Groups around the world are increasingly successful in maintaining or winning autonomy. However, what happens to individuals within the groups who find that their group discriminates against them? This volume brings together sixteen distinguished scholars who examine the balance between group autonomy and individual rights in relation to conflicts involving gender, religion, culture, and indigenous rights in the national and international sphere.

When philosophers talk about perfectionism, it is usually as a view of well-being, of developing characteristically human capacities. Yet perfectionism can also be a normative account of what we ow...

While contemplative practices have emerged from wisdom-traditions, the rhetoric surrounding their justification in contemporary public educational settings has been substantially undergirded by the scientific evidence-based approach. This article finds the practice and construct of ‘attention’ to be the bridge between this peculiar encounter of science and wisdom traditions, and a vantage point from which we can re-examine the scope and practice of ‘education’. The article develops an educational typology based on ‘attention’ as a curricular deliberation point. Every pedagogical act rides (...) over a meta-pedagogical injunction of where to attend to find that which society deems worthwhile. The deep curricular teachings thus begin in the question where knowledge of most worth exists and precede content. It is at this hidden level in which our spatial-temporal disposition towards life-meaning can be shaped. Following this typology, the article will suggest that beyond what may be critiqued as instrumental mindfulness-based curricular ‘interventions’ that cater to an economic educational narrative, lurks the trajectory of a contemplative educational turn that may be outwitting over-instrumentalisation through wisdom-traditions. (shrink)

This book examines several key approaches used by courts and legislatures to assess the claims made by minorities for protection of some aspect of their identities such as a cultural or religious practice.

Amid the growing interest in the relationship between technology and human flourishing, philosophical perfectionism can serve as a fruitful lens through which to normatively evaluate technology. This paper offers an analytic framework that explains the relationship between technology and flourishing by way of innate human capacities. According to perfectionism, our human flourishing is determined by how well we exercise our human capacities to know, create, be sociable, use our bodies and exercise the will, by engaging in activities that ultimately produce (...) valuable output. The paper introduces technology affordances to this framework, to show how affordances enable or restrict the exercise of human capacities, thereby impacting levels of human flourishing. One implication of this analysis is that it highlights how technology affordances can cause the privation (absence) of flourishing, by impoverishing capacities. The upshot is that privation may bring about robustly bad unflourishing, especially given that technology and its affordances have the power to degrade the human capacities in the long run. By linking how human capacities are shaped by affordances, we can achieve a better understanding of the ethical implications of technology on human flourishing. (shrink)

Religious associations sometimes seek to provide services and goods to the public using religious values that discriminate on grounds otherwise prohibited by law and public values. 'Group pluralists' support these efforts by highlighting the importance of shielding group authority from state overreach and protecting a robust associational life within democratic contexts. By contrast, 'liberal statists' insist on the state's final authority over societal groups and the need to protect individuals from arbitrary group power. This paper defends a third approach to (...) group authority called relational pluralism. Relational pluralism is skeptical that the state can resolve group conflicts fully and fairly and recognizes that too much state interference in group life weakens democratic relations. At the same time, it recognizes that groups can rarely act independently of other groups, including the regulatory state. Instead, groups rely on being empowered by other groups and often also by the state to carry out their projects. Group authority is nearly always 'relational' in that it depends on the cooperation of other groups. The paper sketches out a relational pluralist approach to understanding group authority and explains its democratic virtues. It shows how the approach can illuminate otherwise underappreciated features of conflicts about authority. (shrink)

People reject ‘paradoxical’ inferences, such as: Luisa didn't play music; therefore, if Luisa played soccer, then she didn't play music. For some theorists, they are invalid for everyday conditionals, but valid in logic. The theory of mental models implies that they are valid, but unacceptable because the conclusion refers to a possibility inconsistent with the premise. Hence, individuals should accept them if the conclusions refer only to possibilities consistent with the premises: Luisa didn't play soccer; therefore, if Luisa played a (...) game then she didn't play soccer. Two experiments corroborated this prediction for three sorts of ‘paradox’, including a disjunctive paradox. (shrink)

Journal Name: The Law & Ethics of Human Rights Issue: Ahead of print.

There is a growing body of scholarship on the ethics of autonomous vehicles. Yet the ethical discourse has mostly been focusing on the behavior of the vehicle in accident scenarios. This paper offers a different ethical prism: the implications of the autonomous vehicle for human well-being. As such, it contributes to the growing discourse on the wider societal and moral implications of the autonomous vehicle. The paper is premised on the neo-Aristotelian approach which holds that as human beings, our well-being (...) depends on developing and exercising our innate human capacities: to know, understand, love, be sociable, imagine, create and use our bodies and use our willpower. To develop and exercise these capacities, our environments need to provide a range of opportunities which will trigger the development and exercise of the capacities. The main argument advanced in the paper is that one plausible future of the autonomous vehicle—a future of single-rider autonomous vehicles—may effectively reduce the opportunities to develop and exercise our capacities to know, be sociable and use our willpower. It will therefore be bad for human well-being, and this provides us with a moral reason to resist this plausible future and search for alternative ones. (shrink)

For over forty years, economic inequality and distributive justice have been two of the primary concerns of political philosophers. This volume addresses these issues in a novel way, by focusing on the concepts of solidarity and public goods as both descriptive and normative frameworks. Solidarity links the social, political and moral together, in a distinctively political approach that recognizes the social sources of power on the one hand and sources of moral motivation on the other. Public goods such as education, (...) healthcare, and transport systems are indispensable to the forging of solidarity, but at the same time they may become sources of oppression or injustice, when they fail to respect individual autonomy or when they calcify majoritarian preferences. The essays in this volume explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. The moral theory of solidarity is advanced in one case as an intrinsically valuable concept of social connectedness and in another as an approach of epistemic deference; a structural account of solidarity theorizes about action against racial oppression, and a power-relations account points at the urgency of the affective, non-rational dimensions of solidarity. The social value of property and its moral implications are articulated through the lens of French 19th Century ‘Solidarism’ and as a complementary theory to left-libertarianism. Public goods are defended as instrumental to solidarity, in one case within a liberal framework and in another within a human-perfectionism framework. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the volume re-establishes solidarity and public goods as pertinent concepts for theorizing about social justice and inequality. (shrink)

Existing accounts of public-goods distribution rely on the existence of solidarity for providing non-universal public goods, such as the humanities or national parks. There are three fundamental problems with these accounts: they ignore instances of social fragmentation; they treat preferences for public goods as morally benign, and they assume that these preferences are the only relevant moral consideration. However, not all citizens unanimously require public goods such as the humanities or national parks. Public-goods distribution that is based only on citizens’ (...) preferences, therefore, means that non-universal public good are at a constant risk of under-provision, and has negative implications for human flourishing. The paper, therefore, develops a complementary justification for the distribution of public goods, that decouples the distribution of public goods from ad hoc preferences, and grounds the distributive justification in the intrinsic value of these goods. There are three reasons to include intrinsic-value considerations in public-goods distribution: responding to crowding-out effects; promoting shared heritage and cross-fertilization. Finally, the intrinsic-value justification may indirectly promote solidarity. Thus, the intrinsic-value and the solidarity justifications need not be mutually exclusive, rather they can be mutually reinforcing. (shrink)

In his recent papers, entitled Intelligence without Representation and Intelligence without Reason, Brooks argues for mobile robots as the foundation of AI research. This article argues that even if we seek to investigate complete agents in real-world environments, robotics is neither necessary nor sufficient as a basis for AI research. The article proposes real-world software environments, such as operating systems or databases, as a complementary substrate for intelligent-agent research and considers the relative advantages of software environments as test beds for (...) AI. First, the cost, effort, and expertise necessary to develop and systematically experiment with software artifacts are relatively low. Second, software environments circumvent many thorny but peripheral research issues that are inescapable in physical environments. Brooks's mobile robots tug AI toward a bottom-up focus in which the mechanics of perception and mobility mingle inextricably with or even supersede core AI research. In contrast, the softbots (software robots) I advocate facilitate the study of classical AI problems in real-world (albeit, software) domains. For example, the UNIX softbot under development at the University of Washington has led us to investigate planning with incomplete information, interleaving planning and execution, and a host of related high-level issues. (shrink)

This book is the first devoted to modern biology's innovators and iconoclasts: men and women who challenged prevailing notions in their fields.

One of the challenges that liberal neutrality faces in diverse societies is how to maintain neutrality towards conception of the good life, when establishment of a particular conception of the good and exclusion of other conceptions is inevitable, as in the case of language regulation. A possible solution is to justify this establishment by appealing to universal reasons, thus refraining from endorsing the intrinsic value of the established conception. This paper argues that such a solution is limited, as it does (...) not cover all inevitable-establishment domains. This is because there is a distinction within inevitable-establishment domains: domains in which rival options can coexist, such as language policy, and domains in which options are mutually exclusive, such as land-use policy. The paper argues that language policy is a coexistence domain, since it allows for a degree of personal agency, and it can refrain from making value judgments about the language that is endorsed by the state. Spatial organization and land-use policy, on the other hand, must rest on value judgments about the good life and cannot accommodate neutral justifications. The distinction has important implications for the scope of neutrality: neutrality turns out to be applicable in coexistence domains, and inapplicable in mutually-exclusive domains. Ultimately, it may be the case that neutrality may not be applicable even in language policy, since language policy exhibits characteristics of a mutually-exclusive domain. (shrink)

Group Pluralism versus Group Accommodation In this paper, I sharply distinguish between religious group-based pluralism and religious accommodation, which are each reflected in the cases examined in Jean Cohen’s paper and thereby provide a clearer understanding of different kinds of challenges to protecting religious freedom today and explain how these two approaches sometimes pull interpretations of religious freedom in different directions.

Books Reviewed: The New Wars. By Herfried Münkler.. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. By Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.. Sovereignty and its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political. By William Rasch.. The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann. By Duncan Kelly.

In many coevolutionary systems members of one party select members of a second party based on quality differences existing among members of the latter (e.g., predators and prey, pollinators and flowers, etc.). We examined the fate of characters that increase (amplifiers) or decrease (attenuators) the perceived amplitude of differences in the quality upon which choice of the selecting party is based. We found that the evolution of such characters depends on (i) the relationship between the cost of the character and (...) the relative benefit it gives to the high quality individuals (if an amplifier) or low quality individuals (if an attenuator), and (ii) the frequency, among members of the selected party, of the quality sought by the selecting party. (shrink)

Uchiyama et al. emphasize that culture evolves directionally and differentially as a function of selective pressures in different populations. Extending these principles to the level of families, lineages, and individuals exposes additional challenges to estimating heritability. Cultural traits expressed differentially as a function of the genetics whose influence they mask or unmask render inseparable the influences of culture and genetics.

A famous portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein depicts the scholar with his hands resting on a volume identified as his ‘Herculean Labours’. Erasmus associated this adage with the effort expended and ingratitude encountered by the philologist, and made it central to his self-presentation. In this article, its origins are traced to Erasmus’s encounter with Aldus Manutius, the venetian printer-humanist who published his Adagia in 1508. The impact of Aldus on Erasmus is shown to be significant, affecting his entire ideology (...) of humanism, including its relationship to print and its religious purpose. This article challenges distinctions between the Italian and the Northern Renaissance that are unhelpful for understanding Erasmus’s development. In light of its findings, it also proposes a new interpretation of Holbein’s painting. (shrink)

This article argues that early Arabic philologists developed a robust, if implicit, theory of metaphorical language, one that was not dictated by theological concerns, and one that took shape outside the technical term majāz. The starting point of the article is the oft-cited claim found in Islamic legal theory, according to which authority over matters of majāz rested in the hands of the lexicographers. For Ibn Taymiyya, this was a lie meant to justify the acceptance of metaphor in the Quran. (...) But evidence from lexicographical, lexicological, and grammatical works supports the jurists’ general claim. There was a difference, however, between the lexemes that the jurists identified as majāz and the metaphorical expressions that the lexicographers pointed out, in that the former were not always codified in the dictionaries and thus more aligned with “live” or creative metaphors. Methodologically, the article proposes an updated model for the study of medieval Arabic technical terms, away from the term itself and toward the concept behind it. (shrink)

When encoding a real-life, continuous stimulus, the same neural circuits support processing and integration of prior as well as new incoming information. This ongoing interplay is modulated by attention, which is evident in the prefrontal cortex sections of the task positive network (TPN), and in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), a hub of the default mode network (DMN). Yet the exact nature of such modulation is still unclear. To investigate this issue, we utilized an fMRI task that employed movies as (...) the encoded stimuli and manipulated attentional load via an easy or hard secondary task that was performed simultaneously with encoding. Results showed increased intersubject correlation (inter-SC) levels when encoding movies in a condition of high, as compared to low attentional load. This was evident in bilateral ventrolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices and the dorsal PCC (dPCC). These regions became more attuned to the combination of the movie and the secondary task as the attentional demand of the task increased. Activation analyses revealed that at higher load the frontal TPN regions were more activated, whereas the dPCC was more deactivated. Attentional load also influenced connectivity within and between the networks. At high load the dPCC was anti-correlated to the frontal regions, which were more functionally coherent amongst themselves. Finally and critically, greater inter-SC in the dPCC at high load during encoding predicted lower memory strength when that information was retrieved. This association between inter-SC levels and memory strength suggest that as attentional demands increased, the dPCC was more attuned to the secondary task at the expense of the encoded stimulus, thus weakening memory for the encoded stimulus. Together, our findings show that attentional load modulated the function of core TPN and DMN regions. Furthermore, the observed correlation between memory strength and the modulation of the dPCC points to this region as a key area involved in the manipulation of attentional load on memory function. (shrink)

People reject ‘paradoxical’ inferences, such as: Luisa didn't play music; therefore, if Luisa played soccer, then she didn't play music. For some theorists, they are invalid for everyday conditionals, but valid in logic. The theory of mental models implies that they are valid, but unacceptable because the conclusion refers to a possibility inconsistent with the premise. Hence, individuals should accept them if the conclusions refer only to possibilities consistent with the premises: Luisa didn't play soccer; therefore, if Luisa played a (...) game then she didn't play soccer. Two experiments corroborated this prediction for three sorts of ‘paradox’, including a disjunctive paradox. (shrink)

In everyday life, we constantly encounter and deal with useful things without pausing to inquire about the sources of their intelligibility. In Div. I of Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes just such an inquiry. According to a common reading of Heidegger's analysis, the intelligibility of our everyday encounters and dealings with useful things is ultimately constituted by practical self-understandings. In this paper, I argue that while such practical self-understandings may be sufficient to constitute the intelligibility of the tools and equipment (...) specific to many practices, these “tools of the trade” are only a small portion of the things we encounter, use, and deal with on a daily basis. Practical self-understandings cannot similarly account for the intelligibility of the more mundane things—like toothbrushes and sidewalks—used in everyday life. I consider whether an anonymous self-understanding as “one,” “anyone,” or “no one in particular” —das Man—might play this intelligibility-constituting role. In examining this possibility, another type of self-understanding comes to light: cultural identities. I show that the cultural identities into which we are “thrown,” rather than practical identities or das Man, constitute the intelligibility of the abundance of mundane things that fill our everyday lives. Finally, I spell out how this finding bears on our understanding of Heidegger's notion of authenticity. (shrink)

Philosophy’s essence depicted by Socrates lies in its role as pedagogy for living, yet its traditional treatment of ‘body’ as a hindrance to ‘knowledge’ in fact severs it from life, transforming it into ‘an escape from life’.The philosophy/life dichotomy is thus an inherent flaw preventing philosophy as traditionally taught and engaged in, from fulfilling its original goal. Recent rejections of the Cartesian nature of Western curriculum, such as O’Loughlin’s ‘Embodiment and Education: Exploring creatural existence’, constitute an important theoretical paradigm shift, (...) yet still fail to translate to substantial pedagogies which explore the ‘body’ and its relation to ‘mind’ directly. This article suggests a reorientation of philosophy teaching from its present disembodied pedagogy, towards an embodied-lived-philosophicalpractice. By the description and exemplification of modern postural yoga I will depict the twofold role of the ‘body’ in philosophy teaching: 1) The ‘body’ as pedagogical vehicle serving the emergence of philosophical discourse, and 2) The body as yielding livingness to mean embodied-lived-philosophy as opposed to disembodied-lofty-philosophical escape from life. It will thus be suggested that yoga be incorporated as an integral part of philosophy teaching reclaiming its educational ethos. (shrink)

People experience various negative emotions in their everyday lives. They feel anger toward aggressive drivers, shame for making a mistake at work, and guilt for hurting another person. When these...

'Daring, learned and humane... A revelatory restoration of wonder' Stephen Greenblatt. We no longer think, like the ancient Chinese did, that the world was hatched from an egg, or, like the Maori, that it came from the tearing-apart of a love embrace. The Greeks told of a tempestuous Hera and a cunning Zeus, but we now use genes and natural selection to explain fear and desire, and physics to demystify the workings of the universe. Science is an astounding achievement, but (...) are we really any wiser than the ancients? Has science revealed the secrets of fate and immortality? Has it provided protection from jealousy or love? There are those who believe that science has replaced faith, but must it also be a death knell for mythology? Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar system, the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies. Here are the Earth and the Moon presenting a cosmological view of motherhood, a panicking Mitochondrion introducing sex and death to the world, the loneliness of consciousness emerging from the memory of an octopus, and the birth of language in evolution summoning humankind's struggle with truth. Science may not solve our existential puzzles, but like the age-old legends, its magical discoveries can help us continue the never-ending search. (shrink)

In the past few years, calls for integrating ethics modules in engineering curricula have multiplied. Despite this positive trend, a number of issues with these ‘embedded’ programs remains. First, learning goals are underspecified. A second limitation is the conflation of different dimensions under the same banner, in particular confusion between ethics curricula geared towards addressing the ethics of individual conduct and curricula geared towards addressing ethics at the societal level. In this article, we propose a tripartite framework to overcome these (...) difficulties. Our framework analytically decomposes an ethics module into three dimensions. First, there is the ethical dimension, which pertains to the learning goals. Second, there is the moral dimension, which addresses the moral relevance of engineers’ conduct. Finally, there is the political dimension, which scales up issues of moral relevance at the civic level. All in all, our framework has two advantages. First, it provides analytic clarity, i.e. it enables course instructors to locate ethical dilemmas in either the moral or political realm and to make use of the tools and resources from moral and/or political philosophy. Second, it depicts a comprehensive ethical training, which enables students to both reason about moral issues in the abstract, and to socially contextualize potential solutions. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The present chapter examines the philosophical problem of how it is possible, metaphysically and practically speaking, to develop a good moral character when one adheres to the view that a persisting self does not exist. It extracts answers from two thinkers who reject the concept of enduring identity, the Indian philosopher Vasubandhu (4th to 5th centuries CE) and the Western philosopher Derek Parfit (1942–2017). The first section of the chapter outlines some of Vasubandhu’s and Parfit’s shared assumptions concerning the nature (...) of the self and that of personal identity. In section 2, the focus shifts to the distinct ways in which each philosopher advances his understanding of the moral agent. Section 3 suggests that besides formulating different accounts of selfless agency, the ways in which Vasubandhu and Parfit grappled with the problem of agency reveal different approaches to addressing the question of human nature, and consequently, different ways of resolving the difficulties involved in becoming a good person. These differences become apparent in two practices that are relevant to crafting a moral character and that the two thinkers treat, moral commitment and the cultivation of virtue, which are discussed in the final part of the chapter. (shrink)

Classical presentations of the Buddhist path prescribe the cultivation of various good qualities that are necessary for spiritual progress, from mindfulness and loving-kindness to faith and wisdom. Examining the way in which such qualities are described and classified in early Buddhism—with special reference to their treatment in the Visuddhimagga by the fifth-century Buddhist thinker Buddhaghosa—the present article employs a comparative method in order to identify the Buddhist catalog of virtues. The first part sketches the characteristics of virtue as analyzed by (...) neo-Aristotelian theories. Relying on these accounts, the second part considers three lists from early Buddhism as possible catalogs of virtue: the components of ethical conduct, the 37 factors that contribute to awakening, and the wholesome or beautiful mental factors. I then raise the question of why the Buddhist tradition developed several classifications of virtue, whereas the Western tradition of virtue ethics used a single category. Appealing to the connection between the virtues and living well in the eudaimonistic version of virtue ethics, I propose that one of the reasons why Buddhism developed multiple lists of virtues is its pluralistic acceptance of different modalities of living well and associated practices, in MacIntyre’s sense of the term. These modalities and practices are not equal, but are ordered hierarchically. Accordingly, I conclude that Buddhist ethics ought to be seen as a pluralist-gradualist system rather than a universalist theory. (shrink)

When philosophers talk about perfectionism, it is usually as a view of well-being, of developing characteristically human capacities. Yet perfectionism can also be a normative account of what we owe to each other. This article argues that perfectionists have reason to endorse a perfectionist basic structure such that enables persons to develop and exercise their human capacities in meaningful ways. This basic structure has two complementary features: First, it enables a diversity of life experiences. Second, it provides a spatial opportunity (...) structure that creates open-minded environments. Absent these features, rich or lucky individuals gain an unfair advantage in the sphere of opportunities for developing their capacities in meaningful ways. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of “the insufficiency of now” that stems from the entanglement of education with time. Namely, the embodied-lived present is always inferior compared to the hypothetical ideal future. Education and its promise hence carry the seed of inevitable disenchantment. This problem is examined based on two contrasting perspectives: Plato’s cave allegory and its application to contemporary schooling on the one hand and the Yogacara Buddhist “mind-moments” model on the other hand. The insufficiency of now emerges from (...) both models in different ways; however, the latter model accentuates the mind’s role in its formation. The paper then describes mindfulness practice in light of the latter model, and suggests that it may be a necessary pedagogy for addressing a problem that is inherent in the concept of education and in the mind. However, the teaching of mindfulness itself has to overcome the present/future dualism that is the basis for the insufficiency of now. (shrink)