The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK is currently facing a significant waiting list backlog following the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, with millions of patients waiting for elective surgical procedures. Effective treatment prioritisation has been identified as a key element of addressing this backlog, with NHS England's delivery plan highlighting the importance of ensuring that those with ‘the clinically most urgent conditions are diagnosed and treated most rapidly’. Indeed, we describe how the current clinical guidance on prioritisation issued (...) by The Federation of Surgical Specialty Associations serves this aim. However, whilst there are strong reasons to prioritise elective surgery in accordance with clinical need, we argue that it would be a mistake to assume that prioritisation in accordance with clinical need requires only a clinical or scientific judgement. The understanding of clinical need that we choose to employ in a prioritisation system will be grounded by some key ethical judgements. Moreover, we may also have to make trade-offs between addressing clinical need, safeguarding equality, and achieving other benefits. As the UK faces up to the backlog, it is important that surgical prioritisation guidelines enshrine a broad range of values that we believe ought to determine access to care in non-emergency circumstances. Our analysis suggests that the current approach to prioritisation is not a sufficiently nuanced way of balancing the different moral values that are operative in this context. (shrink)

The Uniqueness Thesis holds, roughly speaking, that there is a unique rational response to any particular body of evidence. We first sketch some varieties of Uniqueness that appear in the literature. We then discuss some popular views that conflict with Uniqueness and others that require Uniqueness to be true. We then examine some arguments that have been presented in its favor and discuss why permissivists find them unconvincing. Last, we present some purported counterexamples that have been raised against Uniqueness and (...) discuss some possible reasons why proponents of Uniqueness might find these similarly unconvincing. (shrink)

This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral responsibility.

In this essay, I present a straightforward counterexample to the Uniqueness Thesis, which holds, roughly speaking, that there is a unique rational response to any particular body of evidence.

Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made in public engagement with, and the democratization of, science and technology. Despite notable successes, such developments have often struggled to enhance public trust, avert crises of expertise and democracy, and build more socially responsive and responsible science and innovation. A central reason for this is that mainstream approaches to public engagement harbor what we call “residual realist” assumptions about participation and publics. Recent coproductionist accounts in science and technology studies offer (...) an alternative way of seeing participation as coproduced, relational, diverse, and emergent but have been somewhat reluctant to articulate what this means in practice. In this paper, we make this move by setting out a new framework of interrelating paths and associated criteria for remaking public participation with science and democracy in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory, and responsible ways. This framework comprises four paths to: forge reflexive participatory practices that attend to their framings, emergence, uncertainties, and effects; ecologize participation through attending to the interrelations between diverse public engagements in wider systems; catalyze practices of anticipatory reflection to bring about responsible democratic innovations; and reconstitute participation as constitutive of systems of technoscience and democracy. (shrink)

Recent research in ethics education shows a potentially problematic variation in content, curricular materials, and instruction. While ethics instruction is now widespread, studies have identified significant variation in both the goals and methods of ethics education, leaving researchers to conclude that many approaches may be inappropriately paired with goals that are unachievable. This paper speaks to these concerns by demonstrating the importance of aligning classroom-based assessments to clear ethical learning objectives in order to help students and instructors track their progress (...) toward meeting those objectives. Two studies at two different universities demonstrate the usefulness of classroom-based, formative assessments for improving the quality of students’ case responses in computational modeling and research ethics. (shrink)

Given that natural selection is so powerful at optimizing complex adaptations, why does it seem unable to eliminate genes (susceptibility alleles) that predispose to common, harmful, heritable mental disorders, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder? We assess three leading explanations for this apparent paradox from evolutionary genetic theory: (1) ancestral neutrality (susceptibility alleles were not harmful among ancestors), (2) balancing selection (susceptibility alleles sometimes increased fitness), and (3) polygenic mutation-selection balance (mental disorders reflect the inevitable mutational load on the thousands (...) of genes underlying human behavior). The first two explanations are commonly assumed in psychiatric genetics and Darwinian psychiatry, while mutation-selection has often been discounted. All three models can explain persistent genetic variance in some traits under some conditions, but the first two have serious problems in explaining human mental disorders. Ancestral neutrality fails to explain low mental disorder frequencies and requires implausibly small selection coefficients against mental disorders given the data on the reproductive costs and impairment of mental disorders. Balancing selection (including spatio-temporal variation in selection, heterozygote advantage, antagonistic pleiotropy, and frequency-dependent selection) tends to favor environmentally contingent adaptations (which would show no heritability) or high-frequency alleles (which psychiatric genetics would have already found). Only polygenic mutation-selection balance seems consistent with the data on mental disorder prevalence rates, fitness costs, the likely rarity of susceptibility alleles, and the increased risks of mental disorders with brain trauma, inbreeding, and paternal age. This evolutionary genetic framework for mental disorders has wide-ranging implications for psychology, psychiatry, behavior genetics, molecular genetics, and evolutionary approaches to studying human behavior. (Published Online November 9 2006) Key Words: adaptation; behavior genetics; Darwinian psychiatry; evolution; evolutionary genetics; evolutionary psychology; mental disorders; mutation-selection balance; psychiatric genetics; quantitative trait loci (QTL). (shrink)

This essay updates Aaron Smuts', 2009 Philosophy Compass piece, “Art and Negative Affect” in light of recent work on the topic. The “paradox of painful art” is the general problem of how it is possible to enjoy or value experiences of art that involve painful emotions. It encompasses both the paradox of tragedy and the paradox of horror. Section 2 lays out a taxonomy of solutions to the paradox of painful art and argues that we should opt for a pluralistic (...) approach rather than seeking a unified solution. Section 3 surveys recent work on the topic, with an emphasis on views holding that it is possible for an experience of art to be pleasant partly in virtue of involving painful emotion. Section 4 suggests a range of phenomena that are not usually considered under the umbrella of the paradox of painful art but that offer promising directions for further research. (shrink)

Game theorists tend to model climate negotiations as a so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’. This is rather worrisome, since the conditions under which such commons problems have historically been solved are almost entirely absent in the case of international greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, I will argue that the predictive accuracy of the tragedy model might not stem from the model’s inherent match with reality but rather from the model’s ability to make self-fulfilling predictions. I then sketch some possible (...) ways to dispel the tragedy, including (1) recognizing some ways the assumptions of the model fail, (2) taking seriously recent work suggesting that increasing greenhouse gas emissions is not in most nations’ own self-interest, and (3) preferring alternative models like collective risk dilemmas, bargaining games, or cooperative models. (shrink)

Although there once was a general consensus among race scholars that applying race categories to humans is biologically illegitimate, this consensus has been erased over the past decade. This is largely due to advances in population genetics that allow biologists to pick out genetic population clusters that approximate some of our common sense racial categories. In this paper, I argue that this new ability really ought not undermine our confidence in the biological illegitimacy of the human races. Unfortunately, the claim (...) that races are biologically legitimate is ambiguous—the sense I will be concerned with here holds that the human species can be divided into biological subspecies. Sesardic and Andreasen have both argued that the cluster results are evidence for subspecies within the human population. I show the cluster results are in fact evidentially inert relative to each author’s preferred subspecies concept. I then sketch the kinds of biological facts that could be used to adjudicate whether human subspecies have existed in the past. (shrink)

This article looks at the strong links between Deleuze's molecular ontology and the fields of complexity and emergence, and argues that Deleuze's work implies a ‘philosophy of technology’ that is both open and dynamic. Following Simondon and von Uexküll, Deleuze suggests that technical objects are ontologically unstable, and are produced by processes of individuation and self-organization in complex relations with their environment. For Deleuze design is not imposed from without, but emerges from within matter. The fundamental departure for Deleuze, on (...) the basis of such an ontology, is to conceive of modes of relating to the evolution of technology. In this way Deleuze, along with Guattari, provides the basis for an ethics and a politics of becoming and emergent control that constitutes an alternative to the hubris of contemporary reductionist accounts of new areas such as nanotechnology. (shrink)

Even though social scientists continue to discuss the problems posed by self-fulfilling and self-frustrating predictions, philosophers of science have ignored the topic since the 1970s. Back then, the prevailing view was that the methodological problems posed by reflexive predictions are either minor or easily avoided. I believe that this consensus was premature, ultimately relying on an overly narrow understanding of the phenomenon. I present an improved way to understand reflexive predictions (framed in probabilistic terms) and show that, once such predictions (...) are understood this way, the methodological problems they pose may turn out to be neither minor nor easily avoided. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.

What methodology should philosophers follow? Should they rely on methods that can be conducted from the armchair? Or should they leave the armchair and turn to the methods of the natural sciences, such as experiments in the laboratory? Or is this opposition itself a false one? Arguments about philosophical methodology are raging in the wake of a number of often conflicting currents, such as the growth of experimental philosophy, the resurgence of interest in metaphysical questions, and the use of formal (...) methods. This outstanding collection of specially-commissioned chapters by leading international philosophers discusses these questions and many more. It provides a comprehensive survey of philosophical methodology in the most important philosophical subjects: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, philosophy of science, ethics, and aesthetics. A key feature of the collection is that philosophers discuss and evaluate contrasting approaches in each subject, offering a superb overview of the variety of methodological approaches - both naturalistic and non-naturalistic - in each of these areas. They examine important topics at the heart of methodological argument, including the role of intuitions and conceptual analysis, thought experiments, introspection, and the place that results from the natural sciences should have in philosophical theorizing. The collection begins with a fascinating exchange about philosophical naturalism between Timothy Williamson and Alexander Rosenberg, and also includes contributions from the following philosophers: Lynne Rudder Baker, Matt Bedke, Greg Currie, Michael Devitt, Matthew C. Haug, Jenann Ismael, Hilary Kornblith, Neil Levy, E.J. Lowe, Kirk Ludwig, Marie McGinn, David Papineau, Matthew Ratcliffe, Georges Rey, Jeffrey W. Roland, Barry C. Smith, Amie L. Thomasson, Valerie Tiberius, Jessica Wilson, and David W. Smith. (shrink)

In “Deception and the Clinical Ethicist,” Christopher Meyers argues that clinical ethicists sometimes ought to actively help deceive patients or their families, all...

Recent discussions of culinary authenticity have focused on the problematic sociopolitical implications of Euro‐Americans seeking authenticity in food perceived as ethnic. This article seeks to rehabilitate the concept of culinary authenticity. First, the author relates the issue of culinary authenticity to other philosophical debates concerning authenticity, arguing that the concept of authenticity is value‐neutral. Second, a general theory of culinary authenticity making use of the theoretical apparatus of Kendall Walton's “Categories of Art” is developed and defended against objections. Third, a (...) variety of reasons that authenticity is valued are discussed, with an emphasis on aesthetic reasons. Ultimately, the author acknowledges that some ways of valuing culinary authenticity are objectionable but argues that this should not lead us to abandon our interest in authenticity altogether. (shrink)

Spinoza’s remarks on the exemplar or model of human nature, while few and brief, have far-reaching consequences for his ethics. While commentators have offered a variety of interpretations of the model and its implications, there has been near unanimous agreement on one point, that the identity of the model is the free man, described from E4P66S to E4P73. Since the free man is completely self-determining and, thus, perfectly free and rational, this reading indicates that Spinoza’s ethics sets exceptionally high goals, (...) aiming to make us purely active beings. While this conclusion has been embraced in some quarters—particularly by those who see his ethics as aiming to make us like God—it has also been criticized as intolerant of human weakness and vulnerability. Most work on this subject has been concerned to explain what it means for the free man to serve as the model. This is a difficult task, since Spinoza pointedly claims that it is impossible for human beings to become completely self-determining and, thus, free men. Consequently, it is unclear what implications his claims about the free man have for us, ordinary humans. This paper takes a different approach: I will show that reading the free man as the model of human nature, while intuitively appealing, does not stand up to close scrutiny. The argument for this claim has two prongs: the first asserts that there is not sufficient textual evidence to establish that Spinoza intended the free man to serve as the model; the second asserts that this reading is impossible to reconcile with Spinoza’s other philosophical commitments. In particular, Spinoza holds that we pursue the model of human nature, as well as the general ethical goals of attaining our good and perfection, under the guidance of reason. It would be inconsistent with this claim for Spinoza’s ethics to be founded upon attaining a goal that reason reveals as unattainable and, even, confused. In addition to this negative thesis, I will also defend a positive one: the model of human nature should rather be understood as representing the greatest possible perfection of our nature as it is revealed by reason. The free man meanwhile should be understood as working toward a different goal, determining what is good and bad in the emotions. In making this claim, we offer a very different picture of Spinoza’s ethical goals, for reason shows that our nature is conatus, which is a finite mode and, as such, necessarily determined by and passive with respect to other finite modes. Consequently, a model derived from reason will represent the perfection of this nature as passive to some extent. In this way, I provide a picture of Spinoza’s ethics that takes a more sympathetic view of human weakness and vulnerability. (shrink)

Collective effervescence plays a foundational role in the generation of society. Both the canonical explication of this concept, Émile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and current literature on the topic, are unable to distinguish between two plausible causes of effervescence: shared affiliation or collective action. This study reports a case of collective effervescence in which much of the assembled group had no prior affiliation. This finding proves that shared affiliation is not a necessary condition for effervescence, and supplies evidence (...) for the hypothesis that collective action, not shared affiliation per se, is the source of effervescence in general. The evidence is a detailed ethnographic and in-depth interview study of the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011. (shrink)

For several decades Rafael Capurro has been at the forefront of defining the relationship between information and modernity through both phenomenological and ethical formulations. In exploring both of these themes Capurro has re-vivified the transcultural and intercultural expressions of how we bring an understanding of information to bear on scientific knowledge production and intermediation. Capurro has long stressed the need to look deeply into how we contextualize the information problems that scientific society creates for us and to re-incorporate a pragmatic (...) dimension into our response that provides a balance to the cognitive turn in information science. -/- With contributions from 35 scholars from 15 countries, Information Cultures in the Digital Age focuses on the culture and philosophy of information, information ethics, the relationship of information to message, the historic and semiotic understanding of information, the relationship of information to power and the future of information education. This Festschrift seeks to celebrate Rafael Capurro’s important contribution to a global dialogue on how information conceptualisation, use and technology impact human culture and the ethical questions that arise from this dynamic relationship. (shrink)

Themes of mastery, domination and power are familiar to any scholar of modern technology. Science is commonly cast as enabling the technological control over both the natural and physical worlds. Indeed, Francis Bacon famously equated scientific knowledge with power itself—stating that ‘knowledge itself is a power’. Bacon’s now ubiquitous phrase—commonly repeated as the banal ‘knowledge is power’—was an attempt to combat three heresies in scriptural interpretation by asserting the conjunction between biblical knowledge and divine power. Opening his critique of the (...) heresies he states: ‘You err, not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God’. In this sense the equation made between knowledge and power is of cosmic significance for Bacon in that knowledge is fundamentally associated with divine power. This image of scientific knowledge, method and rationality is deeply seductive. In this Baconian mode scientific method is irreducibly associated with human mastery over natural systems and the material world. In this image science and technology are defined as a kind of power over the physical world—the power of knowledge, method and the logos over nature, myth and irrationality. In its original Latin sense—ipsa scientia potestas est—the word that translates in English as simply power is a in fact a specific type of power. Potestas is defined as ‘power over’—with particular resonances with political and juridical traditions in Roman law. That is, knowledge is equated not simply with personal capacity. Rather, knowledge produces the power of mastery, domination and coercion... (shrink)

In this paper, we respond to a critique by Erik Thorstensen of the ‘Deepening Ethical Engagement and Participation in Emerging Nanotechnologies’ project concerning its ‘realist’ treatment of narrative, its restricted analytical framework and resources, its apparent confusion in focus and its unjustified contextualisation and overextension of its findings. We show that these criticisms are based on fairly serious misunderstandings of the DEEPEN project, its interdisciplinary approachand its conceptual context. Having responded to Thorstensen’s criticisms, we take the opportunity to clarify and (...) develop our approach to narrative. We articulate the need for novel, theoretically robust approaches to the formation of public attitudes which transcend the limitations of both survey-based approaches—which remain wedded to methodological individualism and which presume that individuals hold distinct and relatively stable attitudes and preferences—and interactionist approaches to public talk, which focus too strongly on individuals-in-interaction as reasoning agents and which ignore the constitutive role of culture and discourse in the formation of public opinion. We suggest that our use of narrative can help to better understand the process through which public attitudes to emerging technology develop out of interactive an engagement with wider cultural arguments and accounts of science and technology. We finish by pointing to parallel developments in social thought—from Charles Taylor’s treatment of social imaginaries to recent developments in post-Bourdieuian cultural sociology—as related projects in understanding the cultural resources and grammars that provide the conceptual infrastructure for modern social life. (shrink)

Embedding ethics modules within computer science courses has become a popular response to the growing recognition that CS programs need to better equip their students to navigate the ethical dimensions of computing technologies like AI, machine learning, and big data analytics. However, the popularity of this approach has outpaced the evidence of its positive outcomes. To help close that gap, this empirical study reports positive results from Northeastern’s program that embeds values analysis modules into CS courses. The resulting data suggest (...) that such modules have a positive effect on students’ moral attitudes and that students leave the modules believing they are more prepared to navigate the ethical dimensions they’ll likely face in their eventual careers. Importantly, these gains were accomplished at an institution without a philosophy doctoral program, suggesting this strategy can be effectively employed by a wider range of institutions than many have thought. (shrink)

The jumping off point for this paper is a metaphysical puzzle for this view and for any relational theory of autonomy. Most of the time, our relationships with others are reciprocal in the sense that they involve activity and passivity, acting on others and being acted on by them. Consequently, claiming that our relationships with others are constitutive of our autonomy implies that being passively affected is also constitutive of our autonomy. But this seems problematic, perhaps even contradictory, because autonomy (...) is equivalent to self-determination, which is a kind of activity: how can being passively affected be constitutive of our self-determination and activity? In Spinoza, the difficulty arises in his theory of striving. Spinoza’s view that relationships are constitutive of our freedom and autonomy implies that our relationships—and being passively affected in these relationships—are constitutive of our striving, in which our freedom and autonomy consist. But how can passivity be constitutive of our striving, which is a kind of activity? -/- To resolve the apparent paradox, I look to the Aristotelian notion that the natures of things make them subject or susceptible to undergoing certain kinds of change. For instance, water, because of its nature, is susceptible to boiling, rather than burning. This implies that a passive or exogenous change—for instance, fire causing the water to boil—is brought about partly from the nature and activity of the patient: the water is active in the sense of determining it to boil, rather than burn. This way of thinking implies that changes arise cooperatively from both internal and external sources, which eliminates the apparent contradiction in claiming that change can be both active and passive. The paper shows that Spinoza’s theory of striving shares the gist of this Aristotelian commitment by claiming that our nature is active in determining us to certain effects, even when the effects originate externally. Consequently, like Aristotle, Spinoza does not see passivity and activity as mutually exclusive, which eliminates the apparent paradox. The paper concludes by considering how this more Aristotelian conception of activity is amenable to relational theories of autonomy. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of new research on moral thinking informed by evolutionary theory. The new findings have emanated from a wide variety of fields. While there is no shortage of theoretical models that attempt to account for specific research findings, Matthew Keefer's goals in this essay are more general. First, he examines the strength of the evolutionary approach to understanding morality and moral emotions as adaptations to cooperation. Second, he considers the importance of unconscious (...) processing for generating ethical (or unethical) behavior and the complex relation among moral emotions, intuitions, and conscious moral reasoning. Third, he underscores the importance of understanding self-deception and self-serving biases in moral thinking and behavior. Keefer ends the essay with a discussion of some implications of these considerations for professional ethics and moral education. (shrink)

We present evidence for the existence of ‘responsibility voids’ in committee decision-making, that is, the existence of situations where no member of a committee can individually be held morally responsible for the outcome. We analyse three types of reasons (causal, normative and epistemic) for the emergence of responsibility voids, and show that each of them can occur in committees. But the conditions for these voids are so restrictive as to reduce the philosophical or institutional significance they might be thought to (...) possess. (shrink)

While it is often supposed that Spinoza understood a life of virtue as one of pure activity, with as few passions as possible, this paper aims to make explicit how the passions for Spinoza contribute positively to our virtue. This requires, first, explaining how a passion can increase our power, given Spinoza’s view on the passions generally, which, in turn, requires coming to terms with the problem of passive pleasure, that is, the problem of explaining how being passive can cause (...) an increase in our power. In brief, this paper will argue that, for Spinoza, even when we are passive, we are somewhat active or, in Spinoza’s language, “adequate” to varying degrees. The passions represent activity because they exercise our understanding by providing us with intelligence about external bodies and our own bodies, in particular, the degree of our bodies’ perfection. It follows that a passion can be sufficiently adequate to bring about an increase in one’s power; in this sense, they can be virtuous. Moreover, this paper will show that the passions can also be virtuous in a moral sense. The view goes roughly as follows: according to Spinoza, the passions serve as a measure of our perfection. Consequently, they play a necessary role in moral reasoning, by indicating which activities increase or hinder our virtue. On this view, a truly virtuous person would require the passions in order to engage consistently in the sorts of activities which increase her power, in particular, following reason. Since this sort of consistency in behavior is necessary for a virtuous character, the passions can be virtuous in the sense that they are necessary aspects of the sort of character which disposes us to act according to reason. (shrink)

Web-based access to engaging instructional materials for SEE instruction represents an increasingly viable and attractive opportunity for educators. This paper will review research findings that demonstrate important differences in more experienced and novice ethical responses to engaging online materials, including authentic cases, codes, and commentaries. Results demonstrate that experienced ethical thinkers are more likely than novices to appeal to middle level principles that identify professional role-specific obligations (RSO); to make greater use of professional knowledge in order to recognize moral issues (...) and relevant facts; and to employ more ‘contextually sensitive’ reasoning strategies when crafting resolutions to moral problems — e.g., identify alternative moral issues, assess the moral implications of actions, and provide alternative practical resolutions to conflicts. These findings suggest that when effectively integrated into SEE courses, authentic instructional materials have the potential to effectively challenge students and enhance student learning. however, there is evidence that the uses and benefits of these materials are not well understood. In the second part of this paper, five research-based instructional principles will be identified and discussed that can help SEE instructors better understand how to effectively integrate these materials into their courses. (shrink)

In the mathematics education research literature, there is a growing body of scholarship on how mathematicians practice their craft. The purpose of this chapter is to survey some of this literature and explain how it can contribute to the philosophy of mathematical practice. We first describe how mathematics educators use empirical methodologies to investigate the behaviors of mathematicians and argue that findings from these studies can inform the philosophy of mathematical practice. We then illustrate this by summarizing research on mathematicians’ (...) understandings and mathematicians’ proof reading. (shrink)

The distinction between killing and letting die is too simple. A third category must also be recognized. Like killing, preventing a person from being saved is a species of doing harm; like killing, it infringes one of the victim's negative rights. Yet preventing a person from being saved is morally on a par with letting die, which infringes one of the victim's positive rights. It follows that we cannot explain the moral inequivalence of killing and letting die by saying, as (...) so many have, that negative rights are more stringent than positive rights. A more promising strategy is suggested at the end of the article. (shrink)

Amid the unrest, dislocation, and uncertainty of seventeenth-century Europe, readers seeking consolation and assurance turned to philosophical and scientific books that offered ways of conquering fears and training the mind—guidance for living a good life. _The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution_ presents a triptych showing how three key early modern scientists, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz, envisioned their new work as useful for cultivating virtue and for pursuing a good life. Their scientific and philosophical innovations stemmed in (...) part from their understanding of mathematics and science as cognitive and spiritual exercises that could create a truer mental and spiritual nobility. In portraying the rich contexts surrounding Descartes’ geometry, Pascal’s arithmetical triangle, and Leibniz’s calculus, Matthew L. Jones argues that this drive for moral therapeutics guided important developments of early modern philosophy and the Scientific Revolution. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics X.5, Aristotle gives a series of arguments for the claim that pleasures differ from one another in kind in accordance with the differences in kind among the activities they arise in connection with. I develop an interpretation of these arguments based on an interpretation of his theory of pleasure (which I have defended elsewhere) according to which pleasure is the perfection of perfect activity. In the course of developing this interpretation, I reconstruct Aristotle’s phenomenology of pleasure, arguing (...) that while he denies that all pleasures share any given phenomenal element, he does think that all pleasures have a common phenomenal structure. Finally, I argue that Aristotle’s view that pleasures differ in kind does not imply that they cannot be compared in pleasantness. (shrink)

This article presents a critical examination of Igor Soikhedbrod’s Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights. We argue that the book presents an important criticism of antinomian forms of critical theory, which underplay the extent to which Marx engaged in an imminent critique of liberal societies, including the rule of law, and upheld that progressive advances enshrined in this rule should be carried over or sublated in a communist dispensation.

This article examines the rhetorical deployment of Darwinian natural selection by the Jewish social philosopher Horace M. Kallen, in what is now widely regarded as the first articulation of cultural pluralism, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot”. My analysis proceeds in two steps. First, I identify specific strategies by means of which Kallen endeavored to insert his ideas more deeply into national discourse. I also trace reactions to his essay in the Jewish press, and argue that these indicate ongoing conversations concerning Kallen's (...) ideas, and they also reveal how he was reinterpreted for different reading audiences. Second, I argue that Kallen's strategy was to stress the survival value of cooperation rather than competition in natural selection, and he believed that this view supported both the natural biological inclinations of social groups and reflected American democratic values. Kallen's intervention serves as a striking example of how Darwinian natural selection was deployed to support Jewish participation in American life. (shrink)

This intelligent and often subtle introduction to rationalist metaphysics focuses on the development of the concept of substance in Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. After briefly reviewing the Aristotelian background in the introduction, Woolhouse spends the first three chapters presenting the broad outlines of each thinker’s account of substance. These are followed by three chapters devoted more specifically to the metaphysics of extended substance and to foundational issues in early modern physics. Next come two chapters on thinking substance and its relation (...) to extended substance, and finally a chapter on the relation between created and uncreated substance, which Woolhouse describes as "an organizing centre of the whole book". (shrink)

In this book Nicholas Wolterstorff, a well-known proponent of “Reformed epistemology,” sets out to investigate the modern origins of the evidentialist and foundationalist tradition that he opposes. He locates these origins in book 4 of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Wolterstorff tells us that he had to overcome strong prejudices in writing the book, for “in the philosophical world I inhabit, Locke has the reputation of being boringly chatty and philosophically careless”. He suggests that the earlier parts of the Essay (...) deserve that reputation, but says that while reading book 4 he felt himself to be “present at the making of the modern mind”. To Wolterstorff’s credit, he seems to have vanquished some of his prejudices, for this book offers careful and charitable readings of many important strands in Locke’s epistemology. (shrink)

Spinoza’s ethical claims rest on a basic set of concepts that he regards as kinds of activity: striving, power, virtue, freedom, perfection, among others. Steven Nadler articulates a standard way of thinking about the relationship between these activity concepts: “a number of terms in Spinoza are co-extensive and refer to the same ideal human condition. We can set up the following equation for Spinoza: virtue = knowledge = activity = freedom = power = perfection. Necessarily, the more virtuous a person (...) is, the more knowledge he has, the more free, active and powerful he is, and the more he has achieved of human perfection.” This paper counters that Spinoza’s various notions of activity are not coextensive and do not refer to the same thing. In particular, Spinoza employs two basic notions of activity: striving and being an adequate cause. While these notions of activity are closely connected, they are not coextensive because a thing can strive without being an adequate cause of an effect. I defend that Spinoza’s various other activity concepts—virtue, perfection, reason and so forth—are pegged to one of these two basic notions of activity, so that Spinoza’s activity concepts are bifurcated into two categories, which are not coextensive with one another. Indeed, the members of each category may not be coextensive with one another. -/- Because these basic activity concepts play a fundamental role in Spinoza’s philosophical claims, this thesis has far-reaching implications. Most notably, the standard way of thinking mentioned above indicates that Spinoza’s basic ethical concepts, such as freedom and virtue, are coextensive with being an adequate cause. Since an adequate cause is the sole cause of some effect, this reading implies that freedom and virtue amount to being a sole cause and, thus, to being causally independent and self-sufficient. I argue, in contrast, that human freedom and virtue are coextensive with striving, which does not require causal independence. On this reading, human freedom and virtue can include instances of causal dependence, which implies that Spinoza’s ethics takes a more favorable view of human dependence, passivity and cooperation. (shrink)

Previous findings indicate that negative arousal enhances bottom-up attention biases favouring perceptual salient stimuli over less salient stimuli. The current study tests whether those effects were driven by emotional arousal or by negative valence by comparing how well participants could identify visually presented letters after hearing either a negative arousing, positive arousing or neutral sound. On each trial, some letters were presented in a high contrast font and some in a low contrast font, creating a set of targets that differed (...) in perceptual salience. Sounds rated as more emotionally arousing led to more identification of highly salient letters but not of less salient letters, whereas sounds’ valence ratings did not impact salience biases. Thus, arousal, rather than valence, is a key factor enhancing visual processing of perceptually salient targets. (shrink)

Melancholia is a commonly experienced feeling, and one with a long and fascinating medical history which can be charted back to antiquity. Avoiding the simplistic binary opposition of constructivism and hard realism, this book argues that melancholia was a culture-bound syndrome which thrived in the West because of the structure of Western medicine since the Ancient Greeks, and because of the West's fascination with self-consciousness. While melancholia cannot be equated with modern depression, Matthew Bell argues that concepts from recent (...) depression research can shed light on melancholia. Within a broad historical panorama, Bell focuses on ancient medical writing, especially the little-known but pivotal Rufus of Ephesus, and on the medicine and culture of early modern Europe. Separate chapters are dedicated to issues of gender and cultural difference, and the final chapter offers a survey of melancholia in the arts, explaining the prominence of melancholia - especially in literature. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Descartes’s view on the passions’ moral value, that is, their value with respect to achieving the ethical ends of virtue and happiness. In this regard, there is no question that the passions possess a kind of conative value because of their power to move or incline us in ways that contribute to ethical ends. This paper’s question is whether the passions also contribute to ethical ends in a cognitive sense by informing us of the moral (...) value of things, in other words, telling us whether things are good or bad with respect to the ends of virtue and happiness. The answer to this question is less clear for two reasons. Firstly, in order for the passions to inform us in this way they would have to be the sort of mental state that purports to tell us the way things are, in other words, that contain some sort of presentation or assessment of things. To borrow language from present day philosophy of mind, they would have to be contentful mental states. But this way of thinking about the passions is opposed by a long tradition, running from Descartes’s contemporaries to today, that regards Cartesian passions as purely conative or appetitive movements, along the lines of Thomistic passions. Secondly, even if the passions are contentful, it is not clear whether their contents accurately report the value of things with respect to ethical goals. Descartes frequently warns that the passions provide unreliable ethical guidance because they report on good and evil with respect to more bodily and animalistic aims: bodily health, self-preservation and the continuation of the species In taking up this question, I am guided by the work of Cambridge Platonist, Henry More. More offered a positive assessment of Descartes’s theory of the passions, which served as the basis for More’s ethical theory in the Enchiridion Ethicum. More’s astute reading of Descartes is useful to my investigation both because he reads the Cartesian passions as contentful mental states and because he uses this reading to explain their accuracy and reliability with respect to virtue. Following More's interpretation, I argue that Descartes recognizes a category of passions—including, most notably, the passion of generosity and the passions following from it—that are more ethically reliable and that serve roughly the same ethical functions as the affections of More's boniform faculty. (shrink)

Current literature suggests that corporate social responsibility (CSR) can affect consumers’ attitudes towards an organization and is regarded as a driver for reputation-building and fostering sustained consumer patronage. Although prior research has addressed the direct influence of CSR on consumer responses, this research examined the mediating influence of consumer’s perceived organizational motives within an NGO setting. Given the heightened public attention surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, data were collected from consumers of the Games to assess their perceptions of the (...) International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) socially responsible initiatives. We hypothesized that consumers of the Games were likely to cognitively elaborate on CSR messages by way of three specific attribution effects derived from the literature. The results show that, contingent on CSR awareness, consumers responded positively to social efforts judged to be values-driven and stakeholder-driven; and a negative response was seen for efforts judged to be strategic. These attribution effects influenced various types of patronage and perceived organizational reputation. (shrink)

A wealth of research in social psychology indicates that various ethically arbitrary situational factors exert a surprisingly powerful influence on moral conduct. Empirically-minded philosophers have argued over the last two decades that this evidence challenges Aristotelian virtue ethics. John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt have argued that situationist moral psychology – as opposed to Aristotelian moral psychology – is better suited to the practical aim of helping agents act better. The Aristotelian account, with its emphasis on individual factors, invites (...) too much risk of morally bad conduct insofar as it ignores the power of situational factors which lead us astray. Moral agents are often better off detecting and intervening on situational factors to help themselves act better. This paper offers an argument against the claim that situationism enjoys practical advantages over Aristotelian virtue ethics. There is empirical evidence suggesting that people can improve their behavior via Aristotelian strategies of deliberate self-improvement. This evidence also suggests that focusing our ethical attention on morally trivial factors may result in worse overall conduct. Accordingly, Aristotelianism may fare better than situationism on the practical issue of moral improvement. (shrink)