This article offers an exposition of the J. Peterman Company's Owner's Manual, a mock-vintage clothing catalogue that promises customers ‘things that make their lives the way they wish they were’. Written in dramatic, long-form prose and illustrated in watercolour – both uncommon in today's mail-order fashion industry – the Owner's Manual is at once appalling for its misogyny and enticing for its nostalgia. This article argues that the Owner's Manual and its enduring success confound existing paradigms for interpreting both fashion (...) media and the body's gendered relationship to attire. Are the Manual's millions of subscribers beset by false consciousness, imagining themselves into an oppressive sex/gender field and endorsing the catalogue's misogyny with their desire? The Manual is not fully intelligible within either structuralist or phenomenological interpretive modes – fashion theory's two most prevalent schools of thought – but, rather, begets an interpretive paradigm that forces us to reconcile individuals’ desires for, and identification into, historically mediated gender performance with the fact of individuals’ dignity, agency and autonomy. I argue that the Owner's Manual achieves this reconciliation by foregrounding sartorial objects, rather than individuals, as the bearers of gender fantasy and by demonstrating how these objects, laden with historical associations, have detached from the highly gendered contexts of their origins while nevertheless retaining aspects of their original semiotic potencies. (shrink)

Alec Hyslop defends a (modified) version of the traditional analogical inference to other minds and rejects alternatives, but only after subjecting each of...

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 245-258, March 2022.

Jacob Weinrib's Dimensions of Dignity 1 [DD] joins a small but growing literature committed to the reconstruction, as applied theory, of foundational concepts such as justice, authority, and the ru...

Subjects in studies on humans are used as a means of conducting the research and achieving whatever good would justify putting them at risk. Accordingly, consent must normally be obtained before subjects are exposed to any substantial risks to their welfare. Bystanders are also often put at risk, but they are not used as a means. Accordingly—or so I argue—consent is more often unnecessary before bystanders are exposed to similar substantial risks to their welfare.

This book develops an alternative account of rights according to which rights forfeiture has a much smaller role to play because rights themselves are more contextually contingent. For example, those who threaten to cause harm without a right to do so have weaker claims not to be killed than innocent bystanders or those who have a right to threaten to cause harm. By framing rights as the output of a balance of competing claims, and by laying out a detailed account (...) of how to balance competing claims, Walen provides a more coherent account of when killing in war is permissible. (shrink)

This text meets the requirements of the OCR AS specification for critical thinking. Alec Fisher shows students how they can develop a range of creative and critical thinking skills that are transferable to other subjects and contexts.

Alec Kassman; XIV*—On Punishing, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 221–246, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/7.

In an earlier article, I introduced the “restricting claims principle” to explain what is right about the means principle: the idea that it is harder to justify causing or allowing someone to suffer harm if using him as a means than if causing or allowing harm as a side effect. The RCP appeals to the idea that claims not to be harmed as a side effect push to restrict an agent from doing what she would otherwise be free to do (...) for herself or others, given an appropriate account of her baseline freedom. Claims not to be harmed as a means are not in that way ‘‘restricting.’’ The original RCP relied on a counterfactual account of the agent’s baseline freedom: What could the agent permissibly do if the patient were not present? I argue here that that counterfactual baseline fails. The revised RCP relies instead on a ‘‘toolkit baseline’’: Do the patient claims concern the property the agent needs to use? This toolkit baseline reflects the different ways that agents relate to others: as fellow agents with whom they divide up the resources of the world, and as patients who might be affected by their actions. The toolkit baseline, resting on this agent-patient divide, provides a superior account of an agent’s baseline freedom, and a better account of the moral ground for the means principle. (shrink)

Discussions of risk have assumed that risk must be modeled the same in all cases. This is a mistake. Normally, if people know that those affected by an agent’s choice have conflicting interests, th...

This book explores the principal issues involved in bridging the gap between the pure theory of consumer behavior and its empirical implementation. The authors focus upon the structure of preferences, the treatment of demographic variables, the treatment of dynamics, and the specification of the stochastic structure of the demand system.

The paper argues, against Davidson, that metaphorical utterances involve meaning other than literal meaning. The kind of meaning is a particular case of contextual meaning. It is argued that metaphorical meaning is not a case of speaker's meaning , nor is it occasion meaning . I offer an explanation of why those metaphors that are not paraphrasable cannot be paraphrased.

Isabel Paterson is the founding godmother of the libertarian movement, known best for her book The God of the Machine, which Ayn Rand credited for having done “for capitalism what the Bible did for Christianity.” Often overlooked is her twenty-five-year career as a literary columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson, edited by Stephen Cox, presents a selection of those columns along with private letters and other essays. They are a treasure. Paterson’s critical (...) performances show us a systematic yet unpredictable mind at work—a model not only of the first but also of any future libertarian worthy of the name. (shrink)

Im Mittelpunkt des Beitrages steht die »Psychotherapie-Richtlinie«, die die Anwendung der Psychoanalyse im Rahmen der Krankenversicherung reguliert. Der Beitrag beginnt mit einer Erörterung des Verhältnisses von Psychoanalyse und Krankenbehandlung, um anschließend die Entstehungsgeschichte der »Richtlinie« und ihren Kompromisscharakter darzulegen. Danach werden einzelne Bestandteile des Regelwerks diskutiert und der theoretische Hintergrund des Richtlinien-Systems beleuchtet. Im letzten Teil plädiert der Autor für grundlegende Veränderungen.

It is often argued that suspected terrorists captured in the war on terror can be detained just the same way captured enemy soldiers can: until the relevant war is over. But there is a deep disanalogy between suspected terrorists and captured enemy soldiers. Soldiers cannot be held accountable for the use of force , whereas terrorists normally can. Detaining people who can be held accountable as if they cannot is crossing an important moral line, sacrificing the rights of the individual (...) for the welfare of the whole. (shrink)

At the heart of Seth Lazar’s arguments in support of what he calls Moral Distinction – ‘In war, with rare exceptions, killing noncombatants is worse than killing combatants’ – is his treatment of eliminative and opportunistic killing. He adopts the standard line, that eliminative killing is easier to justify than opportunistic killing. And he acknowledges that there are various circumstances in which one might be able to justify killing noncombatants on eliminative grounds. Nonetheless, he relies on the notion of a (...) mixed kind of agency to argue that intentionally killing civilians is normally ‘more opportunistic than intentionally killing soldiers’, and is therefore normally more wrongful. I argue that his argument in favor of this claim fails. If we distinguish objectively available reasons from subjectively motivating ones, and pay attention to the limited relevance of subjectively motivating reasons, then it becomes clear that mixed agency cannot do the sort of work for just war theory that Lazar wants it to do. This failure need not impugn other parts of his defense of Moral Distinction. But it takes the heart out of his defense of it, putting a greater burden on the other parts of his argument. (shrink)

According to the Doctrine of Illicit Intentions, it is impermissible both to form and then to act on an illicit intention. An intention is illicit, roughly, if it causes the agent who has it to be, in a certain way, disposed to perform actions that are impermissible. If the range of actions an agent might be directed to perform by an intention includes impermissible actions, then it may be impermissible to form or act on that intention even if, in the (...) end, the agent performs no action that is impermissible (other than forming and acting on an illicit intention itself). (shrink)

This paper examines the relations between, on the one hand, accounts of the distinction between an agent's identifying with, as opposed to feeling alienated from, their attitudes; and on the other, metaphysical accounts of action. It claims that a commitment to an event-causal conception of agency, which would analyse agency in terms of the causal potency of psychological states and events, appears to render mandatory a particular style of account of identification and alienation – namely, the hierarchical model offered by (...) Harry Frankfurt and Michael Bratman. It is argued that such accounts fall foul of a dilemma: the Authority Problem. The failure of attempts to avoid the Authority Problem is then used to motivate an attractive alternative style of account of the distinction, offered by Richard Moran. However, it is pressed that Moran's account rests on claims about agency which seem incompatible with the event-causal conception of agency. By making the links between the metaphysics of agency and accounts of identification and alienation more explicit, the paper allows us to better comprehend both the apparent need for and characteristic failures of some traditional accounts of identification and alienation, as well as make clear the action-theoretical debt incurred by those who would offer an alternative. (shrink)

We know our own intentional actions in a distinctively first-personal way. Many accounts of knowledge of intentionally doing something, A, assume that grounds for the knowledge would have to establish or indicate that it is true that one is intentionally doing A. In this paper, I argue against this assumption, showing how it entails being in a Moore-paradoxical situation. I argue that if knowledge of intentionally doing A were such that grounds for it must be truth-indicating, then one could always (...) wonder, when doing A, whether A is for one a goal. However, just as wondering whether p is true is incompatible with thinking that one believes p, so wondering whether A is for one a goal is incompatible with thinking that one is intentionally doing A. We must allow, then, that one’s knowledge of intentionally doing A is itself a representation of A as a goal to be accomplished, apt to be grounded by reasons for doing A. I show that the first-personal character of knowledge of acting intentionally resides in its being practical rather than theoretical. (shrink)

We are likely to have immersive virtual reality and ubiquitous augmented reality in the coming decades. At least some people will use extended reality or “the metaverse” to work, play and shop. In order to achieve the best possible versions of this virtual future, however, we will need to learn from three decades of regulating the Internet. The new virtual world cannot consist of walled corporate fiefdoms ruled only by profitmaximization. The interests of workers, consumers and citizens in virtuality require (...) proactive legislation and oversight. -/- This white paper first addresses the central question the metaverse poses, whether virtual life is inherently more alienating and less authentic than face-to-face life experiences. This question is both a philosophical question about the nature of the good life and an empirical question about the accumulating evidence about the impacts of the digital on subjective well-being. -/- . (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

A robust, if not absolute, prohibition on treating people merely as a means seems to sit at the core of common sense deontological morality. But the principle prohibiting such treatment, the ‘means principle’ (MP), has been notoriously hard to defend: both the subjective, intention-focused and the objective, causal-role-focused interpretations of what it means to use someone as a means face potent objections. In this paper, my goal is not to defend the MP, but to articulate and defend a new principle, (...) which I call the Restricting Claims Principle (RCP), that explains why a person’s causal role is morally significant. The RCP broadens the basic frame of relevant considerations from the MP’s concern with the dyadic relationship between agent and patient to a global balance of patient-claims on an agent. It distinguishes two kinds of patient-claims that weigh in that balance: restricting and non-restricting. In most cases, these can be distinguished as follows: Restricting claims, if respected as rights, would restrict an agent from doing what she could otherwise permissibly do if the claimant (or his property) were absent; non-restricting claims, if respected as rights, would not in that way restrict an agent. Only restricting claims press to make others worse off than if the claimant were absent. The RCP holds that restricting claims must therefore be substantially weaker than non-restricting ones. The claims of those who would be used as a means are non-restricting, while the claims of those who would be harmed as a side effect are restricting. Thus the RCP can account for the same cases (mostly) as the MP, without having to rely on the MP to do so. (shrink)

The standard of proof in criminal trials in many liberal democracies is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the BARD standard. It is customary to describe it, when putting a number on it, as requiring that the fact finder be at least 90% certain, after considering the evidence, that the defendant is guilty. Strikingly, no good reason has yet been offered in defense of using that standard. A number of non-consequentialist justifications that aim to support an even higher standard have been (...) offered; all are morally unsound. Meanwhile, consequentialist arguments plausibly support a substantially lower standard — in some cases so low as to undermine the idea that punishment is what is at stake. In this paper, I offer a new retributive justification that supports excluding the instrumental benefits of punishment from the balance that sets the standard. The resulting balance supports a standard arguably in the ballpark of the customary understanding of BARD: a standard requiring that the fact finder have a high, though not maximally high, degree of confidence that the defendant is guilty. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to begin to try to understand the extent to which ethnomethodology (EM) might be informed by some concepts and ideas from the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. This is done in two parts. The first looks at Heidegger's later work and compares his conception of the ontological difference with Garfinkel's work on the difference between EM and formal sociological analysis (FA). The second part turns to Heidegger's earlier work (around Being and Time) and (...) works through a number of affinities between the analysis of Dasein and ethnomethodological versions of everydayness. (shrink)

The late Alec Nove explores the relationship between Marxist ideas and the Soviet reality and presents a methodology for understanding Soviet type societies.

The atheist who begins to argue his case by saying, ‘Suppose there is an omniscient Being of the sort in which Christians believe ...’ is employing a very familiar move in argumentation. However, most books on argumentation theory ignore ‘suppositions’ completely. Searle omits suppositions entirely from his taxonomy of speech acts and this appears to lead to a similar omission in Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions by van Eemeren and Grootendorst.This paper argues that ‘suppositional argument’ is elegant, powerful and extremely (...) common, that the correct way to understand it is based on Gottlob Frege's distinction between ‘asserted’ and ‘unasserted’ propositions and hence that suppositions are neither assertions nor (and this is more important) assertives. The paper discusses the connections between suppositions and conditionals; it argues that argumentation theory which ignores suppositions is systematically misleading; and it concludes by indicating some possible developments in argumentation theory. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records. Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to (...) anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics. In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age. (shrink)

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that neurological abnormalities decrease punishment by decreasing perceptions of free will. Experiment 1 found that a brain tumor decreased punishment for criminal behavior by decreasing perceptions of the afflicted criminal’s free will. This effect was stronger for liberal and non-religious participants than for conservative and religious participants. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and additionally found that a brain tumor decreased perceptions of the afflicted criminal’s conscious decisions and true self, thereby decreasing perceptions of his free (...) will, thereby decreasing his punishment. Collectively, these results suggest that neurological abnormalities decrease punishment by decreasing perceptions of free will, especially among liberals and non-religious people. These results also suggest that neurological abnormalities decrease perceptions of free will – and ultimately decrease punishment – by decreasing perceptions of conscious decisions and the true self. (shrink)