Elitist scepticism of democracy has a venerable history. This paper responds to the latest round of such scepticism—the ‘competence objection’, articulated in recent work by Jason Brennan. Brennan’s charge is that democracy is unjust because it allows uninformed, irrational, and morally unreasonable voters to exercise power over high-stakes political decisions, thus imposing undue risk upon the citizenry. I show that Brennan’s objection admits of two interpretations, and argue that neither can be sustained on close examination. Along the way, I consider (...) the merits of Brennan’s preferred ‘epistocratic’ alternative to democracy, and argue that it is likely to lead to lower-quality outcomes. (shrink)

Dissatisfaction with democratic institutions has run high in recent years. Perhaps as a result, political theorists have begun to turn their attention to possible alternative modes of political dec...

Almost everyone would agree that vote buying is morally wrong, and that prohibitions on vote buying are morally justified. Yet, recently, several philosophers have argued that vote buying is morally permissible, and that it should be legally permitted. This paper begins by examining and criticising arguments that have been offered in defence of vote buying. I then go on to consider existing attempts to explain the wrongness of vote buying, arguing that none is wholly successful. I then advance a novel (...) account of the wrongness of vote buying. Vote buying is objectionable, I argue, because it involves a failure of respect for one’s fellow citizens as autonomous agents. I also consider the implications of my account for a number of other controversial practices. (shrink)

This book investigates the relationship between non-state actors and climate justice from a philosophical perspective. The climate justice literature remains largely focused upon the rights and duties of states. Yet, for decades, states have failed to take adequate steps to address climate change. This has led some to suggest that, if severe climate change and its attendant harms are to be avoided, non-state actors are going to have to step into the breach. This collection represents the first attempt to systematically (...) examine the climate duties of the most significant non-state actors - corporations, sub-national political communities, and individuals. Targeted at academic philosophers working on climate justice, this collection will also be of great interest to students and scholars of global justice, applied ethics, political philosophy and environmental humanities. (shrink)

Virtually every figure in the climate justice literature agrees that states are presently failing to discharge their duties to take action on climate change. Few, however, have attempted to think through what follows from that fact from a moral point of view. In Climate Justice Beyond the State, Lachlan Umbers and Jeremy Moss argue that states’ failures to take action on climate change have important implications for the duties of the most important actors states contain within them – (...) sub-national political communities, corporations, and individuals – actors that have been largely neglected in the climate justice literature, to date. Sub-national political communities and corporations, they argue, have duties to immediately, aggressively, and unilaterally reduce their emissions. Individuals, on the other hand, have duties to help promote collective action on climate change. Along the way, they contribute to a range of important contemporary debates, including those over the nature of collective duties, what agents are required to do under conditions of partial compliance, and the requirements of fairness. Targeted at academic philosophers working on climate justice, this book will also be of great interest to students and scholars of global justice, applied ethics, political philosophy, and environmental humanities. (shrink)

Most democracies disenfranchise persons with cognitive disabilities. Several democratic theorists have, for a range of reasons, recently argued that such restrictions ought to be abolished. I agree with such arguments. Some, however, have also expressed the hope that enfranchising such persons might give politicians more powerful incentives to attend to such persons’ interests. I argue that such hopes are likely to be disappointed. If we wish to ensure that such persons’ interests are taken seriously in the political process, we must (...) consider reforms of other kinds. After considering several alternatives, I argue for a deliberative solution—a Citizens’ Assembly for the Cognitively Disabled, modeled upon the 2004 British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on electoral reform. (shrink)

The first year of the Trump Presidency has been marked by regressive steps in US climate policy. Trump’s announcement on 1 June 2017 of his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement was...

Volume 98, Issue 1, March 2020, Page 210-210.

Lachlan Umbers defends democracy against Jason’s Brennan’s competence objection, by showing that voting even incompetently does not violate the rights of others, as the risk imposed is negligible, and furthermore lower than other permissible actions, e.g. driving. I show there are costs in taking this line of argument. Accepting it would make arguing for the duty to vote more difficult in two ways: since voting incompetently is permissible, and not voting imposes less risk than not voting, then not (...) voting is permissible; in terms of fairness, voting incompetently is worse than not voting, if voting incompetently is permissible, then there cannot be a fairness-based duty to vote. (shrink)

The article discusses how and why philosopher Ayn Rand attempted to deduce an ought conclusion from only is premises. It contends that Rand did attempt to deduce what one ought and ought not do from what is or is not the case. It argues that Rand attempted to provide a universally objective unshakable normative moral claim, that people ought to act in accordance with her value and virtue system.

In the 1960s, theoretical biologist Richard Levins criticised modellers in his own discipline of population biology for pursuing the “brute force” strategy of building hyper-realistic models. Instead of exclusively chasing complexity, Levins advocated for the use of multiple different kinds of complementary models, including much simpler ones. In this paper, I argue that the epistemic challenges Levins attributed to the brute force strategy still apply to state-of-the-art climate models today: they have big appetites for unattainable data, they are limited by (...) computational tractability, and they are incomprehensible to the human modeller. Along the lines Levins described, this uncertainty generates a trade-off between realistic, precise models with predictive power and simple, highly idealised models that facilitate understanding. In addition to building ensembles of highly complex dynamical models, climate modellers can address model uncertainty by comparing models of different types, such as dynamical and data-driven models, and by systematically comparing models at different levels of what climate modellers call the model hierarchy. Despite its age, Levins’ paper remains incredibly insightful and should be considered an important entry into the philosophy of computational modelling. (shrink)

East India Company surveyors began gaining access to the high Himalaya in the 1810s, at a time when the mountains were taking on increasing political significance as the northern borderlands of British India. Though never as idiosyncratic as surveyors insisted, these were spaces in which instruments, fieldbook inscriptions, and bodies were all highly prone to failure. The ways surveyors managed these failures demonstrate the social performances required to establish credible knowledge in a world in which the senses were scrambled. The (...) resulting tensions reveal an ongoing disconnect in understanding between those displaced not only from London, but also from Calcutta, something insufficiently emphasized in previous histories of colonial science. By focusing on the early nineteenth century, often overlooked in favor of the later period, this article shows the extent to which the scientific, imaginative, and political constitution of the Himalaya was haphazard and contested. (shrink)

An estimated 1.2 to 2.3 million Hindus live in the United States. End-of-life care choices for a subset of these patients may be driven by religious beliefs. In this article, we present Hindu beliefs that could strongly influence a devout person’s decisions about medical care, including end-of-life care. We provide four case examples (one sacred epic, one historical example, and two cases from current practice) that illustrate Hindu notions surrounding pain and suffering at the end of life. Chief among those (...) is the principle of karma, through which one reaps the benefits and penalties for past deeds. Deference to one’s spouse or family is another important Hindu value, especially among Hindu women, which can impact the decision-making process and challenge the Western emphasis on autonomy. In addition, the Hindu embrace of astrology can lead to a desire to control the exact time of death. Confounding any generalizations, a Hindu patient may reject or accept treatments based on the individual patient’s or family’s interpretation of any given tradition. Through an awareness of some of the fundamental practices in Hinduism and the role of individual interpretation within the tradition, clinicians will be better able to support their Hindu patients and families at the end of life. (shrink)

The following article defines Castoriadis’ concepts of the radical imagination and the social imaginary as a platform for a discussion of some motifs important to Castoriadis: the nature of human subjectivity, the nature of ‘reality’, the role and scope of the human imagination, the importance of freedom, the question of whether or not we are free (i.e. how sick/diminished/vulnerable is the second epoch of autonomy that broke open in/as modernity), and the roles of science, politics and philosophy in human social (...) life. The central work on the radical imagination and the social imaginary is of course more than an arbitrary jumping-off point: this paper argues that understanding these concepts is vital if one is to understand the core elements of Castoriadis’ writings and his broader emancipatory project. (shrink)

By constructing a maximal incomplete d.r.e. degree, the nondensity of the partial order of the d.r.e. degrees is established. An easy modification yields the nondensity of the n-r.e. degrees and of the ω-r.e. degrees.

It is shown that there are incomparable Σ2 e-degrees a, b such that every e-degree strictly less than a is also less than b.

Virtue Epistemology has come a long way since Ernest Sosa first mooted its possibility in ‘The Raft and the Pyramid’, a paper about the pitfalls of coherentism and foundationalism. What makes Virtue Epistemology distinctive, as opposed to other forms of reliabilist externalism, is that the epistemic agent becomes the locus for justification rather than the belief. In the midst of a small but growing literature in this focus on the agent, two clear trends are emerging that reflect a difference in (...) interest by the authors rather than any real underlying antagonism between camps. Where faculty reliabilists like Sosa and Greco are concerned about sceptical challenges, virtue responsibilists like Zazebski or Roberts and Wood prefer to write about intellectual flourishing. (shrink)

In this article the chief lines of current American epistemological thought are outlined, as are the criticisms which each of these perspectives has received. A special emphasis is placed on the distinction between internalism and externalism. Mutual criticisms are made between the foundationalists and the coherentists, and the reliabilist standpoint is developed in detail in order to show that Virtue Epistemology is able to capture some of the best intuitions arising from the justification of belief.

Sean B. Carroll’s new book, The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why it Matters, is a well-written mix of history of science and philosophy of biology. In his book, Carroll articulates a set of ecological generalisations, the Serengeti Rules, which are supposed to make salient the structures in ecosystems that ensure the persistence of those ecosystems. In this essay review, I evaluate Carroll’s use of the controversial concept of regulation and his thesis that ecosystems have (...) a natural balance comparable to that of human bodies. My conclusion is optimistic. Carroll’s generalisations provide a tool-kit for building relatively simple models that are accurate enough to be widely applied in experimental ecology and conservation science, guiding interventions upon unhealthy ecosystems. (shrink)