Effective altruism sounds so innocuous—who could possibly be opposed to doing good more effectively? Yet it has inspired significant backlash in recent years. This paper addresses some common misconceptions and argues that the core “beneficentric” ideas of effective altruism are both excellent and widely neglected. Reasonable people may disagree on details of implementation, but all should share the basic goals or values underlying effective altruism.

Is the point of belief and assertion invariably to think or say something true? Is the truth of a belief or assertion absolute, or is it only relative to human interests? Most philosophers think it incoherent to profess to believe something but not think it true, or to say that some of the things we believe are only relatively true. Common sense disagrees. It sees many opinions, such as those about matters of taste, as neither true nor false; it takes (...) it as obvious that some of the truth is relative. Mark Richard's accessible book argues that when it comes to truth, common sense is right, philosophical orthodoxy wrong. The first half of the book examines connections between the performative aspects of talk, our emotions and evaluations, and the conditions under which talk and thought qualifies as true or false. It argues that the performative and expressive sometimes trump the semantic, making truth and falsity the wrong dimension of evaluation for belief or assertion. Among the topics taken up are: racial slurs and other epithets; relations between logic and truth; the status of moral and ethical talk; vagueness and the liar paradox. The book's second half defends the idea that much of everyday thought and talk is only relatively true or false. Truth is inevitably relative, given that we cannot work out in advance how our concepts will apply to the world. Richard explains what it is for truth to be relative, rebuts standard objections to relativism, and argues that relativism is consistent with the idea that one view can be objectively better than another. The book concludes with an account of matters of taste and of how it is possible for divergent views of such matters to be equally valid, even if not true or false. When Truth Gives Out will be of interest not only to philosophers who work on language, ethics, knowledge, or logic, but to any thoughtful person who has wondered what it is, or isn't, for something to be true. (shrink)

Touch is standardly taken to be a proximal sense, principally constituted by capacities to detect proximal pressure and thermal stimulation, and contrasted with the distal senses of vision and audition. It has, however, recently been argued that the scope of touch extends beyond proximal perception; touch can connect us to distal objects. Hence touch generally should be thought of as a connection sense. In this paper, I argue that whereas pressure perception is a connection sense, thermal perception is not. Thermal (...) perception is a proximal sense distinct from touch. One significant consequence of this is that it motivates an alternative explanation of how we detect the thermal properties of the things we touch and what they are. (shrink)

The orderliness of the universe and the existence of human beings already provides some reason for believing that there is a God - as argued in Richard Swinburne's earlier book Is There a God? Swinburne now claims that it is probable that the main Christian doctrines about the nature of God and his actions in the world are true. In virtue of his omnipotence and perfect goodness, God must be a Trinity, live a human life in order to share (...) our suffering, and found a church which would enable him to tell all humans about this. It is also quite probable that he would provide his human life as an atonement for our wrongdoing, teach us how we should live and tell us his plans for our future after death. Among founders of religions, Jesus satisfies uniquely well the requirement of living the sort of human life which God would need to have lived. But to give us adequate reason to believe that Jesus was God, God would need to put his 'signature' on the life of Jesus by an act which he alone could do, for example raise him from the dead. There is adequate historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. The church which he founded gave plausible interpretations of his basic message. Therefore Christian doctrines are probably true. (shrink)

Living with people who differ—racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically—is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city. In this thought-provoking book, Richard Sennett discusses why this has happened and what might be done about it. Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss (...) rather than debate. In _Together_ he explores how people can cooperate online, on street corners, in schools, at work, and in local politics. He traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to today, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, socialist groups in Paris, and workers on Wall Street. Divided into three parts, the book addresses the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened. The author warns that we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper, yet he reassures us that we can do this, for the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature. (shrink)

There is long-standing disagreement among systematists about how to divide biodiversity into species. Over twenty different species concepts are used to group organisms, according to criteria as diverse as morphological or molecular similarity, interbreeding and genealogical relationships. This, combined with the implications of evolutionary biology, raises the worry that either there is no single kind of species, or that species are not real. This book surveys the history of thinking about species from Aristotle to modern systematics in order to understand (...) the origin of the problem, and advocates a solution based on the idea of the division of conceptual labor, whereby species concepts function in different ways - theoretically and operationally. It also considers related topics such as individuality and the metaphysics of evolution, and how scientific terms get their meaning. This important addition to the current debate will be essential for philosophers and historians of science, and for biologists. (shrink)

According to Peter Singer, virtually all of us would be forced by adequate reflection on our own convictions to embrace a radical conclusion about giving. The following principle, he says, is “surely undeniable” -- at least once we reflect on secure convictions concerning rescue, as in his famous case of the drowning toddler.

Parallels in anatomy between humans and domesticated mammals suggest that for the last 300,000 years, Homo sapiens has experienced more intense selection against the propensity for reactive aggression than any other species of Homo. Selection against reactive aggression, a process that can also be called self-domestication, would help explain various physiological, behavioral and cognitive features of humans, including the unique system of egalitarian male hierarchy in mobile hunter-gatherers. Here I review nine leading proposals that could potentially explain why self-domestication occurred (...) in H. sapiens, whether by selecting in favor of cooperation and tolerance or by selecting against aggressiveness. To account for the domestication syndrome, proposals must explain what led to a decline in fitness of highly aggressive males, and why the explanatory factor applies only to H. sapiens rather than to other species of Homo. The proposed explanations invoke genetic group selection; group-structured culture selection (also known as cultural group selection); social selection by female mate choice; social selection by male partner choice; increased self-control; cooperative breeding; high population density; use of lethal weapons; and language-based conspiracy. Most proposals face difficulties in accounting for the origins and/or maintenance of self-domestication. I conclude that the evolution of language-based conspiracy, which is a form of collective intentionality, was the key factor initiating and maintaining self-domestication in H. sapiens, because it is the most convincing mechanism for explaining the selective pressure against individually powerful fighters. Sophisticated language enabled males of low fighting prowess to coordinate in executing physically aggressive and domineering alpha males. This system is known today as a leveling mechanism in small-scale societies. Group-structured culture selection possibly accelerated the process. (shrink)

Edited by Richard Grusin of the Center for 21st Century Studies, this is the first book to name and characterize—and therefore consolidate—a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways—in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and (...) geophysical systems. The nonhuman turn in twenty-first-century studies can be traced to multiple intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the twentieth century: actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, assemblage theory, cognitive sciences, new materialism, new media theory, speculative realism, and systems theory. Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their assumptions, objects, and methodologies. However, they all take up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of twenty-first-century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Unlike the posthuman turn, the nonhuman turn does not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman. Rather, the nonhuman turn insists (paraphrasing Bruno Latour) that “we have never been human,” that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is identified precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman. Contributors: Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins U; Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown U; Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke U; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Brian Massumi, U of Montreal; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana U. (shrink)

This unique book clearly explains genetic and neuroimaging research on intelligence and how neuroscience findings may lead to enhancing it.

Jonathan Kirshner misrepresents classical realism in fundamental ways. His wants to reclaim classical realism, but he never tells us what it is or engages other scholars who have developed the paradigm. He pleads for a more sophisticated realism but spends much of the book engaging neorealism and ‘hyperrationality.’ He foregrounds Thucydides but reads him superficially and indefensibly in terms of contemporary realist tropes. He asserts – incorrectly – that classical realism eschews abstract formulations but then offers his own. I critique (...) his formulation, reading of Thucydides, and offer an overview of classical realism. I argue that classical realism is an ethical project embedded in a tragic understanding of life. It foregrounds human miscalculations, misjudgments, and their causes, sees tight connections between domestic and foreign policy, and the values that motivate both; and regards great powers as likely to be their own worst enemies. (shrink)

How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods. Seaford (...) argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an accentuation in claims that early Heideggerian works are infected with totalitarian ideas that came to full realisation in the early 1930s. In challenging this claim, I suggest that the trajectory from Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein in Being and Time to Heidegger’s later lamentable political involvements is both complicated and tenuous. After first defending this stance with reference to the account of Schuld in Being and Time, I draw substantively on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy in arguing (...) that Heidegger’s later political thought amounts to a perversion of his earlier admittedly under-developed accounts of Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein. Further, with Nancy, I suggest there is much to be learned here more generally—both by Heidegger’s great insights and great failures—concerning the dialectic of self and community. (shrink)

Composed of scientific and technical experts and lay members, thousands of research ethics committees—Institutional Review Boards in the United States—must identify and assess the potential risks to human research subjects, and balance those risks against the potential benefits of the research. IRBs handle risk and its uncertainty by adopting a version of the precautionary principle. To assess scientific merit, IRBs use a tacit ``sanguinity principle,'' which treats uncertainty as inevitable, even desirable, in scientific progress. In balancing human subjects risks and (...) scientific benefits, IRBs use uncertainty as a boundary-ordering device that allows the mediation of the science and ethics aspects of their decisions. One effect is the entangling of methodological and ethical review. Some have suggested these should be more clearly separated, but decisions by research ethics committees depend in part on the negotiating space created by incommensurable approaches to uncertainty. (shrink)

Thirteen seminal essays by Mark Richard develop a nuanced account of semantics and propositional attitudes. The collection addresses a range of topics in philosophical semantics and philosophy of mind, and is accompanied by a new Introduction which discusses attitudes realized by dispositions and other non-linguistic cognitive structures.

It is frequently argued that wrongdoers forfeit, through their wrongdoing, their previously held claim rights against being punished. But this is a mistake. Wrongdoers do not forfeit their claim rights against being punished when they violate rights. They forfeit their _immunity_ to having their claim rights against being punished removed. The reason for this, I argue, is that when they violate rights, wrongdoers culpably disregard the authority of right-holders to negotiate the conditions under which it is permissible to interact with (...) them. The effect of this, far from undermining the authority of right-holders, is to transfer authority to right-holders to unilaterally impose the ‘conditions of interaction’ on wrongdoers _after_ the violation. The conditions can be imposed for a diverse range of reasons and can take a variety of forms, including punishment. In this essay I explain and defend this new ‘unilateral authority theory’ of punishment. (shrink)

I. Levinas, Spinozism, Nietzsche and the body -- II. Prophetic speech in Levinas and Spinoza (and Maimonides) -- III. Levinas and Spinoza: to love God for nothing -- IV. Levinas and Spinoza: justice and the state -- V. Spinoza's Prince: for whom is the theological-political treatise written? VI. Levinas on Spinoza's misunderstanding of Judaism -- VII. Thinking least about death: mortality and morality in Spinoza, Heidegger and Levinas -- VIII. Spleen: Spinoza's babies, fools and madmen.

Commonsensism is a thesis about commonsense beliefs: our commonsense beliefs are items of knowledge (or should be so regarded) that have epistemic or methodological priority. This account of commonsensism risks making our commonsense beliefs impervious to philosophical argument. But in Santayana's commonsensism, what deserves our trust is not our commonsense beliefs but the development of common sense over successive generations. Our commonsense beliefs deserve only a secondary or subsidiary trust; we trust them only insofar as we trust the momentum of (...) common sense. I examine Santayana's distinctive form of commonsensism and explain why he avoids putting trust primarily in commonsense beliefs. (shrink)

Over the last dozen years, the writings of Richard Taruskin have transformed the debate about "early music" and "authenticity." Text and Act collects for the first time the most important of Taruskin's essays and reviews from this period, many of which now classics in the field. Taking a wide-ranging cultural view of the phenomenon, he shows that the movement, far from reviving ancient traditions, in fact represents the only truly modern style of performance being offered today. He goes on (...) to contend that the movement is therefore far more valuable and even authentic than the historical verisimilitude for which it ostensibly strives could ever be. These essays cast fresh light on many aspects of contemporary music-making and music-thinking, mixing lighthearted debunking with impassioned argumentation. Taruskin ranges from theoretical speculation to practical criticism, and covers a repertory spanning from Bach to Stravinsky. Including a newly written introduction, Text and Act collects the very best of one of our most incisive musical thinkers. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ted Bundy and Dennis Rader Psychopaths versus Psychotics The Psychopath Language and the Emotional Brain Empathy, Lack of Shame, Insincerity Fantasies The Serial Killer and Nietzsche.

Several proposals for moral enhancement would use AI to augment (auxiliary enhancement) or even supplant (exhaustive enhancement) human moral reasoning or judgment. Exhaustive enhancement proposals conceive AI as some self-contained oracle whose superiority to our own moral abilities is manifest in its ability to reliably deliver the ‘right’ answers to all our moral problems. We think this is a mistaken way to frame the project, as it presumes that we already know many things that we are still in the process (...) of working out, and reflecting on this fact reveals challenges even for auxiliary proposals that eschew the oracular approach. We argue there is nonetheless a substantial role that ‘AI mentors’ could play in our moral education and training. Expanding on the idea of an AI Socratic Interlocutor, we propose a modular system of multiple AI interlocutors with their own distinct points of view reflecting their training in a diversity of concrete wisdom traditions. This approach minimizes any risk of moral disengagement, while the existence of multiple modules from a diversity of traditions ensures pluralism is preserved. We conclude with reflections on how all this relates to the broader notion of moral transcendence implicated in the project of AI moral enhancement, contending it is precisely the whole concrete socio-technical system of moral engagement that we need to model if we are to pursue moral enhancement. (shrink)

If we set aside the questions of Heidegger’s (mis)translation of Aristotle, Vardoulakis’s diagnosis of Heidegger’s mistake still is pressing and far-reaching. The mistake Vardoulakis identifies arises from a preference for ‘ineffectual’ activity over ends-directed activity in Heidegger’s thought. Vardoulakis’s argument is that even phronesis is ends-directed and it is only because of this that phronesis leads not just to doing something well but to doing something well for the sake of the good. The emphasis on the ineffectual turns us away (...) from a form of calculation in which ends, means, and their relation are in question. (shrink)

From The Birth of Tragedy on, Nietzsche worked to comprehend the nature of the individual. Richard White shows how Nietzsche was inspired and guided by the question of personal "sovereignty" and how through his writings sought to provoke the very sovereignty he described. White argues that Nietzsche is a philosopher our contemporary age must therefore come to understand if we are ever to secure a genuinely meaningful direction for the future. Profoundly relevant to our era, Nietzsche's philosophy addresses a (...) version of individuality that allows us to move beyond the self-dispossession of mass society and the alternative of selfish individualism - to fully understand how one becomes what one is. (shrink)

This volume brings together a variety of scholars and intellectual disciplines from around the world and across academia. Differences of person, place, culture, history and expertise do not alienate but rather fructify the perspectives of the ongoing conversation of the politics of humanity. The latter is a struggle for justice, for human rights, to be sure, but also for the availability, sustainability and fair distribution of food, clothing, shelter, health care, culture and living environment, and all the concrete conditions necessary (...) to make political rights real and ensure they are flourishing. A politics of humanity therefore demands a humane justice, where everyone universally and each person singularly is accorded respect, where equality, liberty and solidarity intersect supportively. It is not despite differences but because of them that there is discourse, dialogue and conversation, and the aspirations of the present volume. Each author, each chapter raises insights and arguments, solicits a hearing, provokes questions and discussion, while not losing sight of their concrete conditions, the learning, dedication and sensitivity, the cooperation and collegiality that guide research, stimulates truth through constructive criticism, and makes justice possible and worthwhile, despite shortcomings and the great labors—of thought and action—that remain to be done. (shrink)

This paper is an ethical exegesis of the biblical story of Gibeah, which concludes the Book of Judges (19–21), to show the catastrophic failure of the anti-political politics of the “community of virtue”, i.e., the rejection of power for the sake of moral society, such as proposed by libertarians, neo-liberals, anarchists and utopians. I consider Kant’s statement of the political problem: given humanity’s unsocial sociality, where each person is tempted to act as an exception to universal law, humans need rulers, (...) but how to obtain rulers who are not themselves ruled by power, and become tyrannical, rather than being ruled by justice? The solution proposed by “the community of virtue” would reject power altogether and replace it with society regulated exclusively according to the moral virtue of its members. The Bible’s story of Gibeah shows graphically and conclusively the failure of any such attempt. Instead, as with normative political philosophy, the Bible endorses the rule of a king, i.e., the rule of the state, and a politics whereby power is disciplined to serve justice because it is rooted in Torah, i.e., a fundamental covenant, charter or constitution, aware and vigilant regarding the ambiguities and temptations of sovereignty, and therefore, ideally, always open to critique. As exemplified by biblical prophets, political protest against injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the least—widow, orphan, stranger—is at once religious obligation and true patriotism. (shrink)

Some persons who believe provably false claims – such as that there were significant voter irregularities in the 2020 election – may nevertheless be evidentially rational for holding their false beliefs. I consider a person I call our average believer. In her daily life, she incidentally gathers evidence favoring the hypothesis that there were significant voter irregularities, but she does not investigate the matter. Her information environment, moreover, is such that it accidentally (through no fault of her own) excludes counterevidence (...) to the thesis that there were such irregularities and intensifies the flow of information that there were irregularities. As a consequence, she becomes convinced that there were significant voting irregularities in the 2020 U.S. election. I argue that while she is not zetetically rational, for she does not investigate the matter, she is evidentially rational in that she apportions her belief to the evidence. While she has no right to the Cliffordian, or assertoric, belief that there were such irregularities, she is not epistemically blameworthy for having the wagered belief it is true. (shrink)

This paper falls into three parts. The first looks at wh-constructions, focussing on the so-called factual whs, ‘X knows where… ’, ‘when’, ‘who’, ‘what’ etc. I suggest, drawing on both linguistic considerations and evidence from developmental psychology, that these constructions take things as their objects, not propositions; and that this may be why they are learned before those taking sentential complements. The second part moves to the case of telling-wh: to constructions such as telling someone who is at the door. (...) This construction brings a very particular set of requirements, not just to tell the truth, but to tell all the relevant truths and nothing but. The third section, in a critical discussion of Katherine Hawley's work, argues that an account of trust and testimony focussing on the telling-wh construction brings better results than one focussed on the blander idea of assertion. (shrink)

Doctors hold coexisting ethical duties to avoid causing deliberate harm to their patients (non-maleficence), to act in patients’ best interests (beneficence), to respect patients’ right to self-determination (autonomy) and to ensure that costs and benefits are fairly distributed among patients (justice). In the context of non-directed altruistic kidney donations (NDAKD), doctors’ duties of autonomy and justice are in tension with those of non-maleficence and beneficence. This article examines these competing duties across three scenarios in which general practitioners (GPs) could promote (...) NDAKD to healthy adults. In the first—when a healthy adult patient prompts the GP to discuss NDAKD—the GP is ethically obligated to counsel the patient about NDAKD to respect their autonomy, yet this does not constitute any form of promotion of NDAKD. In the remaining scenarios, healthy adult patients are unaware of the possibility of NDAKD. In the second, it is ethically permissible for GPs to indirectly raise awareness of NDAKD among healthy adults by displaying recruitment campaign material to non-specified groups of patients in their waiting rooms. In the third, it is ethically impermissible for GPs to directly promote NDAKD to individual healthy adults by raising the possibility of NDAKD with such individuals. The major counterarguments raised against this position are problems with kinds of counselling that fail to reach expected professional standards, rather than problems with the ethical claims made in this article. (shrink)

Until now, no one has unlocked the profound secrets of this wise and witty adventure tale. If you've wondered why men of action shouldn't lie, how the Battle of Wits could have turned out differently, what a rotten miracle would look like and whether it would amount to malpractice, or how Westley could have killed a lot of innocent people and still be a good guy, then The Princess Bride and Philosophy has all the answers"--P. [4] of cover.

This Handbook brings together contributions from leading scholars of constitutional theory, with backgrounds in law, philosophy, and political science. Its 60 chapters not only offer an exceptional survey of the field but also provide a major contribution to it. The book explores three main areas. Firstly, the values upheld by a constitution, including rights, freedom, equality, dignity and well-being. Secondly, the modalities of a constitutional system, such as the separation of powers, democratic representation, and the rule of law. Finally, the (...) institutions through which it operates, both legal and political; including courts, elections, parliaments and international organisations. It also considers the challenges confronting constitutional arrangements from growing inequality, populism, climate change and migration. (shrink)

The book is aimed at students and scholars of law, politics and philosophy. Of unprecedented breadth, it offers both a survey of, and an original contribution to, the field by some the world's leading scholars of constitutional theory.