In this paper, we analyse higher-order risky choices by the representative cumulative prospect theory (CPT) decision maker from three alternative reference points. These are the status quo, average payout and maxmin. The choice tasks we consider in our analysis include binary risks, and are the ones employed in the experimental literature on higher order risk preferences. We demonstrate that the choices made by the representative subject depend on the reference point. If the reference point is the status quo and the (...) lottery choices exhibit symmetric risk, we demonstrate that there is no third order reflection effect of lottery choices but there is a fourth order reflection effect. When the average payout is the reference point, we demonstrate that any third or fourth order lottery choice is possible dependent upon the lottery payoffs. However, under the assumption of maxmin reference point, the risky choices are prudent and temperate. In addition to these results, our analysis reveals that the representative CPT subject can choose combinations of second with third and fourth order risky options that differ from those in other major models of decision under risk. We contrast our theoretical predictions with the empirical results reported in the literature on higher order risk preferences and are able to reconcile some conflicting experimental evidence. (shrink)

Traditionally, Christians have hold the two following beliefs: the belief that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good on the one hand and the belief that God has actualized a possible world in which some people freely reject Christ and are damned eternally, while others freely accept Him and are saved on the other. The combination of these two beliefs seems to result in a contradiction. This serious and well-known problem is called the soteriological problem of evil. In this article (...) the author, on the basis of William Lane Craig's Molinist theory, argues that there is no contradiction between these beliefs and that, therefore, there is no soteriological problem of evil, unless one adds two premises. The theory of middle knowledge shows that there is no good reason to accept the second of these. Therefore, there is no contradiction between belief in a perfectly good, omniscient, and omnipotent God and the eternal damnation of some people in this world. This Molinist account is defended against some philosophical and theological objections that have been raised against it. Finally, the author tries to show that, although Craig's concept of transworld damnation is helpful to offer a defense of the compatibility of the two traditional Christian beliefs mentioned above, it does not help us to offer a theodicy of post-mortem evil.ZusammenfassungIn der christlichen Tradition finden wir die folgenden beiden Überzeugungen: einerseits, dass Gott allwissend, allmächtig und vollkommen gut ist und anderseits, dass er eine mögliche Welt aktualisiert hat, in der einige Menschen Christus freiwillig ablehnen und ewig verloren gehen, während andere ihn freiwillig annehmen und gerettet werden. Es hat den Anschein, dass die Kombination dieser beiden Überzeugungen in einen Widerspruch mündet. Aufgrund der Molinistischen Theorie William Lane Craigs sucht Verfasser zu erweisen, dass diese beiden Überzeugungen sich nicht widersprechen – es sei denn, dass zwei fragwürdige Prämissen hinzugefügt würden. Die Theorie der scientia media zeigt, dass es keine guten Gründe gibt, um die zweite dieser Prämissen zu akzeptieren. Es besteht also kein Widerspruch zwischen der Überzeugung, dass Gott allwissend, allmächtig und vollkommen gut ist, und der Überzeugung, dass einige Menschen ewig verloren gehen. Diese Molinistische Theorie wird gegenüber einigen philosophischen und theologischen Einsprüchen verteidigt. Schliesslich versucht der Verfasser nachzuweisen, dass, obwohl Craigs Konzept der transworld damnation für eine Verteidigung des christlichen Glaubens gebraucht werden kann, es nicht gebraucht werden kann für eine Theodizee hinsichtlich postmortalem Übel. (shrink)

Introduction: Prinz’s SentimentalismMany ethicists claim that one cannot derive an ought from an is. In others words, they think that one cannot derive a statement that has prescriptive force from purely descriptive statements. This thesis plays a crucial role in many theoretical and practical ethical arguments. Since, according to many, David Hume advocated a view along these lines, this thesis has been called ‘Hume’s Law’. In this paper, I adopt this widespread terminology, whether or not Hume did indeed take (...) this position. There are some notable exceptions among philosophers, such as John SearleSee John R. Searle, “How to Derive “Ought” from “Is”,” Philosophical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1, (1964), pp. 43–58. and Arthur Prior,See Arthur N. Prior, “The Autonomy of Ethics,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 38, No. 3, (1960), pp. 199–206. but most philosophers have embraced Hume’s Law. Recently, however, Hume’s Law has come under attack. In his book The Emotional Construction of Mor. (shrink)

Standing at the intersection of criminology and philosophy, this book demonstrates the ways in which mythic movies and television series can provide an understanding of actual crimes and social harms. Taking three social problems as its subjects – capitalist political economy, structural injustice, and racism – the book explores the ways in which David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019), and Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) offer solutions by reconceiving justice in terms of personal and collective transformation, (...) utopian thinking, and the relationship between racism and elitism, respectively. In doing so, the authors set out a theory of understanding the world based on cinematic and televisual works of art and conclude with a template that establishes a methodology for future use. An Epistemology of Criminological Cinema is authoritative and accessible, ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students, criminologists, philosophers, and film, television, and literary critics with an interest in social justice and social harm. (shrink)

In the USA and England and Wales, involuntary treatment for mental illness is subject to the constraint that it must be necessary for the health or safety of the patient, if he poses no danger to others. I will argue against this necessary condition of administering treatment and propose that the category of individuals eligible for involuntary treatment should be extended. I begin by focusing on the common disorder of schizophrenia and proceed to demonstrate that it can be a considerable (...) harm to a person's life without causing the person to be a danger to himself. I illuminate this claim by constructing a thought experiment concerning a person who slips on a banana peel and falls into a malfunctioning version of Robert Nozick's experience machine. I propose that the reasons why we should remove the person from the machine are the same reasons why we should administer involuntary treatment to individuals with schizophrenia. I rebut three objections to the analogy and conclude that if we believe that we have a duty to provide treatment for reasons relating to a person's wellbeing, it follows that we should reject the health or safety requirement and instead broaden the category of individuals who are eligible for involuntary treatment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pairing breaths:Rabah Ameur-Zaïmech's Terminal Sud (2019)Marion Froger (bio)Translated by David F. BellAsphyxiaNever had I felt such a sense of suffocation watching a film by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche.1 The poisoned atmosphere of Terminal Sud (2019) recalls the atmosphere of the Algerian War (1955-1962) and that of the decade of darkness (1991-2002) in that country. The filmmaker chose not to make a historical film, however, but rather a dystopia that fuses (...) together periods and places. The story appears to be contemporary, in a country bathed in the colors of southern France, apparently in the grip of all the violence that French and Algerian memories are nowhere near forgetting.2 Bandits wearing combat uniforms, policemen wearing outfits sporting an acronym that strangely resembles one used by Islamist Algerian groups,3 and generals evoking the French putschists of 1961 all fight against each other—ransoming, threatening, kidnapping, killing, and torturing the local population. Meanwhile, out in the countryside, guerrillas (maquisards4) try to care for their dying leader, like North African freedom fighters (fellagas) were doing before them, and this in turn evokes French Resistance fighters in the 1940s. The film's work on confused memories, which, according to Thierry Kuntzel, is related to the condensation, overdetermination, and displacement of dreamwork, transforms being out of breath into a symptom that hounds the doctor, played by Ramzy Bédia ("Inhale…Exhale…Inhale again…Hold your breath…Exhale"), a state of the world in the form of a trap that threatens to suffocate him—and launches the quest for a filmic poetics of calm through the pairing of breaths.Peeling façades with tightly closed doors, lowered metal shop shutters, narrow and tense streets: the doctor, his wife Hazia, and their family slip outside in fear of kidnapping and gunfire, climb up stairs breathing heavily, anxiously await by the window, their bodies obscured in starkly contrasting shadows cast by glaring light, hug each other with endless sighs. As they share their grief, they have barely enough breath left to sing to the memory of someone who has disappeared,5 as if after an argument, [End Page 244] when everything has been said and all that remains is a strangled sob serving as last farewell.The film opens with an attack on a minivan used for public transportation: bandits, who could be soldiers, steal everything from the passengers and driver. The doctor sees his patients in a rundown hospital, treats a woman whose breathing is raucous, her voice taut with anxiety, and who speaks about the disappearance of her husband. Back home, he finds anonymous letters containing death threats and, to calm down, he searches for his breath by taking a deep drag from a cigarette and a swig of whiskey. "I can't take it any longer, I can't even stand up, I can't do anything, I'm at the end of my rope, I'm tired […] Is that what our country has become?" he confides to a friend several hours before losing, in the emergency room, his wife's brother, a journalist assassinated in front of his house. "Stay with me," he says as he runs beside the stretcher calling for help, "Breathe, breathe."The spasmodic breathing of Ramzy Bédia, provoked by the fear, effort, and pain that define his character, intensifies as the film progresses. He barely breathes in the car taking him to treat the rebel leader; he is running out of breath beside the leader's bed as we hear the death rattle and as Bédia shouts to the leader's comrades, "Give him some air, everyone get out!" Later, one of the policemen standing guard at the entrance to the hospital will be mortally wounded by a kamikaze attack and will die on the operating table despite the doctor's exhausting reparatory manipulations. Asphyxia will ultimately directly threaten the doctor after his arrest. Tied to an old bedspring, he will be tortured by electroshock,6 will attempt one last time to justify himself to a soldier who wants to know everything about the rebel leader the doctor has treated, and will nearly suffocate in his... (shrink)

Poverty, inequality, violence, environmental degradation, and tyranny continue to afflict the world. Ethics of Global Development offers a moral reflection on the ends and means of local, national, and global efforts to overcome these five scourges. After emphasizing the role of ethics in development studies, policy-making, and practice, David A. Crocker analyzes and evaluates Amartya Sen's philosophy of development in relation to alternative ethical outlooks. He argues that Sen's turn to robust ideals of human agency and democracy improves on (...) both Sen's earlier emphasis on 'capabilities and functionings' and Martha Nussbaum's version of the capability orientation. This agency-focused capability approach is then extended and strengthened by applying it to the challenges of consumerism and hunger, the development responsibilities of affluent individuals and nations, and the dilemmas of globalization. Throughout the book the author argues for the importance of more inclusive and deliberative democratic institutions. (shrink)

Standing at the intersection of criminology and philosophy, this book demonstrates the ways in which mythic movies and television series can provide understanding of actual crimes and social harms. Taking three social problems as its subjects - capitalist political economy, structural injustice, and racism - the book explores the ways in which David Fincher's Fight Club (1999), HBO's Game of Thrones (2011-2019), and Jordan Peele's Us (2019) offer solutions by reconceiving justice in terms of personal and collective transformation, utopian (...) thinking, and the relationship between racism and elitism respectively. In so doing, the authors set out a theory of understanding the world based on cinematic and televisual works of art and conclude with a template that establishes a methodology for future use. An Epistemology of Criminological Cinema is authoritative and accessible, ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students, criminologists, philosophers, and film, television, and literary critics with an interest in social justice and social harm. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societal-level analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective (...) autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s α statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and within-society agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research. (shrink)

On the evolution of mind Harry J. Jerison Most of us think of mind as a little person in the head, the 'knower' of reality (cf. Attneave,). ...

I propose an analysis of the metaphysically important distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties, and, in the process, provide a neglected model for the analysis of recalcitrant distinctions generally. First, I recap some difficulties with Kim's well-known (1982) proposal and its recent descendants. Then I define two independence relations among properties and state a ‘quasi-logical’ analysis of the distinction in terms of them. Unusually, my proposal is holistic, but I argue that it is in a certain kind of equilibrium and (...) so probably pins down the target distinction uniquely. Finally, I suggest diagnoses of the previous failed attempts to analyse the distinction. (shrink)

Moral Struggle and Religious Ethics offers a comparative discussion of the challenges of living a moral religious life. This is illustrated with a study of two key thinkers, Bonaventure and Buddhaghosa, who influenced the development of moral thinking in Christianity and Buddhism respectively. Provides an important and original contribution to the comparative study and practice of religious ethics Moves away from a comparison of theories by discussing the shared human problem of moral weakness Offers an fresh approach with a comparison (...) of the understanding of the problem of moral weakness between the two key thinkers, Bonaventure and Buddhaghosa Written by a highly respected academic in the dynamic and fast-growing field of comparative religious ethics. (shrink)

A detailed treatment regarding the diverse properties and uses of evidence and the judgmental tasks they entail. Examines various processes by which evidence may be developed or discovered. Considers the construction of arguments made in defense of the relevance and credibility of individual items and masses of evidence as well as the task of assessing the inferential force of evidence. Includes over 100 numerical examples to illustrate the workings of diverse probabilistic expressions for the inferential force of evidence and the (...) subtleties they reveal. (shrink)

Abstract (for the combined three Parts) This paper presents the simplest known theory of processes involved in a person’s unconscious and conscious achievements such as intending, perceiving, reacting and thinking. The basic principle is that an individual has mental states which possess quantitative causal powers and are susceptible to influences from other mental states. Mental performance discriminates the present level of a situational feature from its level in an individually acquired, multiple featured norm (exemplar, template, standard). The effect on output (...) of a moderate disparity between input and norm is scaled in a universal unit of discrimination (Weber’s fraction), with the norm’s level being zero. When one process converts separate sources of input into an output, their discriminative distances from norm are summated. Distinct processes converging on an output combine their discriminations from norm orthogonally. An output may be influenced by the constructs of other outputs as well as by inputs. Descriptive performance is the influence of one category of input on a verbal output. Reasoning is minimally the effect of one verbal process on another. In deeper mental processing, the influence on a response comes from a response construct modulating a description: this process gives the meaning to an emotion or a motive. Descriptive modulation of stimulation corresponds to a bodily sensation or other conceptualized percept. When an output is explained solely by sources of input, that response to the stimulation may be mediated unconsciously. Development of a person within physical and communal environments embodies such mental causation within material causation and acculturates that mind to social causation. (shrink)

A natural experiment was conducted studying the relations among student cheating, motivation, religiosity, and attitudes toward cheating. Students enrolled in a dual religious/college curriculum were surveyed regarding their cheating behavior, attitudes toward cheating, religiosity, and learning/grade motivations toward classes. Business and liberal arts college students were represented. Results strongly support the following conclusions. First, grade orientation is associated with increases in self-reported cheating. Second, among these religious students, more religiosity correlates with reduced reports of cheating in all courses. This result (...) appears to be due to the unique effect of religion on self-reported cheating rates and, depending on course content, on a reduction of grade orientation in religious students. Third, business students report more cheating than their liberal arts counterparts, even when taking the same courses. They have less critical attitudes toward cheating and greater grade orientation, both of which statistically contribute to this difference, but other factors are involved as well. Keywords: academic integrity, motivation, religiosity, cheating. (shrink)

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in multiple agent contexts. We draw on the structural model account of actual causation (e.g., Halpern & Pearl, 2005) and its extension to responsibility judgments (Chockler & Halpern, 2004). We review the main (...) theoretical and empirical issues that arise from this literature and propose a novel model of intuitive judgments of responsibility. This model is a function of both pivotality (whether an agent made a difference to the outcome) and criticality (how important the agent is perceived to be for the outcome, before any actions are taken). The model explains empirical results from previous studies and is supported by a new experiment that manipulates both pivotality and criticality. We also discuss possible extensions of this model to deal with a broader range of causal situations. Overall, our approach emphasizes the close interrelations between causality, counterfactuals, and responsibility attributions. (shrink)

The present chapter provides a review of the literature addressing changes in memory performance in older adults (often retired individuals with an age between 60 and 80 years), compared to younger adults (often college students around age 20). While it is well-established that memory performance declines in older adults (e.g., Kausler, 1994; Ryan, 1992), it is now clear that not all aspects of memory are impaired (e.g., Balota & Duchek, 1988; Burke & Light, 1981; Craik, 1983; Schacter, Kihlstrom, Kaszniak & (...) Valdiserri, 1993; Shimamura, 1989). Dissociations across age groups with respect to impairments in different memory types/processes have provided (a) insights into the influence of aging on neuropsychological underpinnings of memory, and (b) leverage for memory theorists to develop a better understanding of normal memory functioning. This chapter involves three sections: First, we provide a summary of selected empirical findings that document the nature of age-related changes across a wide set of memory tasks. Although it is beyond the scope of the present chapter to review the rich literature concerning memory and aging, this section will acquaint the reader with examples of paradigms used to study distinct aspects of memory and the conclusions that researchers have reached regarding the influence of age on each memory type/process. Second, we discuss the major theoretical perspectives that have been proposed as explanatory constructs for these age-related memory deficits. Finally, we provide an overview of recent developments that shed some light on understanding the possible neurological underpinnings of aging on memory functioning. (shrink)

Traditional explanations of multistable visual phenomena (e.g. ambiguous figures, perceptual rivalry) suggest that the basis for spontaneous reversals in perception lies in antagonistic connectivity within the visual system. In this review, we suggest an alternative, albeit speculative, explanation for visual multistability – that spontaneous alternations reflect responses to active, programmed events initiated by brain areas that integrate sensory and non-sensory information to coordinate a diversity of behaviors. Much evidence suggests that perceptual reversals are themselves more closely related to the expression (...) of a behavior than to passive sensory responses: (1) they are initiated spontaneously, often voluntarily, and are influenced by subjective variables such as attention and mood; (2) the alternation process is greatly facilitated with practice and compromised by lesions in non-visual cortical areas; (3) the alternation process has temporal dynamics similar to those of spontaneously initiated behaviors; (4) functional imaging reveals that brain areas associated with a variety of cognitive behaviors are specifically activated when vision becomes unstable. In this scheme, reorganizations of activity throughout the visual cortex, concurrent with perceptual reversals, are initiated by higher, largely non-sensory brain centers. Such direct intervention in the processing of the sensory input by brain structures associated with planning and motor programming might serve an important role in perceptual organization, particularly in aspects related to selective attention. (shrink)

A natural experiment was conducted studying the relations among student cheating, motivation, religiosity, and attitudes toward cheating. Students enrolled in a dual religious/college curriculum were surveyed regarding their cheating behavior, attitudes toward cheating, religiosity, and learning/grade motivations toward classes. Business and liberal arts college students were represented. Results strongly support the following conclusions. First, grade orientation is associated with increases in self-reported cheating. Second, among these religious students, more religiosity correlates with reduced reports of cheating in all courses. This result (...) appears to be due to the unique effect of religion on self-reported cheating rates and, depending on course content, on a reduction of grade orientation in religious students. Third, business students report more cheating than their liberal arts counterparts, even when taking the same courses. They have less critical attitudes toward cheating and greater grade orientation, both of which statistically contribute to this difference, but other factors are involved as well. Keywords: academic integrity, motivation, religiosity, cheating. (shrink)

What sorts of reasons are i) required and ii) morally acceptable when citizens in a pluralist liberal democracy undertake to resolve pressing political issues? This paper presents and then critically examines John Rawls''s answer to this question: his so called wide-view of public reason. Rawls''s view requires that the content of liberal public reason prove rich enough to yield a reasoned and determinate resolution for most if not all fundamental political issues. I argue that the content of liberal public reason (...) will prove inadequate in this regard far more often than Rawls suspects. (shrink)

I present, motivate, and defend a theory of properties. Its novel feature is that it takes entire determinables-together-with-their-determinates as its units of analysis. This, I argue, captures the relations of entailment and exclusion among properties, solves the problem of extensionality, and points the way towards an actualist analysis of modality.

Rawls's "The Law of Peoples" has not been well received. The first task of this essay is to draw (what the author regards as) Rawls's position out of his own text where it is imperfectly and incompletely expressed. Rawls's view, once fully and clearly presented, is less vulnerable to common criticisms than it is often taken to be. The second task of this essay is to go beyond Rawls's text to develop some supplementary lines of argument, still Rawlsian in spirit, (...) to deflect key criticisms made by Rawls's critics. The overall defense given here of Rawls's position draws on a deep theme running throughout all of Rawls's work in political philosophy, namely, that the task of political philosophy is to mark the moral limits given by and through a common human reason, itself socially and historically achieved, within which human nature must develop (and reveal itself over time) if it is to be an expression or manifestation of human freedom. (shrink)

What effect does witnessing other students cheat have on one's own cheating behavior? What roles do moral attitudes and neutralizing attitudes (justifications for behavior) play when deciding to cheat? The present research proposes a model of academic dishonesty which takes into account each of these variables. Findings from experimental (vignette) and survey methods determined that seeing others cheat increases cheating behavior by causing students to judge the behavior less morally reprehensible, not by making rationalization easier. Witnessing cheating also has unique (...) effects, controlling for other variables. (shrink)

In response to Hoffmann-Kolss, I modify my account of the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties previously published in this journal. I also strengthen the reason I gave to think my account pins down the distinction uniquely.

Analytical techniques for determining the net worth of the consequences of alternative choices are increasingly used to motivate decisions about public projects and policies, especially where risks are prevalent. What information do these techniques provide, and what are the grounds for using them in decision making? It is argued that the apparent similarities of cost-risk-benefit analyses to decision theory are in some ways misleading, and that the true basis of such analyses in welfare economics suggests some inherent limitations to their (...) use. The limitations described arise from the practice of aggregating individual preferences as determined by economic valuations; they restrict (but do not invalidate) the application of such analyses. (shrink)

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls does not discuss justice and the global economy at great length or in great detail. What he does say has not been well-received. The prevailing view seems to be that what Rawls says in The Law of Peoples regarding global economic justice is both inconsistent with and a betrayal of his own liberal egalitarian commitments, an unexpected and unacceptable defense of the status quo. This view is, I think, mistaken. Rawls’s position on global (...) or international economic justice is richer, more nuanced, and generally more compelling than his critics have been willing to acknowledge. My aim in this essay is to sympathetically set out, and then defend against two common families of objection to, Rawls’s position on global or international economic justice. Objections of the first sort reject Rawls’s position as inadequately attentive to the material and economic interests of individual persons worldwide. Objections of the second sort reject it as inadequately attentive to the material and economic interests of well-ordered peoples. Throughout the paper I develop several arguments implicit in The Law of Peoples but not well-developed there as well as offer some additional arguments of my own consistent with the spirit of The Law of Peoples and Rawls’s work more generally. I conclude with some brief remarks expressing two worries I have about Rawls’s position – one concerning global public goods, the other concerning the formation of a morally adequate and effective political will within the international context under contemporary conditions. (shrink)

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

David Lewis' objection to a generic theory of modality which he calls ‘magical ersatzism’ is that its linchpin, a relation he calls ‘selection’, must be either an internal or an external relation, and that this is unintelligible either way. But the problem he points out with classifying selection as internal is really just an instance of the general problem of how we manage to grasp underdetermined predicates, is not peculiar to magical ersatzism, and is amenable to some familiar solutions. (...) He provides no compelling grounds for thinking that classifying selection as external is unintelligible, and his argument has a false presupposition. I conclude that magical ersatzism is still a viable option in the metaphysics of modality. (shrink)

(2013). Legal idioms: a framework for evidential reasoning. Argument & Computation: Vol. 4, Formal Models of Reasoning in Cognitive Psychology, pp. 46-63. doi: 10.1080/19462166.2012.682656.