The narrative world of the Alien universe is shot through with self‐interested motivations, many of which focus on money. Employees do not have Full Moral Status (FMS), but from the point of view of managers they are valuable assets, i.e., have instrumental value for what they can do to maximize profits. The company, or its agents, repeatedly violates the stringent restrictions on harming beings normally considered to have FMS. There are indications that Carter Burke tried to impregnate Ripley in Aliens (...) by pushing a Facehugger onto her in the lab. This chapter questions what sort of protections would the crews of the Nostromo, Sulaco, and Prometheus have if stockholder theory were rejected. There are at least three different theories people can use to evaluate how each iteration of Weyland Industries treats its employees in the Alien films. These include stockholder theory, libertarian theories, and stakeholder theory. (shrink)

To understand Rey's search for relationships and community one can make use of Aristotle's theory of friendship, which has three forms: friendships of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue. Friendships for the sake of virtue differ from the other two forms of friendship. These imperfect friendships are fundamentally self‐regarding and often short‐lived. Intimate friendships include values of virtue, pleasure, or usefulness. In the Star Wars universe, characters make choices about both these intimate and wider communities, and in doing so choose (...) a set of values. If the choice of an intimate relationship is also a choice of a wider community and the community's values, the weight of such a choice becomes apparent. Rey's choice to claim the Skywalker name is significant as she's making a choice between two communities with irreconcilable values: the Jedi and the Sith. (shrink)

Theories about moral status help answer a variety of questions about events that occur throughout the Star Wars saga. This chapter examines what counts as merely a “thing” in the Star Wars galaxy. It highlights that moral relevance identifies the properties a creature must have in order to be morally considerable; it also determines the creature's degree of moral significance. Theories of moral relevance, understood in terms of the properties a creature must have to be morally valuable, fall into two (...) important categories: those that focus on physical properties and those that focus on psychological properties. The chapter analyzes the numerous moral status issues that emerge in the Star Wars galaxy. In particular, the story of the Zillo Beast confronts us with questions about moral considerability, significance, and relevance. (shrink)

Individuals who share friendships for utility or pleasure, Aristotle says, do not love each other in themselves, but in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each other. Friendships for utility aren't limited to business transactions, though. It's possible for Data to form relationships in order to achieve some other goal. An android without emotions is incapable of caring for another. Friendships can also be formed for the sake of pleasure and mutual enjoyment during communal activities. Friendship and (...) consequentialism are psychologically incompatible, for the only states of mind relevant to assessing the value of an act's consequences are states like purposes, goals, and desires. There are multiple forms of friendship, which require emotion. There's a difference between acting out of friendship and acting for the sake of the friendship or some other goal, which suggests that genuine friendships can't be accommodated by consequentialist ways of thinking. (shrink)

A review of Jan Narveson's _This is Ethical Theory_.

A review of Grene and Depew: Philosophy of Biology.

Many philosophers in the ancient world shared a unitary vision of philosophy – meaning 'love of wisdom' – not just as a theoretical discipline, but as a way of life. Specifically, for the late Neoplatonic thinkers, philosophy began with self-knowledge, which led to a person's inner conversion or transformation into a lover, a human being erotically striving toward the totality of the real. This metamorphosis amounted to a complete existential conversion. It was initiated by learned guides who cultivated higher and (...) higher levels of virtue in their students, leading, in the end, to their vision of the Good, or the One. In this book, James M. Ambury closely analyses two central texts in this tradition: the commentaries by Proclus (412–485 AD) and Olympiodorus (495–560 AD) on the Platonic Alcibiades I. Ambury's powerful study illuminates the way philosophy was conceived during a crucial period of its history, in the lecture halls of late antiquity. (shrink)

This book defends the view that any adequate account of rational decision making must take a decision maker's beliefs about causal relations into account. The early chapters of the book introduce the non-specialist to the rudiments of expected utility theory. The major technical advance offered by the book is a 'representation theorem' that shows that both causal decision theory and its main rival, Richard Jeffrey's logic of decision, are both instances of a more general conditional decision theory. The book solves (...) a long-standing problem for Jeffrey's theory by showing for the first time how to obtain a unique utility and probability representation for preferences and judgements of comparative likelihood. The book also contains a major new discussion of what it means to suppose that some event occurs or that some proposition is true. The most complete and robust defence of causal decision theory available. (shrink)

The scholarship of New Directions in Curriculum as Phenomenological Text manifests through close readings and interpretations of curriculum theorists and Continental philosophers, presented in the form of 'speculative philosophical essays,' an important form of curriculum thinking-writing all but lost to the general contemporary field of research.

The pragmatic character of the Dutch book argument makes it unsuitable as an "epistemic" justification for the fundamental probabilist dogma that rational partial beliefs must conform to the axioms of probability. To secure an appropriately epistemic justification for this conclusion, one must explain what it means for a system of partial beliefs to accurately represent the state of the world, and then show that partial beliefs that violate the laws of probability are invariably less accurate than they could be otherwise. (...) The first task can be accomplished once we realize that the accuracy of systems of partial beliefs can be measured on a gradational scale that satisfies a small set of formal constraints, each of which has a sound epistemic motivation. When accuracy is measured in this way it can be shown that any system of degrees of belief that violates the axioms of probability can be replaced by an alternative system that obeys the axioms and yet is more accurate in every possible world. Since epistemically rational agents must strive to hold accurate beliefs, this establishes conformity with the axioms of probability as a norm of epistemic rationality whatever its prudential merits or defects might be. (shrink)

I take it as my assignment to criticize the Gauthier enterprise. At the outset, however, I should express my general agreement with David Gauthier's normative vision of a liberal social order, including the place that individual principles of morality hold in such an order. Whether the enterprise is, ultimately, judged to have succeeded or to have failed depends on the standards applied. Considered as a coherent grounding of such a social order in the rational choice behavior of persons, the enterprise (...) fails. Considered as an extended argument implying that persons should adopt the moral stance embodied in the Gauthier structure, the enterprise is, I dunk, largely successful. Considered as a set of empirically falsifiable propositions suggesting that persons do, indeed, choose as the Gauthier precepts dictate, the enterprise offers Humean hope rather than Hobbesian despair. (shrink)

John L. Austin believed that in the illocution he had discovered a fundamental element of our speech, the understanding of which would disclose the significance of all kinds of linguistic action: not only proposing marriage and finding guilt, but also stating, reporting, conjecturing, and all the rest of the things men can do linguistically. 2 We claim that the illocution, the full-fledged speech-act, is central to religious utterances as well, and that it provides a perspicuity in understanding them not elsewhere (...) provided in the work of recent philosophy of religion. In particular we hold that understanding religious talk through the illocution shows the way in which the representative and affective elements are connected to one another and to the utterance as a whole. There may, further, be features in such an analysis which can be extended to other forms of discourse than religious. (shrink)

Explores the theories of democratic individualism articulated in the works of the American transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey, and African-American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison.

Karol Wojtyła understood that the turn to the subject had beneficially augmented traditional metaphysics by revealing the uniqueness of each person. Nevertheless, he also knew that for those investigations into personhood to resist devolving into mere relativism, the analysis had to be grounded in the metaphysical principles of Thomism. One contemporary illustration of an ungrounded subjectivism is the rise of identitarianism; that is, the idea that people can choose their own identity based on a peculiar property as distinct from our (...) common human nature. In this paper, I will examine both the Thomistic metaphysical and phenomenological personalist bases for critiquing identitarianism. I will argue that the analogy of being, distinguishing substance from dependent modes of being, is the necessary metaphysical foundation for the personalist integration of actions in a subject who, while unique, must be recognized primarily as an instance of a common human nature. (shrink)

Employing the techniques of modern economic analysis, Professor Buchanan reveals the conceptual basis of an individual's social rights by examining the ...

To commence any answer to the question “Can democracy promote the general welfare?” requires attention to the meaning of “general welfare.” If this term is drained of all significance by being defined as “whatever the political decision process determines it to be,” then there is no content to the question. The meaning of the term can be restored only by classifying possible outcomes of democratic political processes into two sets – those that are general in application over all citizens and (...) those that are discriminatory. (shrink)

This is a study of all the recent literature on william james written from a phenomenological perspective with the purpose of showing that william james made fundamental contributions to the phenomenological theory of the intentionality of consciousness, To the phenomenological theory of self-Identity, And to the phenomenological conception of noetic freedom as the basic concept of ethical theory.

In What is Disease?, renowned philosophers and medical ethicists survey and elucidate the profoundly important concepts of disease and health. Christopher Boorse begins with an extensive reexamination of his seminal definition of disease as a value-free scientific concept. In responding to all those who criticized this view, which came to be called "naturalism" or "neutralism," Boorse clarifies and updates his landmark ideas on this crucial question. Other distinguished thinkers analyze, develop, and oftentimes defend competing, nonnaturalistic theories of disease, including discussions (...) of the relevance of these concepts to the question of "diseased" sexual orientation and to alternative medicine. What is Disease? brings concerned readers up-to-date in the debate over the proper definition of "disease," a concept of central importance not only for bioethicists, but also for those throughout clinical medicine, sociology, psychology, and law who deal with disease and its associated problems on an everyday basis. (shrink)

The ontological argument appears in a multiplicity of forms. Over the past ten or twelve years, however, the philosophical community seems to have been concerned principally with those versions of the proof which claim that God is a necessary being. In contemporary literature, Professors Malcolm and Hartshorne have been the chief advocates of this view, both men holding that God must be conceived as a necessary being and that, as a result, his existence is able to be demonstrated a priori (...) . This claim has not gone unchallenged; indeed, numerous writers have argued that neither Malcolm nor Hartshorne has exercised due care in his use of ‘necessary’. That is, critics charge that the arguments of both men have only the appearance of validity, for in their reasonings the defenders of the a priori proof have tacitly assumed that God is a logically necessary being. Whether or not a being can be logically necessary, however, is a quaestio disputata . In fact, until recently the question was not in dispute at all—virtually all ‘competent judges’ agreed that only propositions could be spoken of as logically necessary, and thus that God must be defined as a physically or factually necessary being. But is the statement, ‘a physically necessary being exists’, logically true? Critics of the ontological argument think not; and in support of this view they offer analyses of ‘physical necessity’ which, they feel, not only give meaning to the phrase, but also show that a physically necessary being's existence can be proven only by some kind of a posteriori investigation. (shrink)

Isaac Levi has long criticized causal decisiontheory on the grounds that it requiresdeliberating agents to make predictions abouttheir own actions. A rational agent cannot, heclaims, see herself as free to choose an actwhile simultaneously making a prediction abouther likelihood of performing it. Levi is wrongon both points. First, nothing in causaldecision theory forces agents to makepredictions about their own acts. Second,Levi's arguments for the ``deliberation crowdsout prediction thesis'' rely on a flawed modelof the measurement of belief. Moreover, theability of agents (...) to adopt beliefs about theirown acts during deliberation is essentialto any plausible account of human agency andfreedom. Though these beliefs play no part inthe rationalization of actions, they arerequired to account for the causalgenesis of behavior. To explain the causes ofactions we must recognize that (a) an agentcannot see herself as entirely free in thematter of A unless she believes herdecision to perform A will cause A,and (b) she cannot come to a deliberatedecision about A unless she adoptsbeliefs about her decisions. FollowingElizabeth Anscombe and David Velleman, I arguethat an agent's beliefs about her own decisionsare self-fulfilling, and that this can beused to explain away the seeming paradoxicalfeatures of act probabilities. (shrink)

Aporias of Translation is a significant scholarly achievement focused on the intersection of literature, philosophy, and poetry in relation to educational issues. The book invites readers on a jour...

Bayesianism claims to provide a unified theory of epistemic and practical rationality based on the principle of mathematical expectation. In its epistemic guise it requires believers to obey the laws of probability. In its practical guise it asks agents to maximize their subjective expected utility. Joyce’s primary concern is Bayesian epistemology, and its five pillars: people have beliefs and conditional beliefs that come in varying gradations of strength; a person believes a proposition strongly to the extent that she presupposes its (...) truth in her practical and theoretical reasoning; rational graded beliefs must conform to the laws of probability; evidential relationships should be analyzed subjectively in terms of relations among a person’s graded beliefs and conditional beliefs; empirical learning is best modeled as probabilistic conditioning. Joyce explains each of these claims and evaluates some of the justifications that have been offered for them, including “Dutch book,” “decision-theoretic,” and “non-pragmatic” arguments for and. He also addresses some common objections to Bayesianism, in particular the “problem of old evidence” and the complaint that the view degenerates into an untenable subjectivism. The essay closes by painting a picture of Bayesianism as an “internalist” theory of reasons for action and belief that can be fruitfully augmented with “externalist” principles of practical and epistemic rationality. (shrink)

There exists a common view that for theories related by a ‘duality’, dual models typically may be taken ab initio to represent the same physical state of affairs, i.e. to correspond to the same possible world. We question this view, by drawing a parallel with the distinction between ‘interpretational’ and ‘motivational’ approaches to symmetries.

This paper provides an analysis of the key term aidagara ('betweenness') in the philosophical ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), in response to and in light of the recent movement in Japanese Buddhist studies known as 'Critical Buddhism'. The Critical Buddhist call for a turn away from 'topical' or intuitionist thinking and towards (properly Buddhist) 'critical' thinking, while problematic in its bipolarity, raises the important issue of the place of 'reason' vs 'intuition' in Japanese Buddhist ethics. In this paper, a comparison (...) of Watsuji's 'ontological quest' with that of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Watsuji's primary Western source and foil, is followed by an evaluation of a corresponding search for an 'ontology of social existence' undertaken by Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962). Ultimately, the philosophico-religious writings of Watsuji Tetsurō allow for the 'return' of aesthesis as a modality of social being that is truly dimensionalized, and thus falls prey neither to the verticality of topicalism nor the limiting objectivity of criticalism. (shrink)

This article is a prophetic and historical look at the prospects for spiritual direction and soul care in our contemporary setting. The thrust of this essay is to argue that soul care today needs to embrace three dimensions: the historical, the biblical, as well as the contemporary behavioral sciences. Otherwise our judgments will be imprisoned within our own culture if we have not traveled abroad in time as well as space, to understand the faith and devotion of God's people in (...) the cultures of the past. We will suggest five aspects of the history of Christian devotion that we need to “remember” today: the lives of the saints, the exercise of contrition, the memory of the Psalms, the basic use of figurative language, and the importance of letter-writing. (shrink)

Examines how the practice of both art and faith necessarily order man to transcendent fulfillment, yet do so in very different ways. The book examines the analogical nature of art and faith; reflects on the nature of art as a virtue perfecting human creativity; contemplates the purpose of the work of art as revelatory of truth; and explores how the arts become debased when their practice rejects the goal of beauty.

The notion of justice implies that what is given is owed to the recipient; charity, on the other hand, acknowledges the reality of a free gift that is not owed to the recipient. This difference is obscured in contemporary liberal societies where, because of the absence of transcendent metaphysical commitments, the demandsof social justice replace charity. A Thomistic analysis, however, recognizes a metaphysical order as the basis for justice. This order limits the sphere of justice and so allows for acts (...) of charity motivated by love for God. If we do not recognize this distinction, we reduce all charitable acts to acts of justice and therefore ignore themost important debt of all: the debt humans owe to God that can only be repaid by loving Him and our neighbor. (shrink)

In The Logic of Decision Richard Jeffrey defends a version of expected utility theory that advises agents to choose acts with an eye to securing evidence for thinking that desirable results will ensue. Proponents of "causal" decision theory have argued that Jeffrey's account is inadequate because it fails to properly discriminate the causal features of acts from their merely evidential properties. Jeffrey's approach has also been criticized on the grounds that it makes it impossible to extract a unique probability/utility representation (...) from a sufficiently rich system of preferences (given a zero and unit for measuring utility). The existence of these problems should not blind us to the fact that Jeffrey's system has advantages that no other decision theory can match: it can be underwritten by a particularly compelling representation theorem proved by Ethan Bolker; and it has a property called partition invariance that every reasonable theory of rational choice must possess. I shall argue that the non-uniqueness problem can be finessed, and that it is impossible to adequately formulate causal decision theory, or any other, without using Jeffrey's theory as one's basic analysis of rational desire. (shrink)

Hubert Dreyfus has argued that cases of absorbed bodily coping show that there is no room for self-awareness in flow experiences of experts. In this paper, I argue against Dreyfus’ maxim of vanishing self-awareness by suggesting that awareness of agency is present in expert bodily action. First, I discuss the phenomenon of absorbed bodily coping by discussing flow experiences involved in expert bodily action: merging into the flow; immersion in the flow; emergence out of flow. I argue against the claim (...) that flow experience does not involve an awareness of agency for each of these features, while conceding that fluent agency does not involve self-awareness in the thetic sense. I challenge the assumption that the awareness of fluent agency must be understood in terms of a thetic awareness of agency. Instead, I develop an Anscombean account of the awareness of fluent agency in terms of the phenomenal character of knowing one’s aims. I respond to the challenge that if an Anscombean account of the awareness of agency is to succeed, then agents must be able to answer Anscombean questions. I consider the objection that awareness of agency is not a form of self-awareness by outlining an account of self-awareness as self-synthesis that is distinct from self-perception and self-ascription, but which makes room for self-awareness in expert bodily action. (shrink)

Andy Egan has recently produced a set of alleged counterexamples to causal decision theory in which agents are forced to decide among causally unratifiable options, thereby making choices they know they will regret. I show that, far from being counterexamples, CDT gets Egan's cases exactly right. Egan thinks otherwise because he has misapplied CDT by requiring agents to make binding choices before they have processed all available information about the causal consequences of their acts. I elucidate CDT in a way (...) that makes it clear where Egan goes wrong, and which explains why his examples pose no threat to the theory. My approach has similarities to a modification of CDT proposed by Frank Arntzenius, but it differs in the significance that it assigns to potential regrets. I maintain, contrary to Arntzenius, that an agent facing Egan's decisions can rationally choose actions that she knows she will later regret. All rationality demands of agents it that they maximize unconditional causal expected utility from an epistemic perspective that accurately reflects all the available evidence about what their acts are likely to cause. This yields correct answers even in outlandish cases in which one is sure to regret whatever one does. (shrink)