This paper develops a sympathetic critique of recent experimental work on free will and moral responsibility. Section 1 offers a brief defense of the relevance of experimental philosophy to the free will debate. Section 2 reviews a series of articles in the experimental literature that probe intuitions about the "compatibility question"—whether we can be free and morally responsible if determinism is true. Section 3 argues that these studies have produced valuable insights on the factors that influence our judgments on the (...) compatibility question, but that their general approach suffers from significant practical and philosophical difficulties. Section 4 reviews experimental work addressing other aspects of the free will/moral responsibility debate, and section 5 concludes with a discussion of avenues for further research. (shrink)

[Publisher's description:] When can we be morally responsible for our behavior? Is it fair to blame people for actions that are determined by heredity and environment? Can we be responsible for the actions of relatives or members of our community? In this provocative book, Tamler Sommers concludes that there are no objectively correct answers to these questions. Drawing on research in anthropology, psychology, and a host of other disciplines, Sommers argues that cross-cultural variation raises serious problems for theories (...) that propose universally applicable conditions for moral responsibility. He then develops a new way of thinking about responsibility that takes cultural diversity into account. -/- Relative Justice is a novel and accessible contribution to the ancient debate over free will and moral responsibility. Sommers provides a thorough examination of the methodology employed by contemporary philosophers in the debate and a challenge to Western assumptions about individual autonomy and its connection to moral desert. (shrink)

This volume stages a debate between two philosophers, one North American, the other German, who hold different views of the relation of redistribution to ...

1. Philosophers tend to talk of belief as a ‘propositional attitude.’ As Fodor says:" The standard story about believing is that it's a two place relation, viz., a relation between a person and a proposition. My story is that believing is never an unmediated relation between a person and a proposition. In particular nobody grasps a proposition except insofar as he is appropriately related to some vehicle that expresses the proposition. " Fodor's story – that belief is a three-place relation (...) between a person, a proposition and a vehicle – is hardly non-standard; by assigning to propositions an essential place in acts of belief, he too is a ‘propositionalist’. My own view is that believing is primarily a relation between a believer and the world . While a great many human beliefs are propositional, many, perhaps most, are mondial and propositionless. As for animals who lack language, it may be that all their beliefs are mondial. In the present article, I show that distinguishing these two very different kinds of belief – de mundo as well as de dicto – enables one to explain phenomena of doxastic dissonance that standard propositionalist accounts cannot adequately explain .The next two sections, §1.1 and §1.2, are about ‘the world’ that is the doxastic object in the primary belief relation, providing needed background for the thesis that mondial belief is more primitive and basic than propositional belief.1.1. The world does not contain itself. Things in the world are …. (shrink)

I aim to alleviate the pessimism with which some philosophers regard the 'objective attitude', thereby removing a particular obstacle which P.F. Strawson and others have placed in the way of more widespread scepticism about moral responsibility. First, I describe what I consider the objective attitude to be, and then address concerns about this raised by Susan Wolf. Next, I argue that aspects of certain attitudes commonly thought to be opposed to the objective attitude are in fact compatible with it. Finally, (...) I examine the prospects of someone who wishes to adopt the objective attitude permanently. In response to philosophers who claim that this would be psychologically impossible, I argue that our commitment to attitudes that presuppose moral responsibility can soften and fade, often without our noticing it. (shrink)

Relational egalitarianism, the view that social equality is fundamentally about equal relationships, has a problem addressing intergenerational justice. Specifically, how can we have any relationship, egalitarian or otherwise, with people that we do not overlap with temporally? I argue that the problem is even greater than that since we do not overlap in many other relevant ways, and are not in relationships with most of our temporal peers either. If relational equality relies on actual relationships, it cannot succeed as an (...) account of justice. However, we stand in certain social relations to one another, less direct than relationships, that might connect us, in an egalitarian fashion, to many more people than the ones with whom we have relationships. If this account, or one like it, cannot succeed, however, we may have to give up on relational egalitarianism altogether. (shrink)

What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory. Where critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject had, in recent years, produced a resistance to ethics in many fields of scholarship, today these critiques have generated a crossover among disciplines and led to theories and practices that see and do ethics otherwise. The decentering of the subject, the (...) contributors to this volume suggest, has brought about a recentering of the ethical. The philosophers, political theorists, literary critics and physician whose essays are collected here bring the particularities of their disciplines and training to a vital complex of questions. Many of these authors express concerns that the turn to ethics is a turn away from politics towards moralism. All ultimately conclude, however, that such concerns, rather than leading away from ethics, have helped to reinvigorate the intellectual field in the present moment. Contributors: Judith Butler, Homi K. Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Nancy Fraser, John Guillory, Beatrice Hanssen, Barbara Johnson, Perri Klass, Chantal Mouffe, Doris Sommer, Rebecca Walkowitz. (shrink)

The use of deception in research is generally permitted so long as participants are debriefed at the conclusion of their participation. Several authoritative research ethics guidelines allow investigators to omit debriefing under certain circumstances, however. Here we examine various justifications for forgoing debriefing in deceptive research, including concerns about subject pool contamination, the risk that revealing the deception will be harmful or distressing to participants, and issues of practicability. We conclude that, contrary to current practice, omitting debriefing is ethically acceptable (...) only when debriefing is impracticable, the deception is innocuous, and no reasonable person would object to involvement in the research. (shrink)

An Invitation to Formal Reasoning introduces the discipline of formal logic by means of a powerful new system formulated by Fred Sommers. This system, term logic, is different in a number of ways from the standard system employed in modern logic; most striking is its greater simplicity and naturalness. Based on a radically different theory of logical syntax than the one Frege used when initiating modern mathematical logic in the 19th Century, term logic borrows insights from Aristotle's syllogistic, Scholastic (...) logicians, Leibniz, and the 19th century British algebraists. Term logic takes its syntax directly from natural language, construing statements as combinations of pairs of terms, where complex terms are taken to have the same syntax as statements. Whereas standard logic requires extensive 'translation' from natural language to symbolic language, term logic requires only 'transcription' into the symbolic language. Its naturalness is the result of its ability to stay close to the forms of sentences usually found in every day discourse. Written by the founders of the term logic approach, An Invitation to Formal Reasoning is a unique introduction and exploration of this new system, offering numerous exercises and examples throughout the text. Summarising the standard system of mathematical logic to set term logic in context, and showing how the two systems compare, this book presents an alternative approach to standard modern logic for those studying formal logic, philosophy of language or computer theory. Fred Sommers is Professor Emeritus, Brandeis University, USA; George Englebretsen is Professor of Philosophy, Bishop's University, Canada. (shrink)

_Gendered Agents_, edited by Silvestra Mariniello andPaul A. Bové, presents essays by influential feminist theorists who challenge traditional Western epistemology and suggest new directions for feminism. By examining both literary and historical discourses, such critics as Gayatri Spivak, Hortense Spillers, and Lauren Berlant assess questions of sexuality, ethics, race, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and identity. Gathered from various issues of the journal _boundary 2_, the essays in _Gendered Agents_ seek to transform the model of Western academic knowledge by restructuring its priorities and (...) values. In the introduction, Mariniello urges feminists to begin anew but take as their starting place the achievements of feminism and feminist theory: an understanding of language that considers the implications of silence, the motivation to decompartmentalize experience, and the acknowledgement that everything is political._ _Challenging both a canonical organization of knowledge and the persistently self-referential "ghettoization" of feminism, contributors subsequently tackle subjects as diverse as pre-Marxist France, the American fetus, black intellectuals, queer nationality, and the art of literary interpretation. _Contributors_. Lauren Berlant, Karen Brennan, Margaret Cohen, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Freeman, Carol Jacobs, Silvestra Mariniello, Larysa Mykyta, Laura Rice, Ivy Schweitzer, Doris Sommer, Hortense J. Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Wilt. (shrink)

The need for professionals to volunteer their time in crisis situations and to reach across time and culture in the service of humanitarian interventions will likely not abate in the near future. This article provides readers with multiple venues for considering the ethical dimensions present in crisis and humanitarian interventions. Core ethical concerns common to helping situations are magnified in crisis work. In addition, issues unique to the nature of volunteer and crisis work must also be considered. Using hypothetical case (...) examples, bioethical principles, and ethical decision-making models, helping professionals are encouraged to go beyond their particular ethical codes in contemplating ethically and clinically sensitive volunteering. (shrink)

Reviewers of this book have praised Christina Hoff Sommer's well-reasoned argument against many feminists' reliance on misleading, politically motivated 'facts' about how women are victimised.

Experimental philosophy has received a great deal of attention in scholarly journals and the popular media. Often the topic of these articles is precisely what I claim is a non-issue – the value of experimental philosophy as a movement. And here I am writing about this same topic yet again. But I am not going to provide another argument for an obvious position. Instead, I’m writing this as an obituary – an obituary for the so-called controversy about experimental philosophy, and (...) an attempt to diagnose how it lived as long as it did. (shrink)

Retributive emotions and behavior are thought to be adaptive for their role in improving social coordination. However, since retaliation is generally not in the short-term interests of the individual, rational self-interest erodes the motivational link between retributive emotions and the accompanying adaptive behavior. I argue that two different sets of norms have emerged to reinforce this link: (1) norms about honor and (2) norms about moral responsibility and desert. I observe that the primary difference between these types of retribution motivators (...) lies in where the normative focus is placed after an offense. In the first form of retribution, the normative focus is on the offended party. In the second, it is on the offender. Next, I show how each class of norms is well tailored to the particular features of the environment in which these forms of retributive behavior emerge. Finally, I consider some philosophical implications of these observations. I suggest that my account, if correct, would pose tough challenges for contemporary philosophical theories of moral responsibility and punishment. (shrink)

In the first edition of A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain – Nine Conversations, philosopher Tamler Sommers talked with an interdisciplinary group of the world’s leading researchers—from the fields of social psychology, moral philosophy, cognitive science, and primatology—all working on the same issue: the origins and workings of morality. Together, these nine interviews pulled back some of the curtain, not only on our moral lives but—through Sommers’ probing, entertaining, and well informed questions—on the way morality traditionally (...) has been studied. This Second Edition increases the subject matter, adding eight additional interviews and offering features that will make A Very Bad Wizard more useful in undergraduate classrooms. These features include structuring all chapters around sections and themes familiar in a course in ethics or moral psychology; providing follow-up podcasts for some of the interviews, which will delve into certain issues from the conversations in a more informal manner; including an expanded and annotated reading list with relevant primary sources at the end of each interview; presenting instructor and student resources online in a companion website. The resulting new publication promises to synthesize and make accessible the latest interdisciplinary research to offer a brand new way to teach philosophical ethics and moral psychology. (shrink)

They do not need to be rescued from masculinity."--BOOK JACKET.

Our think tank tasked by the Dutch Health Council, consisting of Radboud University Nijmegen Honours Academy students with various backgrounds, investigated the implications of Deep Brain Stimulation for psychiatric patients. During this investigation, a number of methodological, ethical and societal difficulties were identified. We consider these difficulties to be a reflection of a still fragmented field of research that can be overcome with improved organization and communication. To this effect, we suggest that it would be useful to found a centralized (...) DBS organization. Such an organization makes it possible to 1) set up and maintain a repository, 2) facilitate DBS studies with a larger sample size, 3) improve communication amongst researchers, clinicians and ethical committees, and 4) improve communication between DBS experts and the public at large. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Abortion and Infanticide. By Michael Tooley.