The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. Family Values provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should—and should not—have over their children. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that parent-child relationships (...) produce the "familial relationship goods" that people need to flourish. Children's healthy development depends on intimate relationships with authoritative adults, while the distinctive joys and challenges of parenting are part of a fulfilling life for adults. Yet the relationships that make these goods possible have little to do with biology, and do not require the extensive rights that parents currently enjoy. Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child's interest in autonomy severely limits parents' right to shape their children's values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children. Family Values reaffirms the vital importance of the family as a social institution while challenging its role in the reproduction of social inequality and carefully balancing the interests of parents and children. (shrink)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11360-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-11360-4 ... HM651.C64 2007 158.1—dc22 2007022671 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information ...

Harry G. Frankfurt begins his inquiry by asking, “What is it about human beings that makes it possible for us to take ourselves seriously?” Based on The Tanner Lectures in Moral Philosophy, Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right delves into this provocative and original question. The author maintains that taking ourselves seriously presupposes an inward-directed, reflexive oversight that enables us to focus our attention directly upon ourselves, and “[it] means that we are not prepared to accept ourselves just (...) as we come. We want our thoughts, our feelings, our choices, and our behavior to make sense. We are not satisfied to think that our ideas are formed haphazardly, or that our actions are driven by transient and opaque impulses or by mindless decisions. We need to direct ourselves—or at any rate to believe that we are directing ourselves—in thoughtful conformity to stable and appropriate norms. We want to get things right.” The essays delineate two features that have a critical role to play in this: our rationality, and our ability to love. Frankfurt incisively explores the roles of reason and of love in our active lives, and considers the relation between these two motivating forces of our actions. The argument is that the authority of practical reason is less fundamental than the authority of love. Love, as the author defines it, is a volitional matter, that is, it consists in what we are actually committed to caring about. Frankfurt adds that “The object of love can be almost anything—a life, a quality of experience, a person, a group, a moral ideal, a nonmoral ideal, a tradition, whatever.” However, these objects and ideals are difficult to comprehend and often in conflict with each other. Moral principles play an important supporting role in this process as they help us develop and elucidate a vision that inspires our love. The first section of the book consists of the two lectures, which are entitled “Taking Ourselves Seriously” and “Getting It Right.” The second section consists of comments in response by Christine M. Korsgaard, Michael E. Bratman, and Meir Dan-Cohen. The book includes a preface by Debra Satz. (shrink)

Comte argued against the Cartesian conception of the mind that the thinker cannot simultaneously think or perceive and observe itself so doing. Based on insights from cognitive neuroscience, Dehaene has recently given a contemporary answer to Comte’s challenge. He has extended some ideas of Helmholtz on unconscious inferences and argued that we can resolve Comte’s problem by reformulating it in terms of the brain. Since the brain consists of different parts having different functions, it is possible that some parts are (...) involved in observing (they unconsciously process information) while other parts integrate the received information resulting in conscious experiences to which we have access. Dehaene’s answer is criticized and the alternative neo-Aristotelian resolution of Comte’s challenge is discussed. Explanations of blindsight are used to illustrate the differences between the two responses to Comte’s challenge. (shrink)

Monogamy, I’ve argued, faces a pressing problem: the difficulty of finding a morally relevant difference between its restriction on having additional partners and a restriction on having additional friends. To the extent that we’d find a restriction on having additional friends morally troubling, that puts pressure on us to judge the same about monogamy. This argument, however, has recently come under attack by Kyle York, who defends monogamy on grounds of specialness, practicality, and jealousy. In this paper I’ll argue that, (...) pace York, these defenses of monogamy all fail. (shrink)

If consciousness emerges into ontological reality at some point in nature, as system complexity increases, then it also ‘submerges’ at some adjoining point, as structures simplify. This has led some to posit a ‘latent-consciousness’ in what Bohr saw as the consciousness-like spontaneity of quantum phenomena. Yet to move on this basis to Whitehead's ontological pan-experientialism or to direct quantum explanations of consciousness faces serious epistemological limitations -- perhaps being more unwittingly projective than genuinely explanatory. More reasonable would be an epistemological (...) pan- experientialism in the sense of the later James. Consciousness, as the ultimate lens and medium of all knowledge, is inseparable from the physical reality it would know, especially at the very limits of empirical observation in microphysics. ‘Submerged’ consciousness is better understood in Jamesian pragmatic terms than via assumed but unprovable ontologies. (shrink)

First published in 1987. The theory that political obligation and authority are derived from the consent of citizens is commonly accepted in the history of Western political thought. It is expressed in the famous assertion of the American Declaration of Independence that governments derive 'their just powers from the consent of the governed' and in the constitutions of some Western powers. This book provides the first systematic and comprehensive restatement and defence of consent theory since the 19th Century. It distinguishes (...) consent from contract theory, examines what the actual consent of citizens can consist in and what place it must have in liberal democratic theory. The consent theory's relationship with ethics is explored and the major objections to the theory are countered. The author points to some political reforms which would increase the proportion of citizens in liberal democracies whose consent places them under political obligation. The book provides an overview of the current state of the consent theory of political obligation and authority. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept. I also defend Robust Temporalism against several common objections, and I highlight its relevance to a (...) number of practical policy debates, including longtermism. My conclusion is that Robust Temporalism is a moral live option, that deserves to be taken much more seriously in the future. (shrink)

Between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skill lies ‘interactional expertise’—the ability to converse expertly about a practical skill or expertise, but without being able to practice it, learned through linguistic socialisation among the practitioners. Interactional expertise is exhibited by sociologists of scientific knowledge, by scientists themselves and by a large range of other actors. Attention is drawn to the distinction between the social and the individual embodiment theses: a language does depend on the form of the bodies of its members (...) but an individual within that community can learn the language without the body. The idea has significance for our understanding of colour-blindness, deafness and other abilities and disabilities. They say that love's a word. (shrink)

We gratefully reply to our five commentators, responding to their criticisms and comments under the following headings: parochialism and curriculum; rationality and truth; production and distribution; perfectionism, decision-making and disagreement; adultism and parents' interests; non-consequential educational goods; and self-education.

In this contribution we will briefly discuss the shareholders' need for social, ethical and environmental information and the efforts of corporations to address this need. Looking at three cases, we will raise some doubt with regard to the adequacy of corporate SEE reporting to meet the needs of shareholders. We will discuss the following three cases: BP's investments in Azerbaijan, Nike's management of its labour conditions, of child labour and security issues, and Monsanto's production of genetically modified seeds.

This paper argues that the substance concept, as discussed by Aristotle in his Categories, aids us to improve our understanding of human nature. Aristotle distinguished the primary from the secondary substance, and substantial from accidental change. We explain these distinctions, their use for understanding phenomena, and discuss how we can integrate them with evolutionary explanations of human nature. For explaining of how the typical human characteristics evolved, we extend our investigations with a discussion of the concept of person. It is (...) argued that psychological attributes, used to characterize persons, are not attributes of a separate mental substance, as Cartesians believe. The concept of a person, though not a substance concept, qualifies a substance concept of a human being possessing rational powers. The latter evolved as the result of language evolution. (shrink)

The subsystem S of Parry's AI [10] (obtained by omitting modus ponens for the material conditional) is axiomatized and shown to be strongly complete for a class of three valued Kripke style models. It is proved that S is weakly complete for the class of consistent models, and therefore that Ackermann's rule is admissible in S. It also happens that S is decidable and contains the Lewis system S4 on translation — though these results are not presented here. S is (...) arguably the most relevant relevant logic known at this time to be decidable. (shrink)

This is a translation of the second chapter of F.W.J. Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erlaüterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre. It is preceded by a brief introduction in which I situate the chapter within Schelling's oeuvre and suggest that it is not only an early articulation of Schellingian Naturphilosophie, but also prescient, anticipating Schelling's later positive philosophy.

This article elaborates the interactional freedom of friendship and its limits. It shows that friendship is marked by a normative freedom that makes it relatively resistant to reification, especially when compared to erotic love. It argues further, however, that due to friendship’s embeddedness in the contemporary gender order, this freedom is limited. Having first outlined the freedom hypothesis, the article goes on to argue that friendship’s normative freedom is made possible by its weak ‘institutional connectivity’. To clarify that point, the (...) article illustrates friendship’s resistance to the reifying tendencies of therapy culture and then draws the gendered boundary of friendship’s freedom with reference to the position of heterosexual cross-sex friendship in the heteronormative social imaginary. The article concludes by way of argument for a differentiated approach to friendship and suggests that the analysis of its freedom provides significant clues concerning the work that remains to be done towards equal gender relations. (shrink)

Frankfurt argues that self-love is the purest and -- paradoxically, perhaps -- most disinterested form of love.