There is growing acknowledgement of a moral obligation to curb our personal carbon emissions. However, while much has been said regarding certain kinds of carbon- ntensive behaviours, the philosophical literature has – until only very recently – been largely silent regarding one of the worst things that a person can choose to do from a climate perspective: namely, have a child. I contend that procreation is an inessential high-emission activity – one that results in inordinately greater emissions than other activities (...) like joyguzzling or flying. Given this, I argue that if we believe that individuals bear moral responsibility for their personal carbon emissions, then we have strong moral reasons to refrain from choosing to procreate, reasons which – for many – amount to a moral obligation to refrain from choosing to have children. I also consider whether our climate duties might also be discharged by offsetting the climate burden of any children we do choose to have and providing a concrete quantification of what that offsetting might look like. (shrink)

A number of attempts have been made to construct a plausible ontology of rock music. Each of these ontologies identifies a single type of ontological entity as the “work” in rock music. Yet, all the suggestions advanced to date fail to capture some important considerations about how we engage with music of this tradition. This prompted Lee Brown to advocate a healthy skepticism of higher-order musical ontologies. I argue here that we should instead embrace a pluralist ontology of rock, an (...) ontology that recognizes more than one kind of entity as “the work” in rock music. I contend that this approach has a number of advantages over other ontologies of rock, including that of allowing us to make some comparisons across ontological kinds. (shrink)

Recent studies of Aristotle’s meteorology have often focused on questions of scientific methodology rather than on the empirical accuracy of the explanations. Here we wish to focus on Aristotle’s theory of storms, considering them in their historical context and in light of Aristotle’s theoretical commitments, but testing them in terms of their ability to explain the phenomena in question. Aristotle’s approach to storm events follows a general pattern of “outburst” theories proposed by Presocratic thinkers, in which wind, fire, and the (...) like burst out of clouds. Aristotle proposes a two-exhalation theory in which a dry and a moist gas arise by evaporation and can conflict with each other. In Meteorologica II.9 and III.1, he provides his own theory of storms. Modern accounts are hampered by a mistranslation of ‘eknephias’ as “hurricane.” We argue that an eknephias is never a hurricane, but in the first place a theoretical construct meant to account for three distinct phenomena: tuphōn, keraunos, and prēstēr, all of which need to be identified more clearly with actual meteorological phenomena than they have been. We identify appropriate phenomena and also propose a phenomenon corresponding to eknephias, which makes sense of Aristotle’s account. (shrink)

Over 40 years of research have shown that traumatic brain injury affects brain volume. However, technical and practical limitations made it difficult to detect brain volume abnormalities in patients suffering from chronic effects of mild or moderate traumatic brain injury. This situation improved in 2006 with the FDA clearance of NeuroQuant®, a commercially available, computer-automated software program for measuring MRI brain volume in human subjects. More recent strides were made with the introduction of NeuroGage®, commercially available software that is based (...) on NeuroQuant® and extends its utility in several ways. Studies using these and similar methods have found that most patients with chronic mild or moderate traumatic brain injury have brain volume abnormalities, and several of these studies found—surprisingly—more abnormal enlargement than atrophy. More generally, 102 peer-reviewed studies have supported the reliability and validity of NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage®. Furthermore, this updated version of a previous review addresses whether NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard for admissibility in court. It concludes that NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard based on their reliability, validity, and objectivity. Due to the improvements in technology over the years, these brain volumetric techniques are practical and readily available for clinical or forensic use, and thus they are important tools for detecting signs of brain injury. (shrink)

Background: Facial proportionality and symmetry are positively associated with perceived levels of facial attractiveness. -/- Objective: The aims of this study were to confirm and extend the association of proportionality with perceived levels of attractiveness and character traits and determine differences in attractiveness and character ratings between "anomalous" and "typical" faces using a large dataset. -/- Methods: Ratings of 597 unique individuals from the Chicago Face Database were used. A formula was developed as a proxy of relative horizontal proportionality, where (...) a proportionality score of "0" indicated perfect proportionality and more negative scores indicated less proportionality. Faces were categorized as "anomalous" or "typical" by 2 independent reviewers based on physical features. -/- Results: Across the ratings for all faces, Spearman correlations revealed greater proportionality was associated with attractiveness ( ρ = 0.292, P < 0.001) and trustworthiness ( ρ = 0.193, P < 0.001), while lesser proportionality was associated with impressions of anger (ρ = 0.132, P = 0.001), dominance (ρ = 0.259, P < 0.001), and threateningness ( ρ = 0.234, P < 0.001). Mann-Whitney U tests revealed the typical cohort had significantly higher levels of proportionality (-13.98 versus -15.14, P = 0.030) and ratings of attractiveness (3.39 versus 2.99, P < 0.001) and trustworthiness (3.48 versus 3.35, P < 0.001). -/- Conclusions: This study demonstrated that facial proportionality is not only significantly associated with higher ratings of attractiveness, but also associated with judgements of trustworthiness. Proportionality plays a role in evoking negative attributions of personality characteristics to people with facial anomalies. (shrink)

Background: Facial attractiveness influences our perceptions of others, with beautiful faces reaping societal rewards and anomalous faces encountering penalties. The purpose of this study was to determine associations of visual attention with bias and social dispositions toward people with facial anomalies. -/- Methods: Sixty subjects completed tests evaluating implicit bias, explicit bias, and social dispositions before viewing publicly available images of preoperative and postoperative patients with hemifacial microsomia. Eye-tracking was used to register visual fixations. -/- Results: Participants with higher implicit (...) bias scores fixated significantly less on the cheek and ear region preoperatively (P = 0.004). Participants with higher scores in empathic concern and perspective taking fixated more on the forehead and orbit preoperatively (P = 0.045) and nose and lips (P = 0.027) preoperativel. -/- Conclusions: Participants with higher levels of implicit bias spent less visual attention on anomalous facial anatomy, whereas participants with higher levels of empathic concern and perspective taking spent more visual attention on normal facial anatomy. Levels of bias and social dispositions such as empathy may predict layperson gaze patterns toward those with facial anomalies and provide insights to neural mechanisms underlying the "anomalous is bad" paradigm. (shrink)

Levinas and the Night of Being investigates the ontological character of Totality and Infinity that has frequently been overlooked, suggesting that this ontological character is constituted by nocturnal events of being, the dark foundations that undergird the intentional activity of consciousness. Through a close reading of Totality and Infinity, Levinas and the Night of Being begins with the separation of the self and the nocturnal event of the enjoyment of the elemental that establishes the self as the same in its (...) independence and self-sufficiency. In its sameness, the self can then encounter the Other as other through the nocturnal event of the speech of the Other. The encounter with the Other through speech and language is the foundation for the nocturnal event of the pluralization of existence through fecundity, culminating in what Levinas and the Night of Being calls a world shared with the Other, a world of sociality and justice. This review emphasizes that Levinas and the Night of Being, by addressing the ontological character of Totality and Infinity, offers a significant contribution to the field of Levinas studies and points toward a valuable path for future research that examines how ontology and ethics might be thought together rather than in opposition. (shrink)

Clark has recently suggested that predictive processing advances a theory of neural function with the resources to put an ecumenical end to the “representation wars” of recent cognitive science. In this paper I defend and develop this suggestion. First, I broaden the representation wars to include three foundational challenges to representational cognitive science. Second, I articulate three features of predictive processing’s account of internal representation that distinguish it from more orthodox representationalist frameworks. Specifically, I argue that it posits a resemblance-based (...) representational architecture with organism-relative contents that functions in the service of pragmatic success, not veridical representation. Finally, I argue that internal representation so understood is either impervious to the three anti-representationalist challenges I outline or can actively embrace them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article studies multi-stakeholder initiatives as spaces for both deliberation and contestation between constituencies with competing discourses and disputed values, beliefs, and preferences. We review different theoretical perspectives on MSIs, which see them mainly as spaces to find solutions to market problems, as spaces of conflict and bargaining, or as spaces of consensus. In contrast, we build on a contestatory deliberative perspective, which gives equal value to both contestation and consensus. We identify four types of internal contestation which can be (...) present in MSIs—procedural, inclusiveness, epistemic, and ultimate-goal—and argue that embracing contestation and engaging in ongoing revision of provisional agreements, criteria, and goals can enhance the democratic quality of MSIs. Finally, we explore the implications of this perspective for theorizing about the democratic quality in MSIs and about the role of corporations in transnational governance. (shrink)

When the costs of acquiring knowledge outweigh the benefits of possessing it, ignorance is rational. In this paper I clarify and explore a related but more neglected phenomenon: cases in which ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it. The paper has four aims. First, I describe the psychological and social factors underlying this phenomenon of motivated ignorance. Second, I describe those conditions in which it is instrumentally rational. Third, I draw on evidence from the (...) social sciences to argue that this phenomenon of rational motivated ignorance plays an important but often unappreciated role in one of the most socially harmful forms of ignorance today: voter ignorance of societal risks such as climate change. Finally, I consider how to address the high social costs associated with rational motivated ignorance. (shrink)

Why do well‐functioning psychological systems sometimes give rise to absurd beliefs that are radically misaligned with reality? Drawing on signalling theory, I develop and explore the hypothesis that groups often embrace beliefs that are viewed as absurd by outsiders as a means of signalling ingroup commitment. I clarify the game‐theoretic and psychological underpinnings of this hypothesis, I contrast it with similar proposals about the signalling functions of beliefs, and I motivate several psychological and sociological predictions that could be used to (...) distinguish it from alternative explanations of irrational group beliefs. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that explanations just ARE those sorts of things that, under the right circumstances and in the right sort of way, bring about understanding. This raises the question of why such a seemingly simple account of explanation, if correct, would not have been identified and agreed upon decades ago. The answer is that only recently has it been made possible to analyze explanation in terms of understanding without the risk of collapsing both to merely phenomenological states. (...) For the most part, theories of explanation were for 50 years held hostage to the historical accident that they far outstripped in sophistication corresponding accounts of understanding. (shrink)

This text focuses on the theory of popular politics constructed within the context of analytical Marxism, and asks if rational choice theory provides an adequate basis for explaining patterns of social, political and economic behaviour in traditional China.

Two striking claims are advanced on behalf of the free energy principle in cognitive science and philosophy: that it identifies a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems; and that it has important implications for our understanding of how the brain works, defining a set of process theories—roughly, theories of the structure and functions of neural mechanisms—consistent with the free energy minimising imperative that it derives as a necessary feature of all self-organising systems. I argue that the conjunction (...) of claims and rests on a fallacy of equivocation. The FEP can be interpreted in two ways: as a claim about how it is possible to redescribe the existence of self-organising systems, and as a claim about how such systems maintain their existence. Although the Descriptive FEP plausibly does identify a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems, it has no important implications for our understanding of how the brain works. Although the Explanatory FEP would have such implications if it were true, it does not identify a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems. I consider various ways of responding to this conclusion, and I explore its implications for the role and importance of the FEP in cognitive science and philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A trivalent theory of indicative conditionals automatically enforces Stalnaker's thesis – the equation between probabilities of conditionals and conditional probabilities. This result holds because the trivalent semantics requires, for principled reasons, a modification of the ratio definition of conditional probability in order to accommodate the possibility of undefinedness. I explain how this modification is motivated and how it allows the trivalent semantics to avoid a number of well-known triviality results, in the process clarifying why these results hold for many (...) bivalent theories. In short, the slew of triviality results published in the last 40-odd years need not be viewed as an argument against Stalnaker's thesis: it can be construed instead as an argument for abandoning the bivalent requirement that indicative conditionals somehow be assigned a truth-value in worlds in which their antecedents are false. (shrink)

Concentrating on their treatment of folk psychology, this paper seeks to establish that, in the form advocated by its leading proponents, the Canberra project is presumptuous in certain key respects. Crucially, it presumes (1) that our everyday practices entail the existence of implicit folk theories; (2) that naturalists ought to be interested primarily in what such theories say; and (3) that the core content of such theories is adequately characterized by establishing what everyone finds intuitively obvious about the topics in (...) question. I argue these presumptions are a bad starting point for any naturalistic project and, more specifically, that in framing things in this way proponents of the Canberra plan have led us unnecessarily into philosophical quagmires. (shrink)

Recent medical and bioethics literature shows a growing concern for practitioners’ emotional experience and the ethical environment in the workplace. Moral distress, in particular, is often said to result from the difficult decisions made and the troubling situations regularly encountered in health care contexts. It has been identified as a leading cause of professional dissatisfaction and burnout, which, in turn, contribute to inadequate attention and increased pain for patients. Given the natural desire to avoid these negative effects, it seems to (...) most authors that systematic efforts should be made to drastically reduce moral distress, if not altogether eliminate it from the lives of vulnerable practitioners. Such efforts, however, may be problematic, as moral distress is not adequately understood, nor is there agreement among the leading accounts regarding how to conceptualize the experience. With this article I make clear what a robust account of moral distress should be able to explain and how the most common notions in the existing literature leave significant explanatory gaps. I present several cases of interest and, with careful reflection upon their distinguishing features, I establish important desiderata for an explanatorily satisfying account. With these fundamental demands left unsatisfied by the leading accounts, we see the persisting need for a conception of moral distress that can capture and delimit the range of cases of interest. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that, contra Strevens (2013), understanding in the sciences is sometimes partially constituted by the possession of abilities; hence, it is not (in such cases) exhausted by the understander’s bearing a particular psychological or epistemic relationship to some set of structured propositions. Specifically, the case will be made that one does not really understand why a modeled phenomenon occurred unless one has the ability to actually work through (meaning run and grasp at each step) a model (...) simulation of the underlying dynamic. (shrink)

Table of Contents -/- 1. Introduction and Overview: Two Entitlement Projects, Peter J. Graham, Nikolaj J.L.L. Pedersen, Zachary Bachman, and Luis Rosa -/- Part I. Engaging Burge's Project -/- 2. Entitlement: The Basis of Empirical Warrant, Tyler Burge 3. Perceptual Entitlement and Scepticism, Anthony Brueckner and Jon Altschul 4. Epistemic Entitlement Its Scope and Limits, Mikkel Gerken 5. Why Should Warrant Persist in Demon Worlds?, Peter J. Graham -/- Part II. Extending the Externalist Project -/- 6. Epistemic Entitlement and (...) Epistemic Competence, Ernest Sosa 7. Extended Entitlement, Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard 8. Moorean Pragmatics, Social Comparisons and Common Knowledge, Allan Hazlett 9. Internalism and Entitlement to Rules and Methods, Joshua Schecter -/- Part III. Engaging Wright's Project -/- 10. Full Bloodied Entitlement, Martin Smith 11. Pluralist Consequentialist Anti-Scepticism, Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen 12. Against (Neo-Wittensteinian) Entitlements, Annalisa Coliva 13. The Truth Fairy and the Indirect Consequentialist, Daniel Elstein and Carrie S. I. Jenkins 14. Knowledge for Nothing, Patrick Greenough . (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to explore some of the moral considerations relating to smoking licences. And I shall offer a limited defence of licences as a replacement for sales tax on tobacco products. This defence will include some moral arguments in favour of one particular licence design over others.

commentary on Fodor, “Against Darwinism.”.

Over the past few decades, large food banks that collect, warehouse, and redistribute food have become institutionalized across Europe. Although food banks gained increased visibility as important food relief mechanisms during the covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the crisis also highlighted their structural weaknesses and the fragility of the charity-based emergency food system. In particular, many European food banks faced higher costs, lower food stocks, uneven food donations, and lower numbers of volunteers and personnel as demand for food relief (...) increased sharply. Also, many food banks lacked personal health and safety equipment for front-line staff and volunteers, many of whom were vulnerable or aged, thus forcing the closure of some charities due to health concerns. Yet, the impact of the pandemic was uneven across the continent as the covid pandemic strengthened some food banks while others were weakened. To explore these dynamics in detail, this paper utilizes in-depth interviews and surveys of key food bank operators in the Netherlands, Norway, and Greece to analyze how and why European food bank systems fared so differently from the pandemic. In short, the findings in this paper reveal how the Norwegian food bank system leveraged its position to increase fundraising and visibility, while the Netherlands food bank system suffered from long-term structural weaknesses, and the Greek food bank system was further embroiled in government tensions that threatened its existence. The preexisting structure of food bank systems, broader political economy, and historical context significantly impacted how food relief networks fared during the pandemic. (shrink)

For years, tour guide Daniel Lum has brought visitors as well as his children out to the remote corners of Barrow, Alaska, one of the northernmost cities in the world, to witness polar bears and walrus on the dark, sandy beaches. Over time, snapping pictures for tourists and shooting photographs of his own, he has been a first-hand witness to the profound environmental changes taking place as his homeland shifts and disappears before his eyes. As arguments over climate change (...) rage in more temperate locales, Nuvuk, the Northernmost is a poignant snapshot of life in a town where these changes are impossible to overlook. Lum's vivid photographs of wildlife, such as whales, polar bears, and birds, offer rare close-ups of animals few ever see. In addition, Lum provides vivid descriptions and pictures of daily life in and around Barrow, offering a compelling insider's introduction to living on the tip of the world. With Lum as a capable guide, Nuvuk, the Northernmost is a chance to see a rare world before it changes forever. (shrink)

This paper responds to Alva Noë’s general critique of Radical Enactivism. In particular, it responds to his claim that Radical Enactivism denies experience, presence and the world. We clarify Radical Enactivism’s actual arguments and positive commitments in this regard. Finally, we assess how Radical Enactvism stands up in comparison with Noë’s own version of Sensorimotor Knowledge Enactivism.

A moral Kantian approach can be developed to deal with the nonidentity problem with regard to environmental intergenerationl justice—at least in cases of depletion or risky policy. Being a duty-oriented moral theory, this approach allows both that people coming into existence in a nonidentity situation can be glad to exist while simultaneously taking into account depletion or risky policy, to which their existence is causally related, as possibly being morally wrong because of a violation of moral duties.

One of six commentaries on “Obesity: Chasing an Elusive Epidemic,” by Daniel Callahan, from the January‐February 2013 issue.