Recent debate in metaethics over evolutionary debunking arguments against morality has shown a tendency to abstract away from relevant empirical detail. Here, I engage the debate about Darwinian debunking of morality with relevant empirical issues. I present four conditions that must be met in order for it to be reasonable to expect an evolved cognitive faculty to be reliable: the environment, information, error, and tracking conditions. I then argue that these conditions are not met in the case of our evolved (...) faculty for moral judgement. (shrink)

According to higher-order theories of consciousness, a mental state is conscious only when represented by another mental state. Higher-order theories must predict there to be some brain areas (or networks of areas) such that, because they produce (the right kind of) higher-order states, the disabling of them brings about deficits in consciousness. It is commonly thought that the prefrontal cortex produces these kinds of higher-order states. In this paper, I first argue that this is likely correct, meaning that, if some (...) higher-order theory is true, prefrontal lesions should produce dramatic deficits in visual consciousness. I then survey prefrontal lesion data, looking for evidence of such deficits. I argue that no such deficits are to be found, and that this presents a compelling case against higher-order theories. (shrink)

uber das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. ZUr Kritik der Gewalt. SChicksal und Charakter. GEschichtsphilosophische Thesen. THeologisch-politisches Fragment.

One reason that many philosophers are reluctant to seriously contemplate the possibility that we lack free will seems to be the view that we must believe we have free will if we are to regard each other as persons in the morally deep sense—the sense that involves deontological notions such as human rights. In the contemporary literature, this view is often informed by P.F. Strawson's view that to treat human beings as having free will is to respond to them with (...) the reactive attitudes, and that if we suspend the reactive attitudes we can only regard human beings as objects to be manipulated in the service of social goals. This purported implication of suspending the reactive attitudes has persuaded many philosophers that we cannot truly treat human beings as persons without assuming that they have free will. I argue that this line of thinking is misguided. I think Strawson is correct to worry that the consequentialism he sees as implicit in the objective attitude undermines our ability to treat each other as persons. But I think it is a mistake to accept that we must maintain the reactive attitudes, or any other attributions of free will or moral responsibility, to avoid a depersonalizing slide into consequentialism. Kant's idea of treating people as autonomous ends in themselves, rather than as mere means to ends, provides a compelling analysis of what it means to treat humans as persons, and I argue that there are ways of interpreting Kant's idea which do not involve reactive attitudes or any other attributions of free will or moral responsibility. -/- . (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated an imbalance between the clinical needs of the population and the effective availability of advanced life support (ALS) resources. Triage protocols have thus become necessary. Triage decisions in situations of scarce resources were not extraordinary in the pre-COVID-19 era; these protocols abounded in the context of organ transplantation. However, this prior experience was not considered during the COVID-19 outbreak in Spain. Lacking national guidance or public coordination, each hospital has been forced to put forth independent (...) and autonomous triage protocols, most of which were, nonetheless, based on common ethical principles and clinical criteria. However, controversial, non-clinical criteria have also been defended by Spanish scientific societies and public institutions, including setting an age cut-off value for unilaterally withholding ALS, using ‘social utility’ criteria, prioritising healthcare professionals or using ‘first come, first served’ policies. This paper describes the most common triage criteria used in the Spanish context during the COVID-19 epidemic. We will highlight our missed opportunities by comparing these criteria to those used in organ transplantation protocols. The problems posed by subjective, non-clinical criteria will also be discussed. We hope that this critical review might be of use to countries at earlier stages of the epidemic while we learn from our mistakes. (shrink)

Bioethicists’ views diverge public opinion on various ethical issues, particularly in healthcare. For instance, bioethicists generally oppose payment for organs and advocate for preventing death at any age, whereas the public is more supportive of organ payment and prioritizing younger patients. I offer four arguments on how best to view this divergence. (a) Bioethicists’ specialized training, objectivity, and reliance on research often lead to views that differ from those of the public, which may be less informed and more influenced by (...) biases. (b) Further, divergence between expert and public opinion is a normal and sometimes necessary aspect of bioethics. Divergence can lead to more informed and progressive ethical practices. (c) While public input is valuable, achieving meaningful engagement is difficult due to varying values, risk perceptions, and socioeconomic circumstances. Effective bioethics would balance expert knowledge with public input, aiming for policies that are both scientifically sound and democratically legitimate. (d) Maintaining public trust in bioethics does not require full alignment with public opinion. Instead, bioethicists should focus on educating the public and incorporating informed public perspectives into their analysis and recommendations. (shrink)

According to orthodoxy, there are two basic moods of supposition: indicative and subjunctive. The most popular formalizations of the corresponding norms of suppositional judgement are given by Bayesian conditionalization and Lewisian imaging, respectively. It is well known that Bayesian conditionalization can be generalized (via Jeffrey conditionalization) to provide a model for the norms of partial indicative supposition. This raises the question of whether imaging can likewise be generalized to model the norms of ‘partial subjunctive supposition’. The present article casts doubt (...) on whether the most natural generalizations of imaging are able to provide a plausible account of the norms of partial subjunctive supposition. (shrink)

Open texture is a kind of semantic indeterminacy first systematically studied by Waismann. In this paper, extant definitions of open texture will be compared and contrasted, with a view towards the consequences of open-textured concepts in mathematics. It has been suggested that these would threaten the traditional virtues of proof, primarily the certainty bestowed by proof-possession, and this suggestion will be critically investigated using recent work on informal proof. It will be argued that informal proofs have virtues that mitigate the (...) danger posed by open texture. Moreover, it will be argued that while rigor in the guise of formalisation and axiomatisation might banish open texture from mathematical theories through implicit definition, it can do so only at the cost of restricting the tamed concepts in certain ways. (shrink)

If logic binds all reality, it would appear that God must be bound by logic. Swinburne argues that logic binds only actual human sentences. His case rests on an argument against Platonism, and the assertion that contradictions are incoherent. I argue that logic binds any possible language and so places a significant limit on God’s actions, that one need not be a Platonist to hold this, and that contradictions are not incoherent. I conclude that if God is an agent, his (...) hands must be tied, and explain why I find this conclusion unwelcome. (shrink)

Diagrams have distinctive characteristics that make them an effective medium for communicating research findings, but they are even more impressive as tools for scientific reasoning. Focusing on circadian rhythm research in biology to explore these roles, we examine diagrammatic formats that have been devised to identify and illuminate circadian phenomena and to develop and modify mechanistic explanations of these phenomena.

Deirdre McCloskey is rightly one of the most recognizable names in economics. She views economics as a language that uses all the rhetorical devices of everyday conversation and therefore it should be judged by aesthetic and literary standards and not the criteria of mathematical rigor that is espoused by the mainstream. This controversial standpoint has been hugely influential and this examination of the methodological and philosophical consequences of her work is overdue, and very welcome.

The chief goal of Velmans' article is to find a way to solve the problem of how conscious experience could have bodily effects. I shall discuss his treatment of this below. First, I would like to deal with Velmans' treatment of my own studies of volition and free will in relation to brain processes. Unconscious Initiation and Conscious Veto of Freely Voluntary Acts Velmans appropriately refers to our experimental study that found that onset of an electrically observable cerebral process preceded (...) the appearance of the subject's awareness of the conscious wish to act, by at least 350 msec. That indicated that the volitional process is initiated unconsciously. Velmans uses the term preconscious instead of unconscious. But, in fact, subjects have no reportable awareness or intuitive feeling that the brain has started a process before their conscious wish/urge to act appears. Unconscious initiation of the voluntary process appeared to mean that conscious free will could not actually 'tell' the brain to begin its preparation to carry out a voluntary act. (shrink)

It is usually thought that wrongful acts of threat-involving coercion are wrong because they involve a violation of the freedom or autonomy of the targets of those acts. I argue here that this cannot possibly be right, and that in fact the wrongness of wrongful coercion has nothing at all to do with the effect such actions have on their targets. This negative thesis is supported by pointing out that what we say about the ethics of threatening (and thus the (...) ethics of coercion) constrains what we can say about the ethics of warning and offering. Importantly, our favoured explanation of the wrongness of certain kinds of threatening should not commit us to condemning as wrong parallel cases of warning and offering. My positive project is to show how this can be done. I defend the claim that wrongful coercion is nothing more than the issuing of a conditional threat to do wrong, and that an agent's issuing of a conditional threat to do wrong is wrong because it constitutes motivation for that agent to adopt the announced intention to do wrong. The idea of explaining the wrongness of wrongful coercion in this way has gone unnoticed because we have thus far been mistaken about what a threat is. In this essay I present my moral analysis of coercion only after presenting a careful descriptive analysis of threats. On my view, it is essential to a threat that the announced intention is one that the agent does not possess before announcing it. This analysis makes it possible to elucidate the descriptive differences between threats, warnings and offers, which sets up the later project of elucidating the moral differences between them. (shrink)

The old literature on whether medical confidentiality may be breached to warn a spouse of a risk of contracting syphilis from his/her partner — a deep and rich literature — has become relevant once again in the context of HIV infection and AIDS. This paper examines the reasoning and method employed in: the Catholic approach centered around the patient's (property) right to the secret; a (generic) model of justice, utilizing minimal principles of non-aggression and restitution; and an approach involving the (...) elimination of unstable alternatives: the view that public health officials, but not the spouse, may/must be notified; and, that maintaining that the physician is at liberty to disclose but is not obliged to do so. The theory and method behind confidentiality turns out to be deeper than you might have anticipated. (shrink)

This paper evaluates recent proposals for compatibilism about doxastic freedom, and attempts to refine them by applying Fischer and Ravizza’s moderate reasons-responsiveness compatibilism to doxastic freedom. I argue, however, that even this refined version of doxastic compatibilism is subject to challenging counter-examples and is more difficult to support than traditional compatibilism about freedom of action. In particular, it is much more difficult to identify convincing examples of the sort Frankfurt proposed to challenge the idea that responsibility requires alternative possibilities.

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, open science has become central to experimental, public health, and clinical responses across the globe. Open science is described as an open commons, in which a right to science renders all possible scientific data for everyone to access and use. In this common space, capitalist platforms now provide many essential services and are taking the lead in public health activities. These neoliberal businesses, however, have a problematic role in the capture of public goods. This paper (...) argues that the open commons is a community of rights, consisting of people and institutions whose interests mutually support the public good. If OS is a cornerstone of public health, then reaffirming the public good is its overriding purpose, and unethical platforms ought to be excluded from the commons and its benefits. (shrink)

In response to the racial disparities that plague the American criminal justice system, the Movement for Black Lives calls for an end to policing and punishment “as we know it.” But refusing to punish violent offenses leaves unprotected those most vulnerable to crime, and outright abolition thus appears to undermine black rights and liberties. I call this the decarceration dilemma. After discussing Tommie Shelby and Christopher Lewis’s attempts to resolve the dilemma, I offer my own, which employs a procedural rather (...) than a substantive solution. I lean on the principle of expanded asymmetry (EA), which holds that it is better to underpunish than overpunish. After defending EA, I note that it obtains only under conditions of uncertainty. I then show that because virtually all trials of black offenders meet the uncertainty condition, sentencing authorities are obliged to treat black offenders leniently. I conclude by noting the advantages of my proceduralist approach. (shrink)

This article addresses the problematic perspectives of drone culture. In critiquing focus on the drone’s apparent ‘autonomy’, it argues that such devices function as part of a socio-technical network. They are relational parts of human–machine interaction that, in our changing geopolitical realities, have a powerful influence on politics, reputation and warfare. Drawing on Žižek’s conception of parallax, the article stresses the importance of culture and perception in forming the role of the drone in widening power asymmetries. It examines how perceptions (...) of autonomy are evoked by drones, to claim that this misperception is a smokescreen that obscures the relational socio-technical realities of the drone. The article therefore argues that a more critical culture of the drone emerges by shifting the focus and perception from autonomy to anonymity. This allows us to engage more fully with the distributed agency and decision-making that define how drones are developed and deployed. Rather than focusing on the drone as a singular, fetishised, technical object, a relational approach to the drone assemblage is proposed that highlights the competing human interests that define and resist drones in global politics and culture. (shrink)

It is often said that clinical research and the practice of medicine are fraught with uncertainties. But what do we mean by uncertainty? Where does uncertainty come from? How do we measure uncertainty? Is there a single theory of uncertainty that applies across all scientific domains, including the science and practice of medicine? To answer these questions, we first review the existing theories of uncertainties. We then attempt to bring the enormous literature to bear from other disciplines to address the (...) issue of uncertainty in clinical research and medical practice. Our main and overarching goal is to review and classify uncertainties in clinical medicine. (shrink)

The current research investigates the interaction between thought suppression and individuals’ explicit awareness of their thoughts. Participants in three experiments attempted to suppress thoughts of a prior romantic relationship and their success at doing so was measured using a combination of self-catching and experience-sampling. In addition to thoughts that individuals spontaneously noticed, individuals were frequently caught engaging in thoughts of their previous partner at experience-sampling probes. Furthermore, probe-caught thoughts were: associated with stronger decoupling of attention from the environment, more likely (...) to occur under cognitive load, more frequent for individuals with a desire to reconcile, and associated with individual differences in the tendency to suppress thoughts. Together, these data suggest that individuals can lack meta-awareness that they have begun to think about a topic they are attempting to suppress, providing novel insight into the cognitive processes that are involved in attempting to control undesired mental states. (shrink)

It is widely believed that platonists face a formidable problem: that of providing an intelligible account of mathematical knowledge. The problem is that we seem unable, if the platonist is right, to have the causal relationships with the objects of mathematics without which knowledge of these objects seems unintelligible. The standard platonist response to this challenge is either to deny that knowledge without causation is unintelligible, or to make room for causal interactions by softening the platonism at issue. In this (...) essay I argue that the idea of causal relations with fully platonist objects is unproblematic. (shrink)

Diese Hardcover-Ausgabe ist Teil der TREDITION CLASSICS. Der Verlag tredition aus Hamburg veroffentlicht in der Buchreihe TREDITION CLASSICS Werke aus mehr als zwei Jahrtausenden. Diese waren zu einem Grossteil vergriffen oder nur noch antiquarisch erhaltlich. Mit TREDITION CLASSICS verfolgt tredition das Ziel, tausende Klassiker der Weltliteratur verschiedener Sprachen wieder als gedruckte Bucher zu verlegen - und das weltweit! Die Buchreihe dient zur Bewahrung der Literatur und Forderung der Kultur. Sie tragt so dazu bei, dass viele tausend Werke nicht in Vergessenheit (...) geraten. (shrink)

What is wrong with colonialism? The standard—albeit often implicit—answer to this question has been that colonialism was wrong because it violated the territorial rights of indigenous peoples, where territorial rights were grounded on acquisition theories. Recently, the standard view has come under attack: according to critics, acquisition based accounts do not provide solid theoretical grounds to condemn colonial relations. Indeed, historically they were used to justify colonialism. Various alternative accounts of the wrong of colonialism have been developed. According to some, (...) colonialism involved a violation of territorial rights grounded on legitimate state theory. Others reject all explanations of colonialism's wrongfulness based on territorial rights, and argue that colonial practices were wrong because they departed from ideals of economic, social, and political association. In this article, we articulate and defend the standard view against critics: colonialism involved a procedural wrong; this wrong is not the violation of standards of equality and reciprocity, but the violation of territorial rights; and the best foundation for such territorial rights is acquisition based, not legitimacy based. We argue that this issue is not just of historical interest, it has relevant implications for the normative evaluation of contemporary inequalities. (shrink)

:In this paper I argue that libertarianism neither prohibits exchanges in which consent is gained through deceit, nor does it entail that such exchanges are morally invalid. However, contra James Child’s similar claim, that it is incapable of delivering these verdicts, I argue that libertarianscanclaim that exchanges involving deceitfully obtained consent are morally invalid by appealing to an external theory of moral permissibility.

The possibility of cooperation and the stability of political order are long-standing problems. Polybius, well known for his Histories analysing the expansion of Rome and his description of the Roman constitution, also offers an intriguing social and political theory that covers ground from psycho-anthropological micro-foundations to institution-based political order, providing a genealogy of morals and political order that is best understood in game-theoretical terms. In this paper I try to give such an interpretation. Polybius’ naturalistic, proto-game theoretical views show similarities (...) with Hume, Smith and especially Hobbes’ doctrine of sovereignty by acquisition. However, Polybius is original in crucial regards, giving a motivationally plausible account of institutional and especially constitutional solutions to moral and political problems. Constitutional order, for Polybius, embodies and makes possible in the first place a kind of political reason that cannot be had individually. Polybian political theory thus offers interesting solutions to problems concerning moral motivation, collective action, and the conditions for political order, as well as the explanation and character of institutions. (shrink)

Non-human animal chimeras, containing human neurological cells, have been created in the laboratory. Despite a great deal of debate, the status of such beings has not been resolved. Under normal definitions, such a being could either be unconventionally human or abnormally animal. Practical investigations in animal sentience, artificial intelligence, and now chimera research, suggest that such beings may be assumed to have no legal rights, so philosophy could provide a different answer. In this vein, therefore, we can ask: What would (...) a chimera, if it could think, think about? Thinking is used to capture the phenomena of a novel, chimeric being perceiving its terrible predicament as no more than a laboratory experiment. The creation of a thinking chimera therefore forces us to reconsider our assumptions about what makes human beings (potentially) unique (and other sentient animals different), because, as such, a chimera’s existence bridges our social and legal expectations about definitions of human and animal. Society has often evolved new social norms based on different kinds of (ir)rational contrivances; the imperative of non-contradiction, which is defended here, therefore requires a specific philosophical response to the rights of a thinking chimeric being. (shrink)