What it is to be an object and what it is to be a whole are separate enterprises: answering the former is doing ontology, and answering the latter is not. By providing this distinction, a new metaphysics of objects emerges. The positing of a whole is a referential gesture, either by ostension or naming, and the alleged object is postulated without consideration of internal causal operations between its parts. An object, however, requires careful physical explanation. I explicate the concept of (...) object as an ontological function which takes mereological sums as arguments, and by causal operations on the members of that sum as structural relata, returns holistic properties of a singular entity. With the revised notions of whole and object in mind, I consider what implications this bears on existential quantification. Following Meinong, I believe that the existential quantifier does not capture existence. Instead, I argue that the existential quantifier expresses a mereological notion of countability; the collecting of things as one. The existential status of a counted entity is left unstated until it is explicitly asserted as existing by a speaker, in the mental frame of a realist attitude, and this expression of existence is captured by the existence predicate. The existence of the counted entity, the alleged object, is confirmed or denied as an object in light of whether it satisfies the conditions specified by an endorsed theory of causally productive relations; the conditions under which something is an object. (shrink)

In Kant scholarship, there has long been a debate about the connection between his political and ethical thought. In his works concerned with political theory, such as the Metaphysics of Morals, Perpetual Peace, or An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, he concerns himself with coercively enforceable principles by which a society can be organised. In his works on ethics, such as The Groundwork to a Metaphysics of Morals, or The Critique of Practical Reason, he is concerned with principles (...) of morality, which require free and unconstrained action. Prima facie, the realms of politics and ethics in Kant’s thought thus appear to be incompatible. This thesis will close the gap between Kant’s ethics and politics through an examination of his anthropological works. The thesis will argue that Kant’s philosophical understanding of human nature, i.e. his “philosophical” anthropology, necessitates a connection between his ethics and politics. The project begins with a reading of Kant’s anthropological texts to show that his concern with human nature was directly related to politics and to ethics. This will allow the thesis to then discuss the way in which human nature necessitates politics as a condition of possibility for ethical deliberation to occur. Finally, having shown the necessity of politics for ethics, and thus their necessary connection, the thesis will present an overview of Kant’s political philosophy in light of this connection to show precisely the way in which politics supports rational ethical deliberation. These considerations will allow for the debate about the connection between Kant’s politics and ethics to be settled, and provide us with an understanding of the depth of Kant’s concern with human nature. (shrink)

Bimanual Coordination Drawing investigates visualising compositional rhythm in the genre of drawing, by using a bi-manual technique. This approach to drawing produces non-figurative artwork, pursuing the musical condition of visuality through the concept of ‘rhythm as composition’. The aim of BCD as a studio practise is to generate a variety of configurations or patterns according to the number of strokes/beats, which can be interpreted and analysed as forms of rhythmic structure. I have theorised BCD according to my own understanding of (...) visual rhythm, which was the subject my former dissertation1 and is based on the idea of “rhythm as composition”. Applying this concept of visual rhythm within practice-based research enables BCD to investigate visualising compositional rhythm in the context of developing unique approaches of drawing and creativity. Artistic practices which closely interrelate theoretical and philosophical investigations and discoveries within the studio practice are very rare. In this thesis I will demonstrate the close connection between my BCD practice and theory/philosophy, especially around the understanding of ‘image’ and ‘rhythm’: I propose the idea of ‘image-screen’ as a pictorial strategy for theorising visual composition beyond the referential semantic realm]. The BCD drawing project argues that the urge to construct referential images is no longer the main purpose or aim of manual image making. This project emphasises the participation of short-term and long-term memory in the drawing process, through which the composition opens up the linear flow of time. The BCD process generates compositional structure in its fundamental state, by finding elementary patterns based on the number of strokes that form each drawing: these basic patterns are conceived as an elementary, combinatorial vocabulary for further improvisation and further development. It introduces the cooperation between left and right hands as a process that involves separation, conflict and unity, rather than habitualised technical skill: the goal is not just to establish fluency in the drawing process to generate visual rhythms. There are broader, socio-cultural implications of bi-manual dexterity: these arise from the epistemological shift that BCD affords. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of two studies researching the theory of subjectivity from a cultural- historical perspective. The studies are situated in the fields of education and health and are conducted using Qualitative Epistemology. The first study discusses the pathological movement problems of learning disabilities in Brazilian schools and how it has hindered examination of the subjective processes of students when they are experiencing a learning context. The second study deals with the work of physical education professional in mental (...) health in the context of Brazilian public health. The importance of a work development on mental health integrating physical education with other professions present in mental health work is discussed. Finally, it defends the idea that Qualitative Epistemology offers an open knowledge production to interdisciplinarity, observed on education and health area, creating space for discussions on subjectivity. (shrink)

This article contributes to the platform of thought proposed by González Rey in the development of qualitative epistemology and the theory of subjectivity. We discuss three core aspects: firstly, the general epistemological problems of modern science, with its non-critical, non-theoretical scientific ideals, and low reflexivity; secondly, we propose Qualitative Epistemology as an alternative for the study of subjective processes and their complexity, explaining its fundamental principles and its scientific legitimacy. Finally, we present a set of interpretive constructions based on several (...) cases from a Brazilian mental health service to illustrate the logic in the production of knowledge in Qualitative Epistemology. In this theoretical-empirical type of production, we show the heuristic value of this theoretical-epistemological framework to study phenomena that can only be understood and intervened using an approach that is equal as complex. This epistemological perspective could be useful for research around childhood and adulthood education, health, as well as other cultural processes, such as organisational and political dynamics. The human character of research is emphasised, or in other words, its intrinsically subjective dimension. (shrink)

I hope to clarify and explicate an account of how a creature comes to be brought into the space of reasons – that is, comes to take its place as a rational agent in social practices. My ultimate interest, however, is with a tension apparently generated by the emphasis on training coupled with this attack on cognitivism. If one’s coming to maturity depends on one being embedded in a practice, so that one comes to adopt, with ‘comfortable certainty’, the common (...) ground of that practice’s language games, then there seems to be no position from which to frame a critique of a practice. (shrink)

This chapter wagers that dance holds a singular, irreducible place in Nancy's work, that it cannot be reduced to thought about dance, and that it provides a way to understanding Nancy's approach to visual culture in general, to equality, and to the circulation of sense in terms of what he calls singular plural being. The chapter takes its starting point from Nancy's discussions of dance in the as yet untranslated Allitérations, a series of email exchanges from 2003 and 2004 followed (...) by transcriptions of face-to-face exchanges between Nancy and choreographer Mathilde Monnier loosely addressing the question of the relation between philosophy and dance, and a conversation between Nancy, Monnier and film-maker Claire Denis. In the first half of the book Nancy raises two questions, each presenting a pair of seemingly irreconcilable demands: 1. How can we understand dance as something open to everyone while retaining the privilege of professional expertise? 2. How can we understand dance in a way that maintains its uniqueness, not reducing it to an example of thought or a vehicle for thought, and yet still allowing for a relation between dance and thought? Both questions invite us to think the privilege of dance together with its openness; its singularity together with its plurality. As Nancy and Monnier grapple with these seemingly contradictory demands in Allitérations, their conversation opens up onto a fresh way to think political equality, and a different way to understand – or ‘catch’, a much more suitable term that I shall introduce later in this chapter – the sense of the world. It is by taking a detour via ‘The Image: Mimesis and Methexis’ that we can also see how Nancy's approach to dance can open to a new way of engaging with visual culture in general. -/- The point in this chapter is not simply to use dance as an example or illustration that helps us better to understand Nancy's approach to visual culture or the Nancean singular plural or his notion of ‘sense’, for in considering dance in terms of art, singular plurality and sense, we shall also be drawn to reassess sense, art and the singular plural in terms of dance. (shrink)

In his late unfinished work on aesthetic theory, Adam Smith develops the concept of rythmus to explore such arts as music, dance and poetry. Smith argues that rythmus communicates emotion in a very specific way. For Smith, narrative arts, such as drama or the novel, predominately seek to recreate or represent in the minds of their readership or audience the emotions of the characters that are portrayed. But what we experience through rythmus, by contrast, is an original, and not a (...) sympathetic, feeling. Rythmus is the communicative medium of a paradoxical mode of collective feeling in which each person feels his or her own emotions, and yet all feel the same thing; in which social being is at once non-fungible and shared. (shrink)

The central motivating idea behind the development of this work is the concept of prespace, a hypothetical structure that is postulated by some physicists to underlie the fabric of space or space-time. I consider how such a structure could relate to space and space-time, and the rest of reality as we know it, and the implications of the existence of this structure for quantum theory. Understanding how this structure could relate to space and to the rest of reality requires, I (...) believe, that we consider how space itself relates to reality, and how other so-called "spaces" used in physics relate to reality. In chapter 2, I compare space and space-time to other spaces used in physics, such as configuration space, phase space and Hilbert space. I support what is known as the "property view" of space, opposing both the traditional views of space and space-time, substantivalism and relationism. I argue that all these spaces are property spaces. After examining the relationships of these spaces to causality, I argue that configuration space has, due to its role in quantum mechanics, a special status in the microscopic world similar to the status of position space in the macroscopic world. In chapter 3, prespace itself is considered. One way of approaching this structure is through the comparison of the prespace structure with a computational system, in particular to a cellular automaton, in which space or space-time and all other physical quantities are broken down into discrete units. I suggest that one way open for a prespace metaphysics can be found if physics is made fully discrete in this way. I suggest as a heuristic principle that the physical laws of our world are such that the computational cost of implementing those laws on an arbitrary computational system is minimized, adapting a heuristic principle of this type proposed by Feynman. In chapter 4, some of the ideas of the previous chapters are applied in an examination of the physics and metaphysics of quantum theory. I first discuss the "measurement problem" of quantum mechanics: this problem and its proposed solution are the primary subjects of chapter 4. It turns out that considering how quantum theory could be made fully discrete leads naturally to a suggestion of how standard linear quantum mechanics could be modified to give rise to a solution to the measurement problem. The computational heuristic principle reinforces the same solution. I call the modified quantum mechanics Critical Complexity Quantum Mechanics (CCQM). I compare CCQM with some of the other proposed solutions to the measurement problem, in particular the spontaneous localization model of Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber. Finally, in chapters 5 and 6, I argue that the measure of complexity of quantum mechanical states I introduce in CCQM also provides a new definition of entropy for quantum mechanics, and suggests a solution to the problem of providing an objective foundation for statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, and the arrow of time. (shrink)

The concept of raga in Hindustani classical music is a complex phenomenon not least of all because it is simultaneously an inventory of melodic elements, a performative process, and an aesthetic outcome. These different dimensions to raga pose challenges to systematised ways of accounting for how it works in performance. Symbolic modes of thought in the tradition have long taken recourse to analogies to attempt to portray the gestalt of raga and also provide alternate modes of pedagogical knowledge and aesthetic (...) sensibility for engaging with raga. Building on the long-held predilections between music, food, and cooking in Hindustani music, this essay provides another vantage point from which to consider raga and also the significance of rasa in the performance of raga. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on the ontological status of the mind according to various interpretative traditions of Spinoza scholarship and Indo-Tibetan Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy. It compares two texts: Ethics by Spinoza and The Way of the Bodhisattva by Śāntideva. I argue against the materialist interpretation of Spinoza on the basis that it reduces his concept of monism to extension and mistakenly frames Spinoza’s insights in terms of Cartesian rationality. I then explain Śāntideva’s non-dual concept of mind as the middle between the (...) extremes of nihilism and essentialism, and compare these to the materialist interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of mind as non-existent, and the non-materialist view that the essence of the mind is basic self-assertion. I conclude that for Spinoza the mind exists, whereas for Śāntideva the mind is beyond concepts of existence and non-existence. Chapter 1: Spinoza’s concept of mind The concept of monism describes reality as one substance with infinite attributes, which human beings encounter as thought or extension, through the modes of individual minds and bodies respectively. For strict materialists, only extended modes actually exist and the concept of the mind is correlated with changes in the body, such as neural activity, or with the conceivability of the order of nature. I argue that despite rejecting Descartes’ concept of mental substance, materialists have transferred the dualism between intellect and feeling to their interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of mind. The non-materialist interpretation of Spinoza such as that of Deleuze, attends to the distinction between essence and existence, and describes the mind as inherently existing to the extent that it participates in substance. For panpsychists, singular minds exist as subjects striving for existence while immersed in the influences of nature. Chapter two: The Mahāyāna Buddhist Concept of Mind Śāntideva refutes the views of earlier Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools in the famous Wisdom chapter of The Way of the Bodhisattva. Śāntideva argues that the mind is beyond the concepts of existence and non-existence using Nāgārjuna’s view of relative and ultimate truth and Dharmakīrti’s logic of valid cognition. The view of selflessness describes the mind as empty: it appears relatively, but ultimately it does not exist as an independent, permanent thing. It is an ephemeral gathering together of the five aggregates, which describe the interconnectedness of thoughts, feelings and dispositions of the mind and body. Chapter three: A comparison of the monist and non-dualist concepts of mind In this chapter I compare Spinoza’s monism and Śāntideva’s non-dualism and I argue that for Spinoza, the mind exists as “basic self-assertion” whereas Śāntideva presents the view of “selflessness”, which is distinct from a view of nihilism. I recognise that although the cultural and historical contexts are very different there are striking similarities in the structure of Spinoza’s and Śāntideva’s theories, including the relationship between the mind and body, thoughts and feelings, and the interconnectedness with nature. (shrink)

This is part of my mother's brief account of the remote Cornish farm where I was born. She repeated it to me several times during my childhood and it was word for word the same story every time. She told me the facts, almost without comment and without expressing her feelings and many years later, I still have no answers for all the questions I would like to ask. I never interrupted her tale to ask for more details because I (...) sensed that it was a world apart, a world with sinister undertones, a description of which my mother felt reluctant, and at the same time compelled, to pass on to me, feeling perhaps that the story was my business. (shrink)

Throughout history, anthropologists have confronted a number of uncomfortable truths around the supposed nature of reality. The anthropological maxim, "through the study of others we learn more about ourselves" has been sorely tested en route. Arguably, this challenge reached culmination during the 1970s and 80s, with several prominent social commentators from Geertz to Clifford suggesting that anthropologists had, in both past and present, been much more concerned with the study of 'others' than of 'ourselves'. In essence, this reflexive critique suggested (...) that ethnographers were in the business of writing fiction and more insidiously came to the field equipped with a set of assumptions and presuppositions about the world in all its variety. These universal verities functioned to reduce all subjects of study into conformity with the observer's sense of what was real and of import and what was not and inconsequential. (shrink)

Nancy's writing on the image may be understood as a critical engagement with the traditions of modern aesthetics and classical theories of art. However, the starting point for his approach to the image indicates that his writing on this topic has much wider ambitions than the treatment of a regional aesthetic topic. Nancy defines the image as a mode of access to sense. Nancy attempts an ontological rehabilitation of the image, which reiterates the precepts of his conception of being as (...) ‘co-presence’. I will argue here that a careful study of the implications of this rehabilitation of the image can be used to clarify the significance of the tacit references that Nancy's ontology makes regarding politics. (shrink)

It is well known that no consistent normal modal logic contains (as theorems) both ♦A and ♦¬A (for any formula A). Here we observe that this claim can be strengthened to the following: for any formula A, either no consistent normal modal logic contains ♦A, or else no consistent normal modal logic contains ♦¬A.

In so far as long-range tele-operated weapons, such as the United States’ Predator and Reaper drones, allow their operators to fight wars in what appears to be complete safety, thousands of kilometres removed from those whom they target and kill, it is unclear whether drone operators either require courage or have the opportunity to develop or exercise it. This chapter investigates the implications of the development of tele-operated warfare for the extent to which courage will remain central to the role (...) of the warrior and for the future culture of the armed services in the age of drone warfare. (shrink)

Would it be ethical to deploy autonomous weapon systems (AWS) if they were unable to reliably recognize when enemy forces had surrendered? I suggest that an inability to reliably recognize surrender would not prohibit the ethical deployment of AWS where there was a limited window of opportunity for targets to surrender between the launch of the AWS and its impact. However, the operations of AWS with a high degree of autonomy and/or long periods of time between release and impact are (...) likely to remain controversial until they have the capacity to reliably recognize surrender. (shrink)

‘Terraforming’ is hypothetical climatic and geo-physical engineering of other planets on a grand scale, with the aim of turning the so-called ‘barren’ planets in our (or for that matter another) solar system into habitable earth-like eco-systems. Although terraforming sounds like an idea from science fiction (where it indeed has appeared), it has been seriously proposed as a future project for the human race. With such a technology we could colonise the solar system and perhaps eventually others, moulding them in an (...) image of our own making. In this chapter I consider the ethics of terraforming through the lens of an ‘agent-based’ virtue ethics. I argue that advocacy of - and any attempt at - terraforming is likely to demonstrate two significant character flaws in agents: an insensitivity to beauty; and, hubris, an excessive pride or faith in our own abilities in the course of transcending the proper limits of human activities. (shrink)

The theological notion of Prophethood and the Prophet Muḥammad has been subjected to an intense theoretical enquiry since the Enlightenment. The emphasis on rational thought and reason was prevalent in this period. While some scholars focused on tradition, a number of others focused on reason. Said Nursi and Muhammad Iqbal engaged both ʿaql and naql in their prophetologies, orientating more towards reason. This thesis argues that the prophetologies of the modernist Muslims were lacking the balance of the metaphysical with that (...) of the rational. In contrast, Said Nursi and Muhammad Iqbal retained this balance in their prophetologies by including the metaphysical aspects of prophethood. Through a textual analysis of the major writings of Said Nursi and Muhammad Iqbal, this thesis explores two unique responses to this theological dilemma in the modern era, and highlights the similarities and differences of their prophetologies in contrast to their modernist contemporaries. (shrink)

A comprehensive proposal for a conceptual framework for describing conscious experience in dreams, integrating philosophy of mind, sleep and dream research, and interdisciplinary consciousness studies. Dreams, conceived as conscious experience or phenomenal states during sleep, offer an important contrast condition for theories of consciousness and the self. Yet, although there is a wealth of empirical research on sleep and dreaming, its potential contribution to consciousness research and philosophy of mind is largely overlooked. This might be due, in part, to a (...) lack of conceptual clarity and an underlying disagreement about the nature of the phenomenon of dreaming itself. In Dreaming, Jennifer Windt lays the groundwork for solving this problem. She develops a conceptual framework describing not only what it means to say that dreams are conscious experiences but also how to locate dreams relative to such concepts as perception, hallucination, and imagination, as well as thinking, knowledge, belief, deception, and self-consciousness. Arguing that a conceptual framework must be not only conceptually sound but also phenomenologically plausible and carefully informed by neuroscientific research, Windt integrates her review of philosophical work on dreaming, both historical and contemporary, with a survey of the most important empirical findings. This allows her to work toward a systematic and comprehensive new theoretical understanding of dreaming informed by a critical reading of contemporary research findings. Windt's account demonstrates that a philosophical analysis of the concept of dreaming can provide an important enrichment and extension to the conceptual repertoire of discussions of consciousness and the self and raises new questions for future research. (shrink)

Both Nancy and Badiou probe the contemporary power of the political, seeking to refashion communism as, respectively, an ontology that issues an imperative, and an as yet unrealized hypothesis to be seized in the present. In both accounts of politics, the limit of the human and the animal plays a crucial yet hidden role. Badiou's articulation of the ‘human animal’ and the ‘immortal’ poses troubling problems for the relation between the limits of the human and the limits of the political. (...) In contrast, in the second volume of his Deconstruction of Christianity, Nancy reworks his notion of the human animal as a ‘being of sense’ in a way that poses awkward questions for his ontology of those who have nothing in common. For both Nancy and Badiou—but in opposite ways—the question of the limits and scope of the political is inextricably intertwined with the nature of the human/animal distinction. (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of liberty at the heart of Sarah Chapone’s 1735 work, The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives. In this work, Chapone (1699-1764) advocates an ideal of freedom from domination that closely resembles the republican ideal in seventeenth and eighteenth- century England. This is the idea that an agent is free provided that no-one else has the power to dispose of that agent’s property—her “life, liberty, and limb” and her material possessions—according to his (...) arbitrary will and pleasure, without being accountable to the law. This paper shows how Chapone uses this ideal to ground her arguments against those laws that put married women in a worse condition than slavery, and to call for the establishment of reasonable and just safeguards for a woman’s personal property and property in her children. More than this, it is argued, in this text Chapone articulates a feminist ideal that is both negative freedom from domination and positive freedom to be one’s own master or arbiter. Her work thus occupies a unique—and hitherto unrecognized—place in the history of feminist philosophy. (shrink)

A central figure in contemporary Turkish cinema, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a director who uses cinema to develop, consider and communicate ideas about the world he films. Although language has long been the dominant vehicle for thought in Western scholarship, this thesis will argue that the image is an equally effective tool for the development and communication of thought, using the presentation of nature and technology in Ceylan’s work as an example. Through a method of visual study devised from the (...) theory of Nicole Brenez, Andrew Benjamin and Alain Bergala and the film work of Harun Farocki, this thesis examines the ways nature and technology diverge, intersect and merge in Ceylan’s films, to argue that, in his view, technology and nature are rhythms of experience. Despite the concentration on a single director, this work is not an auteur study and does not seek to establish a map of the director’s style. It does, however, pay particular attention to the aesthetic dimension of his work. Concentrating on medium, materiality, rhythm, and the presence of space, light and colour, I demonstrate how Ceylan uses these elements to think about nature and technology. This approach is without precedent in existing accounts of his ouevre. From the ecological anxiety of Clouds of May to the sublime synthesis of natural world and digital colour in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan presents a range of perspectives on the experience of technology and nature. The thesis contributes to two key areas of film studies: the growing body of work on Ceylan and Turkish cinema and the argument for cinema as a method of complex and philosophical thought. The idea that images can be both immanently critical and critical tools has precedents in books like Yvette Bíró’s Turbulence and Flow, which takes up Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’ arguments for science and philosophy as “‘open systems’ that endlessly dialogue with the cultural environment, effecting change and in turn being marked by the exchange” and in Nicole Brenez’s comparative analyses, where one film speaks back to another, challenging, supporting and completing it. My work contributes to this area and offers a further example of the image as critical tool. It also challenges traditional notions of photographic ontology and seeks to contribute to a non-oppositional ontology of digital cinema, arguing that the ‘truth’ of an image does not lie in its indexicality. This places the work in a growing field of study that is moving away from critical theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis and semiotics, choosing instead to revive early film theory and ask questions of cinema’s ontology via the cinema itself. Two dominant positions emerge from the analyses. The first is of nature and technology as quotidian experiences. The second is of them as overwhelming and in excess of the space made available for them in the lives of the characters. Both constitute rhythms that are absorbed by the films and influence their pace and rhythmic design. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of cutting-edge research papers in scientifically informed metaphysics, tackling a range of philosophical puzzles which have emerged from recent work on chance and temporal asymmetry. How do the probabilities found in fundamental physics and the probabilities of the special sciences relate to one another? How can we account for the normative significance of chance? Can constraints on the initial conditions of the universe underwrite the second law of thermodynamics, and potentially also all other lawlike regularities? (...) How does contemporary quantum theory bear on debates over the nature of chance and the arrow of time? What grounds do we have for believing in a fundamental temporal direction, or flow? And how do all these questions connect up with one another? The aim of the volume is both to survey and summarize recent debates about chance and temporal asymmetry and to push them forward. The authors bring perspectives from metaphysics, from philosophy of physics and from philosophy of probability. Mainstream approaches are subjected to searching new critiques, and bold new proposals are made concerning (inter alia) the semantics of chance-attributions, the justification of the Principal Principle connecting chance and degree of belief, the limits on inter-theoretic reduction and the source of the temporal asymmetry of human experience. (shrink)

In their paper, “Autonomy and the ethics of biological behaviour modification”, Savulescu, Douglas, and Persson discuss the ethics of a technology for improving moral motivation and behaviour that does not yet exist and will most likely never exist. At the heart of their argument sits the imagined case of a “moral technology” that magically prevents people from developing intentions to commit seriously immoral actions. It is not too much of a stretch, then, to characterise their paper as a thought experiment (...) in service of a thought experiment. In order for an argument involving a thought experiment to progress debate in applied ethics three things must be true. First, the thought experiment must accurately represent and illuminate a pressing ethical dilemma. Second – and most obviously – the central claims of the argument regarding the thought experiment must be plausible. Third, it must be possible to apply or develop the arguments established with reference to the thought experiment to the real world cases the experiment is intended to illuminate. In this commentary, I argue that there are serious reasons to question the extent to which their argument meets each of these challenges involved in the use of thought experiments in applied ethics. While Savulescu et al. succeed in showing how behavioural modification might be compatible with freedom and autonomy – and perhaps justifiable even if it were not — in the fantastic case they consider, there is little we can conclude from this about any technology of “moral bioenhancement” in the foreseeable future. Indeed, there is a real danger that their argument will license attempts to manipulate behaviour through drugs and brain implants, which raise profound moral issues that they barely mention. (shrink)

In “The misguided quest for the ethics of enhancement”, Tom Murray makes two related claims. First, he argues that “understanding the ethics of enhancement is deeply dependent on context". Second, he suggests that, as a consequence, we should not look for “a single all-purpose ethics for every form of human enhancement”. In this brief response, I argue that while Murray is correct in the first of these claims, there is an important sense in which he is wrong in the second. (...) His focus on the ethics of enhancement in sport serves him well in illustrating how our reasons to embrace or resist technological change as it impacts on athletes and players depends crucially on “why we play” and, in particular, on nature of the excellences made possible by the current rules of the game. However, the thing about life is that the “rules” are unknown and the meaning of participation and the excellences it makes possible are widely disputed. For this reason, a focus on the ethics of sport serves us less well when it comes to the larger question of the attitude we should take towards “human enhancement”. In the context of the profound disputes about the nature of the good in modern liberal societies, we may indeed need a single, robust, theoretical framework through which to resolve questions about enhancement – although whether this is best thought of as an “ethics” or a “politics” of enhancement is a further (and difficult) question. Regardless of how such a framework is conceived, Murray’s observations about the importance of context, the significance of competition, and the attractions of a “public health ethics” approach, all serve to alert us to just how difficult the task of developing an ethics for human enhancement more generally is likely to be. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the ethical implications of emerging Nanotechnologically Enhanced Combat Systems (or 'NECS'). Through a combination of materials innovation and biotechnology, NECS are aimed at making combatants much less vulnerable to munitions that pose a lethal threat to soldiers protected by conventional armor. We argue that increasing technological disparities between forces armed with NECS and those without will exacerbate the ethical problems of asymmetric warfare. This will place pressure on the just war principles of jus in bello, (...) by encouraging the resort to tactics that either (i) make it more difficult to respect these principles or (ii) directly violate them, by virtue of attacking non-combatants or creating disproportionate numbers of casualties without a clear military goal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Making Fetal PersonsFetal Homicide, Ultrasound, and the Normative Significance of BirthCatherine MillsIn early 2012, the then attorney general of Western Australia, Christian Porter, announced plans to introduce fetal homicide laws that would “create a new offence of causing death or grievous bodily harm to an unborn child through an unlawful assault on its mother” (Porter 2012). While well established in the United States, fetal homicide laws are only beginning (...) to take shape in Australia.1 The proposed law would mean that if an offender assaulted a woman and thereby caused the death of the fetus she was gestating, the courts would be required to impose a sentence of life imprisonment in all but exceptional circumstances—equivalent to the penalty for murder. While the proposed fetal homicide law is said to give appropriate recognition to the grief and suffering of the woman involved—and while it may help to do that—this is certainly not all it would do.2 For it would also give existence to a new legal subject in Western Australia, that is, the “unborn child”: currently, under Western Australian law a child is only legally capable of being murdered when already external to the mother’s body. Thus, the woman’s body constitutes a kind of “natural” basis for a legal boundary—one that the proposed law transgresses and perhaps obliterates, at the same time as it purports to recognize the trauma associated with the transgression and obliteration of that boundary by another.Fetal homicide laws thus traverse difficult territory in the maternal-fetal relationship, in which actions against one person come to constitute a crime against another. Significantly, these laws are typically formulated to provide legal protection for pregnant women against the intrusions of a third party against [End Page 88] their person. However, it may be that they can also be interpreted more generally to provide legal protection for the fetus against others. So construed, such laws open up a danger for pregnant women themselves, insofar as their actions threaten the life and well-being of the fetus they carry. One recent example of the exploitation of this ambiguity in fetal homicide laws is the case of Bei Bei Shuai, a young woman of Chinese descent who faced felony charges of murder in Indiana after a failed suicide attempt resulted in the death of the thirty three week old fetus she was gestating (Pilkington 2011, 2012). If a woman’s actions against herself, leading to the death of her fetus, can be legally construed as murder, where does this leave the law on abortion? The Western Australian attorney general insisted that the proposed law would not affect laws on abortion in any way, since it would not encroach on a woman’s right to make decisions about her pregnancy (Porter 2012). But a woman’s decisional rights in regards to her pregnancy are at best an unstable dividing line; at worst, it is precisely her decision to terminate a pregnancy—that is, to intentionally bring about the death of the fetus—that substantiates a murder charge. Indeed, at the crux of the Shuai case was her suicide note, in which she apparently stated her intent to kill her fetus.This ambiguity between abortion and fetal homicide has been the topic of much discussion in legal literature, and it raises significant questions that bear further investigation. For one, it raises in a particularly pointed way questions about the moral and legal significance of birth, and the bearing it has on the status of the fetus. Birth has historically been significant in establishing personhood, but this reliance on birth is challenged by the shift to treating the fetus as a person for the purposes of some areas of the law. The further question then arises of whether that status must remain consistent across domains of the law, such as those addressed to the death of a fetus at the hands of a third party, and those on abortion. While these questions have been well canvassed in legal discussions, we might also consider the impact that technologies such as obstetric ultrasound have on notions of fetal life and personhood. Advances in medical technologies appear... (shrink)

What are properties? Examples are easy. Consider a particular billiard ball. The ball is red, spherical, and has a definite mass. The ball's redness, sphericity, and mass are properties: properties of the ball. Putting it this way invites a distinction between the ball, a bearer of properties, and the ball's properties. Some philosophers deny that there are properties. To say that the ball is red or spherical, for instance, is just to say that the predicates "is red" and "is spherical" (...) apply truly to the ball. But it is hard not to think that "is red" applies truly to the ball, if it does, because the ball is a particular way, the red way; and "is spherical" applies to the ball because it is a particular way, the spherical way; and the ways in question are distinct ways the ball is. Ways the ball is are, or appear to be, properties of the ball. (shrink)

This paper is a critical examination of some of the major themes of Brian Leftow's book *God and Necessity*.