The field of neuroimaging has reached a watershed. Brain imaging research has been the source of many advances in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science over the last decade, but recent critiques and emerging trends are raising foundational issues of methodology, measurement, and theory. Indeed, concerns over interpretation of brain maps have created serious controversies in social neuroscience, and, more important, point to a larger set of issues that lie at the heart of the entire brain mapping enterprise. In this volume, (...) leading scholars -- neuroimagers and philosophers of mind -- reexamine these central issues and explore current controversies that have arisen in cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, and signal processing. The contributors address both statistical and dynamical analysis and modeling of neuroimaging data and interpretation, discussing localization, modularity, and neuroimagers' tacit assumptions about how these two phenomena are related; controversies over correlation of fMRI data and social attributions ; and the standard inferential design approach in neuroimaging. Finally, the contributors take a more philosophical perspective, considering the nature of measurement in brain imaging, and offer a framework for novel neuroimaging data structures. Contributors: William Bechtel, Bharat Biswal, Matthew Brett, Martin Bunzl, Max Coltheart, Karl J. Friston, Joy J. Geng, Clark Glymour, Kalanit Grill-Spector, Stephen José Hanson, Trevor Harley, Gilbert Harman, James V. Haxby, Rik N. Henson, Nancy Kanwisher, Colin Klein, Richard Loosemore, Sébastien Meriaux, Chris Mole, Jeanette A. Mumford, Russell A. Poldrack, Jean-Baptiste Poline, Richard C. Richardson, Alexis Roche, Adina L. Roskies, Pia Rotshtein, Rebecca Saxe, Philipp Sterzer, Bertrand Thirion, Edward Vul The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

This chapter concerns the normativity of the concepts of paternalism and libertarian paternalism. The first concept is central in evaluating public health policy, but its meaning is controversial. The second concept is equally controversial and has received much attention recently. It may or may not shape the future evaluation of public health policy. In order to facilitate honest and fruitful debate, I consider three approaches to these concepts, in terms of their normativity. Concepts, I claim, may be considered nonnormative, normatively (...) charged, or normative in that they involve more complex relationships between values or duties. While the last approach is often best, other approaches may be appropriate depending on the context and purpose of discussion. The chapter’s conceptual investigation is illustrated by application to two public health policies: a tax on the consumption of fat and the encouragement of health-promoting food displays in restaurants and supermarkets. (shrink)

Our paper addresses the following question: Is there a general characterization, for all predicates P that take both declarative and interrogative complements , of the meaning of the P-interrogative clause construction in terms of the meaning of the P-declarative clause construction? On our account, if P is a responsive predicate and Q a question embedded under P, then the meaning of ‘P + Q’ is, informally, “to be in the relation expressed by P to some potential complete answer to Q”. (...) We show that this rule allows us to derive veridical and non-veridical readings of embedded questions, depending on whether the embedding verb is veridical or not, and provide novel empirical evidence supporting the generalization. We then enrich our basic proposal to account for the presuppositions induced by the embedding verbs, as well as for the generation of intermediate exhaustive readings of embedded questions. (shrink)

A number of ethical frameworks have been proposed to support decision-making in public health and the evaluation of public health policy and practice. This is encouraging, since ethical considerations are of paramount importance in health policy. However, these frameworks have various deficiencies, in part because they incorporate substantial ethical positions. In this article, we discuss and criticise a framework developed by James Childress and Ruth Bernheim, which we consider to be the state of the art in the field. Their framework (...) distinguishes aims, such as the promotion of public health, from constraints on the pursuit of those aims, such as the requirement to avoid limitations to liberty, or the requirement to be impartial. We show how this structure creates both theoretical and practical problems. We then go on to present and defend a more practical framework, one that is neutral in avoiding precommitment to particular values and how they ought to be weighted. We believe ethics is at the very heart of such weightings and our framework is developed to reflect this belief. It is therefore both pluralist and value-based. We compare our new framework to Childress and Bernheim’s and outline its advantages. It is justified by its impetus to consider a wide range of alternatives and its tendency to direct decisions towards the best alternatives, as well as by the information provided by the ranking of alternatives and transparent explication of the judgements that motivate this ranking. The new framework presented should be useful to decision-makers in public health, as well as being a means to stimulate further reflection on the role of ethics in public health. (shrink)

I first distinguish four types of objection to paternalism and argue that only one – the principled objection – amounts to a substantive and distinct normative doctrine. I then argue that this doctrine should be understood as preventing certain facts from playing the role of reasons they would otherwise play. I explain how this filter approach makes antipaternalism independent of several philosophical controversies: On the role reasons play, on what reasons there are, and on how reasons are related to values. (...) I go on to contrast the filter approach with the competing and dominant action-focused approach, which understands objections to paternalism in terms of paternalistic action, behavior, law, policy and the like. Seana Shiffrin and Peter de Marneffe are singled out as prominent recent proponents of this approach. By engaging with their definitions of paternalism, I explain how the action-focused approach makes antipaternalism dependent on the sorting of actions into paternalistic and nonpaternalistic according to what reasons support them. Because one and the same action can be supported by many different reasons, and by different sorts of reasons, such sorting is very difficult. The upshot is that antipaternalism on the action-focused account fails to provide the precise normative implications of the filter approach that I favor. (shrink)

Including an edited transcription of a colloquium on Sander's life and work, this title contains plates selected from the J. Paul Getty Museum's collection. Sander's works exemplify the contradictory nature of early 20th century Germany.

Two related asymmetries have been discussed in relation to the ethics of creating new lives: First, we seem to have strong moral reason to avoid creating lives that are not worth living, but no moral reason to create lives that are worth living. Second, we seem to have strong moral reason to improve the wellbeing of existing lives, but, again, no moral reason to create lives that are worth living. Both asymmetries have proven very difficult to account for in any (...) coherent moral framework. I propose an impersonal population axiology to underpin the asymmetries, which sidesteps the problematic issue of whether or not people can be harmed or benefited by creation or non-creation. This axiology yields perfect asymmetry from a deliberative perspective, in terms of expected value. The axiology also yields substantial asymmetry for large and realistic populations in terms of their actual value, beyond deliberative relevance. (shrink)

In this article, I challenge the widespread presumption that a child should have exactly two parents. I consider the pros and cons of various numbers of parents for the people most directly affected – the children themselves and their parents. The number of parents, as well as the ratio of parents to children, may have an impact on what resources are available, what relationships can develop between parents and children, what level of conflict can be expected in the family, as (...) well as the costs involved in parenting and the experience of parenting a child. Indirectly, there is also an effect on who will have the opportunity to be a parent, as well as on wider social issues that I mention but do not discuss. Having considered all these factors, I conclude that there is some reason to believe that three or more parents is usually better than one or two, especially if children are to have siblings, which is typically beneficial. However, these reasons are not strong enough to support a general presumption in favor of any particular number. We should therefore jettison the two‐parent presumption and make different numbers of parents more socially accepted as well as legally possible. (shrink)

Both the phenomenon of presupposition and that of vagueness have motivated the use of one form or another of trivalent logic, in which a declarative sentence can not only receive the standard values true and false , but also a third, non-standard truth-value which is usually understood as ‘undefined’ . The goal of this paper is to propose a multivalent framework which can deal simultaneously with presupposition and vagueness, and, more specifically, capture their projection properties as well as their different (...) roles in language. Now, there is a prima facie simple way of doing this, which simply consists in assimilating the two phenomena, and using an appropriate type of trivalent logic. On this view, we just need a compositional system that deals with the ‘undefined’ truth-value, and does not care about whether the source of undefinedness is ‘presuppositional’ or related to vagueness. I will argue that such a simple solution cannot succeed, and point out a number of desiderata that any successful approach must meet. I will then present and discuss two seven-valued semantics, inspired, respectively, by the Strong Kleene semantics and by supervaluationism, which meet these desiderata. (shrink)

As liberals, we would like each person to direct her own life in accordance with her will. However, because of the complexities of the human mind, it is very often not clear what a person wills. She may choose one thing though she prefers another, while having false beliefs the correction of which would cause her to prefer some third thing. I propose, against this background, that to respect a person’s will or self-direction is to respect both her choices and (...) her preferences, with some priority given to those preferences that are informed and coherent. This is a pluralist answer to the neglected question, “respect for what?”. (shrink)

The debate for and against making e-cigarettes available to smokers is to a large extent empirical. We do not know the long-term health effects of vaping and we do not know how smokers will respond to e-cigarettes over time. In addition to these empirical uncertainties, however, there are difficult moral issues to consider. One such issue is that many smokers in some sense choose to smoke. Though smoking is addictive and though many start young, it does not seem impossible to (...) plan for and implement cessation. Yet many choose not to do so and we arguably have some reason to respect this choice. I propose that liberal opposition to strict tobacco control, based on respect for choice, is mitigated when e-cigarettes are available, since they are such a close substitute. Making e-cigarettes available to smokers might therefore not only enable switching in practice, but may make tougher tobacco control more justified. Another moral issue is that making e-cigarettes widely available might induce many people to vape, who would otherwise have neither vaped nor smoked. If this is so, the price of using e-cigarettes to accelerate smoking cessation may be a long-term vaping epidemic. Since vaping is less harmful than smoking, both individuals and society will have less reason to end this epidemic and so it may endure longer than the smoking epidemic would otherwise have done. This raises further questions around the weighing of reduced harm to current smokers against increased harm to future vapers. (shrink)

Plural definite descriptions across many languages display two well-known properties. First, they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they ‘allow for exceptions’. Second, while they tend to have a quasi-universal quantificational force in affirmative sentences, they tend to be interpreted existentially in the scope of negation. Building on previous works, we offer a theory in which sentences containing plural definite expressions trigger a family of possible interpretations, and where general principles of language use account for (...) their interpretation in various contexts and syntactic environments. Our theory solves a number of problems that these previous works encounter, and has broader empirical coverage in that it offers a precise analysis for sentences that display complex interactions between plural definites, quantifiers and bound variables, as well as for cases involving non-distributive predicates. The resulting proposal is briefly compared with an alternative proposal by Križ, which has similar coverage but is based on a very different architecture and sometimes makes subtly different predictions. (shrink)

The philosophical debate on paternalism is conducted as if the property of being paternalistic should be attributed to actions. Actions are typically deemed to be paternalistic if they amount to some kind of interference with a person and if the rationale for the action is the good of the person interfered with. This focus on actions obscures the normative issues involved. In particular, it makes it hard to provide an analysis of the traditional liberal resistance to paternalism. Given the fact (...) that actions most often have mixed rationales, it is not clear how we should categorize and evaluate interfering actions for which only part of the rationale is the good of the person. The preferable solution is to attribute the property of being paternalistic not to actions, but to compounds of reasons and actions. The framework of action–reasons provides the tools for distinguishing where exactly paternalism lies in the complex web of reasons and actions. (shrink)

I come to grips with the deontological critique of constitutional proportionality that asserts that this doctrine ignores rights and slips into the utilitarian maximisation of societal interests. I...

Paternalism means, roughly, benevolent interference: benevolent because it aims at promoting or protecting a person’s good; interference because it restricts his liberty without his consent. The paternalist believes herself superior in that she can secure some benefit for the person that he himself will not secure. Paternalism is opposed by the liberal tradition, at least when it targets sufficiently voluntary behavior. In legal contexts, policies may be paternalistic for some and not for others, forcing trade-offs. In medical contexts, paternalism can (...) be an open or hidden aspect of the relationship between caregiver and patient. (shrink)

This article first describes a dilemma for liberalism: On the one hand restricting their own options is an important means for groups of people to shape their lives. On the other hand, group members are typically divided over whether or not to accept option-restricting solutions or policies. Should we restrict the options of all members of a group even though some consent and some do not? This dilemma is particularly relevant to public health policy, which typically target groups of people (...) with no possibility for individuals to opt out. The article then goes on to propose and discuss a series of aggregation rules for individual into group consent. Consideration of a number of scenarios shows that such rules cannot be formulated only in terms of fractions of consenters and non-consenters, but must incorporate their motives and how much they stand to win or lose. This raises further questions, including what is the appropriate impact of altruistic consenters and non-consenters, what should be the impact of costs and benefits and whether these should be understood as gross or net. All these issues are dealt with in a liberal, anti-paternalistic spirit, in order to explore whether group consent can contribute to the justification of option-restricting public health policy. (shrink)

Building on previous works which argued that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions, this paper proposes a constraint on exhaustification which restricts the conditions under which an exhaustivity operator can be licensed. We show that this economy condition allows us to derive a number of generalizations, such as, in particular, the ‘Implicature Focus Generalization’: scalar implicatures can be embedded under a downward-entailing operator only if the scalar term bears pitch accent. Our economy condition also derives specific predictions regarding (...) the licensing of so-called Hurford disjunctions. (shrink)

Eugenio Bulygin sostiene que la teoría de la clausura necesaria de los sistemas normativos de Joseph Raz se origina en el error de tomar a los permisos débiles o negativos como soluciones normativas. Bulygin cree que Raz omite advertir que los enunciados jurídicos son proposiciones normativas de segundo nivel y que las únicas permisiones capaces de cerrar el sistema jurídico son las permisiones fuertes o explícitas. En este trabajo sostengo que Raz se refiere a un tipo de clausura que es (...) inconcebible en el contexto de un programa reduccionista como el de Bulygin. Una vez que se visualiza que los enunciados jurídicos son proposiciones prácticas del primer nivel, parece obvio que la regla de clausura de Raz es un teorema deóntico. Eugenio Bulygin claims that Joseph Raz's theory on the necessary closure of normative systems derives from the error to take weak or negative permissions as normative solutions. Bulygin believes that Raz fails to notice that legal statements are second-level normative propositions and that the only permissions capable of closing a normative system are strong or explicit permissions. In this paper I argue that Raz focuses on one kind of closure that is inconceivable within the context of a reductionist program such as Bulygin's. Once one visualizes that legal statements are first-level practical claims, it seems obvious that Raz's closure rule is a deontic theorem. (shrink)

Contemporary population ethics is dominated by views that aggregate by summing, whether of well-being or of some construct based on well-being. In contrast, average well-being is generally considered axiologically irrelevant. To many of us, however, the number of future people does not seem important, as long as it is sufficient to enable rich and varied life experiences, and as long as the population continues throughout time. It therefore seems relatively plausible to aggregate future well-being by averaging. In particular, it seems (...) plausible to value high average well-being at any particular time, and to do so for all future times. I present a time-sensitive version of the Average View that underpins such axiological intuitions. I also address a series of issues and objections that confront such a view. (shrink)

Lifelong smokers lose on average a decade of life vis-à-vis non-smokers. Globally, tobacco causes about 5–6 million deaths annually. One billion tobacco-related deaths are predicted for the 21st century, with about half occurring before the age of 70. In this paper, we consider a complete ban on the sale of cigarettes and find that such a ban, if effective, would be justified. As with many policy decisions, the argument for such a ban requires a weighing of the pros and cons (...) and how they impact on different individuals, both current and future. The weightiest factor supporting a ban, we argue, is the often substantial well-being losses many individuals suffer because of smoking. These harms, moreover, disproportionally affect the disadvantaged. The potential gains in well-being and equality, we argue, outweigh the limits a ban places on individuals’ freedom, its failure to respect some individuals’ autonomous choice and the likelihood that it may, in individual cases, reduce well-being. (shrink)

Drink driving causes great suffering and material destruction. The alcohol interlock promises to eradicate this problem by technological design. Traditional counter-measures to drink driving such as policing and punishment and information campaigns have proven insufficient. Extensive policing is expensive and intrusive. Severe punishment is disproportionate to the risks created in most single cases. If the interlock becomes inexpensive and convenient enough, and if there are no convincing moral objections to the device, it may prove the only feasible as well as (...) the only justifiable solution to the problem of drink driving. A policy of universal alcohol interlocks, in all cars, has been proposed by several political parties in Sweden and is supported by the National Road Administration and the 2006 Alcohol Interlock Commission. This article assesses two possible moral objections to a policy of universal interlocks: (i) that it displaces the responsibility of individual drivers and (ii) that it constitutes a paternalistic interference with drivers. The first objection is found unconvincing, while the second has only limited bite and may be neutralized if paternalism is accepted for the sake of greater net liberty. Given the expected technological development, the proposed policy seems a commendable health promotion measure for the near future. (shrink)

Since it is Hume who famously asked how an "ought" can ever possibly be deduced from an "is," it is Hume who is typically cast as the representative of empiricism's inadequacy for doing the work of ethics. Yet, as I will show, in his description of the proper functioning of the passions that necessarily involve other persons and their evaluations of us, Hume provides a naturalistic description that is not reductive of value, but rather incorporates values into the very ground (...) of empirical description. Contemporary moral philosophers who dismiss Hume's complex account of the passions as unnecessary for understanding his account of morals, and then fault the account of morals for its failure to move beyond mere description to any kind of normative assessment, ignore how the detail of Hume's own account of the passions suggests a way that an empirical account can in fact be value-laden, as we shall see. (shrink)

Introduction: Preference, Choice and (Libertarian) Paternalism Kalle Grill & Danny Scoccia This special issue originated in a workshop organized by one of the editors, Kalle Grill, at Umeå University in March 2014, with funding from The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences. The theme of the workshop was Respecting Context-Dependent Preferences. Contributors to this issue who were also speakers at the Umeå workshop are Richard Arneson, Kalle Grill, Jason Hanna, Sven Ove Hansson, Robert Sugden, and Torbjörn (...) Tännsjö. The other speakers at the workshop were Luc Bovens, Sarah Conly, Fabienne Peter and Danny Scoccia. Preferences are context-dependent when they are determined by circumstances other than the contents of the alternatives that preferences range over, such as the way alternatives are presented. As behavioral research increasingly indicates, many of our preferences are context-dependent in this sense. Context-dependence raises difficult issues for many areas of moral and political philosophy. Importantly, the fact that preferences are not in any obvious way based on settled values or considered judgments may cast doubt on liberalism’s stance on when paternalism is morally objectionable: What exactly is liberal antipaternalism supposed to protect, if not settled preferences? What about paternalism that operates by influencing the formation of preferences? Should we, as proposed by so called "libertarian paternalists", shape the choice environment so as to promote choices that are conducive to health, wealth and happiness over the long run? More generally, we may inquire what respect for persons should mean given the context-dependence of their preferences. Several articles in this issue deal with the plausibility of libertarian paternalism and the nudging it endorses. Sugden argues that those who take context-dependence to justify paternalism often rely on ideas of latent preferences that lack a convincing psychological explanation. William Glod argues that, because of informational constraints, nudging often fails to track people's actual preferences. Hanna, in contrast, defends nudging against the objection that it is manipulative. Andres Moles surveys some legitimate aims for which nudging can be justified. The remaining articles either take a more general view of context-dependence, or investigates it in some specific context: Arneson considers, in light of the debate on libertarian paternalism, the general concept of paternalism, and proposes a new theory for when paternalism is justified, in terms of a limited prerogative to be imprudent. Grill argues that respect for persons should be pluralist and include respect for their choices as well as their preferences, even when these two come apart. Tännsjö re-considers, in the light of context-dependence, his earlier rejection of any form of coercive care. Hansson contributes a historical perspective with a discussion of John Stuart Mill's three principles regulating the extent of individual liberty. The guest editors wish to thank the journal editors for giving us the opportunity to produce this special issue. We are grateful also to the reviewers who have helped in the editorial process, and to Margaret Dancy, the Managing Editor, for her friendly support throughout. (shrink)

In many or most instances of paternalism, more than one person acts paternalistically, or more than one person is treated paternalistically. This chapter discusses some complications that arise in such group cases, which are largely ignored in the conceptual debate. First, a group of people who together perform an action may do so for different reasons, which makes it more challenging to determine whether the action is paternalistic. This gives us some reason not to pin the property of being paternalistic (...) on actions, since we may alternatively pin it on reasons for actions and allow that these differ between members in the group. Second, the prevention of harmful consensual interactions is sometimes paternalism towards both or all involved, but only if all benefit from interference with themselves rather than with other members in the group, or if all want the harm or risk (more or less) for its own sake. Third, interrelations between three components of paternalism - interference, benevolence and consent - gives us reason to allow that an action can be paternalistic towards some but not others of those affected. This makes it even more difficult, and less relevant, to determine whether or not actions are paternalistic. (shrink)

To nudge is to design choice contexts in order to improve choice outcomes. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein emphatically endorse nudging but reject more restrictive means. In contrast, I argue that the behavioral psychology that motivates nudging also motivates what may be called jolting — i.e. the design of choice content. I defend nudging and jolting by distinguishing them from the sometimes oppressive means with which they can be implemented, by responding to some common arguments against nudging, and by showing (...) how respect for preferences over option sets and their aggregate properties may require the trimming of option sets, as well as helpful choice contexts. (shrink)

:A good deal of contemporary moral nonconsequentialism assumes that agents have perfect knowledge about the various features and consequences of their options. This assumption is unrealistic. More often than not, moral agents can only assess with a certain degree of probability the factual circumstances that are morally relevant for their decision making. My aim in this essay is to discuss the problem of moral decisions under risk from the point of view of nonconsequentialism. Basically, I analyze how objective moral principles (...) can be transformed into subjective, decisional prescriptions, and argue that the standard nonconsequentialist approach to moral decision making, which focuses on probability thresholds, is wrong. In accordance with the fundamental postulates of nonconsequentialism, I seek to solve the problem of risk in moral choice by proposing a theory about the marginal moral value of various options. Actions can vary along various dimensions, and each of these dimensions can offer a different moral value function. Nonconsequentialist marginalism can level the playing field with consequentialism. Whereas consequentialism can simply borrow the notion of expected utility from economics, nonconsequentialism must introduce the notion of expectational obligation to formulate a general principle of moral choice under risk. I finally suggest that further empirical work is needed to delineate the shape of various moral value functions that are critical for applying the general principle of moral decision making under risk to well-known cases. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.DECISIONAL NONCONSEQUENTIALISM AND THE RISK SENSITIVITY OF OBLIGATIONVolume 32, Issue 2Horacio Spector DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000121Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. DECISIONAL NONCONSEQUENTIALISM AND THE RISK SENSITIVITY OF OBLIGATIONVolume 32, Issue 2Horacio Spector DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000121Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. DECISIONAL NONCONSEQUENTIALISM AND THE RISK SENSITIVITY OF OBLIGATIONVolume 32, Issue 2Horacio Spector DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000121Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Debates on the nature and justifiability of paternalism typically focus only on adults, sometimes presuming without argument that paternalism towards children is a non-issue or obviously justified. Debates on the moral and political status of children, in turn, rarely connect with the rich literature on paternalism. This chapter attempts to bridge this gap by exploring how issues that arise in the general debate on paternalism are relevant also for the benevolent interference with children. I survey and discuss various views and (...) argue for my own: that paternalism towards children is in most respects like paternalism towards adults and stands in the same need of justification, though such justification is more often forthcoming both because children are typically less prudent than adults and so benefit more from interference, and because, in some respects, interference is less harmful to them. (shrink)

Contemporary political philosophers discuss the idea of freedom in terms of two distinctions: Berlin's famous distinction between negative and positive liberty, and Skinner and Pettit's divide between liberal and republican liberty. In this essay I proceed to recast the debate by showing that there are two strands in liberalism, Hobbesian and Lockean, and that the latter inherited its conception of civil liberty from republican thought. I also argue that the contemporary debate on freedom lacks a perspicuous account of the various (...) conceptions of freedom, mainly because it leaves aside the classic contrast between natural liberty and civil liberty. Once we consider both the negative/positive distinction and the natural/civil one, we can classify all conceptions of freedom within four basic irreducible categories. In light of the resulting framework I show that there are two distinct conceptions of republican liberty, natural and civil, and that the former is coupled with an ideal of individual self-control. (shrink)

In the educational strand of cosmopolitanism, much attention has been placed on theorizing and describing who is cosmopolitan. It has been argued that cosmopolitan sensibilities negotiate and/or embody such paradoxes as rootedness and rootlessness, local and global concerns, private and public identities. Concurrently, cosmopolitanism has also been formulated as a globally-minded project for and ethico-political responsibility to human rights and global justice. Such articulations underscore cosmopolitanism in anthropocentric terms. People can be cosmopolitan and cosmopolitan projects aim to cultivate cosmopolitan subjectivities. (...) What is striking about scholarship in educational cosmopolitanism is its lack of serious attention placed on the greatest global threat facing not only but largely created by human beings: environmental degradation. In this paper, I provide an overview of key texts written on the who in educational cosmopolitanism which helps lay the groundwork for an analysis of what is cosmopolitan. Regarding the what, I examine a range of boundary-defying emergencies described in cosmopolitan terms including climate change, radioactive poisoning of the planet, and bioinvasion. In the last analysis, I consider what it would take and what the possibilities are for our species to be truly committed to caring not only for the human world. (shrink)

In this article, we describe and attempt to solve a puzzle arising from the interpretation of modified numerals like less than five and between two and five. The puzzle is this: such modified numerals seem to mean different things depending on whether they combine with distributive or non-distributive predicates. When they combine with distributive predicates, they intuitively impose a kind of upper bound, whereas when they combine with non-distributive predicates, they do not. We propose and explore in detail four solutions (...) to this puzzle, each involving some notion of maximality, but differing in the type of maximality involved and in the source of maximality. While the full range of data we consider do not conclusively favor one theory over the other three, we do argue that overall the evidence goes against the view that modified numerals lexically encode a ‘standard’ maximality operator, and suggests the need for a pragmatic blocking mechanism that filters out readings of sentences that are generated by the grammar but intuitively unavailable. (shrink)

The traditional liberal view on conflicts between care for wellbeing and respect for choice and desire is that we should look to degrees of competence and voluntariness to determine which moral imperative should take priority. This view has likely influenced the common view that children’s choices should be considered only to the extent that this promotes their future autonomy and helps us determine their best interests. I reject both the general traditional liberal view and its application to children. Competence and (...) voluntariness, as well as maturity, are at best proxies for what really matters, which is wellbeing, choice and desire. We typically have reason to respect children’s choices, irrespective of any further positive consequences. If we should more often make children do what they do not want to do, this is mainly because, though we should care about respecting their choices, we should care even more about their wellbeing and future autonomy. (shrink)

Advances in genetic diagnostics lead to more patients being diagnosed with hereditary conditions. These findings are often relevant to patients’ relatives. For example, the success of targeted cancer prevention is dependent on effective disclosure to relatives at risk. Without clear information, individuals cannot take advantage of predictive testing and preventive measures. Against this background, we argue that healthcare professionals have a duty to make actionable genetic information available to their patients’ at-risk relatives. We do not try to settle the difficult (...) question of how this duty should be balanced against other duties, such as the duty of confidentiality and a possible duty not to know one’s genetic predisposition. Instead, we argue for the importance of recognising a general responsibility towards at-risk relatives, to be discharged as well as possible within the limits set by conflicting duties and practical considerations. According to a traditional and still dominant perspective, it is the patient’s duty to inform his or her relatives, while healthcare professionals are only obliged to support their patients in discharging this duty. We argue that this perspective is a mistake and an anomaly. Healthcare professionals do not have a duty to ensure that their patients promote the health of third parties. It is often effective and desirable to engage patients in disseminating information to their relatives. However, healthcare professionals should not thereby deflect their own moral responsibility. (shrink)

The treatment of personal identity in Hume's Treatise displays a shift that is both interesting as an object lesson in the weakness of a particular sort of empirical project, and important for what it teaches about investigating moral life. By examining Hume's change in method and project, I show that theoretical epistemology and practical moral philosophy come together in Hume's account of the passions, and that out of this convergence arises an account of the way interpersonal relations structure our very (...) sense and idea of self. This account of self provides an explanation of moral motivation and the social elements of moral judgment that is naturalistic without being reductive. ;In his turn from the understanding in Book I to the passions in Book II, Hume moves from examining the isolated individual elements of his own mind to investigating the way our mind works as we interact with other persons. Instead of considering the components of thought atomistically, as if each constituent of thought has a nature independent of and unaffected by its relation to other constituents of thought, he considers the network of thought and passion that makes up mental life, developing a picture of the self that is dependent upon the whole of experience, rather than just individual impressions and ideas, considered separately. ;Hume's recovery of the self in the account of the passions shows how the personal identity problem is not just a metaphysical problem concerning the possibility of a substantial self beneath our perceptions, but is a moral problem: it concerns how we assess ourselves and others as moral agents, in interaction with each other. More than just an adjustment to fit the topic of the passions, Hume's change in method indicates an evolution in the kinds of questions he is pursuing. As he turns away from a piecemeal examination of individual elements of his thought to an examination of how persons function in passional life, his inquiry into the source of our idea of self evolves into an investigation of self-awareness and its development through the passions and social experience. (shrink)

Receiving information about threats to one’s health can contribute to anxiety and depression. In contemporary medical ethics there is considerable consensus that patient autonomy, or the patient’s right to know, in most cases outweighs these negative effects of information. Worry about the detrimental effects of information has, however, been voiced in relation to public health more generally. In particular, information about uncertain threats to public health, from—for example, chemicals—are said to entail social costs that have not been given due consideration. (...) This criticism implies a consequentialist argument for withholding such information from the public in their own best interest. In evaluating the argument for this kind of epistemic paternalism, the consequences of making information available must be compared to the consequences of withholding it. Consequences that should be considered include epistemic effects, psychological effects, effects on private decisions, and effects on political decisions. After giving due consideration to the possible uses of uncertain information and rebutting the claims that uncertainties imply small risks and that they are especially prone to entail misunderstandings and anxiety, it is concluded that there is a strong case against withholding of information about uncertain threats to public health. (shrink)

I first provide an analysis of Joel Feinberg’s anti-paternalism in terms of invalidation of reasons. Invalidation is the blocking of reasons from influencing the moral status of actions, in this case the blocking of personal good reasons from supporting liberty-limiting actions. Invalidation is shown to be distinct from moral side constraints and lexical ordering of values and reasons. I then go on to argue that anti-paternalism as invalidation is morally unreasonable on at least four grounds, none of which presuppose that (...) people can be mistaken about their own good: First, the doctrine entails that we should sometimes allow people to unintentionally severely harm or kill themselves though we could easily stop them. Second, it entails that we should sometimes allow perfectly informed and rational people to risk the lives of themselves and others, though they are in perfect agreement with us on what reasons we have to stop them for their own good. Third, the doctrine leaves unexplained why we may benevolently coerce less competent but substantially autonomous people, such as young teens, but not adults. Last, it entails that there are peculiar jumps in justifiability between very similar actions. I conclude that as liberals we should reject anti-paternalism and focus our efforts on explicating important liberal values, thereby showing why liberty reasons sometimes override strong personal good reasons, though never by making them invalid. (shrink)

The singular position of Montesquieu's political philosophy seems to raise the question: Isn't the opposition between republicanism and liberalism a largely artificial one? On the one hand, the description of the republican vivere civile in the Spirit of the Laws testifies to the important ties that exist between Montesquieu and the tradition of ?civic humanism?. However, this apparent theoretical proximity between Montesquieu and the British Neo-Harringtonians ought not to be taken too far, obscuring the deep divergences that differentiate their respective (...) positions, notably when it comes to the interpretation of history. Montesquieu's break from the republican tradition is exemplified by his rejection of its conception of freedom rooted in the citizens' necessary participation in power. But in the end, this does not enable us to conclude that he subscribes to a purely liberal theory. The British model shows that even if direct participation in the exercise of power is not necessary for the existence of liberty, a certain level of civic involvement and public awareness is needed. The liberal opposition between positive and negative liberty, political autonomy and enjoyment of rights without interference must therefore be transcended. (shrink)