This book defends a radical new theory of contingency as a physical phenomenon. Drawing on the many-worlds approach to quantum theory and cutting-edge metaphysics and philosophy of science, it argues that quantum theories are best understood as telling us about the space of genuine possibilities, rather than as telling us solely about actuality. When quantum physics is taken seriously in the way first proposed by Hugh Everett III, it provides the resources for a new systematic metaphysical framework encompassing possibility, necessity, (...) actuality, chance, counterfactuals, and a host of related modal notions. -/- Rationalist metaphysicians argue that the metaphysics of modality is strictly prior to any scientific investigation; metaphysics establishes which worlds are possible, and physics merely checks which of these worlds is actual. Naturalistic metaphysicians respond that science may discover new possibilities and new impossibilities. This book's quantum theory of contingency takes naturalistic metaphysics one step further, allowing that science may discover what it is to be possible. As electromagnetism revealed the nature of light, as acoustics revealed the nature of sound, as statistical mechanics revealed the nature of heat, so quantum physics reveals the nature of contingency. (shrink)

Distinctions in fundamentality between different levels of description are central to the viability of contemporary decoherence-based Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM). This approach to quantum theory characteristically combines a determinate fundamental reality (one universal wave function) with an indeterminate emergent reality (multiple decoherent worlds). In this chapter I explore how the Everettian appeal to fundamentality and emergence can be understood within existing metaphysical frameworks, identify grounding and concept fundamentality as promising theoretical tools, and use them to characterize a system of explanatory (...) levels (with associated laws of nature) for EQM. This Everettian level structure encompasses and extends the ‘classical’ levels structure. The ‘classical’ levels of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are recovered, but they are emergent in character and potentially variable across Everett worlds. EQM invokes an additional fundamental level, not present in the classical levels picture, and a novel potential role for self-location in interlevel metaphysics. When given a modal realist interpretation, EQM also makes trouble for supervenience-based approaches to levels. (shrink)

This article explores three ways in which physics may involve counterpossible reasoning. The first way arises when evaluating false theories: to say what the world would be like if the theory were true, we need to evaluate counterfactuals with physically impossible antecedents. The second way relates to the role of counterfactuals in characterizing causal structure: to say what causes what in physics, we need to make reference to physically impossible scenarios. The third way is novel: to model metaphysical dependence in (...) physics, we need to consider counterfactual consequences of metaphysical impossibilities. Physics accordingly bears substantial and surprising counterpossible commitments. (shrink)

Marxists should reconsider their usual attitude to universal human rights. On the Jewish Question did not reject the entire French Declaration of 1791. In 1843 Marx and Engels were close to Babouvism, the continuation of French rights. Nor was their view that the 1791 Declaration must be completed by economic and social rights; rather, their criticism concerned the reduction of universal rights to citizen rights because it left the state the final arbiter of justice, denying the ‘voice from below’. The (...) source of human rights cannot be the state or its hegemonic rule of law. The article concludes that a politics of human rights would return justice to individuals and create a counter-hegemony. (shrink)

Five leading thinkers on the concept of 'rights' in an era of rightlessness Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, deprived of her German citizenship as a Jew and in exile from her country, observed that before people can enjoy any of the 'inalienable' Rights of Man--before there can be any specific rights to education, work, voting, and so on--there must first be such a thing as 'the right to have rights.' The concept received little attention at the time, (...) but in our age of refugee crises and extra-state war, the phrase has become the center of a crucial and lively debate. Here five leading thinkers from varied disciplines, including history, law, and politics, discuss the critical issue of the basis of rights and the meaning of radical democratic politics today. (shrink)

There is a systematic and suggestive analogy between grounding and causation. In my view, this analogy is no coincidence. Grounding and causation are alike because grounding is a type of causation: metaphysical causation. In this paper I defend the identification of grounding with metaphysical causation, drawing on the causation literature to explore systematic connections between grounding and metaphysical dependence counterfactuals, and I outline a non-reductive counterfactual theory of grounding along interventionist lines.

Quantum physics is believed to be the fundamental theory underlying our understanding of the physical universe. However, it is based on concepts and principles that have always been difficult to understand and controversial in their interpretation. This book aims to explain these issues using a minimum of technical language and mathematics. After a brief introduction to the ideas of quantum physics, the problems of interpretation are identified and explained. The rest of the book surveys, describes and criticises a range of (...) suggestions that have been made with the aim of resolving these problems; these include the traditional, or 'Copenhagen' interpretation, the possible role of the conscious mind in measurement, and the postulate of parallel universes. This new edition has been revised throughout to take into account developments in this field over the past fifteen years, including the idea of 'consistent histories' to which a completely new chapter is devoted. (shrink)

This book equips readers with a sound understanding of the value-base of mental health care and provides them with the skills and knowledge to demystify complex values in decision-making in order to reach outcomes which are focused on the needs of service users. Engaging case examples and exercises link theory and practice throughout.

The best studies on the relationship between pharmaceutical corporations and medicine have recognized that it is an ambiguous one. Yet most scholarship has pursued a simpler, more saleable narrative in which pharma is a scheming villain and medicine its maidenly victim. In this article, I argue that such crude moral framing blunts understanding of the murky realities of medicine's relationship with pharma and, in consequence, holds back reform. My goal is to put matters right in respect to one critical area (...) of scholarly interest, the medical journal publication.Pharma relies on peer advocacy to sell its wares to prescribing doctors. This is an arrangement in which clinicians’ qualified colleagues, including “key opinion leaders,” are recruited by pharmaceutical corporations and marketing agencies to deliver commercially expedient content to their professional fellows. Precisely how this practice works in the setting of publications is not well understood because ethicists studying the problem have made too much of the narrative of corporate villainy and medical victimhood. Accordingly, criticism of industry publications has been preoccupied with the crudely dishonest practices of ghostwriting, ghost authorship, and “ghost management,” vices condemned as “dirty little secrets” perpetrated from “behind the scenes” with the connivance of academic “shills” or “guest authors,” in contempt of standards set by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. This account is appealing, and yet it is wrong or, at the very least, seriously incomplete, with only limited relevance to the actualities of contemporary industry practices. In truth, many commercial publications are not developed in secret but fashioned within a culture of open collaboration, where academic authors make substantial, independent contributions; pharmaceutical companies are showcased rather than hidden; and medicine's editorial standards assist rather than impede the workings of commerce. (shrink)

BackgroundThe International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Recommendations set ethical and editorial standards for article publication in most leading medical journals. Here, I examine the strengths and weaknesses of the Recommendations in the prevention of commercial bias in industry-financed journal literature, on three levels – scholarly discourse, article content, and article attribution.DiscussionWith respect to overall discourse, the most important measures in the ICMJE Recommendations are for enforcing clinical trial registration and controlling duplicate publication. With respect to article content, the ICMJE (...) promotes stringent author accountability and adherence to established reporting standards. However, the ICMJE accepts the use of commercial editorial teams to produce manuscripts, which is a potential source of bias, and accepts private company ownership and analysis of clinical trial data. New ICMJE guidance on data sharing will address but not eliminate problems of commercial data access. With respect to attribution, the Recommendations oppose guest authorship and encourage clear documentation of author contributions. However, they exclude writers from coauthorship; provide no specific advice on the attribution of commercial literature, for instance with respect to company authorship, author sequence or prominent commercial labeling; and endorse the use of fine print and euphemism. The ICMJE requires detailed author interest disclosures, but overlooks the interests of non-authors and companies, and does not recommend that interests most salient to the publication are highlighted. Together, these weaknesses facilitate “advocacy”-based marketing, in which literature planned, financed and produced by companies is fronted by academics, enabling commercial messages to be presented to customers by their respected clinical peers rather than companies themselves.ConclusionsThe ICMJE Recommendations set important research and reporting standards, without which commercial bias would likely be a significantly greater problem than it is today. However, they also support practices of commercial data control, content development and attribution that run counter to science’s values of openness, objectivity and truthfulness. These weaknesses could be addressed with appropriate modifications to the Recommendations. The ICMJE should also disclose its own commercial interests and funding – not least because publishing organizations that finance it and pay the salaries of some member editors derive substantial revenues from industry. (shrink)

This paper outlines a non-reductive counterfactual account of grounding along interventionist lines, and uses the account to argue that taking grounding seriously requires ascribing non-trivial truth-conditions to a range of counterpossible counterfactuals. This result allows for a diagnosis of a route to scepticism about grounding, as deriving at least in part from scepticism about non-trivial counterpossible truth and falsity.

BackgroundThe International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Recommendations set ethical and editorial standards for article publication in most leading medical journals. Here, I examine the strengths and weaknesses of the Recommendations in the prevention of commercial bias in industry-financed journal literature, on three levels – scholarly discourse, article content, and article attribution.DiscussionWith respect to overall discourse, the most important measures in the ICMJE Recommendations are for enforcing clinical trial registration and controlling duplicate publication. With respect to article content, the ICMJE (...) promotes stringent author accountability and adherence to established reporting standards. However, the ICMJE accepts the use of commercial editorial teams to produce manuscripts, which is a potential source of bias, and accepts private company ownership and analysis of clinical trial data. New ICMJE guidance on data sharing will address but not eliminate problems of commercial data access. With respect to attribution, the Recommendations oppose guest authorship and encourage clear documentation of author contributions. However, they exclude writers from coauthorship; provide no specific advice on the attribution of commercial literature, for instance with respect to company authorship, author sequence or prominent commercial labeling; and endorse the use of fine print and euphemism. The ICMJE requires detailed author interest disclosures, but overlooks the interests of non-authors and companies, and does not recommend that interests most salient to the publication are highlighted. Together, these weaknesses facilitate “advocacy”-based marketing, in which literature planned, financed and produced by companies is fronted by academics, enabling commercial messages to be presented to customers by their respected clinical peers rather than companies themselves.ConclusionsThe ICMJE Recommendations set important research and reporting standards, without which commercial bias would likely be a significantly greater problem than it is today. However, they also support practices of commercial data control, content development and attribution that run counter to science’s values of openness, objectivity and truthfulness. These weaknesses could be addressed with appropriate modifications to the Recommendations. The ICMJE should also disclose its own commercial interests and funding – not least because publishing organizations that finance it and pay the salaries of some member editors derive substantial revenues from industry. (shrink)

The evolutionary framework suggested by Müller & Schumann (M&S) can be extended further by considering drug-taking in terms of Niche Construction Theory (NCT). It is suggested here that genetic and environmental components of addiction are modified by cultural acceptance of the advantages of non-addicted drug taking and the legitimate supply of performance-enhancing drugs. This may then reduce the prevalence of addiction.

One property of the emulator framework presented by Grush is that imagery operates off-line. Contrary to this viewpoint, we present evidence showing that mental rotation of a simple figure modulates low-level features of drawing articulation. This effect is dependent upon the type of rotation, suggesting a more integrative online role for imagery than proposed by the target article.

One of the currently popular dogmata of anti-consequentialism is that consequentialism doesn't respect, recognize, or in some important way account for what is referred to as the The charge is often made, but rarely explained in any detail, much less argued for. In this paper I explain what I take to be the most plausible interpretation of the separateness of persons charge. I argue that the charge itself can be deconstructed into at least two further objections to consequentialist theories. These (...) objections amount to (i) the rejection of axiological aggregation, and (ii) the rejection of deontic aggregation. Of these two objections, I argue that the first one, though often made, is untenable. I also argue that the second objection, in its various forms, relies on distinctions whose moral significance is vigorously denied by almost all consequentialist theorists. I thus argue that the separateness of persons objection poses no special threat to consequentialism. (shrink)

In ‘Quiddistic Knowledge’ (Schaffer in Philos Stud 123:1–32, 2005), Jonathan Schaffer argued influentially against the view that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. In this reply I aim to show how a coherent and well-motivated form of necessitarianism can withstand his critique. Modal necessitarianism—the view that the actual laws are the laws of all possible worlds—can do justice to some intuitive motivations for necessitarianism, and it has the resources to respond to all of Schaffer’s objections. It also has certain (...) advantages over contingentism in the domain of modal epistemology. I conclude that necessitarianism about laws remains a live option. (shrink)

Industrial production imposes geographical, economic and cultural distances between producers and consumers. The concept of constituting 'missing objects' can help shrink these distances by enabling actors to engage in discourses and practices about contexts beyond what is materially present. Since the mid-1990s, food miles have emerged as an example of missing objects, representing the distance that agricultural products travel from the farm to the dining table, and the environmental effects of transportation. I analyse how consumers, farmers, activists, industry and policy-makers (...) in the United States and Europe are building agency in making and using food miles. (shrink)

The article offers a critical analysis of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) as applied to new and quasi-religious movements, and uncovers implicit conceptual and theoretical commitments of the approach. A discussion of CSR’s application to new religious movement (NRM) case studies (charismatic leadership, paradise representations, Aḥmadiyya, and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness) identifies concerns about the theorized relationship between CSR and wider socio-cultural factors, and proposals for CSR’s implication in wider processes are discussed. The main discussion analyses three (...) themes in recent work relating CSR to religious and religion-like activities that extend and reframe the model. These include (1) identification of distinctive and accessible cognitive pathways associated with new forms of religious belief and practice (in particular in ‘New Age’ movements), (2) application of CSR to movements and practices outside traditional definitions of religion (near death experiences, conspiracy theories, virtual reality), and (3) engaging CSR in wider cultural processes and negotiations (religion in healthcare settings, and the definition of the study of esoteric religious traditions within academic domains). The conclusion identifies two particular findings: (1) that application of CSR in these areas renders underlying cognitive processes more available to scrutiny and (2) that CSR is employed to identify and enlarge the category of religion. The conclusion suggests that the study of CSR in its application to NRMs and quasi-religion identifies a wide field of common and overlapping themes and interests in which CSR is a more active operand than is commonly assumed. (shrink)

By the 1880s it had become clear that the intellectual tide in Britain was turning against the idea of a minimal state. Under the influence of the New Idealists, the Liberal Party, once the champion of individual liberty, had changed into an organ for interventionist legislation. Challenging this movement was an assortment of anti-collectivists including Old Liberals, Tories, and radical individualists. Spearheading the defence of individualism was the 10th Earl of Wemyss, Francis Wemyss-Charteris-Douglas. Most famous for his role in the (...) formation of the Liberty and Property Defence League, Wemyss worked tirelessly in parliament to obstruct legislation deemed inimical to liberty, as well as to organise a mass educational effort to instruct the public about the errors of collectivist philosophy and policy. This paper examines the role Wemyss played within late Victorian individualism and considers how the melding of traditionalism and individualism provided an intellectual home for libertarianism on the Right. (shrink)

David Wallace has given a decision-theoretic argument for the Born Rule in the context of Everettian quantum mechanics. This approach promises to resolve some long-standing problems with probability in EQM, but it has faced plenty of resistance. One kind of objection charges that the requisite notion of decision-theoretic uncertainty is unavailable in the Everettian picture, so that the argument cannot gain any traction; another kind of objection grants the proof’s applicability and targets the premises. In this article I propose some (...) novel principles connecting the physics of EQM with the metaphysics of modality, and argue that in the resulting framework the incoherence problem does not arise. These principles also help to justify one of the most controversial premises of Wallace’s argument, ‘branching indifference’. Absent any a priori reason to align the metaphysics with the physics in some other way, the proposed principles can be adopted on grounds of theoretical utility. The upshot is that Everettians can, after all, make clear sense of objective probability. 1 Introduction2 Setup3 Individualism versus Collectivism4 The Ingredients of Indexicalism5 Indexicalism and Incoherence5.1 The trivialization problem5.2 The uncertainty problem6 Indexicalism and Branching Indifference6.1 Introducing branching indifference6.2 The pragmatic defence of branching indifference6.3 The non-existence defence of branching indifference6.4 The indexicalist defence of branching indifference7 Conclusion. (shrink)

Alastair Norcross argues that the basic judgments of morality are essentially comparative: alternatives are judged to be better or worse than each other. Notions such as right and wrong are not part of the fundamental subject matter of moral theory, but are constructed in a context-relative fashion out of the basic comparative judgments.

In On the Plurality of Worlds (Lewis 1986), David Lewis imposes a condition on realist theories of modality which he calls ‘plenitude’. Lewis apparently assigns this condition considerable importance, and uses it to motivate his Humean principle of recombination, but he never says exactly what plenitude amounts to. This chapter first sets aside some obvious ways of reconstructing the plenitude criterion which do not fit with the textual evidence. An objection to modal realism due to John Divers and Joseph Melia (...) (Divers and Melia 2002) is diagnosed as equivocating between an overly-demanding plenitude constraint and a weaker constraint which fails to establish their conclusion. An alternative deflationary interpretation of the plenitude condition has it following from an application of standard theoretical virtues to a modal realist’s total theory; Lewis’ correspondence provides new evidence in support of this interpretation. The deflationary plenitude criterion also has broader application, beyond Lewisian modal realism. (shrink)

This article examines an omission in the study of discretionary time that bears on proposals currently being evaluated in this part of political philosophy. Specifically, this is the tendency in many jobs for work time to bleed into what is meant to be protected or discretionary time. I refer to this phenomenon as the relative proximity of labour and capital, which has become more prevalent in the labour market due to increased use of mobile communications technology. Ignored by the literature (...) is the fact that whether a job exhibits a high degree of proximity of labour and capital will influence workers' access to their discretionary time entitlements, including policies such as workplace flexibility and the four-day week. To account for this, I provide a descriptive and normative account of the proximity of labour and capital, in response to which I propose a remedial policy that provides workers with greater autonomy over how and when they take up their discretionary time entitlements. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction The Demandingness Objection Scalar Utilitarianism Wrongness as Blameworthiness Rightness and Goodness as Guides to Action.