Early versions of satellite and radiosonde datasets suggested that the tropical surface had warmed more than the troposphere, while climate models consistently showed tropospheric amplification of surface warming in response to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases. We revisit such comparisons here using new observational estimates of surface and tropospheric temperature changes. We find that there is no longer a serious discrepancy between modeled and observed trends in the tropics. Our results contradict a recent claim that all simulated temperature trends in (...) the tropical troposphere are inconsistent with observations. This claim was based on the use of older radiosonde and satellite datasets and on two methodological errors: the neglect of observational trend uncertainties introduced by interannual climate variability and application of an inappropriate statistical “consistency test”.This emerging reconciliation of models and observations has two primary explanations. First, because of changes in the treatment of buoy and satellite information, new surface temperature datasets yield slightly reduced tropical warming relative to earlier versions. Second, recently developed satellite and radiosonde datasets now show larger warming of the tropical lower troposphere. In the case of a new satellite dataset from remote sensing systems, enhancedRSS warming is due to an improved procedure of adjusting for inter-satellite biases. When the RSS-derived tropospheric temperature trend is compared with four different observed estimates of surface temperature change, the surface warming is invariably amplified in the tropical troposphere, consistent with model results. Even if we use data from a second satellite dataset with smaller tropospheric warming than in remote sensing systems RSS, observed tropical lapse rates are not significantly different from those in all model simulations.Our results contradict a recent claim that all simulated temperature trends in the tropical troposphere and in tropical lapse rates are inconsistent with observations. This claim was based on the use of older radiosonde and satellite datasets and on two methodological errors: the neglect of observational trend uncertainties introduced by interannual climate variability and application of an inappropriate statistical “consistency test”. (shrink)

Using state-of-the-art observational datasets and results from a large archive of computer model simulations, a consortium of scientists from 12 different institutions has resolved a long-standing conundrum in climate science—the apparent discrepancy between simulated and observed temperature trends in the tropics. Research published by this group indicates that there is no fundamental discrepancy between modeled and observed tropical temperature trends when one accounts for: the uncertainties in observations; and the statistical uncertainties in estimating trends from observations. These results refute a (...) recent claim that model and observed tropical temperature trends “disagree to a statistically significant extent”. This claim was based on the application of a flawed statistical test and the use of older observational datasets. (shrink)

It is well known that John Stuart Mill repeatedly acknowledges Harriet Taylor Mill's substantial contribution to On Liberty. After her death, however, he decides to publish the book under his name only. Are we justified in continuing this practice, initiated by JSM, of refusing unequivocal co-authorship status to HTM? Drawing on stylometric analyses, we make a preliminary case that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself and that HTM had a hand in formulating it. Drawing on plausible (...) standards for authorship ascription, we further point out that authorship status requires, in addition to a substantial contribution, the approval by all contributors. We discuss potential reasons to assume that HTM did not approve the published version of On Liberty and would have objected to including her name on the title page. (This paper is available on an open-access basis at UTILITAS). (shrink)

This chapter discusses (in German) John Stuart Mill's position on paternalism and how it relates to his book 'The Subjection of Women'. It is argued that Mill's claim (in On Liberty) that one should not be allowed to sell oneself into slavery is making reference to the Victorian marriage contract through which women essentially become slaves of their husbands. As argued in Subjection, women do not freely develop the desire to get married, the social circumstances do not leave them any (...) other options. Necessarily unaware of what married life is like, the decision to get married is like crossing an unsafe bridge without knowing it is unsafe. It is not paternalist, as Mill argues, to alert them to the condition of the bridge and put them in the position to decide for themselves whether they want to cross it (or turn back half way, e.g. by divorcing). (shrink)

John Stuart Mill hatte ein außergewöhnliches Leben. Einige biographische Besonderheiten sind weithin bekannt: Seine Erziehung durch den strengen VaterMill, James ist legendär, seine komplizierte Beziehung zu seiner späteren Ehefrau Harriet TaylorTaylor, Harriet schon immer Anlass lebhafter Spekulationen. Etwas überraschend mag bei der ersten Beschäftigung mit Mills Leben sein, dass er weder studiert hat noch einer wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeit nachgegangen ist, zumindest nicht als Brotberuf; sein Lebenswerk erschuf er im Privatleben. Bekannt ist auch Mills Autobiography, die 1873 nach seinem Tod veröffentlicht wurde, (...) die er aber bereits ab 1853 zusammen mit seiner Ehefrau Harriet Taylor Mill verfasste. (shrink)

The normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first (...) aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism. (shrink)

(2005). Freedom in Responsibility: On the Relevance of “Sin” As a Hermeneutic Guiding Principle in Bioethical Decision Making. Christian Bioethics: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 147-165.

This is a major and comprehensive study of the philosophy of Hegel, his place in the history of ideas, and his continuing relevance and importance. Professor Taylor relates Hegel to the earlier history of philosophy and, more particularly, to the central intellectual and spiritual issues of his own time. He engages with Hegel sympathetically, on Hegel's own terms and, as the subject demands, in detail. This important book is now reissued with a fresh new cover.

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

During communication, we form assumptions about what our communication partners know and believe. Information that is mutually known between the discourse partners—their common ground—serves as a backdrop for successful communication. Here we present an introduction to the focus of this topic, which is the role of memory in common ground and language use. Two types of questions emerge as central to understanding the relationship between memory and common ground, specifically questions having to do with the representation of common ground in (...) memory, and the use of common ground during language processing. (shrink)

In a recent case, parents of a profoundly developmentally disabled child asked physicians to use high-dose oestrogen to inhibit the growth of their child in the interests of allowing better care of her as she ages. The physicians asked whether such an intervention would be ethically acceptable. Such an intervention would seem to violate the rights of the child to bodily integrity and to normal growth, making the intervention ethically objectionable. But in this paper, I argue that in some rare (...) instances, a developmentally disabled child may have only a minimal right against interference with her growth. In those instances, parents may be acting ethically if they use medical interventions to inhibit the growth of their child for the purposes of facilitating better care. But they may so intervene only when the child's disabilities are so profound that the child has no personal interest in developing an adult size and when the intervention is the least intrusive means available for facilitating the care of the child. (shrink)

The present study examined the effects of thought suppression on sleep-onset mentation. It was hypothesized that the decrease of attentional control in the transition to sleep would lead to a rebound of a suppressed thought in hypnagogic mentation. Twenty-four young adults spent two consecutive nights in a sleep laboratory. Half of the participants were instructed to suppress a target thought, whereas the other half freely thought of anything at all. To assess target thought frequency, three different measures were used in (...) the wake state and mentation reports were repeatedly prompted by a computer at sleep onset. In support of the hypothesis, results revealed a reversal of target thought frequency at sleep onset: Participants instructed to suppress reported fewer target thoughts than did controls before falling asleep, but more target thoughts afterwards. (shrink)

Taylor focuses on the dramatic presentation of time and self at each state of Kierkegaard's dialectic of the stages of existence.

The General Medical Council’s Outcome for Graduates, published in 2018,1 is the latest guidance for medical schools on the GMC’s expectations of the undergraduate medical curriculum. One of its three top level outcomes—Professional Values and Behaviours—refers to medical ethics and law, professionalism and patient safety competencies. Furthermore, the recent proliferation of patient safety inquiries in the UK2–4 has elevated the emphasis on ethical medical practice5 and critical medical ethics and law competencies for future doctors. In response to these developments and (...) to ensure an up to date offering, the Institute of Medical Ethics Education Committee has updated the consensus statement on the core curriculum for medical ethics and law for doctors of tomorrow.6 This refined curriculum is the result of a national consultation process. We asked for the views of all lead teachers of medical ethics and law in all UK medical schools, the UK’s chief medical officers, the GMC, and delegates at our annual education conference in 2017 who …. (shrink)

In his paper Bare Particulars, T. Sider claims that one of the most plausible candidates for bare particulars are spacetime points. The aim of this paper is to shed light on Sider’s reasoning and its consequences. There are three concepts of spacetime points that allow their identification with bare particulars. One of them, Moderate structural realism, is considered to be the most adequate due its appropriate approach to spacetime metric and moderate view of mereological simples. However, it pushes the Substratum (...) theory to dismiss primitive thisness as the only identity condition for bare particulars, but the paper argues that such elimination is a legitimate step. (shrink)

Interpretation, in the sense relevant to hermeneutics, is an attempt to make clear, to make sense of an object of study. This object must, therefore, be a text or a text-analogue, which in some way is confused, incomplete, cloudy, seemingly contradictory--in one way or another, unclear. The interpretation aims to bring to light an underlying coherence or sense.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Fool’s Truth: Diderot, Goethe, and HegelJames SchmidtI. Of the many works that crossed from France into Germany during the “long” eighteenth century, none took as circuitous a route as Rameau’s Nephew. Begun by Diderot in 1761 but never published during his lifetime, the dialogue was among the works sent to Catherine the Great after his death in 1784. A copy of the manuscript was brought to Jena late (...) in 1804, where it was read by Schiller and passed on to Goethe, who immediately set about translating it into German. Goethe’s translation was published in the Spring of 1805 but, as Goethe later complained, made little impact on the German reading public. 1 There was, however, one notable exception: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.Hegel’s interpretation of Diderot’s dialogue in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit has long been an topic of considerable interest. Marxists—and, for that matter, Marx himself—have regarded the Phenomenology’s discussion of Diderot as illustrative of Hegel’s interest in the social and economic foundations of modern society. 2 For Lionel Trilling, it marked an important step in the genesis of the modern ideal of “authenticity.” 3 More recently, the tensions between Diderot’s “dialogizing” of the Enlightenment and the [End Page 625] Hegelian dialectic have been explored by a number of commentators. 4 Less attention, however, has been paid to the fact that the words Hegel appropriated were not, strictly speaking, Diderot’s, but rather came from Goethe’s translation. 5 Before Rameau’s Nephew could appear in the pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology, it first passed into German in a translation that, no less than Hegel, inserted the text into a rather different context from the one in which it had originated.A consideration of Hegel’s appropriation of Rameau’s Nephew thus involves us in questions about the transporting, translating, and transposing of works across borders, languages, and genres. I will begin by examining briefly how Goethe went about presenting an eighteenth century French text to a nineteenth-century German audience. I will then explore, at greater length, how Hegel went about situating this most peculiar of dialogues into his most baffling of books. Finally, I will reflect on some of the tensions between what Diderot wrote and what Hegel attempted to do with it.II. “Now, think of a city like Paris,” Goethe told Eckermann, bemoaning the “isolated, miserable sort of life” to which German intellectuals had been condemned. In Paris one could find “all of the leading minds of a great kingdom all together at the same spot, mutually instructing and advancing one another through daily contact, conflict, and rivalry.” The leading German intellectuals, in contrast, were scattered about: “There is one in Vienna, another in Berlin, another in Königsberg, another in Bonn or Düsseldorf, all fifty to a hundred miles away from each other, so that personal contact and personal exchange of ideas count as rare events.” In Paris “the best from the realms of nature and art from throughout the world lies open for daily inspection,” while “every passage over a bridge or a square recalls a mighty past” and “every street corner has evolved into a piece of history.” It was a city where “men such as Molière, Voltaire, Diderot, and the like have kept up a current of intellect such as has not been found in a single spot anywhere else in the entire world.” 6 Weimar, quite clearly, was not Paris.Rameau’s Nephew was so thoroughly a creature of Paris that the mere thought of rendering it into German might have dismayed a weaker soul than Goethe. Moi and Lui begin a conversation at the Café de la Régence that will [End Page 626] lead them from discussions of the contest between French and Italian styles in music to a consideration of the prospects for human autonomy. In between they will pass over such matters as the social utility of geniuses, the tension between aesthetics and morality, the proper upbringing of children, and the structure of social dependency, pausing from time to time as Lui loses himself in increasingly wilder pantomimes. Along the way... (shrink)

By the end of the Second World War the advancing allied forces discovered a new nerve gas in Germany. It was called Tabun. Codenamed GA, it was found to be extremely toxic. British experts were immediately dispatched to examine the agent. On arrival, they discovered that German scientists had also developed even more toxic nerve agents, including Sarin, known as GB. The first organized testing of Sarin on humans began in October 1951 at Porton Down in Wiltshire, Britain's biochemical warfare (...) establishment since the First World War. In February 1953, volunteer number 562 experienced the first recorded serious adverse reaction. Testing continued. Two months later, on April 27, six subjects were given 300 milligrams of Sarin. One of the volunteers, a man named Kelly, suffered serious ill effects, fell into a coma, but then recovered. Although asked by their superiors to reduce the amount tested to the “lowest range of dosage”—which would have been somewhere in the region of 10–15 milligrams—Porton's scientists continued their tests with a “lower” dosage, reducing it from 300 to 200 milligrams. (shrink)

This 2003 book offers an interpretation of Heidegger's major work, Being and Time. Unlike those who view Heidegger as an idealist, Taylor Carman argues that Heidegger is best understood as a realist. Amongst the distinctive features of the book are an interpretation explicitly oriented within a Kantian framework and an analysis of Dasein in relation to recent theories of intentionality, notably those of Dennett and Searle. Rigorous, jargon-free and deftly argued this book will be necessary reading for all serious (...) students of Heidegger. (shrink)

The moral doctrine of Hobbes, in many ways the most interesting of our major British philosophers, is, I think, commonly seen in a false perspective which has seriously obscured its real affinities. This is, no doubt, largely due to the fact that most modern readers begin and end their study of Hobbes's ethics with the Leviathan , a rhetorical and, in many ways, a popular Streitschrift published in the very culmination of what looked at the time to be a permanent (...) revolution, and do not pay such attention to the more calmly argued statements of the same doctrine contained in the Elements of Law , circulated before the outbreak of the Civil War, or the De Cive. (shrink)

In October 2005, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights . A concept of central importance in the declaration is that of “human dignity”. However, there is lack of clarity about its scope, especially concerning the question of whether prenatal human life has the same dignity and rights as born human beings. This ambiguity has implications for the interpretation of important articles of the delcaration, including 2, 4, 8, 10 and (...) 11. The paper applies relevant provisions of the UDBHR to specific cases, addresses problems of internal consistency and considers attempts at clarifying the scope of “human dignity” by the negotiating parties. An analysis of the important relationship between the UDBHR and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the UDBHR refers in its title and elsewhere, shows that because of a crucial emphatic asymmetry, a broad reading according to which the UDBHR must be understood to ascribe human rights and dignity to prenatal life is untenable. However, the view that the UDBHR confers human rights and dignity on humans from the moment of birth onwards is robust and defensible. This conclusion is important for a proper understanding of the declaration and its use, as stated in Articles 1 and 22, the latter urging states “… to give effect to the principles … in this declaration”. Similarly, it has implications for the use of the declaration in the wider context of bioethics-related law and policy, as well as in academic and other discussions where increasing reference to the UDBHR is likely. (shrink)

I argue that considerations pertaining to constitutive luck undermine historicism—the view that an agent’s history can determine whether or not she is morally responsible. The main way that historicists have motivated their view is by appealing to certain cases of manipulation. I argue, however, that since agents can be morally responsible for performing some actions from characters with respect to which they are entirely constitutively lucky, and since there is no relevant difference between these agents and agents who have been (...) manipulated into acting from a character bestowed upon them by their manipulators, we should give up historicism. After presenting this argument and defending it against some potential objections, I briefly criticize the standard structuralist alternative and propose a new structuralist position that is shaped by reflection on constitutive luck. (shrink)

Recent develops in AI technology have led to increasingly sophisticated forms of video manipulation. One such form has been the advent of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos that typically depict people doing and saying things they never did. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is a close structural relationship between deepfakes and more traditional fake barn cases in epistemology. Specifically, I argue that deepfakes generate an analogous degree of epistemic risk to that which is found in traditional cases. Given (...) that barn cases have posed a long-standing challenge for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge, I consider whether a similar challenge extends to deepfakes. In doing so, I consider how Duncan Pritchard’s recent anti-risk virtue epistemology meets the challenge. While Pritchard’s account avoids problems in traditional barn cases, I claim that it leads to local scepticism about knowledge from online videos in the case of deepfakes. I end by considering how two alternative virtue-theoretic approaches might vindicate our epistemic dependence on videos in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

The vast literature on negative treatment of outgroups and favoritism toward ingroups provides many local insights but is largely fragmented, lacking an overarching framework that might provide a unified overview and guide conceptual integration. As a result, it remains unclear where different local perspectives conflict, how they may reinforce one another, and where they leave gaps in our knowledge of the phenomena. Our aim is to start constructing a framework to help remedy this situation. We first identify a few key (...) ideas for creating a theoretical roadmap for this complex territory, namely the principles of etiological functionalism and the dual inheritance theory of human evolution. We show how a “molecular” approach to emotions fits into this picture, and use it to illuminate emotions that shape intergroup relations. Finally, we weave the pieces together into the beginnings of a systematic taxonomy of the emotions involved in social interactions, both hostile and friendly. While it is but a start, we have developed the argument in a way that illustrates how the foundational principles of our proposed framework can be extended to accommodate further cases. (shrink)