The criminal law presently distinguishes between actions and omissions, and only rarely proscribes failures to avert consequences that it would be an offense to bring about. Why? In recent years it has been persuasively argued by both Glover and Bennett that, celeris paribus, omissions to prevent a harm are just as culpable as are actions which bring that harm about. On the other hand, and acknowledging that hitherto “lawyers have not been very successful in finding a rationale for it,” Tony (...) Honoré has sought to defend the law's differential treatment. He proposes a “distinct-duties theory” that in addition to the general duties we owe to everyone, we also owe distinct duties to a more limited collection of people and associations, specified by features of our relationship with them. Where a distinct duty holds, breach by omission may well be no better than breach by positive action. But absent a distinct duty, omissions, per Honoré, are less culpable. They are mere failures to intervene and improve or rectify things, whereas actions are positive interventions which make things worse. And, thus, the law has good reason to differentiate between them. (shrink)

Axiomatic set theory is the concern of this book. More particularly, the authors prove results about the coding of models M, of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory together with the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis by using a class 'forcing' construction. By this method they extend M to another model L[a] with the same properties. L[a] is Gödels universe of 'constructible' sets L, together with a set of integers a which code all the cardinality and cofinality structure of M. Some applications are also considered. (...) Graduate students and research workers in set theory and logic will be especially interested by this account. (shrink)

Many of the most serious crimes that fall within the justificatory scope of the harm principle do so constitutively. They do so in the sense that the harm that the crime is designed to prevent is a...

Aristotle's definition of the soul should be interpreted as: 'the soul is the entelechy of a natural body that serves as its instrument'.

This paper explores the Offence Principle. It discusses whether two constraints, additional to the criteria stated in conventional analysis, ought to be met before the Offense Principle can be satisfied: (i) that offensive conduct must be a wrong, and (ii) that the conduct must also lead to harm. The nature of the Harm Principle, and its relationship to the Offense Principle, are also considered. The paper suggests that, even if all cases in which offense should be criminalized also involve harm, (...) nonetheless there may be good reasons to retain a separate Offense Principle. (shrink)

Ideal interpretation is understanding a text in the best possible way. It is usually used when the text has a canonical status, such as the Bible or the U.S. Constitution. We argue that Zhu Xi’s view about interpreting the Four Books and Ronald Dworkin’s view about constitutional interpretation are examples of ideal interpretation and that their basic principles are similar. Each holds, roughly, that their target text contains moral truth; that the author’s mind requires the mediation of learning; that the (...) purpose of interpretation is not only to lead the reader to the moral truth but to become a better person; that all propositions are about the same moral truth or about political justice; that the interpretation ultimately must come from oneself, purged of prejudices; and that the only correct interpretation is one that captures the original meaning. (shrink)

This article, written in honor of Fritz Rohrlich, briefly surveys the role of topology in physics.

In her paper, “The Doctrine of Double Effect: Problems of Interpretation,” Nancy Davis attempts to find an interpretation of the means-end relationship that would provide a foundation for the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) and its reliance on the distinction between what an agent intends or brings about intentionally and what that agent merely foresees will result from his/her action, but does not intend (or bring about intentionally). Davis’s inability to find such an interpretation lessens the plausibility of the view (...) that theDDE is an acceptable moral doctrine. In the present paper, it is suggested that Davis’s inability to find an interpretation of the means-end relationship that will support the DDE results from her assumption that an agent must intend to produce whatever he/she produces intentionally. Borrowing an argument from Michael Bratman, this article shows that Davis’s assumption is false. Thatrealization paves the way toward a defense of the DDE. (shrink)

This essay lays the groundwork for a novel conception of autonomy that may be called “effective autonomy”—a conception designed to be genuinely action guiding in bioethics. As empirical psychology research on the heuristics and biases approach shows, decision making commonly fails to correspond to people’s desires because of the biases arising from bounded cognition. People who are classified as autonomous on contemporary philosophical accounts may fail to be effectively autonomous because their decisions are uncoupled from their autonomous desires. Accordingly, continuing (...) attempts to value patient autonomy must go beyond existing philosophical conceptions of autonomy to consider the background conditions of human decision making. (shrink)

Spin-statistics transmutation is the phenomenon occurring when a “dressing” transformation introduced for physical reasons (e.g. gauge invariance) modifies the “bare” spin and statistics of particles or fields. Historically, it first appeared in Quantum Mechanics and in semiclassical approximation to Quantum Field Theory. After a brief historical introduction, we sketch how to describe such phenomenon in Quantum Field Theory beyond the semiclassical approximation, using a path-integral formulation of euclidean correlation functions, exemplifying with anyons, dyons and skyrmions.