(No abstract is available for this citation).

Paul Bloomfield’s latest book, The Virtues of Happiness, is an excellent discussion of what constitutes living the Good Life. It is a self-admittedly ambitious book, as he seeks to show that people who act immorally necessarily fall short of living well. Instead of arguing that immorality is inherently irrational, he puts it in terms of it being inherently harmful in regards to one’s ability to achieve the Good Life. It’s ambitious because he tries to argue this starting from grounds which (...) the immoralist (usually an egoist) would accept. He starts from premises about our desire to be happy, and how happiness is inconsistent with a lack of self-respect, which he claims are premises even an egoist would accept. His key argument is then that self-respect is tied to one’s respect for others, so that being happy is therefore inconsistent with a disrespect for others. He then goes on to argue about the necessity of virtue for truly being as happy as we can be. -/- Bloomfield’s book is an interesting synthesis of the traditional Greek focus on eudaimonia (i.e. living well) with the Kantian concern of a respect for persons. I found myself in agreement with much of what he had to say, making this review a bit challenging. Nevertheless, I will endeavor to point out areas where, despite my agreement on his conclusions, I think his arguments could be challenged and would require further support. (shrink)

Ordinary morality judges agents blameworthy for negligently produced harms. In this paper I offer two main reasons for thinking that explaining just how negligent agents are responsible for the harms they produce is more problematic than one might think. First, I show that negligent conduct is characterized by the lack of conscious control over the harm, which conflicts with the ordinary view that responsibility for something requires at least some conscious control over it. Second, I argue that negligence is relevantly (...) indistinguishable from inadvertence, which is ordinarily thought to excuse agents from responsibility. I argue that the parallels between negligence and inadvertence suggest that negligent agents are not responsible for the harms they produce, while proposing an alternative model for distinguishing between negligence and inadvertence that does justice to our intuitions. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to raise a question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. Our question has rarely been raised previously. Among those who believe in the reality of human freedom, compatibilists have traditionally devoted their energies to providing an account that can avoid any commitment to the falsity of determinism while successfully accommodating a range of intuitive examples. Libertarians, in contrast, have aimed to (...) show that either physical indeterminacy or a certain kind of agent causation can find a place in the world for what they take to be genuine freedom. Few have considered whether moral responsibility requires a commitment to conscious attitudes.2 Our question derives from a confluence of two sources. First, there is reason to think that conscious attitudes matter to theories of responsibility, either directly, as a result of the latter’s commitments, or indirectly, by virtue of the assumptions that they make about certain intuitive examples. Second, there is accumulating evidence suggesting that there aren’t any conscious mental states possessing the sorts of causal roles required of propositional attitudes. Since theorists of responsibility should in general be concerned to make their views compatible with plausible claims about the natural world, the implications of this data should be carefully considered. Our aim is therefore to motivate and begin exploring answers to the following conditional question: If it should turn out that there are no conscious attitudes, then what would be the implications of this fact (if any) for theories of responsibility? We propose that theorists who aren’t skeptics about moral responsibility should examine their accounts, asking whether their theories (or the examples that motivate them) could survive the discovery that there are no conscious judgments, decisions, or evaluations. Since we take it that moral theorizing in general should operate with the weakest possible empirical assumptions about the natural world, such theorists should consider whether their accounts could be motivated in such a way as to be free of any commitment to the existence of conscious attitudes.. (shrink)

In the contemporary moral responsibility debate, most theorists seem to be giving accounts of responsibility in the ‘desert-entailing sense’. Despite this agreement, little has been said about the notion of desert that is supposedly entailed. In this paper I propose an understanding of desert sufficient to help explain why the blameworthy and praiseworthy deserve blame and praise, respectively. I do so by drawing upon what might seem an unusual resource. I appeal to so-called Fitting-Attitude accounts of value to help inform (...) a conception of desert or merit, one that can be usefully applied to discussions of moral responsibility. I argue that the view, which I call, Desert as Fittingness (DAF), merits additional attention. I do so by making two claims: First, that it does better than extant Fitting Attitude accounts of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness; second, that it has an initial plausibility with respect to informing a general account of desert. While these reasons are insufficient to show the view is true, they do make the case for taking the view seriously. (shrink)

There are two broadly competing pictures of moral responsibility. On the view I favor, to be responsible for some action is to be related to it in such a way that licenses attributing certain properties to the agent, properties like blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Responsibility is attributability. A different view understands being responsible in terms of our practices of holding each other responsible. Responsibility is accountability, which “involves a social setting in which we demand (require) certain conduct from one another and (...) respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson, Philos Top 24:227–248, 1996). My concern here is the relation between moral responsibility and desert. Plausibly, if someone is morally responsible for something wrong then they deserve blame, and it is on the basis of them being morally responsible and its being wrong that they deserve blame. In this paper, I try to make progress toward understanding why it would follow that being morally responsible for something supports a desert claim. I propose to do this by exploring how the “two faces” of responsibility should proceed. An important upshot is that we gain a new currency by which to evaluate extant theories of responsibility that might favor one or the other conception: do they carry plausible desert commitments? To illustrate this benefit, I argue that accountability theory carries implausible implications for deserved praise. (shrink)

This review essay discusses Matt King’s recent book Simply Responsible, in which he defends a unifying account of responsibility that spans not only moral responsibility, but also prudential and epistemic responsibility, among other forms. The first half of the essay summarizes the three key elements of King’s account--his treatment of basic responsibility, basic blame, and basic desert--while the second half takes a more critical look at each element.

How exactly do mental disorders affect one’s agency? How might therapeutic interventions help patients regain or improve their autonomy? Do only some disorders excuse morally inappropriate behavior, such as theft or child neglect? Or is there nothing about having a disorder, as such, that affects whether we ought to praise or blame someone for their moral success or failure? Our volume gathers together empirically-informed philosophers who are well equipped to tackle such questions. Contributors specialize in free will, agency, and responsibility, (...) but they are informed by current scientific and clinical approaches to a wide range of psychopathologies, including autism, addiction, Tourette syndrome, personality disorders, depression, dementia, phobias, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. These conditions exhibit a diverse array of symptoms that can contribute quite differently to being blameworthy or praiseworthy. (shrink)

Manipulation arguments have become almost a cottage industry in the moral responsibility literature. These cases are used for a variety of purposes, familiarly to undermine some proffered set of conditions on responsibility, usually compatibilist conditions. The basic idea is to conceive of a case which intuitively includes responsibility-undermining manipulation but which meets the target account’s set of sufficient conditions on responsibility. The manipulation thereby serves as a counterexample to the target theory. More specifically, recent concern with manipulation cases has often (...) been part of an argument for historical conditions on moral responsibility. Exercising control over an action is not necessarily enough to be responsible for it, one must have come to exercise that control in a non-deviant way. Manipulation cases are meant to illustrate how an agent can exercise the supposed sufficient control over an action, and yet intuitively fail to be responsible as a result of some manipulation. The argument concludes that manipulation of this sort must then be ruled out by one’s conditions on responsibility. Accounts that fail to rule out such manipulation are objectionable as a result. Manipulation arguments usually fit a general schema.1 One presents a case intuitively involving responsibility-undermining manipulation, but where all the conditions of the target account are met. Then one argues that there is no relevant difference between that case and ordinary action under the target account. Thus, one can conclude, the target account gets the wrong verdict for manipulation cases. Some variations on this schema seek a slightly grander conclusion. For example, some incompatibilists argue from the manipulation case through a principle that claims there to be no relevant difference between such a case and ordinary action in a deterministic universe. Thus, the conclusion reached is that if determinism is true, all responsibility is undermined. (shrink)

IN THIS PAPER, I observe a set of symmetries exposed by examining cases of excused blameworthiness and mitigated praiseworthiness, and argue that a prominent contemporary approach to explaining moral responsibility is ill-suited to explaining why the symmetry obtains. The view I have in mind has a distinctive explanatory strategy: an agent S’s being responsible, on this view, is to be explained in terms of the appropriateness of holding S responsible. This explanatory strategy, whatever its other merits, cannot adequately explain the (...) symmetry. In light of my arguments here, this view faces a challenge: it can either give up its distinctive explanatory strategy, or else fail to capture the symmetry. While failure to accommodate the symmetrical observation is not grounds for rejecting this view, it does count as a significant cost, one that ought to be recognized and addressed. (shrink)

Review of Tamler Sommers's book, Relative Justice.

This paper is an assessment of the conclusion that negligent agents are not morally responsible for the damages they cause, reached by Matt King in “The Problem with Negligence”. King’s argument involves two difficult issues that are often disregarded in discussions about moral responsibility. One is that it is not clear why we usually attribute responsibility in cases of negligence but not in cases of inadvertence even though both phenomena are characterized by the absence of conscious mental (...) elements. The other is that any explanation of the responsibility attributed in cases of negligence and in paradigmatic cases should shed light on the features that both cases share. I will review these issues involved in King’s argument in order to avoid his conclusion and to clarify some important matters of our attribution of responsibility in cases of negligence and in cases of inadvertence. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide an overview of our ongoing project in the Genetics and Human Agency Initiative sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. Our project focuses on the ways that lay beliefs about the heritability of virtue influence reasoning about the nature of virtue, parenting behaviors, and the development of virtue in children. First, we provide philosophical perspectives on the nature of virtue and suggest that viewing virtue as a malleable skill may have important advantages. Next, we review (...) theory and research that highlights the ways that lay heritability beliefs potentially undermine conceptualizations of virtue as a malleable skill. Finally, we discuss how lay heritability beliefs might ultimately affect parent–child interactions and child virtue development. The paper thus provides a brief description our project’s theoretical foundation and a general look at the empirical questions it will tackle. (shrink)

Background. In some organisations, traumatic events via direct or indirect exposure are routine experiences. A NICE review (2005; updated in December 2018) of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) management in primary and secondary care did not address early interventions for trauma in emergency response organisations. Aims. This scoping review was designed to identify previous research which evaluated the use of early interventions following exposure to primary or secondary trauma, to report on the effectiveness of early interventions models. Method. A (...) scoping review was conducted to examine early interventions for trauma with staff in roles potentially exposed to trauma including: emergency response, military and humanitarian aid. Relevant data was extracted from included studies and outcomes were assessed using meta-ethnography. Results. Fifty studies of mixed quality met the inclusion criteria for this review. Synthesis of study outcomes found that early interventions help emergency responders to manage post-incident trauma when they: are delivered in a manner that respects distinct organisational culture; are supported by organisations and senior management, and; harness existing social cohesion and peer support systems within teams. Conclusions. This review demonstrates that early interventions support emergency responders following exposure to trauma when: tailored to the needs of the population, are supported by the host organisation, and harness existing social cohesion and peer support processes within a team or unit. We identify a number of recommendations for the delivery and evaluation of early interventions for psychological trauma in emergency response organisations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis by Karen Silvia de León-JonesMatt GoldishKaren Silvia de León-Jones. Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis (Yale Studies in Hermeneutics). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Pp. ix + 272. Cloth, $40.00.Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition has become a standard work for the study of Renaissance thought, and it is through her interpretation of (...) Bruno in the tradition of Hermeticism and Lullism that he is generally understood by non-specialists. Karen Silvia de León-Jones proclaims her goal in the present volume to be a new reading of Bruno as a thinker far more affected by Kabbalah than Yates believed, and she expresses herself very sharply against many of Yates’ positions (e.g., 18–23).The book has appropriately been placed in a series on hermeneutics. It is essentially a detailed interpretation of Bruno’s dialogue La cabala del cavallopegaseo, along with two other related dialogues, Lo spaccio della bestia trionjante and De gli eroici furori. The non-specialist reader is not offered a clear introduction to the structure and content of these dialogues or an explanation of how they fit into Bruno’s thought and the larger Renaissance context. This is not to say that de León-Jones does not introduce her material at all, but the choppy prose and lack of overview, particularly in the early chapters of the book, lend it a certain amount of Bruno’s own famous obscurity for those not already conversant with Bruno’s oeuvre.I am not in a position to say whether de León-Jones interprets Bruno’s thought correctly, but I will comment on her approach to Kabbalah and its significance in Bruno’s thought. She makes clear that the Kabbalah “practiced” by Bruno is not identical with Jewish Kabbalah; it is rather what I would call “Cabala,” a group of hermeneutical and mystical techniques based loosely on Jewish Kabbalah, which was used by Renaissance and Baroque Christians. The author nicely defines the theurgic Kabbalah as absorbed by Christian savants: the study of the secret names of God, manipulation of [End Page 675] the Hebrew alphabet and numbers by gematria, temurah and notankon, and meditation on the sephiroth (10).In Bruno’s idiosyncratic theology, or “Cabala-teologia-filosofia” as it is described, Kabbalah has more specific significances. Kabbalah teaches the goal of prophecy and unio mystica; transmigration of souls; the image of God’s relationship to the world through the tree of the sephiroth (he especially emphasizes Hokhmah); the Mors osculi; and manipulation of the divine efflux. Bruno thinks of all Jewish sages who are not pedantic Talmudists as kabbalists, beginning with Moses and Solomon. Biblical wisdom too is Kabbalah. De León-Jones is therefore correct in saying that “Bruno is not a Kabbalist in the strictest sense of [the] word, but instead the example of Renaissance syncretism at its most extreme: in reality Bruno is Bruno; he proselytizes his own philosophy” (181). Going though the book one finds that Kabbalah, or Cabala, which the Nolan clearly learned mainly from Agrippa (as Yates stated), was simply another literature of the prisca sapientia to be manipulated, along with Hermetic writings, Plato, the Bible and many others, as “support” for his own system of thought. Syncretism is indeed the key here, and while de León-Jones is undoubtedly correct that Bruno used kabbalistic hermeneutics and symbols along with everything else in his satchel, I question whether it is meaningful to speak of Bruno and the Kabbalah in the normal sense of the term.After the author so roundly reproves Dame Yates for various errors, including her alleged narrowness in understanding Kabbalah, it is surprising to find that de León-Jones herself makes numerous mistakes when she talks about the Jewish Kabbalah. Over the course of four pages (12–15) for example, she errs with all the following. She says Yohanan Alemanno “was not a practitioner of Kabbalah but knew it well” (he was one of the great Renaissance Jewish kabbalists); that Pico learned Hebrew from Flavius Mithridates then translated and widely circulated Abulafian... (shrink)

Central to the apocalyptic imaginary is the notion that history has some sort of purpose, or that it provides a perspective from which we can authenticate or redeem our human activities. As such, one might reasonably expect that realists would view such apocalypticism as precisely the sort of moralisation that they urge us to be deeply suspicious of. Yet in Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times Alison McQueen argues not only that the relationship between realism and apocalyptic visions is much more (...) complex and nuanced than we might initially suspect, by exploring how it played out in the work of canonical figures in the realist tradition, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Hans J Morgenthau, but also that, at a time when we live in the shadow of several possible global disasters, realist thought might offer us something in the way of instruction ‘in living through an age of catastrophe’. While McQueen is admirably honest as to the limitations of the realist approaches in the thinkers she focuses on, this review suggests that there may be good reason to be even less enthusiastic about their prospects. (shrink)

I can be aware of myself, and thereby come to know things about myself, in a variety of different ways. But is there some special way in which I—and only I—can learn about myself? Can I become aware of myself by introspecting? Do I somehow show up in my own conscious experiences? David Hume and most contemporary philosophers say no. They deny that the self shows up in experience. However, in this paper I appeal to research on schizophrenia—on thought insertion, (...) in particular—to argue that Hume and his follows are wrong: The self does, in fact, show up in experience. (shrink)

Darwin’s Conjecture is a bold attempt to bring evolutionary explanation to the social sciences, particularly economics. The book outlines the history of Darwinian explanation in social science then puts forward a generalized replicator account of social evolution by natural selection. The authors identify habits and routines as examples of the generative replicators necessary in order that social evolution is Darwinian. This reviewer notes that the replicator approach limits the generality of this account and suggests that habits and routines might better (...) be seen as members of a Darwinian population in the tradition of Godfrey-Smith’s (2009) generalized account of natural selection instead. Furthermore, the existence of levels of social evolution will constrain what evolution can occur low in the hierarchy. (shrink)

The acquisition of virtue can be conceptualized as a self-regulatory process in which deliberate practice results in increasingly higher levels of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life. This conceptualization resonates with philosophical virtue theories as much as it converges with psychological models about skill development, expertise, goal motivation, and self-regulation. Yet, the conceptualization of virtue as skill acquisition poses the crucial question of motivation: What motivates individuals to self-improvement over time so that they can learn from past experience, correct mistakes, (...) and expand their ethical knowledge to new and unfamiliar circumstances? In this paper, it is argued that the motivation to increase one’s level of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life is supported by a specific identity goal, namely the goal to be a moral person. However, this moral identity goal needs to carry specific goal characteristics in order to effectively provide this motivation. It needs to be sufficiently abstract, internally motivated and promotion- rather than prevention-oriented. Research in developmental psychology suggests that the moral identity of children is rather concrete, externally motivated, and prevention-oriented. With development, higher levels of abstraction, internal motivation, and promotion-orientation gain importance providing an important motivational basis for a self-regulated process of virtue acquisition. (shrink)

As we witness the collapse of the neoliberal consensus and the subsequent rise of authoritarian ‘strong men’ and xenophobic nationalisms across the globe, the capitalist hegemony that was consolidated by the neoliberal project remains very much intact. In pursuit of a sane alternative to this post-neoliberal world order this article proposes love as a key concept for political theory/philosophy and for performing a central role in the revolutionary transformation of contemporary global capitalism. Through a close reading of the works of (...) Emma Goldman and Michael Hardt, and specifically their own pursuit of a political concept of love—I draw on, and make links with contemporary ideas of love as a political concept for radical social transformation in the twenty-first century. I argue that new love-based political subjectivities, practices, and group formations offer exciting opportunities for a reimagining of the frame within which an alter-globalisation can occur, and link theory to praxis by introducing an ongoing Collective Visioning project which illuminates a new post-capitalist, post-patriarchal, post-colonial and post-anthropocentric synergetic politics grounded in revolutionary love. (shrink)

You may challenge this. You may say that after all scientists need gadgets. They need cyclotrons and space probes, telescopes and microscopes. They need the mechanical skills to make them work. The other day I heard a talk by a novelist who remarked that maybe you don't need to have a poignant love affair to be a writer, but it helps. I take this to mean that writers as well as scientists need data, which implies the equipment and skills for (...) its perception; but this need imply no more than the very basic human endowment. I happen to be a geologist and get a good deal of my data wandering "... lonely as a cloud o'er vales and hills," which also appears to have some poetic value. Still, there seems to be a difference. Are poignant love affairs, which inform the poetic imagination, merely disturbing to scientists? (shrink)

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical (...) science. We argue that the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

This paper examines the ways in which social scientific discourse and classification interact with the objects of social scientific investigation. I examine this interaction in the context of the traditional philosophical project of demarcating the social sciences from the natural sciences. I begin by reviewing Ian Hacking’s work on interactive classification and argue that there are additional forms of interaction that must be treated.

Review of 'Causal Reasoning in Physics' by Mathias Frisch for British Journal for Philosophy of Science.

Most people believe that consciousness is real. But illusionists say it isn’t—they say consciousness is an illusion. One common illusionist strategy for defending their view involves a debunking argument. They explain why people _believe_ that consciousness exists in a way that doesn’t imply that it _does_ exist; and, in so doing, they aim to show that that belief is unjustified. In this paper I argue that we can know consciousness exists even if these debunking arguments are sound. To do this, (...) I draw on the claim that some knowledge is constituted, not by beliefs in propositions, but by awareness of properties and objects. Then I argue that accepting this claim allows us to evade illusionists’ debunking arguments by allowing us to hold that our knowledge of consciousness does not depend solely on potentially debunked _beliefs_ in consciousness. Finally, while considering potential illusionist responses, I suggest that my strategy also yields a plausible account of our most basic knowledge of consciousness and an explanation for why so few people accept illusionism even when they have (or had) no decisive reply to illusionists’ arguments. (shrink)

BackgroundThe objective of this study was to evaluate the nature and extent of reproducible and transparent research practices in neurology publications.MethodsThe NLM catalog was used to identify MEDLINE-indexed neurology journals. A PubMed search of these journals was conducted to retrieve publications over a 5-year period from 2014 to 2018. A random sample of publications was extracted. Two authors conducted data extraction in a blinded, duplicate fashion using a pilot-tested Google form. This form prompted data extractors to determine whether publications provided (...) access to items such as study materials, raw data, analysis scripts, and protocols. In addition, we determined if the publication was included in a replication study or systematic review, was preregistered, had a conflict of interest declaration, specified funding sources, and was open access.ResultsOur search identified 223,932 publications meeting the inclusion criteria, from which 400 were randomly sampled. Only 389 articles were accessible, yielding 271 publications with empirical data for analysis. Our results indicate that 9.4% provided access to materials, 9.2% provided access to raw data, 0.7% provided access to the analysis scripts, 0.7% linked the protocol, and 3.7% were preregistered. A third of sampled publications lacked funding or conflict of interest statements. No publications from our sample were included in replication studies, but a fifth were cited in a systematic review or meta-analysis.ConclusionsCurrently, published neurology research does not consistently provide information needed for reproducibility. The implications of poor research reporting can both affect patient care and increase research waste. Collaborative intervention by authors, peer reviewers, journals, and funding sources is needed to mitigate this problem. (shrink)