Social Phenomenology offers an account of collective intentionality informed by the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology.

Our world can be a bewildering place. The sense of awe and wonder at the states of affairs in which we find ourselves immersed give rise to philosophical questions. Philosophical reflection is a critical attempt to come to grips with our place in the world and the various problems we encounter in respect to the complexities encountered in everyday life. In the most basic terms, phenomenology is the study of the structures and relations of phenomena. Phenomenology begins from a descriptive (...) analysis of our experiences of the world. It grants precedent to the first person perspective-how phenomena appear to consciousness. There are any number of problems related to the plenitude of kinds of experiences which confront us through the course of our lives, in addition to the structure of consciousness itself. This volume presents a variety of views on a number of the phenomena of our everyday lives, offering positions on such things from the nature of consciousness to the structures of religious or political experiences. Its appeal, however, should not be limited to philosophers alone-given that all persons can relate to the subject matter of the essays. For instance, one author asks, "what is friendship?" The present work may also be understood as a gesture toward bridging the division between the valuable insights of continental and analytic philosophical traditions. The authors include a combination of established academics, such as Jeffrey Wattles-the best-selling author of The Golden Rule-and young scholars from varied philosophical backgrounds. This collection is divided into four sections: (I) Foundational Elements of Experience; (II) The Experiencing Subject: What is it to be a Subject?; (III) Amongst Others: The Social World; and (IV) Social Objects and Institutions. Each section represents a level of experience, from the most basic structures of experience, to the subject's experience of the world and objects in it, to experiences and interactions with others, ending at the results of the codifications of certain social practices and beliefs. The sections treat their respective topics principally, even if they share material with other essays. Our experiences of the life-world, the world of human praxis, contain a multiplicity of elements; the divisions of this work are meant to demarcate various types of phenomena, not to offer any definitive thesis regarding a hierarchy or structure of relations. (shrink)

In The Expanse, Naomi Nagata, the Roci's XO and engineering marvel, is a person caught between worlds, someone torn in multiple directions by the social situations she finds herself immersed in. Throughout the series, she embodies multiplicitous subjectivity. In Nemesis Games Naomi Nagata experiences the kind of inner conflict of the self that can occur in moving between worlds. Internal conflict illuminates the multiple worlds Naomi inhabits. Just as one can travel between Earth and Mars, “one can ‘travel’ between these (...) [social] ‘worlds.’” Unlike places such as Earth and Mars, with worlds in the social sense, “one can inhabit more than one of these ‘worlds’ at the very same time.” In framing spaces of meaning, the establishment of borders between worlds creates borderlands. (shrink)

The Analysis of Wonder is a stimulating and worthy introduction to the difficult and unique thought of Nicolai Hartmann. In this venue, the focus is upon criticisms of Cicovacki’s book. The opportunity to elicit further clarification and argumentation from Cicovacki should be fruitful. Hartmann’s philosophy is truly unique in nature and vast. As such, it is worth noting at the outset that, given the nature of Cicovacki’s book and a lack of deeper familiarity with Hartmann’s philosophy, the concerns raised herein (...) may very well be issues in Hartmann that Cicovacki is replicating. The criticisms addressed herein present five sets of worries related to The Analysis of Wonder. The first three may be relatively minor concerns having to do with what is meant by the rediscovery of the world; Cicovacki’s criticisms of post-modernism and existentialism; and Cicovacki’s use of Arendt as a way of framing Hartmann’s value to contemporary philosophy and beyond. The latter two sets of worries are more substantive. They involve Hartmann’s account of the importance of a loving attitude and Hartmann’s theory of personality. Again, these are presented in the spirit of an invitation to dialogue more about Hartmann, a figure who Cicovacki represents well in The Analysis of Wonder. (shrink)

The LEGO Movie provides more ways to think about the nature of autonomy and how others can either help or hinder one's development. At the beginning of The LEGO Movie, Emmet Brickowoski is an extreme case of someone who is not autonomous. Emmet is also contrasted with the Master Builders, who are autonomous, making decisions for themselves with confidence and gusto. When Emmet comes into his own as The Special, it is only with the help of others. Emmet begins his (...) development by convincing the Master Builders to follow his plan. Among them, only he has the capacity to really understand others' expectations in a way that will result in a successful plan to stop Lord Business's plot. Wyldstyle experiences a development similar to Emmet's. Her given name is Lucy, and she molds her personality to others' expectations. Wyldstyle's case examines what might be missing in the Master Builders. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to Eric Chelstrom’s “Criticism of Cicovacki’s The Analysis of Wonder.” Chelstrom mostly critiques my reconstruction of the role of love and personality in Hartmann’s philosophy. I offer a defense of my interpretation by illuminating how Hartmann’s philosophical project differs from that of Kant. Although Hartmann does not sufficiently develop either his conception of love or his understanding of personality, I argue that both conceptions could be further elaborated and that they could serve (...) as the ways to reintroduce Hartmann into the mainstream of the current philosophical discussion. (shrink)

There continues to be a vigorous public debate in our society about the status of climate science. Much of the skepticism voiced in this debate suffers from a lack of understanding of how the science works - in particular the complex interdisciplinary scientific modeling activities such as those which are at the heart of climate science. In this book Eric Winsberg shows clearly and accessibly how philosophy of science can contribute to our understanding of climate science, and how it (...) can also shape climate policy debates and provide a starting point for research. Covering a wide range of topics including the nature of scientific data, modeling, and simulation, his book provides a detailed guide for those willing to look beyond ideological proclamations, and enriches our understanding of how climate science relates to important concepts such as chaos, unpredictability, and the extent of what we know. (shrink)

Introduction -- Sanctioning models : theories and their scope -- Methodology for a virtual world -- A tale of two methods -- When theories shake hands -- Models of climate : values and uncertainties -- Reliability without truth -- Conclusion.

When we say we 'act for a reason', what do we mean? And what do reasons have to do with being good or bad? Introducing readers to a foundational topic in ethics, Eric Wiland considers the reasons for which we act. You do things for reasons, and reasons in some sense justify what you do. Further, your reasons belong to you, and you know the reasons for which you act in a distinctively first-personal way. Wiland lays out and critically (...) reviews some of the most popular contemporary accounts of how reasons can function in all these ways, accounts such as psychologism, factualism, hybrid theories, constitutivist theories, and finally Anscombean views of reasons. Reasons also includes a brief guide to further reading to help readers master this important topic in contemporary writing in ethics and the philosophy of action. (shrink)

Over the last several years, there has been an explosion of interest and attention devoted to the problem of Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) in climate science—that is, to giving quantitative estimates of the degree of uncertainty associated with the predictions of global and regional climate models. The technical challenges associated with this project are formidable, and so the statistical community has understandably devoted itself primarily to overcoming them. But even as these technical challenges are being met, a number of persistent conceptual (...) difficulties remain. So why is UQ so important in climate science? UQ, I would like to argue, is first and foremost a tool for communicating knowledge from experts to policy makers in a way that is meant to be free from the influence of social and ethical values. But the standard ways of using probabilities to separate ethical and social values from scientific practice cannot be applied in a great deal of climate modeling, because the roles of values in creating the models cannot be discerned after the fact—the models are too complex and the result of too much distributed epistemic labor. I argue, therefore, that typical approaches for handling ethical/social values in science do not work well here. (shrink)

In the philosophy of climate science, debate surrounding the issue of variety of evidence has mostly taken the form of attempting to connect these issues in climate science and climate modeling with philosophical accounts of what has come to be known as “robustness analysis.” I argue that an “explanatory” conception of robustness is the best candidate for understanding variety of evidence in climate science. I apply the analysis to both examples of model agreement, as well at to the convergence of (...) evidence from both model and non-model sources. (shrink)

In computer simulations of physical systems, the construction of models is guided, but not determined, by theory. At the same time simulations models are often constructed precisely because data are sparse. They are meant to replace experiments and observations as sources of data about the world; hence they cannot be evaluated simply by being compared to the world. So what can be the source of credibility for simulation models? I argue that the credibility of a simulation model comes not only (...) from the credentials supplied to it by the governing theory, but also from the antecedently established credentials of the model building techniques employed by the simulationists. In other words, there are certain sorts of model building techniques which are taken, in and of themselves, to be reliable. Some of these model building techniques, moreover, incorporate what are sometimes called “falsifications.” These are contrary-to-fact principles that are included in a simulation model and whose inclusion is taken to increase the reliability of the results. The example of a falsification that I consider, called artificial viscosity, is in widespread use in computational fluid dynamics. Artificial viscosity, I argue, is a principle that is successfully and reliably used across a wide domain of fluid dynamical applications, but it does not offer even an approximately “realistic” or true account of fluids. Artificial viscosity, therefore, is a counter-example to the principle that success implies truth – a principle at the foundation of scientific realism. It is an example of reliability without truth. (shrink)

We often rely on others for guidance about what to do. But wouldn't it be better to rely instead on only your own solo judgment? Deferring to others about moral matters, after all, can seem to conflict what Enlightenment demands. In Guided by Voices, however, Eric Wiland argues that there is nothing especially bad about relying on others in forming your moral views. You may rely on others for forming your moral views, just as you can your views about (...) anything else. You can accept moral testimony without loss. Furthermore, there are several distinctive social goods attainable by being guided by what others say. Thus, it can be better to be guided by moral testimony than by your own moral lights. Wiland also argues that relying on others for moral advice has one advantage over relying on others for moral testimony. For when you trust your adviser's advice, you both thereby form a joint agent that can achieve autonomy, moral understanding, and morally worthy action. Sometimes taking another's advice is your only way to act well. Arguing against the presumption that moral reasoning is ideally done alone, Guided by Voices is the first book to significantly address both moral testimony and advice. (shrink)

This paper develops a compositional, type-driven constraint semantic theory for a fragment of the language of subjective uncertainty. In the particular application explored here, the interpretation function of constraint semantics yields not propositions but constraints on credal states as the semantic values of declarative sentences. Constraints are richer than propositions in that constraints can straightforwardly represent assessments of the probability that the world is one way rather than another. The richness of constraints helps us model communicative acts in essentially the (...) same way that we model agents’ credences. Moreover, supplementing familiar truth-conditional theories of epistemic modals with constraint semantics helps capture contrasts between strong necessity and possibility modals, on the one hand, and weak necessity modals, on the other. (shrink)

Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity, in the form of logic and language, philosophy is exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled with. Even more outrageous than this claim, though, is the blatant denial of its obvious truth by many practicing philosophers. The No-Progress view is explored and argued for here. Its denial is diagnosed as a form of anosognosia, a (...) mental condition where the affected person denies there is any problem. The theories of two eminent philosophers supporting the No-Progress view are also examined. The final section offers an explanation for philosophy 's inability to solve any philosophical problem, ever. The paper closes with some reflections on philosophy 's future. (shrink)

We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country's most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of (...) various forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls's wake.--. (shrink)

In the debate on the ethics of the non-medical use of pharmaceuticals for cognitive performance enhancement in healthy individuals there is a clear division between those who view “cognitive enhancement” as ethically unproblematic and those who see such practices as fraught with ethical problems. Yet another, more subtle issue, relates to the relevance and quality of the contribution of scholarly bioethics to this debate. More specifically, how have various forms of speculation, anticipatory ethics, and methods to predict scientific trends and (...) societal responses augmented or diminished this contribution? In this paper, we use the discussion of the ethics of cognitive enhancement to explore the positive and negative contribution of speculation in bioethics scholarship. First, we review and discuss how speculation has relied on different sets of assumptions regarding the non-medical use of stimulants, namely: terminology and framing; scientific aspects such as efficacy and safety; estimates of prevalence and consequent normalization; and the need for normative reflection and regulatory guidelines. Second, three methodological guideposts are proposed to alleviate some of the pitfalls of speculation: acknowledge assumptions more explicitly and identify the value attributed to assumptions; validate assumptions with interdisciplinary literature; and adopt a broad perspective to promote more comprehensive reflection. We conclude that, through the examination of the controversy about cognitive enhancement, we can employ these methodological guideposts to enhance the value of contributions from bioethics and minimize potential epistemic and practical pitfalls in this case and perhaps in other areas of bioethical debate. (shrink)

In a large and impressive body of published work, Quayshawn Spencer has meticulously articulated and defended a metaphysical project aimed at resuscitating a biological conception of race—one free from many of the pitfalls of biological essentialism. If successful, such a project would be highly rewarding, since it would provide a compelling response to philosophers who have denied the genuine existence of race while avoiding the very dangers that they sought to avoid. The aim of this paper is to subject those (...) moves to careful scrutiny and thereby appraise the prospects for a new biologism about race. (shrink)

This book uncovers a logical structure that is common to many, if not all, of the kinds posited by scientific taxonomies. Specification relations, such as those holding between determinates and determinables (determination), are central to this logical investigation of kinds. The species–genus relation is a familiar specification relation for substantival kinds, but this book focuses on adjectival kinds—whose instances are properties—instead. Determination relations are then used to structure kinds at the same level of abstraction into property spaces, which in turn (...) leads to a theory for individuating properties (tropes). These determination relations are contrasted with realization relations, the latter being the favored way of understanding the connection between the mental and the physical. Particular attention is given to the distinction between multiple realizability and multiple determination, and it is argued that determination and realization are mutually exclusive. The claim that multiple realizability entails various senses of autonomy is defended from various reductionist challenges. These theories of determination and realization then provide general standards for establishing the autonomy of the special sciences or, conversely, their reduction. (shrink)

Remembrance of Things Past In 1943 I had arrived at a dead-end in my attempts to find a theory of man, society, and history that would permit an adequate ...

Presenting a comprehensive portrayal of the reading of Chinese and Buddhist philosophy in early 20th-century German thought, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in early Twentieth-Century German Thought examines the implications of these readings for contemporary issues in comparative and intercultural philosophy. Through a series of case studies from the late 19th-century and early 20th-century, Eric Nelson focuses on the reception and uses of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism in German philosophy, covering figures as diverse as Buber, Heidegger, and Misch. He argues (...) that the growing intertextuality between traditions cannot be appropriately interpreted through notions of exclusive identities, closed horizons, or unitary traditions. Providing an account of the context, motivations, and hermeneutical strategies of early twentieth-century European thinkers' interpretation of Asian philosophy, Nelson also throws new light on the question of the relation between Heidegger and Asian philosophy. Reflecting the growing interest in the possibility of intercultural and global philosophy, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in early Twentieth-Century German Thought opens up the possibility of a more inclusive intercultural conception of philosophy. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/chinese-and-buddhist-philosophy-in-early-twentieth-century-german-thoug ht-9781350002562/#sthash.1lY6OTYj.dpuf. (shrink)

A successful theory of the language of subjective uncertainty would meet several important constraints. First, it would explain how use of the language of subjective uncertainty affects addressees’ states of subjective uncertainty. Second, it would explain how such use affects what possibilities are treated as live for purposes of conversation. Third, it would accommodate 'quantifying in' to the scope of epistemic modals. Fourth, it would explain the norms governing the language of subjective uncertainty, and the differences between them and the (...) norms governing the language of subjective certainty. Neither truth conditional nor traditional force modfier theories of the language of subjective uncertainty look adequate to the task of satisfying all four of these constraints. (shrink)

I describe a phenomenon that has not yet been described in the epistemology literature. I label this phenomenon expression-style exclusion. Expression-style exclusion is an example of how s...

Self-deception poses longstanding and fascinating paradoxes. Philosophers have questioned whether, and how, self-deception is even possible; evolutionary theorists have debated whether it is adaptive. For Sigmund Freud self-deception was a fundamental key to understanding the unconscious, and from The Bible to The Great Gatsby literature abounds with characters renowned for their self-deception. But what exactly is self-deception? Why is it so puzzling? How is it performed? And is it harmful? ...

Violations of the Bell inequalities in EPR-Bohm type experiments have set the literature on the metaphysics of microscopic systems to flirting with some sort of metaphysical holism regarding spatially separated, entangled systems. The rationale for this behavior comes in two parts. The first part relies on the proof, due to Jon Jarrett [2] that the experimentally observed violations of the Bell inequalities entail violations of the conjunction of two probabilistic constraints. Jarrett called these two constraints locality and completeness. We prefer (...) the terminology of locality and factorizability.[3] The first part of the rationale for metaphysical holism urges that only Jarrett’s locality allows for “peaceful coexistence” between any model of EPR-Bohm type experiments and special relativity. Factorizability, it is suggested, must be jettisoned. (shrink)

Statistical Mechanics (SM) involves probabilities. At the same time, most approaches to the foundations of SM—programs whose goal is to understand the macroscopic laws of thermal physics from the point of view of microphysics—are classical; they begin with the assumption that the underlying dynamical laws that govern the microscopic furniture of the world are (or can without loss of generality be treated as) deterministic. This raises some potential puzzles about the proper interpretation of these probabilities. It also raises, more generally, (...) the question of what kinds, if any, of objective probabilities can exist in a deterministic world. (shrink)

" Dr. Cassell discusses the world of the sick, the healing connection and healer's battle, the role of omnipotence in the healer's art, illness and disease, and ...

With the originality and energy that have marked his earlier works, Eric Wolf now explores the historical relationship of ideas, power, and culture. Responding to anthropology's long reliance on a concept of culture that takes little account of power, Wolf argues that power is crucial in shaping the circumstances of cultural production. Responding to social-science notions of ideology that incorporate power but disregard the ways ideas respond to cultural promptings, he demonstrates how power and ideas connect through the medium (...) of culture. Wolf advances his argument by examining three very different societies, each remarkable for its flamboyant ideological expressions: the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, the Aztecs of pre-Hispanic Mexico, and National Socialist Germany. Tracing the history of each case, he shows how these societies faced tensions posed by ecological, social, political, or psychological crises, prompting ideological responses that drew on distinctive, historically rooted cultural understandings. In each case study, Wolf analyzes how the regnant ideology intertwines with power around the pivotal relationships that govern social labor. Anyone interested in the history of anthropology or in how the social sciences make comparisons will want to join Wolf in _Envisioning Power_. (shrink)

How did the value of freedom become so closely associated with the institution of the market? Why did the idea of market freedom hold so little appeal before the modern period and how can we explain its rise to dominance? In The Invention of Market Freedom, Eric MacGilvray addresses these questions by contrasting the market conception of freedom with the republican view that it displaced. After analyzing the ethical core and exploring the conceptual complexity of republican freedom, MacGilvray shows (...) how this way of thinking was confronted with, altered in response to, and finally overcome by the rise of modern market societies. By learning to see market freedom as something that was invented, we can become more alert to the ways in which the appeal to freedom shapes and distorts our thinking about politics. (shrink)

This article discusses some of the ways in which natural language can express modal information – information which is, to a first approximation, about what could be or must be the case, as opposed to being about what actually is the case. It motivates, explains, and raises problems for Angelika Kratzer's influential theory of modal auxiliaries, and introduces a new approach to one important debate about the relationships between modality, evidentiality, context change, and imperative force.

This paper explores some connections between competing conceptions of scientific laws on the one hand, and a problem in the foundations of statistical mechanics on the other. I examine two proposals for understanding the time asymmetry of thermodynamic phenomenal: David Albert's recent proposal and a proposal that I outline based on Hans Reichenbach's “branch systems”. I sketch an argument against the former, and mount a defense of the latter by showing how to accommodate statistical mechanics to recent developments in the (...) philosophy of scientific laws. (shrink)

In his original semantics for counterfactuals, David Lewis presupposed that the ordering of worlds relevant to the evaluation of a counterfactual admitted no incomparability between worlds. He later came to abandon this assumption. But the approach to incomparability he endorsed makes counterintuitive predictions about a class of examples circumscribed in this paper. The same underlying problem is present in the theories of modals and conditionals developed by Bas van Fraassen, Frank Veltman, and Angelika Kratzer. I show how to reformulate all (...) these theories in terms of lower bounds on partial preorders, conceived of as maximal antichains, and I show that treating lower bounds as cutsets does strictly better at capturing our intuitions about the semantics of modals, counterfactuals, and deontic conditionals. (shrink)

This paper presents and discusses a range of counterexamples to the common view that quantifiers cannot take scope over epistemic modals. Some of the counterexamples raise problems for ‘force modifier’ theories of epistemic modals. Some of the counterexamples raise problems for Robert Stalnaker’s theory of counterfactuals, according to which a special kind of epistemic modal must be able to scope over a whole counterfactual. Finally, some of the counterexamples suggest that David Lewis must countenance ‘would’ counterfactuals in which a covert (...) ‘would’ scopes over the whole consequent of the counterfactual, including an overt ‘might.’. (shrink)

In some contexts, not saying S generates a conversational implicature: that the speaker didn’t have sufficient reason, all things considered, to say S. I call this an omissive implicature. Standard ways of thinking about conversational implicature make the importance and even the existence of omissive implicatures somewhat surprising. But I argue that there is no principled reason to deny that there are such implicatures, and that they help explain a range of important phenomena. This paper focuses on the roles omissive (...) implicatures play in Quantity implicatures—in particular, in solving the symmetry problem for scalar implicatures—and on the political and social importance of omissions where apologies, objections, or other communicative acts are expected or warranted. (shrink)

Don Marquis’s “future-like-ours” argument against the moral permissibility of abortion is widely considered the strongest anti-abortion argument in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address the issue of whether the argument relies upon controversial metaphysical premises. It is widely thought that future-like-ours argument indeed relies upon controversial metaphysics, in that it must reject the psychological theory of personal identity. I argue that that thought is mistaken—the future-like-ours argument does not depend upon the rejection of such a theory. I suggest, (...) however, that given a widely-accepted view about contraception and abstinence, the argument is committed to contentious metaphysics after all, as it relies upon a highly controversial assumption about mereology. This commitment is not only relevant for those who are inclined to endorse the argument but reject the mereological view in question, but in addition entails dialectical and epistemological liabilities for the argument, which on some views will be fatal to the argument’s overall success. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that many intriguing features of indicative conditionals aren’t shared by subjunctive conditionals. Subjunctive morphology is common in discussions of wishes and wants, however, and conditionals are commonly used in such discussions as well. As a result such discussions are a good place to look for subjunctive conditionals that exhibit features usually associated with indicatives alone. Here I offer subjunctive versions of J. L. Austin’s ‘biscuit’ conditionals—e.g., “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them”—and subjunctive (...) versions of Allan Gibbard’s ‘stand-off’ or ‘Sly Pete’ conditionals, in which speakers with no relevant false beliefs can in the same context felicitously assert conditionals with the same antecedents and contradictory consequents. My cases undercut views according to which the indicative/subjunctive divide marks a great difference in the meaning of conditionals. They also make trouble for treatments of indicative conditionals that cannot readily be generalized to subjunctives. (shrink)

Summary A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” material others such as environments and animals; the (...) bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. “This is an extremely impressive, original, and thorough treatment of two key twentieth-century thinkers and their applicability to the most pressing social and political issues of our time.” — Jeffrey A. Bernstein, author of Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History “This book is an excellent and timely contribution to political and environmental philosophy, located around a nuanced historical and philosophical approach to Levinas and Adorno. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with these figures or with the current moment.” — Martin Shuster, author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. (shrink)

What is group well-being? There is, as of yet, shockingly little philosophical literature explicitly aiming to answer this question. This essay sketches some of the logical space of possible answers, and nudges us to seriously consider certain overlooked options. There are several importantly different ways the well-being of a collective or a group could be related to the well-being of the individuals who constitute it: 1) eliminativism, 2) functionalism, 3) partialism, or 4) the independent view. If the relation between individual (...) and collective well-being is either functional or partial, then we face a further question: What is the direction of constitutive dependence? Does the well-being of a group depend upon the well-being of the well-being of the individuals who compose it, or does the well-being of an individual depend upon the well-being of the groups to which they belong? Or both? These questions raise some puzzles that I begin to resolve. I conclude that there might be a wide variety of ways the well-being of a collective obtains, only some of which are related to the well-being of the individuals who are its members. In the end, I hope to vindicate the thought that an injury to one is an injury to all. (shrink)

Scientific modelling is a value-laden process: the decisions involved can seldom be made using 'scientific' criteria alone, but rather draw on social and ethical values. In this paper, we draw on a body of philosophical literature to analyze a COVID-19 vaccination model, presenting a case study of social and ethical value judgments in health-oriented modelling. This case study urges us to make value judgments in health-oriented models explicit and interpretable by non-experts and to invite public involvement in making them.

Many philosophical theories make comparisons between objects, events, states of affairs, worlds, or systems, and many such theories deliver plausible verdicts only if some of the elements they compare are ranked as ‘best.’ When the relevant ordering does not have such ‘best’ or ‘tied for best’ elements the theory wrongly falls silent or gives badly counterintuitive results. This paper develops ordering supervaluationism---a very general technique that allows any such theory to handle these problematic cases. Just as ordinary supervaluation helps us (...) save and generalize ‘uniqueness assuming’ theories, ordering supervaluationism helps us save and generalize ‘limit assuming’ theories. With so many otherwise attractive limit assuming theories, this is a sensible, methodologically conservative approach. (shrink)

It seems that we can know moral truths. We are also rather reluctant to defer to moral testimony. But it’s not obvious how moral cognitivism is compatible with pessimism about moral testimony. If moral truths are knowable, shouldn’t it be possible for others to know moral truths you don’t know, so that it is wise for you to defer to what they say? Or, alternatively, if it’s always reasonable to refuse to defer to the wisest among us, doesn’t this show (...) that morality is not genuinely cognitive? There is a tension in our commonsense moral epistemology. In this chapter I (a) explicate this tension, (b) criticize how others have attempted to resolve it, and finally (c) explain how Rossian deontology helps us see that the tension is only apparent: morality is indeed knowable, despite the fact that it is usually wise to refuse to defer to moral testimony. (shrink)