The history of international relations is characterized by widespread injustice. What implications does this have for those living in the present? Should contemporary states pay reparations to the descendants of the victims of historic wrongdoing? Many writers have dismissed the moral urgency of rectificatory justice in a domestic context, as a result of their forward-looking accounts of distributive justice. Rectifying International Injustice argues that historical international injustice raises a series of distinct theoretical problems, as a result of the popularity of (...) backward-looking accounts of distributive justice in an international context. It lays out three morally relevant forms of connection with the past, based in ideas of benefit, entitlement and responsibility. Those living in the present may have obligations to pay compensation insofar as they are benefiting, and others are suffering, as a result of the effects of historic injustice. They may be in possession of property which does not rightly belong to them, but to which others have inherited entitlements. Finally, they may be members of political communities which bear collective responsibility for an ongoing failure to rectify historic injustice. Rectifying International Injustice considers each of these three linkages with the past in detail. It examines the complicated relationship between rectificatory justice and distributive justice, assesses the appropriateness of judging the past by contemporary moral standards, and argues that many of those who resist cosmopolitan demands for the global redistribution of resources have failed to appreciate the extent to which past wrongdoing undermines the legitimacy of contemporary resource holdings. (shrink)

The core claim of this paper is that mind minding of the sort required for the simplest and most pervasive forms of joint attentional activity is best understood and explained in non-representational, enactivist terms. In what follows I will attempt to convince the reader of its truth in three steps. The first step, section two, clarifies the target explanandum. The second step, section three, is wholly descriptive. It highlights the core features of a Radically Enactivist proposal about elementary mind minding, (...) revealing it to be at least a possible explanans. The final step is to consider the comparative virtues of the contending proposals; section four. The exercise is to decide which of the possible explanations is best. Various evidential appeals and theoretical considerations that might aid us in this choice are reviewed. The conclusion is that the scales would be tipped in favour of the Radical Enactivist option, decisively, if it should turn out that there is (1) no reason to believe that basic forms of mentality are representational (in a semantically contentful way) and (2) if no good theory is likely to explain how they could be so. It is concluded that all that we need for understanding basic forms of intentional (with a ‘t’) mentality and what it takes to attend to basic cases of mind minding. (shrink)

These free-wheeling, often exhilarating dialogues—which grew out of the acclaimed Carnegie Hall Talks—are an exchange between two of the most prominent figures in contemporary culture: Daniel Barenboim, internationally renowned conductor and pianist, and Edward W. Said, eminent literary critic and impassioned commentator on the Middle East. Barenboim is an Argentinian-Israeli and Said a Palestinian-American; they are also close friends. As they range across music, literature, and society, they open up many fields of inquiry: the importance of a sense of (...) place; music as a defiance of silence; the legacies of artists from Mozart and Beethoven to Dickens and Adorno; Wagner’s anti-Semitism; and the need for “artistic solutions” to the predicament of the Middle East—something they both witnessed when they brought young Arab and Israeli musicians together. Erudite, intimate, thoughtful and spontaneous, Parallels and Paradoxes is a virtuosic collaboration. (shrink)

INTENSIONAL LOGIC §1. Natural Language and Intensional Logic When we speak of a theory of meaning for a natural language such as English, we have in mind an ...

This commentary will seek to clarify certain core features of Thompson’s proposal about the enactive nature of basic mentality, as best it can, and to bring his ideas into direct conversation with accounts of basic cognition of the sort favoured by analytical philosophers of mind and more traditional cognitive scientists – i.e. those who tend to be either suspicious or critical of enactive/embodied approaches (to the extent that they confess to understanding them at all). My proposed way of opening up (...) this sort of dialogue is to concentrate on the close similarities between Thompson’s biologically-based proposal about non-representational forms of basic cognition and what I take to be a reasonable modification to the ambitions of teleosemantic theories of content. Insofar as today’s theories of mental representation are less concerned to understand content in properly semantic terms they are moving ever closer to the sorts of account proposed by enactivists of the Thompsonian stripe – close enough to have meaningful debates about the nature of basic mentality. It is against this backdrop that I put a spotlight on the true promise and value of enactivism, providing some compelling reasons for wanting to go Thompson’s way. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position (...) for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures. (shrink)

This book is a study of the role of intellect in human action as described by Thomas Aquinas. One of its primary aims is to compare the interpretation of Aristotle by Aquinas with the lines of interpretation offered in contemporary Aristotelian scholarship. The book seeks to clarify the problems involved in the appropriation of Aristotle's theory by a Christian theologian, including such topics as the practical syllogism and the problems of akrasia. Westberg argues that Aquinas was much closer to Aristotle (...) than is often recognized, and he puts forward important new interpretations of the relation of intellect and will in the stages of intention, deliberation, decision, and execution. In the concluding section of the book, he shows how this new interpretation yields fruitful insights on a range of theological topics, including sin, law, love, and the moral virtues. (shrink)

Friends of Wright-entitlement cannot appeal to direct epistemic consequentialism (believe or accept what maximizes expected epistemic value) in order to account for the epistemic rationality of accepting Wright-entitled propositions. The tenability of direct consequentialism is undermined by the “Truth Fairy”: a powerful being who offers you great epistemic reward (in terms of true beliefs) if you accept a proposition p for which you have evidence neither for nor against. However, this chapter argues that a form of indirect epistemic consequentialism seems (...) promising as a way to deal with the Truth Fairy problem. The relevant form of indirect consequentialism accommodates evidentialism but allows for exceptions in the case of anti-sceptical hypotheses. Since these are the kind of propositions to which Wright-entitlement is supposed to apply—i.e. cornerstone propositions—indirect consequentialism is entitlement-friendly. (shrink)

This book tries to look at human thought and action from a scientific perspective, and in the process, acquaints the reader with essential concepts about science and its history. It takes a broad look at our present troubles without overlooking some crucial historical, religious, and political causes but places science at the center stage. The author applies what he has learned throughout his career to go beyond science. After an introduction setting the scene and a review of the "scientific temper" (...) and the inexcusable ignorance of science by some leaders and many followers, the author turns his sharp vision to look at other issues. The most significant challenges are critical and global: climate change caused by our activities, stockpiles of nuclear weapons that are a constant threat, population growth, and increasing inequality at all levels. These problems do have a profound ethical character and threaten to end forever with our misery, producing a "catastrophic convergence". Written with rigor for all readers, with many references and infused with relevant quotations, the author's message is clear: we need to change our ways drastically and urgently, now or never. But he offers not much in terms of a solution, something done by many authors to sweeten the pill, because as he argues, beyond lofty declarations, there is no real solution as the clock runs down, leading to his dystopian view of the future. (shrink)

Liberties are taken in portraying the US public as class-conscious and informed. Otherwise, this story would not be about a revolution ... it would be about a fascist takeover. The chances of fighting off fascism are very slim unless the public at large is provided with an accessible alternative to the news and history which they are offered by the mass media, by the schools, by the government and by their employers. These reports are not a hoax, but a piece (...) of fiction written for entertainment and in an effort to stimulate dialog. --D.A. (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)

I present a straightforward objection to the view that what we know has epistemic probability 1: when combined with Bayesian decision theory, the view seems to entail implausible conclusions concerning rational choice. I consider and reject three responses. The first holds that the fault is with decision theory, rather than the view that knowledge has probability 1. The second two try to reconcile the claim that knowledge has probability 1 with decision theory by appealing to contextualism and sensitive invariantism, respectively. (...) I argue that each response fails, and that we can hold on to much of what was attractive in the responses while denying that what we know has probability 1. (shrink)

Jeffrey (1983) proposed a generalization of conditioning as a means of updating probability distributions when new evidence drives no event to certainty. His rule requires the stability of certain conditional probabilities through time. We tested this assumption (“invariance”) from the psychological point of view. In Experiment 1 participants offered probability estimates for events in Jeffrey’s candlelight example. Two further scenarios were investigated in Experiment 2, one in which invariance seems justified, the other in which it does not. Results were in (...) rough conformity to Jeffrey (1983)’s principle. (shrink)

When communicating scientific information, experts often face difficult choices about how to promote public understanding while also maintaining an appropriate level of objectivity. We argue that one way for scientists and others involved in communicating scientific information to alleviate these tensions is to pay closer attention to the major frames employed in the contexts in which they work. By doing so, they can ideally employ useful frames while also enabling the recipients of information to “backtrack” to relatively uncontroversial facts and (...) recognize how these frames relate to their own values and perspectives. Important strategies for promoting this sort of backtracking include identifying the weaknesses of particular frames, preventing misunderstanding of them, differentiating well-supported findings from more speculative claims, and acknowledging major alternative frames. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Moral hazards are ubiquitous. Green ones typically involve technological fixes: Environmentalists often see ‘technofixes’ as morally fraught because they absolve actors from taking more difficult steps toward systemic solutions. Carbon removal and especially solar geoengineering are only the latest example of such technologies. We here explore green moral hazards throughout American history. We argue that dismissing (solar) geoengineering on moral hazard grounds is often unproductive. Instead, especially those vehemently opposed to the technology should use it as an opportunity to (...) expand the attention paid to the underlying environmental problem in the first place, actively invoking its opposite: ‘inverse moral hazards’. (shrink)

Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people’s normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God’s unique mind is due, the authors suggest, (...) to the uniquely moral role He occupies. In this article, the authors propose that God is seen as the ultimate moral agent, the entity people blame and praise when they receive anomalous harm and help. Support for this proposition comes from research on mind perception, morality, and moral typecasting. Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine. (shrink)

This is the first modern book to describe Francis Bacon's jurisprudence. He has long been famous as a scientist, philosopher, politician and literary giant, but his career as one of England's greatest lawyers and jurists has been largely overlooked. Bacon's major contribution to Anglo-American jurisprudence is presented in such a way as to be suitable to specialists and non-specialists alike. The purpose is to restore Bacon to his rightful place as England's first true critical and analytical jurist, and to describe (...) how his legal thought related to his other great intellectual achievements. (shrink)

Consider this chess puzzle. White to checkmate in two. It appeared recently in the Boston Globe, and what startled me about it was that I had thought it had been proven that you can’t checkmate with a lone knight (and a king, of course). This is a counterexample, a strange circumstance that can arise in a legal game of chess. This fact is a higher-order truth of chess, namely that the “proof” that you can never checkmate with a lone knight (...) and king is unsound. Now let’s consider chmess (I made up the term); it’s the game that you get by allowing the king to move two spaces, not one, in any direction. I made it up and I don’t know if anybody has ever played it. I have no idea whether it’s worth playing. Probably it isn’t, but it doesn’t matter; it’s not even worth our attention long enough to figure out. But a moment’s reflection reveals that there are exactly as many higher-order a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess, namely, an infinity of them. And no doubt they would be roughly as difficult to discover and to prove as the higherorder truths of chess. There are people who make a living working out the truths of chess and certainly it’s been a big avocation for many other people. But I doubt if anybody yet has spent more than 5 minutes trying to work out the a priori truths, and the higher-order truths, of chmess. (shrink)

Can Rawls’s theory provide a framework for assessing obligations to future generations? Extending the veil of ignorance so that participants in the original position do not know to which generation they belong appears to fail in this endeavour. Earlier generations cannot improve their situation by “cooperating” with later generations. Such circumstances, lacking mutuality, leave no room for an agreement or contract. Nevertheless, the original position can be reconstructed so as to model relations of mutuality between generations even if these are (...) absent from the real world. This chapter assesses earlier attempts to do this and provides a rationale for viewing the just savings principle as a clause in the full formulation of the difference principle. (shrink)

The discounting principle states that 'the role of a given cause in producing a given effect is discounted if other plausible causes are present' (Kelley, 1972, p. 8). The principle has only been tested with cases where the two explanations are of the same kind (i.e., causal explanations). However, explanations of properties of objects, people, or events often involve functions. Zebras have stripes in order to be better camouflaged. Humans have eyebrows to keep sweat from running into their eyes. Adrenaline (...) is secreted in order to modulate fight and flight responses. Thus, what happens when we are faced with two different kinds of explanation for the same property: one functional and one causal? People evaluated explanations of properties for natural kinds and artefacts. Functional explanations were discounted in favour of causal explanations, however this was only true for properties of artefacts. The presence of an alternative explanation for properties of natural kinds did not affect the plausibility of either kind of explanation. (shrink)

Moral dilemmas set a challenge for ethical theory. They are situations where agents seem to be under an obligation both to do, and to refrain from doing, a specific act. Are such situations possible? What is their exact nature? These are the questions that _Moral Dilemmas_ tries to answer. The book argues that moral theories should not allow for the possibility of irresolvable dilemmas, for situations in which no right answer exists. To this end, arguments seeking to prove the existence (...) of irresolvable dilemmas, especially the argument from the incommensurability of values, are discussed at length and refuted. The book shows that though on the normative level dilemmas are resolved, they typically involve a high moral cost for which there is no adequate compensation. This moral cost is the source of the regret and pain suffered by agents in moral dilemmas. Thus, moral dilemmas do not point to any inconsistency in our moral reasoning or theory, but to a problematic aspect of the human condition; at times (probably less often than is usually believed), human beings are justified, and even required, to dirty their hands by behaving in ways that in ordinary situations would be strictly forbidden and condemned. (shrink)

For the first time, this volume brings together the research and theories of psychologists whose work explores the processes and strategies that are involved when people attempt to control their own thoughts, moods, and behavior. It covers the multiple dimensions of mental control - its causes, consequences, and components, and draws on current research within social, personality, cognitive, developmental, and clinical psychology. For professionals in the field of behavior analysis.

Robert Veatch has claimed that virtue theory is not only irrelevant but potentially dangerous in medical ethics. I argue that virtue is a far more prominent factor in contemporary medical practice than Veatch admits. Even if ‘stranger medicine’ is taken as the norm, proper conduct on the part of physicians depends on certain character traits in order to be maintained consistently over a long period of time and in situations which run counter to the physician's own interests. Right conduct, which (...) Veatch argues is the central moral issue in the physician-patient relationship, is intertwined with certain virtues. Moreover, the virtue of integrity and the concept of a unified lifenarrative are especially useful in analyzing an important factor missing in modern medicine. And since medicine relies necessarily on some concept of human flourishing I argue that virtue theory can play a central role in helping to determine the goals of medical practice. Keywords: virtue, right conduct, character, competence, life-narrative, specialization, human flourishing CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Although torture can establish guilt through confession, how are judgments of guilt made when tortured suspects do not confess? We suggest that perceived guilt is based inappropriately upon how much pain suspects appear to suffer during torture. Two psychological theories provide competing predictions about the link between pain and perceived blame: cognitive dissonance, which links pain to blame, and moral typecasting, which links pain to innocence. We hypothesized that dissonance might characterize the relationship between torture and blame for those close (...) to the torture, while moral typecasting might characterize this relationship for those more distant from it. Accordingly, this experiment placed participants into one of two different roles in which people may be exposed to torture. Participants in the proximal role of prison staffer saw suffering torture victims as relatively more guilty, while participants in the relatively distant role of a radio listener saw suffering victims as more innocent. (shrink)

The emergence of cognitive science as a multi-disciplinary investigation into the nature of mind has historically revolved around the core assumption that the central ‘cognitive’ aspects of mind are computational in character. Although there is some disagreement and philosophical speculation concerning the precise formulation of this ‘core assumption’ it is generally agreed that computationalism in some form lies at the heart of cognitive science as it is currently conceived. Von Eckardt’s recent work on this topic is useful in enabling us (...) to get a sense of the scope of the computational assumption. She makes clear that there are two rather different ways in which we could understand cognitive science’s commitment to computationalism and hence two ways to understand the claim that the ‘mind is a computer’, by appeal to either (1) A mathematical theory of computability or (2) A theory of data-processing or informationprocessing. Importantly, she also argues that although there are many aspects of claim that the ‘mind is a computer’ that can be nicely captured by Boyd’s account of the way scientific metaphors are employed, not to direct attention to the hitherto unnoticed, but to encourage investigation of the unknown. Nonetheless, cognitive scientists are not making the claim that the ‘mind is a computer’ in a metaphorical sense. If Von Eckhardt is correct, when cognitive scientists assume the ‘mind is a computer’ and give a sense to the notion of the computer in the sense of (2) above, they are making a literal claim about the nature of mind (Von Eckardt, 1993, p. 116). And as she points out that if one reads (2) in a theoretically committed way then there is no a priori reason to exclude the organic brain from the list of entities that might fall under the description of being a ‘computer’. Important, we can truly describe it as a data-processing (or information-processing) device. What is useful about Von Eckardt’s general analysis of computationalism’s core assumption is that it provides a clear angle from which to view the flaws of computationalism. This paper defends the claim that if there is an account of information adequate to capture those aspects of mind that we regard as essential to mentality it is one that requires us to surrender the idea that the mind is a computer.. (shrink)

Non-Reductive Physicalism is similar in many ways with, what I will call, Orthodox Theism. This strongly suggests that Non-Reductive Physicalist solutions to the Supervenience Argument can be adapted to offer Orthodox Theistic solutions to the Conservation is Continuous Creation Argument. One particular Non-Reductive Physicalist solution will be examined in detail and then applied in the debate over Occasionalism.

The volumes are self contained and can be used individually in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses ranging from introductory psychology, linguistics, ...

This thesis evaluates several powerful arguments that not only deny that brain states and conscious states are one and the same thing, but also claim that such an identity is unintelligible. I argue that these accounts do not undermine physicalism because they don’t provide any direct or independent justification for their tacit assumptions about a link between modes of presentation and explanation. In my view intelligibility of psychophysical identity should not be based exclusively on the analysis of meaning. The main (...) concern then should be why expect that fully intelligible explanation must be based on the descriptions of the causal roles as modes of presentation. To this effect I propose that we examine "psychological concepts". The psychological concepts are concepts that use descriptions of the functional roles but are about qualities of our experiences. I propose to analyze them in quality space models in order to unveil why phenomenal concepts are expected to refer via descriptions of the causal or functional roles. The quality space should be understood here as a multidimensional space consisting of several axes of relative similarity and differences among the structures of ordering in different modalities of conscious experience. On my proposal it is possible that some axes in the quality space consist of their own quality spaces so we could “zoom in” and “zoom out” into the descriptions of the functional roles and see more clearly what the explanation of certain aspects of consciousness looks like when thought of in terms of psychological concepts. (shrink)

The general knowledge of Brentano's ethical doctrines comes from the little book of his, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, first published in 1889. Only the recent publications and the insight into his not yet published correspondence throw more light on the history of his axiology.