo’s famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo’s experiment is part of the “situationist” literature in social psychology, which suggests that the contexts in which agents act have a larger influence on behavior, and that personality traits have a smaller influence, (...) than is ordinarily supposed. Recently, there has been increased interest among philosophers in research like Zimbardo’s and its potential for influencing ethical theories. This increase is due in part to the publication of John Doris’ Lack of Character. More recently, Doris and Dominic Murphy have argued that soldiers, including those at Abu Ghraib, often act under conditions of moral excuse because the situational pressures to which they are exposed impair their capacities for moral judgment. I argue that soldiers can be morally responsible for wartime behavior even if their moral capacities have been substantially impaired. (shrink)

The influential account of contractualist moral theory offered recently by T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other is not intended to account for all the various moral commitments that people have; it covers only a narrow—though important—range of properly moral concerns and claims. Scanlon focuses on what he calls the morality of right and wrong or, as he puts it in his title, what we owe to each other. The question arises as to whether nonhuman animals can (...) be wronged in the narrow sense of a moral wrong with which contractualism is concerned. Can we owe things to nonhuman animals? Scanlon is sensitive to the importance of this question, but he ultimately favors an account in which the perspectives of nonhuman animals are not explicitly included in contractualist theorizing. Nevertheless, it appears that contractualism, largely as Scanlon conceives it, can accommodate duties to nonhuman animals. Moreover, if contractualism cannot make this accommodation, then its status as a theory that answers to important common-sense moral intuitions becomes questionable in ways that extend beyond its failure to live up to intuitions many share about the status of nonhuman animals. (shrink)

I argue that it is possible to prevent (and to be praiseworthy for preventing) an unwelcome outcome that had no chance of occurring. I motivate this position by constructing examples in which it makes sense to explain the non-occurrence of a certain outcome by referring to a particular agent's intentional and willing behavior, and yet the non-occurrence of the outcome in question was ensured by factors external to the agent. I conclude that even if the non-occurrence of an unwelcome outcome (...) is ensured, the agent whose action explains this non-occurrence is praiseworthy for preventing the outcome. My examples are similar in important respects to Frankfurt-type cases. In the second half of the paper, I discuss the relationship between my examples and Frankfurt-type cases involving both actions and omissions. I conclude that while I may be responsible for the consequences of an action even if those consequences are unavoidable, this is not necessarily so for the consequences of omissions. (shrink)

We “prepunish” a person if we punish her prior to the commission of her crime. This essay discusses our intuitions about the permissibility of prepunishment and the relationship between prepunishment and compatibilism about free will and determinism. It has recently been argued that compatibilism has particular trouble generating a principled objection to prepunishment. The failure to provide such an objection may be a problem for compatibilism if our moral intuitions strongly favor the prohibition of prepunishment. In defense of compatibilism, I (...) argue that while no objection to prepunishment is entailed by the central tenets of compatibilism, this does not necessarily show that compatibilism conflicts with our moral intuitions. And while there may be no distinctly compatibilist objection to prepunishment, there are common-sense objections to prepunishment of which the compatibilist can make use, at least under actual-world circumstances. And, while these common-sense objections might be inoperative in certain non-actual circumstances, it is not clear that support for prepunishment would be unintuitive in these circumstances. (shrink)

Bernard Williams was one of the great philosophical figures of the second half of the 20th century and remains deeply influential. This edited volume brings together new articles from prominent scholars that focus on the innovative ideas and methods that Williams developed as part of his distinctive "outlook" in ethics. The chapters in the first section examine Williams's attempts to explore theoretical options beyond the confines of what he called the "morality system." The contributors show how, through a critical confrontation (...) with this system, Williams found new ways to think about moral obligation, morally relevant emotions such as shame, the relevance of the history of philosophy, and also how these new ways of thinking are linked to Williams's novel metaethical ideas concerning the possibility and limits of moral knowledge. In the second section, contributors explore Williams's discussions of freedom and responsibility, the role of luck in our moral lives, and the reasons that agents can be said to have. Williams's concerns about the morality system still loom large here. For example, Williams was skeptical about the prospects of putting our responsibility practices, and the conception of free will with which they are associated, on a firm footing. But as more than one contributor shows, Williams's skepticism is largely confined to conceptions of free will and responsibility that are conditioned by the morality system's uneasiness with luck. Williams has a more vindicatory story to tell about the prospects for freedom and responsibility once these concepts have been untethered from the assumptions of this system. With a cast of well known contributors, and an introduction by the editors placing Williams's work in broad context, this volume should appeal to a wide range of ethicists and moral philosophers. (shrink)

Using Big Data to better understand urban questions is an exciting field with challenging methodological and theoretical problems. It is also, however, potentially troubling when Big Data is applied uncritically to urban governance via the ideas and practices of “smart cities”. This essay reviews both the historical depth of central ideas within smart city governance —particular the idea that enough data/information/knowledge can solve society problems—but also the ways that the most recent version differs. Namely, that the motivations and ideological underpinning (...) behind the goal of urban betterment is largely driven by technology advocates and neoliberalism rather than the strong social justice themes associated with earlier applications of data to cities. Geosocial media data and metrics derived from them can provide useful insight and policy direction. But one must be ever mindful that metrics don’t simply measure; in the process of deciding what is important and possible to measure, these data are simultaneously defining what cities are. (shrink)

Sadness is generally seen as a negative emotion, a response to distressing and adverse situations. In an aesthetic context, however, sadness is often associated with some degree of pleasure, as suggested by the ubiquity and popularity, throughout history, of music, plays, films and paintings with a sad content. Here, we focus on the fact that music regarded as sad is often experienced as pleasurable. Compared to other art forms, music has an exceptional ability to evoke a wide-range of feelings and (...) is especially beguiling when it deals with grief and sorrow. Why is it, then, that while human survival depends on preventing painful experiences, mental pain often turns out to be explicitly sought through music? In this article we consider why and how sad music can become pleasurable. We offer a framework to account for how listening to sad music can lead to positive feelings, contending that this effect hinges on correcting an ongoing homeostatic imbalance. Sadness evoked by music is found pleasurable (1) when it is perceived as non-threatening; (2) when it is aesthetically pleasing; and (3) when it produces psychological benefits such as mood regulation, and empathic feelings, caused, for example, by recollection of and reflection on past events. We also review neuroimaging studies related to music and emotion and focus on those that deal with sadness. Further exploration of the neural mechanisms through which stimuli that usually produce sadness can induce a positive affective state could help the development of effective therapies for disorders such as depression, in which the ability to experience pleasure is attenuated. (shrink)

The knowledge account of assertion holds that it is improper to assert that p unless the speaker knows that p. This paper argues against the knowledge account of assertion; there is no general norm that the speaker must know what she asserts. I argue that there are cases in which it can be entirely proper to assert something that you do not know. In addition, it is possible to explain the cases that motivate the knowledge account by postulating a general (...) norm that assertions would be true, combined with conversational norms that govern all speech acts. A theory on which proper assertions must be true explains the data better than a theory on which proper assertions must be known to be true. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metaphysics as Mediating Dialogue by Oliva BlanchetteMatthew MinerdBLANCHETTE, Oliva. Metaphysics as Mediating Dialogue. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023. xi + 133 pp. Cloth, $75.00In this text, the author presents a personal synthesis of metaphysics using a lexicon of scholastic and Blondelian-Hegelian thought. The first chapter, "From Questions of Being to the Question of Being as Being," presents a quasi-phenomenological account of the emergence of (...) the analogical conception of order of various degrees of perfection of being as such, concretized in various domains that are physical/natural and human/cultural. In this first chapter, an important theme that emerges and becomes a golden thread throughout the text is the claim that the primary analogate of being is, within our experience, the human person and the human mode of activity in culture and religion. [End Page 538]The second chapter, "Metaphysics as Mediating Dialogue of the Crossroads of Intersubjective, Intercultural, and Interreligious Communication," is perhaps the densest, covering a number of points handled in the remainder of the book. In this chapter, Blanchette is concerned with showing how intercommunication takes place within discourse concerning both the shared principles of intelligent agents and ultimately in view of an orientation toward what he later will call the vertical transcendence of culture in relation to God. Both of these tasks are of critical importance for constituting the necessary background for a philosophy of culture and a philosophy of religion that can mediate among the various actualities of human existence amid the objective and subjective aspects of art, science, and moral mutual recognition of intelligent agents in community.The third chapter, "The Necessity of Metaphysics in the Struggle for World Peace and Justice," opens with an arguably theological observation that the rational agent has two ends, one of which is not attainable in this life involving some kind of "more direct relation with God" in the hereafter, and the other pertaining to the struggle toward the establishment of a "historical communal peace." The framework for this terminology is a scholastically aware engagement with Blondelian (and partly Hegelian) thought. This chapter is concerned with articulating the way that rational agents engage in the historical task of establishing a kind of universal spirit of intersubjective recognition, at least as an asymptotic goal within history, even if contention ultimately prevents the formation of such a single, unified, intrahistorical community. Blanchette argues that this project is possible only within the dual transcendence of the human person, namely, as cultural and as religious, the latter being the condition for the former. Metaphysics has the role of articulating such transcendence.The fourth chapter, "Metaphysics as the Way from Phenomenology to Theology," engages with some of the questions related to the "theological turn" in Continental phenomenology. Phenomenological inquiry, Blanchette argues, must acknowledge that it investigates only one order of being in the universe, the human-intentional (or "historico-social"), and therefore stands in need of metaphysics to mediate its subject material with other kinds of being (as is true, similarly, of other disciplines). However, he also contends that phenomenology offers a very important preamble for a "first-person ontology" that is sensitive to the specific cultural and historical being of spiritual beings, but ultimately, Blanchette argues, it does so as "part of the way up from the bottom" and as opening up to metaphysical speculation, which itself prevents theology from degenerating into a kind of superstition.In chapters 5 through 7, Blanchette traces out the kind of mediation that occurs between metaphysics and theology. In chapter 5, he briefly develops his stated conviction regarding the human person's role as primary analogate in metaphysics and connects to a more Aristotelian [End Page 539] language of a transcendent cause that is pure act, though also immanent creatively and, upon theological supposition, through divine incarnation.The reviewer found chapter 6, "Metaphysics and the Transcendence of Cultures in Religion," to be the most interesting. In it, Blanchette develops earlier themes concerning the metaphysics of culture and its relationship to nature, as well as the constitution of subjectivity precisely as intersubjectivity among rational selves in the order of culture. Developing themes from chapter 3, he... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern ArtMatthew ZiffPainting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, by David W. Galenson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, 272 pp., $29.95.The relationship between the market value of paintings and the chronological point in an artist's working life when the paintings were produced is the driving mechanism for exploring creativity and innovation in David W. Galenson's book "Painting (...) Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art. The working thesis of this book is that Modern artists have worked creatively and innovatively in one of two distinctly different manners. The terminology Galenson uses to describe these distinct ways of working are "finders" and "seekers." Finders are artists like Pablo Picasso, who at age 26, make startling and important innovations with little advance indication that such a burst is about to take place. Seekers are artists like Paul Cezanne, whospend their entire working lives engaged in the pursuit of a singular approach or achievement. The differences between these methodologies are carefully presented through the details of the working lives of a variety of Modern artists. French nineteenth century and early twentieth-century artists and mid-twentieth-century American artists are used as the source data for these comparisons.Early in the book Galenson presents lists of chronological events within the lives of artists and market valuation of their work within this chronology. The dramatic clarity of the relationships presented in this data sets the stage for the detailed information that follows. Factors that in some cases only partly, and in others nearly completely, explain an artist's way of working are offered through biographic information, information about the aesthetic and cultural milieu, and about the economic and educational structures that are predominant during the relevant time in the life of the artist.The relationship between the aesthetic and cultural milieu surrounding an artist and the capacity or inclination of an artist to be innovative is an important aspect of the book's analysis. The scope of the book is limited to Modern artists because of the shift that took place at the outset of Modern art, during the mid 1860s, that brought a strong emphasis on innovation and change for their own sake as an important characteristic within a work of art. This emphasis "created incentives for painters to produce new approaches to art" (p. 111). Prior to the time of Modern art, innovation and change were often unnecessary for an artist to be successful. Modern art introduced the demand that innovation and change be necessary ingredients in art, and therefore the search for innovation became a significant element within the work of many artists. The manner in which this search took place, as presented through the data at hand, reveals how individual artists viewed the need for innovation and change within their own [End Page 123] work. Paul Cezanne, for example, was aware of the impact that his painting was having on the art world, but he insisted that he was not yet finished with discoveries that would reveal the truest expression of his beliefs about aesthetic expression.In the American movement, "Abstract Expressionism," Galenson finds a useful counter example to the art scene in Paris. In the United States, especially during the 1940s and 1950s — the peak years of creative output by Abstract Expressionist artists — the demand for their work was quite low. There were few economically viable outlets for the work of de Kooning, Pollack, Rothko, and the others of this group. Consequently there is a shift in the chronological point at which these artists achieve market value success. Nearly all of these artists receivedrecognition at an older age than the French artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The thesis of the book, that there are two fundamentally different ways of working to produce works of art, is directly applicable to, and useful in, exploring issues of teaching and learning in design education. As a teacher of interior architecture I was interested to follow the details that Galenson presented in support of his analysis of the careers of numerous Modern artists. The methodological differences between seeking and... (shrink)

We learn a lot. Friends tell us about their lives. Books tell us about the past. We see the world. We reason and we reflect on our mental lives. As a result we come to know and to form justified beliefs about a range of topics. We also seem to keep these beliefs. How? The natural answer is: by memory. It is not too hard to understand that memory allows us to retain information. It is harder to understand exactly how (...) memory allows us to retain knowledge and reasons for our beliefs. Learning is largely a matter of acquiring reasons for changing views. But how do we keep reasons for the views we keep? The epistemology of memory concerns memory’s role in our having knowledge and justification. This branch of epistemology, unlike nearly all other branches, addresses our having knowledge and justification over time. This article reviews the major epistemic roles that philosophers have assigned to memory. Section 1 surveys the nature of memory and the various memory systems. Some philosophers think the relation knowledge bears to at least one memory system is maximally strong: remembering just is a way of knowing. Section 2 covers this strong relation. Section 3 canvases the main problems that data on human memory pose to theories of justification and the central attempts to solve these problems. Section 4 discusses the historical and contemporary responses to two main skeptical challenges about memory. (shrink)

This paper explores a fundamental similarity between cognitive models for crying and conceptions of insight, enlightenment or, in the context of art, “aesthetic experience.” All of which center on a process of initial discrepancy, followed by schema change, and conclude in a personal adjustment or a “transformation” of one’s image of the self. Because tears are argued to mark one of the only physical indicators of this cognitive outcome, and because the process is particularly salient in examples with art, I (...) argue that crying may provide an intriguing marker for empirical study of perceiving art. To explore this parallel, I offer a review of crying theory as well as of tearful cases with art, pointing out the key cognitive elements. I then introduce an expanded crying model, based upon our recent model of art experience which does consider insight and adjustment or application of the self. I also consider multiple emotional and evaluative factors, which may co-vary with crying response. This theoretical discussion is then applied in three exploratory, survey-based studies, conducted within U.K., Japan and U.S. museums, and including what is claimed to be the 20th century’s most tear-inducing abstract paintings. Results showed—with cross-cultural consistency—significant correlation between “feeling like crying” and a collection of responses posited to indicate a full progression to aesthetic experience. This also found correlation to positive assessment of artwork goodness, beauty, understanding of meaning, and to final reported self reflection and epiphany. I argue that, beyond the question of why we may cry, by considering implications of what tears may indicate for information processing, feeling like crying may be a compelling basis for identifying outcomes of perceptual (art) experience. (shrink)

Our auditory experience involves the experience of auditory objects—sequences of distinct sounds, or parts of continuous sounds—that are experienced as grouped together into a single sound or “stream” of sounds. In this paper I argue that it is not possible to explain what it is to experience an auditory object as such—i.e. to experience a sequence of sounds as grouped—in purely auditory terms; rather, to experience an auditory object as such is to experience a sequence of sounds as having been (...) (apparently) produced by the same source. (shrink)

Global short-term medical volunteerism is growing, and properly conducted, is a tool in the fight for greater global health equity. It is intrinsically ethical (i.e., it involves ethics at every step) and depends upon ethical conduct for its success. At present, ethical guidelines remain in their infancy, which presents a unique opportunity. This paper presents a set of basic ethical principles, building on prior work in this area and previously developed guidelines for international clinical research. The content of these principles, (...) and the benchmarks used to evaluate them, remain intentionally vague and can only be filled by collaboration with those on-the-ground in local communities where this work occurs. Ethical review must additionally take into consideration the different obligations arising from the type of institution, type of intervention, and type of relationship involved. This paper argues that frequent and formalized ethical review, conducted from the beginning with the local community (where this community helps define the terms of debate), remains the most important ethical safeguard for this work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel by Kevin J. HayesMatthew LeggattKevin J. Hayes. The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. E-book, 192 pp. ISBN 9780192670960.Kevin J. Hayes is a writer of high regard, having published many books over his distinguished career, including biographical studies such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, (...) George Washington: A Life in Books, and several on Edgar Allen Poe. Works like the 2020 monograph Shakespeare and the Making of America showcase his intersecting interests in biography, literature, and American political history. It is these interests that are very much on display in his 2022 monograph The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel, and we should be thankful that Hayes has turned his attention to the subject of utopian fiction as he certainly has much to add to the discussion. The book is clearly a labor of love and Hayes writes with a great degree of detail and authority suggesting he has always held a deep interest in the utopian novel. In fact, from the preface, it is clear the research supporting this book has spanned many years.The preface sets it all up very neatly. Immediately, the reader is invited into the research story of the book. Hayes has an evocative and methodical style that carries that research throughout. The author is also careful in this preface to assert his expertise in the field. Having read “virtually every utopian novel in American literature published before 1910” on microfilm gives Hayes the opportunity to explore many of the obscure and lesser-known works of the period (ix), which he notes in his introduction is primarily between 1880 and 1915. Since many of these novels are yet to be digitized, his insight is notably rare.Aside from an introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into five chapters. The first is titled “The Residential Library” and is centrally about [End Page 601] books in home-spaces, from personal libraries to books on shelves in someone’s living room. Chapter 2, “The Public Library,” explores depictions of public libraries and ways that collected knowledge might be organized and made accessible in utopian visions. “The Idea of Authorship,” chapter 3, is about the professional/amateur status of authors in utopian societies. In this section, Hayes also explores ideas about literary quality and attempts to answer concerns that a utopian age would necessarily be incapable of producing great literature. Chapter 4, titled “The Newspaper,” details the struggles utopian authors have had with the newspaper format. Finally, “The Printed Page and the Written Word” examines ways in which utopian authors sought to refine the printed and written word and their innovative suggestions in this area. Each of these chapters opens by considering Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward in relation to the subject at hand and Bellamy’s 1888 novel is referred to extensively throughout The Future of the Book, offering a frame for Hayes’s exploration of utopian literature’s inner dialogue with the printed word.In his introduction, Hayes highlights that much of the scholarly work in this area has focused on dystopias. Indeed, when I think about the representation of literature in speculative fiction I tend, first, to think of the great dystopias like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which history is erased and rewritten by The Party, or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which books are considered dangerous and thus are rigorously hunted and burned by the ironically named Firemen of the future. Alternatively, postapocalyptic movies spring to mind. Taking shelter in the New York Public Library, Sam Hall (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) frantically burns books for warmth despite the protests of several other characters in Roland Emmerich’s 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. Likewise, in “Marooned” (1989), an episode of the British SF sitcom Red Dwarf (1988–), of which I was particularly fond during my formative years, a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare is burned to keep the last remaining human, David Lister (played by Craig Charles), alive. In the opposite direction, some postapocalyptic... (shrink)

This essay proposes a new theory of agentive modals: ability modals and their duals, compulsion modals. After criticizing existing approaches—the existential quantificational analysis, the universal quantificational analysis, and the conditional analysis—it presents a new account that builds on both the existential and conditional analyses. On this account, the act conditional analysis, a sentence like ‘John can swim across the river’ says that there is some practically available action that is such that if John tries to do it, he swims across (...) the river. The essay argues that the act conditional analysis avoids the problems faced by existing accounts of agentive modality and shows how the act conditional analysis can be extended to an account of generic agentive modal claims. The upshot is a new vantage point on the role of agentive modal ascriptions in practical discourse: ability ascriptions serve as a kind of hypothetical guarantee, and compulsion ascriptions as a kind of nonhypothetical guarantee. (shrink)

Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on two different intellectual traditions: the social welfare function (“SWF”) tradition in welfare economics, and scholarship on “prioritarianism” in moral philosophy. Unlike utilitarians, prioritarians are sensitive to the distribution of well-being. They give greater weight to well-being changes affecting (...) worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism can be captured, formally, through an SWF which sums a concave transformation of individual utility, rather than simply summing unweighted utilities in utilitarian fashion. The Article considers the appropriate structure of a prioritarian SWF in intergenerational cases. The simplest case involves a fixed and finite intertemporal population. In that case, I argue, policymakers can and should maintain full neutrality between present and future generations. No discount factor should be attached to the utility of future individuals. Neutrality becomes trickier when we depart from this simple case, meaning: (1) “non-identity” problems, where current choices change the identity of future individuals; (2) population-size variation, where current choices affect not merely the identity of future individuals, but the size of the world’s future population (this case raises the specter of what Derek Parfit terms “the repugnant conclusion,” i.e., that dramatic reductions in the average level of individual well-being might be compensated for by increases in population size); or (3) an infinite population. The Article grapples with the difficult question of outfitting a prioritarian SWF to handle non-identity problems, population-size variation, and infinite populations. It tentatively suggests that a measure of neutrality can be maintained even in these cases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn by Paul WeithmanMatthew ArboWhy Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn Paul Weithman New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 379 pp. $65.00In Why Political Liberalism? Paul Weithman takes a bifocal look at political liberalism in the Rawlsian tradition. First he interrogates the rationale for John Rawls’s “political turn” from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism. Second, he explores the (...) viability of political liberalism in contemporary Western societies. The soundness of the former—the logic of Rawls’s argument, that is—validates the workability of the latter. Weithman argues that the monumental turn in Rawls’s thought is based first on his dissatisfaction with how Theory of [End Page 203] Justice treated the principle of stability, failing as it did to show that “members of a [well-ordered society] would all judge it good to preserve their ‘firm good will’” (369). Liberalism emerged as a potential answer to the question of stability by further elaborating the criteria for fairness and reasonableness in a civil society composed of citizens desirous of justice and who maintain for themselves a “sense” of justice. Weithman affirms Rawls’s explanation of how the virtue of justice is displayed in fairness and reasonableness. Just how monumental this shift turns out to be, however, depends a great deal on how compelling one finds “justice as fairness” to be.In recent decades, reasonable doubts have been expressed over the viability of Rawls’s liberal dictum: whether liberty and equality are mutually reinforcing or parasitic, or whether fairness is too morally opaque to shoot for as a political ideal. Weithman seems to believe the principle sound; it is, after all, merely a descriptive explanation of how justice is upheld politically, not a prescriptive project. Rawls concerned himself with the stability and endurance of political liberalism and with how to achieve fair and rational equilibrium. Why Weithman believes the project of Rawlsian liberalism to be fruitful, or at least philosophically successful, is due at least in part to its repeated appeal to reasonableness—that is, the rational promotion of equal liberty for all citizens. Political liberalism, as a theory, affirms and encourages all that the West values in civil society: We must desire and actively support justice for it to be preserved.This book is intended primarily for Rawls scholars. Weithman assumes his reader to have “fairly sophisticated” acquaintance with Rawls’s major theories and texts, and thus also assumes proficiency in symbolic logic and analytic methods. Weithman furnishes a way around this demand for analytic aptitude from all readers, however, by inviting those “uninterested in textual exegesis” and “content with a general understanding” of why Rawls made his turn to “read selectively” from chapters 3 through 9 (15). Be that as it may, all eleven chapters of this text are dense, rigorous, and tightly argued—standard industry practice in contemporary analytic philosophy. If one can also forebear the methodological vices of analytic philosophy, its propensity for tedious detail and narrowness, then one will eventually enjoy unexpected clarity on the subject under consideration. It will be of value to scholars with interests in the development of Rawlsian thought, the conditions for the possibility of political liberalism, and theories of justice Rawls’s account of liberalism seeks to elucidate.I doubt one unconvinced by Rawls’s political vision will undergo intellectual conversion upon reading Weithman’s Why Political Liberalism?, but that is not the point. His aim is to defend Rawls’s political turn and the project of political liberalism broadly construed. Defense of the former is done rather successfully; defense of the latter may require more voices than Weithman’s. [End Page 204]Matthew ArboUniversity of EdinburghCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

People who believe they have greater efficacy to address climate change are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviour. To confront the climate crisis, it will therefore be essential to understand the processes through which climate change efficacy is promoted. Some interventions in the literature assume that efficacy emerges from analytic reasoning processes: that it is deliberative, verbal, conscious, and influenced by information and education. In the current paper, we critique this notion. We review evidence showing that climate change (...) efficacy perceptions are (a) associated with climate-related distress and threat, (b) prescribed by social norms, (c) associated with social desirability and identity-expressive concerns, (d) surprisingly difficult to change through explicit, verbal instruction, but (e) responsive to imagery. We conclude by examining applied implications of these five propositions and discuss why non-analytic processes might (ironically) be beneficial for sustaining green activism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Seductiveness of Virtue: Abraham Joshua Heschel and John Paul II on Morality and Personal Fulfillment by John J. FitzgeraldMatthew R. PetrusekThe Seductiveness of Virtue: Abraham Joshua Heschel and John Paul II on Morality and Personal Fulfillment John J. Fitzgerald new york: bloomsbury t&t clark, 2017. 240 pp. $114The Seductiveness of Virtue offers a close study of the twentieth-century Polish-American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the first Polish (...) pope, St. John Paul II, on the relationship between being good and being happy. Overall the book advances the conversation on the meaning and continued relevance of virtue in contemporary ethics, though its eagerness to build bridges across competing religious and philosophical traditions opens the argument to both methodological and substantive criticisms. [End Page 206]Fitzgerald divides the book into an introduction and four chapters. Chapter 1, "The Meaning of Our Question," establishes the definitions of concepts that Fitzgerald addresses throughout the rest his argument, including "happiness," "meaning," "freedom," "personal fulfillment," "good and evil," and "doing." Fitzgerald locates each term within the theologies of Heschel and John Paul II and provides his own definitions. Chapter 2, "Heschel and the 'Joys of Mitsvah,'" enters more deeply into Heschel's theology, arguing that, despite some ambiguity about whether morality will always lead to personal fulfillment, Heschel establishes a firm theological and practical connection between following the law (mitzvah) and being happy. Chapter 3, "John Paul II and the Good We Must Do to Have Eternal Life," engages in a similar analysis of John Paul's thought (including his writings before becoming pope) and, despite using different theological categories (chief among them "Christ"), arrives at a similar conclusion: there is a necessary connection between being good and being happy. Chapter 4, which also functions as a conclusion, places the comparison between Heschel and John Paul into a wider comparative context, examining how their respective conclusions on morality and the good relate to insights from other contemporary perspectives, including the Dalai Lama, Peter Singer, and present-day "positive psychology." Fitzgerald concludes by offering five reasons why it is important to continue, in his words, an "interworldview" and "interdisciplinary" dialogue on how virtue relates to happiness.The book is richly sourced—containing 199 footnotes, bibliography, and detailed index—and serves as a good addition to the libraries of those working on John Paul II, Abraham Heschel, virtue theory, or comparative ethics more broadly. Yet its breadth on the comparative front also highlights its vulnerabilities, particularly on the question of what defines the relationship between virtue and happiness from a normative perspective. While providing lucid descriptive accounts of different conceptions of God and the good, for example, Fitzgerald acknowledges near the book's conclusion, "whether one finds [any] author persuasive will depend in large part on one's prior conclusions about the existence and nature of God and the afterlife" (184) and notes that this topic "cannot be resolved or even explored here" (185). However, these "prior conclusions" themselves are ultimately most meaningful for answering the book's central question.This reticence to engage in meta-ethical questions also leads the text to a problematic epistemological and ethical equalizing of each perspective, one that allows Fitzgerald to claim, for example, "while there is much common ground between Heschel, John Paul II, and [Peter] Singer on the relationship between morality and fulfillment, there are also key differences" (174). Here Fitzgerald understates the contrast: one of the "key" differences between Singer's utilitarian materialism and John Paul II's gospel of life is that Singer's position could serve as a paradigmatic representation of the "culture of death" [End Page 207] that John Paul spent his papacy resisting. Thus, while providing an excellent analysis of each thinker individually, the book's argument would benefit from establishing a firmer and more transparent standard for evaluating ethical claims across traditions.Matthew R. PetrusekLoyola Marymount UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)