This paper argues that there is a tension between two central features of Dworkin’s partnership conception of democracy. The conception holds, on the one hand, that it is a necessary condition of the legitimacy of the decisions of a political majority that every member of the political community has a very robust right to publicly criticize those decisions. A plausible interpretation of this argument is that free political speech constitutes a normatively privileged vehicle for political minorities to become majorities, and (...) therefore in the absence of freedom of speech minorities could not be rightfully compelled to comply with majority decisions. On the other hand, the partnership conception holds that properly exercised constraints on majority rule do not incur any moral costs. The no-moral-costs thesis is argued for on the basis that nothing of significance is lost when individuals’ influence on political decisions is diminished. However, the legitimacy argument for free speech assumes the significance of individual political influence, which the no-moral-costs thesis denies. Hence the tension. (shrink)

This volume presents a collection of refereed papers reflecting the state of the art in the area of over-constrained systems. Besides 11 revised full papers, selected from the 24 submissions to the OCS workshop held in conjunction with the First International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP '95, held in Marseilles in September 1995, the book includes three comprehensive background papers of central importance for the workshop papers and the whole field. Also included is an introduction by (...) one of the volume editors together with a bibliography listing 243 entries. All in all this is a very useful reference book relevant for all researchers and practitioners interested in hierarchical, partial, and over-constrained systems. (shrink)

We show that three fundamental information-theoretic constraints -- the impossibility of superluminal information transfer between two physical systems by performing measurements on one of them, the impossibility of broadcasting the information contained in an unknown physical state, and the impossibility of unconditionally secure bit commitment -- suffice to entail that the observables and state space of a physical theory are quantum-mechanical. We demonstrate the converse derivation in part, and consider the implications of alternative answers to a remaining open question (...) about nonlocality and bit commitment. (shrink)

This paper defends the following principle: For any visually perceptible set of objects and any visual phenomenal character, there could be a veridical perception of exactly those objects with that character. This principle is rejected by almost all contemporary theories of perception, yet rarely addressed directly. Many have taken the apparent inconceivability of a certain sort of “shape inversion” — as compared to the more plausible, frequently discussed “color inversion” — as evidence that the spatial characters of our perceptions are (...) uniquely suited to and/or revelatory of the structure of their objects, such that alleged perceptions of those objects that differed radically in spatial character could not be veridical. I argue that these conclusions are unjustified: I claim that the difficulty involved in constructing coherent “shape inversion” scenarios is attributable to the complex relations among visual and tactile shape experiences, as opposed to relations between shape experiences and worldly shape properties. (shrink)

To naturalize the concept of teleological causality in biology it is not enough to avoid assuming backward causation or positing the existence of an inscrutable te- leological essence like the élan vital. We must also specify how the causality of or- ganisms is distinct from the causality of designed artifacts like thermostats or asym- metrically oriented processes like the ubiquitous increase of entropy. Historically, the concept of teleological causality in biology has been based on an analogy to the familiar experience (...) of purposeful action. This is experienced by us as a disposition to achieve a general type of end that is represented in advance, and which regulates the selection of efficient means to achieve it. Inspired by this analogy, to bridge the gap between biology and human agency we describe a simple molecular pro- cess called autogenesis that shows how two linked complementary self-organizing processes can give rise to higher-order relations that resemble purposeful disposi- tions, though expressed in terms of constraints on molecular processes. Because the autogenic model is described in sufficient detail to be empirically realizable, it provides a proof of principle demonstrating a simple form of teleological causality. (shrink)

What role, if any, does formal logic play in characterizing epistemically rational belief? Traditionally, belief is seen in a binary way - either one believes a proposition, or one doesn't. Given this picture, it is attractive to impose certain deductive constraints on rational belief: that one's beliefs be logically consistent, and that one believe the logical consequences of one's beliefs. A less popular picture sees belief as a graded phenomenon.

Common-sense morality includes various agent-centred constraints, including ones against killing unnecessarily and breaking a promise. However, it's not always clear whether, had an agent ϕ-ed, she would have violated a constraint. And sometimes the reason for this is not that we lack knowledge of the relevant facts, but that there is no fact about whether her ϕ-ing would have constituted a constraint-violation. What, then, is a constraint-accepting theory to say about whether it would have been permissible for her to (...) have ϕ-ed? In this paper, I canvass various possible approaches to answering this question and I argue that teleology offers the most plausible approach—teleology being the view that every act has its deontic status in virtue of how its outcome ranks, relative to those of its alternatives. So although, until recently, it had been thought that only deontological theories can accommodate constraints, it turns out that teleological theories not only can accommodate constraints, but can do so more plausibly than deontological theories can. (shrink)

In contemporary debates about the nature of bioethics there is a widespread view that bioethical decision making should involve certain knowledge of and respect for cultural diversity of persons to be affected. The aim of this article is to show that this view is untenable and misleading. It is argued that introducing the idea of respect for cultural diversity into bioethics encounters a series of conceptual and empirical constraints. While acknowledging that cultural diversity is something that decision makers in (...) bioethical contexts should try to understand and, when possible, respect, it is argued that this cultural turn ignores the typically normative role of bioethics and thus threatens to undermine its very foundations. (shrink)

Highly sophisticated capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) have skyrocketed its popularity across many industry sectors globally. The public sector is one of these. Many cities around the world are trying to position themselves as leaders of urban innovation through the development and deployment of AI systems. Likewise, increasing numbers of local government agencies are attempting to utilise AI technologies in their operations to deliver policy and generate efficiencies in highly uncertain and complex urban environments. While the popularity of AI is (...) on the rise in urban policy circles, there is limited understanding and lack of empirical studies on the city manager perceptions concerning urban AI systems. Bridging this gap is the rationale of this study. The methodological approach adopted in this study is twofold. First, the study collects data through semi-structured interviews with city managers from Australia and the US. Then, the study analyses the data using the summative content analysis technique with two data analysis software. The analysis identifies the following themes and generates insights into local government services: AI adoption areas, cautionary areas, challenges, effects, impacts, knowledge basis, plans, preparedness, roadblocks, technologies, deployment timeframes, and usefulness. The study findings inform city managers in their efforts to deploy AI in their local government operations, and offer directions for prospective research. (shrink)

This study assessed the demographic characteristics of Koreans engaged in leisure sports activities during the COVID-19 pandemic and the differences in their preventive health behaviors and constraints on leisure activities. For this study, the demographic characteristics of 544 leisure sport participants, who were recruited on a nationwide basis, were examined through an online survey. Then, comparisons between groups were performed using independent t-tests, one-way analysis of variance, and multivariate analysis of variance. Women who participated in both indoor and outdoor (...) leisure sports showed higher adoption of health prevention behaviors than their male counterparts, and married individuals who participated in indoor leisure sports showed higher adoption of health prevention behaviors than unmarried participants. Moreover, individuals who participated in both indoor and outdoor leisure sports by themselves had many interpersonal constraints overall, and the group of married individuals who participated in indoor leisure sports showed structural constraints. In conclusion, leisure sports participants have adopted many health prevention behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, but this had led to some interpersonal constraints. These results indicate that, in the case of future pandemics, personal and institutional efforts will need to be made to promote participation in leisure sports and prevent excessive social isolation. (shrink)

Most deontologists find bedrock in the Pauline doctrine that it is morally objectionable to do evil in order that good will come of it. Uncontroversially, this doctrine condemns the killing of an innocent person simply in order to maximize the sum total of happiness. It rules out the conscription of a worker to his or her certain death in order to repair a fault that is interfering with the live broadcast of a World Cup match that a billion spectators have (...) been enjoying. It rules out such sacrifice even if it would maximize the sum total of everyone's happiness. An act utilitarian, by contrast, would require the sacrifice of the one whenever this latter condition obtains, since such a utilitarian is committed to the view that one ought always to act so as to bring about the greatest sum total of happiness. An act utilitarian might, however, consistently hold that a large number of rather insignificant pleasures, such as that which a spectator derives from witnessing men in shorts running around and kicking a ball, is never sufficient to justify the infliction of a great harm on a single individual. 4 He might take such a position without abandoning utilitarianism by denying that the sum total of such minor pleasures could ever be sufficiently great to outweigh the harm of death to the one. Under the inspiration of John Stuart Mill, a utilitarian might draw a more general distinction between serious and trivial harms and pleasures and maintain that no amount of a trivial pleasure could ever amount to a sum of happiness that is greater than the disutility of a serious harm. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhere do the boundaries of the ‘should’ in conceptual engineering lie? Mona Simion suggests that the right kind of reason for a...

Variation, adaptation, heredity and fitness, constraints and affordances, speciation, and extinction form the building blocks of the (Neo-)Darwinian research program, and several of these have been called “Darwinian principles.” Here, we suggest that caution should be taken in calling these principles Darwinian because of the important role played by reticulate evolutionary mechanisms and processes in also bringing about these phenomena. Reticulate mechanisms and processes include symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, infective heredity mediated by genetic and organismal mobility, and hybridization. (...) Because the “Darwinian principles” are brought about by both vertical and reticulate evolutionary mechanisms and processes, they should be understood as foundational for a more pluralistic theory of evolution, one that surpasses the classic scope of the Modern and the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis. Reticulate evolution moreover demonstrates that what conventional (Neo-)Darwinian theories treat as intra-species features of evolution frequently involve reticulate interactions between organisms from very different taxonomic categories. Variation, adaptation, heredity and fitness, constraints and affordances, speciation, and extinction therefore cannot be understood as “traits” or “properties” of genes, organisms, species, or ecosystems because the phenomena are irreducible to specific units and levels of an evolutionary hierarchy. Instead, these general principles of evolution need to be understood as common goods that come about through interactions between different units and levels of evolutionary hierarchies, and they are exherent rather than inherent properties of individuals. (shrink)

In his new book, Logical Form, Andrea Iacona distinguishes between two different roles that have been ascribed to the notion of logical form: the logical role and the semantic role. These two roles entail a bifurcation of the notion of logical form. Both notions of logical form, according to Iacona, are descriptive, having to do with different features of natural language sentences. I agree that the notion of logical form bifurcates, but not that the logical role is merely descriptive. In (...) this paper, I focus on formalization, a process by which logical form, on its logical role, is attributed to natural language sentences. According to some, formalization is a form of explication, and it involves normative, pragmatic, as well as creative aspects. I present a view by which formalization involves explicit commitments on behalf of a reasoner or an interpreter, which serve the normative grounds for the evaluation of a given text. In previous work, I proposed the framework of semantic constraints for the explication of logical consequence. Here, I extend the framework to include formalization constraints. The various constraints then serve the role of commitments. I discuss specific issues raised by Iacona concerning univocality, co-reference and equivocation, and I show how our views on these matters diverge as a result of our different starting assumptions. (shrink)

In non-causal explanations, some non-causal facts (such as mathematical, modal or metaphysical) are used to explain some physical facts. However, precisely because these explanations abstract away from causal facts, they face two challenges: 1) it is not clear why would one rather than the other non-causal explanantia be relevant for the explanandum; and 2) why would standing in a particular explanatory relation (e.g., “counterfactual dependence”, “constraint”, “entailment”, “constitution”, “grounding”, and so on), and not in some other, be explanatory. I develop (...) an explanatory relevance account which is based on erotetic constraints and show how it addresses these two challenges. (shrink)

Integrated information theory of consciousness proposes an identity between its causal structure and phenomenology. Through this assertion, IIT aims to explain consciousness by prioritizing first-person experience. However, despite its phenomenology-first stance, developments in IIT have overlooked temporality. As such, we argue that at present IIT’s phenomenological analysis is incomplete. In this critique, we show how IIT takes a non-identical illusionist stance towards the experiences of continuity, flow, and extent of our experiences. Moreover, in isolating temporal grains of experience to a (...) single timescale, IIT misses out on capturing the multi-scale nested nature of temporal phenomena. Hence, we contend that IIT needs an axiom for time, through which its causal structure can be refined to account for temporal experiences. Here, we propose an axiom to address these concerns. We conclude by discussing how IIT may need to be revised if our concerns hold true. (shrink)

Philosophers writing on forgiveness typically defend the Resentment Theory of Forgiveness, the view that forgiveness is the overcoming of resentment. Rarely is much more said about the nature of resentment or how it is overcome when one forgives. Pamela Hieronymi, however, has advanced detailed accounts both of the nature of resentment and how one overcomes resentment when one forgives. In this paper, I argue that Hieronymi’s account of the nature of forgiveness is committed to two implausible claims about the norms (...) bearing on forgiveness. Her account is highly instructive, however, for it brings into relief how certain intuitive views about the norms of forgiveness should be used to constrain our theories about its nature. I conclude by defending this methodological proposal. (shrink)

In earlier work, I argued that gun prohibition is unjustified because it violates an individual right to self-defense. Here, I defend that argument against objections posed by Nicholas Dixon and Jeff McMahan to the effect that the right of citizens to be free from gun violence counterbalances the right of self-defense, and that gun prohibition does not violate the right of self-defense because it renders everyone overall safer.

In this article we discuss the notion of a linguistic universal, and possible sources of such invariant properties of natural languages. In the first part, we explore the conceptual issues that arise. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the explanatory potential of horizontal evolution. We particularly focus on two case studies, concerning Zipf's Law and universal properties of color terms, respectively. We show how computer simulations can be employed to study the large scale, emergent, consequences of (...) psychologically and psychologically motivated assumptions about the working of horizontal language transmission. (shrink)

Existing accounts of mechanistic causation are not suited for understanding causation in biological and neural mechanisms because they do not have the resources to capture the unique causal structure of control heterarchies. In this paper, we provide a new account on which the causal powers of mechanisms are grounded by time-dependent, variable constraints. Constraints can also serve as a key bridge concept between the mechanistic approach to explanation and underappreciated work in theoretical biology that sheds light on how (...) biological systems channel energy to actively respond to the environment in adaptive ways, perform work, and fulfill the requirements to maintain themselves far from equilibrium. We show how the framework applies to several concrete examples of control in simple organisms as well as the nervous system of complex organisms. (shrink)

In the context of the motor skill literature on observational learning and hierarchical skill structuring, Byrne & Russon's findings call into question their standpoint that great apes imitate the behaviour of role models at the programme level. The authors impose a hierarchical model on their observations without properly considering alternative explanations. One such possibility, which stems from a constraints perspective that they dismiss, is put forward.

In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, & S. Stich (Eds.). The innate mind: Structure and content. (pp. 305-337). New York: Oxford University Press.

Transitioning to sustainable agricultural systems is imperative to meet the global Sustainable Development Goals. Achieving more sustainable agricultural production systems will require significant additional capital, however this cannot be covered by the current financial market setup, which dissociates public and private funders. Blended finance, where concessionary development-oriented funding is used to mobilize additional private capital, is essential. To ensure that the limited pool of concessionary funding is used efficiently and effectively, a shared understanding of the roles and limitations of public (...) and private funders is necessary. In this paper, we describe the high-level funding gap for sustainable agriculture, the general landscape of agricultural finance, and the concept and potential roles of blended finance in this context. This paper introduces the conditions under which different financing mechanisms can contribute to addressing barriers related to sustainable agriculture investments. It highlights that multiple funding modalities must be utilized in order to achieve agricultural investment at a meaningful level and encourages greater exploration of the range of blended financing structures to increase SDG-related agriculture investments. (shrink)

Any progress in shaping up an externalist psychiatry, so previous discussion suggested, must begin from questions about the ontology of social causation. So far, research and theory have adhered to a naturalistic approach to the social causes of illness, concentrating mostly on the ‘social determinants of mental health’ (inequality, discrimination, housing insecurity, etc.). The paper starts with an assessment of ‘social determinants’ through the lens of epidemiology and critical psychiatry. It illustrates existing practical and political approaches that fight these (...) class='Hi'>constraints and it highlights their therapeutic value. It argues, though, that a focus on social determinants is not sufficient for fully realizing externalism because a great portion of sociogenic illness remains causally indeterminate. Alongside political action, externalism requires a social etiology that is established by virtue of the meaning that it holds for patients, rather than by virtue of its capacity to identify objective social causes of illness. This entails abandoning naturalism about social causation and embracing constructivism. The paper shows that this methodological shift is less contradictory and more effective than it is commonly imagined. Drawing from further anthropological evidence, it concludes that only by lending support to projects that balance a focus on constraints with social construction will psychiatry be truly externalist. At stake is a prospect of effective treatment for sociogenic illness for the countless in struggle. (shrink)