I argue that moral goodness is necessarily self-predicating. That is to say, the property of being morally good is morally good. I then argue that reductions of moral goodness to natural properties, particularly utilitarian specifications, are not necessarily self-predicating. Therefore, such reductions are not successful. Finally, I consider the possibility of defining the good as “fulfilling God’s design plan.” I show that, under an Aristotelian construal of property existence this property is provably self-predicating.

In this paper I shall attempt to argue for the simple view of personal identity. I shall first argue that we often do have warrant for our beliefs that we exist as continuing subjects of experience, and that these beliefs are justified independently of any reductionist analysis of what it means to be a person. This has two important implications that are relevant to the ongoing debate concerning the number of persons that are in existence throughout any duration in time: (...) (1) the lack of logically or metaphysically necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing one person from another should imply neither that there is only one person nor that personhood is not individuative; and (2) the lack of such universally applicable identity criteria should not imply that the term ‘person’ is a folk term with no real application. In other words, lack of reductionist analysis does not entail lack of existence. (shrink)

In his paper, “Identity Statements and Essentialism,” Loux seeks to demonstrate sortal essentialism based on Frege’s thesis that all statements of number concerning a collection require that the members fall under the same sortal concept. I shall attempt to argue that a detailed analysis of Loux’s argument reveals it as failing to imply the type of sortal dependency thesis necessary for the justification of sortal essentialism. However, if one construes the transworld identity relation as no different from our run of (...) the mill identity relation, then his argument can serve as the basis for a proof of a type of nontrivial essentialism, thereby showing that the possible worlds picture of modality is indeed committed to a robust essentialism. (shrink)

There are two possible positions with regard to the Mycenaean hegemony: that it existed or that it did not. Modern scholars who accept its existence appear to be more vocal in arguing their position than are those who question the existence of Mycenaean unity. Desborough, for example, states forcibly:I am firmly convinced that there was one ruler over the whole Mycenaean territory, with his capital at Mycenae, although the tablets are of no assistance one way or the other in this (...) matter, and although the overlordship of Agamemnon clearly envisaged by Homer can perhaps be explained simply as a military leadership for the purpose of waging war against Troy. The burden of proof must therefore depend on other evidence, the archaeological material taken in conjunction with the fairly frequent mention by the Hittites, in the fourteenth and much of the thirteenth centuries, of the king of a land called Ahhiyawa, which I believe to represent the entire Mycenaean orbit.The opposite position is represented largely through hints given in a larger context. Stubbings, for example, writes of ‘the Mycenaean Greeks of the mainland and the Mycenaean rulers of Cnossus’ and of ‘the mainland kingdoms’. Catling speaks of ‘metropolitan Greeks grown jealous of the wealth and power which their Knossian relatives had built up’. This emphasis on plurality, it seems to me, is the best way not only to view the events of the Mycenaean Greek world but also to understand the nature and degree of change in Greece during the Dark Age period. (shrink)

Sometime in 1355 the Northumbrian knight Sir Thomas Gray, meditating an ambition to write a history of England during his imprisonment by the Scots in Edinburgh, dreamed a dream. In it a Sibyl appears, to tutor him in his historical project. She takes him to a ladder leaning against a high wall in an orchard. As he climbs each of four rungs, he sees, through an opening in the wall, Walter, archdeacon of Exeter; Bede; the author of the Polychronicon (...) ; and the vicar of Tynemouth, author of the Historia aurea. The Sibyl explains that these writers cover the respective stages of insular history. The fifth and last rung concerns the future and is not for Sir Thomas to climb—the Sibyl quotes two prophecies, one by Merlin, and observes that deciphering them should be left to the divines. When the Sibyl instructs Gray to call his work Scalacronica— referring thus not only to the scaling ladder he is standing on but to his family arms—she makes his task clear: his history is to traverse the periods represented by the four figures and others, in a compilatory work. (shrink)

Benardete paradoxes involve infinite collections of Grim Reapers, assassins, demons, deafening peals, or even sentences. These paradoxes have recently been used in arguments for finitist metaphysical theses such as temporal finitism, causal finitism, and discrete views of time. Here we develop a new finite Benardete-like paradox. We then use this paradox to defend a companions in guilt argument that challenges recent applications of patchwork principles on behalf of the aforementioned finitist arguments. Finally, we develop another problem for those applications by (...) examining the notion of exact duplication. (shrink)

The following is not a successful skeptical scenario: you think you know you have hands, but maybe you don't! Why is that a failure, when it's far more likely than, say, the evil genius hypothesis? That's the question.<br><br>This is an earlier draft.

Low birth weight, intrauterine growth retardation, and prematurity are overwhelming risk factors associated with infant mortality and morbidity. The lack of efficacious prenatal screening tests for these three outcomes illuminates the problems inherent in bivariate estimates of association. A biocultural strategy for research is presented, integrating societal and familial levels of analysis with the metabolic, immune, vascular, and neuroendocrine systems of the body. Policy decisions, it is argued, need to be based on this type of biocultural information in order to (...) impact the difficult-to-change problems of low birth weight, intrauterine growth retardation, and prematurity. (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

Attempts to capture the distinction between categorical and dispositional states in terms of more primitive modal notions – subjunctive conditionals, causal roles, or combinatorial principles – are bound to fail. Such failure is ensured by a deep symmetry in the ways dispositional and categorical states alike carry modal import. But the categorical/dispositional distinction should not be abandoned; it underpins important metaphysical disputes. Rather, it should be taken as a primitive, after which the doomed attempts at reductive explanation can be transformed (...) into circular but interesting accounts. (shrink)

As computers became multi-component systems in the 1950s, handling the speed differentials efficiently was identified as a major challenge. The desire for better understanding and control of ‘concurrency’ spread into hardware, software, and formalism. This paper examines the way in which the problem emerged and was handled across various computing cultures from 1955 to 1985. In the machinic culture of the late 1950s, system programs called ‘monitors’ were used for directly managing synchronisation. Attempts to reframe synchronisation in the subsequent algorithmic (...) culture pushed the problem to a higher level of abstraction; Dijkstra’s semaphores were a reaction to the algorithms’ complexity. Towards the end of the 1960s, the culture of ‘structured programming’ created a milieu in which Dijkstra, Hoare, and Brinch Hansen (among others) aimed for a concurrency primitive which embodied the new view of programming. Via conditional critical regions and Dijkstra’s ‘secretaries’, the co-produced ‘monitor’ appeared to provide the desired encapsulation. The construct received embodiment in a few programming languages; this paper ends by considering Modula and Concurrent Pascal. (shrink)

Several conceptual and methodological challenges must be solved in order to create knowledge that can be useful to pregnant women, their families, and any clinicians who serve them: (1) going beyond nominal and ordinal hypotheses and presenting estimates of conditional probabilities; (2) focusing on clearly defined outcomes; (3) modeling the relationship of fetal growth and length of gestation; (4) understanding the process of fetal growth even though most of our data is cross-sectional; (5) estimating the independent effects of genetics, race, (...) ethnicity, maternal risk behaviors, medical prenatal care, and socioeconomic status on fetal growth and length of gestation; and (6) estimating the independent effects of maternal pre-pregnancy weight, weight gain during pregnancy, and nutrition on fetal growth and length of gestation. (shrink)

"Something in between : on the nature of love" -- Love's blindness (1) : love's closed heart -- Love's blindness (2) : love's friendly eye -- Beyond comparison -- Commitments, values, and frameworks -- Valuing persons -- Love and morality -- Afterword. Between the universal and the particular.

Reductionists about dispositions must either say the natural properties are all dispositional or individuate properties hyperintensionally. Lewis stands in as an example of the sort of combination I think is incoherent: properties individuated by modal profile + categoricalism.

This paper argues for a permissivism of personal rationality, a rationality concerning the epistemic evaluation of persons. I work from the perspective of virtue epistemology where the standards of evaluation are the intellectual character virtues. On this picture, an agent is personally rational in having a doxastic attitude when having it is the result of some exemplification of an intellectual virtue. Permissive cases arise when the emotional components of intellectual virtues conflict, making some potential conclusions both enabled and disabled for (...) the agent. The agent is left in a confusion needing resolution, but if each of these conflicting emotions are components of intellectual virtues, then she has multiple personally rational options. This grounds a potential case of a permissivism of personal rationality, but this should be interesting to epistemologists in general since opting for one of the sides of this conflict leads an agent to have different doxastic attitudes. (shrink)

The process-dissociation procedure has been used in a variety of experimental contexts to assess the contributions of conscious and unconscious processes to task performance. To evaluate whether motivation affects estimates of conscious and unconscious processes, participants were given incentives to follow inclusion and exclusion instructions in a perception task and a memory task. Relative to a control condition in which no performance incentives were given, the results for the perception task indicated that incentives increased the participants' ability to exclude previously (...) presented information, which in turn both increased the estimate of conscious processes and decreased the estimate of unconscious processes. However, the results also indicated that incentives did not influence estimates of conscious or unconscious processes in the memory task. The findings suggest that the process-dissociation procedure is relatively immune to influences of motivation when used with a memory task, but that caution should be exercised when the process-dissociation is used with a perception task. (shrink)

An extended critical investigation of Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN). -/- I wrote this a couple of years ago as a way of thinking through the argument, but now lack the ambition to revise it into a paper. (It's too long to be a paper, too short and too narrowly focused on one person's argument to be a book.) Rather than let it age in private, I'm sharing it publicly for anyone interested in Plantinga's argument.

Abstract:Business ethicists are eager to connect the ethical treatment of stakeholders with financial rewards. However, little attention has been paid to the cultural and industry context that influences how stakeholders are regarded by the firm, and how innovative strategies for engaging stakeholders can help a firm outperform its competitors. By reconnecting stakeholder theory to its roots in the field of strategy, we provide a framework for understanding the dynamic interplay between stakeholder relationships, innovation, and competitive advantage. The result is a (...) set of testable propositions aimed at better characterizing when and how “ethics pays” (Paine 2003). (shrink)

Knowledge as a Feeling offers new reflective and metacognitive tools that help meet this moment in the evolution of our information ecosystem. The book has significant implications for information science, challenging theoreticians and practitioners to reconsider how individuals process information.

This study explores models of how people perceive moral aspects of socio‐scientific issues. Thirty college students participated in interviews during which they discussed their reactions to and resolutions of two genetic engineering issues. The interview data were analyzed qualitatively to produce an emergent taxonomy of moral concerns recognized by the participant. The participants expressed sensitivity to moral aspects including concern and empathy for the well‐being of others, an aversion to altering the natural order and slippery slope implications. In arriving at (...) their final resolutions, many participants integrated their moral concerns with non‐moral factors. The patterns revealed suggest that moral and non‐moral concerns act in concert as they influence socio‐scientific decision‐making. (shrink)

Abstract:Business ethicists are eager to connect the ethical treatment of stakeholders with financial rewards. However, little attention has been paid to the cultural and industry context that influences how stakeholders are regarded by the firm, and how innovative strategies for engaging stakeholders can help a firm outperform its competitors. By reconnecting stakeholder theory to its roots in the field of strategy, we provide a framework for understanding the dynamic interplay between stakeholder relationships, innovation, and competitive advantage. The result is a (...) set of testable propositions aimed at better characterizing when and how “ethics pays” (Paine 2003). (shrink)

"In this fresh critique of Rawls’s political liberalism, Dostert offers a bold and stimulating account of the political potential of religion that actually enhances the prospects of a genuinely democratic public discourse. Drawing lessons from the civil rights movement to the Jubilee 2000 effort, _Beyond Political Liberalism_ presents a profoundly hopeful challenge to the ways of thinking about liberalism and religion that dominate both political science and religious studies today. Setting aside worn diatribes and tattered dichotomies, _Beyond Political Liberalism _constructs (...) a promising vision of religion's role in liberal society that will be of interest to anyone concerned about the future of contemporary western culture." —_Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary_ "This is a fine book. It is clearly written, accessible to a broad audience, and of special relevance now, both in academia and in the larger political and intellectual culture." —_Eldon Eisenach, University of Tulsa_ In _Beyond Political Liberalism,_ Troy Dostert offers a critical examination of political liberalism, the approach to liberal political theory advanced most forcefully in the later work of John Rawls. Political liberalism's defenders claim that an “overlapping consensus” of shared values holds out the strongest prospects for regulating democratic politics in light of our moral diversity. Dostert contends, however, that the attempt to establish such a consensus in fact works to restrict and control the presence of religious and other moral perspectives that can ennoble and invigorate public life. Dostert argues that there is a steep price to be paid for this conception of politics, for what results is a political vision characterized by a profound distrust and fear of citizens' comprehensive convictions—the animating source of many citizens' political activity. He suggests that a “post-secular” ethics is a more appropriate response to moral diversity than restricting and managing the presence of religion and other moral perspectives in public life. By drawing on the religious witness of the civil rights movement and the work of theologian John Howard Yoder, Dostert elucidates several core dialogic practices and illustrates their value through a consideration of the contemporary debates surrounding international debt relief and abortion. (shrink)

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from (...) individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration. (shrink)