Rawls famously argues that the parties in the original position would agree upon the two principles of justice. Among other things, these principles guarantee equal political liberty—that is, democracy—as a requirement of justice. We argue on the contrary that the parties have reason to reject this requirement. As we show, by Rawls’ own lights, the parties would be greatly concerned to mitigate existential risk. But it is doubtful whether democracy always minimizes such risk. Indeed, no one currently knows which political (...) systems would. Consequently, the parties—and we ourselves—have reason to reject democracy as a requirement of justice in favor of political experimentalism, a general approach to political justice which rules in at least some non-democratic political systems which might minimize existential risk. (shrink)

There is growing consensus that teaching computer ethics is important, but there is little consensus on how to do so. One unmet challenge is increasing the capacity of computing students to make decisions about the ethical challenges embedded in their technical work. This paper reports on the design, testing, and evaluation of an educational simulation to meet this challenge. The privacy by design simulation enables more relevant and effective computer ethics education by letting students experience and make decisions about common (...) ethical challenges encountered in real-world work environments. This paper describes the process of incorporating empirical observations of ethical questions in computing into an online simulation and an in-person board game. We employed theValues at Playframework to transform empirical observations of design into a playable educational experience. First, we conducted qualitative research to discover when and how values levers—practices that encourage values discussions during technology development—occur during the design of new mobile applications. We then translated these findings into gameplay elements, including the goals, roles, and elements of surprise incorporated into a simulation. We ran the online simulation in five undergraduate computer and information science classes. Based on this experience, we created a more accessible board game, which we tested in two undergraduate classes and two professional workshops. We evaluated the effectiveness of both the online simulation and the board game using two methods: a pre/post-test of moral sensitivity based on the Defining Issues Test, and a questionnaire evaluating student experience. We found that converting real-world ethical challenges into a playable simulation increased student’s reported interest in ethical issues in technology, and that students identified the role-playing activity as relevant to their technical coursework. This demonstrates that roleplaying can emphasize ethical decision-making as a relevant component of technical work. (shrink)

Relational reasoning is a complex form of human cognition involving the evaluation of relations between mental representations of information. Prior studies have modified stimulus properties of relational reasoning problems and examined differences in difficulty between different problem types. While subsets of these stimulus properties have been addressed in separate studies, there has not been a comprehensive study, to our knowledge, which investigates all of these properties in the same set of stimuli. This investigative gap has resulted in different findings across (...) studies which vary in task design, making it challenging to determine what stimulus properties make relational reasoning—and the putative formation of mental models underlying reasoning—difficult. In this article, we present the Multidimensional Relational Reasoning Task, a task which systematically varied an array of stimulus properties within a single set of relational reasoning problems. Using a mixed-effects framework, we demonstrate that reasoning problems containing a greater number of the premises as well as multidimensional relations led to greater task difficulty. The MRRT has been made publicly available for use in future research, along with normative data regarding the relative difficulty of each problem. (shrink)

In his poem ‘The Last Hours of Cassiodorus’, Peter Porter has the Christian sage ask: ‘After me, what further barbarisms?’. Yet, Cassiodorus himself accepted, even valorized, at least one form of barbarism that had been rejected by earlier rhetoricians: sardismos, the mixture of multiple languages in close proximity. In its earliest attestation, Quintilian classified it as a type of solecism. By contrast, five centuries later Cassiodorus in his Commentary on the Psalms used the term three times to praise the (...) mixture of Greek, Hebrew and Latin in the Latin Psalter. This reversal, from vice to virtue of speech, illustrates some significant changes in attitudes toward language and multilingualism that developed as Christianity reshaped Roman literary culture. For one, Christian preachers, modelling themselves on the plain style of the Gospels, embraced forms of speech that had been regarded as low and stigmatized. In the words of Augustine : ‘better you understand us in our barbarism than to have been deserted in our eloquence’.1 Secondly, Hebrew now entered the linguistic consciousness of the Roman literary elite as one of the three languages of Scripture. Even if in-depth knowledge remained rare, it was worthy of being mentioned alongside Greek and Latin, just as it had appeared with them in the inscription on Jesus’ cross. Lastly, linguistic variety itself came to be positively valued since it reflected the diversity of a church coming together out of many peoples. Commenting on the bride's appearance in Psalm 45, both Augustine and Cassiodorus saw the variegated adornment of her robe as a reference to the diversity of Christian languages. (shrink)

The human sciences—including psychology, anthropology, and social theory—are widely held to have been born during the eighteenth century. This first full-length, English-language study of the Enlightenment sciences of humans explores the sources, context, and effects of this major intellectual development. The book argues that the most fundamental inspiration for the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers from Copernicus to Newton had created a magisterial science of nature based on the realization that the physical world operated (...) according to orderly, discoverable laws. Eighteenth-century thinkers sought to cap this achievement with a science of _human_ nature. Belief in the existence of laws governing human will and emotion; social change; and politics, economics, and medicine suffused the writings of such disparate figures as Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith and formed the basis of the new sciences. A work of remarkable cross-disciplinary scholarship, this volume illuminates the origins of the human sciences and offers a new view of the Enlightenment that highlights the period's subtle social theory, awareness of ambiguity, and sympathy for historical and cultural difference. (shrink)

Sophie de Grouchy, marquise de Condorcet, réinterprète la doctrine de la sympathie propre à la tradition moraliste écossaise dans le sens d’une réévaluation de ses origines physiologiques, ce qui affecte profondément ses dimensions morales et sociales. Dans le cadre d’un rousseauisme compassionnel, elle transforme Adam Smith en un républicain sentimentaliste modéré, précurseur des Idéologues. Elle s’emploie pour cela à montrer que la déférence envers le pouvoir établi, surtout la royauté, érigée par Adam Smith en servilité quasi fétichiste envers (...) les puissants et les rois, doit être réexaminée dans le cadre d’une économie affective post-révolutionnaire. Malgré le risque d’un mimétisme affectif enflammé par une rhétorique démagogique, Sophie de Grouchy mise sur la moralisation de l’identification avec la souffrance humaine, et sur sa régulation par des lois et institutions réformées pour tenir compte d’une nature humaine profondément sympathique. L’institutionnalisation de la sympathie morale est censée porter remède aux tragédies dues à la ségrégation sociale. En revanche, Adam Smith souligne à la fois la corruption morale due à l’adulation des puissants, et l’illusion socialement utile d’un imaginaire collectif cultivé par la tragédie classique et peuplé d’idéalisations du statut social. Adam Smith explore en outre d’une façon originale une dimension quasi psychanalytique de l’idéal social du moi qui anticipe la problématisation du culte du chef, là où la marquise se contente de critiquer le meneur de foule. (shrink)

Growing inequality and its implications for democratic polity suggest that corporate social responsibility has not proved itself in twenty-first century business, largely as it lacks clear criteria of demarcation for businesses to follow. Today the problem is viewed by many commentators as an ethical challenge to business itself. In response to this challenge, we begin by examining Porter and Kramer’s :64–77, 2011) call for a shift from a social responsibility to a shared value framework and the need to respond (...) to the problem of the ‘separation thesis’ between business and ethics :89–118, 1996; Harris and Freeman, Bus Ethics Q 18:541–548, 2008). We identify the eighteenth century economist and philosopher Adam Smith in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a source for an ethical approach to business. Building on his central concept of ‘sympathy’, we introduce the idea of the Impartial Spectator Test, which we argue builds on traditional stakeholder perspectives and which provides an objective route to ethical criteria of demarcation. We conclude by assessing how this approach adds to the existing debate around social responsibility and shared value. (shrink)

It is often claimed that one cannot locate a notion of causation in fundamental physical theories. The reason most commonly given is that the dynamics of those theories do not support any distinction between the past and the future, and this vitiates any attempt to locate a notion of causal asymmetry—and thus of causation—in fundamental physical theories. I argue that this is incorrect: the ubiquitous generation of entanglement between quantum systems grounds a relevant asymmetry in the dynamical evolution of quantum (...) systems. I show that by exploiting a connection between the amount of entanglement in a quantum state and the algorithmic complexity of that state, one can use recently developed tools for causal inference to identify a causal asymmetry—and a notion of causation—in the dynamical evolution of quantum systems. (shrink)

The problem of objectivity has deep roots in the history of sociology, reaching back to the pre-sociological era of social and labor statistics. The admissibility of the section on statistics to the British Association for the Advancement of Science had already raised this issue in the 1840s, and it continued with the labor statistics movement of the later 19th century. The repeated conflicts involved what can be seen as two competing concepts: objectivity as fairness and objectivity as pure factuality. Each (...) was guaranteed by something: fairness by institutional arrangements and purity by methods. The greatest successes of sociology in the face of social conflict occurred when the two coincided, as they did in the study of the 1919 Race Riots in Chicago. More often they did not, leading to the dueling perspectives represented by Robert Lynd in Knowledge for What? and George Lundberg’s Can Science Save Us?, followed by Howard Becker’s “Whose Side Are We On?.” These conflicts continue to the present, and can be illuminated by the work of Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice and Ted Porter on Trust in Numbers. The conflict, however, is unequal in one respect: what counts as fairness shifts as moral saliences shift, and although concepts of purity and method also shift, they have more continuity and stability. Today, the productive interaction between the two forms has broken down, in multiple settings, notably that of race, threatening the enterprise of sociology as a whole with collapse into ideology. (shrink)

On conçoit souvent la jalousie comme une émotion ayant pour objet les relations de proximité (amour, amitié, fratrie, etc.). Elle a généralement mauvaise presse et est typiquement envisagée comme une émotion moralement condamnable, voire comme un vice. Or, la jalousie ne porte pas uniquement sur les relations de proximité : elle peut également porter sur divers biens (prestige, richesses, biens matériels, privilèges, etc.). Par ailleurs, certains auteurs soutiennent que des cas de jalousie pourraient être moralement justifiés, voire que la (...) jalousie pourrait être une vertu. La jalousie paraît également jouer un rôle dans l’institution et le maintien d’institutions visant à perpétuer des inégalités entre les individus jaloux de leurs avantages et ceux qu’ils envisagent comme des concurrents cherchant à les déposséder de leurs biens. De fait, la jalousie paraît utile pour la théorie politique de par les liens qu’elle entretient avec la justice distributive. Cet article propose, dans la première section, une discussion portant sur la nature de la jalousie où elle est contrastée avec l’envie et l’indignation. Dans la seconde section, on se demandera si la jalousie est un vice, ou si elle peut être parfois moralement justifiée, ou même être une vertu. La troisième section traitera les rôles joués par la jalousie collective dans la justice distributive et la fondation et le maintien d’institutions sociales visant à protéger les intérêts des jaloux. Pour le faire, le cas de la jalousie économique, telle que David Hume et Adam Smith la concevaient dans les relations commerciales entre États européens au XVIIIème siècle, est considéré. (shrink)

Andy Egan has recently presented a prominent objection to causal decision theory. However, in this paper, I argue that this objection fails if CDT’s proponent accepts the plausible view that decision-theoretic options are intentions. This result both provides a defence of CDT against a prominent objection and highlights the importance of resolving the nature of decision-theoretic options.

The book shows how Agamben's political concerns emerged and evolved as Agamben responded to contemporary events and new intellectual influences while striving to remain true to his deepest intuitions. Kotsko reveals the trajectory of Agamben's work and shows us what it means to practice philosophy as a living, responsive discipline.

Donnellan makes a convincing case for two distinct uses ofdefinite descriptions. But does the difference between the usesreflects an ambiguity in the semantics of descriptions? This paperapplies a linguistic test for ambiguity to argue that the differencebetween the uses is not semantically significant.

Beginning farmer initiatives like the USDA’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program, farm incubators, and small-scale marketing innovations offer new entrant farmers agricultural training, marketing and business assistance, and farmland loans. These programs align with alternative food movement goals to revitalize the anemic U.S. small farm sector and repopulate landscapes with socially and environmentally diversified farms. Yet even as these initiatives seek to support prospective farmers with tools for success through a knowledge dissemination model, they remain mostly individualistic and entrepreneurial (...) measures that overlook structural barriers to productive and economic success within U.S. agriculture. Analysis of the BFRDP’s funding history and discourse reveals a “knowledge deficit” based program focused on the technical rather than the structural aspects of beginning farming. This is contrasted with qualitative analysis of beginning farmer experiences in California’s Central Coast region. The discrepancies between the farmer experiences and national structure of the BFRDP program ultimately reveal a policy mismatch between the needs of some beginning farmers and the programs intended to support them. (shrink)

In: M. Carrier, D. Howard & J. Kourany (eds), Science and the Social: Knowledge, Epistemic Demands, and Social Values, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press (im Erscheinen).

Shavelson et al., argues that California’s End of Life Option Act (ELOA) violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), because the ELOA requires the patient to “self-administer” their prescri...

The aim of this paper is to give a biographical, historical, and philosophical reconstruction of Neurath’s final years in England. Besides reconstructing Neurath’s arrival to England, in the context of his life and philosophical introduction at Oxford, I will argue that since the 1930s, Neurath was eager to develop a brand for logical empiricism. This brand was based not on theoretical commitments, but on practical considerations and decisions. Using a detailed case study on Neurath’s relation to the Hungarian sociologist of (...) knowledge Karl Mannheim, I show that the development of their connections documents how Neurath gave more and more priority to practical aims during his English years. Finally, the concluding section points to some further considerations on Neurath’s legacy. (shrink)

This book outlines a new conception of political aesthetics based on the notion of order as an aesthetic category pertaining to human perception. Engaging with the thought of a range of figures, including Veblen, Honneth, Foucault, Popper, and MacIntyre, it explores the nature of political aesthetics as an enquiry into the ways in which politics and our perceptions shape one another and our moral choices. Moving beyond the consideration of politics as a matter of perception, the author employs the concept (...) of recognition to shed fresh light on the normative dimensions of politics, before presenting a series of case studies designed to show the utility of this conception of political aesthetics for explaining contemporary urban social phenomena and political conflicts. As such, Politics and Recognition will appeal to sociologists, philosophers, and political social theorists. (shrink)

Most contemporary interpreters of Aquinas have assumed that Thomas subscribed to a “non-repeatability principle” such that created entities, once destroyed entirely, cannot be “brought back" into existence, even by God's power. Souls persisting in the interim between death and resurrection thus play an essential identity-preserving role between our death and rising again. No separated souls, no resurrection. Two of Aquinas’s best medieval interpreters, however, reject this interpretation. Leaning largely on one of Aquinas’s late quodlibetal questions, they deny that Thomas held (...) any non-repeatability principle strong enough to bar God’s resurrecting us even from complete destruction, souls and all. Here the chapter argues that careful analysis of the quodlibet and other texts largely vindicates the contemporary interpretation. It does so in a surprising way, however, since it turns out Aquinas’s non-repeatability principle applies only to corruptible, material entities like us, and not to incorruptible entities like angels. The reason Aquinas held this view, the chapter argues, is rooted in his theory of individuation. (shrink)

In a 1642 letter to Regius, Descartes elaborates several reasons for rejecting Aristotelian substantial forms including that (1) they are explanatorily impotent, (2) they are explanatorily unnecessary, and (3) they threaten the incorporeality and immortality of the human soul. Various ideas have already been proposed as to why Descartes thought Aristotelian substantial forms are susceptible to these criticisms. Here I suggest one further such idea, centered on the ways Descartes and medieval scholastics thought substantial forms—and souls in particular—are related to (...) their powers. (shrink)

In this article, I outline my position regarding the use of deception in psychology experiments, based on my experience as a confederate. I describe an experiment I participated in and the problems resulting from the study: subjects' differing responses to the deception; angry reactions of some subjects to the experiment; and the general discomfort of both subjects and confederates, in particular, who had their doubts concerning the external validity of the study and the ethics involved in running it. issues of (...) informed consent and debriefing are also addressed; it is argued that the success of deception depends on the subject being misinformed as to the experiment's true nature and that debriefing itself sometimes angers subjects. I encourage a decrease in the use of deception and the reexamination of a system that attempts to balance the pain of experimental participants with anticipated benefit to scientific knowledge. (shrink)

In ‘What's Wrong with Speciesism?’, Shelly Kagan sketches an account on which both actually being a person and possibly being a person are relevant to one's moral status, labelling this view ‘modal personism’ and supporting its conclusions with appeals to intuitions about a range of marginal cases. I tender a pessimistic response to Kagan's concern about motivating modal personism: that is, of being able to ‘go beyond the mere appeal to brute intuition, eventually offering an account of why modal personhood (...) should matter in the ways we may intuitively think that it does.’. (shrink)

This article explores the financialisation of the world’s most important commodity, oil. It argues that much of the literature on the financialisation of commodities tends to adopt a dualistic approach to financial markets and physical producers, where financial and non-financial activities are assumed to be externally-related and counterposed to one another. The article locates the roots of this analytical separation in a mistaken acceptance of the fetish character of interest-bearing capital (IBC) – a view that the exchange of loanable sums (...) of capital represents a relationship between money-capitalists rather than a relationship to the moment of production. Against such dichotomous readings, the article argues that the financialisation of oil needs to be understood as part of the reworking of ownership and control across the oil commodity circuit, expressed through the combined centralisation and concentration of capital over the money, productive and commercial moments. This argument is demonstrated through an original empirical investigation of the US oil industry, including 20 years of weekly trading data on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and a detailed study of more than 160 oil and energy-related firms in the US. By mapping the structural weight and connections between different capitalist actors involved in accumulation across the oil sector, we gain a better understanding of the ultimate dynamics (and beneficiaries) of the carbon economy. (shrink)

Drones deployed to monitor endangered species often crash. These crashes teach us that using drones for conservation is a contingent practice ensnaring humans, technologies, and animals. This article advances a crash theory in which pilots, conservation drones, and endangered megafauna are relata, or related actants, that intra-act, cocreating each other and a mutually constituted phenomena. These phenomena are entangled, with either reciprocal dependencies or erosive entrapments. The crashing of conservation drones and endangered species requires an ethics of care, repair, or (...) reworlding. Diffractions, disruptions that expose difference, result from crashes and reveal the precarious manner by which technologies, laws, and discourses bring nature and culture together. To support crash theory, this article presents three ethnographic cases. A drone crash in the United Kingdom near white rhinoceroses while building machine learning training data exhibits the involvement of the electromagnetic spectrum; the threat of crashes in the Pacific Northwest near Puget Sound orcas discloses the impacts of drone laws; and drone crashes in Sri Lanka among Asian elephants presents the problems of technoliberal ideals around programming natural worlds. Throughout the article, a methodology is developed, parallelism, which attends to the material similarities in lateral phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to defend one version at least of Hume’s dictum: roughly, the idea that possibility is determined by ontology through something like independent variation. My defence is broadly pragmatic, in the sense that adherence to something like Hume’s dictum delivers at least three benefits. The first benefit is that, through Hume’s dictum, a physical theory’s ontology delimits a range of possibilities, that I call kinematical possibilities, which serves as a sufficiently permissive notion of possibility to sustain (...) something like an intensional semantics for its claims, and a sufficiently demanding notion of supervenience to sustain plausible claims of inter-theoretic reduction and theoretical equivalence. The second benefit is that Hume’s dictum allows us to work backwards from a range of kinematical possibilities to an ontology. This is especially useful when aiming to glean an interpretation of a physical theory, since often we are more confident that we have arrived at the right space of possibilities than that we have arrived at the right ontology. The third benefit is that Hume’s dictum —- at least the version I aim to defend here —- may be applied to physical theories more or less as we find them, and therefore we can practice something resembling ontology without having to force our theories into some Procrustean bed, such as a first-order language. (shrink)

Contemporary diagnostic categories and various modes of treatment of mood disorders contribute to the development of a managed form of selfhood in contemporary society, particularly as articulated with management in the workplace. This produces a new iteration of the normal in relation to psychopathology; instead of the normal as an absence of disorder or distress, normalcy becomes the private management, often stemming from an external or internalized social injunction, of symptoms through various available techniques of self-care. I support this claim (...) through an analysis of the development of the category of the mood disorder under DSM-III and the functioning of common contemporary treatments such as antidepressant medications, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and alternative techniques such as mindfulness meditation. A new social problematic emerges, in part out of this convergence, in which the notion of mood becomes generalized and an object of vigilance. Everyone has moods; we always have moods; and moods are in principle always subject to the need of being managed. (shrink)

A familiar form of scepticism supposes that knowledge requires infallibility. Although that requirement plays no role in our ordinary epistemic practices, Barry Stroud has argued that this is not a good reason for rejecting a sceptical argument: our ordinary practices do not correctly reflect the requirements for knowledge because the appropriateness-conditions for knowledge attribution are pragmatic. Recent fashion in contextualist semantics for 'knowledge' agrees with this view of our practice, but incorrectly. Ordinary epistemic evaluations are guided by our conception of (...) a person's standing with regard to the reasons that there are for and against the truth of a belief. Thus the objection from our ordinary practices is sound: fallibility is not an epistemological shortcoming, and a convincing sceptical argument must use only requirements which figure in ordinary epistemic practice. (shrink)

Answering in negative a question of M. Hrušák, we construct a Borel ideal not extendable to any \(F_\sigma \) ideal and such that it is not Katětov above the ideal \(\mathrm {conv}\).

This paper aims to establish a distinction and relationship between two types of noise – active noise and passive noise – while giving emphasis to the latter. Active noise is the discourse of negativity and violence that some theorists associate with noise’s materiality, an association particularly pronounced in engagements with Japanoise. The problem with this discourse is that it relies on a culturally normative understanding of noise as well as novelty. This narrative inevitably leads to a dead end. Noise, and (...) artistic practices like Japanoise that draw on noise sounds, have a short lifespan if their entire purpose is one of shock and disturbance. However, Japanoise is not dead: it persists both as a genre and as a sonic idea/gesture. This article suggests that noise persists, and Japanoise remains relevant, because it comes from a region not exhausted by categories of negativity and violence. This article will show how underneath active noise there resounds a deeper, more profound a-cultural noise. Drawing on Maurice Blanchot’s account of passivity, which names the anarchic region of absence in his thought, this noise will be described as passive noise. In this context, passivity must be understood differently from the conventional sense as something opposed to activity. Likewise, passive noise does not refer to background noise. Instead, passive noise will be described as the interiority of excess that manifests as a breach in the closure of active noise. This breach will be shown to be consistent with Blanchot’s view of the inexhaustibility of art and will be described, specifically in the context of Japanoise, as the intimacy of excess that is the lifeblood of maximalist forms of noise-making. This will also amount to a reconsideration of the idea of transgression by reframing Japanoise in terms of inertia. (shrink)

Argumentation Frameworks provide a fruitful basis for exploring issues of defeasible reasoning. Their power largely derives from the abstract nature of the arguments within the framework, where arguments are atomic nodes in an undifferentiated relation of attack. This abstraction conceals different senses of argument, namely a single-step reason to a claim, a series of reasoning steps to a single claim, and reasoning steps for and against a claim. Concrete instantiations encounter difficulties and complexities as a result of conflating these senses. (...) To distinguish them, we provide an approach to instantiating AFs in which the nodes are restricted to literals and rules, encoding the underlying theory directly. Arguments in these senses emerge from this framework as distinctive structures of nodes and paths. As a consequence of the approach, we reduce the effort of computing argumentation extensions, which is in contrast to other approaches. Our framework retains the theoretical and computational bene.. (shrink)

The paper aims at an analysis of the concept of landscape, offering an ontological approach. Our claim is that such a perspective is hardly ever assumed in philosophical aesthetics, even if theories of landscape appreciation are in fact based on tacit ontological assumptions. We argue that having an explicit ontology of landscapes is important, for aesthetic theories of their appreciation are often attacked in terms of the problems caused by their tacit ontologies. Therefore, we sketch an “Experience Ontology” that serves (...) as an alternative to the ontologies implied in the two best known aesthetic approaches to landscapes. We contend that a landscape should not be conceived of as an object or view but as a way of experiencing one’s surroundings, and we argue that our theory is not only free from the shortcomings of the two dominant theories but that it also corresponds better to everyday intuitions. (shrink)