If we are going to treat other species so very differently from our own — killing, eating and experimenting on pigs and sheep, for example, but never human beings — then it seems we need to come up with some morally relevant difference between us and them that justifies this difference in treatment. Otherwise it appears we are guilty of bigotry (in just the same way that someone who discriminates on the basis of race or sex is guilty of bigotry). (...) But what is this morally relevant difference? Julia Tanner's article examines, and rejects, some of the most popular answers to this question. -/- . (shrink)

Rationality (or something similar) is usually given as the relevant difference between all humans and animals; the reason humans do but animals do not deserve moral consideration. But according to the Argument from Marginal Cases not all humans are rational, yet if such (marginal) humans are morally considerable despite lacking rationality it would be arbitrary to deny animals with similar capacities a similar level of moral consideration. The slippery slope objection has it that although marginal (...) humans are not strictly speaking morally considerable, we should give them moral consideration because if we do not we will slide down a slippery slope where we end up by not giving normal humans due consideration. I argue that this objection fails to show that marginal humans have the kind of direct moral status proponents of the slippery slope argument have in mind. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anderson claims that the argument from marginal cases is 'the central argument' behind the claim that nonhuman animals have rights. But she thinks, along with Cora Diamond, that the argument is 'obtuse'. Two different meanings could be intended here: that the argument from marginal cases is too blunt or dull to dissect the reasons why it makes sense to say that nonhuman animals have rights or that the argument from (...) class='Hi'>marginal cases is insensitive regarding nonrational human beings. The purpose of the present article is to argue that, despite Anderson's and Diamond's nuanced and perceptive treatments of the argument from marginal cases, this argument is not obtuse in either sense of the term. (shrink)

Marginal humans are not rational yet we still think they are morally considerable. This is inconsistent with denying animals moral status on the basis of their irrationality. Therefore, either marginal humans and animals are both morally considerable or neither are. In this paper I consider a major objection to this argument: that species is a relevant difference between humans animals.

I characterize the main approaches to the moral consideration of children developed in the light of the argument from 'marginal' cases, and develop a more adequate strategy that provides guidance about the moral responsibilities adults have towards children. The first approach discounts the significance of children's potential and makes obligations to all children indirect, dependent upon interests others may have in children being treated well. The next approaches agree that the potential of children is morally considerable, but (...) disagree as to whether and why children with intellectual disabilities are morally considerable. These approaches explore the moral significance of intellectual capacities, species membership, the capacity for welfare, and the interests of others. I argue that relationships characterized by reciprocity of care are morally valuable, that both the potential to be in such relationships and the actuality of being in them are morally valuable, and that many children with significant intellectual disabilities have this potential. (shrink)

The Singer-Regan debate -- Reciprocity -- Frey's challenge -- The criticisms of Leahy and Carruthers -- The great ape project and slavery -- The Nozick-Rachels debate.

Given the existence of “marginal human cases”, it is often argued that we must either acknowledge that some human beings have less moral status than some non-human animals, or commit to the idea that moral status is held by humans qua human. In this paper, the moves available on both sides are shown to be unsatisfactory, and an argument for moral status that avoids both of the standard positions is suggested. Ultimately, it is argued that the discussion (...) of moral status is confused when marginal human cases are seen as posing a unique, rather than a general, theoretical problem. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Some beings, including children, animals and the mentally handicapped, seem to deserve moral consideration, despite the fact that they are not rational or moral agents. These so‐called marginal cases create a problem for theories that heavily stress the role of moral and/or rational agency in ethics: the latter seem unable to account for the former's moral status. This paper discusses the recent and original attempt of Loren Lomasky to solve this problem. It is argued that Lomasky's arguments (...) are self‐defeating because they can only succeed by relying on common‐sense morality and, thus, by giving up the heavy stress on the role of rational agency in ethics. (shrink)

Philosophers often enroll disabled bodies and minds as objects of thought in their arguments from marginal cases and in thought experiments: for example, arguments for animal ethics use cognitively disabled people as a contrast case, and Merleau-Ponty uses a blind man with a cane as an exemplar of the relationship of technology to the human, of how technology mediates. However, these philosophers enroll disabled people without engaging significantly in any way with disabled people themselves. Instead, disabled people are (...) treated in philosophy as literal objects—and in many cases, as less than human. (This sense of a categorical difference between disabled and nondisabled people is becoming especially clear during the Covid-19 pandemic, as I write this article.) Philosophical reflection thus makes assumptions—often wrong—about disabled people’s lives, experiences, and relationships to technology. Outside of philosophy as well as in, disabled people are not regarded as experts about our own experiences and lives; our testimony is paternalistically written over. We need better consideration of disabled people as people as we consider the future. Lack of disabled people’s points of view in philosophy colors—and sometimes invalidates—views of technological change. (shrink)

I argue that the equal rights views of Tom Regan and Evelyn B. Pluhar must be rejected because they have unacceptable consequences. My objection is similar to one made in the literature by Mary Anne Warren, but I develop it in more detail and defend it from several plausible responses that an equal rights theorist might make. I formulate a theory, a moderate form of perfectionism, that makes a valuedistinction between moral agents and moral patients according to which although both (...) have rights, these rights are not equal. This theory avoids the unacceptable consequences of the equal rights view and is immune to the marginal cases arguments that typical full-personhood theories succumb to. This moderate perfectionism generates an obligation for people to be vegetarians (in most cases) and to severely curtail animal experimentation. (shrink)

I argue that the equal rights views of Tom Regan and Evelyn B. Pluhar must be rejected because they have unacceptable consequences. My objection is similar to one made in the literature by Mary Anne Warren, but I develop it in more detail and defend it from several plausible responses that an equal rights theorist might make. I formulate a theory, a moderate form of perfectionism, that makes a valuedistinction between moral agents and moral patients according to which although both (...) have rights, these rights are not equal. This theory avoids the unacceptable consequences of the equal rights view and is immune to the marginal cases arguments that typical full-personhood theories succumb to. This moderate perfectionism generates an obligation for people to be vegetarians (in most cases) and to severely curtail animal experimentation. (shrink)

It matters a great deal whether animals have moral status. If animals have moral status, it may be wrong for us to use them as we currently do – hunting, farming, eating, and experimenting on them. The argument from marginal cases provides us with a reason to think that some animals have moral status that is equal to that of “marginal” humans.

In this paper I will examine two responses to the argument from marginal cases; the argument from kinds and the similarity argument. I will argue that these arguments are insufficient to show that all humans have moral status but no animals do. This does not prove that animals have moral status but it does shift the burden of proof onto those who want to maintain that all humans are morally considerable, but no animals are.

The argument from species overlap has been widely used in the literature on animal ethics and speciesism. However, there has been much confusion regarding what the argument proves and what it does not prove, and regarding the views it challenges. This article intends to clarify these confusions, and to show that the name most often used for this argument (‘the argument from marginal cases’) reflects and reinforces these misunderstandings. The article claims that the (...) class='Hi'>argument questions not only those defences of anthropocentrism that appeal to capacities believed to be typically human, but also those that appeal to special relations between humans. This means the scope of the argument is far wider than has been thought thus far. Finally, the article claims that, even if the argument cannot prove by itself that we should not disregard the interests of nonhuman animals, it provides us with strong reasons to do so, since the argument does prove that no defence of anthropocentrism appealing to non-definitional and testable criteria succeeds. (shrink)

One debate surrounding Derk Pereboom’s (2001, 2014) four-case argument against compatibilism focuses on whether, and why, we judge manipulated agents to be neither free nor morally responsible. In this paper, we propose a novel explanation. The four-case argument features cases where an agent is the only individual in her universe who has been manipulated. Let us call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents existential manipulation. Contrast this with universal manipulation, which affects all (...) agents within a universe. We propose that we find agents in Pereboom’s manipulation cases less free and morally responsible in part because they are the target of existential manipulation. We empirically tested this hypothesis and found that people’s free will and moral responsibility judgments were sensitive to the scope of manipulation: people judged existentially manipulated agents significantly less free and responsible than universally manipulated agents. (shrink)

Antony Flew; The Paradigm Case Argument: abusing and not using the PCA, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 115–121, http.

This paper addresses the question: Who or what can have a moral status in the sense that we have direct moral duties to them? It argues for a biocentric answer which ascribes inherent moral status value to all individual living organisms. This position must be defended against an anthropocentric position. The argument from marginal cases propounded by Tom Regan and Peter Singer for this purpose is criticised as defective, and a different argument is proposed. The biocentric (...) position developed here is related to that of Albert Schweitzer and Paul F. Taylor, but rejects their assumption of equal inherent value for all living organisms. It argues instead for equal moral status value for moral persons and agents, and gradual moral status value for nonpersons, depending on their degree of similarity with moral persons. Mary Ann Warren's recent book on Moral Status is also discussed. The argument is constructed as a casuistic argument, proceeding by analogical extension from persons to non-persons. The meta-ethical question of its pragmatic validity is discussed. (shrink)

There are two principles that lend Brouwer's mathematics the extra power beyond arithmetic. Both are presented in Brouwer's writings with little or no argument. One, the principle of bar induction, will not concern us here. The other, the continuity principle for numbers, occurs for the first time in print in [4]. It is formulated and immediately applied to show that the set of numerical choice sequences is not enumerable. In fact, the idea of the continuity property can be dated (...) fairly precisely, it is to be found in the margin of Brouwer's notes for his course on Pointset Theory of 1915/16. The course was repeated in 1916/17 and he must have inserted his first formulation of the continuity principle in the fall of 1916 as new material right at the beginning of the course.In modern language, the principle readswhere α and β range over choice sequences of natural numbers, m and x over natural numbers, and stands for ⟨α, α, …, α⟩, the initial segment of α of length m.An immediate consequence of WC-N is that all full functions are continuous, and, as a corollary, that the continuum is unsplittable [28]. Note that WC-N is incompatible with Church's thesis, [22], section 4.6.After Brouwer asserted WC-N, Troelstra was the first to ask in print for a conceptual motivation, but he remained an exception; most authors followed Brouwer by simply asserting it, cf. [18].Let us note first that in one particular case the principle is obvious indeed, namely in the case of the lawless sequences. The notion of lawless sequence surfaced fairly late in the history of intuitionism. Kreisel introduced it in [17] for metamathematical purposes. There is a letter from Brouwer to Heyting in which the phenomenon also occurs [7]. This is an important and interesting fact since it is the only time that Brouwer made use of a possibility expressly stipulated in, e.g., [5], see below. (shrink)

Courts are often criticised as undemocratic. The backlash against international courts in the last decade is also partly driven by this concern. Human rights courts’ legitimacy is particularly challenged because they aim to protect human rights against the very states that need to comply with and implement the courts’ judgements. Therefore, several international courts have developed mechanisms of deference to states. One especially interesting tool is the European Court of Human Rights’ margin of appreciation doctrine. This paper proposes that the (...) margin of appreciation can ensure the conditions of personal autonomy by protecting human rights while respecting the democratic decisions of states. Yet, states’ decisions should only be respected insofar as they realise political autonomy. Understanding the margin in this way allows us to critically evaluate arguments made under this label. The paper reviews developments in the ECtHR practice with regard to (a) different cases that use the margin of appreciation doctrine, (b) appeals to a European consensus, and (c) the procedural turn in its review and assesses whether and how they can be justified in the light of considerations about personal and political autonomy. (shrink)

This paper challenges the moral justificatory significance of the notion of basic desert. The notion of basic desert is commonly used in the literature to distinguish a specific sense of moral responsibility that depends on free will. In this sense, a person is morally responsible for an action if this action belongs to her in such a way that she would deserve to be blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would deserve to be praised if (...) she understood that it was morally exemplary. The central question of the paper concerns the role of the notion of basic desert in moral justifications of social practices including responsibility practices. I argue that the significance sometimes attributed to the notion of basic desert is largely a byproduct of its isolation from a larger context of other moral reasons and moral justifications. First, I introduce the concepts of special and general moral justifications and defend the central assumption behind these concepts. Next, I present a three-case argument that challenges the justificatory moral significance of the notion of basic desert by considering various logical roles that it might play in the general moral justification of various social practices. Finally, I apply this argument to Derk Pereboom’s theory of hard incompatibilism in order to show that moral justification of the revisionary part of his project does not depend on the belief in free will necessary for moral responsibility in the sense of basic desert. (shrink)

There are two principles that lend Brouwer's mathematics the extra power beyond arithmetic. Both are presented in Brouwer's writings with little or no argument. One, the principle of bar induction, will not concern us here. The other, the continuity principle for numbers, occurs for the first time in print in [4]. It is formulated and immediately applied to show that the set of numerical choice sequences is not enumerable. In fact, the idea of the continuity property can be dated (...) fairly precisely, it is to be found in the margin of Brouwer's notes for his course on Pointset Theory of 1915/16. The course was repeated in 1916/17 and he must have inserted his first formulation of the continuity principle in the fall of 1916 as new material right at the beginning of the course.In modern language, the principle readswhere α and β range over choice sequences of natural numbers, m and x over natural numbers, and stands for ⟨α, α, …, α⟩, the initial segment of α of length m.An immediate consequence of WC-N is that all full functions are continuous, and, as a corollary, that the continuum is unsplittable [28]. Note that WC-N is incompatible with Church's thesis, [22], section 4.6.After Brouwer asserted WC-N, Troelstra was the first to ask in print for a conceptual motivation, but he remained an exception; most authors followed Brouwer by simply asserting it, cf. [18].Let us note first that in one particular case the principle is obvious indeed, namely in the case of the lawless sequences. The notion of lawless sequence surfaced fairly late in the history of intuitionism. Kreisel introduced it in [17] for metamathematical purposes. There is a letter from Brouwer to Heyting in which the phenomenon also occurs [7]. This is an important and interesting fact since it is the only time that Brouwer made use of a possibility expressly stipulated in, e.g., [5], see below. (shrink)

We argue that Anthropocentrism – the kind of speciesism that privilegies the human species – is morally unacceptable. We distinguish and criticize three varieties of Anthropocentrism: unqualified, qualified empirical and qualified non-empirical. Firstly, unqualified Anthropocentrism is dismissed because it is grounded on a moral principle which implies that discriminations like racism and sexism are justified. Secondly, qualified empirical Anthropocentrism falls victim to the marginal cases argument, an argument that shows that properties which allegedly attribute moral status (...) to every human and to no animal, ultimately, if they exclude every animal, they also exclude some humans. Lastly, qualified non-empirical Anthropocentrism is rejected due to implausible consequences about which individuals have moral status. After rejecting Anthropocentrism, we consider a generalization of the marginal cases argument against all forms of speciesism. We show that only a species entirely comprised of essentially moral individuals would be unaffected by this argument. However, the possibility of such a species has limited practical import. Contrarily, Anthropocentrism’s moral unacceptability requires profound changes in the way humans relate with animals. (shrink)

Pereboom’s Four-Case Argument was once considered to be the most powerful of the manipulation arguments against compatibilism. However, because of Demetriou’s :595–617, 2010) response, Pereboom has significantly weakened his argument. Manipulation arguments in general have also been challenged by King : 65–83, 2013). In this paper, I argue that the Four-Case Argument resists both these challenges. One upshot is that Pereboom doesn’t need weaken his argument. Another is that compatibilists still need a response the Four-Case (...) class='Hi'>Argument. And another is that we get a much better understanding of the Four-Case Argument, and of manipulation arguments more generally, than is currently available in the literature. (shrink)

The present article is the second one in a series and begins to spell out the case for the intrinsic kind of theory of consciousness4. According to such theory, a mental-occurrence instance is conscious4 on its own, that is, as a part of its own internal structure. Considered here are a prominent phenomenologist’s argument in favor of an intrinsic theory of consciousness4, and his conception of how such inner awareness occurs in the case of objectivating mental acts, which are (...) all conscious4 in his view. Every objectivating act is a mental-occurrence instance that includes outer awareness, that is, awareness of something lying externally to the act. Every objectivating act presents an object distinct from itself, conveys awareness of that object, and — allegedly as a mere by-product or concomitant — conveys awareness of itself. This article emphasizes the question of what property of outer awareness it is that necessarily, as has been claimed, brings along with it inner awareness of the respective objectivating act. Also, this article begins to argue that, in the very occurrence of any conscious4 objectivating act, inner awareness is "interwoven" with outer awareness. Inner awareness is a part of the "thematizing" activity of any conscious4 mental act, rather than being "marginal," that is, a merely implicit concomitant of the act. (shrink)

The point of departure of David Ellerman's paper is that the role of labour in economics can be looked at in a fundamentally different way than has typically been the case. The paper's purpose is, therefore, oppositional. However, it cannot simply be dismissed. It is clearly articulated, well reasoned, and most importantly, thought provoking. It requires one to rethink how one conceives some basic issues in economics. As such, one does not need to be entirely convinced by the argument (...) to consider it worthy of dissemination. At the same time, if one subscribes to the ethic of structured or critical pluralism one must also consider the pressure points of the argument (see Dow, 2004; Dobusch and Kapeller, 2012). Below, I briefly reconstruct Ellerman's core claims and provide some comment on that argument. Read David Ellerman's paper "The Labour Theory of Property and Marginal Productivity Theory". (shrink)

This article is primarily a defense of the Paradigm Case Argument (PCA). It is secondarily a comment on a recent controversy over the validity of its use in philosophy. I argue that the controversy rests on a misinterpretation. By extending the analysis of the objections (and here I invoke Descartes' famous method of possible doubt) I show that the occurrence of a paradigm and the fact that a concept is normally used to describe that paradigm logically entails not that (...) the paradigm is instantiated, but only that it is correct to apply that concept to that paradigm. In this manner the ontological fallacy is avoided, and further, this enforces the important separation between saying something about the correct application of a concept and saying something about its meaning. (shrink)

Antony Flew; The Paradigm Case Argument: abusing and not using the PCA, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 115–121, http.

Catherine Beattie; The Paradigm Case Argument: its use and abuse in education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 77–86.

The paper discusses the structure, applications, and plausibility of the much-used parallel-case argument for workplace democracy. The argument rests on an analogy between firms and states according to which the justification of democracy in the state implies its justification in the workplace. The contribution of the paper is threefold. First, the argument is illustrated by applying it to two usual objections to workplace democracy, namely, that employees lack the expertise required to run a firm and that only (...) capital suppliers should have a say over the governance of the firm. Second, the structure of the argument is unfolded. Third, two salient similarities between firms and states regarding their internal and external effects and the standing of their members are addressed in order to asses the potential and limits of the argument, as well as three relevant differences regarding the voluntariness of their membership, the narrowness of their goals, and the stiffness of the competition they face. After considering these similarities and differences, the paper contends that the the parallel-case argument provides a sound reason in favor of democracy in the workplace—a reason, however, that needs to be importantly qualified and that is only pro tanto. (shrink)

The Qualitative Thesis says that if you leave open P, then you are sure of if P, then Q just in case you are sure of the corresponding material conditional. We argue the Qualitative Thesis provides compelling reasons to accept a thesis that we call Conditional Locality, which says, roughly, the interpretation of an indicative conditional depends, in part, on the conditional’s local embedding environment. In the first part of the paper, we present an argument—due to Ben Holguín—showing that, (...) without Conditional Locality, the Qualitative Thesis is in tension with a margin for error principle on rational sureness. We show Conditional Locality reconciles the Qualitative Thesis with the margin for error principle. In the second part, we argue the full range of data supports what we call the Strong Qualitative Thesis. Without Conditional Locality, the Strong Qualitative Thesis has unacceptable consequences. But with Conditional Locality, it is tenable. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of the moral status of non-human animals, or the question whether sentient animals are morally considerable. The arguments for and against the moral status of animals are discussed, above all the argument from marginal cases. It is argued that sentient animals have moral status based on their having interests in their experiential well-being, but that there are degrees of moral status. Two interest-based approaches are presented and discussed: DeGrazia’s view that sentient animals (...) have interests in continuing to live, and that their interests should be granted moral weight; and McMahan’s TRIA which similarly postulates that animals have interests and that in a given situation we should compare the human and animal interests at stake. Finally, the paper concludes that the anthropocentric approach to animal ethics should be abandoned in favour of the biocentric ethics. (shrink)

The use of the capability approach as an evaluative tool for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy and programs in developing countries, in particular at a grass-roots community level, is an emerging field of application. However, one of the difficulties with ICT for development (ICT4D) evaluations is in linking what is often no more than a resource, for example basic access, to actual outcomes, or means to end. This article argues that the capability approach provides a framework for evaluating the (...) strength of this linkage and that the latter is a key determinant of whether or not communities sustain ICT4D programs beyond the initial start-up phase. The argument is made by describing an evaluative application of the capabilities approach to community ICT4D programs using two Indigenous community case studies conducted in Cape York, in the far north-east of Australia. Key to the evaluative approach is the identification of community defined, context specific concepts of well-being and constitutive valued functionings and the derivation from this of required capabilities. This move away from normative definitions of capabilities or capability types to a definition that reflects the Indigenous culture, history, circumstances, and well-being aspirations of each community is intended to give a voice to the people and at the same time provide a deeper informational base—through narrative—for policy and program design than has previously been available. The article concludes that by operationalising the capability approach in a context and purpose specific way, policy and program design can be improved so as to include more communities on the margin and thereby achieve more socially inclusive ICT based development. A process is also outlined for using the evaluative application of the capability approach for community ICT4D within a policy feedback loop. (shrink)

There are two principles that lend Brouwer's mathematics the extra power beyond arithmetic. Both are presented in Brouwer's writings with little or no argument. One, the principle of bar induction, will not concern us here. The other, the continuity principle for numbers, occurs for the first time in print in [4]. It is formulated and immediately applied to show that the set of numerical choice sequences is not enumerable. In fact, the idea of the continuity property can be dated (...) fairly precisely, it is to be found in the margin of Brouwer's notes for his course on Pointset Theory of 1915/16. The course was repeated in 1916/17 and he must have inserted his first formulation of the continuity principle in the fall of 1916 as new material right at the beginning of the course.In modern language, the principle readswhere α and β range over choice sequences of natural numbers,mandxover natural numbers, andstands for ⟨α(0), α(1), …, α(m− 1)⟩, the initial segment of α of lengthm.An immediate consequence of WC-N is that all full functions are continuous, and, as a corollary, that the continuum is unsplittable [28]. Note that WC-N is incompatible with Church's thesis, [22], section 4.6.After Brouwer asserted WC-N, Troelstra was the first to ask in print for a conceptual motivation, but he remained an exception; most authors followed Brouwer by simply asserting it, cf. [18].Let us note first that in one particular case the principle is obvious indeed, namely in the case of the lawless sequences. The notion of lawless sequence surfaced fairly late in the history of intuitionism. Kreisel introduced it in [17] for metamathematical purposes. There is a letter from Brouwer to Heyting in which the phenomenon also occurs [7]. This is an important and interesting fact since it is (probably) the only time that Brouwer made use of a possibility expressly stipulated in, e.g., [5], see below. (shrink)

Recently, Timothy Williamson has argued that considerations about margins of errors can generate a new class of cases where agents have justified true beliefs without knowledge. I think this is a great argument, and it has a number of interesting philosophical conclusions. In this note I’m going to go over the assumptions of Williamson’s argument. I’m going to argue that the assumptions which generate the justification without knowledge are true. I’m then going to go over some of (...) the recent arguments in epistemology that are refuted by Williamson’s work. And I’m going to end with an admittedly inconclusive discussion of what we can know when using an imperfect measuring device. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of human rights accept that all persons have human rights. Typically, ‘personhood’ is understood as unitary and binary. It is unitary because there is generally supposed to be a single threshold property required for personhood. It is binary because it is all-or-nothing: you are either a person or you are not. A difficulty with binary views is that there will typically be subjects, like children and those with dementia, who do not meet the threshold, and so who (...) are not persons with human rights, on these accounts. It is consequently unclear how we ought to treat these subjects. This is the problem of marginal cases. I argue that we cannot resolve the problem of marginal cases if we accept a unitary, binary view of personhood. Instead, I develop a new non-binary personhood account of human rights, and defend two main claims. First, there are many, scalar properties, the having of which are conducive to personhood. Second, different subjects have different human rights depending on which of these properties they have, and what threats apply to them. On my view, and contra most existing accounts, most marginal cases have some degree of personhood and are entitled to some human rights. (shrink)

The paper retraces the history of one of the ancient arguments, which took place in the period of the rise of metaphysics between Plato and Isocrates. The problem at issue was the balance between words and acts. Both philosophers aimed at different resolutions of the problems brought about by this conflict bewteen the words and acts . In the course of history the ways of "settling" this argument have been gradually marginalized. The metaphysics, however, had not freed itself of (...) the necessity to resolve the confilcts, which the metaphysics itself provoked by its claims on the "rule of reason". That is why even such a marginalized character as Isokrates could become an interesting and a very significant impulse for the contemporary thought, still captured by platonism and facing "isocratian objections". (shrink)

Many people think that animal liberation would require a fundamental transformation of basic beliefs. We would have to give up "speciesism" and start viewing animals as our equals, with rights and moral status. And we would have to apply these beliefs in an all-or-nothing way. But in Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir makes the radical argument that animal liberation doesn't require such radical arguments--and that liberation could be accomplished in a flexible and pragmatic way. By making a case (...) for liberation that is based primarily on common moral intuitions and beliefs, and that therefore could attract wide understanding and support, Zamir attempts to change the terms of the liberation debate. Without defending it, Ethics and the Beast claims that speciesism is fully compatible with liberation. Even if we believe that we should favor humans when there is a pressing human need at stake, Zamir argues, that does not mean that we should allow marginal human interests to trump the life-or-death interests of animals. As minimalist as it sounds, this position generates a robust liberation program, including commitments not to eat animals, subject them to factory farming, or use them in medical research. Zamir also applies his arguments to some questions that tend to be overlooked in the liberation debate, such as whether using animals can be distinguished from exploiting them, whether liberationists should be moral vegetarians or vegans, and whether using animals for therapeutic purposes is morally blameless. (shrink)

THERE have been several attempts in recent philosophical discussion to present criteria for determining which words have ontological implications. I am going to concern myself with one attempt. The paradigm case argument has been appealed to in philosophical disputes ranging over such wide problem-areas as ‘other minds’, ‘freedom and determinism’ and ‘epistemological scepticism’. Reference has been made to paradigm cases in answering philosophers’ claims that ‘I can never know that another person is in pain’, ‘There are no acts (...) of free-will’ and ‘I can never know anything for certain’. (shrink)

Virtue and vice remain at the margins of feminist conceptual analysis although both establish a dualism that denies women full citizenship. To make this argument, this analysis explores the historical case of the Lowell mill girls – the first nearly all-female labour force in the United States between 1826 and 1850. Their public debate illustrates how virtue aligns some women with the economic and political status quo while society affiliates those who challenge its dominant beliefs with vice. This moral (...) location reveals the ‘virtues of vice’ or the political benefits that women may derive from vice which places them outside traditional moral and political discourse, enabling them to question existing moral paradigms, consider alternatives, and politically organize against the status quo. As such, the Lowell mill girl debate can inform contemporary feminist theory by raising serious questions about virtue and suggesting how vice opens up a critical space for ideological innovation, referred to here as a moral middle ground, that may result in a more democratic, feminist ethics. (shrink)