The prospects for moral realism and ethical naturalism have been important parts of recent debates within metaethics. As a first approximation, moral realism is the claim that there are facts or truths about moral matters that are objective in the sense that they obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. Ethical naturalism is the claim that moral properties of people, actions, and institutions are natural, rather than occult or supernatural, features of the world. Though these metaethical debates (...) remain unsettled, several people, myself included, have tried to defend the plausibility of both moral realism and ethical naturalism. I, among others, have appealed to recent work in the philosophy of language—in particular, to so-called theories of “direct reference” —to defend ethical naturalism against a variety of semantic worries, including G. E. Moore's “open question argument.” In response to these arguments, critics have expressed doubts about the compatibility of moral realism and direct reference. In this essay, I explain these doubts, and then sketch the beginnings of an answer—but understanding both the doubts and my answer requires some intellectual background. (shrink)

David Spurrett, David Papineau; A note on the completeness of ‘physics’, Analysis, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 January 1999, Pages 25–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/anal.

Simon Blackburn can be seen as challenging those committed to sui generis moral facts to explain the supervenience of the moral on the descriptive. We (like perhaps Derek Parfit) hold that normative facts in general are sui generis. We also hold that the normative supervenes on the descriptive, and we here endeavour to answer the generalization of Blackburn's challenge. In the course of pursuing this answer, we suggest that Frank Jackson's descriptivism rests on a conception of properties inappropriate to discussions (...) of normativity, and we see reason to reject descriptivism generally. We also discuss the views of David Brink, Jonathan Dancy and Bernard Williams in this area. (shrink)

David Ross made the first sustained attack on Moore's agathistic utilitarianism or ethical neutralism a damaging concession to consequentialism.

These days, just about every philosophical debate seems to generate a position labeledinternalism. The debate I will be joining in this essay concerns reasons for action and their connection, or lack of connection, to motivation. The internalist position in this debate posits a certain essential connection between reasons and motivation, while the externalist position denies such a connection. This debate about internalism overlaps an older debate between Humeans and Kantians about the exclusive reason-giving power of desires. As we will see, (...) however, while these debates overlap, the new debate is importantly different from the old debate. (shrink)

During the Cold War, arguments about representation were a significant part of international debates about democracy. Proponents of minimal democracy dominated these arguments, and their thin notions of representation became political common sense. I propose a view of representation that differs from the main views advocated during the Cold War. Representation has a central positive role in democratic politics: I gain political representation when my authorized representative tries to achieve my political aims, subject to dialogue about those aims and to (...) the use of mutually acceptable procedures for gaining them. Thus the opposite of representation is not participation. The opposite of representation is exclusion – and the opposite of participation is abstention. Rather than opposing participation to representation, we should try to improve representative practices and forms to make them more open, effective, and fair. (shrink)

In recent years the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons has been taken by many to play a key role in distinguishing deontology from consequentialism. It is central to all universalist consequentialist theories that value is determined impersonally; the real value of any state of affairs does not depend on the point of view of the agent. No reference, therefore, to the agent or to his or her position in the world need enter into a consequentialist understanding of what makes (...) an action right or wrong or morally permissible. Consequentialism thus provides an agent-neutral account of both the right and the good. (shrink)

A central issue in Chinese philosophy today is the relationship between Confucianism and democracy. While some political figures have argued that Confucian values justify non-democratic forms of government, many scholars have argued that Confucianism can provide justification for democracy, though this Confucian democracy will differ substantially from liberal democracy. These scholars believe it is important for Chinese culture to develop its own conception of democracy using Confucian values, drawn mainly from Kongzi (Confucius) and Mengzi (Mencius), as the basis. This essay (...) describes some obstacles to this form of Confucian democracy. It argues that considering the political philosophies of Kongzi and Mengzi in the context of their views on personal cultivation reveals that they oppose some of the central assumptions of democracy. They do not trust the public to make good decisions, and advocate government for the people, but not by the people. These philosophies alone cannot generate democracy. (shrink)

Political equality is in tension with political quality, and quality has recently been neglected. My thesis is that proper attention to the quality of democratic procedures and their outcomes requires that we accept substantive inequalities of political input in the interest of increasing input overall. Mainly, I hope to refute political egalitarianism, the view that justice or legitimacy requires substantive political equality, specifically equal availability of power or influence over collective choices that have legal force. I hope to show that (...) political egalitarianism exaggerates individual rights in the conduct of political procedures, and neglects the substantive justice of the decisions made through those procedures. Some unequal distributions of influence may better promote just decisions, and without reliance on any invidious comparisons such as the relative wisdom of the wealthy or the educated. (shrink)

This article examines a particular debate between Eamonn Callan and William Galston concerning the need for a civic education which counters the divisive pull of pluralism by uniting the citizenry in patriotic allegiance to a single national identity.

David Wiggins; IV*—Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating Moral Beliefs, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1 June 1991, P.

I propose some changes to the conceptions of argument and of argumentative discussion in Ralph Johnson's Manifest Rationality (2000). An argument is a discourse whose author seeks to persuade an audience to accept a thesis by producing reasons in support of it and discharging his dialectical obligations. An argumentative discussion (what Johnson calls ‘argumentation’) is a sociocultural activity of constructing, presenting, interpreting, criticizing, and revising arguments for the purpose of reaching a shared rationally supported position on some issue. Johnson's theory (...) of argumentative discussion, with occasional modifications, is derived from this definition as a sequence of 17 theorems. Argumentative discussion is a valuable cultural practice; it is the most secure route to correct views and wise policies. (shrink)

Poincare’s arguments for his thesis of the conventionality of metric depend on a relationalist program for dynamics, not on any general philosophical interpretation of science. I will sketch Poincare’s development of the relationalist program and show that his arguments for the conventionality of metric do not depend on any global strategies such as a general empiricism or Duhemian underdetermination arguments. Poincare’s theory of space, while empirically false, is more philosophically sophisticated than his critics have claimed.

Thinking is known to be state dependent but a systematic study of how thinking in dreams differs from thinking while awake has not been done. The study consisted of analyzing the dream reports of 26 subjects who, in addition to providing dream reports also provided answers to questions about their thinking within the dream. Our hypothesis was that thinking in dreams is not monolithic but has two distinct components, one that is similar to wake-state cognition, and another that is fundamentally (...) different. We found that cognition within a dream scenario was similar to that of wake-state cognition, but that thinking about the scenario itself was deficient and very different than wake-state thinking. (shrink)

As non-biological machines come to be designed in ways which exhibit characteristics comparable to human mental states, the manner in which the law treats these entities will become increasingly important both to designers and to society at large. The direct question will become whether, given certain attributes, a non-biological machine could ever be viewed as a legal person. In order to begin to understand the ramifications of this question, this paper starts by exploring the distinction between the related concepts of (...) human, person, and property. Once it is understood that person in the legal sense can apply to a non-biological entity such as a corporation, the inquiry then goes on to examine the folk psychology view of intentionality and the concept of autonomy. The conclusion reached is that these two attributes can support the view that a non-biological machine, at least in theory, can be viewed as a legal person. (shrink)

In response to a recent argument by David Bloor, I argue that denying absolutes does not necessarily lead to relativism, that one can be a fallibilist without being a relativist. At issue are the empirical natural sciences and what might be called “framework relativism”, that is, the idea that there is always a conceptual scheme or set of practices in use, and all observations are theory-laden relative to the framework. My strategy is to look at the elements that define (...) a relativist stance and show where the pragmatic fallibilist disagrees. Defending the pragmatic notion of experience will be central, given that relativists reject the idea that experience can play a role in objectively justifying belief. We can reject all absolutes and start from the premise that everything is historical, contingent, and situated. One of the lessons of pragmatism is that universal and fixed principles are not necessary for objective knowledge. (shrink)

This paper stands at the confluence of two streams in contemporary political thought. One stream is composed of those critics of liberal political philosophy who are often described collectively as ‘communitarians’. What unites these critics is a belief that contemporary liberalism rests on an impoverished and inadequate view of the human subject. Liberal political thought – as manifested, for instance, in the writings of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin – claims centrally to do justice to individuality: to specify (...) the conditions under which distinct individuals, each with his own view about how life should be lived, can pursue these visions to the best of their ability. But, the critics claim, liberalism is blind to the social origins of individuality itself. A person comes by his identity through participating in social practices and through his affiliation to collectivities like family and nation. An adequate political philosophy must attend to the conditions under which people can develop the capacity for autonomy that liberals value. This, however, means abandoning familiar preoccupations of liberal thought – especially the centrality it gives to individual rights – and looking instead at how social relationships of the desired kind can be created and preserved. It means, in short, looking at communities – their nature and preconditions. (shrink)

In response to a recent argument by David Bloor, I argue that denying absolutes does not necessarily lead to relativism, that one can be a fallibilist without being a relativist. At issue are the empirical natural sciences and what might be called “framework relativism”, that is, the idea that there is always a conceptual scheme or set of practices in use, and all observations are theory-laden relative to the framework. My strategy is to look at the elements that define (...) a relativist stance and show where the pragmatic fallibilist disagrees. Defending the pragmatic notion of experience will be central, given that relativists reject the idea that experience can play a role in objectively justifying belief. We can reject all absolutes and start from the premise that everything is historical, contingent, and situated. One of the lessons of pragmatism is that universal and fixed principles are not necessary for objective knowledge. (shrink)

David Wiggins; XV*—Weakness of Will Commensurability, and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 79, Issue 1, 1.

A property analysis of the U.K. Biobank reveals a new imagination of the genomic biobank as a national commonpool resource. U.K. Biobank's treatment of property and governance exhibit both strengths and weaknesses that may be instructive to genome project planners around the world.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was the premier Jewish thinker of his day and one of the best-known figures of the German Enlightenment, earning the sobriquet 'the Socrates of Berlin'. He was thoroughly involved in the central issue of Enlightenment religious thinking: the inevitable conflict between reason and revelation in an age contending with individual rights and religious toleration. He did not aspire to a comprehensive philosophy of Judaism, since he thought human reason was limited, but he did see Judaism as compatible (...) with toleration and rights. David Sorkin offers a close study of Mendelssohn's complete writings, treating the German, and the often-neglected Hebrew writings, as a single corpus and arguing that Mendelssohn's two spheres of endeavour were entirely consistent. (shrink)

In his recent paper, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” John Rawls makes use of a footnote to disown what to many readers must have seemed one of the most striking and original underlying ideas of his theory of justice, that it “is a part, perhaps the most significant part, of the theory of rational choice.” That Rawls should issue this disclaimer indicates, at least in my view, that he has a much clearer understanding of his theory, and its relationship (...) to rational choice than he did at the time that he wrote A Theory of Justice. As I note in Morals by Agreement, Rawls does not show that principles of justice are principles of rational choice. Hence, in appropriating the idea, I can claim diat I am undertaking a pioneering enterprise. No doubt Thomas Hobbes would have undertaken it had the resources of the theory of rational choice been at his disposal, but I do not intend to pursue counterfactuals in a search for historical antecedents. Moral theory as rational choice theory is, I claim, a new venture. (shrink)

Those objecting to human DNA patenting frequently do so on the grounds that the practice violates or threatens human dignity. For example, from 1993 to 1994, more than thirty organizations representing indigenous peoples approved formal declarations objecting to the National Institutes of Health's bid to patent viral DNA taken from subjects in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Although these were not patents on human DNA, the organizations argued that the patents could harm and exploit indigenous peoples and violate (...) their cultural values. NIH eventually dropped one of its patent applications.On May 18, 1995, 180 religious leaders, led by biotechnology critic Jeremy Rifkin, held a press conference objecting to DNA patenting in Washington, D.C. In their “Joint Appeal against Human and Animal Patenting,” these leaders decried any attempt to patent nature. Some of the more outspoken members of the Joint Appeal likened DNA patenting to slavery, while others objected to treating human beings as marketable commodities. In his recent book, The Biotech Century, Rifkin rehashed the objections to DNA patenting voiced by members of the Joint Appeal. (shrink)

This paper describes and offers an analysis of a "new cosmopolitanism" emerging in the late 1990's --which is contrasted with cultural pluralism.

The incident in May-June 2007 involving a U.S. citizen traveling internationally while infected with drug-resistant tuberculosis involved the U.S. federal government's application of its quarantine and isolation powers. The incident and the isolation order raised numerous important issues for public health governance, law, and ethics. This article explores many of these issues by examining how the exercise of quarantine powers provides a powerful lens through which to understand how societies respond to and attempt to govern threats posed by dangerous, contagious (...) pathogens. The article considers historical aspects of governmental power to quarantine and isolate individuals and groups; analyzes the current state of quarantine and isolation law in the United States in light of the recent incident with drug-resistant tuberculosis; and explores global aspects of public health governance and law highlighted by this incident. (shrink)

This article addresses all of the issues involved in the debate about whether or not bioethicists should be paid by private biomedical companies to perform consultations. These issues include the following: differentiation of this role from bioethicists' other roles, an analysis of to whom bioethicists owe a duty, consideration of what bioethicists are “selling,” whether bioethicists should be allowed to get paid, when payment becomes problematic, and whether consulting fee arrangements should be regulated. The author often compares bioethicists' relationship to (...) the companies to bioethicists' other relationships, as well as to professional relationships in other fields, such as law and accounting. (shrink)

In an earlier paper we have shown that a proposition can have a well-defined probability value, even if its justification consists of an infinite linear chain. In the present paper we demonstrate that the same holds if the justification takes the form of a closed loop. Moreover, in the limit that the size of the loop tends to infinity, the probability value of the justified proposition is always well-defined, whereas this is not always so for the infinite linear chain. This (...) suggests that infinitism sits more comfortably with a coherentist view of justification than with an approach in which justification is portrayed as a linear process. (shrink)

At the end of the fifth century B.C.E., the character of Odysseus was scorned by most of the Athenians: he illustrated the archetype of the demagogic, unscrupulous and ambitious politicians that had led Athens to its doom. Against this common doxa, the most important disciples of Socrates (Antisthenes, Plato, Xenophon) rehabilitate the hero and admire his temperance and his courage. But it is most surprising to see that, in spite of Odysseus' lies and deceit, these philosophers, who condemn steadfastly the (...) sophists' deceptions, praise his rhetorical ability, his polutropia. The word polutropia is ambiguous: for Antisthenes, it means either "diversity of styles and discourses" or "diversity of dispositions, characters, or souls". It is argued that the same distinction is implicitly at work in Plato's Hippias Minor, where Socrates defends Odysseus' polutropia against the pseudo "simplicity" of Hippias' favourite hero, Achilles. However, whereas Antisthenes tries to clarify these different meanings, Plato's Socrates exploits the ambiguity to confuse his interlocutor. Such a distinction sheds a new light on the Hippias Minor: Odysseus is polutropos in the first (positive) sense, while the simplicity of Achilles should be understood as a bad kind of polutropia. It provides an explanation for the first paradoxical thesis of the dialogue which many commentators do not admit as an expression of the true Socratic view, on the ground of its supposed immorality: that he who voluntary deceives is better than he who errs, for falsehood is, in one case, only in words, while in the other, it is falsehood in the soul itself. It is thus proposed that Odysseus' skill in adapting his logos to his hearers was probably a model for Socrates himself. The analogy between the hero and Socrates is especially clear in Plato's dialogues, which show the philosopher in an Odyssey for knowledge. (shrink)

A significant portion of the practice of medicine is dependent on individual acts of medical altruism. Many of these acts, such as the donation of blood, gametes, stem cells, and organs, entail varying degrees of bodily intrusion and, for the altruist, various combinations of discomfort, risk, and expense. Discussion of the ethics of altruism has typically been fragmented under various rubrics such as blood donation, organ and tissue transplantation, health information, and the assisted reproductive technologies. The ethics of these specific (...) examples of altruism are best explored in conjunction with a broader discussion of their relatively neglected mother discipline, altruism in medicine.David Steinberg, M.D., is a board certified internist, hematologist, and oncologist. He is Chief of the Section of Medical Ethics at the Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School.FootnotesThis work was made possible by a grant in memory of Harold Karp by the Karp Family Foundation. (shrink)

The paper is a preliminary examination of the origin and role of psychological perception or “feeling” of dignity in human beings. Following Ayala's naturalistic account of morality, a sense of emotional dignity is seen as an outcome of processes of natural selection, cultural evolution, and above all a need for social inclusion. It is suggested that the existence of emotional dignity as part of a human species-related continuum provides an explanation of why we treat those in a persistent vegetative state, (...) the severely and hopelessly mentally impaired, the senile demented, cadavers and archaeological remains with dignity and respect. For older Europeans, dissonance between physical and mental abilities, unfamiliarity with social and cultural changes and relative proximity to death may influence their emotional dignity and hence vulnerability. (shrink)

This article presents a detailed exploration of what Sextus and Pyrrhonists regarded as mnemonic signs, where one experience reminds us of another, such as seeing smoke reminds us of a fire that is not yet evident to our present observations. For the skeptic the use of mnemonic signs obviates the need for reasoned, theoretical interpretations or elaborated belief formation. It allows the skeptic or the theory-free physician, for that matter, to live a life or practice symptomatic medicine without the need (...) for philosophizing. (shrink)

In this article I want to ask what we should do, either collectively or individually, if we could identify by genetic and family profding the 12% of the male population likely to commit almost half the violent crime in our society. What if we could identify some individuals in that 12% not only at birth, but in utero, or before implantation? I will explain the source of these figures later; for now, I will use them only to provide a concrete (...) example of the kind of predictive claims we can expect to be made with some frequency, and some scientific credibility, over the next generation. I will adopt an outlook that one commentator has called “pragmatic optimism,” but which could also be called technological optimism - the belief that a science or technology will achieve many or most of its advertised goals. My optimism will be directed towards human behavioral genetics, the source of predictions like the one I just offered; I will assume that this controversial discipline will achieve a substantial pan of its scientific ambition to identlfy genetic differences among individuals that help predict and possibly explain future behavior, psychological health, and cognitive skill. This optimism is very limited -it concerns the scientific success of behavioral genetics, not the social value of that success. (shrink)

The demonstration that hypnotic suggestion can inhibit word/colour Stroop highlights one of the benefits of using hypnosis to explore cognitive psychology and in particular attentional processes. The compelling results using a rigorous design have particular relevance for the presumed automaticity of some forms of information processing. Moreover the results support the potential that hypnotic suggestion offers for creating clinically informed analogues of relevant psychological and neuropsychological conditions. As with all novel research, the results of Raz and Campbell raise further operational (...) and theoretical questions, relating in this case to the use of hypnotic, post-hypnotic and non-hypnotic suggestion and the utility of existing measures of hypnotizability. (shrink)

There is general agreement that the “principle of balance” should guide controlled substance policy and regulation in the United States. Although the diversion of controlled substances from medical to nonmedical purposes is a significant public health problem, overly aggressive controlled substance regulation has been shown to have an unintended deterrent effect on appropriate controlled substance use, including pain management with opioid analgesics. The promotion of effective pain management and the reduction of substance abuse are equally important regulatory objectives. Neither regulatory (...) objective need be sacrificed to achieve the other. Rather, the two objectives must be balanced with each other to assure that necessary pain management is encouraged while drug abuse is curtailed.Approximately 75 million people in the United States suffer from severe pain. Fifty million of these suffer chronic pain, and 25 million suffer acute pain from trauma or surgery. Pain is not merely an uncomfortable symptom. (shrink)

The Problem Economic efficiency is naturally thought to be a virtue of social policies and decisions, and cost-benefit analysis is commonly regarded as a technique for measuring economic efficiency. It is not surprising, then, that CB analysis is so widely used in social policy analysis. However, there is a great deal of controversy about CB analysis, including controversy about its underlying philosophical rationale. The rationales that have been proposed fall into three basic, though not mutually exclusive categories. There are moralist (...) views to the effect that an acceptable CB analysis would provide, or contribute to, an ethical appraisal of proposed policies or projects. There are rationalist views to the effect that an acceptable CB analysis would contribute to the selection of social policies and projects that are “socially rational.” Finally, there are so-called management science views to the effect that the purpose of CB analysis is to promote the achievement of objectives held by the policy maker, whatever they may be. Different positions are available within each of these categories. But there is also the possibility that CB analysis lacks any viable rationale. I will examine some of the major rationales for CB analysis in this paper, and I will suggest that the last view is close to the truth. (shrink)