The motivation of this paper is to contribute to the project of finding new ways to use "utopia" in philosophy again. Since philosophers as well as poets can look to their forbears for inspiration in re-inventing terms, it would be nice if those of us trying to rehabilitate the term could lean a bit on our own disciplinary heavies, especially in the current climate of philosophical skepticism, even cynicism, about the very idea of utopia. My contribution to that task here (...) will be to present a vision of utopian commitment that I see taking shape in the interface between Kant's ethics and aesthetics. This vision is broadly speaking a moral one, insofar as it describe the barriers to, but also the necessary conditions of, human motivation to strive for the creation of a just society in the real world. But turning to Kant's ethics as a model for a theory of utopia requires some explanation. After all, his moral theory, when it takes into account the really existing conditions of human existence, appears to do so only to dismiss them as obstacles or diversions in the path of correct moral judgment. When he discusses human community, it is often to dismiss it as driven by self-interest and and an "each against all" struggle that can be responsibly regulated but never eliminated. At best this "unsocial sociability" might be evidence for a hypothetical natural purpose: human strife and misery is a mechanical force driving the progress of our talents and capacities in the long evolutionary run.1 But this is hardly a utopian vision in the sense in which we would wish to see a well-regulated society be.. (shrink)

Mill's discussion of ‘the internal sanction’ in chapter III of Utilitarianism does not do justice to his understanding of internal sanctions; it omits some important points and obscures others. I offer an account of this portion of his moral psychology of motivation which brings out its subtleties and complexities. I show that he recognizes the importance of internal sanctions as sources of motives to develop and perfect our characters, as well as of motives to do our duty, and I examine (...) in some detail the various ways in which these sanctions give rise to motivating desires and aversions. (shrink)

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a large portion of the world into quarantine, leading to an extensive period of stress making it necessary to explore regulatory techniques that are effective at stimulating long-lasting positive emotion. Previous research has demonstrated that anticipating positive events produces increases in positive emotion during discrete stressors. We hypothesized that state and trait positive anticipation during the COVID-19 pandemic would be associated with increased positive emotions. We assessed how often participants thought about a future (...) positive/negative/neutral event, activity, or goal through a daily reconstruction method that represented a “day in the life” of people in the United States during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of multi-level modeling and mediational analyses demonstrated that higher optimism, one form of trait positive anticipation, was related to higher state positive anticipation, which was in turn related to higher positive emotions during the current episode, which persisted to the next episode. In addition, both optimism and state positive anticipation were related to adaptive responses to the pandemic. These findings suggest that anticipation of future emotional experiences and hopefulness for the future can be a powerful predictor of positive emotions during global pandemics and perhaps other similar chronic stressors. (shrink)

Quantum field theories containing massless particles are divergent not just in the ultraviolet but also in the infrared. Infrared divergences are typically regarded as less conceptually problematic than ultraviolet divergences because there is a cancellation mechanism that renders measurable physical observables such as decay rates and cross-sections infrared finite. In this article, I scrutinize the restriction to measurable physical observables that is required to arrive at infrared finite results. I argue that the restriction does not necessitate a retreat to operationalism (...) about the meaning of the theory, but it does call attention to underappreciated features of the infrared regime. (shrink)

In a well-known passage in chapter V of On Liberty, J. S. Mill notes that while economic competition is generally socially beneficial and should be permitted, this “Free Trade” doctrine does not follow from the liberty or harm principle because “trade is a social act.” In a largely overlooked passage in chapter IV of the same essay, however, Mill contends that for society to coercively prohibit the practice of piecework – paying workers by the unit rather than by the hour (...) or day – does violate this principle. In this short note, I demonstrate that Mill's reasoning in these two passages is contradictory. (shrink)

Friesen et al. (2023) article explores tensions within institutional review boards (IRBs) when they aim both to protect participants from harm and to include under-represented populations in clinic...

In The Second-Person Standpoint and subsequent essays, Stephen Darwall develops an account of morality that is “second-personal” in virtue of holding that what we are morally obligated to do is what others can legitimately demand that we do, i.e., what they can hold us accountable for doing through moral reactive attitudes like blame. Similarly, what it would be wrong for us to do is what others can legitimately demand that we abstain from doing. As part of this account, Darwall argues (...) for the proposition that we have a distinctive “second-personal reason” to fulfill all of our obligations and to avoid all wrong-actions, an “authority-regarding” reason that derives from the legitimate demands the “moral community” makes of us. I show that Darwall offers an insufficient case for this proposition. My criticism of this aspect of Darwall’s account turns in part on the fact that we have compunction-based or “compunctive” reasons to fulfill all of our obligations and to avoid all wrong actions, a type of reason that Darwall seemingly overlooks. (shrink)

Using payment to recruit research subjects is a common practice, but it raises ethical concerns that coercion or undue inducement could potentially compromise participants’ informed consent. This is the first national study to explore the attitudes of IRB members and other human subjects protection professionals concerning whether payment of research participants constitutes coercion or undue influence, and if so, why. The majority of respondents expressed concern that payment of any amount might influence a participant’s decisions or behaviors regarding research participation. (...) Respondents expressed greater acceptance of payment as reimbursement or compensation than as an incentive to participate in research, and most agreed that subjects are coerced if the offer of payment makes them participate when they otherwise would not or when the offer of payment causes them to feel that they have no reasonable alternative but to participate . Views about undue influence were similar. We conclude that human subjects protection professionals hold expansive and inconsistent views about coercion and undue influence that may interfere with the recruitment of research participants and impede valuable research. (shrink)

Physical theories often characterize their observables with real number precision. Many non-fundamental theories do so needlessly: they are more precise than they need to be to capture the physical matters of fact about their observables. A natural expectation is that a truly fundamental theory will require its full precision in order to exhaustively capture all of the fundamental physical matters of fact. I argue against this expectation and I show that we do not have good reason to expect that the (...) standard of precision set by successful theories, or even by a truly fundamental theory, will match the granularity of the physical facts. (shrink)

After critiquing some earlier attempts (including those of Marcus Singer and Frances Howard–Snyder) to ground objections to actual–consequence act utilitarianism (ACAU) on human cognitive limitations, I present two new objections with this same foundation. Both start with the observation that, because human cognitive abilities are not up to the task of reliably recognizing utility–maximizing actions, any agents who are recognizably human – including the best possible humans, morally speaking – are certain to perform many actions every day that ACAU says (...) are immoral, and to perform some actions over the course of their lives that it says are highly immoral. The first objection is that, if Mill's analysis of what it means to call an action wrong is accurate, then ACAU entails a conclusion that no one will accept, viz., that the morally–best humans possible ought to undergo constant punishment. The second objection is that ACAU entails that even the morally–best humans possible are bad moral agents in some respect. This conclusion, while unpalatable, is not so obviously unacceptable as the first. However, I do briefly consider some ways in which it might be possible to demonstrate that it is false and thereby complete a reductio of ACAU. (shrink)

With breathtalung speed, traditional criminal prohibitions against assisted suicide have been declared unconstitutional in twelve states, including California and New York. This poses great promise and great peril. The promise is that competent terminally ill patients, as a compassionate measure of last resort, will have the option of putting an end to their suffering by physician-assisted suicide. More sigmficant, legally permitting this controversial option may be a catalyst for doctors, health care institutions, and society to improve the care of the (...) dying. PAS should be limited only to those relatively few competent patients who continue to suffer intolerably despite unrestrained efforts to palliate and who face a continued existence that they regard as worse than death. When dying patients know they will not be abandoned to miserable and pointless suffering if palliative care fails, they will be fortified to cope better with the process of dying.The immediate peril is that PAS will become a quick fix, available on demand to any patient diagnosed as terminally ill, thus bypassing palliative care and producing premature deaths. (shrink)

Could an accreditation, certification, or rating mechanism help the pharmaceutical industry improve both its bioethical performance and its public reputation? Other industries have used such systems to assess, improve, distinguish, and demonstrate the quality of their services, processes, and products. These systems have also helped increase transparency, accountability, stakeholder confidence, and awareness of industry best practices. This article explains how market forces can be harnessed to recognize and promote better bioethical performance by pharmaceutical companies when there are good systems to (...) accredit, certify, or rate. It concludes with a review of relevant failures of credit-rating agencies — such as conflicts of interests and revolving-door practices — to illuminate some of the pitfalls of developing a bioethics accreditation, certification, or rating system for pharmaceutical companies. (shrink)

Timothy Murphy argues in his article “In Defense of Irreligious Bioethics” (2012) that the role of religion in normative bioethics should be limited and that a viable means for limiting its role (o...

Theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF) have traditionally been measured starting in preschool and share a similar developmental progression into childhood. Although there is some research examining early ToM and EF in the first 3 years, further empirical evidence and a theoretical framework for a ToM-EF relationship from infancy to preschool are necessary. In this paper we review the ToM-EF relationship in preschoolers and provide evidence for early development in ToM, EF, and the ToM-EF relationship. We propose that (...) models of cognitive control (i.e., Hierarchical Competing Systems Model: Marcovitch & Zelazo (Journal of Cognition and Development 7:477–501, 2006), (Developmental Science 12:1–25, 2009)); and Levels of Consciousness Model: Zelazo (Trends in Cognitive Science 8:12–17, 2004) account for the ToM-EF relationship across childhood through domain-general developments in the ability to form and reflect on relevant representations that can guide behavior in both ToM and EF situations. The combination of these models also presents unique, domain-general considerations for interpreting early ToM from infancy to preschool. (shrink)

This chapter offers an overview of some of the most significant aspects of J. S. Mill’s work in moral, social, and political philosophy and presents a balanced picture of the debates between interpreters over how this work should be understood without remaining strictly neutral. On the reading developed herein, Mill’s moral theory comprises a hedonistic theory of value and a rule-utilitarian theory of obligation. While not a ‘virtue ethicist’ per se, he attaches paramount importance to the development of our distinctly (...) human faculties and the formation of desirable habits. These moral views underlie his social and political philosophy, including his famous ‘liberty’ or ‘harm’ principle, defence of women’s liberation, advocacy of an employee-ownership economy, and call for a system of government that balances democratic and elitist tendencies. Mill’s social and political philosophy is ‘utopian’ inasmuch as it aims at making it possible for virtually everyone to enjoy a genuinely happy life. (shrink)

BackgroundThe U.S. Food and Drug Administration traditionally has kept confidential significant amounts of information relevant to the approval or non-approval of specific drugs, devices, and biologics and about the regulatory status of such medical products in FDA’s pipeline.ObjectiveTo develop practical recommendations for FDA to improve its transparency to the public that FDA could implement by rulemaking or other regulatory processes without further congressional authorization. These recommendations would build on the work of FDA’s Transparency Task Force in 2010.MethodsIn 2016-2017, we convened (...) a team of academic faculty from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Yale Medical School, Yale Law School, and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to develop recommendations through an iterative process of reviewing FDA’s practices, considering the legal and policy constraints on FDA in expanding transparency, and obtaining insights from independent observers of FDA.ResultsThe team developed 18 specific recommendations for improving FDA’s transparency to the public. FDA could adopt all these recommendations without further congressional action.FundingThe development of the Blueprint for Transparency at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. (shrink)

Rule consequentialism holds that an action's moral standing depends on its relation to the moral code whose general adoption would have the best consequences. Heretofore rule consequentialists have understood the notion of a code's being generally adopted in terms of its being generally obeyed or, more commonly, its being generally accepted. I argue that these ways of understanding general adoption lead to unacceptable formulations of the theory. For instance, Brad Hooker, Michael Ridge, and Holly Smith have recently offered different answers (...) to the question of what ‘acceptance rate’ we should build into our formulation of rule consequentialism, and all are unsatisfactory. I argue instead for a novel approach to formulating rule consequentialism, ‘uniform-moral-education’ rule consequentialism, on which what it means for a moral code to be generally adopted is not for it to be generally followed or generally accepted, but instead for it to be generally taught. (shrink)

[The Catcher in the Rye's] catalogue of characters, incidents, expressions could be extended indefinitely, all of them suggesting that Holden's sickness of soul is something deeper than economic or political, that his revulsion at life is not limited to social and monetary inequities, but at something in the nature of life itself - the decrepitude of the aged, the physical repulsiveness of the pimpled, the disappearance and dissolution of the dead, the terrors of sex, the hauntedness of human aloneness, the (...) panic of individual isolation. Headlines about Korea, Dean Acheson, and the cold war seem, if not irrelevant, essentially wide of the mark - if we define the mark as the heart and soul of Catcher. James E. Miller, Jr., author of "Henry James in Reality" and numerous books and articles on American literature, responds in this essay to Carol and Richard Ohmann's "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye. The Ohmann's answer will appear in our summer issue. (shrink)

In working his way through his complex conception of the relation of fiction and reality, [Henry] James thus found the unconscious moral dimension inextricably embedded within "realism" itself. In following the threads of realism back to consciousness itself, James invariably found there intertwined with its roots those aspects and elements that other theorists kept carefully separate. By exploring experience to its source, he found imagination. By following objective life from "out there" to conception, he found individual vision. By following the (...) seeming oneness of the passing show back to perception, he found infinite variation and multiplicity. By following the uncolored flux and flow of events to their embodiment in the fictional medium, he found coloration of personality. And by following the "felt life" back to the artist's "prime sensibility", James found there the "moral sense" and the "enveloping air of the artist's humanity"—that which gives "the last touch to the worth of a work." James E. Miller, Jr., professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass; Walt Whitman; F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique; J.D. Salinger; Theory of Fiction: Henry James; and numerous articles on American literature and education. He contributed "Catcher In and Out of History" to Critical Inquiry, Spring 1977. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue for the following theory: constitutive Russellian phenomenal bonding panpsychism. To do so I do three main things: 1) I argue for Russellian panpsychism. 2) I argue for phenomenal bonding panpsychism. 3) I defend the resultant phenomenal bonding panpsychist model. The importance of arguing for such a theory is that if it can be made to be viable, then it is proposed to be the most promising theory of the place of consciousness within nature. This is (...) because constitutive Russellian panpsychism has all the theoretical virtues of physicalism and dualism but does not face the problems they do. The combination problem, however, is the most significant problem for the Russellian panpsychist, and, hence, in order to show the viability of the theory I address this problem. Moreover, I present a novel ”mereological argument’ for panpsychism which makes it necessary that the Russellian panpsychist addresses the combination problem. The focus of this thesis is therefore addressing this problem. I argue that the combination problem can indeed be solved. To do so I argue for the phenomenal bonding solution proposed by Goff. I argue that this solution works and that we can form a positive concept of the phenomenal bonding relation. This forces the panpsychist to make sense of how experiencing subjects can be proper parts of other experiencing subjects. I then argue that this can indeed be made sense of and show that we can indeed be composite subjects made of other subjects. To show that we can be subjects made up of other subjects I defend this proposal from various objections from throughout the literature. All these objections can be responded to by the constitutive Russellian phenomenal bonding panpsychist. Ultimately this leaves us with a novel and interesting account of what conscious subjects are, and what the material world is: they are both composite entities made wholly of conscious matter. (shrink)

Approaches to the interpretation of physical theories provide accounts of how physical meaning accrues to the mathematical structure of a theory. According to many standard approaches to interpretation, meaning relations are captured by maps from the mathematical structure of the theory to statements expressing its empirical content. In this article I argue that while such accounts adequately address meaning relations when exact models are available or perturbation theory converges, they do not fare as well for models that give rise to (...) divergent perturbative expansions. Since truncations of divergent perturbative expansions often play a critical role in establishing the empirical adequacy of a theory, this is a serious deficiency. I show how to augment state-space semantics, a view developed by Beth and van Fraassen, to capture perturbatively evaluated observables even in cases where perturbation theory is divergent. This new semantics establishes a sense in which the calculations that underwrite the empirical adequacy of a theory are both meaningful and true, but requires departure from the assumption that physical meaning is captured entirely by the exact models of a theory. (shrink)