The crash of two 737 MAX passenger aircraft in late 2018 and early 2019, and subsequent grounding of the entire fleet of 737 MAX jets, turned a global spotlight on Boeing’s practices and culture. Explanations for the crashes include: design flaws within the MAX’s new flight control software system designed to prevent stalls; internal pressure to keep pace with Boeing’s chief competitor, Airbus; Boeing’s lack of transparency about the new software; and the lack of adequate monitoring of Boeing by the (...) FAA, especially during the certification of the MAX and following the first crash. While these and other factors have been the subject of numerous government reports and investigative journalism articles, little to date has been written on the ethical significance of the accidents, in particular the ethical responsibilities of the engineers at Boeing and the FAA involved in designing and certifying the MAX. Lessons learned from this case include the need to strengthen the voice of engineers within large organizations. There is also the need for greater involvement of professional engineering societies in ethics-related activities and for broader focus on moral courage in engineering ethics education. (shrink)

The literature on self-driving cars and ethics continues to grow. Yet much of it focuses on ethical complexities emerging from an individual vehicle. That is an important but insufficient step towards determining how the technology will impact human lives and society more generally. What must complement ongoing discussions is a broader, system level of analysis that engages with the interactions and effects that these cars will have on one another and on the socio-technical systems in which they are embedded. To (...) bring the conversation of self-driving cars to the system level, we make use of two traffic scenarios which highlight some of the complexities that designers, policymakers, and others should consider related to the technology. We then describe three approaches that could be used to address such complexities and their associated shortcomings. We conclude by bringing attention to the “Moral Responsibility for Computing Artifacts: The Rules”, a framework that can provide insight into how to approach ethical issues related to self-driving cars. (shrink)

Research ethicists have recently declared a new ethical imperative: that researchers should communicate the results of research to participants. For some analysts, the obligation is restricted to the communication of the general findings or conclusions of the study. However, other analysts extend the obligation to the disclosure of individual research results, especially where these results are perceived to have clinical relevance. Several scholars have advanced cogent critiques of the putative obligation to disclose individual research results. They question whether ethical goals (...) are served by disclosure or violated by non-disclosure, and whether the communication of research results respects ethically salient differences between research practices and clinical care. Empirical data on these questions are limited. Available evidence suggests, on the one hand, growing support for disclosure, and on the other, the potential for significant harm. (shrink)

An important disagreement in contemporary debates about free will hinges on whether an agent must have alternative possibilities to be morally responsible. Many assume that notions of alternative possibilities are ubiquitous and reflected in everyday intuitions about moral responsibility: if one lacks alternatives, then one cannot be morally responsible. We explore this issue empirically. In two studies, we find evidence that folk judgments about moral responsibility call into question two popular principles that require some form of alternative possibilities for moral (...) responsibility. Survey participants given scenarios involving agents that fail to satisfy these principles nonetheless found these agents to be morally responsible, blameworthy, deserving of blame, and at fault for morally bad actions and consequences. We defend our interpretation of this evidence against objections and explore some implications of these findings for the free will debate. (shrink)

Focusing specifically on Hegels analysis of Dutch genre painting in the Lectures on Aesthetics, Jason Miller argues that Hegel regards modern art not as a failure to convey the deepest interests of a culture or society, but as a welcome liberation of art in which it comes to reflect the diversity and complexity of human experience.

In this article, I raise a simple but surprisingly vexing question: What makes heavy metal heavy? We commonly describe music as “heavy,” whether as criticism or praise. But what does “heavy” mean? How is it applied as an aesthetic term? Drawing on sociological and musicological studies of heavy metal, as well as recent work on the aesthetics of rock music, I discuss the relevant musical properties of heaviness. The modest aim of this article, however, is to show the difficulty, if (...) not impossibility, of this seemingly straightforward task. I first address the difficulties of identifying the defining features, or “Gestalt,” of heavy metal that would allow us to treat heaviness as a genre concept. Next, I discuss both the merits and the limits of analyzing heaviness in terms of an aesthetics of “noise” in rock music developed in recent philosophy of music. In the remaining sections, I consider other nonaesthetic features relevant to aesthetic judgments of heaviness and show that the term ‘heavy’ is conceptually inarticulable, if not irreducible. This, I conclude, has partly to do with the radically different, sometimes incompatible, musical properties present in the perception of musical heaviness. (shrink)

In both politics and art in recent decades, there has been a dramatic shift in emphasis on representation of identity. Liberal ideals of universality and individuality have given way to a concern with the visibility and recognition of underrepresented groups. Modernist and postmodernist celebrations of disruption and subversion have been challenged by the view that representation is integral to social change. Despite this convergence, neither political nor aesthetic theory has given much attention to the increasingly central role of art in (...) debates and struggles over cultural identity in the public sphere. -/- Connecting Hegelian aesthetics with contemporary cultural politics, Jason Miller argues that both the aesthetic and political value of art are found in the reflexive self-awareness that artistic representation enables. The significance of art in modern life is that it shows us both the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity. Just as Hegel asks us to acknowledge how different historical and cultural contexts produce radically different experiences of art, identity-based art calls on its audiences to situate themselves in relation to perspectives and experiences potentially quite remote—or even inaccessible—from their own. Miller offers a timely response to questions such as: How does contemporary art’s politics of perception contest liberal notions of deliberative politics? How does the cultural identity of the artist relate to the representations of cultural identity in their work? How do we understand and evaluate identity-based art aesthetically? -/- Discussing a wide range of works of art and popular culture—from Antigone to Do the Right Thing and The Wire—this book develops a new conceptual framework for understanding the representation of cultural identity that affirms art’s capacity to effect social change. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Thematic Apperception Test was a projective psychological test created by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray and his lover Christina Morgan in the 1930s. The test entered the nascent intelligence service of the United States during the Second World War due to its celebrated reputation for revealing the deepest aspects of an individual's unconscious. It subsequently spread as a scientifically objective research tool capable not only of dredging the unconscious depths, but also of determining the best candidate for a management (...) position, the psychological complexes of human nature, and the unique characteristics of a culture. Two suppositions underlie the utility of the test. One is the power of narrative. The test entails a calculated abuse of the subjects tested, based on their inability to interpret their own narrative. The form of the test requires that a subject fail to decipher the coded, unconscious meaning their narrative reveals. Murray believed the interpretation of a subject's narrative and the projection contained therein depended exclusively on the psychologist. This view of interpretation stems from the seemingly more reasonable belief of nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers that a literary text serves as a proxy for an author's deepest self. The TAT also supposes that there is something beyond consciousness closely resembling a psychoanalytic unconscious, which also has clear precedents in nineteenth-century German thought. Murray's views on literary interpretation, his view of psychology as well as the continuing prevalence of the TAT, signals a nineteenth-century concept of self that insists “on relations of depth and surface, inner and outer life”. It is clear the hermeneutic practice of Freud's psychoanalysis, amplified in Jung, drew on literary conceptions of the unconscious wider than those of nineteenth-century psychology. (shrink)

¿Cómo reacciona la ciudadanía en un sistema político polarizado ante una emergencia como la pandemia de la COVID-19?, ¿cómo procesa la ciudadanía las narrativas polarizadas que están en conflicto?, y ¿qué imagen se forman de la gestión política de la amenaza de la pandemia? En EE. UU, hay que retrotraerse a la epidemia de la polio de hace 70 años para encontrar una emergencia sanitaria como la pandemia de la COVID-19. No obstante, hay importantes diferencias; en la década de 1950, (...) el clima político de los EE.UU. era mucho más uniforme y consensuado que el actual, profundamente dividido y polarizado. Este trabajo utiliza datos de un estudio longitudinal realizado durante 35 años en personas jóvenes de la Generación X (ahora ya en la cuarentena) y datos provenientes de encuestas realizadas en Estados Unidos durante tres décadas, con el propósito de examinar los patrones de adquisición de la información en la comprensión de una nueva amenaza. Nuestro análisis de los últimos 35 años de la Generación X muestra que, en las elecciones de 2020, el factor predictivo del voto individual que tuvo más fuerza fue una ideología política polarizada, pero, aquellas personas que contaban con una mejor comprensión del coronavirus fueron más críticas con la gestión de la pandemia de la COVID-19 que realizó la administración de Donald Trump y estuvieron más predispuestas a votar por Joe Biden que a votar por Trump. Un análisis paralelo de una muestra probabilística representativa de personas adultas estadounidenses en 2020 reveló el mismo patrón de influencia del partidismo ideológico, la comprensión del coronavirus y la evaluación de la administración de Trump. Los resultados muestran que el conocimiento y la comprensión pueden proporcionar un efecto moderador crítico en un sistema político polarizado y dividido. (shrink)

The photograph of Ai Weiwei’s middle finger set against the backdrop of Tiananmen Square has become an icon of politically subversive art. But can we see beyond the middle finger? Here I argue that current theories of political aesthetics operate on an oversimplified dichotomy between two competing paradigms of political art, and that this threatens a more nuanced engagement with contemporary artistic practices. In the first part, I re-examine both the antagonistic relation between art and politics exemplified in Plato's verdict (...) against poetry as a socially corrosive form of imitation as well as the instrumental relation of art and politics developed in Friedrich Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education as a means of social and political reform. Then, drawing on recent work by the controversial Chinese artist, I argue for a model of political art that can account for the more complex interrelation of criticism and cultural affirmation evident in a growing body of politically-oriented art. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe investigated the impact of emotions on learning vocabulary in an unfamiliar language to better understand affective influences in foreign language acquisition. Seventy native English speakers learned new vocabulary in either a negative or a neutral emotional state. Participants also completed two sets of working memory tasks to examine the potential mediating role of working memory. Results revealed that participants exposed to negative stimuli exhibited difficulty in retrieving and correctly pairing English words with Indonesian words, as reflected in a lower (...) performance on the prompted recall tests and the free recall measure. Emotional induction did not change working memory scores from pre to post manipulation. This suggests working memory could not explain the reduced vocabulary learning in the negative group. We argue that negative mood can adversely affect language learning by suppressing aspects of native-language processing and impeding form-meaning mapping with second language words. (shrink)

Are free will and determinism compatible? Philosophical focus on this deceptively simple `compatibility question' has historically been so pervasive that the entire free will debate is now standardly framed in its terms - that is, as a dispute between compatibilists, who answer the question affirmatively, and incompatibilists, who respond in the negative. This dissertation, in contrast, adopts a position that I call `descriptive variantism,' according to which prevailing notions of free will exhibit significant aspects of both compatibilism and incompatibilism. My (...) formulation and defense of this position provides a framework for considering several important issues that cannot be adequately addressed on the traditional conception of the free will debate. The theoretical advantages of descriptive variantism become apparent, I argue, only after adopting needed refinements to the compatibility question itself. As it stands, this question conflates at least two distinct issues: whether free will, as ordinarily understood, does in fact conflict with determinism, and whether free will should be taken to involve such a conflict. The vast majority of work in this area, I maintain, implies that (a) the shared notion of free will exemplified in everyday usage conforms exclusively to either compatibilism or incompatibilism, and (b) the (singular) position suggested by this shared notion constitutes the most adequate response to the compatibility question. This is a mistake: it ignores several other possibilities, among them the prospect that multiple `shared notions' are implicated in the complex network of judgments, attitudes, and social practices related to free will. Having reformulated various aspects of the free will debate in ways that address these issues, I go on to argue that no single account of free will can underwrite the broad range of phenomena associated with this notion. Most importantly, I maintain that contextual features, especially those related to abstraction and concreteness, engender significantly different notions of free will: abstract contexts tend to elicit judgments and other behaviors conducive to incompatibilism, while concreteness often promotes tendencies best captured by compatibilist theories. I support these empirical claims primarily by drawing out the conceptual implications of recent experimental work on these topics in a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, and defend my interpretation against alternative accounts that purport to `explain away' the contextual differences exhibited in the experimental data. If these claims are correct, then the fundamental conflicts inherent in prevailing notions of free will have the potential to manifest themselves in some highly problematic ways. For example, criminal laws enacted in abstract contexts may presuppose constraints on free agency deeply at odds with those implicitly adopted by jurors evaluating concrete violations of these laws. I attempt to make some preliminary progress on these vexing, but vital, issues by suggesting that revision towards compatibilism represents an initially appealing method of resolving some of these practical difficulties. Importantly, though, this suggestion is tentative, particularly insofar as the extent to which such revision is ultimately desirable, feasible, or even psychologically possible remains unclear. Further consideration of these issues thus constitutes an important avenue for future research. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Shortly after John Andrew Rice, the eccentric classics professor and fire-brand advocate of progressive education, was dismissed from Rollins College for, among other things, teaching his students to “do as they please,”1 he drafted a sort of pedagogical manifesto announcing a new, and fundamentally new kind of, liberal arts school. The “Preliminary Announcement of Black Mountain College” describes this radical educational paradigm in largely contrarian terms, as the antithesis to traditional higher learning. This new college would be one without exams, (...) without grades and required courses, and without typical hierarchy of academic administration. Beyond this negative agenda, however, Rice makes one positive... (shrink)

States are beginning to restructure their U.S. history assessments from previous multiple-choice based assessments to include written-response questions that have higher levels of academic language demands. These higher-order thinking and analytical items pose challenges to linguistically and culturally diverse students. The purpose of the current study is to investigate how the restructuring of a U.S. history state assessment is associated with English Learners’ (ELs) achievement over time. The author incorporates 3 years of data from the Tennessee Department of Education, and (...) utilizes multi-level modeling (Hierarchical Linear Modeling) to examine and compare the association between school percentage ELs and U.S. history achievement on Tennessee's (TN) U.S. history state assessment. Findings indicate that the restructuring of the TN U.S. history state assessment in the 2015–16 school year is significantly and inversely associated with ELs’ achievement on this assessment. At the same time, there are no significant associations for the 2012–13 and the 2013–14 school years. This suggests a negative inverse association between the restructuring of the TN U.S. history state assessment and ELs’ performance. In addition, this suggests that ELs’ lack of U.S. history reading and writing ability may have contributed to the negative association. (shrink)

Fred D. Miller, Jr.'s stated goal for his new translation for the Oxford World's Classics series is, 'to provide a clear and accessible translation of Aristotle's psychological works while . . . conveying something of his distinctive style'. Not only does Miller achieve these goals in spades, but he also provides something more. His translation of Aristotle's De Anima and Parva Naturalia (the 'short works concerning nature'), along with twenty-three selected fragments from Aristotle's lost works and his 'Hymn (...) to Hermias', is elegant, philosophically sensitive, and informed by some of the best recent scholarly work on Aristotle's psychology and biology. (shrink)

This review calls for portions of Annie Miller's book to be released as a pro-basic-income shorter book. This book as it stands, should be on the shelf of policy-makers who want to work through options in basic income for the legislation they are writing.

I am very grateful to Jason Baehr and Bella DePaulo for the careful attention they have paid to my chapter. As I noted, this is my initial foray into providing a conceptual account of the virtue of honesty, and for that matter it is about the only such attempt any philosopher has offered in the past forty years. If others start to go down this road too, I would be thrilled. -/- Following the structure of my paper, I will (...) start with conceptual matters before turning to the implications of the empirical studies and then ending with more on mixed traits. (shrink)

This Introduction introduces readers to the concepts of political philosophy: authority, democracy, freedom and its limits, justice, feminism, multiculturalism, and nationality. Accessibly written and assuming no previous knowledge of the subject, it encourages the reader to think clearly and critically about the leading political questions of our time. THe book first investigates how politcial philosophy tackles basic ethical questions such as 'how should we live together in society?' It furthermore looks at political authority, discusses the reasons society needs politics in (...) the first place, explores the limitations of politics, and asks if there are areas of life that shouldn't be governed by politics. Moreover, the book explores the connections between political authority and justice, a constant theme in political philosophy, and the ways in which social justice can be used to regulate rather than destroy a market economy. In his travels through this realm, Miller covers why nations ar the natural units of government and wonders if the rise of multiculturalism and transnational co-operation will change all this, and asks in the end if we will ever see the formation of a world government. (shrink)

This book is the first systematic treatment of 'responsibilist' or character-based virtue epistemology, an approach to epistemology that focuses on intellectual ...

Jason Stanley presents a startling and provocative claim about knowledge: that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests, i.e. by how much is at stake for that person at that time. In defending this thesis, Stanley introduces readers to a number of strategies for resolving philosophical paradox, making the book essential not just for specialists in epistemology but for all philosophers interested in philosophical methodology. Since (...) a number of his strategies appeal to linguistic evidence, it will be of great interest to linguists as well. (shrink)

The reimagined Battlestar Galactica series (2003–2009) and its prequel series Caprica (2009–2010) provoked viewers to consider anew perennial philosophical questions regarding, among others, the nature of personhood and the role of religion in culture and politics. While no single philosophical viewpoint encapsulates the creators’ vision as a whole, the theory of biopolitics, as formulated by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and others, is a fruitful lens through which various points of story and character development may be analyzed. Two noteworthy areas of (...) attention are, first, whether a race of intelligent, self-aware beings, who have been artificially created, should be considered “persons” with attendant moral and legal status, and second, whether the purported ontological division between the “biological” and the “artificial” has moral import concerning the degree of control one class of beings may legitimately exercise over another. (shrink)

This chapter outlines the main ideas of my book National responsibility and global justice. It begins with two widely held but conflicting intuitions about what global justice might mean on the one hand, and what it means to be a member of a national community on the other. The first intuition tells us that global inequalities of the magnitude that currently exist are radically unjust, while the second intuition tells us that inequalities are both unavoidable and fair once national responsibility (...) is allowed to operate. This conflict might be resolved either by adopting a cosmopolitan theory of justice (which leaves no room for national responsibility) or by adopting a ?political? theory of justice (which denies that questions of distributive justice can arise beyond the walls of the sovereign state). Since neither resolution is satisfactory, the chapter defends the idea of national responsibility and proposes a new theory of global justice, whose main elements are the protection of basic human rights worldwide, and fair terms of interaction between independent political communities. (shrink)

Platonists and nominalists disagree about whether mathematical objects exist. But they almost uniformly agree about one thing: whatever the status of the existence of mathematical objects, that status is modally necessary. Two notable dissenters from this orthodoxy are Hartry Field, who defends contingent nominalism, and Mark Colyvan, who defends contingent Platonism. The source of their dissent is their view that the indispensability argument provides our justification for believing in the existence, or not, of mathematical objects. This paper considers whether commitment (...) to the indispensability argument gives one grounds to be a contingentist about mathematical objects. (shrink)

With its focus on intellectual virtues and their role in the acquisition and transmission of knowledge and related epistemic goods, virtue epistemology provides a rich set of tools for educational theory and practice. In particular, characteristics under the rubric of "responsibilist" virtue epistemology, like curiosity, open-mindedness, attentiveness, intellectual courage, and intellectual tenacity, can help educators and students define and attain certain worthy but nebulous educational goals like a love of learning, lifelong learning, and critical thinking. This volume is devoted to (...) exploring the intersection between virtue epistemology and education. It assembles leading virtue epistemologists and philosophers of education to address such questions as: Which virtues are most essential to education? How exactly should these virtues be understood? How is the goal of intellectual character growth related to other educational goals, for example, to critical thinking and knowledge-acquisition? What are the "best practices" for achieving this goal? Can growth in intellectual virtues be measured? The chapters are a prime example of "applied epistemology" and promise to be a seminal contribution to an area of research that is rapidly gaining attention within epistemology and beyond. (shrink)

In the Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1670, Spinoza asked why people “fight for their servitude as if for salvation.” In doing so, he foregrounded the affective dimension of despotism, putting forward the idea that servitude is not just passively endured but passionately strived for—something people want and will. Three hundred years later, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari repeated this formula in Anti-Oedipus, arguing that it was the central question of political philosophy. They read Spinoza through Wilhelm Reich, stating that the (...) astonishing thing is that “those who are exploited are not continually out on strike.” In doing so they shifted the political question from domination to exploitation. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I argue for an updated version of the question, asking why people fight for exploitation as if it were rebellion. Asking this question involves reexamining the way in which the critique of religion is the antechamber of the critique of political economy in Marx, and is the thread connecting Spinoza to Marx. Finally, I argue that reframing the question in terms of rebellion and exploitation is useful in making sense of contemporary forms of right populism that present themselves as rebellion, but actually deepen the domination of capitalism over our lives. (shrink)

Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers is a contingent fact, and researchers may reach a consensus for all kinds of reasons, such as fighting a common foe or sharing a common bias. Scientific consensus, by itself, does not necessarily indicate the existence of shared knowledge among (...) the members of the consensus community. I address the question of under what conditions it is likely that a consensus is in fact knowledge based. I argue that a consensus is likely to be knowledge based when knowledge is the best explanation of the consensus, and I identify three conditions—social calibration, apparent consilience of evidence, and social diversity, for knowledge being the best explanation of a consensus. (shrink)

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which (...) put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Barry Loewer attempts to defend Humeanism about laws of nature from a charge that Humean laws are not adequately explanatory. Central to his defense is a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations: even if Humeans cannot offer further metaphysical explanations of particular features of their “mosaic,” that does not preclude them from offering scientific explanations of these features. According to Marc Lange, however, Loewer’s distinction is of no avail. Defending a transitivity principle linking scientific explanantia to (...) their metaphysical grounds, Lange argues that a charge of explanatory inadequacy resurfaces once this intuitive principle is in place. This paper surveys, on behalf of the Humean, three strategies for responding to Lange’s criticism. The ready availability of these strategies suggests that Lange’s argument may not bolster anti-Humean convictions, since the argument rests on premises that those not antecedently sharing these convictions may well reject. The three strategies also correspond to three interesting ways of thinking about relations of grounding linking Humean laws and their instances, all of which are consistent with theses of Humean supervenience, and some of which have been heretofore overlooked. (shrink)