There are in fact two questions to be discussed. Is the importance of a philosophical thesis relative to language? Is the validity of a philosophical thesis relative to language? The answer to both questions is "yes." It can be shown that two well-known philosophical theses--the logical distinction between numerals and adjectives drawn by Frege, and the distinction between tasks and achievements drawn by Ryle--are true but trivial when stated in Chinese. This is the program for the first part of this (...) paper. In the second part, I will try to show that Mrs. Daitz's statement "a sentence states, but its parts cannot state" and Strawson's grammatical criterion for the subject-predicate distinction are both invalidated by Chinese grammar. (shrink)

Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) maintain that “being conscious is a basic liberty,” and infer from this that without informed consent, deep sedation, by intruding upon one’s consciousness, is an in...

Moral particularism, on some interpretations, is committed to a shapeless thesis: the moral is shapeless with respect to the natural. (Call this version of moral particularism ‘shapeless moral particularism’). In more detail, the shapeless thesis is that the actions a moral concept or predicate can be correctly applied to have no natural commonality (or shape) amongst them. Jackson et al. (Ethical particularism and patterns, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) argue, however, that the shapeless thesis violates the platitude ‘predication supervenes on (...) nature’—predicates or concepts apply because of how things are, and therefore ought to be rejected. I defend shapeless moral particularism by arguing that Jackson et al’s contention is less compelling than it firstly appears. My defense is limited in the sense that it does not prove shapeless moral particularism to be right and it leaves open the possibility that shapeless moral particularism might attract criticisms different from the ones advanced by Jackson et al. But at the very least, I hope to say enough to undermine Jackson et al’s powerful attack against it. The plan of this paper is as follows. Section 1 glosses the view of moral particularism and why it is taken to be essentially committed to the shapeless thesis. Section 2 examines a Wittgensteinian argument for the shapeless thesis. I shall argue that the Canberrans’ counter-arguments against it on grounds of disjunctive commonality and conceptual competence do not succeed. Section 3 explicates Canberrans’ predication supervenience argument against the shapeless thesis. Section 4 offers my criticisms of the Canberrans’ predication supervenience argument. In view of the above discussions, in Sect. 5, I conclude that there is no compelling argument (from the Canberrans) to believe that the shapeless thesis fails (as I have argued in Sect. 4). In fact, there is some good reason for us to believe it (as I have argued in Sect. 2). If so, I contend that moral particularism, when construed as essentially committed to the shapeless thesis, still remains as a live option. (shrink)

Moral perception, for the purposes of this article, is taken to be the perception of moral properties, unless contexts dictate otherwise. While both particularists and generalists agree that we can perceive the moral properties of an action or a feature, they disagree, however, over whether rules play any essential role in moral perception. The particularists argue for a ‘no’ answer, whereas the generalists say ‘yes’. In this paper, I provide a limited defense of particularism by rebutting several powerful generalist arguments. (...) It is hoped particularism can thus be made more attractive as a theory of moral perception. Positive arguments for particularism will also be provided along the way. (shrink)

I take the debate between the particularists and the principlists to be centered on the issue of whether there are true moral principles. One argument the principlists often appeal to in support of their claim that there are true moral principles is the argument from supervenience. Roughly, the argument is made up of the following three statements: (P1) If the thesis of moral supervenience holds, then there are true moral principles. (P2) The thesis of moral supervenience holds. (C) There are (...) true moral principles, and hence particularism is false. In this paper, I argue that the above argument is not sound by attacking (P1). I hold that no general supervenient/resultance base has a robust enough configuration of contextual features as to ground the existence of true moral principles. If I am right about this, I think it would be indicative of a reason to be less confident about the truth of principlism and more confident about the truth of particularism. (shrink)

This chapter delves into the museological side of ‘the way forward’ to conservation for planetary health bioethics. Specifically, it highlights the crucial role that museums play – their curatorial or exhibition interventions, conservation operations, development policies, or practices – which present or represent the vital relationship between human and planetary health. While it is not new to stress the significance of museums’ link to the environment and environmental education, it is necessary to re-examine recent cases in light of the rapid (...) changes brought about by climate change and the constant call for sustainability. We thus offer a review of some recent literature that appraises the museum’s role in bioethically considering the health of our living planet. Learning this role taps into relatively new themes such as ecomuseums and architectural heritage, or critical eco-museology. (shrink)

In this paper, I will examine the debate between the principlists and the particularists with special focus on the question of whether there is any true and coherent set of moral principles that codifies the moral landscape metaphysically speaking. My stance on this issue is an extreme sort of particularism which gives a ‘no’ answer to the above question. Yet it is significantly different from the positions of other extremists like John McDowell, Jonathan Dancy and Margaret Little. In section 2, (...) I will explain how my position is distinguished from theirs and why it is worth exploring. In section 3, I elucidate the meaning of ‘codify’. In section 4, I examine four types of principlism that claim to codify morality and argue that none of them succeeds. In section 5, I distinguish between four models of virtue and explore what implications the failure of principlism has for normative ethics and applied ethics. (shrink)

Every discipline of inquiry takes certain tasks for granted. They are not seen as the big questions that inspire and guide the field, even though they have been the practices that shape and imprint its deepest presuppositions. The question of translation, having been the focus of other humanist disciplines for decades, has come to the history of science only as of late. This essay, as a final review of the issues raised in a Focus section entitled “Historians of Science Translating (...) the History of Science,” discusses the underlying struggle between elegant renditions and literal accuracy and opens up larger and comparative questions about the reflexive capacity of a discipline, its conditions for knowledge, and the historical mishaps and shared labor that can connect or thwart the process beyond local origins. The essay offers comparative cases in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China as a counterpoint, where the Western history of science became world knowledge through unintended readership. (shrink)

Incarcerated persons have suffered a disproportionate burden of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to the general population, with heightened risk for adverse...

Against the reason holists (e.g. Dancy 2014), it has been contended by many reason atomists that while many features might well change their reason statuses or valences in different contexts in the way suggested by reason holists, they are merely secondary rather than primary reasons. In these atomists’ scheme of things, there are features that function as primary reasons whose reason statuses remain invariant across contexts. Moreover, these features provide the ultimate source of explanations for why some features, qua secondary (...) reasons, are variable in their reason statuses. Against the background of reason holism, this two-level picture of moral reason has been highly influential as an alternative theory of how moral reasons behave, and has been championed by several eminent philosophers such as Roger Crisp, Brad Hooker, David McNaughton and Piers Rawling. Call this theory ‘primary reason atomism’ (or PRA). Since its advancement, it has been met with lots of challenges, yet most, if not all, of these challenges remain unaddressed, insofar as I could see. This article will pick up the slack, and argues that none of its existing powerful criticisms works that can be derived from Swanton’s target-center view of the virtues, Stangl’s virtue variabilism, Dancy’s bottom-up holism, and coverage challenge, McKeever & Ridge, and Väyrynen’s double-counting objection, and Scanlon’s buck-passing account of values. This may not prove PRA to be right, but at least shows PRA to be a serious contender for the right theory of how moral reason behaves. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 61-62, July 2012.