There are two possible ways to understand form and substance in legal reasoning. The first refers to the distinction between concepts and their applications, whereas the second concentrates on the difference between authoritative and non-authoritative reasons. These approaches refer to the formalistic and positivistic conceptions of the law, the latter being the author's point of departure. Nevertheless, they are both helpful means of analysis in legal interpretation. Interpretation is divided into formal and substantive justification. They have certain functions and they (...) are utilized in interaction. Authoritative reasons and formal reasoning constitute the necessary point of departure. However, substantive reasons are also necessary in order to justify choices included in interpretation. In addition to formal and substantive reasoning, the role of legal concepts is analysed. (shrink)

This paper deals with the problems involved in the concept of knowledge in the sphere of law. Traditionally, the idea of knowledge has dealt with the presumption of given objects of information. According to this approach, knowing means finding these objects. This is the natural and understandable foundation of metaphysical or philosophical realism. Cognition and cognitive interest are directed outside the sentences by which they are described. This is the point of departure of legal positivism as well. However, it is (...) not possible to see valid law as totally independent of language and concepts. This makes the idea of legal facts as institutional facts vague. From a practical viewpoint, the sentences of judges and legal scholars, when they present valid law, justify rather than describe. Their crucial function is interpretation. Hence, the objectivity of these sentences cannot be based on the presumption of separate objects either. Instead, it has to be based on the principles of acceptable reasoning. Moreover, the author claims that this kind of approach, united with the utilization of human rights and substantial legal principles, leads one to acknowledge objective values. (shrink)

This paper deals with the concept of practical wisdom and its applications in the field of jurisprudence. The starting point is the Aristotelian idea that a skill to understand and apply law is an embodiment of practical sense. racticality of law has many dimensions. One important dimension is contextuality. Contextuality appears as the situation dependence of interpretation. Hence, the ultimate content of law is context dependent, too. I try to elucidate the essence of practicality of law and its interpretation by (...) examining a precedent of the Finnish Supreme Court (KKO 1997: 87). It is a case involving the distribution of an estate among heirs. The main idea of that decision is that the proper values of inheritance‐shares depend on the utilization values of them and the whole economic situation among heirs. What is just depends on a situation. Taken seriously, the practicality and contextuality of law forces us to adopt an unconventional conception of jurisprudence. First, it is doubtful if one can point to any scientific method at all. Second, according to this conception, legal dogmatics is not a description of law. Rather, it is a skill of argumentation, the skill of taking considered steps from different kinds of arguments to conclusions. The purpose of legal dogmatics is to offer valid and useful arguments to be used in different situations. (shrink)

In God Emperor of Dune, Leto II explains to Moneo why people destroyed thinking machines in the Butlerian Jihad: "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments." The Orange Catholic Bible (OCB), the key religious text in the Dune universe, forbids the creation of machines that imitate human thinking: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind." The OCB focuses on human mental (...) abilities – especially computation, reason, and logic – that have a status that machines should not emulate. In Frank Herbert's universe, divine imitation and creation are presented in conflicting ways: on the one hand, they are strictly prohibited, on the other, they are aspirations for key characters. Mentats replace machines by use of hard, cold, logical thinking and reasoning with machine‐like efficiency. (shrink)

This paper reviews how research on the demarcation problem has developed, starting from Popper’s criterion of falsifiability and ending with recent naturalistically oriented approaches. The main differences between traditional and contemporary approaches to the problem are explicated in terms of six postulates called the traditional assumptions. It is argued that all of the assumptions can be dismissed without giving up on the demarcation problem and that doing so might benefit further discussions on pseudoscience. Four present-day research movements on evaluating the (...) boundaries of science are introduced: (1) philosophy of pseudoscience, (2) social epistemology of dissent, (3) agnotology, and (4) evaluation of expertise. Researchers working within these areas have abandoned some or all traditional assumptions. (shrink)

Is the tendency to morally prioritize humans over animals weaker in children than adults? In two pre-registered studies (N = 622), 5- to 9-year-old children and adults were presented with moral dilemmas pitting varying numbers of humans against varying numbers of either dogs or pigs and were asked who should be saved. In both studies, children had a weaker tendency to prioritize humans over animals than adults. They often chose to save multiple dogs over one human, and many valued the (...) life of a dog as much as the life of a human. While they valued pigs less, the majority still prioritized ten pigs over one human. By contrast, almost all adults chose to save one human over even one hundred dogs or pigs. Our findings suggest that the common view that humans are far more morally important than animals appears late in development and is likely socially acquired. (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that we sometimes are disposed to accept false and even jointly inconsistent claims by virtue of our semantic competence, and that this comes to light in the sorites and liar paradoxes. Among the subsidiary theses are that this is an important source of indeterminacy in truth conditions, that we must revise basic assumptions about semantic competence, and that classical logic and bivalence can be upheld in the face of the sorites paradox.

Moral and political philosophers no longer condemn harm inflicted on nonhuman animals as self-evidently as they did when animal welfare and animal rights advocacy was at the forefront in the 1980s, and sentience, suffering, species-typical behavior, and personhood were the basic concepts of the discussion. The article shows this by comparing the determination with which societies seek responsibility for human harm to the relative indifference with which law and morality react to nonhuman harm. When harm is inflicted on humans, policies (...) concerning negligence and duty of care and principles such as the ‘but for’ rule and the doctrine of double effect are easily introduced. When harm is inflicted on nonhumans, this does not happen, at least not any more. As an explanation for the changed situation, the article offers a shift in discussion and its basic terminology. Simple ethical considerations supported the case for nonhuman animals, but many philosophers moved on to debate different views on political justice instead. This allowed the creation of many conflicting views that are justifiable on their own presuppositions. In the absence of a shared foundation, this fragments the discussion, focuses it on humans, and ignores or marginalizes nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Recent epistemology of modality has seen a growing trend towards metaphysics-first approaches. Contrastingly, this paper offers a more philosophically modest account of justifying modal claims, focusing on the practices of scientific modal inferences. Two ways of making such inferences are identified and analyzed: actualist-manipulationist modality and relative modality. In AM, what is observed to be or not to be the case in actuality or under manipulations, allows us to make modal inferences. AM-based inferences are fallible, but the same holds for (...) practically all empirical inquiry. In RM, modal inferences are evaluated relative to what is kept fixed in a system, like a theory or a model. RM-based inferences are more certain but framework-dependent. While elements from both AM and RM can be found in some existing accounts of modality, it is worth highlighting them in their own right and isolating their features for closer scrutiny. This helps to establish their relevant epistemologies that are free from some strong philosophical assumptions often attached to them in the literature. We close by showing how combining these two routes amounts to a view that accounts for a rich variety of modal inferences in science. (shrink)

Metaontology – the study of the nature of ontological issues – has flourished in recent years. The focus of this summary will be on some views and arguments that are central to today’s debate. One theme will be that of how seriously to take ontology: whether there is reason to take a skeptical or deflationary attitude toward ontological claims, as theorists like Rudolf Carnap, Hilary Putnam, and Eli Hirsch in different ways have urged. The other theme will be that of (...) the viability of the Fregean and Quinean approaches to ontology that have been and still are central to analytic philosophy. (shrink)

People’s causal judgments are susceptible to the action effect, whereby they judge actions to be more causal than inactions. We offer a new explanation for this effect, the counterfactual explanation: people judge actions to be more causal than inactions because they are more inclined to consider the counterfactual alternatives to actions than to consider counterfactual alternatives to inactions. Experiment 1a conceptually replicates the original action effect for causal judgments. Experiment 1b confirms a novel prediction of the new explanation, the reverse (...) action effect, in which people judge inactions to be more causal than actions in overdetermination cases. Experiment 2 directly compares the two effects in joint-causation and overdetermination scenarios and conceptually replicates them with new scenarios. Taken together, these studies provide support for the new counterfactual explanation for the action effect in causal judgment. (shrink)

Supervaluationism, traditionally conceived, is the conjunction of three theses: Vagueness in a language gives rise to there being a multitude of acceptable assignments of semantic values to some expressions of the language, These assignments correspond to possible completions of the meanings of vague expressions, Truth is truth under all acceptable assignments, and falsity is falsity under all acceptable assignments. Supervaluationism has three chief virtues. It preserves classical logic. It provides an account of what vagueness is. And it extends nicely to (...) the vagueness of singular terms. I argue, however, that the existence of vagueifiers ‐ expressions like‘roughly’– pose problems for thesis of Supervaluationism, and that the supervaluationist can get around these problems only at a serious cost. Toward the end of the paper, I present an alternative analysis of vagueness, which preserves the main virtues of Supervaluationism, but which identifies vagueness as semantic Overdetermination, rather than as semantic underdetermination. (shrink)

This paper argues that the proponents of epistemological scientism must take some stand on scientific methodology. The supporters of scientism cannot simply defer to the social organisation of science because the social processes themselves must meet some methodological criteria. Among such criteria is epistemic evaluability, which demands intersubjective access to reasons. We derive twelve theses outlining some implications of epistemic evaluability. Evaluability can support weak and broad variants of epistemological scientism, which state that sciences, broadly construed, are the best sources (...) of knowledge or some other epistemic goods. Since humanities and social sciences produce epistemically evaluable results, narrow types of scientism that take only natural sciences as sources of knowledge require additional argumentation in their support. Strong scientism, which takes sciences as the only source of knowledge, also needs to appeal to some further principles since evaluability is not an all-or-nothing affair. (shrink)

In Andreas Stokke (ed.), Festschrift for Matti Eklund, 2024. -/- Replies to Katharina Felka and Nils Franzén, Eli Hirsch, Dan Korman, David Liebesman, Øystein Linnebo, Anna-Sofia Maurin and Debbie Roberts. Topics discussed concern metaethics, metaphysics and philosophy of language. More specifically, issues discussed are thick concepts (Felka and Franzén; Roberts), ontology (Hirsch, Linnebo), indifferentism and fictionalism (Korman), alien languages and alien metaphysics (Liebesman), and Bradley's regress (Maurin).

Yleensä Wienin piirin loogista empirismiä kannattaneet filosofit mielletään antirealisteiksi. Tässä artikkelissa kuitenkin argumentoidaan, että piirin johtohahmo Moritz Schlick oli eräänlainen realisti myös nykystandardien valossa. Näin ollen – niin yllättävältä kuin se kuulostaakin – positivismi ja realismi ovat yhteensovitettavissa. Schlick tosin erotti kannattamansa empiirisen realismin jyrkästi metafyysisestä realismista, jota hän piti merkityksettömänä. Schlickin realismin esittelyn lisäksi artikkelissa tarkastellaan yleisellä tasolla hänen epistemologiaansa, kielifilosofiaansa ja metafysiikan kritiikkiään. Tekstissä pohditaan myös Schlickin suosiman realismin asemaa ja relevanssia nykyisessä realismikeskustelussa.

I distinguish two kinds of contribution that have been made by recent minimalist accounts of joint action in philosophy and cognitive science relative to established philosophical accounts of shared intentional action. The “complementarists” seek to analyze a functionally different kind of joint action from the kind of joint action that is analyzed by established philosophical accounts of shared intentional action. The “constitutionalists” seek to expose mechanisms that make performing joint actions possible, without taking a definite stance on which functional characterization (...) of joint action is the appropriate one. I elucidate the contrasting methodological underpinnings of these minimalist research programs in accordance with Bechtel and Richardson’s account of the heuristics of decomposition and localization as a research strategy for the study of complex systems. (shrink)

The concepts we use to value and prescribe are historically contingent, and we could have found ourselves with others. But what does it mean to say that some concepts are better than others for purposes of action-guiding and deliberation? What is it to choose between different normative conceptual frameworks?

This paper argues for theoretical modeling and model-construction as central types of activities that philosophers of social ontology engage in. This claim is defended through a detailed case study and revisionary interpretation of Raimo Tuomela’s account of the we-perspective. My interpretation is grounded in Ronald Giere’s account of scientific models, and argued to be compatible with, but less demanding than Tuomela’s own description of his account as a philosophical theory of the social world. My approach is also suggested to be (...) applicable to many other methodologically naturalist accounts of collective intentionality and social ontology. (shrink)

With the considerable attention given to UNESCO's Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, the time has come to take another look at the concept of dignity, on which this document is morally founded. The term “dignity” now appears in many national constitutions and international bioethical statements. It has also become popular among Continental European ethicists, many of whom wish to challenge the particularly American and overtly individualistic principles of “autonomy,” “justice,” “beneficence,” and “nonmaleficence.” a.

The role that trust plays in blockchain-based systems is understood and portrayed in various manners. The blockchain technology is said to enable and establish trust as well as to redirect it, to substitute for it, and to make it obsolete. Furthermore, there is disagreement on whom or what users have to trust when using the blockchain technology: code, math, algorithms, and machines, or still human actors. This paper hypothesizes that the divergences of the depictions largely rest on implicitly adhering to (...) different accounts of trust. Thus, the goal of this paper is to outline how the current lack of a shared understanding of the term “trust” leads to diverging interpretations of the blockchain technology’s core features. Furthermore, it shows how this lack of common understanding obstructs scholars from referring to one another meaningfully in the discourse on blockchain technology. To do so, this paper outlines the most prominent depictions of the setup of relevant trust relationships within blockchain-based systems and traces their roots to different underlying assumptions on the nature of trust. (shrink)

According to theoretical work on epistemic injustice, baseless discrediting of the knowledge of people with marginalized social identities is a central driver of prejudice and discrimination. Discrediting of knowledge may sometimes be subtle, but it is pernicious, inducing chronic stress and coping strategies such as emotional avoidance. In this research, we sought to deepen the understanding of epistemic injustice’s impact by examining emotional responses to being discredited and assessing if marginalized social group membership predicts these responses. We conducted a novel (...) series of three experiments (Total N = 1690) in which participants (1) shared their factual knowledge about how a game worked or their personal feelings about the game; (2) received discrediting feedback (invalidating remarks), validating feedback (affirming remarks), or insulting feedback (general negative social evaluation); and then (3) reported their affect. In all three studies, on average, affective responses to discrediting feedback were less negative than to insulting feedback, and more negative than to validating feedback. Participants who shared their knowledge reported more negative affect after discrediting feedback than participants who shared their feelings. There were consistent individual differences, including a twice-replicated finding of reduced negative affect after receiving discrediting and insulting feedback for Black men compared to White men and women and Black women. Black men’s race-based traumatic symptom scores predicted their affective responses to discrediting and insulting feedback, suggesting that experience with discrimination contributed to the emotional processing of a key aspect of epistemic injustice: remarks conveying baseless discrediting of knowledge. (shrink)

There is a growing feeling in many Western countries that every human being has a right to health, or a right to health care. This feeling is reflected in a declaration of the World Health Organization (WHO) from 1976, which states: The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition. Our intention in the following is to use the WHO (...) declaration as a basis for considering the allocation of resources in health care. We shall first argue that most of the criteria suggested as grounds for fair allocation of scarce medical resources have their difficulties if one tries to apply them one by one to medical practices. We shall then go on to claim that, if we take the right of all human beings to health or health care even moderately seriously, increasing the resources would in most cases be more ethical than attempting to allocate them ‘fairly’. (shrink)

Relativism is usually a derogatory word in philosophical bioethics in the West. If people make the mistake of trying to understand radically “different” points of view, an accusation of relativism is quickly forthcoming. But why should this be an accusation? My aim in this paper is to demonstrate that it should not.

Messaging from U.S. authorities about COVID-19 has been widely divergent. This research aims to clarify popular perceptions of the COVID-19 threat and its effects on victims. In four studies with over 4,100 U.S. participants, we consistently found that people perceive the threat of COVID-19 to be substantially greater than that of several other causes of death to which it has recently been compared, including the seasonal flu and automobile accidents. Participants were less willing to help COVID-19 victims, who they considered (...) riskier to help, more contaminated, and more responsible for their condition. Additionally, politics and demographic factors predicted attitudes about victims of COVID-19 above and beyond moral values; whereas attitudes about the other kinds of victims were primarily predicted by moral values. The results indicate that people perceive COVID-19 as an exceptionally severe disease threat, and despite prosocial inclinations, do not feel safe offering assistance to COVID-19 sufferers. This research has urgent applied significance: the findings are relevant to public health efforts and related marketing campaigns working to address extended damage to society and the economy from the pandemic. In particular, efforts to educate the public about the health impacts of COVID-19, encourage compliance with testing protocols and contact tracing, and support safe, prosocial decision-making and risk assessment, will all benefit from awareness of these findings. The results also suggest approaches, such as engaging people's stable values rather than their politicized perspectives on COVID-19, that may reduce stigma and promote cooperation in response to pandemic threats. (shrink)

_Liberal Utilitarianism and Applied Ethics_ explores the foundations of early utilitarianism and, at the same time, the theoretical bases of social ethics and policy in modern Western welfare states. Matti Hayry sees the main reason for utilitarianism's growing disrepute among moral philosophers is that its principles cannot legitimately be extended to situations where the basic needs of the individuals involved are in conflict. He is able to formulate a solution to this fundamental problem by arguing convincingly that by combining (...) a limited version of liberal utilitarianism and the methods of applied ethics, we are able to define our moral duties and rights. _Liberal Utilitarianism and Applied Ethics_ will appeal to students and teachers of philosophy who are interested in the doctrine of utilitarianism or in ethical decison-making. (shrink)

_Liberal Utilitarianism and Applied Ethics_ explores the foundations of early utilitarianism and, at the same time, the theoretical bases of social ethics and policy in modern Western welfare states. Matti Hayry sees the main reason for utilitarianism's growing disrepute among moral philosophers is that its principles cannot legitimately be extended to situations where the basic needs of the individuals involved are in conflict. He is able to formulate a solution to this fundamental problem by arguing convincingly that by combining (...) a limited version of liberal utilitarianism and the methods of applied ethics, we are able to define our moral duties and rights. _Liberal Utilitarianism and Applied Ethics_ will appeal to students and teachers of philosophy who are interested in the doctrine of utilitarianism or in ethical decison-making. (shrink)

Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form “SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because…” (...) where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows “because”—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications (N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Can philosophers come up with persuasive reasons to allow or to ban human reproductive cloning? Yes. Can philosophers agree, locally and temporarily, which practices related to cloning should be condoned and which should be rejected? Some of them can. Can philosophers produce universally convincing arguments for or against different kinds of human cloning? No. This paper analyses some of the main arguments presented by philosophers in the cloning debate, and some of the most important objections against them. The clashes (...) between the schools of thought suggest that philosophers cannot be trusted to provide the public authorities, or the general public, a unified, universally applicable view of the morality of human reproductive cloning. (shrink)

The article is centered on the question of how best to understand the logical pluralism/logical monism debate. A number of suggestions are brought up and rejected on the ground that they re...

My focus here will be Rudolf Carnap’s views on ontology, as these are presented in the seminal “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (1950). I will first describe how I think Carnap’s distinction between external and internal questions is best understood. Then I will turn to broader issues regarding Carnap’s views on ontology. With certain reservations, I will ascribe to Carnap an ontological pluralist position roughly similar to the positions of Eli Hirsch and the later Hilary Putnam. Then I turn to some (...) interrelated arguments against the pluralist view. The arguments are not demonstrative. Some possible escape routes for the pluralist are outlined. But I think the arguments constitute a formidable challenge. There should be serious doubt as to whether the pluralist view, as it emerges after discussion of these arguments, will be worth defending. Moreover, there is an alternative ontological view which equally well subserves the motivations underlying ontological pluralism. (shrink)

This article examines Martin Luther’s view of Natural theology and natural knowledge of God. Luther research has often taken a negative stance towards a possibility of Natural theology in Luther’s thought. I argue, that one actually finds from Luther’s texts a limited area of the natural knowledge of God. This knowledge pertains to the existence of God as necessary and as Creator, but not to what God is concretely. Luther appears to think that the natural knowledge of God is limited (...) because of the relation between God and the Universe only one side is known by natural capacities. Scholastic Theology built on Aristotelianism errs, according to Luther, when it uses created reality as the paradigm for thinking about God. Direct experiential knowledge of the divinity, given by faith, is required to comprehend the divine being. Luther’s criticism of Natural theology, however, does not appear to rise from a general rejection of metaphysics, but from that Luther follows certain ideas of Medieval Augustinian Platonism, such as a stark ontological differentiation between finite and infinite things, as well as the idea of divine uniting contradictions. Thus the conflict between faith and reason on Luther seems to be explicable at least in part as a conflict between two different ontological systems, which follow different paradigms of rationality. (shrink)