I defend the theory that one's life is meaningful to the extent that one promotes the good. Call this the good cause account (GCA) of the meaning of life. It holds that the good effects that count towards the meaning of one's life need not be intentional. Nor must one be aware of the effects. Nor does it matter whether the same good would have resulted if one had not existed. What matters is that one is causally responsible for the (...) good. I argue that the best theory of the meaning of life should clearly distinguish between subjective fulfillment and objective meaningfulness. The GCA respects the distinction. And it is superior to its leading rivals in the recent literature, most notably those of Erik Wielenberg and Susan Wolf. (shrink)

Obligations to reduce one’s green house gas emissions appear to be difficult to justify prior to large-scale collective action because an individual’s emissions have virtually no impact on the environmental problem. However, I show that individuals’ emissions choices raise the question of whether or not they can be justified as fair use of what remains of a safe global emissions budget. This is true both before and after major mitigation efforts are in place. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to establish an (...) obligation to reduce personal emissions because it appears unlikely that governments will in fact maintain safe emissions budgets. The result, I claim, is that under current conditions we lack outcome, fairness, promotional, virtue or duty based grounds for seeing personal emissions reductions as morally obligatory. (shrink)

This paper is a systematic exploration of non-wellfounded mereology. Motivations and applications suggested in the literature are considered. Some are exotic like Borges’ Aleph, and the Trinity; other examples are less so, like time traveling bricks, and even Geach’s Tibbles the Cat. The authors point out that the transitivity of non-wellfounded parthood is inconsistent with extensionality. A non-wellfounded mereology is developed with careful consideration paid to rival notions of supplementation and fusion. Two equivalent axiomatizations are given, and are compared to (...) classical mereology. We provide a class of models with respect to which the non-wellfounded mereology is sound and complete. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 128-132.

I evaluate four historically precedented tests for what makes a life worth living: (1) The Suicide Test (Camus), (2) The Recurrence Test (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), (3) The Extra Life Test (Cicero and Hume), and (4) The Preferring Not to Have Been Test (Job and Williams). I argue that all four fail and tentatively defend the heuristic value of a fifth, The Pre-Existence Test for what makes a life worth living: (5) A life worth living is one that a benevolent caretaker (...) with foreknowledge would allow. A life worth avoiding is one that a benevolent caretaker would disallow. This test usefully tracks the general extension of the concept of what makes a life worth living. I consider three objections and note that there appears to be an indeterminate middle category of lives worth neither. Ultimately, I argue that any plausible test will risk circularity or will require a theory of worth to be viable. (shrink)

Is the procreation asymmetry intuitively supported? According to a recent article in this journal, an experimental study suggests the opposite. Dean Spears (2020) claims that nearly three-quarters of participants report that there is a reason to create a person just because that person’s life would be happy. In reply, I argue that various confounding factors render the study internally invalid. More generally, I show how one might come to adopt the procreation asymmetry for the wrong reasons by misinterpreting one’s intuitions.

There appear to be few ways available to improve the prospects for international cooperation to address the threat of global warming within the very short timeframe for action. I argue that the most effective and plausible way to break the ongoing pattern of delay in the international climate regime is for economically powerful states to take the lead domestically and demonstrate that economic welfare is compatible with rapidly decreasing GHG emissions. However, the costs and risks of acting first can be (...) very large. This raises the question of whether it is fair to expect some states to go far ahead of others in an effort to improve the conditions for cooperation. I argue that a costly obligation to act unilaterally and to accept weak initial reciprocity can be justified and does not violate standards of fair burden sharing. Rather, the costs of creating the underlying conditions within which we can hope to achieve meaningful international cooperation are non-­‐ideal burdens for which we can appropriately assign fair shares. (shrink)

The counterfactual comparative account of harm and benefit (CCA) has faced a barrage of objections from cases involving preemption, overdetermination, and choice. In this paper I provide a unified diagnosis of CCA’s vulnerability to these objections: CCA is susceptible to them because it evaluates each act by the same criterion. This is a mistake because, in a sense I make precise, situations raise prudential questions, and only some acts—the relevant alternatives—are directly relevant to these questions. To answer the objections, we (...) must revise CCA so that its evaluations foreground the relevant alternatives. The result is a question-centered account of harm and benefit. (shrink)

On the aesthetics and poetics of Hawks and Ford; their resurgence in film studies.

In this chapter I explore what painful art can tell us about the nature and importance of human welfare. My goal is not so much to defend a new solution to the paradox of tragedy, as it is to explore the implications of the kinds of solutions that I find attractive. Both nonhedonic compensatory theories and constitutive theories explain why people seek out painful art, but they have troublesome implications. On some narrow theories of well-being, they imply that painful art (...) is bad for us. Accordingly, we may rightly wonder if it rational for people to watch melodramas or to listen to love songs. One might think that we should generally avoid unpleasant works of art. This implication flirts with absurdity. I show how it can be avoided by making a distinction between well-being and worth. (shrink)

Can any being worthy of worship make others worship it? I think not. By way of an analogy to love, I argue that it is perfectly coherent to think that one could be made to worship. However, forcing someone to worship violates their autonomy, not because worship must be freely given, but because forced worship would be inauthentic—much like love earned through potions. For this reason, I argue that one cannot be made to worship properly; forced worship would be unfitting. (...) My principal claim is that no being worthy of worship could exercise the power to make others worship it, since the act of making another worship would necessarily make one unworthy of worship. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate backward-looking accounts of death's badness. I begin by reviewing deprivationism—the standard, forward-looking account of death's badness. On deprivationism, death is bad for its victims when it deprives them of a good future. This account famously faces two problems—Lucretius’s symmetry problem and the preemption problem. This motivates turning to backward-looking accounts of death's badness on which death is bad for its victim (in a respect) when it involves a decline from a good life. I distinguish three (...) different backward-looking accounts of death's badness in terms of decline, and I argue for the attractiveness of one in particular. I conclude by considering how the backward-looking consideration of decline might factor into our overall account of death's badness. (shrink)

Transplantation is now the best therapy for eligible patients with end-stage organ disease. For patients with failed kidneys, successful renal transplantation improves the quality and increases the quantity of their lives. For people with other types of organ failure, transplantation offers the only hope for long-term survival. a.

Ásta’s Categories We Live By is a superb addition to the literature on social metaphysics. In it she offers a powerful framework for understanding the creation and maintenance of social categories. In this commentary piece, I want to draw attention to Ásta’s reliance on explanatory individualism – the view that the social world is best explained by the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that this reliance makes it difficult for Ásta to explain how many social categories are maintained (...) and why certain categories are reliably available to us and so resistant to change. These explanatory deficiencies could be overcome, I argue, by eschewing explanatory individualism and positing social structures to figure in structural explanations of the maintenance and availability of social categories. (shrink)

This paper argues that Spinoza's main political writings are concerned, in part, with knowledge of essences as detailed in the Ethics. It is further argued that knowledge of the essences of states, and essential properties that belong to states, may be an example of the elusive scientia intuitiva or third kind of knowledge. The paper concludes by considering Spinoza's goals in his political writings and the importance of metaphysics and the theory of knowledge more broadly for early modern political philosophers.

Many think that love would be a casualty of free will skepticism. I disagree. I argue that love would be largely unaffected if we came to deny free will, not simply because we cannot shake the attitude, but because love is not chosen, nor do we want it to be. Here, I am not alone; others have reached similar conclusions. But a few important distinctions have been overlooked. Even if hard incompatibilism is true, not all love is equal. Although we (...) have only minimal control over love, it can be more or less authentic. I develop my position by considering the fictional trope of love potions and the implications of a futuristic psychotropic, Lovezac—Viagra for the heart. But I am not as optimistic as some. Even though free will skepticism would not jeopardize love-the-feeling, there are reasons to think that loving relationships might not be immune. (shrink)

Understanding factors that motivate farmers to perform conservation behaviors is seen as key to enhancing efforts to address agri-environmental challenges. This study uses survey data collected from 277 farmers in the La Moine River watershed in western Illinois to develop new measures of farmers’ environmental attitudes and examine their influence on current usage of agricultural best management practices (BMPs). The results suggest that a Dual Interest Theory approach reflecting two separate, competing psychological frames representing a stewardship view of the environment (...) and a farm as a business (or profit maximization) view of the environment are present within the decision making domain. Using a cluster analysis technique to examine the interaction between these attitude frames reveals four groups of farmers who hold distinct views of the environment. Further exploration of these distinct belief systems reveals little evidence of differences in participation or willingness to participate in agricultural BMPs; however, we observe significant differences between these groups with regard to their willingness to support rural conservation planning priorities that address agri-environmental challenges. Further discussion focuses on the implications of these interactive dual interest typologies and the implications of these findings on efforts to engage farmers in conservation efforts. (shrink)

Is cinematicity a virtue in film? Is lack of cinematicity a defect? Berys Gaut thinks so. He claims that cinematicity is a pro tanto virtue in film. I disagree. I argue that the term “cinematic” principally refers to some cluster of characteristics found in films featuring the following: expansive scenery, extreme depth of field, high camera positioning, and elaborate tracking shots. We often use the word as a term of praise. And we are likely right to do so. We are (...) right if we mean that the film does well what movies often do well. We are wrong if we mean that the film is good for doing what is merely distinctive of film. This issue has important implications for understanding the role of the medium in artistic evaluation. I argue that we should reject Gaut’s claim because it entails an implausibly strong medium specificity thesis. (shrink)

Most philosophers appear to have ignored the distinction between the broad concept of Virtual Machine Functionalism (VMF) described in Sloman&Chrisley (2003) and the better known version of functionalism referred to there as Atomic State Functionalism (ASF), which is often given as an explanation of what Functionalism is, e.g. in Block (1995). -/- One of the main differences is that ASF encourages talk of supervenience of states and properties, whereas VMF requires supervenience of machines that are arbitrarily complex networks of causally (...) interacting (virtual, but real) processes, possibly operating on different time-scales, examples of which include many different procesess usually running concurrently on a modern computer performing various tasks concerned with handling interfaces to physical devices, managing the file system, dealing with security, providing tools, entertainments, and games, and possibly processing research data. Another example of VMF would be the kind of functionalism involved in a large collection of possibly changing socio-economic structures and processes interacting in a complex community, and yet another is illustrated by the kind of virtual machinery involved in the many levels of visual processing of information about spatial structures, processes, and relationships (including percepts of moving shadows, reflections, highlights, optical-flow patterns and changing affordances) as you walk through a crowded car-park on a sunny day: generating a whole zoo of interacting qualia. (Forget solitary red patches, or experiences thereof.) -/- Perhaps VMF should be re-labelled "Virtual MachinERY Functionalism" because the word 'machinery' more readily suggests something complex with interacting parts. VMF is concerned with virtual machines that are made up of interacting concurrently active (but not necessarily synchronised) chunks of virtual machinery which not only interact with one another and with their physical substrates (which may be partly shared, and also frequently modified by garbage collection, metabolism, or whatever) but can also concurrently interact with and refer to various things in the immediate and remote environment (via sensory/motor channels, and possible future technologies also). I.e. virtual machinery can include mechanisms that create and manipulate semantic content, not only syntactic structures or bit patterns as digital virtual machines do. -/- Please note: Click on the title above or the link below to read the paper. I prefer to keep all my papers freely accessible on my web site so that I can correct mistakes and add improvements. -/- http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/vm-functionalism.html -/- This is now part of the Meta-Morphogenesis project: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html. (shrink)

Good-for theorists claim that to be valuable is to be good for someone, in the sense of being beneficial for them. Their opponents deny this, arguing that some things are good-simpliciter: good independently of being good for anyone. In this article I argue in favor of good-simpliciter. I appeal to the category of symbolically valuable acts, acts which seem valuable even when they do not benefit anyone and even when they are costly to the agent. I explore various strategies a (...) good-for theorist might pursue to address these apparently valuable acts, for example by appealing to the acts’ connection to beneficial character traits or practices, and I argue that none of these strategies succeed. Instead, I propose that the best way to understand the value of these acts involves seeing them as appropriate responses to what is good-simpliciter, and more specifically, as ways of loving what is worthy of love. (shrink)

The left ventricular assist device was originally designed to be surgically implanted as a bridge to transplantation for patients with chronic end-stage heart failure. On the basis of the REMATCH trial, the US Food and Drug Administration and the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services approved permanent implantation of the left ventricular assist device as a destination therapy in Medicare beneficiaries who are not candidates for heart transplantation. The use of the left ventricular assist device as a destination therapy (...) raises certain ethical challenges. Left ventricular assist devices can prolong the survival of average recipients compared with optimal medical management of chronic end-stage heart failure. However, the overall quality of life can be adversely affected in some recipients because of serious infections, neurologic complications, and device malfunction. Left ventricular assist devices alter end-of-life trajectories. The caregivers of recipients may experience significant burden (e.g., poor physical health, depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder) from destination therapy with left ventricular assist devices. There are also social and financial ramifications for recipients and their families. We advocate early utilization of a palliative care approach and outline prerequisite conditions so that consenting for the use of a left ventricular assist device as a destination therapy is a well informed process. These conditions include: (1) direct participation of a multidisciplinary care team, including palliative care specialists, (2) a concise plan of care for anticipated device-related complications, (3) careful surveillance and counseling for caregiver burden, (4) advance-care planning for anticipated end-of-life trajectories and timing of device deactivation, and (5) a plan to address the long-term financial burden on patients, families, and caregivers. Short-term mechanical circulatory devices (e.g. percutaneous cardiopulmonary bypass, percutaneous ventricular assist devices, etc.) can be initiated in emergency situations as a bridge to permanent implantation of ventricular assist devices in chronic end-stage heart failure. In the absence of first-person (patient) consent, presumed consent or surrogate consent should be used cautiously for the initiation of short-term mechanical circulatory devices in emergency situations as a bridge to permanent implantation of left ventricular assist devices. Future clinical studies of destination therapy with left ventricular assist devices should include measures of recipients' quality of end-of-life care and caregivers' burden. (shrink)

While the science of animal consciousness has seen a surge of new work, its most basic methodology remains highly disputed. In this paper I identify four candidate norms of inquiry that have been implicitly introduced in the recent literature. I call these (1) expansive theorizing, (2) indirect inquiry, (3) lowering epistemic standards, and (4) inflating epistemic standards. In each section, an instantiation of the norm of inquiry is discussed, and the broader lessons that can be taken from avoiding it are (...) drawn out. Interestingly, each of these candidate norms of inquiry have something in common: they implicitly hold that, to study animal consciousness, ordinary scientific standards must in some way be departed from. The overarching claim of this paper is that this is a mistake. In response to this, I propose four alternative candidate norms of inquiry. I call these (1) weighted development, (2) evidential foundations, (3) knowledge directed, and (4) anti-proof. The overarching norm of ‘no exceptionalism’ is then proposed with the goal of establishing a minimal methodological consensus. (shrink)

The following article is a response to Virginia Aspe’s “The Political Dilemmas of the Transformations of Mexico: A Philosophical Approach”. My aim is to discuss some ideas developed by Aspe Armella, pointing out, from the perspective of the history of Mexican philosophy, both the successes of her approach, as well as some aspects that deserve more debate.

It is not uncommon to hear that poor school performance, welfare dependancy, youth unemployment, and criminal activity result more from shortcomings in the personal makeup of individuals than from societal forces beyond their control. Are American values declining as so many suggest? And are those values at the root of many social problems today?Shaped by experience and public policies, people's values and social norms do change. What role can or should a democratic government play in shaping values? And how do (...) these values conditon the efficacy of public policy?In this book, six distinguished social scientists identify trends in America's values and their consequences, and consider public policy tools with which some of those values might be changed.Daniel Yankelovich begins with a discussion of how American values have shifted in the last half-century, and argues that affluence is the driving force behind these changes in values. James Q. Wilson argues that destructive habits which can lead to social pathologies, like crime and drug use, are set early in life; he examines how public policy might intervene when children are young to promote better values. David Popenoe maintains that America has veered too far towards industrialist values, and explores the resulting decline of families and many attendant social ills. Nathan Glazer describes the history and present status of the dispute over multicultural education. Jane Mansbridge examines the process of building cooperation, consensus, and public spirit. And George Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen discuss the problem of gang criminality.Inthe past, social scientists have often sidestepped questions about values as undefinable, unquantifiable, and somehow unscientific. The essays in this volume address these questions at last.Henry J. Aaron, director of the Economic Studies program at Brookings, is the authorof numerous books, including most recently Serious and Unstable Condition: Financing America's Health Care (1991), and coeditor of Setting Domestic Priorities (1992). Thomas E. Mann is director of the Brookings Governmental Studies program, coeditor of Media Polls in American Politics (1992), and coauthor of the Renewing Congress series (1993). Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives at Stanford University. (shrink)

This essay intends to create a path forward for philosophical work in higher education that is sensitive to the discursive, organizational, economic, epistemic, and political cultures of the institution. This essay will therefore not provide a grand theory of higher education that might be overlaid onto university practice. Instead, as we will argue, any viable philosophy of higher education must not only recognize but also be prepared to account for and harness the heterogeneity of theoretical, organizational, economic, epistemic, and professional (...) perspectives that are the ground of institutions of higher learning. (shrink)

Faithful persons tend to relate to their religious beliefs as truth claims, particularly inasmuch as their beliefs have soteriological implications for those of different religions. For Christians the particular claims which matter most in this regard are those made by Jesus of Nazareth and his claims are primarily relational in nature. I propose a model in which we understand divine grace from Jesus as being mediated through relational knowledge of him on a compassionately exclusivist basis, including post-mortem. Supporting this model, (...) I draw from Eleonore Stump’s hypothesis in her 2018 Atonement that the crucifixion of Jesus opens the divine psyche to all human psyches sufficiently for salvific mutual indwelling to occur, and from Gavin D’Costa’s conception of the descensus Christi ad inferos as the mechanism for grace’s accessibility post-mortem presented in his 2009 Christianity and World Religions. This model seeks to address ongoing, justified pastoral concern for the soteriological status of non-Christians while still treating Christianity as objectively true. (shrink)

There is a tension between the pedagogical aim of comparative and cross-cultural inclusion and teaching an introductory-level deductive logic course. On the one hand, those who are interested in including non-“Western” sources are doing so in order to expand the philosophical content under consideration in their courses. On the other, it seems that the student learning objectives for deductive logic classes aimed at novices are narrow and specific for the purpose of developing a particular skill. This paper highlights the challenge (...) of teaching logic cross-culturally by arguing that it is inadvisable to do so. Using Jain logic as a case study, it illustrates that even though there is depth available in the content, the contextual support needed to compare logics without being reductive would interfere with the amount of time needed to develop deductive logic skills in students in the first place. (shrink)

Author comments Rick Grush’s statements about emulation and embodied approach to representation. He proposes his modification of Grush’s definition of emulation, criticizing notion of “standing in for”. He defends of notion of representation. He claims that radical embodied theories are not applicable to all cognition.

Are embryos deserving of moral consideration in our actions? A standard view suggests that embryos are considerable only if they have interests. One argument for embryonic interests contends that embryos are harmed by death because they are deprived of valuable future lives as adult persons. Some have challenged this argument on the grounds that embryos aren’t identical to adults: either due to the potential for embryos to twin or because we do not exist until the fetus develops consciousness. These arguments (...) fail to show that embryos do not have future adult lives. There is a better reason to think that embryos cannot have interests; namely, because they are not capable of having desires. Others have held this view but have not sufficiently justified it. The justification lies in the fact that the capacity for desires is necessary to make sense of the normativity of interests. (shrink)

Theological anthropology has tended to view human flourishing as consisting in the loving communion of ourselveswith God. Recently, Natalia Marandiuc has brought the tools of attachment theory to theological anthropology to argue that a self is not inherent to human persons but rather is co-created through our loving relationships with one another and with God. In this paper I argue for the introduction of narrative, particularly as understood through the work of Eleonore Stump, to Marandiuc’s account as a practical means (...) by which healing love might be communicated, particularly through Scriptural narratives. In evidence of narrative’s usefulness, I offer a brief exegesis of the Gospel of John’s account of the Woman at the well. This synthesis fills a gap in our understanding of the self’s flourishing by not only adopting a model demonstrating its emergence but also by providing a method by which the model can be applied. (shrink)

Midrash Genesis Rabbah takes aim at a variety of ideological adversaries, but the most subtle polemic is directed at sages who went beyond standard hermeneutical practices to embrace mystical approaches to Torah learning. This essay seeks to expose the use of satire and other literary forms of critique among passages treating cosmology and Torah study. Analytic tools developed by Pierre Bourdieu, especially as they pertain to exposing the use of the symbolic language intrinsic to the establishment of systems of social (...) authority, will be employed to delineate the ideological conflict among sages developing diverse approaches to ascending the religious hierarchy within early rabbinism. (shrink)

Midrash Genesis Rabbah takes aim at a variety of ideological adversaries, but the most subtle polemic is directed at sages who went beyond standard hermeneutical practices to embrace mystical approaches to Torah learning. This essay seeks to expose the use of satire and other literary forms of critique among passages treating cosmology and Torah study. Analytic tools developed by Pierre Bourdieu, especially as they pertain to exposing the use of the symbolic language intrinsic to the establishment of systems of social (...) authority, will be employed to delineate the ideological conflict among sages developing diverse approaches to ascending the religious hierarchy within early rabbinism. (shrink)

Paul Churchland argues that Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism is unsuccessful and so we need not accept its conclusion. In this paper, we respond to Churchland’s argument. After we briefly recapitulate Plantinga’s argument and state Churchland’s argument, we offer three objections to Churchland’s argument: (1) its first premise has little to recommend it, (2) its second premise is false, and (3) its conclusion is consistent with, and indeed entails, the conclusion of Plantinga’s argument.

Walter Glannon argues that our proposal for routine recovery of transplantable cadaveric organs is unacceptable After carefully reviewing his counterarguments, we conclude that, although some of them have merit, none are sufficiently strong to warrant abandoning this plan. Below we respond to each of Glannon's concerns.

This paper offers a unified explanation for the procreation asymmetry and the non-identity thesis – two of the most intractable puzzles in population ethics. According to the procreation asymmetry, there are moral reasons not to create lives that are not worth living but no moral reasons to create lives that are worth living. I explain the procreation asymmetry by arguing that there are moral reasons to prevent the bad, but no moral reasons to promote the good. Various explanations for the (...) procreation asymmetry have failed to explain the non-identity thesis: if one could create a person with a good life or a different person with a better life, one has a moral reason to create the better life. I argue that reflections on the misfortune of unfulfilled potential allow us to circumvent the non-identity problem. (shrink)