Although the counterfactual comparative account of harm, according to which someone is harmed when things go worse for her than they otherwise would have, is intuitively plausible, it has recently come under attack. There are five serious objections in the literature: some philosophers argue that the counterfactual account makes it hard to see how we could harm someone in the course of benefitting that person; others argue that Parfit’s non-identity problem is particularly problematic; another objection claims that the account forces (...) us to see many harms where there is just one; a fourth objection is based on the claim that the counterfactual account makes mysterious the distinction between harms and mere failures-to-benefit; and a final problem arises from cases of pre-emption, in which the nearest possible world in which the harmful event does not occur is a world in which some other harmful event occurs. This paper argues that, properly understood, harm essentially involves a counterfactual comparison, and that these comparisons are sensitive to context in the manner typical of counterfactual conditionals, and that, augmented with two plausible distinctions, this account has the resources to provide satisfying responses to each of the objections that have been raised against it. (shrink)

The counterfactual comparative account of harm has emerged as the main contender in the recent literature on the nature of harm. But Erik Carlson argues that the account violates plausible normative principles connecting harm with our reasons to perform certain actions and to prefer certain outcomes. According to Carlson, the account implies that we have reason to perform actions and to prefer outcomes that we do not in fact possess. This paper defends the counterfactual comparative account from these objections.

In the literature about harm, the counterfactual comparative account has emerged as a main contender. According to it, an event constitutes a harm for someone iff the person is worse off than they would otherwise have been as a result. But the counterfactual comparative account faces significant challenges, one of the most serious of which stems from examples involving non-harmful omitted actions or non-occurring events, which it tends to misclassify as harms: for example, Robin is worse off when Batman does (...) not give him a new set of golf clubs, but Batman has not harmed him. In this article, I will clearly state the counterfactual comparative account; state and explain this objection to the account; canvass several unsatisfactory responses; and attempt to show how the account can overcome the objection. This solution involves distinguishing between principles concerning the existence of harm and principles concerning attributions of responsibility for harm. (shrink)

Although the thesis that the moral better than relation is transitive seems obviously true, there is a growing literature according to which Parfit’s repugnant conclusion and related puzzles reveal that this thesis is false or problematic. This paper begins by presenting several such puzzles and explaining how they can be used in arguments for the intransitivity of better than. It then proposes and defends a plausible alternative picture of the behavior of better than that both resolves the repugnant conclusion and (...) preserves transitivity. On the threshold-based model of lexicality defended here, hedonic episodes whose intensity is above a certain point are lexically greater than those whose intensity is below it. The final sections argue that this model is independently plausible and can be defended from several important objections. (shrink)

‘Epistocracy’ is the name of a type of political power structure in which the power is held by the knowledgable—for example, by restricting the right to vote to those who can demonstrate sufficient knowledge. Though Plato and Mill defended epistocratic views, it has found few contemporary advocates. In a recent book, however, Jason Brennan argues that epistocratic power structures are capable of outperforming democratic ones. His argument is two-pronged: first, he argues that democratic procedures with universal suffrage allow poorly-informed voters (...) to pollute the electorate, and that doing so has negative policy-related consequences that are easily avoidable. Second, he argues that voting does not possess any non-intrinsic value, and so restricting suffrage to the educated does not result in a loss of status or standing for less well-educated persons in any meaningful way. I argue that epistocratic techniques are impossible to implement fairly, and represent an ineffective solution for the problems they are designed to solve. On these bases, I recommend rejecting it. (shrink)

Several prominent ethical philosophers have attempted to demonstrate that there exist instances or types of value that are of crucial moral significance but which cannot legitimately be compared with one another. Bernard Williams and Michael Stocker, for example, argue that it can sometimes be rational to regret having chosen the all-things-considered better of two alternatives, and that this sense of regret entails that the goodness of the worse option is not made up for by and is therefore incommensurable with that (...) of the better. Joseph Raz and others have made similar points. In this paper, I propose a theory of value that is monistic in that it countenances just one sort of morally crucial value, but pluralistic in that several distinct properties bearer this value. I then explain how this view avoids incommensurable values without doing violence to the core intuitions that seemed to necessitate them, and how it fits into a larger conception of morality, right conduct, and moral psychology. (shrink)

Why is pain the opposite of pleasure? Several theories of pleasure and pain have substantial difficulty explaining this basic feature. Theories according to which pleasure and pain are individual sensations or features of sensations have particular difficulty, since it is difficult to understand how pairs of sensations could be opposites. Some philosophers argue that the pain is the opposite of pleasure because pain and pleasure are fundamentally a matter of desire and aversion, and desire and aversion are clear opposites. I (...) argue that the structure of desire and aversion does not correspond to that of pleasure and pain. I propose that pleasure and pain are opposites because pleasure is good and pain is bad, and good and bad are clear opposites. I show that this view explains the structure of opposition of pleasure and pain, and I answer several objections. (shrink)

According to a standard picture, for any two comparable objects and a basis for comparison, either one is greater than the other or they are equal with respect to the basis. This picture has been called the Trichotomy Thesis, and although it is intuitive and plausible, it has been called into question by such philosophers as Derek Parfit, James Griffin, Joseph Raz, and Ruth Chang. Chang’s discussion is particularly rich, for she proposes and provides a detailed account of a possible (...) fourth relation that, she argues, provides a satisfying explanation of hard cases of comparison. In this paper, I will examine a version of the main argument against the Trichotomy Thesis and attempt to show that it is unsound. (shrink)

This paper raises an objection to two important arguments for reductive ethical naturalism. Reductive ethical naturalism is the view that ethical properties reduce to the properties countenanced by the natural and social sciences. The main arguments for reductionism in the literature hold that ethical properties reduce to natural properties by supervening on them, either because supervenience is alleged to guarantee identity via mutual entailment, or because non-reductive supervenience relations render the supervenient properties superfluous. After carefully characterizing naturalism and reductionism, we (...) will present, explain, and raise objections against each of the main reductionist arguments: that supervenience does not support the claim that ethical properties and their subvenient natural properties are mutually entailing; that reductive views undermine the claim that ethical properties yield resemblance; and that supervenience does not entail that non-descriptive ethical properties are superfluous in the most fundamental sense. (shrink)

Several philosophers have argued that interpersonal comparisons of utility are problematic or even impossible, and that this poses a problem for the thesis that pleasure is a legitimate, measurable quantity. This, in turn, is thought to pose a problem of some kind for a variety of normative ethical and axiological theories. Perhaps it is supposed to show that utilitarianism or hedonism is false, or is supposed to show that there is no genuine hedonic calculus, or that any view that presupposes (...) that pleasure and pain are morally relevant is false or untenable. Its proponents begin by noticing that interpersonal comparisons of pleasure and pain are impossible in some relevant sense. This impossibility has been exploited by different philosophers for different purposes. It is clear, however, that a great many ethical theories rely in some way on the thesis that pleasure is measurable, and that its incoherence therefore threatens a great many theories in ethics. The purpose of this paper is to survey several of the most interesting versions of this argument; then to explain several attempts to respond to the problem, and to explain why each attempt fails; then to present, explain, and defend the correct solution to the problem. (shrink)

Is it possible to do a good thing, or to make the world a better place? Some argue that it is not possible, because perspective‐neutral value does not exist. Some argue that ‘good’ does not play the right grammatical role; or that all good things are good ‘in a way’; or that goodness is inherently perspective‐dependent. I argue that the logical and semantic properties of ‘good’ are what we should expect of an evaluative predicate; that the many ways of being (...) good don't threaten the thesis that some ways are perspective‐independent; and that there are clear examples of perspective‐independent goodness. (shrink)

Several prominent philosophers believe that moral facts are facts about what reasons we have, and that this entails that moral judgments are necessarily and inherently motivating. According to this argument, if morality cannot move us, then it is hard to understand how it could be sensibly regarded as action-guiding or normative. That is, they endorse a traditional argument for motivational judgment internalism based on moral rationalism. This paper criticizes this argument, and argues instead that there is no necessary or conceptual (...) connection between moral facts and motivation. First, I formulate MJI as the thesis that moral judgments are necessarily and inherently motivating, and introduced several refinements designed to accommodate some plausible exceptions to the initial formulation. I then introduce MR as the thesis that moral facts are identical with or analyzable in terms of facts about requirements of reason. MR is ambiguous between an interpretation that analyzes moral requirements in terms of motivating reasons, and is also subject to various possible refinements, and an interpretation that proceeds in terms of justifying reasons. Finally, I argue that neither interpretation entails any interesting or plausible formulation of MJI. If the argument of this paper are sound, then there is no important connection between moral rationalism and motivational internalism. (shrink)

According to several prominent philosophers, pleasure and pain come in measurable quantities. This thesis is controversial, however, and many philosophers have presented or felt compelled to respond to arguments for the conclusion that it is false. One important class of these arguments concerns the problem of aggregation, which says that if pleasure and pain were measurable quantities, then, by definition, it would be possible to perform various mathematical and statistical operations on numbers representing amounts of them. It is sometimes argued (...) that such operations cannot be sensibly applied to pleasure and pain, and that sentences expressing such operations must be false or meaningless. The purpose of this paper is to present, explain, and rebut several versions of this argument. In the first section, I present a generic version of the argument. In the second section, I present a defense of its key premise based on a case involving comparisons of relief from pain, and explain why I think it fails. In the third section, I present and rebut another defense, based on a pair of analogies with temperature. In the final section, I present a third defense, based on an analogy with spatial distances. I then present my reasons for rejecting it. Along the way, I explain my reasons for thinking that pleasure and pain are amenable to interval measurement. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 20 What is the relationship between justice and moral permissibility? If an action constitutes an injustice, does that decisively rule it out, morally speaking, or merely count heavily against it? This paper argues that although the injustice of an action counts heavily against performing it, this effect can sometimes be overridden by consequentialist concerns. This suggests that injustice does not conclusively rule out actions that generate it, which in turn suggests that an approach to justice that (...) conceives of it as an object of intrinsic moral value more accurately reflects the behavior of justice than do more traditional deontological approaches. (shrink)

Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness (2018) and (2020) argue that adjuncts are not exploited. We are sympathetic to some of their points. We agree, for example, that certain ways in which adjuncts are compared to sweatshop workers are offensive. For, as Brennan and Magness point out, there are many respects in which adjuncts are much better off than sweatshop workers. However, we show that the core insights of their paper are compatible with the view that adjuncts are exploited. Furthermore, their (...) more general views about exploitation expressed in Cracks in the Ivory Tower actually lend support to the claim that adjuncts are exploited. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, I claimed that the widely held counterfactual comparative account of harm violates two very plausible principles about harm and prudential reasons. Justin Klocksiem argues, in a reply, that CCA is in fact compatible with these principles. In this rejoinder, I shall try to show that Klocksiem’s defense of CCA fails.

In a recent article in this journal, Justin Klocksiem proposes a novel response to the widely discussed failure to benefit problem for the counterfactual comparative account of harm (CCA). According to Klocksiem, proponents of CCA can deal with this problem by distinguishing between facts about there being harm and facts about an agent's having done harm. In this reply, we raise three sets of problems for Klocksiem's approach.

Recent work in cognitive science of religion (CSR) is beginning to converge on a very interesting thesis—that, given the ordinary features of human minds operating in typical human environments, we are naturally disposed to believe in the existence of gods, among other religious ideas (e.g., seeAtran [2002], Barrett [2004; 2012], Bering [2011], Boyer [2001], Guthrie [1993], McCauley [2011], Pyysiäinen [2004; 2009]). In this paper, we explore whether such a discovery ultimately helps or hurts the atheist position—whether, for example, it lends (...) credence to atheism by explaining away religious belief or whether it actually strengthens some already powerful arguments against atheism in the relevant philosophical literature.We argue that the recent discoveries of CSR hurt, not help, the atheist position—that CSR, if anything, should not give atheists epistemic assurance. (shrink)

Criticism plays an essential role in the growth of scientific knowledge. In some cases, however, criticism can have detrimental effects; for example, it can be used to ‘manufacture doubt’ for the purpose of impeding public policy making on issues such as tobacco consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Oreskes & Conway 2010). In this paper, we build on previous work by Biddle and Leuschner (2015) who argue that criticism that meets certain conditions can be epistemically detrimental. We extend and refine (...) their account by arguing that such criticism can be epistemically corrupting—it can create social conditions that are conducive to the development of epistemic vice by agents operating within them. (shrink)

Reformed epistemology and cognitive science have remarkably converged on belief in God. Reformed epistemology holds that belief in God is basic—that is, belief in God is a natural, non-inferential belief that is immediately produced by a cognitive faculty. Cognitive science of religion also holds that belief in gods is (often) non-reflectively and instinctively produced—that is, non-inferentially and automatically produced by a cognitive faculty or system. But there are differences. In this paper, we will show some remarkable points of convergence, and (...) a few points of divergence, between Reformed epistemology and the cognitive science of religion. (shrink)

I articulate the challenge disagreement poses for epistemic contextualism, and then discuss several possible replies on behalf of the contextualist.

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a way of doing philosophy. It is “traditional” philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected philosophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps radical, addition to philosophical practice. We don’t think so. As this chapter will show, empirical claims have been common across the history of Western philosophy, as have appeals to (...) empirical observation in attempting to support or subvert these claims. While conceptions of philosophy have changed over time, across these changes we find philosophers employing empirical methods in pursuing their philosophical questions. Our primary aim in this chapter is to illustrate this fact. We begin by discussing the relevance of history to experimental philosophy (Section 2), then offer a necessarily condensed and highly selective history of empirical work in Western philosophy, ranging from the ancients (Section 3), to the early moderns (Section 4), to the late moderns (Section 5), and on to the present (Section 6). (shrink)

Recent scholarship in philosophy of science and technology has shown that scientific and technological decision making are laden with values, including values of a social, political, and/or ethical character. This paper examines the role of value judgments in the design of machine-learning systems generally and in recidivism-prediction algorithms specifically. Drawing on work on inductive and epistemic risk, the paper argues that ML systems are value laden in ways similar to human decision making, because the development and design of ML systems (...) requires human decisions that involve tradeoffs that reflect values. In many cases, these decisions have significant—and, in some cases, disparate—downstream impacts on human lives. After examining an influential court decision regarding the use of proprietary recidivism-prediction algorithms in criminal sentencing, Wisconsin v. Loomis, the paper provides three recommendations for the use of ML in penal systems. (shrink)

I develop a reduction of grounding to essence. My approach is to think about the relation between grounding and essence on the model of a certain conceptof existential dependence. I extend this concept of existential dependence in a coupleof ways and argue that these extensions provide a reduction of grounding to essenceif we use sorted variables that range over facts and take it that for a fact to obtain is forit to exist. I then use the account to resolve various (...) issues surrounding the concept of grounding and its connection with essence; apply the account to paradigm cases andto the impure logic of grounding; and respond to objections. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the concept of collective essence: that some truths are essential to many items taken together. For example, that it is essential to conjunction and negation that they are truth-functionally complete. The concept of collective essence is one of the main innovations of recent work on the theory of essence. In a sense, this innovation is natural, since we make all sorts of plural predications. It stands to reason that there should be a distinction between essential and (...) accidental plural predications if there is a distinction among singular predications. In this paper I defend the view that the concept of collective essence is governed by the principle of Monotonicity: that something is essential to some items only if it is essential to any items to which they belong. (shrink)

This work draws an analogical defence of strong emotionism—the metaethical claim that moral properties and concepts consist in the propensity of actions to elicit emotional responses from divergent emotional perspectives. I offer a theory that is in line with that of Prinz. I build an analogy between moral properties and what I call emotion-dispositional properties. These properties are picked out by predicates such as ‘annoying’, ‘frightening’ or ‘deplorable’ and appear to be uncontroversial and frequent cases of attribution error—the attributing of (...) subjective emotional states as mind-independent properties. I present a linguistic analysis supporting the claim that moral properties and their related concepts are reducible to a subset of emotion-dispositional properties and concepts. This is grounded in the observation that utterances featuring moral predicates function linguistically and conceptually in analogous ways to emotion-dispositional predicates. It follows from this view that asserted moral utterances are truth-apt relative to ethical communities, but that speakers misconceive the extensions of predicates. I show how the framework of Cognitive Linguistics allows us to explain this error. Further analysis of moral and non-moral utterances exposes the deeper conceptual schemas structuring language through cognitive construal processes. An understanding of these processes, coupled with an emotionist elucidation of moral properties and concepts, makes the attribution error an expected upshot of the emotionist thesis, rather than an uncomfortable consequence. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to address the neglected but important problem of differentiating between epistemically beneficial and epistemically detrimental dissent. By “dissent,” we refer to the act of objecting to a particular conclusion, especially one that is widely held. While dissent in science can clearly be beneficial, there might be some instances of dissent that not only fail to contribute to scientific progress, but actually impede it. Potential examples of this include the tobacco industry’s funding of studies that (...) questioned the link between smoking and lung cancer, and the attempt by the petroleum industry and other groups to cast doubt upon the conclusion that human consumption of fossil fuels contributes to global climate change. The problem of distinguishing between good and bad dissent is important because of the growing tendency of some stakeholders to attempt to delay political action by ’manufacturing doubt’. Our discussion in this paper focuses on climate science. This field, in our view, is rife with instances of bad dissent. On the basis of our discussion of climate science, we articulate a set of sufficient conditions for epistemically problematic dissent in general, which we call “the inductive risk account of epistemically detrimental dissent.”. (shrink)

This paper examines the state of the field of “science and values”—particularly regarding the implications of the thesis of transient underdetermination for the ideal of value-free science, or what I call the “ideal of epistemic purity.” I do this by discussing some of the main arguments in the literature, both for and against the ideal. I examine a preliminary argument from transient underdetermination against the ideal of epistemic purity, and I discuss two different formulations of an objection to this argument—an (...) objection that requires the strict separation of the epistemic from the practical. A secondary aim of the paper is to suggest some future directions for the field, one of which is to replace the vocabulary of values that is often employed in the literature with a more precise one. (shrink)

This essay* takes two notions of autonomy and two notions of explanation and argues that colours occur in explanations that fall under all of them. The claim that colours can be used to explain anything at all may seem to some people an outrage. But their pessimism is unjustified and the orthodox dispositional view which may seem to support it, I shall argue, itself has difficulties. In broad terms, Section 2 shows that there exist good straight scientific laws of colour, (...) constituting what one might call a phenomenal science. Section 3 offers a larger view of what we are doing when we attribute colours to things, a view which makes it a case of holistic explanation, similar in many ways to psychological explanation. Section 2 emphasizes the model of scientific explanation, and Section 3 the holistic model found in rational explanation; but it will emerge that colour explanation in different ways fits both models, as it also does the two principal notions of autonomy that the first section identifies. (shrink)

Through the lenses of cognitive science of religion, successful god concepts must possess a number of features. God concepts must be counterintuitive, an intentional agent, possessing strategic information, able to act in the human world in detectable ways and capable of motivating behaviors that reinforce belief. That Santa Claus appears to be only inconsistently represented as having all five requisite features Santa has failed to develop a community of true believers and cult. Nevertheless, Santa concepts approximate a successful god concept (...) more closely than other widespread cultural characters such as Mickey Mouse and the Tooth Fairy, in part explaining Santa's relative cultural prominence. (shrink)

What is it for something to be essential to an item? For some time, it was standard to think that the concept of necessity alone can provide an answer: for something to be essential to an item is for it to be strictly implied by the existence of that item. We now tend to think that this view fails because its analysans is insufficient for its analysandum. In response, some argue that we can supplement the analysis in terms of necessity (...) with a further condition. In this paper I argue that this view is untenable in its current form. I then provide a glimmer of hope to those who think that essence is at least partially analyzable in terms of necessity. (shrink)

The biological functions debate is a perennial topic in the philosophy of science. In the first full-length account of the nature and importance of biological functions for many years, Justin Garson presents an innovative new theory, the 'generalized selected effects theory of function', which seamlessly integrates evolutionary and developmental perspectives on biological functions. He develops the implications of the theory for contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of medicine and psychiatry, the philosophy of biology, and biology (...) itself, addressing issues ranging from the nature of mental representation to our understanding of the function of the human genome. Clear, jargon-free, and engagingly written, with accessible examples and explanatory diagrams to illustrate the discussion, his book will be highly valuable for readers across philosophical and scientific disciplines. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I develop a truthmaker semantics for essence and use the semantics to investigate the explanatory role of essence.

This book is a critical survey of and guidebook to the literature on biological functions. It ties in with current debates and developments, and at the same time, it looks back on the state of discourse in naturalized teleology prior to the 1970s. It also presents three significant new proposals. First, it describes the generalized selected effects theory, which is one version of the selected effects theory, maintaining that the function of a trait consists in the activity that led to (...) its differential persistence or reproduction in a population, and not merely its differential reproduction. Secondly, it advances “within-discipline pluralism” (as opposed to between-discipline pluralism) a new form of function pluralism, which emphasizes the coexistence of function concepts within diverse biological sub-disciplines. Lastly, it provides a critical assessment of recent alternatives to the selected effects theory of function, namely, the weak etiological theory and the systems-theoretic theory. The book argues that, to the extent that functions purport to offer causal explanations for the existence of a trait, there are no viable alternatives to the selected effects view. -/- The debate about biological functions is still as relevant and important to biology and philosophy as it ever was. Recent controversies surrounding the ENCODE Project Consortium in genetics, the nature of psychiatric classification, and the value of ecological restoration, all point to the continuing relevance to biology of philosophical discussion about the nature of functions. In philosophy, ongoing debates about the nature of biological information, intentionality, health and disease, mechanism, and even biological trait classification, are closely related to debates about biological functions. (shrink)

The present study sought to determine whether Barrett's counterintuitiveness coding and quantifying scheme could be applied to cultural materials with sufficient intercoder reliability, provide evidence concerning just how counterintuitive is too counterintuitive for a concept to be a recurrent cultural idea, and test whether counterintuitive intentional agent concepts are more common in folktales than other classes of counterintuitive concepts. Seventy-three folktales from around the world were sampled from larger collections. Using Barrett's CI-Scheme, two independent coders identified 116 counterintuitive objects and (...) scored them for degree of counterintuitiveness with very high inter-rater concordance. Of folktales, 79% had one or two counterintuitive objects. Of the counterintuitive objects 93% had a counterintuitiveness score of only one. Of counterintuitive objects, 98% were agents. Results suggest the CI-Scheme may have utility for analyzing cultural materials, that the cognitive optimum for cultural transmission falls around one counterintuitive feature, and that counterintuitive agents are more common than other types of counterintuitive objects in folktales. (shrink)

. Recent philosophers of science have not only revived the classical argument from inductive risk but extended it. I argue that some of the purported extensions do not fit cleanly within the schema of the original argument, and I discuss the problem of overdiagnosis of disease due to expanded disease definitions in order to show that there are some risks in the research process that are important and that very clearly fall outside of the domain of inductive risk. Finally, I (...) introduce the notion of epistemic risk in order to characterize such risks. (shrink)

Collaboration is increasingly popular across academia. Collaborative work raises certain ethical questions, however. How will the fruits of collaboration be divided? How will the work for the collaborative project be split? In this paper, we consider the following question in particular. Are there ways in which these divisions systematically disadvantage certain groups? -/- We use evolutionary game theoretic models to address this question. First, we discuss results from O'Connor and Bruner (unpublished). In this paper, we show that underrepresented groups in (...) academia can be disadvantaged in such situations by dint of their small numbers. Second, we present novel results exploring how the hierarchical structure of academia can lead to bargaining disadvantage. We investigate models where one actor has a higher baseline of academic success, less to lose if collaboration goes south, or greater rewards for non-collaborative work. We show that in these situations, the less powerful partner is disadvantaged in bargaining over collaboration. (shrink)

When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences, it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences. This inference then plays a key role in a now-standard argument against certain theories (...) in moral semantics. In this paper, we introduce new evidence that bears on this debate. We show that there are moral conflict cases in which people are inclined to say both that the two speakers disagree and that it is not the case at least one of them must be saying something incorrect. We then explore how we might understand such disagreements. As a proof of concept, we sketch an account of the concept of disagreement and an independently motivated theory of moral semantics which, together, explain the possibility of such cases. (shrink)

We identify a novel ‘cultural red king effect’ that, in many cases, results in stable arrangements which are to the detriment of minority groups. In particular, we show inequalities disadvantaging minority groups can naturally arise under an adaptive process when minority and majority members must routinely determine how to divide resources amongst themselves. We contend that these results show how inequalities disadvantaging minorities can likely arise by dint of their relative size and need not be a result of either explicit (...) nor implicit prejudices, nor due to intrinsic differences between minority and majority members. (shrink)

Since the early 1980s, private, for-profit corporations have become increasingly involved in all aspects of scientific research, especially of biomedical research. In this essay, I argue that there are dangerous epistemic consequences of this trend, which should be more thoroughly examined by social epistemologists. In support of this claim, I discuss a recent episode of pharmaceutical research involving the painkiller Vioxx. I argue that the research on Vioxx was epistemically problematic and that the primary cause of these inadequacies was faulty (...) institutional arrangements. More specifically, the research was organized in such a way as to allow short-term commercial interests to compromise epistemic integrity. Thus, the Vioxx case study, in conjunction with numerous case studies developed elsewhere, provides strong reasons for believing that the privatization of the biomedical sciences is epistemically worrisome, and it suggests that the primary response to this situation should be a social, or organizational, one. What kind of organizational response would be most beneficial? I briefly discuss two prominent social epistemological proposals for how scientific research should be organized - namely those of Philip Kitcher and Helen Longino - and I suggest that they are incapable of dealing with the phenomenon of privatization. I then draw upon the Vioxx episode in order to outline an alternative suggestion for reorganizing certain aspects of pharmaceutical research. (shrink)

For epistemic subjects like us, updating our credences incurs epistemic costs. Expending our limited processing power and working memory to properly update our credences by some information can come at the cost of not responding to other available information. It is thus desirable to flesh out and compare alternative ways of taking information into account in light of cognitive shortcomings like our own. This paper is a preliminary attempt to do so. I argue that it is better, in a range (...) of circumstances and from the point of view of expected credal accuracy, for epistemic subjects like us not to update on available information that bears on propositions for which substantial evidence has been gathered than it is to update on information as it presents itself. In order to clarify the argument, and enable comparisons between information-response policies more generally, I develop a queue-theoretic model of learning for subjects with cognitive limitations. The model characterizes how policies for responding to information interact with a subject’s limitations to yield confidences. Finally, I discuss implications of the discussion for work on confidence, outright belief, and the relationship between those two states. The comparison of information-response policies helps to explain how some of the “biases” revealed by psychological research might be cognitively valuable, clarify views that take outright belief to be a kind of epistemic plan that resists reconsideration, and assuage certain “demandingness” worries for the hypothesis that we are credal reasoners. (shrink)

Christian Protestants typically affirm both the essential moral perfection of heaven and the sufficiency of saving faith. Yet these two commitments generatean apparently self-destructive dilemma—one I call the dilemma of sanctification. The prima facie puzzle can be resolved in at least three ways. In this paper, I articulate the dilemma of sanctification in some detail and offer an argument against a widely-held Protestant solution I call provisionism. This constitutes indirect support for the solution I find most promising, namely, a doctrine (...) of purgatory. I close by sketching a model of purgatory consistent with Protestant soteriology. (shrink)

A philosphical exploration of perception explores Wittgenstein's work on visual meaning and his analysis of the concept of "seeing.".

Root kit -- Buffer overflow: the space and time of cyberwar -- Injection attack: writing and the information catastrophe -- Distributed denial of service: cybernetic sovereignty -- Spear phishing: nodal subjects -- Firmware vulnerabilities.

Epistemicists claim that vague predicates have precise but unknow- able cutoffs. I argue against against the standard, Williamsonian, answer, that appeals to metalinguistic safety: we can know that p even if our true belief that p is metalinguistically lucky. I then propose that epistemicists should be diagonalized epistemicists and show how this alternative formulation of the view avoids the chal- lenge. However, in an M. Night Shyamalan-style twist, I then argue we should not be diagonalized epistemicists either.

Offers a concise, expert account of Aristotle's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world.