William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer continues to be a touchstone in cultural representations of the impact of new information and communication technologies on the self. As critics have noted, the posthumanist, capital-driven, urban landscape of Neuromancer resembles a Foucaultian vision of a panoptically engineered social space in which no activity (even unofficial and illegal activity) eludes the disciplinary gaze of power. On the other hand, William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition, marks an important ideological shift from Neuromancer. Though the (...) novel retains a deep ambivalence toward new technologies' potential impact on the self, Pattern Recognition nevertheless locates a new source for hope and agency in embodied everyday experience. This article maintains that the change can best be understood as a complex transition from the worldview of Michel Foucault to that of Michel de Certeau. (shrink)

In discussions of whether and how pragmatic considerations can make a difference to what one ought to believe, two sets of cases feature. The first set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic reasons for belief, is exemplified by cases of being financially bribed to believe (or withhold from believing) something. The second set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic encroachment on epistemic justification, is exemplified by cases where acting on a belief rashly risks some disastrous outcome if the belief turns (...) out to be false. Call those who think that pragmatic considerations make a difference to what one ought to believe in the second kind of case, but not in the first, ‘moderate pragmatists’. Many philosophers – in particular, most advocates of pragmatic and moral encroachment – are moderate pragmatists. But moderate pragmatists owe us an explanation of exactly why the second kind of pragmatic consideration makes a difference, but the first kind doesn’t. I argue that the most promising of these explanations all fail: they are either theoretically undermotivated, or get key cases wrong, or both. Moderate pragmatism may be an unstable stopping point between a more extreme pragmatism, on one hand, and an uncompromising anti-pragmatism on the other. (shrink)

Several decades of work in both philosophy and psychology acutely highlights our limitations as individual inquirers. One way to recognize these limitations is to defer to experts: roughly, to form one’s beliefs on the basis of expert testimony. Yet, as has become salient in the age of Brexit, Trumpist politics, and climate change denial, people are often mistrustful of experts, and unwilling to defer to them. It’s a trope of highbrow public discourse that this unwillingness is a serious pathology. But (...) to what extent is this trope accurate? Answering this requires us to settle both a normative question—under exactly what conditions ought we to defer to experts?—and an empirical question—under what conditions are people willing to defer to experts? The first question has been investigated primarily by philosophers; the second, primarily by psychologists. Yet there is little work integrating these literatures and putting together their results. The aim of this review article is to begin this task, enabling us to begin reaching conclusions about how much real practices of deference diverge from the ideal. We present an opinionated guide to relevant work from both philosophy and psychology, and note places where the literature has important gaps. (shrink)

In epistemology and in ordinary life, we make many normative claims about beliefs. As with all normative claims, philosophical questions arise about what – if anything – underwrites these kinds of normative claims. On one view, epistemic instrumentalism, facts about what we (epistemically) ought to believe, or about what is an (epistemic, normative) reason to believe what, obtain at least partly in virtue of our goals (or aims, ends, intentions, desires, etc.). The converse view, anti-instrumentalism, denies this, and holds that (...) the facts about what we ought or have reasons to believe are independent of our goals. In this chapter, I present the case for anti-instrumentalism. I lay out a well-known problem for instrumentalism, which is to say exactly what goal (or goals) grounds our epistemic reasons. For each possible answer, the view seems to generate problematic results. I consider some ways of trying to make the instrumentalist view more sophisticated to solve the problem and reject them. I then note a further problem for instrumentalism that applies regardless of what goal the instrumentalist says grounds our epistemic reasons. Finally, I sketch my preferred positive anti-instrumentalist view and argue that it is more theoretically virtuous than instrumentalism in several respects. (shrink)

This paper offers a new account of how structural rationality, or coherence, is normative. The central challenge to the normativity of coherence – which I term the problem of “making space” for the normativity of coherence – is this: if considerations of coherence matter normatively, it is not clear how we ought to take account of them in our deliberation. Coherence considerations don’t seem to show up in reasoning about what to believe, intend, desire, hope, fear, and so on; moreover, (...) they seem awkward to take account of alongside more “substantive” considerations about the merits of such attitudes. I aim here to solve this problem, and in so doing to offer the aforementioned new account of how coherence is normative. On the view I defend, which I call the Reasons-to-Structure-Deliberation model, considerations of coherence constitute reasons for structuring deliberation in certain ways: more particularly, to treat incoherent combinations of attitudes as off-limits, and so to focus one’s deliberation on choosing between the coherent combinations. (shrink)

There are at least two different aspects of our rational evaluation of agents’ doxastic attitudes. First, we evaluate these attitudes according to whether they are supported by one’s evidence (substantive rationality). Second, we evaluate these attitudes according to how well they cohere with one another (structural rationality). In previous work, I’ve argued that substantive and structural rationality really are distinct, sui generis, kinds of rationality – call this view ‘dualism’, as opposed to ‘monism’, about rationality – by arguing that the (...) requirements of substantive and structural rationality can come into conflict. In this paper, I push the dialectic on this issue forward in two main ways. First, I argue that the most promising ways of resisting the diagnosis of my cases as conflicts still end up undermining monism in different ways. Second, supposing for the sake of argument that we should understand the cases as conflicts, I address the question of what we should do when such conflicts arise. I argue that, at least in a prominent kind of conflict case, the coherence requirements take precedence over the evidential requirements. (shrink)

It is fairly uncontroversial that when you encounter disagreement with some view of yours, you are often epistemically required to become at least somewhat less confident in that view. This includes political disagreements, where your level of confidence might in various ways affect your voting and other political behavior. But suppose that your opponents don’t comply with the epistemic norms governing disagreement – that is, they never reduce their confidence in their views in response to disagreement. If you always reduce (...) your confidence, but your opponents never reduce theirs – and everyone participates in the political process accordingly – then it seems like the deliberative process will be unfairly skewed in favor of your opponents. In this paper, I do two things. First, I try to explain how this can be so, even though the process by stipulation represents everyone’s beliefs equally. Second, I defend the view that in such cases, you should remedy the unfairness by voting out of accord with your beliefs. By introducing a distinct state that I call a “personal take,” which you can vote on the basis of in such a case, I explain how doing this need not be problematically insincere, nor incoherent from the inside. The discussion has a number of independent upshots for both democratic theory and the epistemology of disagreement. (shrink)

Lying is a familiar and important concept for virtually all of us, and philosophers have written a lot about what it means to lie. Although it is commonly accepted that an adequate definition of lying captures people's use and understanding of this concept, there have been surprisingly few empirical studies on it. n recent years, however, there is a trend emerging to remedy this lacuna. In this paper, we provide an overview of these studies. Starting from a widely accepted philosophical (...) definition of lying, we focus on the following three questions: Is an intention to deceive required for lying? Is it possible to lie despite saying something true? Can you lie by falsely implicating? (shrink)

A possible person’s conditional expected well-being is what the quality of their prospects would be if they were to come into existence. This paper examines the role that this form of expected well-being should play in distributing benefits among prospective people and in deciding who to bring into existence. It argues for a novel egalitarian view on which it is important to ensure equality in people’s life prospects, not merely between actual individuals, but also between all individuals who, given our (...) choices, have a chance of coming into existence. The paper argues that such egalitarianism for prospective people springs from equal concern for each person and has plausible implications. It further shows that it has a rationale in respect for both the unity of the individual and the separateness of persons. Finally, it defends this view against a key objection and shows it is superior to a rival view. (shrink)

Philosophers sometimes give arguments that presuppose the following principle: two theories can fail to be empirically equivalent on the sole basis that they present different “thick” metaphysical pictures of the world. Recently, a version of this principle has been invoked to respond to the argument that composite objects are dispensable to our best scientific theories. This response claims that our empirical evidence distinguishes between ordinary and composite-free theories, and it empirically favors the ordinary ones. In this paper, I ask whether (...) this response to the dispensability argument is tenable. I claim that it is not. This is because it presupposes an indefensible thesis about when two empirical consequences are distinct or the same. My argument provides some insight into what our empirical consequences are, and I conclude that empirical evidence is radically metaphysically neutral. This gives us some insight into the significant content of our scientific theories—the content that a scientific realist is committed to—and I show how this insight relates to questions about theoretical equivalence more broadly. (shrink)

This paper defends and extends Quine’s version of a naturalistic epistemology, and defends it against criticism, especially that offered by Kim, according to which Quine’s naturalism deprives epistemology of its normative role, and indeed of its relevance to psychological states, such as beliefs, whose warrant epistemology aims to assess. I defend Quinean epistemology’s objections to the epistemic pluralism associated with other self-styled naturalistic epistemologies, and show how recent theories in the philosophy of psychology which fail to account for the intentionality (...) of psychological states in fact provide a cognitive foundation for an eliminativist epistemology which both honors Quine’s strictures and helps us accommodate important findings and results in experimental psychology and cognitive science. (shrink)

In some severely uncertain situations, exemplified by climate change and novel pandemics, policymakers lack a reasoned basis for assigning probabilities to the possible outcomes of the policies they must choose between. I outline and defend an uncertainty averse, egalitarian approach to policy evaluation in these contexts. The upshot is a theory of distributive justice which offers especially strong reasons to guard against individual and collective misfortune.

Especially but not exclusively in the United States, there is a significant gulf between expert opinion and public opinion on a range of important political, social, and scientific issues. Large numbers of lay people hold views contrary to the expert consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccines, and economics. Much political commentary assumes that ordinary people should defer to experts more than they do, and this view is certainly lent force by the literally deadly effects of many denials of (...) established science. But there are complex philosophical issues here, concerning, among other things, (i) what an expert is; (ii) what kind of deference is called for; (iii) and when deference is called for. This entry gives an overview of these three issues and recent work on them. It then examines some potential collective and pragmatic disadvantages of deference, before concluding with reflections on what we can say to those who distrust experts. (shrink)

Does immorality necessarily involve irrationality? The question is often taken to be among the deepest in moral philosophy. But apparently deep questions sometimes admit of deflationary answers. In this case we can make way for a deflationary answer by appealing to dualism about rationality, according to which there are two fundamentally distinct notions of rationality: structural rationality and substantive rationality. I have defended dualism elsewhere. Here, I’ll argue that it allows us to embrace a sensible – I will not say (...) boring – moderate view about the relationship between immorality and irrationality: roughly, that immorality involves substantive irrationality, but not structural irrationality. I defend this moderate view, and argue that many of the arguments for less moderate views turn either on missing the distinction between substantive and structural rationality, or on misconstruing it. (shrink)

The paper aims to disarm arguments, prevalent in diverse philosophical contexts, that deny the legitimacy of attributions of propositional attitudes on the grounds that the putative subject lacks one or more of the requite concepts. Its strategy is to offer and defend an extremely minimal account on concept possession. The agenda of the paper broadens into a defence of the thesis that concepts are a linguistic epiphenomenon: talk about them emerges as the result of certain contingently available and pleonastic ways (...) of talking about propositional attitudes. (shrink)

: An Aristotelian conception of practical ethics can be derived from the account of practical reasoning that Aristotle articulates in his Rhetoric and this has important implications for the way we understand the nature and limits of practical ethics. An important feature of this conception of practical ethics is its responsiveness to the complex ways in which agents form and maintain moral commitments, and this has important implications for the debate concerning methods of ethics in applied ethics. In particular, this (...) feature enables us to understand casuistry, narrative, and principlism as mutually supportive modes of moral inquiry, rather than divergent and mutually exclusive methods of ethics. As a result, an Aristotelian conception of practical ethics clears the conceptual common ground upon which practical ethicists can forge a stable and realistic self-understanding. (shrink)

It is standard, both in the philosophical literature and in ordinary parlance, to assume that one can fall short of responding to all one’s moral reasons without being irrational. Yet when we turn to epistemic reasons, the situation could not be more different. Most epistemologists take it as axiomatic that for a belief to be rational is for it to be well-supported by epistemic reasons. We find ourselves with a striking asymmetry, then, between the moral and epistemic domains concerning what (...) is taken for granted about whether failures to respond to reasons are failures of rationality. My aim in this paper is to interrogate this asymmetry, and ultimately to argue that the asymmetry is groundless. Instead, I will offer an error theory to explain the asymmetry in intuitions. This error theory suggests that we should amend the conventional wisdom about the relationship between epistemic reasons and rationality. (shrink)

How should governments balance saving people from very large individual disease burdens (such as an early death) against saving them from middling burdens (such as erectile dysfunction) and minor burdens (such as nail fungus)? This chapter considers this question through an analysis of a priority-setting proposal in the Netherlands, on which avoiding a multitude of middling burdens takes priority over saving one person from early death, but no number of very small burdens can take priority over avoiding one death. It (...) argues that there is some, albeit imperfect, evidence of substantial public support for such a policy. Furthermore, it provides a principled rationale for it in terms of respect for the person who faces the largest burden. (shrink)

Many epistemologists call themselves ‘fallibilists’. But many philosophers of language hold that the meaning of epistemic usages of ‘possible’ ensures a close knowledge- possibility link : a subject’s utterance of ‘it’s possible that not-p’ is true only if the subject does not know that p. This seems to suggest that whatever the core insight behind fallibilism is, it can’t be that a subject could have knowledge which is, for them, possibly false. I argue that, on the contrary, subjects can have (...) such possibly false knowledge. My ultimate aim, then, is to vindicate a very robust form of fallibilism. Uniquely, however, the account I offer does this while also allowing that concessive knowledge attributions – sentences of the form “I know that p, but it’s possible that not-p” – are not only infelicitous but actually false whenever uttered. The account predicts this result without conceding KPL. I argue that my account has the resources to explain some related cases for which the KPL account yields the wrong predictions. Taken as a whole, the linguistic data not only do not support the proposal that subjects cannot have possibly false knowledge, but indeed positively favor the proposal that they can. (shrink)

Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a new account of plural logic. They argue that there is such a thing as genuinely plural denotation in logic, and expound a framework of ideas that includes the distinction between distributive and collective predicates, the theory of plural descriptions, multivalued functions, and lists.

It's often said that it is impossible to respond to non-evidential considerations in belief-formation, at least not directly and consciously. Many philosophers think that this provides grounds for accepting a normative thesis: typically, some kind of evidentialism about reasons for belief, or what one ought to believe. Some also think it supports thinking that evidentialist norms are constitutive of belief. There are a variety of ways in which one might try to support such theses by appeal to the impossibility-claim. In (...) this paper, I put pressure on these various attempts by raising a simple yet overlooked problem for them. In brief, the problem is that it isn't true that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that don't actually constitute (good) evidence for the proposition under consideration; what is true, at most, is that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that one oneself takes to be evidentially irrelevant to that proposition. While this point is obvious once stated, its significance hasn't been appreciated, or so I'll argue. Once we take full account of it, the standard arguments from the impossibility-claim to evidentialism don't go through. (shrink)

Standard responses to the knowledge argument grant that Mary could know all of the physical facts even while trapped inside her black‐and‐white room. What they deny is that upon leaving her black‐and‐white room and experiencing red for the first time, Mary learns a genuinely new fact. This paper develops an alternate response in a grounding physicalist framework, on which Mary does not know all of the physical facts while trapped inside the room. The main thesis is that Mary does not (...) know certain phenomenal facts while trapped inside the room, whereby these facts classify as physical due to being wholly and fully metaphysically grounded in the underlying fundamental facts which are themselves entirely physical. (shrink)

Outside the philosophy classroom, global skeptics – skeptics about all (purported) knowledge of the external world – are rare. But there are people who describe themselves as “skeptics” about various more specific domains, including self-professed “skeptics” about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. There is little to no philosophical literature that juxtaposes the climate change skeptic with the external world skeptic. While many “traditional” epistemologists assume that the external world skeptic poses a serious philosophical challenge in a way that the (...) climate change skeptic doesn’t, many “applied” or “social” epistemologists assume that there isn’t much to be learned from debates about the external world skeptic, finding her challenge to be distant from both common sense and real-world concerns. I try to show that both of these views are mistaken. The external world skeptic raises deep questions that are important for our everyday deliberation about what to believe, and there are significant structural parallels between the arguments for external world skepticism and those for at least a form of climate change skepticism that is idealized – but not too idealized! – from the views of flesh-and-blood climate change skeptics. As such, we have strong reasons to think in parallel about how to reply to both skeptics’ challenges. I thus finish by (briefly) considering how different widespread responses to the external world skeptic might or might not generalize happily to the climate change skeptic’s challenge. (shrink)

A pragmatic approach to business ethics is argued for in this volume, which demonstrates the usefulness of the approach by applying it to a variety of issues. These issues are broad and far-reaching and include the relations between rational and moral//ethical decision-making, the limits of loyalty to employers, the impact of trust on business and the role of commercial public opinion polling during elections. The author also covers advertising, tobacco promotion, manufacture and marketing of armaments, concentration and taxation of wealth, (...) and the North American Free Trade Agreement. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that requirements of rationality are “wide-scope”. That is to say: they are requirements to satisfy some material conditional, such that one counts as satisfying the requirement iff one either makes the conditional’s antecedent false or makes its consequent true. These contrast with narrow-scope requirements, where the requirement takes scope only over the consequent of the conditional. Many of the philosophers who have preferred wide-scope requirements to narrow-scope requirements have also endorsed a corresponding semantic claim, namely that ordinary (...) talk about rationality, despite appearances to the contrary, expresses wide-scope claims. In doing so, they seek to avoid attributing massive error to ordinary speakers. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the wide-scope semantics inadequately captures the meaning of ordinary talk about rationality. It seems, then, that we are left with a dilemma: either give up the view that requirements of rationality are wide-scope, or accept an implausible semantics for ordinary talk about rationality, or attribute massive error to speakers. In this paper, I argue that this dilemma is only apparent, since we can appeal to a standard kind of contextualist semantics for modals to explain why narrow-scope talk comes out true in virtue of the wide-scope requirements. My view, then, combines wide-scoping about the explanatorily fundamental requirements of rationality with a contextualist variant of a narrow-scope semantics. I argue that this view gives us the best of both worlds, as well as solving related puzzles and challenges for the extant views in the literature. (shrink)

I note the multitude of ways in which, beginning with the classic paper by Machamer et al., the mechanists have qualify their methodological dicta, and limit the vulnerability of their claims by strategic vagueness regarding their application. I go on to generalize a version of the mechanist requirement on explanations due to Craver and Kaplan :601–627, 2011) in cognitive and systems neuroscience so that it applies broadly across the life sciences in accordance with the view elaborated by Craver and Darden (...) in In Search of Mechanisms. I then go on to explore what ramifications their mechanist requirement on explanations may have for explanatory “dependencies” reported in biology and the special sciences. What this exploration suggests is that mechanism threatens to eliminate instead of underwrite a large number of such “dependencies” reported in higher-levels of biology and the special sciences. I diagnose the source of this threat in mechanism’s demand that explanations identify nested causal differences makers in mechanisms, their components, the components further components, and so forth. Finally, I identify the “love–hate” relationship mechanism must have with functional explanation, and show how it makes mechanism an extremely interesting thesis indeed. (shrink)

The aim of this encyclopedia is to provide a comprehensive reference work on scientific and other scholarly research on the quality of life, including health-related quality of life research or also called patient-reported outcomes research. Since the 1960s two overlapping but fairly distinct research communities and traditions have developed concerning ideas about the quality of life, individually and collectively, one with a fairly narrow focus on health-related issues and one with a quite broad focus. In many ways, the central issues (...) of these fields have roots extending to the observations and speculations of ancient philosophers, creating a continuous exploration by diverse explorers in diverse historic and cultural circumstances over several centuries of the qualities of human existence. What we have not had so far is a single, multidimensional reference work connecting the most salient and important contributions to the relevant fields. Entries are organized alphabetically and cover basic concepts, relatively well established facts, lawlike and causal relations, theories, methods, standardized tests, biographic entries on significant figures, organizational profiles, indicators and indexes of qualities of individuals and of communities of diverse sizes, including rural areas, towns, cities, counties, provinces, states, regions, countries and groups of countries. (shrink)

Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible. In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers (...) a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra’s cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice. (shrink)

Climate change is often described as an existential risk to the human species, but this terminology has generally been avoided in the climate-justice literature in analytic philosophy. I investigate the source of this disconnect and explore the prospects for incorporating the idea of climate change as an existential risk into debates about climate justice. The concept of existential risk does not feature prominently in these discussions, I suggest, because assumptions that structure ‘ideal’ accounts of climate justice ensure that the prospect (...) of climate change as an extinction-level threat does not arise. Given persistent noncompliance with mitigation duties, however, we have reason to revisit these assumptions. I argue that the most promising way for theories of climate justice to account for the significance of existential risk is to look to the practices of protest and resistance in which a concern about extinction or global catastrophe is frequently given expression. (shrink)

Speciesism, broadly understood as the view that species membership is a morally relevant property, has been a central topic of debate within animal ethics for around 50 years. However, in all this time, animal ethicists have paid relatively scant attention to the nature of species membership itself. This seems potentially regrettable, since species membership's precise nature is presumably highly pertinent to the question of its exact moral relevance. Here, I advocate for a ‘species-focused’ approach to assessing speciesism, arguing that, in (...) debating the merits of speciesism, animal ethicists should (i) centre the nature of species membership, and (ii) consult philosophers of biology. Adherence to this second prescription appears necessary since a lot of what philosophers of biology believe regarding the nature of species membership appears contrary to what many animal ethicists have seemingly assumed. (shrink)

This paper introduces a symposium on Equality versus Priority. It explains how cases involving risk are key to distinguishing these views and discusses a 'social egalitarian' critique of both 'telic egalitarians' and 'telic prioritarians'.

This paper shows how critical realism can be used to integrate empirical data and philosophical analysis within ‘empirical bioethics’. The term empirical bioethics, whilst appearing oxymoronic, simply refers to an interdisciplinary approach to the resolution of practical ethical issues within the biological and life sciences, integrating social scientific, empirical data with philosophical analysis. It seeks to achieve a balanced form of ethical deliberation that is both logically rigorous and sensitive to context, to generate normative conclusions that are practically applicable to (...) the problem, challenge, or dilemma. Since it incorporates both philosophical and social scientific components, empirical bioethics is a field that is consistent with the use of critical realism as a research methodology. The integration of philosophical and social scientific approaches to ethics has been beset with difficulties, not least because of the irreducibly normative, rather than descriptive, nature of ethical analysis and the contested relation between fact and value. However, given that facts about states of affairs inform potential courses of action and their consequences, there is a need to overcome these difficulties and successfully integrate data with theory. Previous approaches have been formulated to overcome obstacles in combining philosophical and social scientific perspectives in bioethical analysis; however each has shortcomings. As a mature interdisciplinary approach critical realism is well suited to empirical bioethics, although it has hitherto not been widely used. Here I show how it can be applied to this kind of research and explain how it represents an improvement on previous approaches. (shrink)

Epicurus posited that the best life involves the greatest pleasures. He also argued that it involves attaining tranquillity. Many commentators have expressed scepticism that these two claims are compatible. For, they argue, Epicurus’ tranquil life is so austere that it is hard to see how it could be maximally pleasurable. Here, I offer an Epicurean account of the pleasures of tranquillity. I also consider different ways of valuing lives from a hedonistic point of view. Benthamite hedonists value lives by the (...) sum of pleasures minus the sum of pains, weighted by intensity and duration. Meanwhile, Binmore proposes that Epicurus valued lives by their worst episode. In contrast, I offer an Epicurean argument for why the best life is one in which a person attains tranquillity and tastes its pleasures until death. (shrink)

It has become increasingly common for animal ethicists to advance deontological theories of animal rights, as opposed to merely welfarist theories of animals’ moral significance. Kantians, however, have not been so quick to adapt. The gates to the Kingdom of Ends are closed to any who lack rational autonomy. Christine Korsgaard’s recent work, however, has made a concerted effort to find a place for animals within Kant’s Kingdom of Ends. I argue that Korsgaard can have animal rights or Kantian ethics, (...) but not both. (shrink)

BackgroundSolitary death (kodokushi) has recently become recognized as a social issue in Japan. The social isolation of older people leads to death without dignity. With the outbreak of COVID-19, efforts to eliminate solitary death need to be adjusted in line with changes in lifestyle and accompanying changes in social structure. Health monitoring services that utilize wearable devices may contribute to this end. Our goals are to outline how wearable devices might be used to (1) detect emergency situations involving solitary older (...) people and swiftly connect them with medical treatment, to (2) reduce the frequency of deaths that remain undiscovered and (3) to reduce social isolation by promoting social interaction. MethodsTheoretical and philosophical approaches were adopted to examine ethical issues surrounding the application of wearable devices and cloud-based information processing systems to prevent solitary death in the world with/after COVID-19.Main body(1) Technology cannot replace social connections; without social support necessary to foster understanding of the benefits of health management through wearable devices among older adults, such devices may remain unused, or not used properly. (2) Maturity of the technology; systems face the difficult task of detecting and responding to a wide range of health conditions and life-threatening events in time to avert avoidable morbidity and mortality. (3) Autonomy and personhood; promoting the voluntary use of wearable devices that are a part of larger efforts to connect isolated individuals to a community or social services might be effective. Legal force should be avoided if possible. There is some concern that landlords may require an older person to sign a contract agreeing to wear a device. The autonomy of solitary older people should be respected. (4) Governance: policies must be developed to limit access to data from wearables and the purposes for which data can be used.ConclusionIf thoughtfully deployed under proper policy constraints, wearable devices offer a way to connect solitary older people to health services and could reduce cases of solitary death while respecting the personhood of the user. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to discuss Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Third World. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the Third World is not only a geographical term, but also one that denotes the linguistic zones, another term of the minority. The essay argues that the concept of the Third World is related to minor literature, the minor or intense use of language. This ‘transcendental exercise’ of writing is an opposition to the initial purpose of language, namely representation. (...) Language must escape from its normative usage, and then be liberated to a new spatio-temporality, in other words, the linguistic Third World zones. My conclusion is that the creation of Third World linguistic zones is the repetition of differences against the generalisation of representation, such as becoming non-human and non-European, not in imitation of the molar form of the animal or a non-continent extending terrestrial power into the ocean, but as the right way to invent the people missing in the Third World. Inventing the people of the Third World is the right condition in which alternative political subjects can be produced through desubjectification, not domestication, by capitalist axiomatics. In this way, Deleuze's political philosophy aims to use the virtual politics of the Third World to radicalise the actual representation of the existing Left. (shrink)

This thesis argues that a particular version of equal opportunity for welfare is the best way of meeting the joint demands of three liberal egalitarian ideals: distributional equality, responsibility, and respect for individuals’ differing reasonable judgements of their own good. It also examines which social choice rules best represent these demands. Finally, it defends the view that achieving equal opportunity for welfare should not only be a goal of formal public institutions, but that just citizens should also sometimes be guided (...) by it in their everyday life. The version of equal opportunity for welfare it defends differs from some well-known contemporary versions in the following ways. First, it rejects a definition of welfare as the degree of satisfaction of a person’s preferences, because, it argues, this conception of welfare cannot adequately deal with preference change. Instead, it suggests that we should adopt a conception of welfare based on a list of goods and conditions that are recognised as valuable from the perspective of a variety of different conceptions of the good. Second, it argues that individuals’ prima facie claim to an equally valuable share of the world’s resources—a claim which is based on their equal moral worth—is limited to situations in which giving one person a more valuable share means that someone else ends up with a less valuable share. It also argues that in situations where we can improve at least one person’s situation without worsening anyone else’s, we generally do not fail to respect each person’s equal moral worth by doing so, even if this leads to inequalities. Third, it defends a distinct view of responsibility, which justifies social arrangements that give people certain options with reference to the value that individuals can achieve (but don’t necessarily achieve) through their choices from these options. (shrink)

The funding information is missing in the original article. It is given below.

The key claims of left accelerationism are grounded upon a network of concepts. Crucial here have been the notions of hegemony ; strategy ; and rationality. Though the concepts of hegemony–strategy and strategy–rationality have received wide treatment, the hegemony and rationality pair has received minimal attention. Yet to render the core arguments of left accelerationism explicable requires that these three ideas are placed in some concrete relation. To put the issue another way: what is the relationship between power and rationality? (...) This article will argue that many of the critiques which the left accelerationist position has received are bound up in misunderstanding this relationship. To remedy such misnomers, we will argue that it is a more sophisticated understanding of strategy that can help bridge these two domains. This leads us to delineate a form of strategy-without-a-strategiser, a distributed and emergent strategic orientation which mediates the power/rationality binary. (shrink)

Geach's account of the Aristotelian logic of categorical sentences supplemented the views shared by Frege, Russell, Quine and others. I argue that this particular predicate logic approach and Geach's points apply to only one variety of natural language categorical sentences. For example, it takes the universal categorical as a universal conditional “If anything is a man, then it is mortal”. A different natural language form can and should be invoked: “Every man is a mortal.” Employing special restricted quantifiers in a (...) version of predicate logic, we justify a full square of opposition and the rules of quality and quantity that Geach rejected. (shrink)

The existing literature on the rational underdetermination problem often construes it as one resulting from the ubiquity of objective values. It is therefore sometimes argued that subjectivists need not be troubled by the underdetermination problem. But on closer examination, it turns out, they should. Or so I will argue. The task of the first half of this paper is explaining why. The task of the second half is finding a subjectivist solution the rational underdetermination problem. The basic problem, I argue, (...) is as follows. Idealizing subjectivism generates too many ideal selves to deliver determinate or commensurable options regarding what non-ideal deliberating agents ought to do. My solution: these idealized options should be assessed from the only perspective we can, in fact, occupy, namely, that of our non-ideal, actual selves. Deciding what to do therefore becomes, in part, an exercise in deciding who to be. But one might now worry this just moves the arbitrariness bump in the rug. Privileging the perspective of our actual self seems contrary to the rationale for idealizing in the first place. I consider two solutions to the problem, one democratic, the other modelled on trusteeship. In the end, I argue, our actual self has complete freedom to choose the ideal self it grants rational authority. In the final part of the paper, I present my positive proposal as a solution to the underdetermination problem confronting the idealizing subjectivist and then argue that, so understood, this account vindicates a tidied-up version of how some reflective people already do deliberate in their everyday lives. This, in turn, suggests that a decision-procedure closely connected to the account is both possible and attractive. (shrink)

La Cnil est confrontée à une évolution technologique incessante et considérable face à laquelle elle doit rester vigilante. La question des usages se pose au regard des menaces vis-à-vis de l'exercice des libertés. Un double traçage dans le temps et dans l'espace se produit, cristallisant les discours et la personnalité d'un individu de manière indélébile. La protection des données personnelles est appliquée de manière très inégale dans le monde tandis que le G29 fait respecter la législation de l'Union européenne sur (...) son territoire. Alors que la Cnil est amenée à assurer de plus en plus de contrôles, elle manque de moyens qu'il faudrait lui procurer en demandant des contributions aux collectivités territoriales et aux entreprises.To exercise the vigilance required of it, the CNIL - the French Data Protection Authority - has to deal with a continuous stream of technological development, which is often of major significance. The issue of data use needs to be addressed because it raises potential threats to civil liberties. Data leave traces both in space and time, generating indelible snapshots of individual discourses and personalities. Personal data protection is unevenly applied around the world, while the G29 enforces European data protection legislation within Europe. The CNIL is required to apply ever more controls, but lacks the financial resources do to so. These should be provided by contributions from territorial authorities and private companies. (shrink)

Toleration is one possible response to diversity, and it is a defining feature of contemporary liberal democracies. Still, why we should tolerate and what we should tolerate are persistent political questions. This dissertation explores the reasons why citizens should sometimes refrain from embodying in law moral beliefs that they hold to be true. It claims that a neglected aspect of John Locke's writings on religious toleration, the formal relationship between moral principles and law, can instruct political deliberation. Since this portion (...) of Locke's thought is deeply influenced by Christian natural law, the approach is analogical. Locke confronted some political problems analogous to our own and there are alternative secular justifications available for the intermediate principles he employed. These intermediate principles can provide meaningful guidance in contemporary disputes about law and morality. ;Chapter Two explores Locke's most important insight into the formal relationship between law and morality, concerns about the use of "non-neutral principles" in political argument. A non-neutral principle is one that contains the very term under dispute between two contending parties. Neglected arguments in Locke's Third Letter Concerning Toleration provide formal tests for differentiating between non-neutral principles that do and do not justify coercive law. The Lockean criteria assume a "juridical equality" between persons such that at the persons who disagree are moral equals under a common set of public, general, and reasonable rules that determine when they may and may not use force. ;This Lockean insight has broad implications both for political theory and Locke scholarship. Chapter Three explores the relationship between natural law, consent, and the public good and argues that Lockean criteria can help modern readers choose between competing conceptions of the public good. Chapter Four explores the tensions between the Lockean formal criteria and Locke's specific views about which groups the government should tolerate. Chapter Five shows how a Lockean theory can account for institutional reasons for toleration, instances where a person refrains from putting a stop to an action for lack of jurisdiction. Chapter Six shows how both substantive and institutional forms of toleration should guide interpreters of the United States Constitution. (shrink)