Whereas several commentators have held that Kant’s argument for the postulate of private right fails insofar as it begs the question, I argue here that this criticism misses the mark. Critics have...

Although many recent free speech skeptics claim Millian credentials, they neglect the more pessimistic elements of Mill's account of human nature. Once we recover the darker elements of Mill's thought, American-style laissez-faire in the domain of expression looks significantly more attractive. Indeed, this paper argues that if Mill is correct about human nature, we have good reason to oppose recent proposed restrictions on expression and to embrace a legal regime that tolerates much speech that is false, obscene, demeaning, and even (...) hateful. While philosophers are right to worry about the substantial moral costs of such regimes, we ought to attempt to address these costs in ways that do not amount to rejecting the regimes themselves. (shrink)

Contractarians aim to derive moral principles from the dictates of instrumental rationality alone. But it is well-known that contractarian moral theories struggle to identify normative principles that are both uniquely rational and morally compelling. Michael Moehler's recent book, *Minimal Morality* seeks to avoid these difficulties by developing a novel "two-level" social contract theory, which restricts the scope of contractarian morality to cases of deep and persistent moral disagreement. Yet Moehler remains ambitious, arguing that a restricted version of Kant's categorical imperative (...) is a uniquely rational principle of conflict resolution. We develop a formal model of Moehler's informal game-theoretic argument, which reconstructs a valid argument for Moehler's conclusion. This model, in turn, enables us to expose how a successful argument for Moehler's contractarian principle rests on assumptions that can only be justified by subtle yet significant departures from the standard conception of rationality. We thus extend our understanding of familiar contractarian difficulties by showing how they arise even if we restrict the scope of contractarian morality to a domain where its application seems both promising and necessary. We show that the problem lies not in contractarians' immodest ambitions but in the modest resources rationality can offer to satisfy them. (shrink)

This paper defends traditional political philosophy against the challenges Gaus leverages against it in The Open Society and Its Complexities. Granting Gaus that consensus on the principles of political philosophy is not forthcoming and that complexity undermines many of our most ambitious reform efforts, the paper argues that much work remains for political philosophy as it has been practiced for centuries. This is for three reasons. First, Gaus's own defense of the open society requires resources from the very traditions that (...) he tends to dismiss. Secondly, the kinds of reform Gaus encourages us to focus on in light of complexity presuppose answers to philosophical questions, answers that philosophers have long attempted to provide. Thirdly, not all politically salient philosophical questions are aimed at action guidance. Despite the value in Gaus's analysis, I conclude that political philosophy's future will look, at least in part, like its storied past. (shrink)

Any discussion of the relativity of categories necessarily opens up questions of prime interest for the theory of knowledge, and it appears to me that L. von Bertalanffy's paper points to certain implications which, though they were incidental to his particular approach to the problem, might repay further elaboration.

I argue that a theory of distributive justice is sensitive to desert if and only if it does not require an institutional scheme that prevents individuals from treating one another as they deserve, and requires a desert ethos. A desert ethos is a set of principles that, though not embodied in a society’s basic coercive structure, nevertheless governs interpersonal relations between citizens. These two necessary conditions are jointly sufficient for ‘giving desert its due’ in a theory of justice. I therefore (...) reject the received view that a desert-sensitive theory must endeavor to guarantee distributions patterned according to desert. (shrink)

Despite Vancil’s (1979) proclamation over twenty years ago that topoi have been abandoned in argument theory, this essay contends that topoi should have a vital role in contemporary argumentation theory. Four key areas are identified where topoi are (or can be) essential tools for argumentation: Locating argument, building argument, development of critical thinking, and argument pedagogy. As a result, teachers and students of argument can both benefit from a (re)discovery of topoi.

Concerns about censorship have once again reached a fever pitch across the liberal West. In other historical periods, such concerns may have marked reactions to book bans and burnings. Often, they followed prosecutions and subsequent jailtime for things spoken or written. During the Red Scare, they were the hushed response to chilling state-sponsored watch-lists and employer-supported blacklists designed to ensure victory against communism. Against this history, complaints about the new censorship appear differently. With respect to the new censorship, there are (...) no books burnings, no prosecutions, no laws or committees. Indeed, there is no coercive state involvement at all. With a few notable exceptions, complaints about censorship in the 21st-century West are complaints about the behavior of private parties: social groups, employers, media conglomerates, social media platforms, and search engines. -/- To better understand the concerns surrounding nonstate interference with speech, Private Censorship offers an account of censorship, as well as an assessment of the ethical and political issues it raises across contexts. J.P. Messina asks and variously answers questions like: what should we think when employees get fired for things they say and how might patterns of such firings create a climate of fear inimical to free inquiry? When is it appropriate for social media firms to deplatform users, and what does it mean for our democracy that those in charge of such decisions are often wealthy Silicon Valley executives? Do search engines act as massive gatekeepers to information in troubling ways, and how might they be constrained, if they do? Along the way, Messina casts a critical eye on many popular proposals for responding to these complaints. Unlike these popular approaches, Private Censorship foregrounds the importance of rights to property, association, and free expression for thinking well about 21st-century censorship concerns. (shrink)

In their thought-provoking article, Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) defend the view that the status—both epistemic and ethical—of Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) used in psychotherapy is complicated. While therapeutic CAI seems to be more than a mere tool implementing particular therapeutic techniques, it falls short of being a “digital therapist.” One of the main arguments supporting the latter claim is that even though “the interaction with CAI happens in the course of conversation… the conversation is profoundly different from a conversation with (...) a human therapist” (Sedlakova and Trachsel 2023, 8). In particular, unlike a human therapist, CAI cannot help its users gain new insight and self-understanding (Sedlakova and Trachsel 2023). We agree that currently available therapeutic CAI cannot be considered a “digital therapist,” however, we think that the issue surrounding the acquisition of new self-understanding in the interaction with therapeutic CAI is more complicated than Sedlakova and Trachsel suggest. (shrink)

Neologicists have sought to ground mathematical knowledge in abstraction. One especially obstinate problem for this account is the bad company problem. The leading neologicist strategy for resolving this problem is to attempt to sift the good abstraction principles from the bad. This response faces a dilemma: the system of ‘good’ abstraction principles either falls foul of the Scylla of inconsistency or the Charybdis of being unable to recover a modest portion of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with its intended generality. This article (...) argues that the bad company problem is due to the ‘static’ character of abstraction on the neologicist's account and develops a ‘dynamic’ account of abstraction that avoids both horns of the dilemma. 1 Introduction2ion Reconstructed3 From Bad to Worse4 Abstraction Reconceived5 Bad Company Made GoodA AppendixA.1SemanticsA.2LogicA.3ConsistencyA.4Strength. (shrink)

Objectives: To determine the effects of risk and payment on subjects’ willingness to participate, and to examine how payment influences subjects’ potential behaviours and risk evaluations.Methods: A 3 × 3 , between subjects, completely randomised factorial design was used. Students enrolled at one of five US pharmacy schools read a recruitment notice and informed consent form for a hypothetical study, and completed a questionnaire. Risk level was manipulated using recruitment notices and informed consent documents from hypothetical biomedical research projects. Payment (...) levels were determined using the payment models evaluated by Dickert and Grady as a guide. Five dependent variables were assessed in the questionnaire: willingness to participate, willingness to participate with no payment, propensity to neglect to tell about restricted activities, propensity to neglect to tell about negative effects, and risk rating.Results: Monetary payment had positive effects on respondents’ willingness to participate in research, regardless of the level of risk. However, higher monetary payments did not appear to blind respondents to the risks of a study. Payment had some influence on respondents’ potential behaviours regarding concealing information about restricted activities. However, payment did not appear to have a significant effect on respondents’ propensity to neglect to tell researchers about negative effects.Conclusions: Monetary payments appear to do what they are intended to do: make subjects more willing to participate in research. Concerns about payments blinding subjects to risks could not be substantiated in the present study. However, the findings do raise other concerns—notably the potential for payments to diminish the integrity of a study’s findings. Future research is critical to make sound decisions about the payment of research subjects. (shrink)