In this paper, I argue that dialogue between legal philosophers and social scientists can be mutually beneficial. Nicola Lacey offers a vision of jurisprudence that supposes as much. I start by setting out my interpretation of her view. I then defend its potential, which she takes for granted, from the challenges posed by, first, an apparent friend—Brian Leiter—and, second, obvious adversaries—Joseph Raz and others. My response proposes an alternative to their conceptions of legal philosophy, one that is consistent (...) with my understanding of the approach to jurisprudence that Lacey recommends. (shrink)

The author maintains in this article that it is possible an approach between the positivistic legal theory, the one that follows the model of the analytical theory developed by Hart, and those others that apply a socio-legal method. Against what some defenders of both perspectives advocate, who view each others with some disdain, the author asserts the need to integrate legal theory with social sciences in the field of juridical ideas. This supposes opening spaces to develop a socio-legal theory of (...) law that lives equally from categories of conceptual analysis and of sociological research. The author rests specially, in order to defend this position, on authors like Roger Coterrell, Denis Galligan, Nicola Lacey and, above all, Brian Tamanaha and William Twinning, whose arguments are here object of special consideration. (shrink)

The enhancement debate in neuroscience and biomedical ethics tends to focus on the augmentation of certain capacities or functions: memory, learning, attention, and the like. Typically, the point of contention is whether these augmentative enhancements should be considered permissible for individuals with no particular “medical” disadvantage along any of the dimensions of interest. Less frequently addressed in the literature, however, is the fact that sometimes the _diminishment_ of a capacity or function, under the right set of circumstances, could plausibly contribute (...) to an individual's overall well-being: more is not always better, and sometimes less is more. Such cases may be especially likely, we suggest, when trade-offs in our modern environment have shifted since the environment of evolutionary adaptation. In this article, we introduce the notion of “diminishment as enhancement” and go on to defend a _welfarist_ conception of enhancement. We show how this conception resolves a number of definitional ambiguities in the enhancement literature, and we suggest that it can provide a useful framework for thinking about the use of emerging neurotechnologies to promote human flourishing. (shrink)

The ‘born this way’ movement for sexual orientation minority rights is premised on the view that sexual orientation is something that can neither be chosen nor changed. Indeed, current sexual orientation change efforts appear to be both harmful and ineffective. But what if ‘high-tech conversion therapies’ are invented in the future that are effective at changing sexual orientation? The conceptual basis for the movement would collapse. In this chapter, we argue that the threat of HCT should be taken seriously, motivating (...) a change in tactics for proponents of sexual orientation minority rights. We also discuss some of the practical-ethical and public-policy issues surrounding HCT, in case the technology is one day developed. (shrink)

Abstract Since their inception, distributional models of semantics have been criticized as inadequate cognitive theories of human semantic learning and representation. A principal challenge is that the representations derived by distributional models are purely symbolic and are not grounded in perception and action; this challenge has led many to favor feature-based models of semantic representation. We argue that the amount of perceptual and other semantic information that can be learned from purely distributional statistics has been underappreciated. We compare the representations (...) of three feature-based and nine distributional models using a semantic clustering task. Several distributional models demonstrated semantic clustering comparable with clustering-based on feature-based representations. Furthermore, when trained on child-directed speech, the same distributional models perform as well as sensorimotor-based feature representations of children’s lexical semantic knowledge. These results suggest that, to a large extent, information relevant for extracting semantic categories is redundantly coded in perceptual and linguistic experience. Detailed analyses of the semantic clusters of the feature-based and distributional models also reveal that the models make use of complementary cues to semantic organization from the two data streams. Rather than conceptualizing feature-based and distributional models as competing theories, we argue that future focus should be on understanding the cognitive mechanisms humans use to integrate the two sources. (shrink)

The problem of evil -- Aquinas, philosophy, and theology -- What there is -- Goodness and badness -- God the creator -- God's perfection and goodness -- The creator and evil -- Providence and grace -- The trinity and Christ -- Aquinas on god and evil.

Scholars working in philosophy of action still struggle with the freedom/determinism dichotomy that stretches back to Hellenist philosophy and the metaphysics that gave rise to it. Although that metaphysics has been repudiated in current philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the dichotomy still haunts these fields. As such, action is understood as distinct from movement, or motion. In early China, under a very different metaphysical paradigm, no such distinction is made. Instead, a notion of self-caused movement, or spontaneity, is elaborated. (...) In this article a general conception of spontaneity from early Daoism is explained, detailing its constituent aspects. Similar notions appeared from time to time in Western philosophy, and these instances are pursued, exploring how their instantiations differed from Daoist spontaneity and why. Based on these approximate examples of spontaneity and on early Daoist spontaneity, new criteria are postulated for a plausible theory of action that dispenses with presuppositions that eventuate in a freedom/determinism dichotomy, and instead the possibility is offered of a general model of action that can be applied smoothly across current philosophical and cognitive scientific subdisciplines. (shrink)

I argue that the strongest form of consequentialism is one which rejects the claim that we are morally obliged to bring about the best available consequences, but which continues to assert that what there is most reason to do is bring about the best available consequences. Such an approach promises to avoid common objections to consequentialism, such as demandingness objections. Nevertheless, the onus is on the defender of this approach either to offer her own account of what moral obligations we (...) do face, or to explain why offering such a theory is ill-advised. I consider, and reject, one attempt at the second sort of strategy, put forward by Alastair Norcross, who defends a 'scalar' consequentialism which eschews the moral concepts of right, wrong and obligation, and limits itself to claims about what is better and worse. I go on to raise some considerations which suggest that no systematic consequentialist theory of our moral obligations will be plausible, and propose instead that consequentialism should have a more informal and indirect role in shaping what we take our moral obligations to be. (shrink)

We investigate a simple stochastic model of social network formation by the process of reinforcement learning with discounting of the past. In the limit, for any value of the discounting parameter, small, stable cliques are formed. However, the time it takes to reach the limiting state in which cliques have formed is very sensitive to the discounting parameter. Depending on this value, the limiting result may or may not be a good predictor for realistic observation times.

Traces the early years of the philosopher, detailing the roles that his troubled family, his imposing and wealthy father, turn-of-the-century Viennese intellectuals, and his World War I experiences played in the formation of his philosophy.

In this article, we aim to illustrate evolutionary explanations for the emergence of framing effects, discussed in detail in Cristina Bicchieri’s The Grammar of Society . We show how framing effects might evolve which coalesce two economically distinct interactions into a single one, leading to apparently irrational behavior in each individual interaction. Here we consider the now well-known example of the ultimatum game, and show how this ‘irrational’ behavior might result from a single norm which governs behavior in multiple games. (...) We also show how framing effects might result in radically different play in strategically identical situations. We consider the Hawk-Dove game (the game of chicken) and also the Nash bargaining game. Here arbitrary tags or signals might result in one party doing better than another. (shrink)

Evolutionary Psychology has a bigger problem with free will than it acknowledges, argues Brian Garvey.

In this important new book, Brian Gregor gives a comprehensive account of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of religion, which focuses on the regeneration of human capability. Gregor documents the thinkers, movements, and themes that shaped Ricoeur’s thought and gives a critical examination of Ricoeur’s philosophical interpretation of religion.

In Search of Truth presents a comprehensive story of the evolution of the School of Economic Science, now in its eighth decade. Brian Hodginkson brings his historian's skills and philosophic insight to bear in telling it in fascinating detail.

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 93-112, Spring 2022.

This article seeks to situate pharmacological cognitive enhancement as part of a broader relationship between cultural understandings of the body-brain and the political economy. It is the body of the worker that forms the intersection of this relationship and through which it comes to be enacted and experienced. In this article, we investigate the imaginaries that both inform and are reproduced by representations of pharmacological cognitive enhancement, drawing on cultural sources such as newspaper articles and films, policy documents, and pharmaceutical (...) marketing material to illustrate our argument. Through analysis of these diverse cultural sources, we argue that the use of pharmaceuticals has come to be seen not only as a way to manage our brains, but through this as a means to manage our productive selves, and thereby to better manage the economy. We develop three analytical themes. First, we consider the cultural representations of the brain in connection with the idea of plasticity – captured most graphically in images of morphing – and the representation of enhancement as a desirable, inevitable, and almost painless process in which the mind-brain realizes its full potential and asserts its will over matter. Following this, we explore the social value accorded to productive employment and the contemporary (biopolitical) ethos of working on or managing oneself, particularly in respect of improving one’s productive performance through cognitive enhancement. Developing this, we elaborate a third theme by looking at the moulding of the worker’s productive body-brain in relation to the demands of the economic system. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 260-266, March 2022.

Many theorists, including Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault, have regarded genealogy as an important technique for social criticism. But it has been unclear how genealogy can go beyond the accomplishments of other, more mundane, critical methods. I propose a new approach to understanding the critical potential of history. I argue that theorists have been misled by the assumption that if a claim is deserving of criticism, it is because the claim is false. Turning to the criticism of concepts rather than criticism (...) of claims, I expand on the distinction between "descriptive semantics" and "foundational semantics" to show that genealogy can be uniquely qualified to explore the foundations of concepts, and hence to criticize concepts that are problematic in nonobvious ways. (shrink)

In the philosophy of action, it is generally understood that action presupposes an agent performing or guiding the action. Action is also generally understood as distinct form the kind of motion that happens in nature. Together these common perspectives on action rule out both action without agency and natural action. And yet, there are times when action can seem qualitatively both natural and lacking a sense of agency. Recently, David Velleman, referring to work by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Zhuangzi, has considered (...) the possibility of agency without agency. In this chapter, I build on Velleman's work and posit the notion of self-organization (which in the natural sciences serves as the basis for many familiar kinds of motion in nature) to also serve as the basis for human behavior. If action is a variety of behavior, conceiving of human behavior as fundamentally an instance of self-organization unifies human action with nature from the beginning and allows us to conceptualize the possibility of human action without presupposing the necessity of agency. I go on to entertain three types of human behavior in which the sense of agency is significantly absent and which progressively qualify as action. (shrink)

Male circumcision—partial or total removal of the penile prepuce—has been proposed as a public health measure in Sub-Saharan Africa, based on the results of three randomized control trials showing a relative risk reduction of approximately 60 per cent for voluntary, adult male circumcision against female-to-male human immunodeficiency virus transmission in that context. More recently, long-time advocates of infant male circumcision have argued that these findings justify involuntary circumcision of babies and children in dissimilar public health environments, such as the USA, (...) Australasia and Europe. In this article, we take a close look at the necessary ethical and empirical steps that would be needed to bridge the gap between the African RCTs and responsible public health policy in developed countries. In the course of doing so, we discuss some of the main disagreements about the moral permissibility of performing a nontherapeutic surgery on a child to benefit potential future sexual partners of his. In this context, we raise concerns not only about weaknesses in the available evidence concerning such claims of benefit, but also about a child’s moral interest in future autonomy and the preservation of his bodily integrity. We conclude that circumcision of minors in developed countries on public health grounds is much harder to justify than proponents of the surgery suggest. (shrink)

Most analytic philosophers hold that if God exists, He exists with broad logical necessity. Richard Swinburne denies the distinction between narrow and broad logical necessity, and argues that if God exists, His existence is narrow-logically contingent. A defender of divine broad logical necessity could grant the latter claim. I argue, however, that not only is God's existence broad-logically necessary, but on a certain understanding of God's relation to modality, it comes out narrow-logically necessary. This piece argues against Swinburne's overall account (...) of modality and rebuts his argument for narrow-logical contingency. (shrink)

Moral and legal notions engaged in clinical ethics should not only possess analytic clarity but a sound basis in empirical findings. The latter condition brings into question the expansion of the mature minor exception. The mature minor exception in the healthcare law of the United States has served to enable those under the legal age to consent to medical treatment. Although originally developed primarily for minors in emergency or quasi-emergency need for health care, it was expanded especially from the 1970s (...) in order to cover unemancipated minors older than 14 years. This expansion initially appeared plausible, given psychological data that showed the intellectual capacity of minors over 14 to recognize the causal connection between their choices and the consequences of their choices. However, subsequent psychological studies have shown that minors generally fail to have realistic affective and evaluative appreciations of the consequences of their decisions, because they tend to over-emphasize short-term benefits and underestimate long-term risks. Also, unlike most decisionmakers over 21, the decisions of minors are more often marked by the lack of adequate impulse control, all of which is reflected in the far higher involvement of adolescents in acts of violence, intentional injury, and serious automobile accidents. These effects are more evident in circumstances that elicit elevated affective responses. The advent of brain imaging has allowed the actual visualization of qualitative differences between how minors versus persons over the age of 21 generally assess risks and benefits and make decisions. In the case of most under the age of 21, subcortical systems fail adequately to be checked by the prefrontal systems that are involved in adult executive decisions. The neuroanatomical and psychological model developed by Casey, Jones, and Summerville offers an empirical insight into the qualitative differences in the neuroanatomical and neuropsychological bases of adolescent versus adult decision making. These and other data, as well as developing law bearing on the culpability of juvenile criminal offenders, argue for critically re-evaluating the expansion of the mature minor exception with regard to medical decision making, as well as in support of a rebuttable presumption in favor of treating minors as immature decisionmakers. The clinical ethics of adolescent medical decision making will need foundationally to be reconsidered. (shrink)