This chapter explores collateral sanctions' awkward straddling of punitive and regulatory aims. In showing that these restrictions do not fit clearly into either category, it demonstrates the real dangers of that ambiguity. The harmful consequences of the massive, murky, ill-defined collateral-sanctions regime extend well beyond those directly affected, rendering citizens unable to judge the efficacy of such restrictions and undermining core commitments of the American political order. While many such restrictions seem quite unlikely to fulfill their purported objectives, the confusion (...) over the character and purpose of collateral sanctions actually keeps us from knowing how to judge them in the first place. (shrink)

The book discusses whether animals are designed according to the same rules that engineers use in building machines.

This research assessed how the performance and team skills of three-person teams working with an Intelligent Team Tutoring System on a virtual military surveillance task were affected by feedback privacy, participant role, task experience, prior team experience, and teammate familiarity. Previous work in Intelligent Tutoring Systems has focused on outcomes for task skill training for individual learners. As research extends into intelligent tutoring for teams, both task skills and team skills are necessary for good team performance. This work includes a (...) brief review of previous research on ITTSs, feedback, teams, and teamwork, including the recounting of two categories of a framework of teamwork performance, Communication and Cognition, which are relevant to the present study. This research examines the effects of an intelligent agent, as well as features of the team, its members, and the task being undertaken, on team communication and team situation awareness. Thirty-seven teams of three participants, each at their own computer running a multiplayer surveillance simulation, were given just-in-time private or public performance feedback during four 5-min trials. In the fourth trial, two of the three participants switched roles. Feedback type, teamwork experience, and teammate familiarity had no statistically significant effect on communication or team situation awareness. However, higher levels of role experience and task experience showed significant and medium-sized effects on communication performance. Results, based on performance data and structured interview responses, also revealed areas of improvement in future feedback design and a potential benchmark for feedback frequency in an action-oriented serious game-based ITTS. Among the conclusions are six design objectives for future ITTSs, establishing a foundation for future research on designing effective ITTSs that train interpersonal skills to nascent teams. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson recently argued that it is impermissible for a bystander to turn a runaway trolley from five onto one. But she also argues that a trolley driver is required to do just that. We believe that her argument is flawed in three important ways. She fails to give proper weight to (a) an agent¹s claims not to be required to act in ways he does not want to, (b) impartiality in the weighing of competing patient-claims, and (c) the (...) role of patient-claims in determining agent-duties. All three of these failures can be understood in terms of what we call the Mechanics of Claims, an approach we develop for identifying and balancing competing claims in determining rights. Using that framework, one can see both why Thomson's most recent argument is mistaken, and how to think more clearly about deontological choices generally. (shrink)

Certain theorists argue that intention cannot be a wrong-making feature of actions because (a) it is morally impermissible to encourage morally impermissible actions; (b) there are certain putatively impermissible actions that seem to be impermissible because of the intention with which they are performed; and (c) at least some of these actions can permissibly be encouraged. If one accepts (a) and (c), then one should conclude that these actions cannot really be impermissible. This paper rejects the premise that it is (...) always impermissible to encourage impermissible acts. The argument explores three ways one could encourage an act that would be permissible but for its being performed with a wrong-making intention. It argues that there is at most a strong but defeasible presumption against encouraging the performance of impermissible actions. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

This text meets the requirements of the OCR AS specification for critical thinking. Alec Fisher shows students how they can develop a range of creative and critical thinking skills that are transferable to other subjects and contexts.

This book develops an alternative account of rights according to which rights forfeiture has a much smaller role to play because rights themselves are more contextually contingent. For example, those who threaten to cause harm without a right to do so have weaker claims not to be killed than innocent bystanders or those who have a right to threaten to cause harm. By framing rights as the output of a balance of competing claims, and by laying out a detailed account (...) of how to balance competing claims, Walen provides a more coherent account of when killing in war is permissible. (shrink)

The standard of proof in criminal trials in many liberal democracies is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the BARD standard. It is customary to describe it, when putting a number on it, as requiring that the fact finder be at least 90% certain, after considering the evidence, that the defendant is guilty. Strikingly, no good reason has yet been offered in defense of using that standard. A number of non-consequentialist justifications that aim to support an even higher standard have been (...) offered; all are morally unsound. Meanwhile, consequentialist arguments plausibly support a substantially lower standard — in some cases so low as to undermine the idea that punishment is what is at stake. In this paper, I offer a new retributive justification that supports excluding the instrumental benefits of punishment from the balance that sets the standard. The resulting balance supports a standard arguably in the ballpark of the customary understanding of BARD: a standard requiring that the fact finder have a high, though not maximally high, degree of confidence that the defendant is guilty. (shrink)

Who are we today? That deceptively simple question continued to be asked by the French historian and philosopher, Michel Foucault, who for the last three decades has had a profound influence on English-speaking scholars in the humanities and social sciences.; This text is designed for undergraduates and others who feel in need of some assistance when coming to grips with Foucault's voluminous and complex writings. Instead of dealing with them chronologically, however, this book concentrates on some of their central concepts, (...) primarily Foucault's rethinking of the categories of "discourse", "power", and " the subject".; Foucault's writings contribute collectively to what he himself calls "an ontology of the present". His historical research was always geared towards showing how things could have been and still could be otherwise. This is especially the case with respect to the production of human subjects. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 245-258, March 2022.

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records. Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to (...) anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics. In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

This paper examines the relations between, on the one hand, accounts of the distinction between an agent's identifying with, as opposed to feeling alienated from, their attitudes; and on the other, metaphysical accounts of action. It claims that a commitment to an event-causal conception of agency, which would analyse agency in terms of the causal potency of psychological states and events, appears to render mandatory a particular style of account of identification and alienation – namely, the hierarchical model offered by (...) Harry Frankfurt and Michael Bratman. It is argued that such accounts fall foul of a dilemma: the Authority Problem. The failure of attempts to avoid the Authority Problem is then used to motivate an attractive alternative style of account of the distinction, offered by Richard Moran. However, it is pressed that Moran's account rests on claims about agency which seem incompatible with the event-causal conception of agency. By making the links between the metaphysics of agency and accounts of identification and alienation more explicit, the paper allows us to better comprehend both the apparent need for and characteristic failures of some traditional accounts of identification and alienation, as well as make clear the action-theoretical debt incurred by those who would offer an alternative. (shrink)

This paper presents the case of the post-crisis discursive defence of shadow banking in the Netherlands to argue, first, that there is a need to dust off older elite theories and adapt them to post-democratic conditions where there are no widely shared ‘political formulas’ to secure mass support for elite projects. Second, that temporality should be taken more seriously; it is when stories fail that elite storytelling can be observed in practice. As new ‘political formulas’ are minted and become established, (...) elites can again hope to withdraw from the political scene and leave policy-making to the self-evidence of output legitimacy and/or the perpetuum mobile of There-Is-No-Alternative. This suggests that elite theory should replace an epochal reading of post-democracy with a more conjunctural one. (shrink)

According to the Doctrine of Illicit Intentions, it is impermissible both to form and then to act on an illicit intention. An intention is illicit, roughly, if it causes the agent who has it to be, in a certain way, disposed to perform actions that are impermissible. If the range of actions an agent might be directed to perform by an intention includes impermissible actions, then it may be impermissible to form or act on that intention even if, in the (...) end, the agent performs no action that is impermissible (other than forming and acting on an illicit intention itself). (shrink)

Alec Kassman; XIV*—On Punishing, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 221–246, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/7.

When one is intentionally doing something, one represents that thing as a goal to be accomplished. One represents it practically. How should we characterize this practical representation further? In this paper, I argue that when one is intentionally doing something, one's representation of it as a goal to be accomplished must also be knowledge that one is intentionally doing that thing. And I argue that this knowledge must itself be one's intentionally doing that thing. I aim to show, then, that (...) insofar as representing practically just is knowing practically, it is equally acting intentionally. (shrink)

What economic conditions are necessary for us to arrive at a post-work future, and what should a post-work future look like? This chapter argues that only through the democratization of core economic institutions can we properly experiment with post-work imaginaries. I argue, based on principles of participatory autonomy and relational equality, for the democratization of workplaces, finance and investment, and the knowledge commons. Given these necessary structural changes, the possibility of a post-work future becomes a democratic choice by placing democratic (...) decision-making power in the hands of those who are directly affected by workplace decisions, investment decisions, and the collective production of knowledge. Through this democratization process, the potential to reduce working hours, the possibility of building meaningful work, and the chance to decenter work as the mechanism for economic security and meaning-making, all become subject to democratic deliberation and decision-making. (shrink)

Alec Hyslop defends a (modified) version of the traditional analogical inference to other minds and rejects alternatives, but only after subjecting each of...

This commentary examines Glenberg's characterization of “suppression” in light of negative priming and related phenomena. After offering a radically different slant on suppression, an attempt is made to weave this alternative version into Glenberg's provocative discussion of embodied memories.

This article offers an exposition of the J. Peterman Company's Owner's Manual, a mock-vintage clothing catalogue that promises customers ‘things that make their lives the way they wish they were’. Written in dramatic, long-form prose and illustrated in watercolour – both uncommon in today's mail-order fashion industry – the Owner's Manual is at once appalling for its misogyny and enticing for its nostalgia. This article argues that the Owner's Manual and its enduring success confound existing paradigms for interpreting both fashion (...) media and the body's gendered relationship to attire. Are the Manual's millions of subscribers beset by false consciousness, imagining themselves into an oppressive sex/gender field and endorsing the catalogue's misogyny with their desire? The Manual is not fully intelligible within either structuralist or phenomenological interpretive modes – fashion theory's two most prevalent schools of thought – but, rather, begets an interpretive paradigm that forces us to reconcile individuals’ desires for, and identification into, historically mediated gender performance with the fact of individuals’ dignity, agency and autonomy. I argue that the Owner's Manual achieves this reconciliation by foregrounding sartorial objects, rather than individuals, as the bearers of gender fantasy and by demonstrating how these objects, laden with historical associations, have detached from the highly gendered contexts of their origins while nevertheless retaining aspects of their original semiotic potencies. (shrink)