This paper addresses the criticism recently directed at Internet companies who have chosen to do business in China. Currently, in order to conduct business in China, companies must agree to the Chinese government's rule of self-censoring any information the government deems inappropriate. We start by explaining how some of these companies have violated the human rights of Chinese citizens to freely trade information. We then analyze whether the justifications and excuses offered by these companies are sufficient to absolve them of (...) moral responsibility. We argue that both justifications and excuses offered are insufficient. Wilfully abiding by unjust laws, albeit necessary to do business in China, should not trump moral actions that protect rights. (shrink)

In an article discussing the means by which democratic values education is to be inculcated, Tapio Puolimatka argued that ‘it is possible to educate in democratic values in ways that foster the development of the rational and moral autonomy of children only within the moral realist context’. Examining in detail Puolimatka’s defence of moral realism, we will offer a Rortyan response to moral realism as well as a pragmatist account of democratic values education.

Edgar A. Towne is Professor of Theology, Emeritus at Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis. This book began as Towne’s 1967 doctoral dissertation in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The original title, Ontological and Theological Dimensions of God in the Thought of Paul Tillich and Charles Hartshorne, clearly described the intent of his study. While the essential structure and documentation of this earlier form remains, the presentation in this present work is briefer, with additional notes referring to recent study (...) on Tillich and Hartshorne. (shrink)

Letson’s text is a dense, richly worded exposition of three of perhaps the most engaging philosophers of contemporary philosophy: Rorty, Putnam, and Davidson.

Edited by James Sennett, this collection of articles by Alvin Plantinga is certainly deserving. The problem facing Sennett, however, is how to choose articles from an author whose writings span forty years of reflection. Fortunately, in Plantinga's after-word to this book, he approves of Sennett's choice. Plantinga states that the selection is a “snapshot” of his work thus far in the philosophy of religion, one that represents two major concerns: negative apologetics and the development of Christian philosophy.

This recent study on the ethics of human cloning is a lively exchange between two articulate and well informed opponents: Leon R. Kass and James Q. Wilson. Kass is the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College of the University of Chicago. Wilson is the James A. Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The political problem John Locke inherited from Thomas Hobbes was to produce a theory of natural rights that would not preclude the possibility of entering peacefully into civil association. If political existence is grounded on an unmediated theory of natural right, where every individual has a natural right to whatever he or she conceives to be useful in assuring his or her preservation, and where there are no moral limits to what one's rights will justify, civil association cannot come about (...) without invoking the coercive power of absolute sovereign authority. The problem with that, Locke insisted, is that absolute political authority transforms citizens into slaves.To avoid the necessity for invoking Hobbesian absolutism, Locke needed philosophical evidence that, in the natural situation, man is limited by natural duties. Locke produces an idea of natural duty which relocates the source of man's identity as a person bearing rights in what might be called the labor of consciousness. For Locke, it is the labor of consciousness itself - i.e. the act of self-imputation and self-ownership implicit in self-consciousness - that connects self-interest with an assumption of responsibility, and that transforms natural right into a natural principle of morality which does not need the mediating authority of sovereign power or the legitimating authority of God. The result is, we do not need to draw on theological foundations or call upon natural law doctrines as moral substitutes for the Hobbesian sovereign in order to legitimate Locke's political philosophy. Unvarnished natural duty is, for Locke, enough to ground civil association. The result is a natural morality that enables humans to enter into conditions of community and mutual trust without enlisting the intervening authority of sovereign power. Das staatsphilosophische Problem, das Locke von Hobbes geerbt hatte, war das Problem, eine Theorie natürlicher Rechte zu formulieren, die dem friedlichen Übertritt in eine bürgerliche Gesellschaft nicht entgegensteht. Wenn die Existenz des Staates mit der unkritisiert bleibenden Vorstellung verbunden wird, jedem Individuum komme ein natürliches Recht auf alles zu, was es als für seine Selbsterhaltung nützlich erachtet, und außerdem die moralischen Grenzen, denen ein derartig umfassendes Recht unterliegt, ebenfalls nicht reflektiert werden, dann läßt sich eine bürgerliche Gesellschaft nicht ohne die zwingende Gewalt einer absolut souveränen Macht begründen. Das Problem eines solchen Konzepts, so betont Locke nachdrücklich, besteht darin, daß unter einer absoluten politischen Autorität Bürger zu Sklaven werden.Um einen Absolutismus Hobbes'scher Prägung zu vermeiden, mußte Locke den Beweis dafür führen, daß der Mensch im Naturzustand durch natürliche Pflichten gebunden ist. Dazu schuf er die Vorstellung von einer natürlichen Verpflichtung, die den Ursprung der Identität des Menschen als einer Person, die Rechte hat, auf etwas zurückführt, was als "Tätigkeit des Bewußtseins" bezeichnet werden könnte. Für Locke ist es die Tätigkeit des Bewußtseins, d.i. der im Selbstbewußtsein gegründete Akt, sich die eigenen Handlungen selbst zuzuschreiben, überhaupt der Akt der Inbesitznahme des eigenen Selbst, der das Eigeninteresse mit der Annahme von Verantwortlichkeit verknüpft und das natürliche Recht in ein natürliches Prinzip der Moralität verwandelt, das der regulierenden Autorität einer souveränen Gewalt oder der legitimierenden Autorität Gottes nicht mehr bedarf. Um Lockes politische Philosophie zu rechtfertigen, sind daher weder theologische Begründungen nötig noch Naturrechtsdoktrinen als moralischer Ersatz für den Hobbes'schen Souverän. Locke betrachtet die bloße natürliche Verpflichtung als hinreichend für die Begründung einer bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Das Resultat ist eine natürliche Moralität, die Menschen erlaubt, sich ohne die Intervention einer souveränen Gewalt in einen Zustand der Gemeinschaft und des gegenseitigen Vertrauens zu begeben. (shrink)

Gary Dann criticises my argument that democratic values education requires a moral realist framework. In this paper I argue that Dann's critique contains three basic confusions: (1) He assumes that moral realism necessarily implies evidentialism. (2) He assumes that moral realism gives priority to philosophical thinking as over against common sense reasoning. (3) He forgets that realism is primarily an ontological rather than an epistemological doctrine.

1 Cognitive Architectures 2 Multilayer Perceptrons 3 Relations between Variables 4 Structured Representations 5 Individuals 6 Where does the Machinery of Symbol Manipulation Come From? 7 Conclusions.

Philosophy has never delivered on its promise to settle the great moral and religious questions of human existence, and even most philosophers conclude that it does not offer an established body of disciplinary knowledge. Gary Gutting challenges this view by examining detailed case studies of recent achievements by analytic philosophers such as Quine, Kripke, Gettier, Lewis, Chalmers, Plantinga, Kuhn, Rawls, and Rorty. He shows that these philosophers have indeed produced a substantial body of disciplinary knowledge, but he challenges many (...) common views about what philosophers have achieved. Topics discussed include the role of argument in philosophy, naturalist and experimentalist challenges to the status of philosophical intuitions, the importance of pre-philosophical convictions, Rawls' method of reflective equilibrium, and Rorty's challenge to the idea of objective philosophical truth. The book offers a lucid survey of recent analytic work and presents a new understanding of philosophy as an important source of knowledge. (shrink)

My reply to Macpherson begins by addressing whether it is effects of cognition on early vision or perceptual performance that I am interested in. I proceed to address Macpherson’s comments on evidence from cross-modal effects, interpretations of linguistic effects on image detection, evidence from illusions, and the usefulness of predictive coding for understanding cognitive penetration. By stressing the interactive and distributed nature of neural processing, I am committing to a collapse between perception and cognition. Following such a collapse, the very (...) question of whether cognition affects perception becomes ill-posed, but this may be for the best. (shrink)

Details the intellectual development of George Herbert Mead as a thinker of great originality and as a practitioner of social reform.

Management plays an important role in reinforcing ethics in organizations. To support this aim, managers must use incentive and goal programs in ethical ways. This study examines experimentally the potential ethical costs associated with incentive-driven and goal-induced employee behavior from a managerial perspective. In a quasi-experimental setting, 243 MBA students with significant professional work experience evaluated a hypothetical employee’s ethical behavior under incentive pay systems modeled on a business case. In the role of the employee’s manager, participants evaluated the ethicality (...) of the employee’s incentive-driven and goal-induced ethical/unethical behavior and the outcomes of behavior, with consequences that were either favorable or unfavorable to the organization. The results indicated that participants discounted the ethical considerations of incentive-driven and goal-induced behavior when consequences were favorable to the organization. Participants’ morals and outcome orientations were also significantly related to their ethical judgments and intentions to intervene. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

We model happiness as a measurement tool used to rank alternative actions. Evolution favors a happiness function that measures the individual’s success in relative terms. The optimal function, in particular, is based on a time-varying reference point –or performance benchmark –that is updated over time in a statistically optimal way in order to match the individual’s potential. Habits and peer comparisons arise as special cases of such updating process. This updating also results in a volatile level of happiness that continuously (...) reverts to its long-term mean. Throughout, we draw a parallel with a problem of optimal incentives, which allows us to apply statistical insights from agency theory to the study of happiness. (shrink)

This rich and wide-ranging book defends a “tripartite theory” of responsibility. The general thesis is that responsibility-responses fall into three overlapping categories, each of which presumes distinct agential capacities. On the basis of a close examination of various sorts of marginal agency, these capacities are said to be independent and ground what deserves to be called distinct types or “faces” of responsibility. The first face, attributability, depends on a capacity for character, answerability on a capacity for judgment, and accountability on (...) a capacity for “regard”. This commentary questions the theory’s account of the relations among the types of responsibility, and its attempt to ground responsibility-responses in qualities of “will”. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 4, April 2022. -/- In a moment where needs for care are acute and their provision precarious, feminist care ethics has gained new relevance as a framework for understanding and responding to necessary interdependence. This article reviews and evaluates two long-standing critiques of care ethics in light of this recent research. First, I assess what I call the pluralist feminist critique, or the dispute over the ability of care ethics to address the needs and histories (...) of a range of marginalized subjects. I identify two forms of this critique: the first disputes the biased starting points shaping the development of the theory, and the second concerns the weaponization of care in support of domination. Although these critiques are well-established, I draw attention to recent responses that move care theory in generative directions. I argue that the pluralist feminist critique demands both self-critical transformation in dialog with other feminist schools of thought and a robust account of care ethics' normative authority. I then take up critiques those levied by mainstream ethicists concerned with care theory's adequacy as an ethical approach. I show that recent work on normative authority, conceptual uniqueness, and the grounding of responsibility must be engaged before care theory can be dismissed as “under-theorized.” In articulating these two sets of critiques and evaluating recent rebuttals to them, I argue for a pluralist feminist theory of care within which strands informed by varying philosophical schools and methods can coexist. (shrink)

In this essay, I want to explore one of the most ironic episodes in the history of propaganda, the attempt by various federal agencies to moderate American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda films. My texts will be four films, two produced by the military, and two by Hollywood: December 7th (1943), directed by Gregg Toland and revised by John Ford; Air Force (1943), directed Howard Hawks; Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), directed by Frank Capra; and Betrayal for the East (1945), directed by (...) William Berke. As all of these films are readily available on YouTube, I will be brief in my description of them. Instead, I will focus on how they served to intensify racial hatred of Japanese in general and Japanese-Americans in particular, and how the federal government tried to control that propaganda—but was limited by its own policies regarding Japanese-Americans. (shrink)

Philosophers frequently struggle with the relation of metaphysics to the everyday world, with its practical value, and with its relation to empirical science. This paper distinguishes several different models of the relation between philosophical ontology and applied (scientific) ontology that have been advanced in the history of philosopy. Adoption of a strong participation model for the philosophical ontologist in science is urged, and requirements and consequences of the participation model are explored. This approach provides both a principled view and justification (...) of the role of the philosophical ontologist in contemporary empirical science as well as guidelines for integrating philosophers and philosophical contributions into the practice of science. (shrink)

Plotinus’ account of matter in Ennead III 6[26] 11-15 serves two purposes. The terms, evil and ugly, present the negative side of matter’s causality, providing for the change characteristic of the sensible world and the possibility of ontological evil and privation as well as of moral evil among human beings. The receptacle and other images from Plato’s Timaeus present the positive side of this causality, matter as allowing for the presence of forms in the bodies of the sensible world. Plotinus (...) explicitly articulates the linguistic problem surrounding the nature of matter, since language is derived from the corporeal and thus needs constant correction when applied to matter as incorporeal. His use of language, thus, always has two phases, first, capturing the nature of matter as aptly as possible, and second, highlighting the difference between matter and the image, analogy, or metaphor used to help explain it. (shrink)

This article examines some of the interactions between law, science, and society taking place during a trial. By focusing on a restricted set of scientific and nonscientific actors engaged in negotiating the meaning, relevance, and reliability of scientific evidence, the article illustrates how the categories—law, science, and society—are inextricably interrelated in the legal negotiations and outcome. The introduction of scientific evidence into adversarial legal settings produces strategies, opinions, and claims that are not shaped solely by scientists, lawyers, or legal processes. (...) The situated law-science negotiations provide a site where social order and scientific knowledges are mutually constituted. The outcome of specific law-science interactions will be open to a range of readings and constraints that are not reducible to some putatively correct scientific understanding nor adequately described as the distortion of scientific evidence by the legal system. (shrink)

Volume 33 contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2015-16. Works: Parmenides’ _Poem, Posterior Analytics_ and _Poetics_, Gorgias. Topics: liar’s paradox, syllogism and nature, authorial freedom, _ousia_ and the true and good.

Considers Peter Leeson's arguments regarding the economic viability of workplace democracy.

How should universities help their life science faculty members to integrate discussions of ethics into their courses? The Iowa State University Model Bio-ethics Institutes offer one model.

In a number of places over the last few years Hayden White has attacked a view of history which I shall call the common-sense position and which runs as follows. Although moral and aesthetic assessments play some role in the writing of history, historians are to a large extent concerned with making true statements about the past and with giving correct explanations pf past events, and these central activities can and ought to be assessed by empirical standards, which on the (...) whole are not dissimilar to those employed in the sciences. For White, historical accounts are more like literary fictions than like scientific accounts. They are to be assessed ultimately by appeal to pragmatic, moral, and aesthetic considerations rather than to empirical ones. My aim in this paper is mainly critical. I shall examine a number of claims and arguments which White puts forward in opposition to the common-sense position and argue that they do nothing to undermine it. I shall concentrate mainly on his article "The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact" (in Clio, Vol. Ill, No. 3, June, 1974), although I shall be making some reference to his book Metahistory (John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1973). (shrink)

The role and place of transcendental psychology in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has been a source of some contention. This work presents a detailed argument for restoring transcendental psychology to a central place in the interpretation of Kant's Analytic, in the process providing a detailed response to more "austere" analytic readings.

Tononi et al. claim that their integrated information theory of consciousness makes testable predictions. This article discusses two of the more startling predictions, which follow from the theory’s claim that conscious experiences are generated by inactive as well as active neurons. The first prediction is that a subject’s conscious experience at a time can be affected by the disabling of neurons that were already inactive at that time. The second is that even if a subject’s entire brain is “silent,” meaning (...) that all of its neurons are inactive (but not disabled), the subject can still have a conscious experience. A few authors have noted the implausibility of these predictions—which I call the disabling prediction and the silent brain prediction—but none have considered whether they are testable. In this article, I argue that they are not. In order to make this case, I first try to clarify the distinction between active, inactive (i.e. silent), and inactivated (i.e. disabled) neurons. With this clarification in place, I show that, even putting aside practical difficulties, it is impossible to set up a valid test of either the disabling prediction or the silent brain prediction. The conditions of the tests themselves are conditions under which a response from the subject could not reasonably be interpreted as evidence of consciousness or change in consciousness. (shrink)