According to recent news reports, developments in biotechnology promise to transform our bodies and our lives. Stem cell research and cloning research are reported to offer us the prospect of being able to grow `spare' body parts and to replace diseased or damaged tissue, implying that there are no natural limits to life, and that the body-machine may be endlessly repaired, and even replicated. The birth of a cloned sheep, Dolly, announced in February 1997, is seen as a milestone development (...) in this regard, suggesting that it is possible to defy `nature' by `turning back the biological clock'. While the development was heralded by many as pointing to new medical therapies, it also served to fuel widespread fears that the technology would soon be applied to cloning humans. This article explores how the news media `framed' issues on human cloning in the aftermath of the announcement of Dolly and thus may have heightened public concerns about its implications, particularly for `individuality' or `identity'. It draws on articles appearing in Australian newspapers, beginning with the initial stories on Dolly through to May 1999, when it was reported that Dolly had shown signs of premature ageing. The article highlights the role of the media in shaping public debate on biotechnology, particularly with regard to its impacts on the body, self and society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A great deal of ink has been spilled on the topic of "Augustinian illumination" over the past two hundred years. Why add more? Although there have been, and continue to be, disagreements over the philosophical relevance of "Augustinian illumination," a standard picture of "Augustinian illumination" is widespread in journal articles, encyclopedias, and commentaries on medieval philosophy. "Augustinian illumination" is widely understood as that Platonic account of knowledge that holds (...) that absolutely certain, necessary truth is attained not via the senses, which are mutable and thus incapable of delivering certainty, but via awareness of the eternality of the divine ideas in the mind of God. Further, the secondary literature has routinely described "Augustinian illumination" as offering an account of knowledge that is different from and incompatible with Aristotle's emphasis on the necessity of input from sensible species in our knowledge of the natures of material things. Finally, the literature has consistently represented Bonaventure as continuing "Augustinian illumination," and Aquinas as rejecting it, and has represented Bonaventure and Aquinas as in agreement that Aristotle and Augustine's cognitive psychologies are incompatible.I have argued elsewhere that this standard representation of "Augustinian illumination" is perhaps best seen as the product of the era of the retrieval of medieval philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Here, my focus is on two texts long considered central to Bonaventure's continuation of "Augustinian illumination" and Aquinas's rejection of it: Bonaventure's Question IV of the Quaestiones disputatae de scientia Christi , and Aquinas's Summa theologiae Ia. 84, 1-8 . My argument is that Aquinas and Bonaventure do not interpret Augustine as following a Platonic epistemological schema, nor do they agree that Aristotle and Augustine hold contradictory cognitive psychologies. Instead, both Bonaventure and Aquinas interpret Augustine as consciously rejecting Platonic epistemology and as ripe for assimilation with Aristotelian epistemological givens, including the notion that paradigmatic knowledge proceeds from the senses, and both articulate a cognitive psychology that harmonizes Augustinian and Aristotelian elements. In other words, if by "Augustinian illumination" we mean the continuation of a Platonic account of knowledge at odds with an Aristotelian emphasis on the necessity of the senses in the creation of certain knowledge, then at least in these texts, Bonaventure does not continue "Augustinian illumination," nor does Aquinas reject it, because "it" does not exist in their reading or interpretation of Augustine's texts.After some brief remarks about the history of the interpretative strain that has marked the commentary on these texts, I begin with Aquinas's ST Ia 84.1-8 in section I. Although it is chronologically a decade or so later, Aquinas's streamlined treatment of the role of the eternal reasons in the production of scientia sets up a clear comparison with Bonaventure's slightly earlier, longer Quaestiones disputatae de scientia Christi , which I discuss in section II. The similarities between Bonaventure and Aquinas's positions can be seen with greater clarity when contrasted with Henry of Ghent's slightly later treatment in the Summa theologiae, Q. 1, art. 1, 2, which I treat in section III. In particular what emerges is a clear contrast with how Ghent reads and assimilates the Augustinian corpus: Ghent's is an explicitly pro-Platonic Augustine, and his formulation of "illumination" is precisely the reading of Augustine that Bonaventure and Aquinas reject. I conclude with remarks highlighting the similarities in Bonaventure and Aquinas's approach vis a vis Ghent's and suggest the need to revise our notions of thirteenth century approaches to "Augustinian illumination" as well as our narratives regarding the assimilation of Aristotle's epistemological corpus in the middle-decades of the thirteenth-century.Interpretative strainBonaventure's question IV and Aquinas's ST Ia 84, 1-8 have long shown signs of interpretive strain. Detailed commentaries on this section of the Summa often skip over article 5 on the Augustinian eternal reasons entirely, or simply reiterate stock interpretations. Alternatively, it is grudgingly admitted that Question 84 evidences an. (shrink)

PURPOSE: To evaluate the effects of social support on comprehension and recall of consent form information in a study of Parkinson disease patients and their caregivers.DESIGN and METHODS: Comparison of comprehension and recall outcomes among participants who read and signed the consent form accompanied by a family member/friend versus those of participants who read and signed the consent form unaccompanied. Comprehension and recall of consent form information were measured at one week and one month respectively, using Part A of the (...) Quality of Informed Consent Questionnaire .RESULTS: The mean age of the sample of 143 participants was 71 years . Analysis of covariance was used to compare QuIC scores between the intervention group and control group . In the 1-week model, no statistically significant intervention effect was found . However, the intervention status by patient status interaction was statistically significant . In the 1-month model, no statistically significant intervention effect was found . Again, however, the intervention status by patient status interaction was statistically significant . At both time periods, intervention group patients scored higher on the QuIC than did intervention group caregivers, and control group patients scored lower on the QuIC than did control group caregivers.IMPLICATIONS: Social support played a significant role in enhancing comprehension and recall of consent form information among patients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mild Cognitive Impairment:Where Does It Go From Here?John Bond (bio) and Lynne Corner (bio)Keywordsbiomedicalization, dementia, mild cognitive impairment, subjectivityThe joy of formal interdisciplinary discussion of this kind is the way that ideas presented through the gaze of social scientists stimulate such exciting thoughts and responses from other disciplines such as philosophy and psychology. We would like to thank Sabat and Thornton for their supportive and provocative reactions to our (...) paper. In the spirit of their responses, it is not our intention to respond to their thoughts directly; rather, we take the opportunity to theorize sociologically about this new category of psychiatry that has come to be known simply as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In reviewing the responses of Sabat and Thornton, three thoughts emerged. First, together we have covered ontologic, epistemologic, methodologic, and theoretical questions about MCI, but none of us has posed basic political questions, such as: Why has MCI emerged as a new psychiatric label at this particular time? Second, this discussion brings together social scientists with a psychologist and a philosopher, but important constituents are missing. Consequently we are missing "insider" views on the importance of MCI to clinical practice. Third, this discussion highlights for us even more acutely the central question: Is MCI a real entity? In the following, we reflect on the first of these because our response also addresses the third. We first revisit the "evidence" about the importance of MCI for clinical practice.The notion of MCI as the transitional state between normal aging and Alzheimer's disease and other dementias has existed in a number of guises for many years, with benign senescent forgetfulness (Kral 1962) being the forerunner of a number of other terms, including questionable dementia, incipient dementia, isolated memory impairment, mild neurocognitive decline, age-associated memory impairment, age-associated cognitive decline, and cognitive-impairment-not-demented (Geda et al. 2004). Given that psychiatric labels implying the existence of MCI have been part of the practice landscape for over forty years, it is perhaps not surprising that its reinvention in the form of MCI has not, it appears, raised much attention outside specialist centers in North America and Europe. The reaction from grassroots clinical practice has been similar in intensity to their subdued reaction to the antipsychiatry movement in the 1960s. But for specialist clinics like the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, it has been an expanding [End Page 29] industry with numerous published papers, international conference presentations, and research funding opportunities.MCI can be distinguished from similar diagnostic categories that preceded its appearance in 1991. A key diagnostic criteria is the requirement for a subjective memory complaint by the person subsequently diagnosed as having MCI. Other diagnostic criteria include normal general cognitive function, normal activities of daily living, and memory being impaired for age, but not being demented (Petersen et al. 1999; Petersen and Morris 2003). To our knowledge, the idea of subjectivity being an important diagnostic criterion, as opposed to a means of identifying signs and symptoms, is a first in medical science. We know of no other medical category or diagnosis where subjectivity plays such a significant role, other than perhaps severe health phobias. Broadly speaking, two kinds of clinical evidence for MCI exist: first, that originating from studies (some quite small) applying the diagnostic criteria in specialist clinic populations; and, second, that found in large population studies. The main distinction between these two sets of evidence is that one is based on selected clinic populations and the other on unselected community populations. Most studies conclude that people whose memory is impaired for their age, as measured by similar cognitive tests such as the Mini-Mental State Examination, show decline in cognition that often leads to Alzheimer's disease and other kinds of dementia in the future. This finding is not remarkable given that it has long been known that age is a predictor of cognitive impairment. However, the population studies suggest a lower conversion rate than those for specialist clinics (Ritchie, Artero, and Touchon 2001).Petersen (2005) provides a robust defense as to why MCI might be a useful category in research and also indicates the potential benefits of treating MCI... (shrink)

Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary hypotheses about the cognitive and epistemic roles of emotions, is able to (...) explain key characteristics of body checking, including how body checking behavior becomes habitual and compulsive. (shrink)

According to the thesis of pragmatic encroachment, practical circumstances can affect whether someone is in a position to know or rationally believe a proposition. For example, whether it is epistemically rational for a person to believe that the bank will be open on Saturdays, can depend not only on the strength of the person’s evidence, but also on how practically important it is for the person not to be wrong about the bank being open on Saturdays. In recent years, philosophers (...) have argued that moral considerations can also affect the epistemic rationality of belief, thus giving rise to moral encroachment. In previous work (Steglich-Petersen, forthcoming a), I have developed an explanation of pragmatic encroachment grounded in an instrumentalist theory of epistemic reasons. Here, I argue that this explanation extends to moral encroachment as well, including so-called “radical” moral encroachment. I also show how this explanation dispels the worry raised by Gerken (2019), that pragmatic encroachment might give rise to morally adverse consequences in the form of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Whether it would take one decade or several centuries, many agree that it is possible to create a *superintelligence*---an artificial intelligence with a godlike ability to achieve its goals. And many who have reflected carefully on this fact agree that our best hope for a "friendly" superintelligence is to design it to *learn* values like ours, since our values are too complex to program or hardwire explicitly. But the value learning approach to AI safety faces three particularly philosophical puzzles: first, (...) it is unclear how any intelligent system could learn its final values, since to judge one supposedly "final" value against another seems to require a further background standard for judging. Second, it is unclear how to determine the content of a system's values based on its physical or computational structure. Finally, there is the distinctly ethical question of which values we should best aim for the system to learn. I outline a potential answer to these interrelated puzzles, centering on a "miktotelic" proposal for blending a complex, learnable final value out of many simpler ones. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide a systematic reconstruction and critique of what is taken to be a central ethical concern against the use of non-medical egg freezing. The concern can be captured in what we can call the individualisation argument. The argument states, very roughly, that women should not use NMEF as it is an individualistic and morally problematic solution to the social problems that women face, for instance, in the labour market. Instead of allowing or expecting (...) women to deal with them on an individual level, we should address them by challenging the patriarchal structures of the labour market—for example, by securing equal pay, or paid maternal leave, or ‘paid paternal [partner] leave and sick leave and affordable child care’. It will be made clear that there are several versions of this argument. The author will try to elaborate this claim, and it will be explained that the differences depend on the way in which bioethicists believe that individuals use of NMEF is morally problematic, compared with the alternative of securing social change for women in, say, the labour market. Finally, a critical discussion of three versions of the individualisation argument will follow, and it will be shown why all versions are on rather thin ice, or in other words, that they are implausible. (shrink)

Standard epistemology takes it for granted that there is a special kind of value: epistemic value. This claim does not seem to sit well with act utilitarianism, however, since it holds that only welfare is of real value. I first develop a particularly utilitarian sense of “epistemic value”, according to which it is closely analogous to the nature of financial value. I then demonstrate the promise this approach has for two current puzzles in the intersection of epistemology and value theory: (...) first, the problem of why knowledge is better than mere true belief, and second, the relation between epistemic justification and responsibility. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, Carter and Peterson raise two distinctly epistemological puzzles that arise for anyone aspiring to defend the precautionary principle. The first puzzle trades on an application of epistemic contextualism to the precautionary principle; the second puzzle concerns the compatibility of the precautionary principle with the de minimis rule. In this note, I argue that neither puzzle should worry defenders of the precautionary principle. The first puzzle can be shown to be an instance of the (...) familiar but conceptually harmless challenge of adjudicating between relevant interests to reach assessments of threats when applying the precautionary principle. The second puzzle can be shown to rely on a subtle but crucial misrepresentation of the relevant probabilities at play when applying the precautionary principle. (shrink)

Inquiry is an aim-directed activity, and as such governed by instrumental normativity. If you have reason to figure out a question, you have reason to take means to figuring it out. Beliefs are governed by epistemic normativity. On a certain pervasive understanding, this means that you are permitted – maybe required – to believe what you have sufficient evidence for. The norms of inquiry and epistemic norms both govern us as agents in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and, on the (...) surface, they do so in harmony. Recently, however, Jane Friedman (2020) has pointed out that they are in tension with each other. In this paper, I aim to resolve this tension by showing that reasons for acts of inquiry – zetetic reasons – and epistemic reasons for belief can both be understood as flowing from the same general normative principle: the transmission principle for instrumental reasons. The resulting account is a version of epistemic instrumentalism that offers an attractive unity between zetetic and epistemic normativity. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 69-100, Winter 2024.

Does transparency in doxastic deliberation entail a constitutive norm of correctness governing belief, as Shah and Velleman argue? No, because this presupposes an implausibly strong relation between normative judgements and motivation from such judgements, ignores our interest in truth, and cannot explain why we pay different attention to how much justification we have for our beliefs in different contexts. An alternative account of transparency is available: transparency can be explained by the aim one necessarily adopts in deliberating about whether to (...) believe that p. To show this, I reconsider the role of the concept of belief in doxastic deliberation, and I defuse 'the teleologian's dilemma'. (shrink)

While research on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has traditionally focused on cognitive and behavioral deficits, there is increasing interest in exploring possible resources associated with the disorder. In this paper, we argue that the attention-patterns associated with ADHD can be understood as expressing an alternative style of inquiry, or “zetetic” style, characterized mainly by a lower barrier for becoming curious and engaging in inquiry, and a weaker disposition to regulate curiosity in response to the cognitive and practical costs associated (...) with inquiry. Exploring this zetetic style from an epistemological perspective, we show that it is often epistemically rational and can be advantageous in important respects. We close by suggesting that the very aspects of the zetetic style that might at times render it disadvantageous from the point of view of individual subjects with ADHD, will often confer epistemic benefits to the social group that the subjects are part of. (shrink)

A popular account of epistemic justification holds that justification, in essence, aims at truth. An influential objection against this account points out that it is committed to holding that only true beliefs could be justified, which most epistemologists regard as sufficient reason to reject the account. In this paper I defend the view that epistemic justification aims at truth, not by denying that it is committed to epistemic justification being factive, but by showing that, when we focus on the relevant (...) sense of ‘justification’, it isn’t in fact possible for a belief to be at once justified and false. To this end, I consider and reject three popular intuitions speaking in favor of the possibility of justified false beliefs, and show that a factive account of epistemic justification is less detrimental to our normal belief forming practices than often supposed. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a teleological account of epistemic reasons. In recent years, the main challenge for any such account has been to explicate a sense in which epistemic reasons depend on the value of epistemic properties. I argue that while epistemic reasons do not directly depend on the value of epistemic properties, they depend on a different class of reasons which are value based in a direct sense, namely reasons to form beliefs about certain propositions or subject matters. (...) In short, S has an epistemic reason to believe that p if and only if S is such that if S has reason to form a belief about p, then S ought to believe that p. I then propose a teleological explanation of this relationship. It is also shown how the proposal can avoid various subsidiary objections commonly thought to riddle the teleological account. (shrink)

The theory of belief, according to which believing that p essentially involves having as an aim or purpose to believe that p truly, has recently been criticised on the grounds that the putative aim of belief does not interact with the wider aims of believers in the ways we should expect of genuine aims. I argue that this objection to the aim theory fails. When we consider a wider range of deliberative contexts concerning beliefs, it becomes obvious that the aim (...) of belief can interact with and be weighed against the wider aims of agents in the ways required for it to be a genuine aim. (shrink)

The predominant view in developmental psychology is that young children are able to reason with the concept of desire prior to being able to reason with the concept of belief. We propose an explanation of this phenomenon that focuses on the cognitive tasks that competence with the belief and desire concepts enable young children to perform. We show that cognitive tasks that are typically considered fundamental to our competence with the belief and desire concepts can be performed with the concept (...) of desire in the absence of competence with the concept of belief, whereas the reverse is considerably less feasible. (shrink)

Many have found it plausible that practical circumstances can affect whether someone is in a position to know or rationally believe a proposition. For example, whether it is rational for a person to believe that the bank will be open tomorrow, can depend not only on the person’s evidence, but also on how practically important it is for the person not to be wrong about the bank being open tomorrow. This supposed phenomenon is known as “pragmatic encroachment” on knowledge and (...) rational belief. Assuming that the phenomenon is real, I ask what explains it. I argue that a variant of instrumentalism about epistemic reasons offers a natural explanation, that at the same time is able avoid commitment to a more radical form of pragmatism. (shrink)

I argue that, contrary to intuition, it would be both possible and permissible to design people - whether artificial or organic - who by their nature desire to do tasks we find unpleasant.

Nishi Shah has recently argued that transparency in doxastic deliberation supports a strict version of evidentialism about epistemic reasons. I argue that Shah's argument relies on a principle that is incompatible with the strict version of evidentialism Shah wishes to advocate.

Many epistemologists have been attracted to the view that knowledge-wh can be reduced to knowledge-that. An important challenge to this, presented by Jonathan Schaffer, is the problem of “convergent knowledge”: reductive accounts imply that any two knowledge-wh ascriptions with identical true answers to the questions embedded in their wh-clauses are materially equivalent, but according to Schaffer, there are counterexamples to this equivalence. Parallel to this, Schaffer has presented a very similar argument against binary accounts of knowledge, and thereby in favour (...) of his alternative contrastive account, relying on similar examples of apparently inequivalent knowledge ascriptions, which binary accounts treat as equivalent. In this article, I develop a unified diagnosis and solution to these problems for the reductive and binary accounts, based on a general theory of knowledge ascriptions that embed presuppositional expressions. All of Schaffer's apparent counterexamples embed presuppositional expressions, and once the effect of these is taken into account, it becomes apparent that the counterexamples depend on an illicit equivocation of contexts. Since epistemologists often rely on knowledge ascriptions that embed presuppositional expressions, the general theory of them presented here will have ramifications beyond defusing Schaffer's argument. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD (Taylor 2022), we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argue instead that the irrationality of OCD is located in the emotions that are (...) characteristic of OCD, such as anxiety or fear. In particular, we propose to understand the irrationality of OCD as a matter of harboring recalcitrant emotions. We argue that this account not only solves the puzzle about insight, but also makes better sense of how OCD sufferers experience and describe their condition and helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of compulsive behavior. (shrink)

When one has both epistemic and practical reasons for or against some belief, how do these reasons combine into an all-things-considered reason for or against that belief? The question might seem to presuppose the existence of practical reasons for belief. But we can rid the question of this presupposition. Once we do, a highly general ‘Combinatorial Problem’ emerges. The problem has been thought to be intractable due to certain differences in the combinatorial properties of epistemic and practical reasons. Here we (...) bring good news: if we accept an independently motivated version of epistemic instrumentalism—the view that epistemic reasons are a species of instrumental reasons—we can reduce The Combinatorial Problem to the relatively benign problem of how to weigh different instrumental reasons against each other. As an added benefit, the instrumentalist account can explain the apparent intractability of The Combinatorial Problem in terms of a common tendency to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an elliptical manner. (shrink)

In a recent article, I criticized Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss's so-called “no guidance argument” against the truth norm for belief, for conflating the conditions under which that norm recommends belief with the psychological state one must be in to apply the norm. In response, Glüer and Wikforss have offered a new formulation of the no guidance argument, which makes it apparent that no such conflation is made. However, their new formulation of the argument presupposes a much too narrow understanding (...) of what it takes for a norm to influence behaviour, and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of the truth norm. Once this is taken into account, it becomes clear that the no guidance argument fails. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalists seek to understand the normativity of epistemic norms on the model practical instrumental norms governing the relation between aims and means. Non-instrumentalists often object that this commits instrumentalists to implausible epistemic assessments. I argue that this objection presupposes an implausibly strong interpretation of epistemic norms. Once we realize that epistemic norms should be understood in terms of permissibility rather than obligation, and that evidence only occasionally provide normative reasons for belief, an instrumentalist account becomes available that delivers the (...) correct epistemic verdicts. On this account, epistemic permissibility can be understood on the model of the wide-scope instrumental norm for instrumental rationality, while normative evidential reasons for belief can be understood in terms of instrumental transmission. (shrink)

A popular account of luck, with a firm basis in common sense, holds that a necessary condition for an event to be lucky, is that it was suitably improbable. It has recently been proposed that this improbability condition is best understood in epistemic terms. Two different versions of this proposal have been advanced. According to my own proposal :361–377, 2010), whether an event is lucky for some agent depends on whether the agent was in a position to know that the (...) event would occur. And according to Stoutenburg :319–334, 2015, Synthese, 1–15, 2018), whether an event is lucky for an agent depends on whether the event was guaranteed or certain to occur in light of the agent’s evidence. In this paper, I argue that we should prefer the account in terms of knowledge over that in terms of evidential certainty. (shrink)

Als praktische Philosophie ist der Pragmatismus an Prinzipien und Mechanismen von Gesellschaft interessiert. Es geht im Kern darum, diese Prinzipien und Mechanismen zu verstehen, Handlungsformen und Institutionen mit Blick auf gesellschaftliche Probleme und deren Behebung zu entwickeln und auf diesem Wege Gesellschaft menschlicher, gerechter und demokratischer zu gestalten. Aus diesem Grund scheint der Pragmatismus für die kritische zeitgenössische Sozialwissenschaft von größter Bedeutung. Der vorliegende Band versammelt eine Reihe von Beiträgen, die das Themenfeld pragmatistischer Sozialforschung näher bestimmen. Diese lassen sich in (...) zwei Gruppen einteilen: Beiträge, die pragmatistische Theorien und Methoden mit anderen Denktraditionen oder Forschungsansätzen ins Gespräch bringen, sowie Beiträge, die pragmatistische Perspektiven auf zeitgenössische, gesellschaftliche Problemlagen beziehen. (shrink)

A "patternist" approach to explanation seeks to formalize unificationism using notions from algorithmic information theory. Among other advantages, this account provides both a rigorous sense of how data can admit multiple explanations, and a rigorous sense of how some of those explanations can conjoin, while others compete.

I argue for patternism, a new answer to the question of when some objects compose a whole. None of the standard principles of composition comfortably capture our natural judgments, such as that my cat exists and my table exists, but there is nothing wholly composed of them. Patternism holds, very roughly, that some things compose a whole whenever together they form a “real pattern”. Plausibly we are inclined to acknowledge the existence of my cat and my table but not of (...) their fusion, because the first two have a kind of internal organizational coherence that their putative fusion lacks. Kolmogorov complexity theory supplies the needed rigorous sense of “internal organizational coherence”. (shrink)

Several liberal philosophers and penal theorists have argued that the state has a reason to prohibit acts that harm individuals. But what is harm? According to one specification of harm, a person P is harmed by an act (or an event) a iff, as a result of a, P is made worse off in terms of well-being. One central question here involves the baseline against which we assess whether someone is ‘worse off’. In other words, when a person is harmed (...) he is worse off, certainly—but what is worse off a variation from? A central part of the paper critically discusses different answers to this question based on versions of what we can call: the temporal baseline, the baseline from mankind and the counterfactual baseline. Essentially, it will be argued that the counterfactual baseline leaves us with a better understanding of harming than the other baselines discussed. The final part of the paper will describe some of the implications of our investigation for the application and evaluation of the view that harm matters in the justification of which type of acts should be criminalized by the state. The overall conclusion of the paper is that adherents of a view like the harm principle face a dilemma. Either they can accept the counterfactual baseline but then, they can do without the harm principle. Or they can reject the counterfactual baseline—but then they will have to formulate an alternative baseline which, as will be shown in the paper, is no easy task. (shrink)

In this article, we critically discuss different versions of the fairness objection to the legalisation of neuro-doping. According to this objection, legalising neuro-doping will result in some enjoying an unfair advantage over others. Basically, we assess four versions. These focus on: 1) the unequal opportunities of winning for athletes who use neuro-doping and for those who do not; 2) the unfair advantages specifically for wealthy athletes; 3) the unfairness of athletic advantages not derived from athletes’ own training ; and 4) (...) the unfair health care costs imposed on everyone as a result of athletes’ use of neuro-doping. We conclude that none of these versions offer a convincing principled fairness-based objection to legalising neuro-doping. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that an event is lucky for an agent only if it was suitably improbable, but there is considerable disagreement about how to understand this improbability condition. This paper argues for a hitherto overlooked construal of the improbability condition in terms of the lucky agent’s epistemic situation. According to the proposed account, an event is lucky for an agent only if the agent was not in a position to know that the event would occur. It is also (...) explored whether this new account threatens the anti- luck program in epistemology. It is argued that although not detrimental to the anti- luck program, the epistemic account of luck sets certain important limits to its scope and feasibility. (shrink)

It has become a mantra, that doping is immorally and therefore should be punished with exclusion, fines and stigmatization. In most parts of the world, the doping debate is characterised by an extreme tunnel vision since all athletes, politicians and sports managers who have public airtime express that doping is bad or the invention of the devil. -/- The purpose of 'Doping in Sport: A Defence' is to identify, clarify and challenge some of the central arguments that are used in (...) the often extremely emotional debate that primarily focuses on rejecting the use of doping. I hope that my effort to clarify and challenge the arguments will help cultivate a productive dialogue where all arguments are given a fair trial instead of the prevailing one-sided condemnation of doping. An open dialogue about doping is important since the question of where the line should be drawn when it comes to doping in sports is highly relevant in terms of the scope within which athletes, sports physicians, sports managers, coaches and pharmaceutical companies can operate in the world of sports. (shrink)

For at least three decades, philosophers have argued that general causation and causal explanation are contrastive in nature. When we seek a causal explanation of some particular event, we are usually interested in knowing why that event happened rather than some other specified event. And general causal claims, which state that certain event types cause certain other event types, seem to make sense only if appropriate contrasts to the types of events acting as cause and effect are specified. In recent (...) years, philosophers have extended the contrastive theory of causation to encompass singular causation as well. In this article, I argue that this extension of the theory was a mistake. Although general causation and causal explanation may well be contrastive in nature, singular causation is not. (shrink)

$$\mathbf {Z}$$ is a new type of non-finitist inference, i.e., an inference that involves treating some infinite collection as completed, designed for contraction free logic with unrestricted abstraction. It has been introduced in Petersen (Studia Logica 64:365–403, 2000) and shown to be consistent within a system $$\mathbf {{}L^iD{}}{}$$ $$_{\uplambda }$$ of contraction free logic with unrestricted abstraction. In Petersen (Arch Math Log 42(7):665–694, 2003) it was established that adding $$ \mathbf {Z}$$ to $$\mathbf {{}L^iD{}}{}$$ $$_{\uplambda }$$ is sufficient (...) to prove the totality of primitive recursive functions but it was also indicated that this would not extend to 2-recursive functions such as the Ackermann–Péter function, for instance. The purpose of the present paper is to expand the underlying idea in the construction of $$\mathbf {Z}$$ to gain a stronger notion, conveniently labeled $$\mathbf {Z}_2$$, which is sufficient to prove a form of nested double induction and thereby the totality of 2-recursive functions. (shrink)

Many philosophers have sought to account for doxastic and epistemic norms by supposing that belief ‘aims at truth.’ A central challenge for this approach is to articulate a version of the truth-aim that is at once weak enough to be compatible with the many truth-independent influences on belief formation, and strong enough to explain the relevant norms in the desired way. One phenomenon in particular has seemed to require a relatively strong construal of the truth-aim thesis, namely ‘transparency’ in doxastic (...) deliberation. In this paper, I argue that the debate over transparency has been in the grip of a false presupposition, namely that the phenomenon must be explained in terms of being a feature of deliberation framed by the concept of belief. Giving up this presupposition makes it possible to adopt weaker and more plausible versions of the truth-aim thesis in accounting for doxastic and epistemic norms. (shrink)

On the one hand, the absence of contraction is a safeguard against the logical (property theoretic) paradoxes; but on the other hand, it also disables inductive and recursive definitions, in its most basic form the definition of the series of natural numbers, for instance. The reason for this is simply that the effectiveness of a recursion clause depends on its being available after application, something that is usually assured by contraction. This paper presents a way of overcoming this problem within (...) the framework of a logic based on inclusion and unrestricted abstraction, without any form of extensionality. (shrink)

The growing literature on philosophical thought experiments has so far focused almost exclusively on the role of thought experiments in confirming or refuting philosophical hypotheses or theories. In this paper we draw attention to an additional and largely ignored role that thought experiments frequently play in our philosophical practice: some thought experiments do not merely serve as means for testing various philosophical hypotheses or theories, but also serve as facilitators for conceiving and articulating new ones. As we will put it, (...) they serve as ‘heuristics for theory discovery’. Our purpose in the paper is two-fold: to make a case that this additional role of thought experiments deserves the attention of philosophers interested in the methodology of philosophy; to sketch a tentative taxonomy of a number of distinct ways in which philosophical thought experiments can aid theory discovery, which can guide future research on this role of thought experiments. (shrink)

It seems obvious that when higher-order evidence makes it rational for one to doubt that one’s own belief on some matter is rational, this can undermine the rationality of that belief. This is known as higher-order defeat. However, despite its intuitive plausibility, it has proved puzzling how higher-order defeat works, exactly. To highlight two prominent sources of puzzlement, higher-order defeat seems to defy being understood in terms of conditionalization; and higher-order defeat can sometimes place agents in what seem like epistemic (...) dilemmas. This chapter draws attention to an overlooked aspect of higher-order defeat, namely that it can undermine the resilience of one’s beliefs. The notion of resilience was originally devised to understand how one should reflect the ‘weight’ of one’s evidence. But it can also be applied to understand how one should reflect one’s higher-order evidence. The idea is particularly useful for understanding cases where one’s higher-order evidence indicates that one has failed in correctly assessing the evidence, without indicating whether one has over- or underestimated the degree of evidential support for a proposition. But it is exactly in such cases that the puzzles of higher-order defeat seem most compelling. (shrink)

A number of authors have recently developed and defended various versions of ‘normative essentialism’ about the mental, i.e. the claim that propositional attitudes are constitutively or essentially governed by normative principles. I present two arguments to the effect that this claim cannot be right. First, if propositional attitudes were essentially normative, propositional attitude ascriptions would require non-normative justification, but since this is not a requirement of folk-psychology, propositional attitudes cannot be essentially normative. Second, if propositional attitudes were essentially normative, propositional (...) attitude ascriptions could not support normative rationality judgments, which would remove the central appeal of normative essentialism. (shrink)

This article addresses the sacredness of Ayahuasca from the perspective of the global shamanic vocation. If encounters with Ayahuasca are said to revitalize forms of sacredness in contemporary societies, this is perhaps clearest in cases where individuals understand themselves to be called to lead ceremonies. Recognizing the global scale of Ayahuasca shamanism, we compare facilitators of ceremonies in two societies to discern differences and similarities in how Ayahuasca vocations exist in differently modernized societies: Peru, a predominantly Catholic society with a (...) substantial Indigenous Amazonian population and an active Ayahuasca shamanism tourism sector, and Denmark, a secular society in Northern Europe, where Ayahuasca is illegal. Building on recent reappraisals of Weber’s reflection on vocation and Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, we argue that being called by Ayahuasca to follow shamanic vocations in contemporary societies leads to tensions around the need to both justify and resist the rationalization of Ayahuasca. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalists think that epistemic normativity is just a special kind of instrumental normativity. According to them, you have epistemic reason to believe a proposition insofar as doing so is conducive to certain epistemic goals or aims—say, to believe what is true and avoid believing what is false. Perhaps the most prominent challenge for instrumentalists in recent years has been to explain, or explain away, why one’s epistemic reasons often do not seem to depend on one’s aims. This challenge can (...) arguably be met. But a different challenge looms: instrumental reasons in the practical domain have various properties that epistemic reasons do not seem to share. In this chapter, we offer a way for epistemic instrumentalists to overcome this challenge. Our main thesis takes the form of a conditional: if we accept an independently plausible transmission principle of instrumental normativity, we can maintain that epistemic reasons in fact do share the relevant properties of practical instrumental reasons. In addition, we can explain why epistemic reasons seem to lack these properties in the first place: some properties of epistemic reasons are elusive, or easy to overlook, because we tend to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an ‘elliptical’ manner. (shrink)

In a recent article, I criticized Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss's so‐called “no guidance argument” against the truth norm for belief, for conflating the conditions under which that norm recommends belief with the psychological state one must be in to apply the norm. In response, Glüer and Wikforss have offered a new formulation of the no guidance argument, which makes it apparent that no such conflation is made. However, their new formulation of the argument presupposes a much too narrow understanding (...) of what it takes for a norm to influence behaviour, and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of the truth norm. Once this is taken into account, it becomes clear that the no guidance argument fails. (shrink)

In this article, our aim is to show why increasing the effectiveness of detecting doping fraud in sport by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) may be morally wrong. The first argument in favour of this conclusion is that using AI to make a non-ideal antidoping policy even more effective can be morally wrong. Whether the increased effectiveness is morally wrong depends on whether you believe that the current antidoping system administrated by the World Anti-Doping Agency is already morally wrong. (...) The second argument is based on the possibility of scenarios in which a more effective AI system may be morally worse than a less effective but non-AI system. We cannot, of course, conclude that the increased effectiveness of doping detection is always morally wrong. But our point is that whether the introduction of AI to increase detection of doping fraud is a moral improvement depends on the moral plausibility of the current system and the distribution of harm that will follow from false positive and false negative errors. (shrink)