This concise, elegant essay on the roots and historical justification of philosophy marks a decisive step in posing the problem of what philosophy is. With consummate clarity and the charisma that distinguished him as a lecturer, José Ortega y Gasset re-creates "that moment when Parmenides began talking about something exceptionally strange, which he called 'being.'" How and why, he asks, did such a surprising adventure come about? Considering the human qualities that prompt a curiosity about existence and eternity, Ortega examines (...) philosophy's etymology, its connection to poetry, and its differentiation from religion and other modes of thought. He lucidly delineates radical differences of doctrine and style among early Greek thinkers, especially the "madman of reason" Parmenides and the "absolute individual" Heraclitus. He also considers philosophy's fundamental task of revealing the latent world poised behind the manifest world and discovering the relations between them. "Unable to find lodging among the philosophies of the past," Ortega observes, "we have no choice but to attempt to construct one of our own." The Origin of Philosophy argues for the vital importance of philosophy as a human endeavor, even while noting that each generation of thought reveals the past as "a defunct world of errors". (shrink)

"This concise, elegant essay on the roots and historical justification of philosophy marks a decisive step in posing the problem of what philosophy is.

Talbot Brewer offers a new approach to ethical theory, founded on a far-reaching reconsideration of the nature and sources of human agency.

In this article, Ellen Bliss Talbot affirms the reality of both time and change in individual human lives, asserting that moral growth is possible because an individual is a unity in and through time.

Accuracy‐first epistemology is an approach to formal epistemology which takes accuracy to be a measure of epistemic utility and attempts to vindicate norms of epistemic rationality by showing how conformity with them is beneficial. If accuracy‐first epistemology can actually vindicate any epistemic norms, it must adopt a plausible account of epistemic value. Any such account must avoid the epistemic version of Derek Parfit's “repugnant conclusion.” I argue that the only plausible way of doing so is to say that accurate credences (...) in certain propositions have no, or almost no, epistemic value. I prove that this is incompatible with standard accuracy‐first arguments for probabilism, and argue that there is no way for accuracy‐first epistemology to show that all credences of all agents should be coherent. (shrink)

When an agent suffers in their capacity as a knower, they are a victim of epistemic injustice. Varieties of epistemic injustices have been theorised. A salient feature across these theories is that perpetrators and victims of epistemic injustice belong to different social groups. In this paper, I argue for a form of epistemic injustice that could occur between members of the same social group. This is a form of epistemic injustice where the knower is first a victim of historical and (...) continuing oppression. Secondly, they internalise and appreciate the systems that harm them as a knower. This is possible because the victim subscribes to perniciously formed epistemic systems. This form of epistemic injustice is a valuable explanatory tool for non-standard and obscure instances of epistemic injustice where the victim a) accepts and appreciates the injustice they experience and b) is even the seeming perpetrator of the injustice against themselves. (shrink)

Humanity stands at a precipice. -/- Our species could survive for millions of generations — enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice; to reach new heights of flourishing. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, gaining the power to destroy ourselves, without the wisdom to ensure we won’t. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence. If we do not (...) act fast to reach a place of safety, it may soon be too late. -/- The Precipice explores the science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies we can take today to safeguard humanity’s future. (shrink)

We think we know what healers do: they build on patients' irrational beliefs and treat them in a 'symbolic' way. If they get results, it's thanks to their capacity to listen, rather than any influence on a clinical level. At the same time, we also think we know what modern medicine is: a highly technical and rational process, but one that scarcely listens to patients at all. In this book, ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan and philosopher Isabelle Stengers argue that this commonly (...) posed opposition between traditional and modern medicine is misleading. They show instead that healers are interesting precisely because they don't listen to patients, using techniques of 'divination' rather than 'diagnosis'. Healers construct genuine therapeutic strategies by identifying the origins of symptoms in external forces, outside of the mind of the sufferer, and in this regard African healers are virtuosos. Though it may claim otherwise, modern medicine, for its part, is characterised by empiricism rather than rationality. What appears to be the pursuit of rationality is ultimately only a means to dismiss and exclude other forms of treatment. Blurring the distinctions between traditional and modern practices and drawing on perspectives from across the globe, this ethnopsychiatric manifesto encourages us to think in radically new ways about illness, challenging accepted notions on the relationship between sufferer and symptom. It will be of great interest to those working in medicine and healthcare, as well as anthropologists, social scientists and those in the humanities more broadly. (shrink)

An account of how quantum physics is putting forward ideas that confirm the perceived beliefs of mystics who think the world is an illusion.

Sometimes a belief that p promotes having true beliefs, whether or not p is true. This gives reasons to believe that p, but most epistemologists would deny that it gives epistemic reasons, or that these reasons can epistemically justify the belief that p. Call these reasons to believe “truth promoting non-evidential reasons for belief.” This paper argues that three common views in epistemology, taken together, entail that reasons of this sort can epistemically justify beliefs. These three claims are: epistemic oughts (...) are normative, epistemic oughts have a source, and the source of epistemic oughts is an end that has true belief as a necessary component. These claims would be hard for many epistemologists to deny, but accepting them, and thus accepting that truth promoting non-evidential reasons can justify beliefs, has significant consequences for epistemology. The paper considers accounts of epistemic oughts that endorse these claims but might seem to avoid the consequence that truth promoting non-evidential reasons generate real epistemic oughts, and shows that none do. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by highlighting some previously unnoticed subtleties in the pragmatics of “commissive” utterances. I argue that theories which seek to model all commitments on promises, or to ground them all on voluntary consent, can account only for one sort of obligation and not for the other. Since social groups are most perspicuously categorized in terms of the sorts of commitments that bind their members together, this puts me (...) in a position to distinguish two importantly different kinds of social groups, which I call aggregations and associations. I try to show that this position can account for features of the normative structure of social groups that are overlooked by those theorists (e.g. Margaret Gilbert) who have attempted to offer a unitary, voluntarist account of the phenomena under investigation. (shrink)

This paper develops two ideas with respect to dispositional properties: (1) Adapting a suggestion of Sungho Choi, it appears the conceptual distinction between dispositional and categorical properties can be drawn in terms of susceptibility to finks and antidotes. Dispositional, but not categorical properties, are not susceptible to intrinsic finks, nor are they remediable by intrinsic antidotes. (2) If correct, this suggests the possibility that some dispositions—those which lack any causal basis—may be insusceptible to any fink or antidote. Since finks and (...) antidotes are a major obstacle to a conditional analysis of dispositions, these dispositions that are unfinkable may be successfully analysed by the conditional analysis of dispositions. This result is of importance for those who think that the fundamental properties might be dispositions which lack any distinct causal basis, because it suggests that these properties, if they exist, can be analysed by simple conditionals and that they will not be subject to ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

It has often been noted that there is some tension between engaging in decision-making and believing that one’s choices might be predetermined. The possibility that our choices are predetermined forces us to consider, in our decisions, act-state pairs which are inconsistent, and hence to which we cannot assign sensible utilities. But the reasoning which justifies two-boxing in Newcomb’s problem also justifies associating a non-zero causal probability with these inconsistent act-state pairs. Put together these undefined utilities and non-zero probabilities entail that (...) expected utilities are undefined whenever it is a possibility that our choices are predetermined. There are three ways to solve the problem, but all of them suffer serious costs: always assume that, contrary to our evidence, the outcome of our present decision-making is not predetermined; give up the reasoning that justifies unconditional two-boxing in Newcomb’s problem; or allow epistemically impossible outcomes to contribute to expected utility, leading to the wrong results in a series of cases introduced by Ahmed :665–685, 2014a, Evidence, decision and causality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014b). However they choose to respond, causal decision theorists cannot remain silent: the intuitive tension between decision-making and the possibility of predetermination can be made precise, and resolving it will require giving up something. Causal decision theorists have a predetermination problem. (shrink)

It is widely affirmed that human beings have irreplaceable valuable, and that we owe it to them to treat them accordingly. Many theorists have been drawn to Kantianism because they think that it alone can capture this intuition. One aim of this paper is to show that this is a mistake, and that Kantianism cannot provide an independent rational vindication, nor even a fully illuminating articulation, of irreplaceability. A further aim is to outline a broadly Aristotelian view that provides a (...) more fitting theoretical framework for this appealing conception of human value. This critique of Kantianism extends to contemporary theorists with a broadly Kantian orientation, including Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Darwall and John Rawls. The problem with these views, at heart, is that they attempt to ground morality in respect alone. Yet it is love, not respect, that brings irreplaceability into view. The paper closes with a sketch of a virtue-theoretic theory that follows Aquinas in taking love to be a master virtue that refines the other virtues so as to ensure a continuous and practically efficacious sensitivity to the irreplaceable value of fellow human beings. (shrink)

I describe three extant attempts to identify the global external symmetries within a Humean framework with theorems of some or other deductive systematization of the world, respectively, the best system, a meta-best system and a maximally simple system. Each has merits, but also serious flaws. Instead, I propose a view of global external symmetries as consequences of the structure of Humean-consistent world-making relations.

It is not clear whether to assess Robert Audi’s Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character as a collection of essays or a unified piece of theorizing. Seven of the book’s twelve essays have been published before, and at first blush they appear connected by little more than a common focus on ethics. These essays are framed, however, by an introduction and conclusion characterizing the book as the elaboration of a single, large-scale ethical theory. Perhaps a comprehensive theory can be disentangled from (...) these essays, but its contours and merits would be far clearer if Audi had presented it systematically, drawing selectively from previous essays rather than reproducing them wholesale. (shrink)

In J Philos Logic 34:155–192, 2005, Leitgeb provides a theory of truth which is based on a theory of semantic dependence. We argue here that the conceptual thrust of this approach provides us with the best way of dealing with semantic paradoxes in a manner that is acceptable to a classical logician. However, in investigating a problem that was raised at the end of J Philos Logic 34:155–192, 2005, we discover that something is missing from Leitgeb’s original definition. Moreover, we (...) show that once the appropriate repairs have been made, the resultant definition is equivalent to a version of the supervaluation definition suggested in J Philos 72:690–716, 1975 and discussed in detail in J Symb Log 51(3):663–681, 1986. The upshot of this is a philosophical justification for the simple supervaluation approach and fresh insight into its workings. (shrink)

Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation are said to aim for “contentless” experiences, where mental content such as thoughts, perceptions, and mental images is absent. Silence is understood to be a central feature of those experiences. The main source of information about the experiences is texts by experts from within the three traditions. Previous research has tended not to use an explicit scientific method for selecting and reviewing expert texts on meditation. We have identified evidence synthesis as a robust and transparent (...) method that is suitable for this purpose. In this paper we use evidence synthesis based on expert texts to examine silence/quietness as a feature of the contentless experiences in the three practices. Objective criteria were used to select a sample of 135 expert texts. A database containing the expert descriptions of the meditation techniques and experiences was produced by extracting the relevant material from the publications and coding that material to differentiate individual features. The database, which forms part of the supplementary material for this paper, identifies each feature of the contentless experiences referred to in the expert texts, including silence/quietness. Our key finding is that the experts indicate silence/quietness has a particular connection with stillness, and the absence of concepts, mental activity/noise, thoughts, and disturbance. Further analysis leads to the following insights. The silence/quietness reflects the absence of thoughts and sounds, and this fits neatly with a conception of silence/quietness as the absence of internal and external noise. In some cases the terms silence and quietness may also reflect the absence of other disturbances such as non-auditory perceptions, mental images, and negative feelings. That would fit with a conception of silence/quietness as complete calm or absence of disturbance. It is not clear from the expert texts how silence/quietness is distinct from other features such as stillness that also reflect the absence of disturbances. As a separate matter, silence/quietness has connections with all the other features of the contentless experiences, but the closeness of the connections varies. Our work uncovers fine distinctions and ambiguities which lead to new research questions that can be explored in future studies. (shrink)

The Church-Turing Thesis is widely regarded as true, because of evidence that there is only one genuine notion of computation. By contrast, there are nowadays many different formal logics, and different corresponding foundational frameworks. Which ones can deliver a theory of computability? This question sets up a difficult challenge: the meanings of basic mathematical terms are not stable across frameworks. While it is easy to compare what different frameworks say, it is not so easy to compare what they mean. We (...) argue for some minimal conditions that must be met if two frameworks are to be compared; if frameworks are radical enough, comparison becomes hopeless. Our aim is to clarify the dialectical situation in this bourgeoning area of research, shedding light on the nature of non-classical logic and the notion of computation alike. (shrink)

De Dreu and Gross's distinction between attack and defense is complicated in real-world conflicts because competing leaders construe their position as one of defense, and power imbalances place status quo challengers in a defensive position. Their account of defense as vigilant avoidance is incomplete because it avoids a reference to anger which transforms anxious avoidance into collective and unified action.

If A is better than B and B is better than C, then A is better than C, right? Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels say: No! Betterness is nontransitive, they claim. In this paper, I discuss the central type of argument advanced by Temkin and Rachels for this radical idea, and argue that, given this view very likely has sceptical implications for practical reason, we would do well to identify alternative responses. I propose one such response, which employs the idea (...) that rational agents might regard some options as incommensurate in value, and will reasonably employ a heuristic of status quo maintenance to avoid suboptimal choices from incommensurate goods. (shrink)

Why should we decolonise knowledge? One popular rationale is that colonialism has set up a single perspective as epistemically authoritative over many equally legitimate ones, and this is a form of...

Instances of epistemic injustice elicit resistance, anger, despair, frustration or cognate emotional responses from their victims. This sort of response to the epistemic injustices that accompanied historical systems of oppression such as colonialism, for example, is normal. However, if their victims have internalised these oppressive situations, we could get the counterintuitive response of appreciation. In this paper, I argue for the phenomenon of appreciative silencing to make sense of instances like this. This is a form of epistemic silencing that happens (...) when the accepted hegemonic intuitions of the oppressed are formed/influenced by the ideologies of the oppressors over time. Here, we have a resilient, oppressive and hegemonic epistemic system. Put together, it creates a variant of epistemic injustice and silencing that is obscure since its victims are neither resistant nor aware of the injustice they face but are appreciative. (shrink)

The letters transcribed in this book were written by physicist David Bohm to three close female acquaintances in the period 1950 to 1956. They provide a background to his causal interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Marxist philosophy that inspired his scientific work in quantum theory, probability and statistical mechanics. In his letters, Bohm reveals the ideas that led to his ground breaking book Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. The political arguments as well as the acute personal problems contained (...) in these letters help to give a rounded, human picture of this leading scientist and twentieth century thinker. (shrink)

Humean metaphysics is characterized by a rejection of necessary connections between distinct existences. Dispositionalists claim that there are basic causal powers. The existence of such properties is widely held to be incompatible with the Humean rejection of necessary connections. In this paper I present a novel theory of causal powers that vindicates the dispositionalist claim that causal powers are basic, without embracing brute necessary connections. The key assumptions of the theory are that there are natural types of causal processes, and (...) that manifestations of powers are identified with certain kinds of causal processes. From these assumptions, the modal features of powers are explained in terms of internal relations between powers themselves and the process-types in which powers are manifested. (shrink)

In this book, Toby Svoboda develops and defends a Kantian environmental virtue ethic, challenging the widely-held view that Kant's moral philosophy takes an instrumental view toward nature and animals and has little to offer environmental ethics. On the contrary, Svoboda posits that there is good moral reason to care about non-human organisms in their own right and to value their flourishing independently of human interests, since doing so is constitutive of certain virtues. Svoboda argues that Kant’s account of indirect (...) duties regarding nature can ground a compelling environmental ethic: the Kantian duty to develop morally virtuous dispositions strictly proscribes unnecessarily harming organisms, and Svoboda argues that this duty compels us to act in ways that benefit non-human organisms, given that doing so can enhance one’s virtues. Svoboda’s argument engages the recent literature on environmental virtue and provides an original argument for an environmental virtue ethic firmly rooted in Kant’s moral philosophy. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that scientific inquiry makes extensive use of probabilities, many of which seem to be objective chances, describing features of reality that are independent of our minds. Such chances appear to have a number of paradoxical or puzzling features: they appear to be mind-independent facts, but they are intimately connected with rational psychology; they display a temporal asymmetry, but they are supposed to be grounded in physical laws that are time-symmetric; and chances are used to explain and (...) predict frequencies of events, although they cannot be reduced to those frequencies. This book offers an accessible and non-technical introduction to these and other puzzles. Toby Handfield engages with traditional metaphysics and philosophy of science, drawing upon recent work in the foundations of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics to provide a novel account of objective probability that is empirically informed without requiring specialist scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The ubiquitous schema ‘All Fs are Gs’ dominates much philosophical discussion on laws but rarely is it shown how actual laws mentioned and used in science are supposed to fit it. After consideration of a variety of laws, including those obviously conditional and those superficially not conditional, I argue that we have good reason to support the traditional interpretation of laws as conditionals of some quantified form with a single object variable. I show how this conclusion impacts on the status (...) of ‘system laws’ and the significance of having only one object variable with regard to the relationship between laws and causal relations. (shrink)

As a response to climate change, geoengineering with solar radiation management has the potential to result in unjust harm. Potentially, this injustice could be ameliorated by providing compensation to victims of SRM. However, establishing a just SRM compensation system faces severe challenges. First, there is scientific uncertainty in detecting particular harmful impacts and causally attributing them to SRM. Second, there is ethical uncertainty regarding what principles should be used to determine responsibility and eligibility for compensation, as well as determining how (...) much compensation ought to be paid. Significant challenges loom for crafting a just SRM compensation system. (shrink)

In contentless experience there is an absence of mental content such as thought, perception, and mental imagery. The path to contentless experience in meditation can be taken to comprise the meditation technique, and the experiences on the way to the contentless “goal-state/s”. Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation are each said to access contentless experience, but the path to that experience in each practice is not yet well understood from a scientific perspective. We have employed evidence synthesis to select and review (...) 135 expert texts from those traditions. In this paper we describe the techniques and interim-states based on the expert texts and compare them across the practices on key dimensions. Superficially, Shamatha and Transcendental Meditation appear very different to Stillness Meditation in that they require bringing awareness to a meditation object. The more detailed and systematic approach taken in this paper indicates that posturally Shamatha is closer to Stillness Meditation, and that on several other dimensions Shamatha is quite different to both other practices. In particular, Shamatha involves greater measures to cultivate attentional stability and vividness with respect to an object, greater focusing, less tolerance of mind-wandering, more monitoring, and more deliberate doing/control. Achieving contentless experience in Shamatha is much slower, more difficult, and less frequent. The findings have important implications for taxonomies of meditation and for consciousness, neuroscientific, and clinical research/practice, and will provide new and useful insights for meditation practitioners. (shrink)

Part–whole causation is the thesis that some causes are part of their effects. PWC has been objected to because of its incompatibility with the criterion that causes not be spatially included within their effects and the criterion that causes and effects are ontologically distinct in some sense. This paper serves to undermine the sufficiency of these ways of objecting to PWC by showing that for each criterion either cause-effect relationships need not satisfy it or part–whole relationships can. A case-study of (...) the collapse of Bridge 9340 is employed to facilitate the discussion. (shrink)

Part–whole causation (PWC) is the thesis that some causes are part of their effects. PWC has been objected to because of its incompatibility with the criterion that causes not be spatially included within their effects and the criterion that causes and effects are ontologically distinct in some sense. This paper serves to undermine the sufficiency of these ways of objecting to PWC by showing that for each criterion either cause-effect relationships need not satisfy it or part–whole relationships can. A case-study (...) of the collapse of Bridge 9340 is employed to facilitate the discussion. (shrink)

f The purpose of this paper is to investigate categoricity arguments conducted in second order logic and the philosophical conclusions that can be drawn from them. We provide a way of seeing this result, so to speak, through a first order lens divested of its second order garb. Our purpose is to draw into sharper relief exactly what is involved in this kind of categoricity proof and to highlight the fact that we should be reserved before drawing powerful philosophical conclusions (...) from it. (shrink)

Subpart B of 45 Code of Federal Regulations Part 46 (CFR) identifies the criteria according to which research involving pregnant women, human fetuses, and neonates can be conducted ethically in the United States. As such, pregnant women and fetuses fall into a category requiring “additional protections,” often referred to as “vulnerable populations.” The CFR does not define vulnerability, but merely gives examples of vulnerable groups by pointing to different categories of potential research subjects needing additional protections. In this paper, I (...) assess critically the role of this categorization of pregnant women involved in research as “vulnerable,” both as separate entities and in combination with the fetuses they carry. In particular, I do three things: (1) demonstrate that pregnant women qua pregnancy are either not “vulnerable” according to any meaningful definition of that term or that such vulnerability is irrelevant to her status as a research participant; (2) argue that while a fetus may be vulnerable in terms of dependency, this categorization does not equate to the vulnerability of the pregnant woman; and (3) suggest that any vulnerability that appends to women is precisely the result of federal regulations and dubious public perceptions about pregnant women. I conclude by demonstrating how this erroneous characterization of pregnant women as “vulnerable” and its associated protections have not only impeded vital research for pregnant women and their fetuses, but have also negatively affected the inclusion of all women in clinical research. (shrink)

It is often claimed that from the moment of conception embryos have the same moral status as adult humans. This claim plays a central role in many arguments against abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem cell research. In what follows, I show that this claim leads directly to an unexpected and unwelcome conclusion: that natural embryo loss is one of the greatest problems of our time and that we must do almost everything in our power to prevent it. I examine (...) the responses available to those who hold that embryos have full moral status and conclude that they cannot avoid the force of this argument without giving up this key claim. (shrink)

It is common, in current literature on the topic at hand, to distinguish two kinds of reasons for action: justificatory reasons, which answer questions about what we ought to do, and explanatory reasons, which explain what we actually do. Internalism is a thesis about justificatory reasons—that is, the kind of reasons we are in search of when we deliberate about what to do or advise others about what they ought to do. Of course, since internalism traces justificatory reasons to the (...) subjective motivations of those to whom the reasons apply, and since these motivations play a central role in explaining actions, the doctrine implies that there is a close relation—perhaps even a relation of identity—between justificatory and explanatory reasons. Still, the main proponents of internalism have presented it, in the first instance, as a thesis about justificatory reasons. What I hope to show is that internalism cannot be accepted as a limitation on justificatory reasons because it cannot coherently be accepted in the course of first-person deliberation; and it ought not to be accepted when offering advice. To think otherwise, I will argue, is to reverse the ‘direction of gaze’ appropriate to deliberation, mistaking the psychological states that shape our view of justificatory reasons for the justificatory reasons they bring into view. The upshot of this reversal is to make justification far too easy to come by, and to render it obscure what we are doing when we pause to consider whether we really have the reasons that we are disposed to think we have. (shrink)

The most familiar philosophical conception of objective chance renders determinism incompatible with non-trivial chances. This conception – associated in particular with the work of David Lewis – is not a good fit with our use of the word ‘chance’ and its cognates in ordinary discourse. In this paper we show how a generalized framework for chance can reconcile determinism with non-trivial chances, and provide for a more charitable interpretation of ordinary chance-talk. According to our proposal, variation in an admissible ‘evidence (...) base’ generates a spectrum of different chance functions. Successive coarse-grainings of the evidence base generates a partial ordering of chance functions, with finer trumping coarser if known. We suggest that chance-attributions in ordinary discourse express different chance functions in different contexts, and we sketch a potential contextual mechanism for making particular chance functions salient. The mechanism involves the idea that admissible evidence is available evidence: propositions that could be known. A consequence is that attributions of objective chances inherit the relatively familiar context-sensitivity associated with the modal ‘could’. We show how this context-dependency undermines certain arguments for the incompatibility of chance with determinism. (shrink)

Some authors have called for increased research on various forms of geoengineering as a means to address global climate change. This paper focuses on the question of whether a particular form of geoengineering, namely deploying sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to counteract some of the effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations, would be a just response to climate change. In particular, we examine problems sulfate aerosol geoengineering (SAG) faces in meeting the requirements of distributive, intergenerational, and procedural justice. We argue (...) that SAG faces obstacles to meeting the requirements of all three considered kinds of justice, because its impacts can harm some persons and communities much more than others; it poses serious risks to future generations; and SAG is especially prone to unilateral implementation. While we do not claim that SAG ought not to be implemented, we argue that it is the responsibility of proponents of SAG to recognize and address these ethical obstacles before advocating its implementation. (shrink)