When people go shopping for gametes, their first and most important criterion is the donor's race. In so choosing, they are making wrong and invidious assumptions about what race is. They are also assuming that their child will develop her sense of self within those parameters. The effect is harmful both for children and for society at large. People should be able to recognize racial categories as they construct their own identities, but those categories should not limit their self‐identification from (...) the very outset. (shrink)

The Homeric influence on two prominent avian images in the parodos of the Agamemnon—the vulture simile and the omen of the eagles and the pregnant hare —has long been noted. In 1979 West suggested that the animal imagery also derived in part from Archilochus’ fable of the fox and the eagle , and his discussion was quickly welcomed and supplemented by Janko's reading of the eagle and snake imagery used by Orestes at Cho. 246–7. Capping this triennium mirabile of critical (...) interest in Aeschylus’ birds of prey, Davies argued that the convincing resemblances between the fable and the Aeschylean passages in West's thesis—the anthropomorphism implied in παίδων and δεγπνον and the concern of Zeus for aggrieved animals —derive more generally from the nature of fable rather than from any one particular tale. Thus we have, according to Davies, an example of Aeschylus ‘exploring the resources and familiar modes of expression of a popular and well-known genre’ and transforming it into ‘the purest and sublimest type of poetry’. (shrink)

On 7 April 2022 – coinciding with World Health Day – the British Medical Association launched its new report, Health and human rights in the new world order.1 Written during the global upheaval triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and published just weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the report responds to a range of emerging and intensifying threats to health-related human rights globally. As the report establishes, human rights in health and healthcare matter because human suffering, and its relief, (...) are fundamental moral issues. As relief of human suffering is the primary purpose of medicine, it follows that doctors and other health professionals are often active in times of human challenge and extremity. During conflict, humanitarian crises, and, as we have so recently seen, global public health emergencies, health professionals are essential to the response. But these crises – and the response to them – can put fundamental human rights and interests under pressure. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen sustained indiscriminate shelling of civilian infrastructure. Whether health facilities were directly targeted is moot – the indiscriminate nature of the assault means they will inevitably be hit. Not only is this a violation of the Geneva Conventions, it undermines fundamental human rights, not least of which the right to health. Destroying health infrastructure drives further suffering and delays post-conflict recovery. Public heath emergencies can rightly require draconian measures – social distancing, enforced isolation, location tracking, economic shutdown. Although we saw their necessity during the COVID-19 outbreak, concerns were raised about disproportionate restrictions on basic rights, including rights to privacy and liberty. Human Rights Watch drew attention to the way governments unlawfully exploited COVID-19 to crack down on fundamental rights.2 Although conflicts and public health emergencies are not new, the report also tracks a number of …. (shrink)

[I]f you could know a priori that you are in a given mental state, and your being in that state conceptually or logically implies the existence of external objects, then you could know a priori that the external world exists. Since you obviously _can.

Despite the increased prevalence of bioethics research that seeks to use empirical data to answer normative research questions, there is no consensus as to what an appropriate methodology for this would be. This review aims to search the literature, present and critically discuss published Empirical Bioethics methodologies.

In the economic literature on the firm, especially in the transaction–cost tradition, a sharp distinction is drawn between so-called “market transactions” and “administered transactions.” This distinction is of enormous importance for business ethics, since market transactions are governed by the competitive logic of the market, whereas administered transactions are subject to the cooperative norms that govern collective action in a bureaucracy. The widespread failure to distinguish between these two types of transactions, and thus to distinguish between adversarial and non-adversarial relations, (...) has led many business ethicists to develop a “uniform” moral code. Yet in market transactions, the checks and balances built into the system of commercial exchange are such as to permit more instrumental forms of behavior. In administered transactions, by contrast, these checks and balances are absent, and thus the institutional context calls for much greater exercise of moral restraint. In this paper, I begin the task of developing an adversarial ethic for business. According to this view, the competitive environment licenses a greater range of “self-interested” behavior, but also imposes its own constraints on the strategies that firms may adopt in the pursuit of their interests. (shrink)

One of the most influential ideas in the field of business ethics has been the suggestion that ethical conduct in a business contextshould be analyzed in terms of a set of fiduciary obligations toward various “stakeholder” groups. Moral problems, according to this view, involve reconciling such obligations in cases where stakeholder groups have conflicting interests. The question posed in this paper is whether the stakeholder paradigm represents the most fruitful way of articulating the moral problems that arise in business. By (...) way of contrast, I outline two other possible approaches to business ethics: one, a more minimal conception, anchored in the notion of a fiduciary obligation toward shareholders; and the other, a broader conception, focused on the concept of market failure. I then argue that the latter offers a more satisfactory framework for the articulation of the social responsibilities of business. (shrink)

Philosophical Perspectives on Art presents a series of essays devoted to two of the most fundamental topics in the philosophy of art: the distinctive character of artworks and what is involved in understanding them as art. In Part I, Stephen Davies considers a wide range of questions about the nature and definition of art. Can art be defined, and if so, which definitions are the most plausible? Do we make and consume art because there are evolutionary advantages to doing so? (...) Has art completed the mission that guided its earlier historical development, and if so, what is to become of it now? Should architecture be classified as an art form? -/- Part II turns to the interpretation and appreciation of art. What is the target and purpose of the critic's interpretation? Is interpretation primarily directed at uncovering artists' intended meanings? Can apparently contradictory interpretations of a given piece both be true? Are interpretative evaluations entailed by descriptions of a work's aesthetic and artistic characteristics? In addition to providing fresh answers to these and other central questions in aesthetics, Davies considers the nature and content of metaphor, and the relation between the expressive qualities of a work of art and the emotions of its creator. (shrink)

The recent renewal of interest in the philosophy of Henri Bergson has increased both recognition of his influence on twentieth-century philosophy and attention to his relationship to phenomenology. Until now, the question of Martin Heidegger’s debt to Bergson has remained largely unanswered. Heidegger’s brief discussion of Bergson in Being and Time is geared toward explaining why he fails in his attempts to think more radically about time. Despite this dismissal, a close look at Heidegger’s early works dealing with temporality reveals (...) a sustained engagement with Bergson’s thought. In The Origin of Time, Heath Massey evaluates Heidegger’s critique of Bergson and examines how Bergson’s efforts to rethink time in terms of duration anticipate Heidegger’s own interpretation of temporality. Massey demonstrates how Heidegger follows Bergson in seeking to uncover “primordial time” by disentangling temporality from spatiality, how he associates Bergson with the tradition of philosophy that covers up this phenomenon, and how he overlooks Bergson’s ontological turn in Matter and Memory. Through close readings of early major works by both thinkers, Massey argues that Bergson is a much more radical thinker with respect to time than Heidegger allows. (shrink)

There is an idea, extremely common among social contract theorists, that the primary function of social institutions is to secure some form of cooperative benefit. If individuals simply seek to satisfy their own preferences in a narrowly instrumental fashion, they will find themselves embroiled in collective action problems – interactions with an outcome that is worse for everyone involved than some other possible outcome. Thus they have reason to accept some form of constraint over their conduct, in order to achieve (...) this superior, but out-of-equilibrium outcome. A social institution can be defined as a set of norms that codify these constraints.1 Simplifying somewhat, one can then say that social institutions exist in order to secure gains in Pareto-efficiency. (shrink)

Husserl’s early picture of explanation in the sciences has never been completely provided. This lack represents an oversight, which we here redress. In contrast to currently accepted interpretations, we demonstrate that Husserl does not adhere to the much maligned deductive-nomological (DN) model of scientific explanation. Instead, via a close reading of early Husserlian texts, we reveal that he presents a unificationist account of scientific explanation. By doing so, we disclose that Husserl’s philosophy of scientific explanation is no mere anachronism. It (...) is, instead, tenable and relevant. We discuss how Husserl and other contemporary thinkers draw theoretical inspiration from the same source—namely, Bernard Bolzano. Husserl’s theory of scientific explanation shares a common language and discusses the same themes as, for example, Phillip Kitcher and Kit Fine. To advance our novel reading, we discuss Husserl’s investigations of grounding, inter-lawful explanation, intra-mathematical explanation, and scientific unification. (shrink)

This paper makes a phenomenological contribution to the distinction between personal and subpersonal types of explanation. I expound the little-known fact that Husserl gives an account of personal level explanation via his exposition of our capacity to express the understanding of another’s motivational nexus when we are in the personalistic attitude. I show that Husserl’s unique exposition of the motivational nexus conveys its concrete, internally coherent, and intentional nature, involving relationships amongst the sense contents of acts of consciousness. Moreover, the (...) motivational nexus is a generative space of possibility and choice. I show that, for these reasons, motivational explanation is not causal, nor deductive nomological, nor does it reduce to subpersonal explanation. I finish with the comment that the uniqueness of personal level explanation points towards the possibility that the human sciences ought also employ types of explanations not found in natural sciences. (shrink)

I identify an inconsistency in Jago’s theory of truth. I show that Jago is committed to the identity of the proposition that the proposition that A is true and the proposition that A. I show that Jago is committed to the proposition that A being true because A if the proposition that A is true. I show that these two commitments, given the rest of Jago’s theory, entail a contradiction. I show that while the latter commitment follows from Jago’s theory (...) of truth, even by Jago’s own lights he should not be committed to the identity of the proposition that the proposition that A is true and the proposition that A. (shrink)

"Although the task of formulating an appropriate policy response to the problem of anthropogenic climate change is one that raises a number of very difficult normative issues, environmental ethicists have not played an influential role in government deliberations. This is primarily due to their rejection of many of the assumptions that structure the debates over policy. This book offers a philosophical defense of these assumptions, in order to overcome the major conceptual barriers to the participation of philosophers in these debates. (...) There are five important barriers: First, the policy debate presupposes a stance of liberal neutrality, as a result of which it does not privilege any particular set of environmental values over other concerns. Second, it assumes ongoing economic growth, along with a commitment to what is sometimes called a weak sustainability framework when analyzing the value of the bequest being made to future generations. Third, it treats climate change as fundamentally a collective action problem, not an issue of distributive justice. Fourth, there is the acceptance of cost-benefit analysis, or more precisely, the view that a carbon pricing regime should be guided by our best estimate of the social cost of carbon. And finally, there is the view that when this calculation is undertaken, it is permissible to discount costs and benefits, depending on how far removed they are from the present. This book attempts to make explicit and defend these presuppositions, and in so doing offer philosophical foundations for the debate over climate change policy"--. (shrink)

This book analyses tensions that arise between the principles of social justice and the need for cooperation to advance collective goals.

Habermas has argued that many of the endemic socio- economic problems of Western society are either symptoms or prod ucts of a 'lopsided' process of cultural rationalization, one that has emphasized instrumental forms of rationality over communicative. But other than presenting a rather general typology of lifeworld pathologies, Habermas has not done much to specify what these problems might be, nor has he provided any 'middle-range' analysis of the mechanisms through which they might be generated. This paper discusses some of (...) the ways in which, consistent with Haber mas's general framework, rational choice theory can be used for pre cisely this task. In this analysis, rational choice theory is not presented as a comprehensive theory of action, but is employed as a critical- diagnostic tool that allows the theorist to identify undesirable social interaction patterns that arise from a broader instrumentalization of the lifeworld. Key Words: critical theory • Habermas • instrumental rationality • market failure • rational choice theory. (shrink)

Moriarty argues that the Market Failures Approach to business ethics is inapplicable to “real world” problems, because it treats “market failure” as a failure to achieve Pareto efficiency. Depending upon how it is applied, Pareto efficiency is either trivially easy to satisfy or else so demanding that no real-world market could ever satisfy it. In this Commentary, I argue that Moriarty overstates these difficulties. The regulatory structure governing markets is best understood as an attempt to maximize the number of Pareto-improving (...) exchanges that occur. There is no reason to think business self-regulation cannot be guided by the same normative-conceptual framework. (shrink)

This paper shows that Husserl is not guilty of Sellars’ myth of the sensory given. I firstly show that Husserl’s account of ‘sensations’ or ‘sense data’ seems to possess some of the attributes Sellars’ myth critiques. In response I show that, just as Sellars thinks that our ‘conceptual capacities’ afford us an awareness of a logical perceptual space that has a propositional structure, Husserl thinks that ‘acts of apprehension’ structure sensations to afford us perception that is similarly propositionally structured. Not (...) only this, but there is much affinity and shared motivation between Husserl and Sellars accounts of the sensory stratum. Reflection on phenomenological considerations prevents Sellars from denying phenomenal non-conceptual content, whilst Husserlian ‘sense data’ are technical designations; dependant parts of perceptual experience grasped in abstraction, necessary for providing a reflective/philosophical account of empirical knowledge. I show that both Husserl and Sellars assert that the proper description of phenomenal content affords it the function of presenting properties of spatial objects during perception, and reiterate the well-known fact that Husserl thinks that perception is of ‘conceptually’ apprehended spatiotemporal objects. (shrink)

Designed to introduce beginning students of philosophy to a number of problems which are appropriate subjects for reflection. These problems relate to the human condition, human nature, the definition of the good life, authority, & freedom, the religious quest, & the future.

In the economic literature on the firm, especially in the transaction-cost tradition, a sharp distinction is drawn between so-called “market transactions” and “administered transactions.” This distinction is of enormous importance for business ethics, since market transactions are governed by the competitive logic of the market, whereas administered transactions are subject to the cooperative norms that govern collective action in a bureaucracy. The widespread failure to distinguish between these two types of transactions, and thus to distinguish between adversarial and non-adversarial relations, (...) has led many business ethicists to develop a “uniform” moral code. Yet in market transactions, the checks and balances built into the system of commercial exchange are such as to permit more instrumental forms of behavior. In administered transactions, by contrast, these checks and balances are absent, and thus the institutional context calls for much greater exercise of moral restraint. In this paper, I begin the task of developing an adversarial ethic for business. According to this view, the competitive environment licenses a greater range of “self-interested” behavior, but also imposes its own constraints on the strategies that firms may adopt in the pursuit of their interests. (shrink)

Society, based on contract and voluntary exchange, is evolving, but remains only partly developed. Goods and services that meet the needs of individuals, such as food, clothing, and shelter, are amply produced and distributed through the market process. However, those that meet common or community needs, while distributed through the market, are produced politically through taxation and violence. These goods attach not to individuals but to a place; to enjoy them, individuals must go to the place where they are. Land (...) owners, all unknowingly, distribute such services contractually as they rent or sell sites. Rent or price is the market value of such services, net after disservices, as they affect each site. By distributing occupancies to those who can pay the highest price, land owners’ interests align with those of society. Without this, tenure would be precarious—by force or favor of politicians. The 18th-century separation of land from state, so little studied by historians, permitted the development of modern property in land. This change is perhaps “the greatest single step in the evolution of Society the world has ever seen.” When land owners realize that they market community services, they will organize to produce and administer them as well, and society will be made whole. (shrink)

David Gauthier tries to defend morality by showing that rational agents would choose to adopt a fundamental choice disposition that permits them to cooperate in prisoner's dilemmas. In this paper, I argue that Gauthier, rather than trying to work out a prudential justification for his favored choice disposition, should opt for a transcendental justification. I argue that the disposition in question is the product of socialization, not rational choice. However, only agents who are socialized in such a way that they (...) acquire a disposition of this type could acquire the capacity to use language. Given the internal connection between language and thought, this means that no agent endowed with such a disposition could rationally choose to adopt another. Thus rational reflection by moral agents upon their own fundamental choice disposition will have no tendency to destabilize it.“It is a necessary truth that people tend to do what they think they ought to do, for it is a necessary truth that people who occupy a linguistic position which means /ought to do A now, tend to do A. If they did not, the position they occupy could not mean Iought to do A now.”Wilfrid Sellars, “Some Reflections on Language Games.”. (shrink)

This work analyzes the centrality of law in nineteenth-century historical and institutional economics and is a prehistory to the new institutional economics of the late twentieth century. In the 1830s the 'new science of law' aimed to explain the working rules of human society by using the methodologically individualist terms of economic discourse, stressing determinism and evolutionism. Practitioners stood readier than contemporary institutionalists to admit the possibilities of altruistic values, bounded rationality, and institutional inertia into their research program. Professor Pearson (...) shows that the positive analysis of law tended to push normative discussions up from the level of specific laws to that of society's political organization. The analysis suggests that the professionalization of the social sciences - and the new science's own imprecision - condemned the program to oblivion around 1930. Nonetheless, institutional economics is currently developing greater resemblances to the now-forgotten new science. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of Edmund Husserl’s lesser known account of high-level imaginative empathy. The author discusses Husserl’s solution to what we might call the ‘generalizability problem’; if empathy is conceived as a relation whereby the understanding I have of my own mind allows me to understand your mind, then how does empathy account for potential differences between us? The author also discusses some features that make empathy more generalizable than might be initially thought, as well as its limits. (...) A second major aim is to use this exegesis of Husserl to show a variety of overlaps between his theory and high-level simulation theory. The author also shows how Husserl’s phenomenological theory provides a compelling response to critiques of high-level simulation from authors that utilize a hybrid cognitive science/phenomenological approach. (shrink)

Anyone who has ever lived with roommates understands the Hobbesian state of nature implicitly. People sharing accommodations quickly discover that buying groceries, doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, and a thousand other household tasks, are all prisoner's dilemmas waiting to happen. For instance, if food is purchased communally, it gives everyone an incentive to overconsume. Individuals also have an incentive to buy expensive items that the others are unlikely to want. As a result, everyone's food bill will be higher than (...) it would be if everyone did their own shopping. Things are not much better when it comes to other aspects of household organization. Cleaning is a common sticking point. Once there are a certain number of people living in a house, cleanliness becomes a quasi-public good. If everyone ‘pitched in’ to clean up, then everyone would be happier. But there is a free-rider incentive—before cleaning, it's best to wait around a bit to see if someone else will do it. As a result, the dishes will stack up in the sink, the carpet will get grungy, and so on. (shrink)

Andrew Davis; 7. Matching, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 32, Issue 1, 7 March 2003, Pages 107–121, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.00080.

Robert Brandom claims that language expressing pro-attitudes makes explicit proprieties of practical inference. This thesis is untenable, especially given certain premises which Brandom himself endorses. Pro-attitude vocabulary has the wrong grammatical structure; other parts of vocabulary do the job he ascribes to pro-attitude vocabulary; the thesis introduces implausible differences between the inferential consequences of desires and intentions, and distorts the interpretation of conditional statements. Rather, I suggest, logical vocabulary can make proprieties of practical inference explicit, just as the inferentialist says (...) it can for theoretical inference. (shrink)

How do scientific conjectures become laws? Why does proof mean different things in different sciences? Do numbers exist, or were they invented? Why do some laws turn out to be wrong? In this wide-ranging book, Brian Davies discusses the basis for scientists' claims to knowledge about the world. He looks at science historically, emphasizing not only the achievements of scientists from Galileo onwards, but also their mistakes. He rejects the claim that all scientific knowledge is provisional, by citing examples from (...) chemistry, biology and geology. A major feature of the book is its defence of the view that mathematics was invented rather than discovered. While experience has shown that disentangling knowledge from opinion and aspiration is a hard task, this book provides a clear guide to the difficulties.Full of illuminating examples and quotations, and with a scope ranging from psychology and evolution to quantum theory and mathematics, this book brings alive issues at the heart of all science. (shrink)