Reichenbachian approaches to indexicality contend that indexicals are "token-reflexives": semantic rules associated with any given indexical-type determine the truth-conditional import of properly produced tokens of that type relative to certain relational properties of those tokens. Such a view may be understood as sharing the main tenets of Kaplan's well-known theory regarding content, or truth-conditions, but differs from it regarding the nature of the linguistic meaning of indexicals and also regarding the bearers of truth-conditional import and truth-conditions. Kaplan has criticized these (...) approaches on different counts, the most damaging of which is that they make impossible a "logic of demonstratives". The reason for this is that the token-reflexive approach entails that not two tokens of the same sentential type including indexicals are guaranteed to have the same truth-conditions. In this paper I rebut this and other criticisms of the Reichenbachian approach. Additionally, I point out that Kaplan's original theory of "true demonstratives" is empirically inadequate, and claim that any modification capable of accurately handling the linguistic data would have similar problems to those attributed to the Reichenbachian approach. This is intended to show that the difficulties, no matter how real, are not caused by idiosincracies of the "token-reflexive" view, but by deep facts about indexicality. (shrink)
The paper examines an alleged distinction claimed to exist by Van Gelder between two different, but equally acceptable ways of accounting for the systematicity of cognitive output (two “varieties of compositionality”): “concatenative compositionality” vs. “functional compositionality.” The second is supposed to provide an explanation alternative to the Language of Thought Hypothesis. I contend that, if the definition of “concatenative compositionality” is taken in a different way from the official one given by Van Gelder (but one suggested by some of his (...) formulations) then there is indeed a different sort of compositionality; however, the second variety is not an alternative to the language of thought in that case. On the other hand, if the concept of concatenative compositionality is taken in a different way, along the lines of Van Gelder's explicit definition, then there is no reason to think that there is an alternative way of explaining systematicity. (shrink)
Descriptive semantic theories purport to characterize the meanings of the expressions of languages in whatever complexity they might have. Foundational semantics purports to identify the kind of considerations relevant to establish that a given descriptive semantics accurately characterizes the language used by a given individual or community. Foundational Semantics I presents three contrasting approaches to the foundational matters, and the main considerations relevant to appraise their merits. These approaches contend that we should look at the contents of speakers’ intuitions; at (...) the deep psychology of users and its evolutionary history, as revealed by our best empirical theories; or at the personal-level rational psychology of those subjects. Foundational Semantics II examines a fourth view, according to which we should look instead at norms enforced among speakers. The two papers aim to determine in addition the extent to which the approaches are really rival, or rather complementary. (shrink)
In this paper I critically examine Michael Moore's views about responsibility in overdetermination cases. Moore argues for an asymmetrical view concerning actions and omissions: whereas our actions can make us responsible in overdetermination cases, our omissions cannot. Moore argues for this view on the basis of a causal claim: actions can be causes but omissions cannot. I suggest that we should reject Moore's views about responsibility and overdetermination. I argue, in particular, that our omissions can make us responsible in overdetermination (...) cases. I go on to provide an account of how this may be possible. (shrink)
The cross-cultural literature is reviewed and integrated together with attitude theories, thereby outlining a model through which certain values influence the intervening variables that ultimately lead managers to tolerate employee bribery. The case of Latin America is employed to illustrate how regionally dominant cultural values may shape managers' attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, which in turn affect tolerance of employee bribery. A series of research propositions and practical recommendations are derived from the model.
Over the years, two models of freedom have emerged as competitors: the alternative-possibilities model and the actual-sequence model. This paper is a partial defense of the actual-sequence model. My defense relies on two strategies. The first strategy consists in de-emphasizing the role of examples in arguing for a model of freedom. Imagine that, as some people think, Frankfurt-style cases fail to undermine the alternative-possibilities model. What follows from this? Not much, I argue. In particular, I note that the counterparts of (...) Frankfurt-style cases also fail to undermine the actual-sequence model. My second strategy of defense consists in revitalizing the original motivation for the actual-sequence model, by revamping it, isolating it from claims that do not fully capture the same idea, and arguing that it can be developed in a successful way. (shrink)
RESUMO O presente artigo apresenta uma semântica baseada nas atitudes cognitivas de aceitação e rejeição por uma sociedade de agentes para lógicas inspiradas no First Degree Entailment de Dunn e Belnap. Diferente das situações epistêmicas originalmente usadas em E, as atitudes cognitivas não coincidem com valores-de-verdade e parecem mais adequadas para as lógicas que pretendem considerar o conteúdo informacional de proposições “ditas verdadeiras” tanto quanto as proposições “ditas falsas” como determinantes da noção de validade das inferências. Após analisar algumas lógicas (...) associadas à semântica proposta, introduzimos a lógica E B cuja relação de consequência semântica subjacente - o B-entailment - é capaz de expressar diversos tipos de raciocínio em relação às atitudes cognitivas de aceitação e rejeição. Apresentamos também um cálculo de sequentes correto e completo para E B.ABSTRACT In the present work I introduce a semantics based on the cognitive attitudes of acceptation and rejection entertained by a given society of agents for logics inspired on Dunn and Belnap’s ‘First Degree Entailment’. Distinctly from the original epistemic situation of E, the cognitive attitudes do not coincide with truth-values and it seems more suitable for logics that intend to consider the informational content of propositions “said to be true” as well as propositions “said to be false” as determinants of the notion of logical validity. After analyzing some logics associated with the proposed semantics, we introduce the logic E B, whose underlying semantic entailment relation - the B-entailment - is able to express several kinds of reasoning towards the cognitive attitudes of acceptance and rejection. Acorrect and complete sequent calculus for E B is also presented. (shrink)
Delusions are deeply evidence-resistant. Patients with delusions are unmoved by evidence that is in direct conflict with the delusion, often responding to such evidence by offering obvious, and strange, confabulations. As a consequence, the standard view is that delusions are not evidence-responsive. This claim has been used as a key argumentative wedge in debates on the nature of delusions. Some have taken delusions to be beliefs and argued that this implies that belief is not constitutively evidence-responsive. Others hold fixed the (...) evidenceresponsiveness of belief and take this to show that delusions cannot be beliefs. Against this common assumption, I appeal to a large range of empirical evidence to argue that delusions are evidence-responsive in the sense that subjects have the capacity to respond to evidence on their delusion in rationally permissible ways. The extreme evidence-resistance of delusions is a consequence of powerful masking factors on these capacities, such as strange perceptual experiences, motivational factors, and cognitive biases. This view makes room for holding both that belief is constitutively evidence-responsive and that delusions are beliefs, and it has important implications for the study and treatment of delusions. (shrink)
Some classical studies in social psychology suggest that we are more sensitive to situational factors, and less responsive to reasons, than we normally recognize we are. In recent years, moral responsibility theorists have examined the question whether those studies represent a serious threat to our moral responsibility. A common response to the “situationist threat” has been to defend the reasons-responsiveness of ordinary human agents by appeal to a theory of reasons-responsiveness that appeals to patterns of counterfactual scenarios or possible worlds. (...) In this paper I identify a problem with that response and I offer a better solution. (shrink)
I respond to the critical comments by Randolph Clarke, Alfred Mele, and Derk Pereboom on my book Causation and Free Will. I discuss some features of the view that our freedom is exclusively based on actual causes, including the role played in it by absences of reasons, absence causation, modal facts, and finally some additional thoughts on how a compatibilist can respond to the manipulation argument for incompatibilism.
There is an initial presumption against disjunctive causes. First of all, for some people causation is a relation between events. But, arguably, there are no disjunctive events, since events are particulars and thus they have spatiotemporal locations, while it is unclear what the spatiotemporal location of a disjunctive event could be.1 More importantly, even if one believes that entities like facts can enter in causal relations, and even if there are disjunctive facts, it is still hard to see how disjunctive (...) facts could be causes. Imagine, for instance, the following scenario. I have a gun filled with red paint and another gun filled with blue paint, and I fire both guns at my neighbor’s white wall. A moment later, there is a graffiti on the wall and my neighbor notifies the police. He would have done so regardless of the graffiti’s color, since all he cares about is the existence of a graffiti on his wall. Is it plausible to claim that a disjunctive fact is a cause of his notifying the police? In particular, is it plausible to claim that he notified the police because I fired the red-paint gun or the blue-paint gun (the thought being that my firing paint of either color would have sufficed)? It seems not. The police was notified because of the actual graffiti on the wall, and the actual graffiti on the wall is made of a certain pattern of colored patches. Imagine, that, as it turns out, there are patches of both colors on the wall. Then it seems that both my firing the red-paint gun and my firing the blue-paint gun were causes of my neighbor’s notifying the police. In other words, my firing the red-paint gun and my firing the blue-paint gun jointly caused the outcome: each of them was a contributory cause of the outcome’s occurrence. On the other hand, imagine that there are only patches of one color on the wall. Then it seems that my firing only one of the guns was a cause. Either way, the disjunction fails to be a cause: either my firing the red-paint gun was a cause, or my firing the blue-paint gun was a cause, or they were both causes, but their disjunction was not.. (shrink)
I argue that, according to ordinary morality, there is moral inertia, that is, moral pressure to fail to intervene in certain circumstances. Moral inertia is manifested in scenarios with a particular causal structure: deflection scenarios, where a threatening or benefiting process is diverted from a group of people to another. I explain why the deflection structure is essential for moral inertia to be manifested. I argue that there are two different manifestations of moral inertia: strict prohibitions on interventions, and constraints (...) on interventions. Finally, I discuss the connection between moral inertia and the distinction between killing and letting die (or doing and allowing harm). (shrink)
In this paper I reexamine the debate between two contrasting conceptions of free will: the classical model, which understands freedom in terms of alternative possibilities, and a more recent family of views that focus only on actual causes, and that were inspired by Frankfurt’s famous attack on the principle of alternative possibilities. I offer a novel argument in support of the actual-causes model, one that bypasses the popular debate about Frankfurt-style cases.
This is a critical discussion of Vihvelin’s recent book Causes, Laws, and Free Will. I discuss Vihvelin’s ideas on Frankfurt-style cases and the actual-sequence view of freedom that is inspired by them.
This paper deals with the methodological role played by the term «motivation» in young Heidegger’s early hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology. To that effect, I shall start analyzing the concept of motivation in Husserl’s phenomenology so as to better understand its hermeneutical variation in young Heidegger’s philosophy. Subsequently, I will pay special attention to the relevance exhibited by motivation in the emergence of the most important methodological notions of hermeneutical phenomenology as «destruction», «formal indication» and «preconception». To conclude, I shall explore (...) the possibility of reshaping the phenomenological problem of the motivation to reduction in hermeneutical terms. That is to say: a motivation to reduction in factical life experience is always needed to access to the primordial sphere of meaning. Accordingly, I will finally suggest that the philosophical basic experience of radical questioning can be read as a hermeneutical epoche, which is, however, directly linked to the concern for one’s own existence. (shrink)
Southern Appalachia is unique among agroecological regions of the American South because of the diverse environmental conditions caused by its mountain ecology, the geographic and commercial isolation of the region, and the relative cultural autonomy of the people that live there. Those three criteria, combined with a rich agricultural history and the continuance of the homegardening tradition, make southern Appalachia an area of relatively high crop biodiversity in America. This study investigated the history and survival of traditional heirloom vegetable crops (...) in western North Carolina and documented 134 heirloom varieties that were still being grown. I conducted interviews with 26 individuals from 12 counties in western North Carolina. I used a snowball sampling method to identify individuals or communities that maintained heirloom vegetable varieties, and used the “memory banking” of farmers’ knowledge as a strategy to complement the gathering of seed specimens. Most of the varieties were grown and saved by homegardeners; beans were the most numerous. Results indicate that usually only one or two individuals in a community maintained significant numbers of heirloom varieties and that many communities have lost their heirloom vegetable heritage altogether. The decline of the farming population combined with a lack of cultural continuance in family seed-saving traditions threatens the ability of communities to maintain crop biodiversity. Some of the cultivars may represent the last (small) populations of endangered varieties. (shrink)
ResumenEn el presente trabajo se intentará mostrar que la fenomenología no conduce a una postura solipsista. Para ello, se caracterizará en qué consiste el solipsismo. Luego, se intentará refutar a lo que se ha de llamar “solipsismo metafísico” y “solipsismo gnoseológico”, con el objetivo principal de poner de manifiesto el fundamento de motivación para la salida de la ficción solipsista.Palabras claves:Phenomenology – solipsim – empatía - HusserlWith the aim of showing that phenomenology does not lead in solipsism, I will first (...) attempt a characterization of it. Then, I will attempt a refutation of the so-called “metaphysical” and “epistemological” solipsisms. Finally, the nature and role of Husserl´s solipsistic fiction is examined, and the grounds that motivate the overcoming of this standpoint are disclosed.key wordsFenomenología – solipsismo - empathy – Husserl. (shrink)
Over the years, two models of freedom have emerged as competitors: the alternative-possibilities model, which states that acting freely consists in being able to do otherwise, and, more recently, the actual-sequence model, which states that acting freely is exclusively a function of the actual sequence of events issuing in our behavior. In general, a natural strategy when trying to decide between two models of a certain concept is to look for examples that support one model and undermine the other. Frankfurt-style (...) cases have been used for this kind of purpose, to challenge the alternative-possibilities view and support the actual-sequence view. In this paper I examine the prospects of the counterparts of Frankfurt-style cases: “PAP-style” cases, or cases that could be used to support the alternative-possibilities view and challenge the actual-sequence view. I argue that there are no successful PAP-style cases. (shrink)
We study some properties of the quotient forcing notions ${Q_{tr(I)} = \wp(2^{< \omega})/tr(I)}$ and P I = B(2 ω )/I in two special cases: when I is the σ-ideal of meager sets or the σ-ideal of null sets on 2 ω . We show that the remainder forcing R I = Q tr(I)/P I is σ-closed in these cases. We also study the cardinal invariant of the continuum ${\mathfrak{h}_{\mathbb{Q}}}$ , the distributivity number of the quotient ${Dense(\mathbb{Q})/nwd}$ , in order to (...) show that ${\wp(\mathbb{Q})/nwd}$ collapses ${\mathfrak{c}}$ to ${\mathfrak{h}_{\mathbb{Q}}}$ , thus answering a question addressed in Balcar et al. (Fundamenta Mathematicae 183:59–80, 2004). (shrink)
Este trabajo intenta dilucidar el significado de la afirmación polémica de Platón relativa a la índole peculiar de los relatos literarios que, aunque falsos, encierran también algunas verdades, pues resulta problemático que Platón, al mismo tiempo, critique esos relatos y, sin embargo, proponga también hacer uso de otros igualmente falsos. Examino tres posibilidades de desambiguar el sentido de pseûdos en estos contextos -"falso" designaría ficción o mentira verbal o el carácter de uno de los dos niveles que constituiría un relato (...) literario- y defiendo que la falsedad rechazable para Platón es sólo la atinente al núcleo tipológico contenido en esos relatos. This paper attempts to elucidate the meaning of the controversial Platonic statement in relation to the peculiarity in the literary accounts which, in spite of being false, contain at the same time certain truths. Furthermore, there seems to be contradiction in the fact that Plato critiques those writings and still proposes using others equally false. I analyze three possibilities to disambiguate the meaning of pseûdos in these contexts -"false" would point to fiction or to a verbal lie or the character of one of the two levels which would comprise a literary account; and I support the fact that, for Plato, the undesirable falsity is only the one related to the typological core comprised in those accounts. (shrink)
A billionaire tells you: “That chair is in my way; I don’t feel like moving it myself, but if you push it out of my way I’ll give you a hundred dollars.” You decide you don’t want the billionaire’s money and you’d actually prefer that the chair stay in the billionaire’s way, so you graciously turn down the offer and go home. As it turns out, the billionaire is also a stingy old miser; he was never willing to let go (...) of a hundred dollars. Knowing full well that the chair couldn’t be moved due to the existence of several tons of weight tying it to the ground, he simply wanted to have a laugh at your expense. (shrink)
En este artículo examinaremos un caso de aplicación de la hipótesis de la relatividad lingüística : la influencia del género gramatical de las lenguas sobre la cognición o el pensamiento de los hablantes. Dado que las lenguas difieren tanto en sus repertorios léxicos como sobre todo en sus gramáticas de género para referir a las personas, a otras entidades animadas e incluso a entidades inanimadas, nuestro propósito será, en primer lugar, revisar la evidencia experimental reciente que avalaría la HRL en (...) este dominio, al comprobar una variedad de impactos cognitivos y psicológicos, variables según las lenguas de los hablantes. En particular, identificaremos cuáles son los “efectos relativistas” en el caso de los rasgos morfosintácticos de las lenguas con carga de género, y en relación con la universalización del género masculino. Sobre la base de la evaluación realizada e incorporando los aportes de los estudios de “género y lenguaje” de los enfoques feministas, concluiremos señalando de qué diversas maneras es viable e importante promover usos inclusivos del lenguaje e incluso cambios más profundos hacia un lenguaje inclusivo, con especial referencia al español. (shrink)
In this article I review the core elements of Carolina Sartorio’s actual causal sequence account of free will and moral responsibility, and propose two revisions. First, I suggest replacing the contested notion of absence causation by the relatively uncontroversial notion of causal explanation by absences. Second, I propose retaining explanation by unreduced dispositions, of which Sartorio appears to be wary. I then set out a response to her critical treatment of manipulation arguments against compatibilism. Lastly, I point out that (...) Sartorio’s reasons-sensitivity condition on moral responsibility is amenable to a conception of moral responsibility that, unlike the one she endorses, dispenses with basic desert. (shrink)
The focus of this paper is an influential family of views in the ethics of self-defense and war: views that ground the agent’s liability to be attacked in self-defense in the agent’s moral responsibility for the threat posed. I critically examine the concept of responsibility employed by such views, by looking at potential connections with the contemporary literature on moral responsibility. I start by uncovering some of the key assumptions that Responsibility Views make about the relevant concept of responsibility, and (...) by scrutinizing those assumptions under the lens of more general theorizing about responsibility. I identify an important conflict that arises at that point. The problem is that the concept presupposed by Responsibility Views is in tension with the standard way of understanding the connection between the neutral and non-neutral forms of moral responsibility. I draw attention to a particular strategy that could be used to address this challenge, but I also identify some important obstacles that stand in the way. (shrink)
This is a precis of my book Causation and Free Will. I go over the main features of my compatibilist account of free will, which is based on the actual causes of our behavior.
One of the leading figures of Logical Positivism, Moritz Schlick, wrote a well-known article “On the Foundations of Knowledge”, edited in English by Sir Alfred Ayer in 1959, in which he proposes Konstantierungen, also known as affirmations or confirmations in English, to play the part of the much sought-after indubitable and incorrigible foundation of personal belief. In the present article I will oppose this view via the perspective of confirmations in their linguistic nature, a trait that renders Konstatierungen untenable both (...) as sentences in Language of Thought – where it is thought that is linguistic, and natural language is but a means for expressing it-, and as occurring in natural languages due to the obligatory phenomenon of grammatical evidentiality in many world languages. (shrink)
I criticize what seems to be a common assumption of the precedent papers, namely, that the model-theoretic argument has similar consequences for the different realms of language. In particular, I argue that while the argument does not have serious consequences for natural languages, this is not the case with the language of mathematics.
Resumen: El estatuto teórico del concepto de la violencia escolar se ha resuelto parcialmente mediante el uso de definiciones. En el caso del campo científico chileno las definiciones de violencia escolar se formulan desde una episteme dualista, que establece la distinción entre lo escolar y lo no escolar, priorizan a un individuo abstracto, donde el espacio prima sobre el tiempo, las relaciones son causales y, en menor medida, de tipo covariación, constructiva de realidades y especular. El componente performativo es doble: (...) i) un modo de codificación y clasificaciones que estabilizan a un objeto que irrumpe en el campo científico y escolar; ii) producen una ausencia y exclusión de las relaciones y categorías posibles. No obstante, se observa que al interior de las propias definiciones se encuentran las semillas para un trabajo de transformación hacia epistemes no dualistas y complejas mediante las dimensiones de producción, reproducción y cruce de las violencias en la institución escolar según un enfoque tríadico. Esta reconstrucción se basa en un corpus de artículos indexados del campo de la educación sobre Chile entre los años 2001 a 2013.: The theoretical statute of the concept of school violence has been partly solved using definitions. In the case of the Chilean scientific field, the definitions of school violence are defined from a dualistic episteme that establishes the distinction between what is part of the school and what is not, that prioritizes an abstract subject, where space is more important than time, the relationships are of causal type and, to a lesser extent, of covariation type, that builds realities and that is speculative. The performative component has two aspects: i) a coding mode and classifications that stabilize an object that disrupts the scientific and school fields, and ii) produce a lack and exclusion of the relationships and potential categories. Nevertheless, it has been observed that there are some elements within the own definitions that could work for the transformation of dualistic and complex epistemes, through a dimension of production, reproduction, and the cross of different types of violence at school, following a triadic approach. This reconstruction is based on a corpus of articles from indexed journals about the Chilean educational field between 2001 and 2013. (shrink)
My main aim is to examine the extent to which an appeal to the concept of cause contributes to elucidating moral notions or to increasing the plausibility of moral views. Something that makes this task interestingly complex is the fact that the notion of causation itself is controversial and difficult to pin down. As a result, in some cases the success of its use in moral theory hinges on how certain debates about causation are resolved. I will point to examples (...) of this phenomenon as I proceed. (shrink)
Important theories about the attribution of mental contents and/or linguistic meanings propose a theoretical characterization about mental and linguistic understanding. As one of the consequences of this, they cannot account for instances of genuine conceptual diversity: the exotic expressions and their conceptual repertoires must be re-describe by means of a theory, articulated in our conceptual repertoire, that eliminates that diversity. Wittgenstein, on the other side, has argued that understanding of the linguistic and non linguistic behavior of other creatures is based (...) on primitive ways of reciprocal understanding, settled on practical agreements. Consequently, he has characterized our relationship towards radically estrange behaviors as a form of “instinctive uncertainty”. On these bases, I will attempt to show how it is possible to dissolve skeptical problems and elude contrived solutions about other “forms of life”, recognizing that genuine conceptual diversity is possible. (shrink)
Resumen: El presente artículo se propone establecer un dialogo entre las nociones de desarrollo y de reconocimiento. La fundamentación epistémica de esta discusión se enmarca en la consideración de Ricoeur que apuesta a la condición del individuo como un hombre capaz o “un yo puedo”, con el poder de hablar, actuar e imputarse acciones, condiciones básicas para enfrentar el camino hacia el reconocimiento de sí mismo. Ahora bien, dichas capacidades individuales de obrar, en el plano colectivo se extienden hacia prácticas (...) sociales de reconocimiento mutuo sustentadas bajo un principio ético, desde el cual, es posible identificar tres imperativos dialogantes con la noción de desarrollo: tender hacia la vida buena, en y con el otro y con instituciones justas. Se concluye afirmando que la crisis respecto de la noción de desarrollo propia de la modernidad ha dado a la misma la posibilidad de resignificar los enfoques que exaltan las capacidades humanas en la búsqueda de un bienestar subjetivo que se orienten hacia el camino del reconocimiento mutuo.: This article aims to establish a dialogue between notions of development and recognition. The epistemic foundation of this discussion is framed in Ricoeur consideration that bets on the individual's condition as a capable man or "I can", with the power to speak, act and impute actions, basic conditions to face the path to recognition of himself. However, these individual capacities to act, on the collective level, extend to social practices of mutual recognition based on an ethical principle, from which, it is possible to identify three imperatives dialoguing with the notion of development: to tend towards the good life, in and with others, and with just institutions. It concludes by affirming that the crisis regarding the notion of development proper to modernity has given it the possibility of resignifying the approaches that exalt human capacities in the search for subjective well-being that are oriented towards the path of mutual recognition. (shrink)
Toma-se a crítica de Nietzsche a Sócrates como um caso exemplar que mostra os dois sentidos fundamentais da crítica nietzscheana: (i) a crítica nietzscheana consiste em censura e em elogio de modo dual, ou seja, censura e elogio são aspectos da crítica; e (ii) ao criticar alguém, Nietzsche está, igualmente, se autocriticando.
In this essay I sketch a philosophical argument for classical liberalism based on the requirements of public reason. I argue that we can develop a philosophical liberalism that, unlike so much recent philosophy, takes existing social facts and mores seriously while, at the same time, retaining the critical edge characteristic of the liberal tradition. I argue that once we develop such an account, we are led toward a vindication of “old” (qua classical) liberal morality—what Benjamin Constant called the “liberties of (...) the moderns.” A core thesis of the paper is that a regime of individual rights is crucial to the project of public justification because it disperses moral authority to individuals thus mitigating what I call the “burdens of justification.” Footnotesa Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Philosophy Department workshop on the morality of capitalism, and at the conference on rights theory at the Murphy Institute, Tulane University. I am grateful for the comments of the participants; my special thanks to David Schmidtz, Julian Lamont, and Andrea Houchard for their useful written comments and suggestions. (shrink)
This article analyzes the epistemological aims and justification of character education legislation passed by the North Carolina General Assembly. I take this specific state law as representative of the broader national trends in the character education movement. I primarily use the work of Richard Rorty as the theoretical lens for the analysis and critique. I conclude by commending aspects of the legislative effort, but I suggest that greater emphasis must be placed on strengthening students' ethics through democratic action inside (...) and outside schools and not on a right-leaning, conservative, and didactic curriculum. Further, as social foundations educators, it is imperative to make strides in our classrooms to expose preservice teachers to the apparent and hidden contradictions of using character education as a tool of educational reform. (shrink)
This article examines the significance of cultural practices related to food and women's role in the formation and continuance of these practices in Gullah communities in the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. I argue that although food preparation, under pressure of dominant cultural practices, may be viewed as a measure of gender inequality and women's subordination in the household, analysis of the relationship between women and food preparation practices can broaden understanding of the construction and maintenance of (...) tradition in marginalized cultural groups, a neglected aspect of the study of social organization within sociology. The study uses ethnographic data based on field observations and semistructured interviews with 22 women over several visits made between 1989 and 1992. (shrink)
In this reply, I seek to summarize fairly the criticisms advanced by each of my four critics, Jonathan Schaffer, Gideon Yaffe, John Gardner, and Carolina Sartorio. That there is so little overlap either in the aspects of the book on which they focus or in the arguments they advance about those issues has forced me to reply to each of them separately. Schaffer focuses much of his criticisms on my view that absences cannot serve as causal relata and argues (...) that this commits me to the view that double preventions cannot be causal of events such as deaths. I deny that double preventions such as beheadings are not causal, while admitting that other double preventions are not causal but denying that this latter conclusion is unwelcome in its implications. Yaffe criticizes my view that a person substantially causing some harm H is sufficient for that person having performed the activity of H-ing, whereas I affirm that causing H is sufficient for doing the action of H-ing even if it is not sufficient for intentionally H-ing. Gardner takes issue with my “experiential argument” for the relevance of causation to moral blame; he urges that we cannot infer that we are more guilty from either the psychological fact that we feel more guilty or from the moral fact that it is virtuous to feel such heightened guilt, because it is viciously circular: we feel such guilt only because we have already judged that we are more guilty, and it is virtuous to feel such guilt only because we in fact are more guilty. I deny such circularity exists. Sartorio takes issue with my thesis that in omissive overdetermination cases neither omitter is morally responsible for the harm. I trade intuitions with Sartorio about a range of related cases that we each think bears on the issue. (shrink)
This paper argues for what I call modest ethical veganism: the view that it is typically wrong to use or eat products made from or by animals such as cows, pigs, or chickens. The argument has three central parts. First, I argue that a central explanation for the wrongness of causing suffering rests upon what it is like to experience such suffering, and that we have good reasons to think that animals suffer in ways that are relevantly analogous to humans. (...) Second, I argue that animals can have better and worse lives, and that a central explanation for the wrongness of killing is that it deprives the victim of the valuable life that they would otherwise have had. Third, I argue that it is wrong to cooperate with massive wrongdoing. By consuming animal products, we typically support institutions that engage in massive and systematic wrongful treatment of animals. We thus ought to become vegan. (shrink)
