When making consumption choices, people often fail to meet their own standards of both ethics and frugality. People also generally tend to demand more of others than they do of themselves. But little is known about how these different types of hypocrisy interact, particularly in relation to attitudes toward ethical consumption. In three experiments, we integrate research methods using anchoring and hypocrisy within the context of ethical consumption. Across three experiments, we find a default expectation that people should spend less (...) on consumer items than they actually do. This default position can be inverted by making the ethical context of consumption salient, whereby the expectation is then that people should spend more on consumer items than they actually do. Experiments 2 and 3 show that a moderate price anchor for ethical consumption is sufficient to shift expected standards for other people, but a higher price anchor is required to shift expected standards in personal behaviour. We discuss the countervailing roles of frugality and ethical consumption in understanding hypocrisy and ethical decision-making. (shrink)

The heart of this book is the reciprocal relationship between philosophical theories of mind and empirical studies of animal cognition.

As arti® cial intelligence moves ever closer to the goal of producing fully autonomous agents, the question of how to design and implement an arti® cial moral agent (AMA) becomes increasingly pressing. Robots possessing autonomous capacities to do things that are useful to humans will also have the capacity to do things that are harmful to humans and other sentient beings. Theoretical challenges to developing arti® cial moral agents result both from controversies among ethicists about moral theory itself, and from (...) computational limits to the implementation of such theories. In this paper the ethical disputes are surveyed, the possibility of a `moral Turing Test ’ is considered and the computational di culties accompanying the diŒerent types of approach are assessed. Human-like performance, which is prone to include immoral actions, may not be acceptable in machines, but moral perfection may be computationally unattainable. The risks posed by autonomous machines ignorantly or deliberately harming people and other sentient beings are great. The development of machines with enough intelligence to assess the eŒects of their actions on sentient beings and act accordingly may ultimately be the most important task faced by the designers of arti® cially intelligent automata. (shrink)

In this paper we1 assess the potential for research on nonhuman animals to address questions about the phenomenology of painful experiences. Nociception, the basic capacity for sensing noxious stimuli, is widespread in the animal kingdom. Even rel- atively primitive animals such as leeches and sea slugs possess nociceptors, neurons that are functionally specialized for sensing noxious stimuli (Walters 1996). Vertebrate spinal cords play a sophisticated role in processing and modulating nociceptive signals, providing direct control of some motor responses to noxious (...) stimuli, and a basic capacity for Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning (Grau et al. 1990; Grau 2002). Higher brain systems provide additional layers of association, top-down control, and cognition. In humans, at least, these higher brain systems also give rise to the conscious experiences that are characteristic of pain. What can be said about the experiences of other animals who possess nervous systems that are similar but not identical to humans? (shrink)

Presents a self-contained introduction to logic suitable for majors and nonmajors, and can be covered entirely in a one-semester course. Natural deduction systems of sentential logic and of first-order logic, truth tables, and the basic ideas of model theory are presented without superfluous discussion.

In this paper, I describe grounds for dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the sciences of animal cognition and argue that a turn toward mathematical modeling of animal cognition is warranted. I consider some objections to this call and argue that the implications of such a turn are not as drastic for ordinary, commonsense understanding of animal minds as they might seem.

Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It is not appropriate to treat some widely reported results in animal cognition as if their interpretations are a matter of (...) scientific consensus. It is especially important to understand why loose references to “cognitive ethology” by philosophers can signal ignorance of the field to scientists who are more deeply immersed in the relevant literature. Understanding the variety of approaches to cognitive phenomena in animals is essential if such capacities are to form the foundation of scientifically-informed ethical reasoning about animals. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett and Stephen Stich have independently, but similarly, argued that the contents of mental states cannot be specified precisely enough for the purposes of scientific prediction and explanation. Dennett takes this to support his view that the proper role for mentalistic terms in science is heuristic. Stich takes it to support his view that cognitive science should be done without reference to mental content at all. I defend a realist understanding of mental content against these attacks by Dennett and (...) Stich. I argue that they both mistake the difficulty of making content ascriptions precise for the impossibility of doing so. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that there is much to learn about “wild justice” and the evolutionary origins of morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living mammals. Because of its relatively wide distribution among the mammals, ethological investigation of play, informed by interdisciplinary cooperation, can provide a comparative perspective on the evolution of ethical behavior that is broader than is provided by the usual focus on primate sociality. Careful analysis of social play reveals rules of (...) engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. Because of its significance in development, play may provide a foundation of fairness for other forms of cooperation that are advantageous to group living. Questions about the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality are best answered by attention to the details of what animals do when they engage in social play – how they negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, and to develop trust. We consider questions such as why play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does “being fair” mean being more fit? Do individual variations in play influence an individual’s reproductive fitness? Can we use information about the foundations of moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? We conclude that there is likely to be strong selection for cooperative fair play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play, to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. (shrink)

This guest column consists of a tongue-in-cheek counterfactual history of England from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its highlight is the fifty-year reign of the saintly King Richard III, who dies a martyr in New York at the hands of the Iroquois in 1536 and is promptly canonized. In this version of events, England evades the Reformation and the wars of religion and enters modernity as a prosperous nation of small farmers who have no interest in enclosures and engrossing, (...) let alone in capitalism and industrialization. (shrink)

Seven chimpanzees in twenty-seven experiments run over the course of five years at his University of Louisiana laboratory in New Iberia, Louisiana, are at the heart of Daniel Povinelli’s case that chimpanzee thinking about the physical world is not at all like that of humans. Chimps, according to Povinelli and his coauthors James Reaux, Laura Theall, and Steve Giambrone, are phenomenally quick at learning to associate visible features of tools with specific uses of those tools, but they appear to lack (...) cognitive access to forces and other invisible causal features of those tools. Povinelli’s chimps appar- ently rely on a trial-and-error strategy to learn whether a particular tool is suitable for a particular task, and and having mastered one task they appear unable to generalize to other tasks on the basis of tool properties that are not directly visible. Thus, for instance, Povinelli’s research subjects did not immediately recognize that a tool that had been demonstrated to be non- rigid would be unsuitable for dragging a piece of food towards them. When presented with a choice between a rigid, T-shaped “rake” that they had used many times previously and a rake with non-rigid arms, Povinelli and Reaux found, over the course of eight trials, that their chimps chose the non-rigid rake as frequently as they chose the rigid one (experiment 9, chapter 7). (shrink)

Social play is naturally characterized in intentional terms. An evolutionary account of social play could help scientists to understand the evolution of cognition and intentionality. Alexander Rosenberg (1990) has argued that if play is characterized intentionally or functionally, it is not a behavioral phenotype suitable for evolutionary explanation. If he is right, his arguments would threaten many projects in cognitive ethology. We argue that Rosenberg's arguments are unsound and that intentionally and functionally characterized phenotypes are a proper domain for ethological (...) investigation. (shrink)

This novel's plot, if one may speak of a plot, appears to have been hatched, if one may speak of something not an egg being hatched, at Oxford. The plotters, who have unlikely names even for plotters, met in Wellington Square, a place I know well. I once drank whiskey in the afternoon there with Jane Minto, as likely a character as any in a city that breeds characters (as any follower of Inspector Morse will know). The plotters, however, drank (...) tea, from a tin teapot, while wearing wellingtons. Making something up is, in general, not that hard; making something up about Kurt Schwitters is, because his life itself was so abundant a collage. I once met a woman in front of one of his portraits: “That's me,” she said, “but I never liked it; nor did my husband; we put it under the bed.” She could have appeared in this novel but does not. Plenty of others do—relations and friends of the inventor of Merz.Merz was a fragment, a piece of Humpty Dumpty who fell off the wall in 1914 and could not be put together again. Not for want of trying by the likes of El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Ivan Puni, and Schwitters, especially the last, collecting the Dumpty pieces into a Merzbau that was no more than an assemblage—not a Gesamtkunstwerk and not a cathedral, but what in England was once called a PreFab, a hopeful gesture in an age of helplessness. Schwitters was a collector of the discarded, of the disregarded, of the unregarded, and out of the debris he made beauty. He made poetry (if poetry it may be called) out of sounds, noises sounding in the ear like those made by the guns that had daily blown men, women, and horses to pieces.Clearly, Draesner, the author of this novel, has been totally beSchwittered. I myself became so at Oxford in 1959 and have never wavered in my beSchwitterment, albeit adding over the years beBeuysment, beFluxusment, and beKieferment to my inventory. Thus beSchwittered, I have been a pilgrim to Cylinders, though not finding it; to the grave at Ambleside, with no body in it; to Wordsworth's cottage, where I left my book of Kurt's poems; and to Hannover, to be photographed on Schwitters Square. Kurt's Hannover might have been Hanover (with a single n) had not Bismarck stolen it; Bomber Harris might, in that case, have thought twice about bombing it; and we might not have been asking of this Scheinkünstlerroman how German is it, but instead telling ourselves just how English it is. (shrink)

In old age, I seldom keep the books I read, but The Books of Jacob has been shelved next to Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah; my copy of the latter bears an inscription on its flyleaf, “Gift of Jacob Taubes to Tantur, 1978,” which in some way (possibly mystical) authenticates bringing the two books together. It seems I have been waiting for the conjunction since first reading Gerhom Scholem on the Frankists, in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, in the (...) carriage of a train waiting to depart from New Street Station, Birmingham, sometime in the mid-1980s. It was a moment of revelation; reading Tokarczuk has been too.A major literary achievement—no question: published in Polish in 2014, Tokarczuk's narrative meditation on the Frankists is a model of what may be done by integrating imagination with documentation. This is how what is loosely termed historical fiction should be written. Terrific when evoking the tastes and smells of Podolia or Smyrna, Tokarczuk is no less profound when expressing the aspirations and hesitations of a Jewish people trapped between two other religions, Islam and Christianity. Like Scholem before her, but in her own, entirely different manner, she brings to center stage movements of the mind that had previously been relegated to the wings. What was once regarded contemptuously as too “other”—other, that is, to post-Enlightenment descriptions of the world, past and present—has been shown by Scholem and now Tokarczuk to be crucial to an understanding of the modern world's genesis. What Scholem did for Sabbatai Sevi, Tokarczuk has done for Jacob Frank—and for his followers as well: those beyond-the-pale Jews who saw in him a savior who was no less anti-messianic than he was the messiah. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 107 Heft: 2 Seiten: 427-427.

This article develops and defends a performative conception of historical re-enactment as a fruitful method by which intellectual historians can interpret texts. Specifically, it argues that, in order to understand properly any given text, the intellectual historian should re-enact the performative activities of the writer of that text. The first section analyses one of the most influential and powerful theories of historical re-enactment, namely that found in the later writings of Robin George Collingwood. Drawing on Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblances, (...) certain key insights are identified in Collingwood's theory. Crucially, certain limitations are also stressed. The second section argues that an alternative theory of re-enactment can be developed by drawing on Judith Butler's theory of "performativity". The interpretative implications of a writer's genre, mode of experience, presuppositions, deliberate inventiveness and unintended failures are highlighted. The particularized nature of texts is shown to problematize the writing of unilinear histories of written debates. The article concludes by summarizing briefly the key methodological implications of performative re-enactment as they have been identified in the body of the article. (shrink)

In this previously unpublished essay, Edward Caird attacks Spencer's Transfigured Realism, before defending an absolute idealist theory of the formation of self-consciousness. Along the way, Caird also considered the writings of Bishop George Berkeley, David Hume, Sir William Hamilton, J.S. Mill and Henry Sidgwick. Yet the primary foci of the essay were Herbert Spencer's writings, particularly First Principles, the second edition of Principles of Psychology and the third volume of Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative . It appears to follow from (...) Caird's 1874 review of the third volume of Spencer's Essays, a piece which concluded with the observation that: 'There are some other points of interest in Mr. Spencer's 'Replies,' particularly his strange representation of Kant's meaning , but it would take too much space to discuss the subject here.'. (shrink)

This paper seeks to demonstrate that propositions 23–27 of the Euclidian Optics originated in the context of geometrical astronomy. These entries, which deal with the geometry of spheres and rays, present material that overlaps considerably with propositions 1–3 of Aristarchus of Samos’ On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon. While all these theorems deal with material that could conceivably be native to celestial illumination, the proofs do not work for binocular vision. It therefore seems probable that (...) the proofs were borrowed from Aristarchus or, more likely, some common astronomical predecessor. As an extension of this observation, this paper argues that the Optics displays a far less unified purpose than has typically been assumed. Instead, it reflects a conglomerate of concerns, goals and dependencies, insofar as it presents multiple proofs that emerge from a set of geometrical concerns not directly related to vision as a physical phenomenon. These entries complicate the idea that the Optics is about explaining light, sight or false appearances in any straightforward sense. Instead, the text is oriented toward a somewhat more diffuse goal: simply to articulate the geometry of vision and rays. Optics as a discipline should should therefore be understood not as a purely mathematical explanation of vision, but as a target-field of explanation constituted by features and boundaries derived from extra-visual geometric concerns. (shrink)

Ethicists have commonly appealed to science to bolster their arguments for elevating the moral status of nonhuman animals. I describe a framework within which I take many ethicists to be making such appeals. I focus on an apparent gap in this framework between those properties of animals that are part of the scientific consensus, and those to which ethicists typically appeal in their arguments. I will describe two different ways of diminishing the appearance of the gap, and argue that both (...) of them present challenges to ethicists seeking a firm scientific basis for their claims about the moral status of animals. I argue that more clarity about the role of appeals to science by applied ethicists leads to questions about the effectiveness of such appeals, and that these questions might best be pursued empirically. (shrink)

A common criticism of Hume’s famous anti-induction argument is that it is vitiated because it fails to foreclose the possibility of an authentically probabilistic justification of induction. I argue that this claim is false, and that on the contrary, the probability calculus itself, in the form of an elementary consequence that I call Hume’s Theorem, fully endorses Hume’s argument. Various objections, including the often-made claim that Hume is defeated by de Finetti’s exchangeability results, are considered and rejected.

A principal goal of the discipline of artificial morality is to design artificial agents to act as if they are moral agents. Intermediate goals of artificial morality are directed at building into AI systems sensitivity to the values, ethics, and legality of activities. The development of an effective foundation for the field of artificial morality involves exploring the technological and philosophical issues involved in making computers into explicit moral reasoners. The goal of this paper is to discuss strategies for implementing (...) artificial morality and the differing criteria for success that are appropriate to different strategies. (shrink)

How should scientists react to anthropomorphism (defined for the purposes of this paper as the attribution of mental states or properties to nonhuman animals)? Many thoughtful scientists have attempted to accommodate some measure of anthropomorphism in their approaches to animal behavior. But Wynne will have none of it. We reject his argument against anthropomorphism and argue that he does not pay sufficient attention to the historical facts or to the details of alternative approaches.

This special issue of Synthese discusses conceptual, ontological, technological, ethical, political, and professional dimensions of attempts to represent the entire discipline of philosophy. One of our goals with this issue was to collect in one place several of the leading projects in digital philosophy so that the profession can begin to discern and debate what might be the best practices for the representation of philosophy in the 21st century.

This article evaluates the gains but also the losses of the set-theoretical ontology Badiou develops in Being and Event, in order to stress the importance of the shift to a concern with appearance and difference in Logics of Worlds. It is argued that this shift suggests a possible rapprochement between Badiou’s philosophy of the event on the one hand and postcolonial critical race theory on the other. This is explored through an evental reading of the so-called Morant Bay Revolt that (...) took place in Jamaica in 1865. The article closes by exploring some of the overlaps between Badiou’s development of an “objective phenomenology” in Logics of Worlds, and Frantz Fanon’s elaboration of a phenomenology of race in Black Skin, White Masks. (shrink)

In this chapter, Colin Marshall argues that Schopenhauer’s views about the foundations of morality pose important challenges for five tenets of contemporary metaethics. After presenting these challenges, Marshall explores the potential viability of contemporary Schopenhauerian approaches to metaethics that would leave aside his radical metaphysical monism.

Public policies designed to regulate the use of information technology to protect personal data have been based on different theoretical assumptions in different states, depending on whether the problem is defined in technological, civil libertarian, or bureaucratic terms. However, the rapid development, dispersal, and decentralization of information technology have facilitated a range of new surveillance practices that have in turn rendered the approaches of the 1960s and 1970s obsolete. The networking of the postindustrial state will require a reconceptualization of the (...) dynamic relationship between organizational practices and information technology and a more comprehensive appreciation of the privacy problem. With the call for the development of a more coherent information policy in a number of countries, there is evidence that policymakers have been taking this more holistic view. (shrink)