Climate change poses real and immediate impacts to the public health of populations around the globe. Adverse impacts are expected to continue throughout the century. Emphasizing co-benefits of climate action for health, combining adaptation and mitigation efforts, and increasing interagency coordination can effectively address both public health and climate change challenges.

In the philosophy of perception, olfaction is the perennial problem child, presenting a range of difficulties to those seeking to define its proper referents, and its phenomenological content. Here, we argue that many of these difficulties can be resolved by recognizing the object-like representation of odors in the brain, and by postulating that the basic objects of olfaction are best defined by their biological value to the organism, rather than physico-chemical dimensions of stimuli. Building on this organism-centered account, we speculate (...) that the phenomenological space of olfaction is organized into a number of coarse affective dimensions that apply categorically. This organization may be especially useful for coupling sensation to decision-making and instrumental action in a sensory modality where the stimulus space is especially complex and high-dimensional. (shrink)

Videogames present deep challenges for traditional concepts of sport and games. Cybersport in particular suggests that sport might be transposed into digital arenas, and videogames in general provide apparently striking counterexamples to the orthodox Suitsian theory of games, seeming to lack strictly prelusory goals and perhaps even also constitutive rules. I argue as follows: if any cybersports count as genuine sports, it will be those most closely resembling uncontroversial core instances of sport, those that essentially involve gross motor skill. Even (...) so, we might reject cybersports as sport by distinguishing physical skills’ domain of execution from their domain of application, sport implying the non-virtual status of both. Although, like chess, videogames appear to lack prelusory goals, chess conventions and nominal descriptions of the object of any videogame suggest the possibility of Suitsian compliance, as does the inclusion of ‘cheat codes’ in videogame programming. Perhaps such... (shrink)

:This essay argues for what may be called the parity thesis: Whenever it would be morally permissible to kill a civilian in self-defense or in defense of others against that civilian's unjust acts, it would also be permissible to kill government officials, including police officers, prison officers, generals, lawmakers, and even chief executives. I argue that in realistic circumstances, violent resistance to state injustice is permissible, even and perhaps especially in reasonably just democratic regimes. When civilians see officials about to (...) commit certain severe injustices — such as police officers engaging in excessive violence — they may sometimes act unilaterally and kill the offending officials. I consider and rebut a wide range of objections, including objections against vigilantism, objections based on state legitimacy, and objections that violence can produce bad fallout. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.WHEN MAY WE KILL GOVERNMENT AGENTS? IN DEFENSE OF MORAL PARITYVolume 32, Issue 2Jason Brennan DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000108Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle email.@free.kindle.com@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. WHEN MAY WE KILL GOVERNMENT AGENTS? IN DEFENSE OF MORAL PARITYVolume 32, Issue 2Jason Brennan DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000108Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. WHEN MAY WE KILL GOVERNMENT AGENTS? IN DEFENSE OF MORAL PARITYVolume 32, Issue 2Jason Brennan DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000108Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume's Knave and the Interests of JusticeJason Baldwin, doctoral student in philosophyHume's account of the artificial virtues of justice and promise-keeping developed in Book III, Part ii of the Treatise is among the most provocative elements of his ethics. His goal there is to tell a naturalistic story of the origin and moral standing of these virtues, a story that makes no appeal to any irreducibly moral motives or (...) properties but instead grounds even our most basic and apparently binding obligations in the same thoroughly human passions and sentiments with which Hume explains all our actions. Several modern critics, including David Gauthier and Stephen Darwall, have claimed that Hume's story of the artificial virtues is inconsistent with his account of natural human motivations, and have further claimed that Hume himself became aware of this problem in the second Enquiry, where he discussed it in the famous "sensible knave" passage in the last paragraphs of the "Conclusion." They therefore claim that Hume abandoned in the Enquiry what is usually taken to be his official Treatise account of justice and promise-keeping, and may also have intended a different account in the Treatise itself.This paper argues that the sensible knave passage neither signals nor requires any significant change in Hume's official Treatise story of the artificial virtues. Part 1 summarizes this official account, Part 2 explains the challenge Gauthier and Darwall believe the sensible knave poses to this account, and Part 3 defends the standard Humean account from this challenge. Whatever other problems Hume's account of justice and promise-keeping may have, the free rider problem, as developed by Gauthier and Darwall through the character of the sensible knave, is not among them.1. The Interest Account of Artificial Virtues1.1 Hume's Predecessor TraditionsHume makes few explicit references to the English-speaking predecessors whose work informs his thinking about the artificial virtues, and I shall follow his example. [End Page 277] But without pretending to survey that rich and varied history, we may usefully think of Hume's approach to justice and its allied virtues as an attempt to preserve the strengths of two opposed predecessor traditions.1 The first tradition, represented most prominently by Hobbes but also by Mandeville, explains the origin of virtues generally, including Humean artificial virtues, in purely naturalistic terms, without any appeal to divinely ordained ends or observer-independent moral facts. Hume shares this humanistic aspiration, but he disavows the cynical skepticism and crude egoism which are usually taken to accompany it. He wants to tell a story about justice which will allow us to admire its genuine moral worth even as we acknowledge its human pedigree.The second tradition, a reaction to the first, is the moral sense school represented by Shaftesbury, Butler, and especially Hutcheson. This tradition insists, against the cynical egoists, on a moral reality to which our sentiments or consciences give us immediate access, an access secured by God's design. Also characteristic of the moral sense theorists is the claim that human nature contains benevolent motives which are the objects of the moral sense's approval and which are just as basic to our constitution as are selfish motives. Hume avails himself of both moral sense strands, albeit in attenuated form. He agrees that justice and injustice are known by the sentiments, and he also believes that benevolent first-order motives are a part of human nature. But Hume rejects the moral sense tradition's Christian teleology, and he is also less optimistic about the potential of benevolence to explain such complex moral behaviors as are involved in our institutions of justice and promise-keeping.Hume's standard Treatise story of the origin of justice and promise-keeping, which we may call the "interest account," has two stages. In the first stage, Hume explains how the practices which constitute justice and promise-keeping arise through the working of our natural interests; in this stage Hume might be seen as working in the broadly naturalistic-egoist tradition. In the second stage, Hume explains how these practices and the motives which underlie them become the objects of moral evaluation, i.e., why... (shrink)

The question of how to handle incidental findings has sparked a heated debate among neuroimaging researchers and medical ethicists, a debate whose urgency stems largely from the recent explosion in the number of imaging studies being conducted and in the sheer volume of scans being acquired. Perhaps the point of greatest controversy within this debate is whether the magnetic resonance imaging scans of all research participants should be reviewed in an active search for pathology and, moreover, whether this search should (...) be performed by a radiologist. Resistance to routine readings performed by radiologists, as opposed to selective review of those scans on which investigators have spotted a possible IF, has been fueled in part by the obvious and enormous cost — financial and logistical — of engaging radiologists to read massive numbers of scans. This cost would be especially burdensome, even prohibitive, to investigators who are not affiliated with a medical center, because of their limited access to radiologists and other medical expertise. (shrink)

In this review essay, I review in detail Abram de Swann's fine new book, The Killing Compartments. The book is a theoretical analysis of the varieties and causes of genocides and other mass asymmetrical killing campaigns. I then suggest several criticisms of his analysis.

Adequate theories of well-being must also explain ill-being. While it is formally possible to explain ill-being without postulating robust bads, certain experiential states do qualify as robust bads and thus require theoretical recognition. Experiential bads are recognized by some hedonists, experientialists, and pluralists, but these theories face well-known difficulties. This paper considers whether perfectionist and value-fulfillment accounts of well-being can accommodate such bads. Perfectionists might propose that we all have the avoidance of negative experiential states as a standing end, so (...) that failure to avoid them is robustly bad. This view is unacceptable. A version of the value-fulfillment theory can instead say that such experiential states are intrinsically aversive, so that enduring them represents diminished agential functioning. After explaining this version of the value-fulfillment theory, this paper considers possible objections to it relating to “hurts so good” experiences, appropriate negative emotions, and the aggregative value of experiential goods. (shrink)

In this essay, I look at more or less sympathetic portrayals of egoists in film. I start by explaining some basic concepts: psychological egoism; ethical egoism; default egoism; rational egoism; egotism; cynicism; narcissism; and psychopathy. I then review in-depth two excellent WWII films, Stalag 17 and The Bridge on the River Kwai. I note that the key protagonist in both pictures is the same type of character—both played by the same fine actor, William Holden. The main protagonist in both is (...) a soldier in a POW camp, who appears completely egoistic; however, in both cases, the movie shows that he is just a man acting for self-preservation, but within moral limits. The character in both cases is certainly not an egotist, nor a narcissist, much less a psychopath. (shrink)

A difficult question in the philosophy of sport concerns how winning athletes should perform in uneven contests in which victory has been secured well before the competition is over. Nicholas Dixon, the protagonist in the ongoing debate, argues against critics who urge following an 'anti-blowout' thesis that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with running up the score. We engage this debate, providing much needed distinctions, and draw on Aristotelian resources to explore a framework by which to understand competing claims found (...) within the literature. (shrink)

This essay is my critical review of Al Gini and Alexei Marcoux’s fine text, The Ethics of Business. Unlike most business ethics texts, Gini/Marcoux recognize that most businesses are small, and that business is not inherently immoral and always in need of reform. And they put their focus on using ethical theory to find action-guiding principles to help guide business behavior. Moreover, they adopt the Schumpeterian view that business is an entrepreneurial activity—one that not merely executes transactions, but seeks them (...) out. I critically probe a number of issues with their book such as their reliance upon virtue ethics as their main ethical theory, and their view that trust plays an overwhelming role in business. (shrink)

This essay clarifies and defends the methodological multidimensionality and improvisational character of Clifford Geertz’s account of interpretation and explanation. In contrast to accounts of power analysis offered by Michel Foucault and Talal Asad, I argue that Geertz’s work can simultaneously attend to meaning, power, identity, and experience in understanding and assessing religious practices and cultural formations.

In this essay, I look at two negative portrayals of egoism. I summarize in detail the superb All About Eve—which won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The movie is about the rise of a ruthlessly ambitious actress, and how she treats her main competitor. Eve Harrington worms her way into top theatrical actress Margo Channing’s inner circle by pretending to be an admirer, but she is really a schemer who wants to eclipse Margo’s star in the theater universe. However, (...) Eve runs into trouble when she attempts to manipulate tart-tongued theater critic, Addison de Witt. The movie portrays the New York theater industry as being full of narcissists. I then review the classic film noir The Third Man (1949), rated by the prestigious British Film Institute as the greatest film of the 20th century. The film centers around a charismatic, handsome criminal mastermind Harry Lime living in bombed-out post-War Vienna. Lime is a man of no conscience or empathy—a true psychopath. He cripples children by selling hospitals adulterated penicillin. But we (the audience) still feel sympathy for him. I end the piece by explaining the psychological mechanisms at work that give rise to our paradoxical sympathy. (shrink)

This essay explores the possibility that religiously motivated intolerance and conflict can be reframed and positively utilized for constructive social-political purposes. After reviewing efforts by political philosophers over the past two decades to accommodate religious voices in political discourse, I scrutinize Charles Taylor’s attempt to improve upon the limits of “accommodationist” approaches to religious intolerance and conflict. I argue that both accommodationist and Taylor’s recognition-based approaches to religiously motivated conflict take the gravity of such conflict with insufficient seriousness. I then (...) explore the potential goods of intentional conflict by examining Chantal Mouffe’s account of agonistic pluralism as a proposal for thinking beyond tolerance as an orienting value for resolving intransigent conflict. While I argue that Mouffe’s account finally suffers from certain of the same misgivings as the accommodationist and recognition-based approaches, I conclude that agonistic pluralism’s aim to conceptually reframe (rather than eliminate) intolerance and conflict moves in an important and promising direction. (shrink)

This essay is my review of Philip Booth’s ...and the Pursuit of Happiness: Wellbeing and the Role of Government. The book is an anthology of original articles by eminent researchers in modern happiness economics, such as: Booth himself; Paul Omerod; David Sacks, Betsey Stephenson, and Justin Wolfers; Christopher Snowden; J. R. Shackleton; Christian Bjornskov; Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne; and Pedro Schwartz. I conclude by offering several criticisms of the work.

This is a review of the biopic of the great mathematician Ramanujan, 'The Man Who Knew Infinity'(2016).

In this essay, I look at two films as possible exemplars of the Nietzschean view of egoism. Compulsion is based on the infamous 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case. In the movie, two arrogant young men—one of whom admires Nietzsche and preaches the (apparently Nietzschean) view that the strong and superior don’t need to follow conventional morality—kill a boy to prove they can outsmart the unter-menschen police. For a different take on what Nietzsche may have had in mind as “the (...) Overman,” I also look at the film The Moon and Sixpence. Here the protagonist isn’t violent or aggressive, but a completely self-absorbed artist, who paints with genius but uses others without feeling any gratitude or friendship, let alone love. (shrink)

In this essay, I briefly review ten of the best bio flicks of artists. After laying out my criteria for assessing biographical films about artists, I review my ten choices. These films are: The Agony and the Ecstasy; Frida; Local Color; The Moon and Sixpence; Girl with the Pearl Earring; Pollock; Rembrandt; Moulin Rouge; Modigliani; and Lust for Life. For each film, I try to explain the ways in which the directors were able to show the artist’s creative processes and (...) personal challenges. (shrink)

In this essay, I use four war movies to explore conflicts of loyalty and how they are resolved, all to illustrate W.D. Ross’ multiple rule deontologism. The films are all fine WWII movies: The Enemy Below; Decision Before Dawn; John Rabe; and The Bridge on the River Kwai. In my analysis of each, I show how the protagonists face conflicts of their loyalty to themselves, their countrymen, their friends, and humanity in general, and resolve them in the face of changing (...) factual backgrounds. (shrink)

Resumo Os Qualia, ou são “entidades espaciais” – ou seja, estão localizados no espaço como os objectos físicos –, ou não são “entidades espaciais”. Então, o dualismo deve alegar que ou os qualia não-físicos são entidades espaciais, ou que eles não o são. Contudo, qualquer resposta é problemática. Se os qualia não-físicos não são entidades espaciais, então, é difícil de conceber como podem ser atribuídos a cérebros particulares, individualizados uns dos outros, e assim por diante. Mas se os qualia não-físicos (...) são entidades espaciais, então, surgem outros problemas, por exemplo, torna-se difícil perceber como poderíamos ter então um acesso privilegiado a eles. Dada uma ou outra opção, o dualismo é problemático. Portanto, o dualismo é problemático. Palavras-chave : argumento do conhecimento, consciência, dualismo, fisicalismo, problema mente-corpo, qualiaQualia are either “spatial entities” – i.e., they are located in space like physical objects – or they are not. So, dualism must claim that either non-physical qualia are spatial entities or they are not. But either answer is problematic. If non-physical qualia are not spatial entities, then it is difficult to see how they can be attributed to particular brains, individuated from one another, and so on. But if non-physical qualia are spatial entities, then other problems arise, e.g., it is difficult to see how we could have privileged access to them. Given either option, dualism is problematic. Therefore, dualism is problematic. Keywords : consciousness, dualism, knowledge argument, mind-body problem, Physicalism, Qualia. (shrink)

In this essay, I take up the question of why so many of the movies made by Hollywood are endless sequels, “prequels,” and remakes of prior blockbuster hits and so many are based on comic books (X-men, Superman, Batman, and so on). I tie the explanation in part to the aforementioned 1950 Supreme Court ruling prohibiting production companies, and in part to broader cultural changes. In particular, I argue that precisely because film producers can no longer make money from the (...) concessions (i.e., the purchases within the theater), but only of the ticket sales, the producers keep producing remakes of known popular movies, rather than make deeply original movies. (shrink)

In this essay, I look at some extraordinary actors who never got their due—actors who had distinguished careers, but never won an Academy Award for acting. I review the work of: Joseph Cotten; Orson Welles; Edward G. Robinson; Cary Grant; James Mason; Richard Burton; Claude Rains; Alan Ladd: Robert Mitchum; and Fred MacMurray. In each case, I explore the actor’s best work, what made his acting outstanding, and offer possible explanations why he was not so honored.

Over the last 20 years, Reinhart Koselleck has become familiar to an Anglophone audience as the foremost practitioner of Begriffsgeschichte . Yet, an early work of his, Critique and Crisis: the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, is today largely overlooked by political theorists. In this paper, I argue that the book is an important resource for contemporary political theory. Not only does it outline a highly cogent approach to the relationship between political theory and practice, but its substantive argument concerning Enlightenment (...) provides insights into the character of political concepts, and the concept of politics itself, that are relevant for thinking about political theory and discourse in the present. (shrink)

Kevin O’Rourke argues that Aquinas’s concept of a “spiritual goal of life,” to which Pius XII refers in his famous allocution of 1957, serves as a basis for declaring that certain treatments, such as artificial nutrition and hydration [ANH] for patients in a persistent vegetative state [PVS], are “extraordinary” and thus morally optional. I examine whether O’Rourke properly interprets Aquinas’s concept in this regard and conclude that he is correct in his assessment and that ANH is properly understood, in typical (...) and properly diagnosed cases of PVS, as extraordinary treatment the use of which is not morally obligatory. (shrink)

According to the Social Security Administration, 98% of minor children are eligible to receive survivors benefits if a working parent dies. However, the eligibility of children born, and even conceived, after a working parent dies is less clear. In recent years, the Social Security Administration has received more than 100 applications for survivors benefits filed on behalf of children conceived after a parent's death, and one such case, Astrue v. Capato, was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012. In (...) that case, whether the child is eligible to inherit under state intestacy law was accepted as a reasonable — and is a common — approach for determining eligibility for Social Security survivors benefits. The purpose of this study is to examine attitudes concerning access to Social Security survivors benefits in the context of various reproductive pathways and varying state intestacy laws. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays on logic and philosophy. In the first section, the essays address issues in informal logic, including whether fallacies are common, and the nature of the ad baculum and ad hominem fallacies. The section also includes essays on formal dialogue logic and its applications in computer science. The second section contains articles on epistemology and philosophy of science, including issues surrounding induction, the role of error in computer science, the relation between science and common (...) sense, and the concept of discovery. In the third section, I take up ethical issues. I sketch out an ethical theory and discuss a variety of ethical issues, such as the ethics of organ sales, tort reform, free trade, and computer ethics. The final section includes essays on a number of miscellaneous issues, such as using thought experiments to teach philosophy, the soul-making defense against the problem of free will, and the limitations of postmodern philosophy. (shrink)

I follow Etienne Balibar in understanding Freud as not only an important thinker of transindividuality alongside Spinoza and Marx, but also the one that pushes an ontology of relations to its full development. In response to Balibar I critically examine Freud, who, outside of Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego, often referred individual and collective development to the family as the primal scene. I also explore how it would be possible to conceive of a concept of social relations that (...) recognizes the social and transindividual basis of subjectivity. Ultimately, it is not a matter of deciding whether Freud is a transindividual thinker, but of understanding that an ontology of relations can privilege no particular scene or social institution, such as family or the, economy. (shrink)