Subjectivism about well-being holds that ϕ is intrinsically good for x if and only if, and to the extent that, ϕ is valued, under the proper conditions, by x. Given this statement of the view, there is room for intramural dissent among subjectivists. One important source of dispute is the phrase “under the proper conditions”: Should the proper conditions of valuing be actual or idealized? What sort of idealization is appropriate? And so forth. Though these concerns are of the first (...) importance, this essay focuses on a second source of dispute. As stated, subjectivists must account for what it means for an individual x to value ϕ under any conditions. Though there has been some disagreement, most subjectivists hold that x values ϕ if and only if x desires ϕ. This essay argues that subjectivists have erred in accepting a desiderative theory of valuing. Instead, it argues that subjectivists should hold that x values ϕ to the extent that x judges or believes that ϕ is good for x. The resulting “judgment subjectivism” is intuitively superior to, and maintains important structural advantages over, its desiderative rival. (shrink)

A common presupposition in metaethical theory is that moral assessment comes in two flavors, one of which is sensitive to our epistemic circumstances, the second of which is not so sensitive. Though this thought is popular, a number of questions arise. In this paper, I limit my discussion to what I dub the "explanatory question": how one might understand the construction of subjective moral assessment given an explanatorily prior objective assessment. I argue that a proper answer to this question is (...) important not simply for its own sake, but because it also sheds new light on important challenges to the existence of both objective and subjective moral obligations. (shrink)

The demandingness of act consequentialism is well-known and has received much sophisticated treatment.1 Few have been content to defend AC’s demands. Much of the response has been to jettison AC in favor of a similar, though significantly less demanding view.2 The popularity of this response is easy to understand. Excessive demandingness appears to be a strong mark against any moral theory. And if excessive demandingness is a worry of this kind, AC’s goose appears cooked: attempts to show that AC is (...) not particularly demanding are implausible at best. Given that AC requires agents to promote goodness, and given that “goodness” here is most often construed as impartial and aggregative between persons, were I in a position to save others from death by sacrificing myself, I am morally required, on. (shrink)

This collection of 24 readings is the first comprehensive treatment of important topics by leading figures in the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of...

Lenman's ‘argument from cluelessness’ against consequentialism is that a significant percentage of the consequences of our actions are wholly unknowable, so that when it comes to assessing the moral quality of our actions, we are without a clue. I distinguish the argument from cluelessness from traditional epistemic objections to consequentialism. The argument from cluelessness should be no more problematic for consequentialism than the argument from epistemological scepticism should be for metaphysical realism. This puts those who would reject consequentialism on the (...) ground of cluelessness in an awkward philosophical position. (shrink)

The Association of Staff Developers in Philosophy for Children came into being in 1988. It was the result of staff developers feelin a need to be a part of an ongoing community of inquiry among themselves concerning problems of staff development, drawing upon our collective experience as staff developers, and recognizing our autonomy as philosophers. At the San Antonio Symposium in April of 1989, an Excutivr Board of 5 persons was elected: Marie Hungerman, Gerard Potvin, Cynthia Duque, Ron Reed, Ann (...) Sharp, and myself, Dale Cannon, as President, One of our decisions at that meeting was to solicit reports from different Centers of Philosophy for Children on their experience with different formats of staff developement and publish them in Analytic Teaching. The longer range goal was inclusion in a projected resource manual for staff development. (shrink)

Las tasas de producción y consumo de alimentos en el mundo se hacen insostenibles. Estados Unidos está a la cabeza de los países que exceden con creces su capacidad en esta materia. La causa principal es la incorporación de combustibles fósiles en la producción de alimentos desde 1950, tanto en forma de energía cinética, como también en los pesticidas y otros productos utilizados en su producción. Según el autor, literalmente nos estamos comiendo los hidrocarburos rápidamente y sin tener ninguna alternativa (...) con la cual reemplazarlos. Sólo un restablecimiento de un equilibrio entre capacidad productiva sostenible y consumo alimentario podría evitar la crisis que se avista en el horizonte. (shrink)

The liar paradox is standardly supposed to arise from three conditions: classical bivalent truth value semantics, the Tarskian truth schema, and the formal constructability of a sentence that says of itself that it is not true. Standard solutions to the paradox, beginning most notably with Tarski, try to forestall the paradox by rejecting or weakening one or more of these three conditions. It is argued that all efforts to avoid the liar paradox by watering down any of the three assumptions (...) suffers serious disadvantages that are at least as undesirable as the liar paradox itself. Instead, a new solution is proposed that admits that if the liar sentence is true then it is false, in the first paradox dilemma horn, but denies that the liar sentence is true, but asserting instead that it is false, and refuting the second paradox dilemma horn according to which it is supposed to follow that if the liar sentence is false then it is true. The reasoning for the second paradox dilemma horn is flawed, in that is not only not supported by but actually contradicted by the Tarskian truth schema. We could only infer the second dilemma horn if it were to clasically follow from the assumption that the liar sentence is false, and from the three liar paradox conditions, that therefore it is false that the liar sentence is false. This entire sentence can be shown to be false on the basis of the standard truth schema, thus blocking the paradox. Alternative formulations of the liar sentence are discussed, and the formal proofs and counterproofs for the two paradox dilemma horns, are considered along with the further philosophical implications of maintaining a resolute stance that the liar sentence is simply false. (shrink)

Drawing inspiration from Iris Murdoch, I develop a systematic account of love that countenances love beyond persons. I then show how this account applies to nature, and explain why loving nature matters.

Based on an original synthesis of the work of Marx and Bergson, the key theorists of capitalism and creativity, the book presents an astonishing analysis of ...

Consider the Strong Beneficence Principle (SBP): Persons of affluent means ought to give to those who might fail basic human subsistence until the point at which they must give up something of comparable moral importance. This principle has been the subject of much recent discussion. In this paper, I argue that no coherent interpretation of SBP can be found. SBP faces an interpretive trilemma, each horn of which should be unacceptable to fans of SBP; SBP is either (a) so strong (...) as to be patently absurd; (b) implausible given its acceptance of a form of numbers skepticism; (c) drained of all its demanding force. In the conclusion, I show how the problems with SBP generalize to all similarly demanding principles of beneficence. (shrink)

In this article, I subject the claim that autonomous choice is an intrinsic welfare benefit to critical scrutiny. My argument begins by discussing perhaps the most influential argument in favor of the intrinsic value of autonomy: the argument from deference. In response, I hold that this argument displays what I call the ‘Autonomy Fallacy’: the argument from deference has no power to support the intrinsic value of autonomy in comparison to the important evaluative significance of bare self-direction or what I (...) call ‘self-direction tout court’. I defend the claim that the Autonomy Fallacy really is a fallacy, and show that my examination of the argument from deference has wider reverberations. Once we clearly distinguish between autonomy and self-direction tout court, it becomes much less plausible to say that autonomy of itself is an intrinsic welfare benefit. (shrink)

Psychologism is the target of vehement disapproval in much of mainstream philosophy from Kant to the present day. Yet although antipsychologistic rhetoric is adamant, there is little substantive argument against psychologism to be discovered in contemporary discussions of the problem. Many recent influential philosophical projects, moreover, including intuitionistic logic, conceptualism in the ontology of mathematics and the program to naturalize epistemology, are in different ways efforts to apply modern psychology in the service of philosophical theory. In this essay, I critically (...) survey the history of attacks on psychologism and conclude with a refutation of eight of the most important objections of the theory. My purpose is both to try to clarify the concept of psychologism and to encourage a renewed dialectical interaction between proponents and opponents of the philosophical merits of psychologism. (shrink)

In a number of recent discussions of non-standard, Philosophy programs vaarious ages have been identified as the focus for spontaneous or exceptional interest in philosophising. Such claims, supporting a particular population as naturally suited to philosophical inquiry, are based as often as not, on anecdotes that exhibit telling instances of philosophical activity. Needless to say, such motivated activity occurring spontaneously and outside of a formal classroom may occur in many contexts and at various ages. If professional educators egar to support (...) philsophical programs on the basis of the naturalness of the philosophical enterprise are to warrant their interest on the basis of claims to age-appropriateness, some reasonable attempt at gathering empirical data is required. We offer the questionaire on the following pages as a probe to be used by interested educators and others. (shrink)

In her book Uneasy Virtue, Julia Driver presents an account of motive or trait utilitarianism, one that has been taken as “the most detailed and thoroughly defended recent formulation” of consequential virtue ethics. On Driver's account character traits are morally virtuous if and only if they generally lead to good consequences for society. Various commentators have taken Driver to task over this account of virtue, which she terms “pure evaluational externalism.” They object that, on Driver's account of virtue, it could (...) turn out that traits traditionally understood as pernicious are actually virtuous. While many writers have speculated about the forms new 'virtues' might take in a hypothetical world, I will argue that at least one trait that is seemingly pernicious but would have to be counted as virtuous by Driver already exists. (shrink)

We discuss two problems for a general scientific understanding of language, sequences and synergies: how language is an intricately sequenced behavior and how language is manifested as a multidimensionally structured behavior. Though both are central in our understanding, we observe that the former tends to be studied more than the latter. We consider very general conditions that hold in human brain evolution and its computational implications, and identify multimodal and multiscale organization as two key characteristics of emerging cognitive function in (...) our species. This suggests that human brains, and cognitive function specifically, became more adept at integrating diverse information sources and operating at multiple levels for linguistic performance. We argue that framing language evolution, learning, and use in terms of synergies suggests new research questions, and it may be a fruitful direction for new developments in theory and modeling of language as an integrated system. (shrink)

Meinong's doctrine of the modal moment and the watering-down of extranuclear properties to surrogate nuclear counterparts was offered in response to Russell's problem of the existent round square. To avoid an infinite regress of successively watered-down factualities, Meinong stipulates that the modal moment itself cannot be watered-down. This limits free assumption, since it means that the idea of the existent-cum-modal-moment round square cannot be entertained in thought. It is possible to eliminate the modal moment and watering-down from Meinongian semantics in (...) favor of a strict enforcement of the distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties. This provides a simpler, more economical Meinongian object theory, and regains unrestricted free assumption. (shrink)

In _Notebooks 1914-1916, Wittgenstein considers two related arguments to prove the transcendence of ethics. The inferences involve the claim that the existence of ethics must be indifferent to whether or not the world is inhabited by living things, and that moral good and evil occur only because of the extraworldly metaphysical subject. I reconstruct and criticize these arguments in detail as a prelude to analyzing Wittgenstein's _Tractatus remarks about the transcendence of value, the identification of ethics and aesthetics as one, (...) and the elimination of theoretical ethics or metaethics as meaningless pseudopropositions. (shrink)

Pylyshyn is willing to assume that attention can influence feature integration. We argue that he concedes too much. Feature integration occurs preattentively, except in the case of certain “perverse” displays, such as those used in feature-conjunction searches.

Reflecting on Nature introduces readers to the fields of environmental philosophy and environmental ethics, offering both classic and current readings that focus on key themes - images of nature, ethics, justice, animals, food, climate, biodiversity, aesthetics and wilderness. It helps students to focus on fundamental issues within environmental philosophy and offers succinct readings that explore the central tensions and problems within environmental philosophy.

In Moral Literacy, or How to Do the Right Thing, Colin McGinn proposes a consequentialist solution to the abortion dilemma. McGinn interprets moral rights and moral interests as attributable only to actually sentient beings by virtue of their ability to experience pleasure or pain. McGinn argues against the moral rights of potentially conscious human fetuses, on the grounds that the unjoined ova and spermatazoa of any fertile men and women are also potentially sentient, but we do not generally suppose that (...) unjoined human genetic germ plasm has moral rights. I argue that McGinn’s reply equivocates between two different senses of ‘potential sentience’. I distinguish between strong and weak potentiality, or between naturally probable potentiality and merely logically possible potentiality. I agree that it is reasonable to deny that a weak or merely logically possible potentially sentient fetus that would result from any unjoined ovum and sperm has a moral right to life. But I claim that this fact does not diminish the plausibility of extending a moral right or potential moral right to life to a naturally probable potentially sentient fetus, which we have good reason to believe will actually become sentient in the natural course of things if nothing is done to prevent its normal development. I conclude that it is not merely the potentiality, but the strong potentiality of a healthy, normally developing fetus that is soon to acquire sentience, moral interests, and, on McGinn’s own terms, a moral right to life, that continues to sustain the abortion contro‐versy, even among those who also want respect a woman’s moral right to reproductive self‐determination. (shrink)