The accelerating disruption of the Earth's climate systems is the defining issue of our time. The persistent failure of international climate diplomacy has encouraged local, regional, and some national-level solutions and spurred an emerging global movement for climate justice, mainly rooted in communities that bear disproportionate impacts from climate change. This article discusses the ways in which movements from below, seeking economic and energy democracy, are shaping our responses to the crisis. How can the imperative for immediate climate action and (...) the ethical agenda of climate justice be furthered by movements seeking democratic alternatives and a more genuinely ecological future? (shrink)

Why do oppressive social and political systems persist for as long as they do? Critical theorists posit that the oppressed are in the grip of ideology or false consciousness, leading them voluntarily to accept their servitude. An objection to this explanation points out that we have no account of how the ruling class’s ideology comes to dominate. One common reply says that the ruling class’s ideology comes to dominate because they control major organizations such as schools, churches, and news agencies. (...) This response is seriously flawed, I argue. I then explore an alternative, neglected answer: The ruling class’s ideology dominates because believing it is good for the oppressed. After sketching some details, I explore the implications of this account for critical theory as a research program. (shrink)

David Lewis (1941–2001) was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, decision theory, epistemology, meta-ethics and aesthetics. In most of these fields he is essential reading; in many of them he is among the most important figures of recent decades. And this list leaves out his two most significant contributions. -/- In philosophy of mind, Lewis developed and defended at length a new version (...) of materialism (see the entry on physicalism). He started by showing how the motivations driving the identity theory of mind and functionalism could be reconciled in his theory of mind. He called this an identity theory, though his theory motivated the position now known as analytic functionalism. And he developed detailed accounts of mental content (building on Davidson’s interpretationism) and phenomenal knowledge (building on Nemirow’s ability hypothesis) that are consistent with his materialism. The synthesis Lewis ended up with is one of the central positions in contemporary debates in philosophy of mind. -/- But his largest contributions were in metaphysics. One branch of his metaphysics was his Hume-inspired reductionism about the nomological. He developed a position he called “Humean supervenience”, the theory that said that there was nothing to reality except the spatio-temporal distribution of local natural properties. And he did this by showing in detail how laws, chances, counterfactual dependence, causation, dispositions and colours could be located within this Humean mosaic. The other branch of his metaphysics was his modal realism. Lewis held that the best theory of modality posited concrete possible worlds. A proposition is possible if and only if it is true at one of these worlds. Lewis defended this view in his most significant book, On the Plurality of Worlds. Alongside this, Lewis developed a new account of how to think about modal properties of individuals, namely counterpart theory, and showed how this theory resolved several long-standing puzzles about modal properties. (shrink)

In this commentary, I raise four objections to the view defended in Michael Pelczar’s book, Phenomenalism: A Metaphysics of Chance and Experience. First, I challenge his claim that physical things are identical to possibilities for experience even if there turns out to be some categorical reality underlying these possibilities. Second, I argue that Pelczar’s phenomenalism cannot accommodate the existence of some unobservable entities that we have good scientific reason to accept. Third, I argue that his view threatens to lead to (...) massive indeterminacy about what the physical world is like. Fourth, I argue that phenomenalism fares much worse than its rivals with respect to the theoretical virtue of nomological parsimony, the ideal of keeping the fundamental laws simple. (shrink)

Are slurring statements, when applied to members of the slurred group, true, false, or a little bit of both? Intuitions are mixed. And investigating more truth-value judgments is unlikely to cure the stalemate we find ourselves in. Truth-value judgments are just not up to the task. In their place, I propose we look to judgments of lying instead. This change in focus provides a new and better tool for understanding the complex semantics and pragmatics of slurs. As I argue, it (...) also suggests that slurring statements encode, conventionally implicate and presuppose the same information as statements with the slur's neutral counterpart. I then briefly apply this style of argument to the semantics and pragmatics of evaluative language more generally. (shrink)

Orthodox Bayesian decision theory requires an agent’s beliefs representable by a real-valued function, ideally a probability function. Many theorists have argued this is too restrictive; it can be perfectly reasonable to have indeterminate degrees of belief. So doxastic states are ideally representable by a set of probability functions. One consequence of this is that the expected value of a gamble will be imprecise. This paper looks at the attempts to extend Bayesian decision theory to deal with such cases, and concludes (...) that all proposals advanced thus far have been incoherent. A more modest, but coherent, alternative is proposed. Keywords: Imprecise probabilities, Arrow’s theorem. (shrink)

The central thesis of this paper is that fake news and related phenomena serve as defeaters for knowledge transmission via journalistic channels. This explains how they pose a threat to democracy; and it points the way to determining how to address this threat. Democracy is both intrinsically and instrumentally good provided the electorate has knowledge (however partial and distributed) of the common good and the means of achieving it. Since journalism provides such knowledge, those who value democracy have a reason (...) to protect it. Hostile agents, however, can undermine both the effectiveness of democratic decision-making and faith in democracy itself, by deliberately promulgating fake news and hyper-partisan views; moreover, these effects can come about unintentionally on social media. I conclude that we may need to change, not just the way we process information online, but also the informational environment in which we operate. (shrink)

According to some, humanity’s search to answer the question “What is the meaning of life?” fuels the creative fires that forge all of civilization’s great religious, spiritual, and philosophical texts. But how seriously should we take the question? In the following paper, I provide an implexic genealogical analysis of the cognitive structures that make the very articulation of the question possible. After outlining my procedure, my paper begins by explaining the main components of a genealogical inquiry. Next, I examine Camus’s (...) and Nagel’s respective analyses of philosophical absurdity, paying particular attention to their different evaluations of avatars of the absurd, such as the myth of Sisyphus. Finally, I demonstrate how we may complete Nagel’s solution to the absurd (which counsels that whenever the seeming meaninglessness of life is raised in consciousness, we address it with an ironic smile) by providing an evolutionary pathway of how the cognitive scaffolding required to ask the question about life’s meaning arose. I argue that by reframing philosophical absurdity, we see the phenomenon in a different light. In this very reframing, we may become free from the malaise often connected to avatars for the absurd. (shrink)

This paper presents a unified theory of reality, which integrates two interdependent frameworks: Cellular Primary Consciousness Theory (CPCT) and Open and Closed Systems Theory (OCST). Although CPCT and OCST can each stand as individual theories, they are, in this work, combined to form a cohesive explanation of both the mechanics and purpose of the universe. CPCT posits that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of all life, extending to even the simplest cells, rather than being an emergent property exclusive to complex (...) neural systems. Drawing upon evidence from quantum mechanics, cell biology, and systems theory, CPCT challenges traditional views on the origins of consciousness by suggesting that awareness is a universal property present from the cellular level. OCST, which forms the second component of this unified theory, examines the nature of the universe as a closed system subject to the laws of entropy. This theory explores how the universe is moving toward maximum entropy, where meaning and contrasts dissolve. However, beyond this closed system lies the realm of an open system—a domain of infinite potential that transcends the dualities and limitations of the physical universe. This open system offers a philosophical explanation for existence and the possibility of eternal meaning. Together, these two theories provide a novel and cohesive framework that addresses both the mechanics of consciousness and the ultimate purpose of the universe. The integration of CPCT and OCST bridges scientific evidence from quantum biology and systems theory with philosophical explorations of existence, presenting a comprehensive vision of reality as both a closed physical system and an open metaphysical one. This unified theory encourages a reexamination of our place in the cosmos, suggesting that beyond the observable universe lies an infinite realm of potential where consciousness and meaning endure. (shrink)

A deep and precise introduction to the philosophy of religion that is also remarkably clear and insightful. The author has a conversation with the student and uses concrete examples to explain often abstract concepts and issues.

In “A Public Health Ethics Framework for Populations with Limited English Proficiency,” Chipman and colleagues present a valuable framework for addressing health disparities linked to limited Engli...

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.

In “Bioethicists Today: Results of the Views in Bioethics Survey,” Pierson et al. (2024) provide a valuable snapshot of the normative commitments and demographic backgrounds of 824 U.S. bioethicist...

When it comes to contentious conversations, the call for civility is commonplace. Rarely do we hear a call for nonviolence in communication. This is unfortunate, since nonviolence is a better standard than civility (a standard I critiqued in part one of this three-part series). Part of the problem is that a framework for communicative nonviolence has not (to my knowledge) been fully developed. Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi, the “father of nonviolence,” is widely known for nonviolence, but primarily in the realm of (...) noncommunicative action. However, there is a natural line of development in that direction from elements in his thought: Gandhi derives his commitment to nonviolence ("ahimsa" in Sanskrit) from his "law of Truth," which directs us to follow “Truth in thought, Truth in speech, and Truth in action." Inspired by Gandhi among others, Marshall B. Rosenberg developed what he termed "Nonviolent Communication" (NVC). Valuable though NVC is, it is most applicable to particular conversational contexts. It is but one part of a broader nonviolent framework, which I’ll call "ahimsic communication" (AC) to distinguish it from NVC. In this second installment of the series, I develop a framework for AC. (shrink)

In this first installment of a three-part series, I focus on the critique of civility. In so doing, I do not defend incivility. In fact, part of my critique of civility extends equally to incivility. My position is that we must move our normative discourse beyond both the thesis of civility and the antithesis of incivility to a synthesis that reframes the discussion in terms of nonviolence.

Every set can been thought of as a directed graph whose edge relation is ∈. We show that many natural examples of directed graphs of this kind are indivisible: for every infinite κ, for every indecomposable λ, and every countable model of set theory. All of the countable digraphs we consider are orientations of the countable random graph. In this way we find indivisible well‐founded orientations of the random graph that are distinct up to isomorphism, and ℵ1 that are distinct (...) up to siblinghood. (shrink)

The American College of Nurse-Midwives, American Society for Pain Management Nursing, American Academy of Pediatrics, and other largely US-based medical organizations have argued that at least some forms of non-therapeutic child genital cutting, including routine penile circumcision, are ethically permissible even when performed on non-consenting minors. In support of this view, these organizations have at times appealed to potential health benefits that may follow from removing sexually sensitive, non-diseased tissue from the genitals of such minors. We argue that these appeals (...) to “health benefits” as a way of justifying medically unnecessary child genital cutting practices may have unintended consequences. For example, it may create a “loophole” through which certain forms of female genital cutting—or female genital “mutilation” as it is defined by the World Health Organization—could potentially be legitimized. Moreover, by comparing current dominant Western attitudes toward female genital “mutilation” and so-called intersex genital “normalization” surgeries (i.e. surgeries on children with certain differences of sex development), we show that the concept of health invoked in each case is inconsistent and culturally biased. It is time for Western healthcare organizations—including the American College of Nurse-Midwives, American Society for Pain Management Nursing, American Academy of Pediatrics, and World Health Organization—to adopt a more consistent concept of health and a unified ethical stance when it comes to child genital cutting practices. (shrink)

In parts one and two of this three-part series, I developed a framework for ahimsic (nonviolent) communication (AC) as an alternative to the standard communicative norm of civility. The framework presented for AC offers various categories of resistance to violence, including nonviolent forms of negotiation, compromise, protest, verbal force, verbal distraction, argumentation, and communicative satyagraha (Gandhian nonviolence applied to communication). I also provided a range of real-life examples of successful AC resistance, including the stories of Derek Black, Daryl Davis, James (...) Lawson, and Antoinette Tuff. These examples demonstrate that AC “works” even against neo-Nazis, KKK grand wizards, angry punch-throwing bikers, and active school shooters. In this third and final installment, I will explain why AC works—better than any form of violent communication (VC). My main claim is that AC derives strategic power from its moral power. As various components of my argument are drawn from the nonviolence tradition more generally, what follows will double as a primer on the morality of nonviolence. However, we will also see significant differences in how we must adapt nonviolent strategy and morality to the case of communication. (shrink)

What is the relationship between belief in (or other forms of engagement with) conspiratorial thinking and trust? To what extent does engagement with conspiracy theories lead to an erosion of trust in others, especially in public institutions? Further, would such an erosion of public trust constitute a reason for rejecting such engagement with conspiracy theories? In current philosophical discussions of the phenomenon of conspiracy theories, a number of scholars (e.g., M. R. X. Dentith, Lee Basham, Juha Räikkä, Pelkmans & Machold, (...) among others) have identified and argued against what has been called Public Trust Skepticism (PTS), which is the thesis that, because they undermine the public trust of citizens in important democratic institutions, conspiracy theories should be given lesser credibility. In other words, we ought to discount conspiracy theories on the grounds that condoning them ends up undermining public trust. However, I argue that PTS gets things backwards: For at least an important class of conspiracy theories, it is the high degree of skepticism about the trustworthiness of public institutions that is presupposed by such theories that undermines their credibility. This happens in part, I argue, because such broad distrust of so many public sources of evidence tends to render incoherent much that such theorists would ordinarily wish to believe, resulting in a form of what I call “epistemic nihilism.". (shrink)

Frank Hindriks has attempted to derive a variant of Timothy Williamson’s knowledge rule for assertion on the basis of a more fundamental belief expression analysis of that speech act. I show that his attempted derivation involves a crucial equivocation between two senses of ‘must,’ and therefore fails. I suggest two possible repairs; but I argue that even if they are successful, we should prefer Williamson’s fully general knowledge rule to Hindriks’s restricted moral norm.

Where does entertaining (or promoting) conspiracy theories stand with respect to rational inquiry? According to one view, conspiracy theorists are open-minded skeptics, being careful not to accept uncritically common wisdom, exploring alternative explanations of events, no matter how unlikely they might seem at first glance. Seen this way, they are akin to scientists attempting to explain the social world. On the other hand, they are also sometimes seen as overly credulous, believing everything they read on the internet, say. In addition (...) to conspiracy theorists and scientists, another significant form of explanation of the events of the world can be found in religious contexts, such as when a disaster is explained as being an “act of God.” By comparing conspiratorial thinking with scientific and religious forms of explanation, features of all three are brought into more clear focus. For example, anomalies and a commitment to naturalist explanation are seen as important elements of scientific explanation, although the details are less clear. This paper uses conspiracy theories as a lens through which to investigate rational or scientific inquiry. In addition, a better understanding of the scientific method as it might be applied in the study of events of interest to conspiracy theorists can help understand their epistemic virtues and vices. (shrink)

This Handbook is therefore meant to be useful to someone wanting to learn about Aquinas's philosophy and theology while also looking for help in philosophical ...

Permissivism in epistemology is a family of theses, each of which says that rationality is compatible with a number of distinct attitudes. This paper argues that thinking about symmetric games gives us new reason to believe in permissivism. In some finite games, if permissivism is false then we have to think that a player is more likely to take one option rather than another, even though each option has the same expected return given that player’s credences. And in some infinite (...) games, if permissivism is false there is no rational way to play the game, although intuitively the games could be rationally played. The latter set of arguments rely on the recent discovery that there are symmetric games with only asymmetric equilibria. It was long known that there are symmetric games with no pure strategy symmetric equilibria; the surprising new discovery is that there are symmetric games with asymmetric equilibria, but no symmetric equilibria involving either mixed or pure strategies. (shrink)

Adolescents present a puzzle. There are foundational unclarities about how they should be regarded as decision-makers. Although superficially adolescents may appear to have mature decisional capacity, their decision-making is in many ways unlike that of adults. Despite this seemingly obvious fact, a concern for the claims of autonomy has led to the development of the legal doctrine of the mature minor. This legal construct considers adolescents, as far as possible, as equivalent to adults for the purpose of medical decision-making. The (...) movement to support independent decision-making by adolescents through providing information to them and securing their consent apart from their parents is encouraged by those legal understandings that hold that unemancipated minors should generally be considered as possessing effective decisional capacity. Such legal structures, however, do not adequately take account of the wide variations in adolescent capacities, the immaturity of most adolescent decision-makers, or the important contributions made by parents to the development of their adolescents through parental partnering in the adolescent’s decision-making. The data available indicate that in general adolescents should be regarded as apprentice decision-makers who should make decisions in collaboration with their parents until at least the age of 18. Steps should not be taken pre-emptively to isolate adolescents from the guidance of their parents. As a general rule, what Piker has referred to as “collaborative paternalism” appears most likely both to protect adolescents from their own untoward choices, while also very importantly helping them with parental guidance to develop into mature decision-makers with the capacity to make medical choices on their own. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there is an inconsistency between the content of some of the labour-related human rights articulated in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the obligations ascribed to various actors regarding those rights in the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), in particular those ascribed to corporations. Recognizing the inconsistency, I claim, can help us see some of (...) the moral limitations of both familiar public responses to exploitative labour practices and influential philosophical accounts of the wrong of exploitation. In light of these limitations, I argue that there are reasons to accept a more expansive account of the human rights-related obligations of corporations than that found in the UNGPs, and in particular that we should accept that corporations have obligations to actively contribute to lifting people out of poverty. (shrink)

Harvey Siegel's (1985) attempts to revive the traditional epistemological formulation of the rationality of science. Contending that "a general commitment to evidence" is constitutive of method and rationality in science, Siegel advances its compatibility with specific, historically attuned formulations of principles of evidential support as a virtue of his aprioristic candidate for science's rationality. In point of fact, this account is compatible with virtually any formulation of evidential support, which runs afoul of Siegel's claim that scientific beliefs must be evaluated (...) with respect to their rationality. The unwelcome consequence of Siegel's view is that most any belief, scientific or pseudoscientific, can be defended as rational. Indeed, if we want to furnish a warrant for rational choice, we must turn to the very historically informed principles of evidential support that are dismissed by Siegel as providing a misleading portrait of science's rationality. (shrink)

Accelerationism offers a theoretical stance towards capitalism that takes shape in various rhetorical guises. In general, these writings attempt to push through the boundaries imposed by capital while speeding off into unknown possible futures. While some articulations of this philosophy rely on traditional scholarly argumentation, others proceed along more obscure paths to envision a post-capitalist (and usually post-human) future. In this article, I focus on the latter approach by examining how some accelerationist works embrace occult poetics and subsequently align with (...) what Brad Baumgartner identifies as a communicative praxis of Weird Mysticism. In contrast to more pragmatic approaches, Weird Mysticism provides a worthwhile rhetorical perspective for contemplating accelerationist works that embrace a nihilistic inclination to imagine a world without us. (shrink)

Most affluent people do little to aid those living in severe poverty. In this paper, we consider the extent to which such people are blameworthy for their inaction. We argue for three main claims. First, we cannot convincingly appeal to the phenomenon of non-culpable moral ignorance to argue that the affluent are not seriously blameworthy for their inaction: affluent people are either not ignorant, or else they are culpably ignorant. Second, however, a parallel phenomenon of non-culpable lack of vivid awareness (...) does have some purchase in mitigating blame. Although this diminishes blame to some degree, significant blame is still appropriate, given that vivid awareness is to some extent under our control. Thirdly, there is good reason to believe that expressions of appropriate blame, which could alert us to moral wrongdoing, are systematically suppressed regarding global poverty. Therefore, the absence of blame doesn’t indicate the absence of blameworthy behaviour. (shrink)

For Karl Marx, ideological forms of consciousness are false, but how and in what respects? Ideologies must include some beliefs in order to be false, even if not all the beliefs that are inferentially related in the ideology are false, and even if there are (causally) related attitudes in the ideology that are neither true nor false. “Ideological” beliefs, however, are not simply false; their falsity has the specific property of not being in the interests of the agents who accept (...) the ideology. One can make two kinds of mistakes about interests. One can mistake what is in one’s intrinsic interest or one can mistake what is in one’s extrinsic interest (that is, the means required to realize one’s intrinsic interests). Marx is mostly, but not exclusively, focused on mistakes about extrinsic interests; this is important in understanding how “morality” (which is not a matter of beliefs, but attitudes) can be ideological for Marx. I illustrate this analysis with some of Marx’s paradigmatic examples of ideological mistakes and offer an account of Marx’s conception of “interests.”. (shrink)