Neologicists have sought to ground mathematical knowledge in abstraction. One especially obstinate problem for this account is the bad company problem. The leading neologicist strategy for resolving this problem is to attempt to sift the good abstraction principles from the bad. This response faces a dilemma: the system of ‘good’ abstraction principles either falls foul of the Scylla of inconsistency or the Charybdis of being unable to recover a modest portion of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with its intended generality. This article (...) argues that the bad company problem is due to the ‘static’ character of abstraction on the neologicist's account and develops a ‘dynamic’ account of abstraction that avoids both horns of the dilemma. 1 Introduction2ion Reconstructed3 From Bad to Worse4 Abstraction Reconceived5 Bad Company Made GoodA AppendixA.1SemanticsA.2LogicA.3ConsistencyA.4Strength. (shrink)

What does being money consist in? We argue that something is money if, and only if, it is typically acquired in order to realise the reduction in transaction costs that accrues in virtue of agents coordinating on acquiring the same thing when deciding what thing to acquire in order to exchange. What kinds of things can be money? We argue against the common view that a variety of things (notes, coins, gold, cigarettes, etc.) can be money. All monetary systems are (...) best interpreted as implementing the same basic protocol. Money, i.e. the thing that we coordinate on acquiring in order to lower our transaction costs, is, in all cases, a set of positions on an abstract mathematical object, namely a relative ratio scale. The things that we ordinarily call ‘money’ are merely records of positions on such a scale. (shrink)

Contemporary discussion concerning institutions focus on, and mostly accept, the Searlean view that institutional objects, i.e. money, borders and the like, exist in virtue of the fact that we collectively represent them as existing. A dissenting note has been sounded by Smit et al. (Econ Philos 27:1–22, 2011), who proposed the incentivized action view of institutional objects. On the incentivized action view, understanding a specific institution is a matter of understanding the specific actions that are associated with the institution and (...) how we are incentivized to perform these actions. In this paper we develop the incentivized action view by extending it to institutions like property, promises and complex financial organisations like companies. We also highlight exactly how the incentivized action view differs from the Searlean view, discuss the method appropriate to such study and discuss some of the virtues of the incentivized action view. (shrink)

Objectives: To determine the effects of risk and payment on subjects’ willingness to participate, and to examine how payment influences subjects’ potential behaviours and risk evaluations.Methods: A 3 × 3 , between subjects, completely randomised factorial design was used. Students enrolled at one of five US pharmacy schools read a recruitment notice and informed consent form for a hypothetical study, and completed a questionnaire. Risk level was manipulated using recruitment notices and informed consent documents from hypothetical biomedical research projects. Payment (...) levels were determined using the payment models evaluated by Dickert and Grady as a guide. Five dependent variables were assessed in the questionnaire: willingness to participate, willingness to participate with no payment, propensity to neglect to tell about restricted activities, propensity to neglect to tell about negative effects, and risk rating.Results: Monetary payment had positive effects on respondents’ willingness to participate in research, regardless of the level of risk. However, higher monetary payments did not appear to blind respondents to the risks of a study. Payment had some influence on respondents’ potential behaviours regarding concealing information about restricted activities. However, payment did not appear to have a significant effect on respondents’ propensity to neglect to tell researchers about negative effects.Conclusions: Monetary payments appear to do what they are intended to do: make subjects more willing to participate in research. Concerns about payments blinding subjects to risks could not be substantiated in the present study. However, the findings do raise other concerns—notably the potential for payments to diminish the integrity of a study’s findings. Future research is critical to make sound decisions about the payment of research subjects. (shrink)

Background: Ethics consultation is used regularly by some doctors, whereas others are reluctant to use these services.Aim: To determine factors that may influence doctors to request or not request ethics consultation.Methods: A survey questionnaire was distributed to doctors on staff at the University Community Hospital in Tampa, Florida, USA. The responses to the questions on the survey were arranged in a Likert Scale, from strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat agree to strongly agree. Data were analysed with (...) the Wilcoxon test for group comparisons, the χ2 test to compare proportions and a logistic regression analysis.Results: Of the 186 surveys distributed, 121 were returned, giving a 65% response rate. Demographic data were similar between the groups saying yes and no . No statistically significant differences were observed between the user and non-user groups in terms of opinions about ethics consultants having extensive training in ethics or participating in ethics educational opportunities. On the issue “Ethics committee members or consultants cannot grasp the full picture from the outside”, the non-users were neutral, whereas the users somewhat disagreed . Even more significant was the difference between surgeons and non-surgeons, where, by logistic regression analysis, surgeons who believed that ethics consultants could not grasp the full picture from the outside were highly likely to not use . Non-users of ethics consultations thought that it was their responsibility to resolve issues with the patient or family . Users of ethics consultation believed in shared decision making or the importance of alternate points of view .Implications: Ethics consultations are used by doctors who believe in shared decision making. Doctors who did not use ethics consultation tended to think that it was their responsibility to resolve issues with patients and families and that they were already proficient in ethics. (shrink)

The ‘decapitation gambit’ holds that, if physical decapitation normally entails the death of the human being, then physiological decapitation, evident in cases of total brain failure, entails the death of the human being. This argument has been challenged by Franklin Miller and Robert Truog, who argue that physical decapitation does not necessarily entail the death of human beings and that therefore, by analogy, artificially sustained human bodies with total brain failure are living human beings. They thus challenge the current neurological (...) criterion for determining death and argue for a return to the traditional criterion of the irreversible loss of circulation and respiration. In this paper, I defend the decapitation gambit and total brain failure as a criterion for determining death against Miller and Truog's criticism. (shrink)

Moral conflicts occur in theories that involve more than one principle. I examine basic ways of dealing with moral dilemmas in medical ethics and in ethics generally, and propose a different approach based on a principle I call the "mutuality principle". It is offered as an addition to Tom Beauchamp and James Childress' principlism. The principle calls for the mutual enhancement of basic moral values. After explaining the principle and its strengths, I test it by way of an examination of (...) three responses—in the recent Festschrift for Dr Raanon Gillon—to a case involving parental refusal of a blood transfusion. The strongest response is the one that comes closest to the requirements of the mutuality principle but yet falls short. I argue that the mutuality principle provides an explicit future orientation in principlism and gives it greater moral coherence. (shrink)

Philosophy is experiencing a resurgence of property (PD) and generic substance dualism (SD). One important argument for SD that has played a role in this resurgence is some version of a modal argument. Until recently, premise (3) of the argument (Possibly, I exist, and no wholly physical objects exist.) has garnered most of the attention by critics. However, more recently, the focus has also been on (2) (Wholly physical objects are essentially, wholly, and intrinsically physical and wholly spiritual substances are (...) essentially, wholly, and intrinsically immaterial.). Andrew Bailey has provided one of the best criticisms of (2) on offer. In what follows, I present and clarify one form of the argument and defend premise (2) by responding to important defeaters proffered by Andrew Bailey and his contingent physicalism. (shrink)

Voluntary active euthanasia and physician assisted suicide should not be legalised because too much that is important about living and dying will be lostIn the first of this two part series, I unpack the historical philosophical distinction between killing and allowing a patient to die in order to clear up the confusion that exists. Historically speaking the two kinds of actions are morally distinct because of older notions of causality and human agency. We no longer understand that distinction primarily because (...) we have shifted our notions of causality from a traditional formulation to a modern formulation of causality and thus of moral assessment that focuses on the effects of an action. In this essay, I prepare the ground for a companion essay by showing that the traditional formulation allows us to maintain notions of meaning and purpose to human living and dying that are precluded in the efficiency paradigm of modernity. Taken together with the companion essay, I am claiming that voluntary active euthanasia and physician assisted suicide should not be legalised because too much that is important about dying and living will be lost.TWO LIESIt would be naïve to think that euthanasia, in either the VAE sense, or in the more passive sense of PAS, does not happen. It would even be naïve to think that it does not occur in a non-voluntary form. It would be equally naïve, however, to think it could be controlled through governmental regulation. The real question with regard to PAS/VAE, put so eloquently by Martha Minow, is which lie do you countenance: the lie that euthanasia does not already happen, or the lie that it can be controlled without having repercussions well beyond the limits of procedural mastery?1 With this two part paper series, I will argue that the …. (shrink)

Graham Oppy had criticized my argument for God from consciousness (AC) in my recent book ’Consciousness and the Existence of God’ (N.Y.: Routledge, 2008). In this article I offer a rejoinder to Oppy. Specifically, I respond to his criticisms of my presentation of three forms of AC, and interact with his claims about theism, consciousness and emergent chemical properties.

While most philosophers agree that libertarian agency and naturalism are incompatible, few attempts have been offered to spell out in some detail just why this is the case. My purpose in this article is to fill this gap in the literature by expanding on and clarifying the connection between naturalism as it is widely understood today and the rejection of libertarian agency. To accomplish this end I begin by clarifying different forms of libertarian agency and identity the key philosophical components (...) that constitute libertarian agency per se. Second, three different aspects of contemporary scientific naturalism are analyzed and the relations among them clarified: the naturalist epistemic attitude, etiology, and ontology. This is followed by a presentation of six arguments for the claim that libertarian agency should be rejected by advocates of scientific naturalism. Finally, I criticize a recent attempt by Randolf Clarke to reconcile libertarian agency and scientific naturalism. (shrink)

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation is a technique that may aid researchers in their attempts to elucidate the underlying brain functions involved in consciousness. By employing TMS along with other neuroimaging methods and case studies, researchers may be aided in addressing their various hypotheses. Employing the ‘brain as mobile’ analogy, it may be possible to determine the individual contributions of single elements of the brain without upsetting the overall balance.

Traditional descriptivism and Kripkean causalism are standardly interpreted as rival theories on a single topic. I argue that there is no such shared topic, i.e. that there is no question that they can be interpreted as giving rival answers to. The only way to make sense of the commitment to epistemic transparency that characterizes traditional descriptivism is to interpret Russell and Frege as proposing rival accounts of how to characterize a subject’s beliefs about what names refer to. My argument relies (...) on a development of the distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. (shrink)

In this article I propose what I call the inverse spaceship paradox. The article's interest lies in the fact that, contrary to what appears to be an implicit agreement in the literature on indeterminism, it shows that coming from infinity can be a perfectly predictable and therefore deterministic process in a classical universe.

I argue that a theory of distributive justice is sensitive to desert if and only if it does not require an institutional scheme that prevents individuals from treating one another as they deserve, and requires a desert ethos. A desert ethos is a set of principles that, though not embodied in a society’s basic coercive structure, nevertheless governs interpersonal relations between citizens. These two necessary conditions are jointly sufficient for ‘giving desert its due’ in a theory of justice. I therefore (...) reject the received view that a desert-sensitive theory must endeavor to guarantee distributions patterned according to desert. (shrink)