Although many accept the Rawlsian distinction between ‘end-state’ and ‘transitional’ principles, theorists disagree strongly over which feasibility constraint to use when selecting the former. While ‘minimalists’ favor a scientific-laws-only constraint, ‘non-minimalists’ believe that end-state principles should also be constrained by what people could (empirically) accept after reasoned discussion. I argue that a theorist who follows ‘non-minimalism’ will devise end-state principles that cannot be realized (as end-state principles), or cannot be stabilized (as end-state principles), or are indistinguishable in content from those (...) she would have selected had she followed ‘minimalism.’ The paper ends by outlining the implications of my analysis for the broader methodological map of political philosophy. (shrink)

In this article we defend the view that, on the All Affected Principle of voting rights, the weight of a person’s vote on a decision should be determined by and only by the degree to which that dec...

Who should have a right to participate in a polity’s decision-making? Although the answers to this ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory remain controversial, it is widely believed that the enfranchisement of tourists and children is unacceptable. Yet, the two most prominent inclusion principles in the literature – Robert Goodin’s ‘all (possibly) affected interests’-principle and the ‘all subjected to law’-principle – both enfranchise those groups. Unsurprisingly, democratic theorists have therefore offered several reasons for nonetheless exempting tourists and children from the franchise. (...) In this paper, I argue that their attempts fail. None of the proposed rationales can do the job without having unacceptable implications for the voting rights of other groups. I then develop a new specification of the affected interests-view, one that avoids such problems. According to my life plan-principle, a person is entitled to participate in a polity’s decision-making if and only if its decisions will actually affect her autonomously chosen life plans, or prevent her from developing or revising plans of that kind. I show that this principle straightforwardly avoids enfranchising tourists and children, and thus improves upon its two prominent rivals. The paper ends by considering and rejecting two objections to my new principle. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to the people of sinking island states. When their territories inevitably disappear, what, if anything, do the world's remaining territorial st...

Secession is again a hot political topic. Consider the recent events in Catalonia. In an illegal referendum in October 2017, amid large-scale demonstrations and violent interventions by the Spanish...

A prominent approach in the debate on territorial rights claims that a group may have jurisdictional rights over a particular land if that land has become a repository of value for the group. This justification relies on a premise which has remained largely unsubstantiated, namely that having jurisdictional rights should be our preferred means for ensuring the group’s retaining of the land’s embedded value. This article discusses a recent attempt to fill this gap. David Miller acknowledges that the value could (...) be retained by the group if it has private property rights. However, he argues that because such rights can be changed at will by the holder of jurisdictional rights the group’s retaining of value is unacceptably insecure. I argue that this attempt fails. Miller’s argument is briefly stated so I start with some reconstructive work. Most importantly, I suggest that the argument relies on a descriptive claim about empirical probabilities, namely that the group’s having jurisdictional rights (in international law) provides the largest feasible reduction of insecurity. I then provide some tentative suggestions about expected state behavior which challenge the validity of that descriptive claim; I argue that a reform of international law which confers internationally enforced property rights on the relevant groups—rather than jurisdiction—may provide a similar (or even relatively larger) reduction of insecurity. My tentative conclusion is that Miller’s appeal to insecurity fails to provide the “embedded value” approach (favored by him and others) with the needed bridge from property rights to rights of jurisdiction. (shrink)

This paper argues that democratic collectives have reason to increase the voting power of their younger members. It first presents an intuitive case for weighted voting in general, before drawing support from a prominent principle of democratic inclusion – the all-affected principle. On a plausible understanding of that principle, a decision may affect people to varying degrees, and this variation should be reflected in the strength of their say. The paper then argues that exposure time to a decision’s effects is (...) typically a good proxy for tracking such variation, such that collectives have reason to gradually reduce their members’ voting power as they grow older. This holds, for example, in the ordinary parliamentary elections in representative democracies. It is then argued that we may build a similar case for age-weighting on a plausible version of the all-affected principle’s main rival, the all-subjected principle. The paper ends by addressing various objections. It argues that none of them undermine the case for age-weighting, and that some might even support age-weighting over its non-weighted (‘one person, one vote’) alternative. (shrink)

This paper discusses what implications global luck egalitarianism (GLE) has for border control. Some authors suggest that an open‐borders policy follows from GLE. The idea is that various unchosen inequalities inevitably follow from differences in birthplace, such that GLE will always have principled reason to condemn closed borders. Others are skeptical of the assumption that GLE will have liberal implications for border control, because open borders may have other, adverse effects that outweigh the reductions in unjust inequality. Against such skeptics, (...) we argue that GLE will (typically) have quite liberal implications for border control. However, this connection is not a principled one: Whether (and to what extent) GLE favors opening or closing borders will depend upon empirical circumstances. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

In ‘Justice and Natural Resources,’ Chris Armstrong offers a rich and sophisticated egalitarian theory of resource justice, according to which the benefits and burdens flowing from natural resources are ideally distributed with a view to equalize people’s access to wellbeing, unless there are compelling reasons that justify departures from that egalitarian default. Armstrong discusses two such reasons: special claims from ‘improvement’ and ‘attachment.’ In this paper, I critically assess the account he gives of these potential constraints on global equality. I (...) argue that his recognition of them has implications that Armstrong does not anticipate, and which challenge some important theses in his book. First, special claims from improvement will justify larger departures from the egalitarian default than Armstrong believes. Second, a consistent application of Armstrong’s life plan-foundation for special claims from attachment implies that nation-states may move closer to justify ‘permanent sovereignty’ over the resources within their territories than what his analysis suggests. (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we (...) take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

This paper presents an abstract-algebraic formulation of action facilitating reasoning about two opposing agents. Two dual nondeterministic choice operators are formulated abstract-algebraically: angelic (or user) choice and demonic (or system) choice. Iteration operators are also defined. As an application, Hoare-style correctness rules are established by means of the algebra. A negation operator is also discussed.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi ed. by Kim-chong ChongLuyao Li (bio)Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi. Edited by Kim-chong Chong. Dordrecht: Springer, 2022. Pp. 835. Hardcover US $133.15, isbn 978-3-030-92330-3.Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi, edited by Kim-chong Chong, is the sixteenth volume in the Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy series. This volume includes a total of 34 chapters and is (...) divided into six parts: "Authorship and Commentary" (Part I), "Concepts" (Part II), "Language and Metaphor" (Part III), "Zhuangzi in the Context of Chinese Philosophy" (Part IV), "Ethical, Social, and Epistemic Issues" (Part V), and "The Zhuangzi and Western Philosophy" (Part VI). These six parts not only provide students or non-specialists with a clear overview of the various possible aspects and approaches to Zhuangzi studies, but also present the latest discussions and diverse perspectives on crucial issues in the Zhuangzi, making the volume a valuable resource for experts in this field.Each part of the Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi extensively explores diverse research perspectives on a specific theme in Zhuangzi studies. Part IV, "Zhuangzi in the Context of Chinese Philosophy," serves as an exemplary illustration of this approach. Considering the possibility that Laozi and the Logicians may have influenced the thought in the Zhuangzi to some extent, this part is comprised of two chapters that respectively examine the connections and distinctions between Zhuangzi and Laozi, and Zhuangzi and the Logicians. Regarding scholars who may have lived after Zhuangzi, Angel On Ki TING envisions Zhuangzi's response to Xunzi's criticism, exploring their respective attitudes towards rites (li 禮) through examining the motivation for action. Additionally, there are chapters that discuss the influence of Zhuangzi's thoughts after the Warring States period, on Neo-Daoism, Buddhism, and Neo-Confucianism, as well as on inner alchemy and religious Daoism.In Part II, however, such extensive exploration proves to be less satisfactory. Here, some crucial concepts in the Zhuangzi are illustrated, including heaven (tian 天) and human (ren 人), transformation (hua 化), vast or big (da 大) and minute (xiao 小), true person (zhen ren 真人) and true knowledge (zhen zhi 真知), no-emotion (wu qing 无情), and ming 命 (fate, destiny, mandate and command). It is unclear why certain concepts are chosen, whereas the central concepts of Dao (道) and de (德) are not focused on. It would perhaps be worthwhile to look closer into more of the above listed concepts, and the [End Page 1] relevance of Dao and de, particularly in terms of Dao and de's relationships to closely connected notions like heaven (tian 天) and ming (命).Furthermore, clear distinctions of themes in various parts of this edited volume overlook the connections among them. Certain terms and issues are addressed in chapters of different parts, with little or no communication between them. For example, the true person is the main concern in a number of chapters: "The True Person and True Knowledge in the Zhuangzi" (Part II, pp. 179-198); "Those Who Fly Without Wings: Depictions of the Supreme Idea Figure in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi" (Part III, pp. 305-376); and "Zhuangzi's Notion of the True Master and Wittgenstein's Grammatical Investigation" (Part VI, pp.807-824). Such exploration of various perspectives on a particular theme is noteworthy. It is regrettable, however, that there is a lack of correspondence between those perspectives. Some discussion on interactions among relevant chapters would certainly enhance the volume.In addition to presenting an extensive range of studies on the Zhuangzi, the Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi also makes contributions to specific issues, which will be appealing to specialists in this field. I will elaborate on three of these contributions drawing on various parts of the volume.First, this work contributes to discussions on the issue of authorship. The traditional viewpoint attributes the Inner Chapters, or at least their main part, to the historical figure Zhuang Zhou, and assumes that they were written in the Warring States period and composed earlier than other chapters. Therefore, the Inner Chapters are prioritized in studies of the Zhuangzi. Esther Klein has previously challenged the view that the Inner... (shrink)

I propose a conceptual framework for emotions according to which they are best understood as the feedback mechanism a creature possesses in virtue of its function to learn. More specifically, emotions can be neatly modeled as a measure of harmony in a certain kind of constraint satisfaction problem. This measure can be used as error for weight adjustment (learning) in an unsupervised connectionist network.

Since the early 1980’s, with the clinical advent of in vitro fertilization resulting in so-called “test tube babies,” a wide array of ethical considerations and concerns regarding artificial womb technology (AWT) have been described. Recent breakthroughs in the development of extracorporeal neonatal life support by means of AWT have reinitiated ethical interest about this topic with a sense of urgency. Most of the recent ethical literature on the topic, however, pertains not to the more imminent scenario of a physiologically improved (...) method of neonatal care through AWT, but instead to the remote scenario of “complete ectogenesis” that imagines human gestation occurring entirely outside of the womb. This scoping review of the ethical literature on AWT spans from more abstract concerns about complete ectogenesis to more immediate concerns about the soon-to-be-expected clinical life support of what we term the fetal neonate or fetonate. Within an organizing framework of different stages of human gestational development, from conception to the viable premature infant, we discuss both already identified and newly emerging ethical considerations and concerns regarding AWT and the care of the fetonate. (shrink)

In this paper a formalized logic of propositions, PA1, is presented. It is proven consistent and its relationships to traditional logic, to PM ([15]), to subjunctive (including contrary-to-fact) implication and to the “paradoxes” of material and strict implication are developed. Apart from any intrinsic merit it possesses, its chief significance lies in demonstrating the feasibility of a general logic containing theprinciple of subjunctive contrariety, i.e., the principle that ‘Ifpwere true thenqwould be true’ and ‘Ifpwere true thenqwould be false’ are incompatible.

American doctors in the 1990s are being asked to serve as "double agents," weighing competing allegiances to patients' medical needs against the monetary costs to society. This situation is a reaction to rapid cost increases for medical services, themselves the result of the haphazard development since the 1920s of an inherently inflationary, open-ended system for funding and delivering health care. The answer to an inefficient system, however, is not to stint on care, but rather to restructure the system to remove (...) the inflationary pressures. As long as we are spending enormous resources on an inherently inefficient and inflationary system we cannot justify asking doctors to withhold beneficial care to save money for third-party payers. Doing so serves a largely political agenda and endangers the patient-centered ethic that is central to medicine. (shrink)

We analysed research ethics committee (REC) letters. We found that RECs frequently identify process errors in applications from researchers that are not deemed “favourable” at first review. Errors include procedural violations (identified in 74% of all applications), missing information (68%), slip-ups (44%) and discrepancies (25%). Important questions arise about why the level of error identified by RECs is so high, and about how errors of different types should be handled.

A-LOGIC is a full-length book (600+ pg). It functions as a system of logic designed to: 1) solve the standard paradoxes and major problems of standard mathematical logic; 2) minimize that logic's anomalies with respect to ordinary language, yet; 3) prove that all theorems in mathematical logic are tautologies. It covers lst order logic the logic of the words "and", "or", "not", "all" and "some". But it also has a non truth functional "if...then" and differs in its definition of validity, (...) its semantics and its theorems. In the book A-logic is contrasted step by step with standard mathematical logic as presented and defended by Quine. All of standard logic's theorems are proven tautologies in A-logic. But some argument-forms called "valid" in standard logic are not valid in A-logic -- notably non-sequiturs like "(P and not-P), therefore Q". In addition A-logic has many tautologies with its non-truthfunctional "if ... then" that standard logic can not derive -- e.g., "Not-(if P&Q then not-P)." A-logic's semantics is based on syntactically defined concepts of logical synonymy and containment of meanings rather than on truth-values and truth-functions. Its "if...then" sentences (called "C-conditionals") are valid if and only if (i) the meaning of the consequent is logically contained in that of the antecedent, and (ii) the antecedent and consequent are jointly consistent. The predicate "valid" holds only of C-conditionals and arguments. No valid C-conditionals are translatable into standard logic though all of them imply tautologies of standard logic. (shrink)

The capacities required for both peace and war predate 100,000 years ago in the genus Homo are deeply entangled in the modes by which humans physically and perceptually construct their worlds and communities, and may not be sufficiently captured by economic models.

Completely revised and updated in its Second Edition, Language and Reality provides students, philosophers and cognitive scientists with a lucid and provocative introduction to the philosophy of language.

Two separate regulatory regimes govern research with adults who lack capacity to consent in England and Wales: the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) 2005 and the Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Regulations 2004 (“the Regulations”). A service evaluation was conducted to investigate how research ethics committees (RECs) are interpreting the requirements. With the use of a coding scheme and qualitative software, a sample of REC decision letters where applicants indicated that their project involved adults who lacked mental capacity was analysed. (...) The analysis focuses on 45 letters about projects covered by the MCA and 12 letters about projects covered by the Regulations. The legal requirements for involving incapacitated adults in research were not consistently interpreted correctly. Letters often lacked explicitness and clarity. Neither consent nor assent from third parties is a legally valid concept for purposes of the MCA, yet they were suggested or endorsed in 10 post-MCA letters, and there was evidence of confusion about the consultee processes. The correct terms were also not consistently used in relation to clinical trials. Inappropriate use of terms such as “relative” had the potential to exclude people eligible to be consulted. Unless the correct terms and legal concepts are used in research projects, there is potential for confusion and for exclusion of people who are eligible to be consulted about involvement of adults who lack capacity. Improved clarity, explicitness and accuracy are needed when submitting and reviewing applications for ethical review of research in this area. (shrink)

This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field. The editors' introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, to feminist perspectives on prominent subfields of philosophy. The (...) first section contains chapters that explore feminist philosophical engagement with mainstream and marginalized histories and traditions, while the second section parses feminist philosophy's contributions to with numerous philosophical subfields, for example metaphysics and bioethics. A third section explores what feminist philosophy can illuminate about crucial moral and political issues of identity, gender, the body, autonomy, prisons, among numerous others. The Handbook concludes with the field's engagement with other theories and movements, including trans studies, queer theory, critical race, theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. The volume provides a rigorous but accessible resource for students and scholars who are interested in feminist philosophy, and how feminist philosophers situate their work in relation to the philosophical mainstream and other disciplines. Above all it aims to showcase the rich diversity of subject matter, approach, and method among feminist philosophers. (shrink)

This volume represents the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of canonical readings in theory of knowledge. It is ideal as a reader for all courses in epistemology.

Delivered at Tale University,. WE celebrate today the auspicious conclusion of a great administration. For twenty-two years President Hadley has served the ...