Consider our attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences depending on when they occur. A striking but rarely discussed feature of our attitude which Derek Parfit has emphasized is that we strongly wish painful experiences to lie in our past and pleasant experiences to lie in our future. Our asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures can be forcefully illustrated by means of a thought-experiment described by Parfit (1984, 165) which I will paraphrase as follows: You are in the (...) hospital to have an extremely painful but completely safe operation for which you can be given no anaesthetic. In order to ease recovery, you know that the hospital will give you drugs that cause you to forget your operation as soon as it is completed. You wake up, not remembering having gone to sleep, and ask the nurse if your operation has been completed. She tells you that there were two patients for this operation and she cannot remember which you are: either you already had your operation and it was the longest such operation ever performed, lasting ten hours, or else you are the other patient in which case your operation is imminent, but will last only one hour. 1. I wish to thank Sarah Broadie for comments on a version of this paper and Derek Parfit for conversations on this subject. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Saving Honor:The Ideology of Equal Esteem and the Good of Honor, Friendship, and Glory according to St. ThomasDominic Verner O.P.In his book Natural Law and Human Rights, Pierre Manent assesses and critiques a practical ideology that he finds pervasive within the European academy and sees increasingly informing the practical sensibilities of much of the Western world. "Our governing doctrine," as Manent calls it, is chiefly characterized by the (...) primacy of right over law and the rejection of any objective principle by which actions and persons might be judged.1 It is "the plasticity of the human form" itself which demands respect.2 The only non-constructed and thus normative characteristic of equal human nature is the power of being an "individval-conatus," the power to be one's own rule and reason for acting.3 And the only generally recognized purpose of this "individual-conatus" is to satisfy the desire for power, which is the sole universal motive of human action.4 Such an individual can be legitimately ruled and governed only by himself, a claim reflected in the ideal of the autonomous subject and representative government.5 In sum, Manent characterizes this ideology in terms of a thoroughgoing [End Page 335] rejection of any objective rule, "any law of God or of nature," according to which man is defined and judged.6Manent warns that this ideology is opposed to the very wellsprings of action, since an operation is rightly called an action only when it is performed according to some deliberate choice, which requires some rule and reason. If all rules and reasons are entirely self-generated, then there is no principle according to which deliberation might occur. Such a so-called autonomous subject purports to command himself, but in fact he is more patient than agent: the subject is moved by desires and preferences which cannot be weighed according to any discriminatory rule or principle, since the desires and preferences themselves are the only rule the subject acknowledges. Aside from submitting to the movement of the inexplicably strongest preference, the only positive reason for acting that remains is to destroy any vestiges of objective rules or reasons for acting—that is, the law—that might hinder the realization of individual preference: "The acting animal is now the prisoner of the very audacious and ingenious arrangement that he once devised to escape the urgency and to avoid the difficulty of the practical question. Caught in the realm of inaction, he seeks out, in a kind of terminal fever, the last corners of social existence that still escape the laissez-faire idea and where the very idea of the law might suffer its final defeat."7What is a Christian to make of this practical ideology? What natural inclinations does it privilege and how might the goods it seeks be sought rightly? Manent argues that the sole universal motive for action explicitly recognized by this practical ideology is a certain kind of power: the power of self-determination. According to the governing doctrine, this power is the only universal human motive that can be relied upon to construct common life and political order. Manent's response to this ideology is therefore to propose a recovery of a natural law account of the heterogeneity of universal human motivations to include useful, pleasing, and honorable goods. In this article, I will argue that Manent's own account of the ideology he critiques suggests a more fundamental motive driving the ideology, namely, a desire for an unassailable esteem. And since it is a desire for esteem that best explains the attractiveness of the ideology of modern freedom, an alternative vision of practical life will need to address the desire for esteem and articulate its proper bases. In advancing this argument, I will first show that Manent's own analysis highlights the importance of the desire for esteem in motivating the ideology of modern freedom. I will then turn to the anthropology of Thomas [End Page 336] Aquinas to show that the desire for esteem is manifested in the desire for honor and for friendship and is rooted in a fundamental inclination to have certain knowledge of one's... (shrink)

In this article, I defend Thomistic eudaimonism against John Hare's Kantian charge of unacceptable self-regard, and argue that Hare's own Scotistic-Kantian double-source theory of motivation introduces a problematic conception of beatitude. Hare argues that the beatitude which motivates the will in Thomistic eudaimonism is a self-indexed good, which cannot motivate truly altruistic action. Hare fails to recognize that the beatitude that ultimately motivates the human will according to Thomas can be an ‘ourself-indexed’ rather than merely a ‘myself-indexed’ good, as the (...) love of friendship brings other selves into the will's self-intention, facilitating a truly intersubjective and communal beatitude. Rejecting beatitude as the sole motivation of the will, Hare proposes a Scotistic double-source theory of motivation where the beatitude of another and the agent's own beatitude can never be loved with one and the same affection of the will, rendering beatitude unacceptably exclusive and proprietary. By making this argument, I hope to show that contemporary debates concerning moral motivation should carefully consider whether they can account for the intersubjective beatitude that bolsters human solidarity and forms the object of hope given by Christ who wills that his joy may be in us. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to take a critical look at some of the assumptions and theories found in economics and management and discuss their implications for the practices found in the management of business and in public management. Two sets of assumptions are of interest here. First and foremost, the assumption that economic agents are only actuated by self-interest, accompanied by assumptions about the motivating effect of pecuniary incentives and assumptions about the regulation of behaviour through rules, controls (...) and sanctions; secondly, assumptions about “scientificness” and objectivity, accompanied by demands for mathematical formalism, clear goals, quantifiable models and measurements. The assertion is that unrealistic assumptions of economics have become taken for granted and tacitly included into theories and models of management. Guiding management to behave in a fashion that apparently makes these assumptions become “true”. Cases and illustrative examples are used to show how this influences the practice of decision makers and managers. (shrink)

‘Isn’t it clear that a man must have the right to warn the majority, to argue with the majority, to fight with the majority if he believes he holds the truth? Before many can know something, one must know it!’ The words are Dr Stockman’s of An Enemy of the People1 and in a competitive market building upon a Smithian self-interest there might seem to be no room for people like him. Whatever the personal attitudes of the owners, managers and (...) employees, they would feel forced to behave in business like all of their competitors. Such is the logic of the basic driving forces in Western societies. It is a logic that necessitates lean and mean production, the substitution of labour with capital, relocation of production to places with low labour costs — also known as social dumping — or to places with less stringent environmental demands and/or less costly safety regulations. The traditional way to prevent this happening has been to use state intervention and regulation to curb the worst cases. But today many of the traditional harnesses on an unbridled market economy have been removed, such as controls on capital movements, trade across borders or regulation of sectors like transport, telecommunication, energy, utilities and so on. With this in mind we may ask whether there exists an alternative to state intervention that would contain or change the direction of the logic from within the logic itself. In other words, is it possible for a single or a few entrepreneurs to change the logic in such a way that external regulation is avoided or reduced, while finding answers to the problems and concerns caused by that logic? Of course there is a risk that these answers may consist of just a kind of exploitative riding of the waves of concerns and offering strange, Potemkin-like answers to for instance the clamour for environmental responsibility. Responsible entrepreneurship is something else, though. It consists in understanding genuine concerns and using one’s special knowledge in a certain field, to experiment and develop constantly improving answers to these concerns, giving a concrete form to emerging values, and raising the expectations of all those having these concerns. (shrink)

An integral method of keeping a non-conforming community functioning is the construction and up keep of networks, as this web of connections provided security and protection with other non-conformists against the persecuting authorities. The non-conforming Catholic community of Elizabethan England established various networks within England and abroad. This article is based on research that examines the network of Catholics in the Elizabethan Midlands in order to understand both its effectiveness and the relationship of the local and extended Catholic community with (...) one another. The construction, function and result of these networks will be surveyed over several categories of networks, such as local, underground, clerical and exile. Members of the Midland Catholic community travelled to others areas of the British Isles and Europe to gather spiritual and material support for their faith, sent their children abroad for religious education, and resettled abroad creating in this wake a larger and complex international network. The main objective of this exercise is to show the dynamic and function of the network, and understand the impact it had at the local level for Midland Catholics. (shrink)

Solidarität wird in Krisenzeiten sowie bei Ungerechtigkeit und Marginalisierung gefordert. Sie tritt dabei in unterschiedlichen Reichweiten und Akteurskonstellationen auf und basiert auf verschiedenen Motiven und Ausgangslagen. Julia Masurkewitz-Möller nimmt sich dieser Vielfalt an und erarbeitet eine Systematisierung der Solidarität, die Ordnung in den begrifflichen Dschungel des Konzepts bringt. Sie zeigt, dass verschiedene Solidaritätsformen trotz ihrer Unterschiede einen gemeinsamen Kern und eine Beziehung zueinander haben - und damit die Transformationen von Solidaritätsformen möglich machen.

We investigate which filters onωcan contain towers, that is, a modulo finite descending sequence without any pseudointersection. We prove the following results:Many classical examples of nice tall filters contain no towers.It is consistent that tall analytic P-filters contain towers of arbitrary regular height.It is consistent that all towers generate nonmeager filters, in particular Borel filters do not contain towers.The statement “Every ultrafilter contains towers.” is independent of ZFC.Furthermore, we study many possible logical implications between the existence of towers in filters, (...) inequalities between cardinal invariants of filters $,${\rm{co}}{{\rm{f}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$,${\rm{no}}{{\rm{n}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$, and${\rm{co}}{{\rm{v}}^{\rm{*}}}\left$), and the existence of Luzin type families, that is, if${\cal F}$is a filter then${\cal X} \subseteq {[\omega ]^\omega }$is an${\cal F}$-Luzin family if$\left\{ {X \in {\cal X}:|X \setminus F| = \omega } \right\}$is countable for every$F \in {\cal F}$. (shrink)

Bart Streumer argues that it is not possible for us to believe the error theory, where by ‘error theory’ he means the claim that our normative beliefs are committed to the existence of normative properties even though such properties do not exist. In this paper, we argue that it is indeed possible to believe the error theory. First, we suggest a critical improvement to Streumer’s argument. As it stands, one crucial premise of that argument—that we cannot have a belief while (...) believing that there is no reason to have it—is implausibly strong. We argue that for his purposes, Streumer’s argument only requires a weaker premise, namely that we cannot rationally have a belief while believing that there is no reason to have it. Secondly, we go on to refute the improved argument. Even in its weaker form, Streumer’s argument is either invalid or the crucial premise should be rejected. (shrink)

We show in ZFC that the existence of completely separable maximal almost disjoint families of subsets of $\omega $ implies that the modal logic $\mathbf {S4.1.2}$ is complete with respect to the Čech–Stone compactification of the natural numbers, the space $\beta \omega $. In the same fashion we prove that the modal logic $\mathbf {S4}$ is complete with respect to the space $\omega ^*=\beta \omega \setminus \omega $. This improves the results of G. Bezhanishvili and J. Harding in [4], where (...) the authors prove these theorems under stronger assumptions. Our proof is also somewhat simpler. (shrink)

In this short paper, we describe another class of forcing notions which preserve measurability of a large cardinal $\kappa$ from the optimal hypothesis, while adding new unbounded subsets to $\kappa$. In some ways these forcings are closer to the Cohen-type forcings—we show that they are not minimal—but, they share some properties with treelike forcings. We show that they admit fusion-type arguments which allow for a uniform lifting argument.

Esse estudo objetivou analisar a violência infantil no contexto brasileiro, correlacionando-a com fatores socioeconômicos, socioculturais, geracionais e de gênero, investigando o impacto dos mesmos na saúde das crianças. Realizou-se um estudo epidemiológico descritivo, realizado a partir de dados de artigos científicos e documentos oficiais sobre e violência infantil, além do banco de dados do Sistema de Informação de Agravos de Notificação (SINAN) e da plataforma SciELO e Google Acadêmico. Encontrou-se uma maior prevalência de violência física e negligência, maior índice de (...) violência sexual contra o sexo feminino e negligência no sexo masculino. Os principais agressores identificados foram o pai e a mãe. Acerca da etnia, crianças pardas foram as mais agredidas, bem como as de menor escolaridade. As consequências da violência infantil se estendem para além do momento da agressão, ao perturbar funções cognitivas e mesmo influenciar na gênese de transtornos psiquiátricos. (shrink)

We show in ZFC that the existence of completely separable maximal almost disjoint families of subsets of $\omega $ implies that the modal logic $\mathbf {S4.1.2}$ is complete with respect to the Čech–Stone compactification of the natural numbers, the space $\beta \omega $. In the same fashion we prove that the modal logic $\mathbf {S4}$ is complete with respect to the space $\omega ^*=\beta \omega \setminus \omega $. This improves the results of G. Bezhanishvili and J. Harding in [4], where (...) the authors prove these theorems under stronger assumptions. Our proof is also somewhat simpler. (shrink)

This paper presents a simple argument against life being the product of design. The argument rests on three points. We can conceive of the debate in terms of likelihoods, in the technical sense – how probable the design hypothesis renders our evidence, versus how probable the competing Darwinian hypothesis renders that evidence. God, as traditionally conceived, had many more options by which to bring about life as we observe it than were available to natural selection. That is, the relevant parameters (...) were, in many cases, far more constrained under natural selection. Utterly mundane features of the world, like that the earth is very old, are actually powerful evidence that the world was not designed, since that outcome was optional on the design hypothesis but nearly inevitable on natural selection. (shrink)

In 2003, Ruth Faden and eighteen other colleagues argued that a.

Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, punishing women for being raped, differential access for men and women to health care and education, unequal rights of ownership, assembly, and political participation, unequal vulnerability to violence. These practices and conditions are standard in some parts of the world. Do demands for multiculturalism — and certain minority group rights in particular — make them more likely to continue and to spread to liberal democracies? Are there fundamental conflicts between our commitment to gender equity (...) and our increasing desire to respect the customs of minority cultures or religions? In this book, the eminent feminist Susan Moller Okin and fifteen of the world’s leading thinkers about feminism and multiculturalism explore these unsettling questions in a provocative, passionate, and illuminating debate. Okin opens by arguing that some group rights can, in fact, endanger women. She points, for example, to the French government’s giving thousands of male immigrants special permission to bring multiple wives into the country, despite French laws against polygamy and the wives’ own bitter opposition to the practice. Okin argues that if we agree that women should not be disadvantaged because of their sex, we should not accept group rights that permit oppressive practices on the grounds that they are fundamental to minority cultures whose existence may otherwise be threatened. In reply, some respondents reject Okin’s position outright, contending that her views are rooted in a moral universalism that is blind to cultural difference. Others quarrel with Okin’s focus on gender, or argue that we should be careful about which group rights we permit, but not reject the category of group rights altogether. Okin concludes with a rebuttal, clarifying, adjusting, and extending her original position. These incisive and accessible essays — expanded from their original publication in Boston Review and including four new contributions — are indispensable reading for anyone interested in one of the most contentious social and political issues today. The diverse contributors, in addition to Okin, are Azizah al-Hibri, Abdullahi An-Na’im, Homi Bhabha, Sander Gilman, Janet Halley, Bonnie Honig, Will Kymlicka, Martha Nussbaum, Bhikhu Parekh, Katha Pollitt, Robert Post, Joseph Raz, Saskia Sassen, Cass Sunstein, and Yael Tamir. (shrink)

Susan Moller Okin. AFTERWORD or greater weighting of these over “masculine" values. For how are women to continue to assume all of the nurturing activities that allegedly both follow from and reinforce their “naturally” superior virtues, and  ...

What makes trust such a powerful concept? Is it merely that in trust the whole range of social forces that we know play together? Or is it that trust involves a peculiar element beyond those we can account for? While trust is an attractive and evocative concept that has gained increasing popularity across the social sciences, it remains elusive, its many facets and applications obscuring a clear overall vision of its essence. In this book, Guido Möllering reviews a broad range (...) of trust research and extracts three main perspectives adopted in the literature for understanding trust. Accordingly, trust is presented as a matter of reason, routine or reflexivity. While all these perspectives contribute something to our understanding of trust, Möllering shows that they imply, but cannot explain, ‘suspension’ – the leap of faith that is typical of trust. He therefore proposes a new direction in trust research that builds on existing perspectives but places the suspension of uncertainty and vulnerability at the heart of the concept of trust. Beyond a purely theoretical line of argument, the author discusses implications for empirical studies of trust and presents original case material that captures the experience of trust in terms of reason, routine, reflexivity and suspension. Möllering concludes by suggesting how the new approach can enhance the relevance of trust research and its contributions to broader research agendas concerning the constitution of positive expectations in the face of prevalent uncertainty and change at various levels in our economies and societies. The book is essential reading for anyone who wants to gain a thorough understanding of trust. It can serve as a general introduction for advanced students and scholars in the social sciences, especially in economics, sociology, psychology and management. For more experienced researchers, it is a challenging and provocative critique of the field and a new approach to understanding trust. (shrink)

We show that MAκ implies that each collection of Pc-points of size at most κ which has a Pc-point as an RK upper bound also has a Pc-point as an RK lower bound.

The rich diversity of avian natural history provides exciting possibilities for comparative research aimed at understanding three-dimensional navigation. We propose some hypotheses relating differences in natural history to potential behavioral and neurological adaptations possessed by contrasting bird species. This comparative approach may offer unique insights into some of the important questions raised by Jeffery et al.

The recent global movement for women's human rights has achieved considerable re-thinking of human rights as previously understood. Since many of women's rights violations occur in the private sphere of family life, and are justified by appeals to cultural or religious norms, both families and cultures (including their religious aspects) have come under critical scrutiny.

In this pathbreaking study of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Mill, Susan Moller Okin turns to the tradition of political philosophy that pervades Western culture and its institutions to understand why the gap between formal and real gender equality persists. Our philosophical heritage, Okin argues, largely rests on the assumption of the natural inequality of the sexes. Women cannot be included as equals within political theory unless its deep-rooted assumptions about the traditional family, its sex roles, and its (...) relation to the wider world of political society are challenged. So long as this attitude pervades our institutions and behavior, the formal equality women have won has no chance of becoming substantive. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Dutch case of Brongersma presents novel challenges to the definition and evaluation of voluntary euthanasia since it involved a doctor assisting the suicide of an individual who was (merely?) ‘tired of life’. Legal officials had called on the courts to ‘set a principled boundary’, excluding such cases from the scope of permissible voluntary euthanasia, but they arguably failed. This failure is explicable, however, since the case seems justifiable by reference to the two major principles in favour of that (...) practice, respect for autonomy and beneficence. Ultimately, it will be argued that those proponents of voluntary euthanasia who are wary of its use in such circumstances may need to draw upon ‘practical’ objections, in order to erect an otherwise arbitrary perimeter. Furthermore, it will be suggested that the issues raised by the case are not peculiarly Dutch in nature and that, therefore, there are lessons here for other jurisdictions too. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Dutch case of Brongersma presents novel challenges to the definition and evaluation of voluntary euthanasia since it involved a doctor assisting the suicide of an individual who was (merely?) ‘tired of life’. Legal officials had called on the courts to ‘set a principled boundary’, excluding such cases from the scope of permissible voluntary euthanasia, but they arguably failed. This failure is explicable, however, since the case seems justifiable by reference to the two major principles in favour of that (...) practice, respect for autonomy and beneficence. Ultimately, it will be argued that those proponents of voluntary euthanasia who are wary of its use in such circumstances may need to draw upon ‘practical’ objections, in order to erect an otherwise arbitrary perimeter. Furthermore, it will be suggested that the issues raised by the case are not peculiarly Dutch in nature and that, therefore, there are lessons here for other jurisdictions too. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 6, June 2022.

It is natural for those with permissive attitudes toward abortion to suppose that, if they have examined all of the arguments they know against abortion and have concluded that they fail, their moral deliberations are at an end. Surprisingly, this is not the case, as I argue. This is because the mere risk that one of those arguments succeeds can generate a moral reason that counts against the act. If this is so, then liberals may be mistaken about the morality (...) of abortion. However, conservatives who claim that considerations of risk rule out abortion in general are mistaken as well. Instead, risk-based considerations generate an important but not necessarily decisive reason to avoid abortion. The more general issue that emerges is how to accommodate fallibilism about practical judgment in our decision-making. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 6, June 2022.

Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists, has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the (...) like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high, and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it. Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory. (shrink)

Empirical evidence indicates that bereaved spouses are surprisingly muted in their responses to their loss, and that after a few months many of the bereaved return to their emotional baseline. Psychologists think this is good news: resilience is adaptive, and we should welcome evidence that there is less suffering in the world. I explore various reasons we might have for regretting our resilience, both because of what resilience tells us about our own significance vis-à-vis loved ones, and because resilience may (...) render us incapable of comprehending how things really stand, valuewise. I also compare our actual dispositions to extreme alternatives (“sub-resilience” and “super-resilience”), and consider whether we might endorse (plain) resilience as a kind of mean. (shrink)