Since field experiments in democratic politics influence citizens and the relationships among citizens, they are freighted with normative significance. Yet the distinctively democratic concerns that bear upon such field experiments have not yet been systematically examined. In this paper, we taxonomize such democratic concerns. Our goal is not to justify any of them, but rather to reveal their basic structure, so that they can be scrutinized at further length. We argue that field experiments could be democratically objectionable even if they (...) are not decisive – even if they do not swing the results of elections or other political decisions. Rather, if a class of campaign experiments is objectionable, one reason for this is that they undermine citizens’ equal standing. The ideal of equal standing affords nuanced judgments about the permissibility of field experiments in democratic politics. (shrink)

In this article, we propose the Fair Priority Model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and emphasize three fundamental values we believe should be considered when distributing a COVID-19 vaccine among countries: Benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing the disadvantaged, and equal moral concern for all individuals. The Priority Model addresses these values by focusing on mitigating three types of harms caused by COVID-19: death and permanent organ damage, indirect health consequences, such as health care system strain and stress, as well as (...) economic destruction. It proposes proceeding in three phases: the first addresses premature death, the second long-term health issues and economic harms, and the third aims to contain viral transmission fully and restore pre-pandemic activity. -/- To those who may deem an ethical framework irrelevant because of the belief that many countries will pursue "vaccine nationalism," we argue such a framework still has broad relevance. Reasonable national partiality would permit countries to focus on vaccine distribution within their borders up until the rate of transmission is below 1, at which point there would not be sufficient vaccine-preventable harm to justify retaining a vaccine. When a government reaches the limit of national partiality, it should release vaccines for other countries. -/- We also argue against two other recent proposals. Distributing a vaccine proportional to a country's population mistakenly assumes that equality requires treating differently situated countries identically. Prioritizing countries according to the number of front-line health care workers, the proportion of the population over 65, and the number of people with comorbidities within each country may exacerbate disadvantage and end up giving the vaccine in large part to wealthy nations. (shrink)

Book review of Conant, James and Kern, Andrea, Varieties of Skepticism: Essays after Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014, vi + 458 pp.

This dissertation is an investigation into the ground of moral objectivity. My preliminary claim is that in order to be objective, moral properties must be real properties. The following question is, what kind of properties are moral properties? A number of recent philosophers have argued that moral properties are natural properties. ''Natural" in this context means " open to investigation and discovery by the senses or by empirical science." The natural properties proposed in the recent literature are connected to the (...) property of human well-being. The main project of my dissertation is to show that natural properties are not adequate as the foundation for moral objectivity, because there is no necessary connection between any natural properties and moral properties. Another answer to the question of what kind of properties moral properties are is that they are supernatural properties. "Supernatural" in this context means "not open to investigation and discovery by the senses, or by empirical science." It is my argument that a singular supernatural being who created the world and has particular ideas about what sorts of people/actions/states of affairs are good and bad or right and wrong is the only sufficient ground for moral objectivity. Given such a being, moral properties will be real and objective. They will also be moral properties, since the originator of these properties confers value on them. Using and expanding on work in Divine Command Theory, especially that of Robert M. Adams, my original contribution to this discussion is to propose that moral properties are relational properties. The relationship is between persons, actions, states of affairs, etc., in the physical world, and the ideas, desires, character, or commands of the supernatural being. An important limitation of my dissertation project is that I do not consider any practical issues such as "How do we know whether God exists?", "How would God communicate the content of morality to us?", or "What is God like?" These are important and worthwhile questions, but are not a part of my present investigation. (shrink)

The claim of this paper is that the everyday functions of knowledge make most sense if we see knowledge as contrastive. That is, we can best understand how the concept does what it does by thinking in terms of a relation “a knows that p rather than q.” There is always a contrast with an alternative. Contrastive interpretations of knowledge, and objections to them, have become fairly common in recent philosophy. The version defended here is fairly mild in that there (...) is no suggestion that we cannot think in terms of a simpler not explicitly contrastive relation “a knows that p.” Some, for instance Schaffer (2005) and Karjalainen and Morton (2003), have hinted that this stronger possibility may be right. But all that I am arguing now is that facts that are easily expressed in contrastive terms are vital to understanding why we need the concept of knowledge. In a piece that is in some ways a companion to this one ("Contrastivism" in Duncan Pritchard and Sven Bernecker, eds. The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Routledge 2010, 513-522), I give a general survey of theories of contrastive knowledge and the differences between them. (shrink)

When one encounters disagreement about the truth of a factual claim from a trusted advisor who has access to all of one's evidence, should that move one in the direction of the advisor's view? Conciliatory views on disagreement say "yes, at least a little." Such views are extremely natural, but they can give incoherent advice when the issue under dispute is disagreement itself. So conciliatory views stand refuted. But despite first appearances, this makes no trouble for *partly* conciliatory views: views (...) that recommend giving ground in the face of disagreement about many matters, but not about disagreement itself. (shrink)

Thema dieses Buchs ist die Religion von fünf Philosophen aus unterschiedlichen Kulturen und Epochen: Konfuzius, Sokrates, Epiktet, Montaigne und Pascal. Anhand der sehr unterschiedlichen Textgrundlagen werden nicht nur ihre Gedanken über ihre Religion dargestellt, sondern auch ihre philosophischen Lehren. Im Blickpunkt steht auch, wie sich das, was diese fünf über Religion sagen, von ihrer religiösen Praxis unterscheidet. Ein Ergebnis des Vergleichs ist die Erkenntnis, dass alle echte Religion, die Gott als Höchstes hat, in fünf voneinander untrennbaren Haltungen besteht, die ausdrücken, (...) was dieses Höchste für sie ist: in der Überzeugung, einen göttlichen Auftrag zu haben und diesen Auftrag erfüllen, d.h. dadurch Gott dienen zu sollen, in der Dankbarkeit gegenüber Gott, in der Güte oder tätigen Liebe gegenüber seinen Mitmenschen, im Vertrauen in den Schutz oder in die Hilfe Gottes und in der Ehrlichkeit und Wahrhaftigkeit sich selbst und seinen Mitmenschen gegenüber. (shrink)

Many favor representationalism about color experience. To a first approximation, this view holds that experiencing is like believing. In particular, like believing, experiencing is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way. Once you view color experience along these lines, you face a big question: do our color experiences represent the world as it really is? For instance, suppose you see a tomato. Representationalists claim that having an experience with this sensory character is necessarily connected with representing (...) a distinctive quality as pervading a round area out there in external space. Let us call it “sensible redness” to highlight the fact that the representation of this property is necessarily connected with the sensory character of the experience. Is this property, sensible redness, really co-instantiated with roundness out there in the space before you? (shrink)

Ethisch gutes Handeln ist tätige Liebe, die vom Gewissen geleitet wird - das ist die Einsicht dieses Ethikentwurfs. Worin ein solches Handeln besteht, wird in allen ethisch relevanten Beziehungen untersucht. Ausgangspunkt ist, im Geiste von Husserls Phänomenologie, das erfahrende, wertende und handelnde Subjekt: Die Frage nach dem ethisch guten Handeln wird zur Frage nach dem Selbstverständnis des Ichs und der Bedeutung, welche die Mitmenschen und die Umwelt für es haben. So zeigt der Autor, wie ein ethisch gutes und somit glückliches (...) Leben für den Einzelnen heute möglich ist. Er baut auch auf osteuropäische, chinesische und jüdische Philosophie-Traditionen und wird damit einer Gegenwart gerecht, in der die Menschheit durch neue Wege der Kommunikation zu einem Gefüge geworden ist. (shrink)

In order to predict and explain behavior, one cannot specify the mental state of an agent merely by saying what information she possesses. Instead one must specify what information is available to an agent relative to various purposes. Specifying mental states in this way allows us to accommodate cases of imperfect recall, cognitive accomplishments involved in logical deduction, the mental states of confused or fragmented subjects, and the difference between propositional knowledge and know-how .

In this paper, I do a few things. I develop a (largely) empirical argument against naïve realism (Campbell, Martin, others) and for representationalism. I answer Papineau’s recent paper “Against Representationalism (about Experience)”. And I develop a new puzzle for representationalists.

The significance of teaching to the evolution of human culture is under debate. We contribute to the discussion by using a quantitative, cross-cultural comparative approach to investigate the role of teaching in the lives of children in two small-scale societies: Aka foragers and Ngandu farmers of the Central African Republic. Focal follows with behavior coding were used to record social learning experiences of children aged 4 to 16 during daily life. “Teaching” was coded based on a functional definition from evolutionary (...) biology. Frequencies, contexts, and subtypes of teaching as well as the identity of teachers were analyzed. Teaching was rare compared to observational learning, although both forms of social learning were negatively correlated with age. Children received teaching from a variety of individuals, and they also engaged in teaching. Several teaching types were observed, including instruction, negative feedback, and commands. Statistical differences in the distribution of teaching types and the identity of teachers corresponded with contrasting forager vs. farmer foundational cultural schema. For example, Aka children received less instruction, which empirically limits autonomous learning, and were as likely to receive instruction and negative feedback from other children as they were from adults. Commands, however, exhibited a different pattern suggesting a more complex role for this teaching type. Although consistent with claims that teaching is relatively rare in small-scale societies, this evidence supports the conclusion that teaching is a universal, early emerging cognitive ability in humans. However, culture structures the nature of teaching. (shrink)

Most of what we know about teaching comes from research among people living in large, politically and economically stratified societies with formal education systems and highly specialized roles with a global market economy. In this paper, we review and synthesize research on teaching among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. The hunter-gatherer lifeway is the oldest humanity has known and is more representative of the circumstances under which teaching evolved and was utilized most often throughout human history. Research among contemporary hunter-gatherers also illustrates (...) a complex pattern of teaching that is both consistent with and distinct from teaching in other small- and large-scale societies with different subsistence practices and cultural forms. In particular, we find that the cultural emphasis on individual autonomy and socio-political egalitarianism among hunter-gatherers differently shapes how teaching occurs. For example, teaching clearly exists among hunter-gatherers and appears in many forms, including institutionalized instruction in valued cultural and technical skills. However, teaching tends to be less common in hunter-gatherer societies because people live in small, intimate egalitarian, groups that support each other’s learning in a variety of ways without teaching. Furthermore, foundational cultural schemas of autonomy and egalitarianism impact the nature of teaching. For example, adults and older children limit their interventions, permitting autonomous learning, and, when they occur, teaching episodes are generally brief, subtle, indirect, and situated in a present activity. We discuss the implications of this research in terms of discussions of the evolution of human cognition and the co-evolution of teaching and culture through the process of cultural niche construction. (shrink)

How best to think about quantum systems under permutation invariance is a question that has received a great deal of attention in the literature. But very little attention has been paid to taking seriously the proposal that permutation invariance reflects a representational redundancy in the formalism. Under such a proposal, it is far from obvious how a constituent quantum system is represented. Consequently, it is also far from obvious how quantum systems compose to form assemblies, i.e. what is the formal (...) structure of their relations of parthood, overlap and fusion. In this paper, I explore one proposal for the case of fermions and their assemblies. According to this proposal, fermionic assemblies which are not entangled—in some heterodox, but natural sense of ‘entangled’—provide a prima facie counterexample to classical mereology. This result is puzzling; but, I argue, no more intolerable than any other available interpretative option. (shrink)

The problem of trust in social relationships was central to the emergence of the modern form of civil society and much discussed by social and political philosophers of the early modern period. Over the past few years, in response to the profound changes associated with postmodernity, trust has returned to the attention of political scientists, sociologists, economists, and public policy analysts. In this sequel to his widely admired book, The Idea of Civil Society, Adam Seligman analyzes trust as a (...) fundamental issue of our present social relationships. Setting his discussion in historical and intellectual context, Seligman asks whether trust--which many contemporary critics, from Robert Putnam through Francis Fukuyama, identify as essential in creating a cohesive society--can continue to serve this vital role. Seligman traverses a wide range of examples, from the minutiae of everyday manners to central problems of political and economic life, showing throughout how civility and trust are being displaced in contemporary life by new "external' system constraints inimical to the development of trust. Disturbingly, Seligman shows that trust is losing its unifying power precisely because the individual, long assumed to be the ultimate repository of rights and values, is being reduced to a sum of group identities and an abstract matrix of rules. The irony for Seligman is that, in becoming postmodern, we seem to be moving backward to a premodern condition in which group sanctions rather than trust are the basis of group life. (shrink)

Discusses recent work on representationalism, including: the case for a representationalist theory of consciousness, which explains consciousness in terms of content; rivals such as neurobiological type-type identity theory (Papineau, McLaughlin) and naive realism (Allen, Campbell, Brewer); John Campbell and David Papineau's recent objections to representationalism; the problem of the "laws of appearance"; externalist vs internalist versions of representationalism; the relation between representationalism and the mind-body problem.

Aus dem Inhalt: Epistemologische und ontologische Bedeutung der Liebe - Ich / Personalität - Du / Andere(s) - Das theologische Argument - Die entfremdete Liebe - Leiblichkeit / Praxis / Gefühl - Liebe als Kommunikation - Liebe und Existenz - Konstruktivität der Liebe.

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

This paper considers the possibility that ‘epistemic hypocrisy’ could be relevant to our blaming practices. It argues that agents who culpably violate an epistemic norm can lack the standing to blame other agents who culpably violate similar norms. After disentangling our criticism of epistemic hypocrites from various other fitting responses, and the different ways some norms can bear on the legitimacy of our blame, I argue that a commitment account of standing to blame allows us to understand our objections to (...) epistemic hypocrisy. Agents lack the epistemic standing to blame when they are not sufficiently committed to the epistemic norms they are blaming others for violating. This not only gives us a convincing account of epistemic standing to blame, it leaves us with a unified account of moral and epistemic standing. (shrink)

This paper introduces a novel strategy for responding to skeptical arguments based on the epistemic possibility of error or lack of certainty. I show that a nonclassical logic motivated by recent work on epistemic modals can be used to render such skeptical arguments invalid. That is, one can grant that knowledge is incompatible with the possibility of error and grant that error is possible, all while avoiding the skeptic’s conclusion that we lack knowledge.

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

What should I do? What can I hope for? The essays are weighted towards the practical philosophy, which Kant himself described as the keystone of his complete philosophical system.

The book analyzes the sources of widespread dissatisfaction with democracies around the world and identifies directions for feasible reforms"--Provided by publisher.

Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...) What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)

This book offers a novel account of grace, framed in terms of Bruno Latour's "principle of irreduction.

In January 1975, Michel Foucault contemplated the nature and formation of what in subsequent years he would come to know as governmentality. For Foucault, plague marks the rise of the invention of positive technologies of power, where these relations center around inclusion, multiplication, and security, rather than exclusion, negation, and rejection. In a point that might at first seem ancillary to his central argument, Foucault comments on stylized works about plague, such as those, according to the lecture series’ editors, exemplified (...) by Albert Camus. In footnote fifteen of the January 15, 1975 lecture, in reference to what Foucault deemed the “literary dream of” plagues, the editors list Camus’ 1947 novel La Peste, among other works, as representative of what Foucault described as “a kind of orgiastic dream in which plague is the moment when individuals come apart and when the law is forgotten.”. This article places Camus’ novel and other works in conversation with Foucault on governmentality, subjectivation, and truth to demonstrate the ways in which individualism itself can be viewed biopolitically. In so doing, it offers an urgent intervention that speaks powerfully to and is exemplified by the current global pandemic. Plague serves both as this literary dream and as a discursive mechanism engaged simultaneously with regimes of truth and the individuals constructing them. By pairing Foucault’s historical understanding of the invention of positive technologies of power with Camus’ treatment of “the absurd” in and out of the plague context, one uncovers the interrelation of governmentality, subjectivation, and truth. (shrink)

This thoughtful new abridgment is enriched by the brilliant commentary which accompanies it. In it, Laurence Dickey argues that the _Wealth of Nations_ contains--and conceals--a great deal of how Smith actually thought a commercial society works. Guided by his conviction that the so-called Adam Smith Problem--the relationship between ethics and economics in Smith's thinking--is a core element in the argument of the work itself, Dickey's commentary focuses on the devices Smith uses to ground his economics in broadly ethical and (...) social categories. An unparalleled guide to an often difficult and perplexing work. (shrink)

In two experiments, we demonstrate that intentional action intuitions vary as a function of whether one brings about or observes an event. In experiment 1a (N?=?38), participants were less likely to judge that they intended (M?=?2.53, 7 point scale) or intentionally (M?=?2.67) brought about a harmful event compared to intention (M?=?4.16) and intentionality (M?=?4.11) judgments made about somebody else. Experiments 1b and 1c confirmed and extended this pattern of actor-observer differences. Experiment 2 suggested that these actor-observer differences are not likely (...) to occur when participants are asked to ?imagine? being an actor. We argue that these results challenge the substantial philosophical and empirical reliance on hypothetical thought examples about intentional action. Our data offer new and necessary methodological avenues for understanding folk intentional action intuitions. (shrink)

Die Monadologie Husserls, die durch eine Phanomenologie der Intersubjektivitat begrundet ist, weist gegenuber der metaphysischen Monadologie von Leibniz Vorzuge auf. Anderseits fehlt Husserls Monadologie Leibniz' philosophisch radikalste Frage: Warum ist uberhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts?, ebenso Leibniz' Lehren vom Verhaltnis der Macht und Ohnmacht zwischen den Monaden und der Kraft der Monaden. Den Versuch, die Fragestellungen und die Lehren der beiden zu vereinigen, unternimmt Iso Kern in diesem Band - durch eine Synthese kann die beste Metaphysik der europaischen (...) Philosophiegeschichte entstehen. Sie ist unbegrenzt durch neue Fragen zu bereichern, aber auch zu korrigieren. (shrink)

Was ist Vernunft im Gegensatz zur Sinnlichkeit? Diese Frage erortert der erste Teil dieser Studie, die unterscheidet zwischen Vernunft als Verstehen bzw. Verstand und Vernunft in vollem Sinn: Verstand ist z. B. das Sich-Erinnern an die eigene Vergangenheit, das Vergegenwartigen der Erlebnisse anderer in der Einfuhlung, das Vorausplanen der Zukunft. Vernunft im vollen Sinne dagegen ist Institution des Vergegenwartigens in der Sinnlichkeit oder Kultur, z. B. die menschliche logische Sprache, die Bilder, vergegenwartigende Spiele. Vernunft hat auch mit Erkennen und Wahrheit (...) zu tun, worum es in einem zweiten Teil geht. Hier setzt der Autor sich unter anderem mit tierischem Erleben im Gegensatz zum menschlichen Erkennen, mit naturwissenschaftlichem Erkennen und religiosem Glauben sowie mit Erkennen in den Humanwissenschaften auseinander. An Beispielen aus ganz unterschiedlichen Bereichen, mit vielen Bezugen zur europaischen Philosophie und in sehr personlichem Ton zeigt Iso Kern, was Vernunft ist. (shrink)

“Moorean Dogmatist” responses to external world skepticism endorse courses of reasoning that many people find objectionable. This paper seeks to locate this dissatisfaction in considerations about epistemic responsibility. I sketch a theory of immediate warrant and show how it can be combined with plausible “inferential internalist” demands arising from considerations of epistemic responsibility. The resulting view endorses immediate perceptual warrant but forbids the sort of reasoning that “Moorean Dogmatism” would allow. A surprising result is that Dogmatism’s commitment to immediate epistemic (...) warrant isn’t enough to avoid certain standard arguments for skepticism about the external world. (shrink)

Meister Eckhart ist der transzendental-mündige Aufklärer par excellence. Transzendentale Menschenwürde eignet dem Menschen durch die Gottesgeburt in der Seele. So ist er gotwizzender mensche. Eckharts transzendentaler Bezug, der sich aus biblischen, aristotelischen, (neu)platonischen, christlichen, jüdischen und arabischen Quellen lebendig speist, wirkt wirklich. Das Christentum ist in seinem transzendental-intellektuellen Bezug begrifflich überzeugend zu denken. Eckhart sagt, dass "er seine ganze Hoffnung auf niemanden geneigt habe, denn auf Gott allein.".