Some have recently argued that the current generation dominates future generations by causing long-term climate change. They relate these claims to Philip Pettit and Frank Lovett's neorepublican theory of domination. In this paper, I examine their claims and ask whether the neorepublican conception of domination remains theoretically coherent when the relation is between current agents and nonoverlapping future subjects. I differentiate between an ‘outcome’ and a ‘relational’ conception of domination. I show how both are theoretically coherent when extended to posterity (...) but only if we make different definitional and normative choices than those made by Pettit and Lovett. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine whether the concept of domination can be used to provide a coherent normative justification for policies or institutional changes regarding individuals who are members of f...

According to the widely accepted principles of beneficence and distributive justice, I argue that healthcare providers and facilities have an ethical duty to reduce the ecological footprint of the services they provide. I also address the question of whether the reductions in footprint need or should be patient-facing. I review Andrew Jameton and Jessica Pierce’s claim that achieving ecological sustainability in the healthcare sector requires rationing the treatment options offered to patients. I present a number of reasons to think that (...) we should not ration health care to achieve sufficient reductions in a society’s overall consumption of ecological goods. Moreover, given the complexities of ecological rationing, I argue that there are good reasons to think that the ethical duty to reduce the ecological footprint of health care should focus on only nonpatient-facing changes. I review a number of case studies of hospitals who have successfully retrofitted facilities to make them more efficient and reduced their resource and waste streams. (shrink)

Because of the “problem of individual causal inefficacy,” it has been difficult to explain why a purchase that will make little to no difference to a producer’s wrongdoing is itself morally wrong. Some have recently appealed to the concept of complicity in order to support the idea that consumers have a moral reason to avoid purchasing from companies engaged in wrongdoing. In this paper, I contribute to the development of this direction in consumer ethics. First, I explore how we should (...) define moral complicity in such situations. Some have claimed that an individual’s purchase makes her complicit, even though it makes no difference to the wrongdoing, because she is still knowingly joining in with the wrong that the company or other consumers are doing. I argue, however, that it is difficult to see making a purchase as a form of joining in a joint or group action. Instead, I respond to the causal inefficacy problem directly. I argue that even when the outcome is massively overdetermined, an individual purchase still makes a causal contribution to the principal wrongdoing and thus a basic condition for an act of moral complicity is met. Yet, this does not resolve the deeper question of whether and why consumers should morally avoid purchases that make them complicit in these cases. The issue is with how small the causal contribution such an individual purchase makes. That is, an individual purchase in such a situation may only make one a little bit complicit. I argue that for the concept of moral complicity to gain traction here, we will have to appeal to normative concerns besides the outcome of the complicit action. Still, even with this account, purchases in such overdetermination cases may not often be all things considered wrong because the reasons against them may be outweighed by other relevant reasons. (shrink)

A number of theorists have argued that Scanlon's contractualist theory both "gets around" and "solves" the non-identity problem. They argue that it gets around the problem because hypothetical deliberation on general moral principles excludes the considerations that lead to the problem. They argue that it solves the problem because violating a contractualist moral principle in one's treatment of another wrongs that particular other, grounding a person-affecting moral claim. In this paper, I agree with the first claim but note that all (...) it shows is that the act is impersonally wrong. I then dispute the second claim. On Scanlon's contractualist view, one wrongs a particular other if one treats the other in a way that is unjustifiable to that other on reasons she could not reasonably reject. We should think of person-affecting wronging in terms of the reasons had by the actual agent and the actual person affected by the agent's action. In non-identity cases, interpersonal justifiability is therefore shaped both by the reason to reject the treatment provided by the bad suffered and the reason to affirm the treatment provided by the goods had as a result of existing. I argue it would be reasonable for the actual person to find the treatment justifiable, and so I conclude that Scanlon's contractualist metaethics does not provide a narrow person-affecting solution to the non-identity problem on its own terms. I conclude that the two claims represent a tension within Scanlon's contractualist theory itself. (shrink)

The author argues non-human, sentient animals have aggregation-trumping rights by explaining why and how they should be included in the scope of Kantian contractualism. He explains that the beings to whom we owe duties—who can be wronged by our treatment—are all those with the capacity for first-person, subjective experience; i.e., all sentient beings. To determine what duties we owe to such beings, we should reflect on the principles for the general regulation of behavior that could be hypothetically justified to their (...) imaginary perfectly reasonable counterparts; i.e., even though animals actually cannot understand or reflect on the reasons we have for treating them in a particular way, burdening them unjustifiably is wrong to them. The author argues this inclusive contractualist theory can explain all the distinctive moral phenomena that T. M. Scanlon’s approach does and so is a more attractive contractualist moral theory. (shrink)

Traditional moral theories often struggle to say what we ought to do about the harms of climate change and why. Theories of moral responsibility have particular difficulty. This is because no one a...

This volume will address whether and to what extent those working to better understand or achieve climate justice should think about the real-world feasibility of their theories or proposals.

There is a major divide between the work of normative theorists and concrete climate action (or inaction) politics and policies. In this volume, authors tackle the strained relationships between principles of justice and climate politics by responding to real-world climate politics and policies, offering proposals and analyses that take concerns of feasibility seriously, and identifying immediate justice and feasibility concerns with recent proposals for climate action. Contributors look at questions of feasibility as they relate to specific international institutions like the (...) IPCC and UNFCCC, and widely discussed principles of climate justice, including backward-looking principles like polluter pays and forward-looking principles like ability to pay. Others explore the feasibility hurdles and justice concerns that challenge popular mitigation proposals. (shrink)

Hyperalgesia can arise from peripheral sensitization, on-going peripheral activation, and central plasticity. In the target article, coderre & katz argue that all three mechanisms contribute to hyperalgesia. In contrast, we believe that existing experimental evidence suggests that central plasticity plays only an insignificant role in most experimental models and clinical presentations of hyperalgesia induced by tissue injury or chemical activation of sensory receptors.

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Bereby‐Meyer, Hayakawa, Shalvi, Corey, Costa and Keysar investigate lying for self‐serving reasons. Participants in their experiments had to report the outcome of rolling a die only known to them. They inflated their outcomes less, and thus lied less, when using a foreign language than when using their native language. The authors suggest that lying for self‐serving reasons is an automatic tendency that can be overcome by speaking in a foreign language. [71].

While substantial progress has been made in the field known as artificial consciousness, at the present time there is no generally accepted phenomenally conscious machine, nor even a clear route to how one might be produced should we decide to try. Here, we take the position that, from our computer science perspective, a major reason for this is a computational explanatory gap: our inability to understand/explain the implementation of high-level cognitive algorithms in terms of neurocomputational processing. We explain how addressing (...) the computational explanatory gap can identify computational correlates of consciousness. We suggest that bridging this gap is not only critical to further progress in the area of machine consciousness, but would also inform the search for neurobiological correlates of consciousness and would, with high probability, contribute to demystifying the “hard problem” of understanding the mind–brain relationship. We compile a listing of previously proposed computational correlates of consciousness and, based on the results of recent computational modeling, suggest that the gating mechanisms associated with top-down cognitive control of working memory should be added to this list. We conclude that developing neurocognitive architectures that contribute to bridging the computational explanatory gap provides a credible and achievable roadmap to understanding the ultimate prospects for a conscious machine, and to a better understanding of the mind–brain problem in general. (shrink)

One of the most influential scientific treatises in Cauchy's era was J.-L. Lagrange's Mécanique Analytique, the second edition of which came out in 1811, when Cauchy was barely out of his teens. Lagrange opens his treatise with an unequivocal endorsement of infinitesimals. Referring to the system of infinitesimal calculus, Lagrange writes:Lorsqu'on a bien conçu l'esprit de ce système, et qu'on s'est convaincu de l'exactitude de ses résultats par la méthode géométrique des premières et dernières raisons, ou par la méthode analytique (...) des fonctions dérivées, on peut employer les infiniment petits comme un instrument sûr et commode pour abréger et simplifier les demonstrations.Lagrange's renewed enthusiasm for .. (shrink)

For much of its brief history, the field of environmental ethics has been critical of anthropocentrism. I here undertake a pragmatic reconsideration of anthropocentrism. In the first part of this essay, I explain what a pragmatic reconsideration of anthropocentrism means. I differentiate two distinct pragmatic strategies, one substantive and one methodological, and I adopt methodological pragmatism as my guiding principle. In the second part of this essay, I examine a case study of environmental policy—the problem of beach replenishment on Fire (...) Island, New York—as a pragmatic test of anthropocentrism. I conclude that the debate between anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism needs to be expressed in non-absolutist terms, i.e., in a language that permits compromise, flexibility, and a pluralism of values. Thechoice between anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism as the basis of both environmental policy and environmental ethics is highly contextual and thus requires a subtle examination of the concrete policy situation. (shrink)

In "Literal Meaning," John Searle claims to refute the view that sentences of a natural language have a meaning independent of the social contexts in which their utterances occur. The present paper is a reply on behalf of this view. In the first section, I show that the issue is not a parochial dispute within a narrow area of the philosophy of language, of interest only to specialists in the area, but is at the heart of a wide range of (...) important philosophical problems, those on which the recent linguistic turn in philosophy has properly taken a grammatical perspective. In the second section, I reply to Searle's criticisms of the view. (shrink)

Why does the law spurn win-win transactions? -- Things we can't consent to, though no one knows why -- A parable -- Lessons -- The social choice connection -- Why is the law so full of loopholes? -- The irresistible wrong answer -- What is wrong with the irresistible answer? -- The voting analogy -- Turning the analogy into an identity -- Intentional fouls -- Why is the law so either/or? -- The proverbial rigidity of the law -- Line drawing (...) as a matter of life and death -- Why don't we punish all we condemn? -- The undercriminalization problem -- Multicriterial ranking and the undercriminalization problem -- Final thoughts. (shrink)

The doctrine of informed consent, borrowed from the law of torts, cannot be readily transplanted into therapeutic settings. The broader, as yet unrealized, idea of informed consent, which suggests that parties must make decisions jointly, should guide interactions between physicians and patients or investigators and subjects.

This paper deals with the two-envelope paradox. Two main formulations of the paradoxical reasoning are distinguished, which differ according to the partition of possibilities employed. We argue that in the first formulation the conditionals required for the utility assignment are problematic; the error is identified as a fallacy of conditional reasoning. We go on to consider the second formulation, where the epistemic status of certain singular propositions becomes relevant; our diagnosis is that the states considered do not exhaust the possibilities. (...) Thus, on our approach to the paradox, the fallacy, in each formulation, is found in the reasoning underlying the relevant utility matrix; in both cases, the paradoxical argument goes astray before one gets to questions of probability or calculations of expected utility. (shrink)

This paper examines the identity of Asian swamp buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) from different value orientations. Buffalo were introduced into Northern (Top End) Australia in the early nineteenth century. A team of transdisciplinary researchers, including an ethicist, has been engaged in field research on feral buffalo in Arnhem Land over the past three years. Using historical documents, literature review, field observations, interviews with key informants, and interaction with the Indigenous land owners, an understanding of the diverse views on the scientific, cultural, (...) and economic significance of buffalo was obtained. While the diverse stakeholders in buffalo exploitation and management have historically delivered divergent value orientations on the nature of the human–buffalo relationship, we argue that over time there is the possibility of values and ethical convergence. Such convergence is possible via transdisciplinary and transcultural agreement on the value stances that constitute the construction of the being or identity of buffalo in the face of the overwhelming need to manage population density and gross numbers. (shrink)

The Anthropic Principle, in use by physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists, is currently under consideration by philosophers. This principle, in its various forms, appeals to man's existence as a constraint on our determination of natural laws and natural constants, as a principle of prediction, and, in its strongest form, as a principle of explanation which sanctions an argument for the universe being a product of design. What I shall endeavour to show here is how this principle, in its various forms, is (...) used in furthering our understanding of cosmology, and why this principle cannot be used as a principle of explanation. (shrink)

In two experiments, we examined whether POWER is embodied in terms of horizontal forward and backward movement using an action compatibility task. Participants were asked to categorize power-relate...

Among the many parodic elements in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes is the day-old baby's fart-omen. As is well-known, sneezing was considered prophetic in the ancient world, and the humour of the scene comes from the immediately preceding fart and the fact that Hermes’ bodily emissions are deliberate . Apollo has, in fact, gone in search of his baby brother on the basis of a standard bird-omen and confronted with Hermes’ signs, he recognizes that the crepitation is just as much (...) an omen as the sneeze, witness the plural τoúτoιζ oìωυoîσι a few lines later . We may compare a passage in Aristophanes’ Knights where the Sausage-seller reports that he took courage before speaking to the Council from a good omen: a man farted to the right, ༐κ δπξιâζ ᾤπέπαρδε . Aristophanes’ formulation suggests to me that the composer of the hymn may be intentionally setting up a play on words : the only difference between the verbal form ༐πέπταδε ‘sneezed’ is the reversal of the liquid and the dental stop. (shrink)

This article raises the question of ‘normality’ today and the fracturing of health ideals along new lines of enablement and function. In particular the study asks if ‘functional’ and ‘dysfunctional’ are displacing ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ as master biopolitical binarisms, and if so, what distinctions can be drawn between them. The discourse of ‘function’ and ‘dysfunction’ is certainly ubiquitous in two areas of research and practice: gerontology and sexology. In the former case ‘functional health’ is linked to successful aging represented by (...) technical tests around activities of daily living (ADLs) and risk-assessment profiles. In the latter case, sexual function and dysfunction have become all-encompassing markers of heterosexual competence, now largely detached from reproductive imperatives, but refashioned as integral to responsible and successful self-management. Presenting examples from both cases, the article concludes that functionality, circulating under the signs of ‘normal’, ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’, furnishes economic, technological, educational, professional, pharmacological and policy fields with a rich intellectual, practical and regulatory resource. (shrink)

Weston and I will be forever linked in the field of environmental philosophy because of an exchange of essays that were published in the journal Environmental Ethics in 1985 and 1987 on the subject...

I discuss donald davidson's argument for the psycho-Physical identity theory and contend that it fails: it relies on an implausible account of mental and physical events. Davidson proposes a linguistic test for determining whether a given event is mental or physical. I argue that the assumptions that are necessary for employing such a criterion of the mental are either false or presuppose the truth of the identity theory.

Many historians of the calculus deny significant continuity between infinitesimal calculus of the seventeenth century and twentieth century developments such as Robinson’s theory. Robinson’s hyperreals, while providing a consistent theory of infinitesimals, require the resources of modern logic; thus many commentators are comfortable denying a historical continuity. A notable exception is Robinson himself, whose identification with the Leibnizian tradition inspired Lakatos, Laugwitz, and others to consider the history of the infinitesimal in a more favorable light. Inspite of his Leibnizian sympathies, (...) Robinson regards Berkeley’s criticisms of the infinitesimal calculus as aptly demonstrating the inconsistency of reasoning with historical infinitesimal magnitudes. We argue that Robinson, among others, overestimates the force of Berkeley’s criticisms, by underestimating the mathematical and philosophical resources available to Leibniz. Leibniz’s infinitesimals are fictions, not logical fictions, as Ishiguro proposed, but rather pure fictions, like imaginaries, which are not eliminable by some syncategorematic paraphrase. We argue that Leibniz’s defense of infinitesimals is more firmly grounded than Berkeley’s criticism thereof. We show, moreover, that Leibniz’s system for differential calculus was free of logical fallacies. Our argument strengthens the conception of modern infinitesimals as a development of Leibniz’s strategy of relating inassignable to assignable quantities by means of his transcendental law of homogeneity. (shrink)