In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. Jeff Sebo argues that humans have a moral responsibility to include animals in global health and environmental policy. In particular, we should reduce our use of animals as part of our pandemic (...) and climate change mitigation efforts and increase our support for animals as part of our adaptation efforts. Applying and extending frameworks such as One Health and the Green New Deal, Sebo calls for reducing support for factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade; increasing support for humane, healthful, and sustainable alternatives; and considering human and nonhuman needs holistically. Sebo also considers connections with practical issues such as education, employment, social services, and infrastructure, as well as with theoretical issues such as well-being, moral status, political status, and population ethics. In all cases, he shows that these issues are both important and complex, and that we should neither underestimate our responsibilities because of our limitations, nor underestimate our limitations because of our responsibilities. Both an urgent call to action and a survey of what ethical and effective action requires, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves is an invaluable resource for scholars, advocates, policy-makers, and anyone interested in what kind of world we should attempt to build and how. (shrink)

This groundbreaking inquiry into the centrality of place in Martin Heidegger's thinking offers not only an illuminating reading of Heidegger's thought but a detailed investigation into the way in which the concept of place relates to core philosophical issues. In Heidegger's Topology, Jeff Malpas argues that an engagement with place, explicit in Heidegger's later work, informs Heidegger's thought as a whole. What guides Heidegger's thinking, Malpas writes, is a conception of philosophy's starting point: our finding ourselves already "there," situated (...) in the world, in "place." Heidegger's concepts of being and place, he argues, are inextricably bound together.Malpas follows the development of Heidegger's topology through three stages: the early period of the 1910s and 1920s, through Being and Time, centered on the "meaning of being"; the middle period of the 1930s into the 1940s, centered on the "truth of being"; and the late period from the mid-1940s on, when the "place of being" comes to the fore. The significance of Heidegger as a thinker of place, Malpas claims, lies not only in Heidegger's own investigations but also in the way that spatial and topographic thinking has flowed from Heidegger's work into that of other key thinkers of the past 60 years. (shrink)

Most people are skeptical of the claim that the expectation that a person would have a life that would be well worth living provides a reason to cause that person to exist. In this essay I argue that to cause such a person to exist would be to confer a benefit of a noncomparative kind and that there is a moral reason to bestow benefits of this kind. But this conclusion raises many problems, among which is that it must be (...) determined how the benefits conferred on people by causing them to exist weigh against comparable benefits conferred on existing people. In particular, might the reason to cause people to exist ever outweigh the reason to save the lives of existing people? (shrink)

In this paper I ask how we should treat other beings in cases of uncertainty about sentience. I evaluate three options: an incautionary principle that permits us to treat other beings as non-sentient, a precautionary principle that requires us to treat other beings as sentient, and an expected value principle that requires us to multiply our subjective probability that other beings are sentient by the amount of moral value they would have if they were. I then draw three conclusions. First, (...) the precautionary and expected value principles are more plausible than the incautionary principle. Second, if we accept a precautionary or expected value principle, then we morally ought to treat many beings as having at least partial moral status. Third, if we morally ought to treat many beings as having at least partial moral status, then morality involves more cluelessness and demandingness than we might have thought. (shrink)

Rational Pavelka logic extends Lukasiewicz infinitely valued logic by adding truth constants r̄ for rationals in [0, 1]. We show that this is a conservative extension. We note that this shows that provability degree can be defined in Lukasiewicz logic. We also give a counterexample to a soundness theorem of Belluce and Chang published in 1963.

There is a nonabsolute or “contingent” form of pacifism that claims that war in contemporary conditions inevitably involves the killing of innocent people on a scale that is too great to be justified. Some contingent pacifists argue that war always involves a risk that virtually everyone that one might kill is innocent – either because one can never be sure that one’s cause is just or because even most of those who fight in wars that lack a just cause are (...) nevertheless not culpable and are therefore innocent in the relevant sense. Others argue that there is no just cause for war that is sufficiently important to justify the large-scale killing of innocent civilians that is unavoidable in war. I seek to refute contingent pacifism by arguing that its theoretical presuppositions are untenable. (shrink)

Most contributors to the debate about brain death, including Dr. James Bernat, share certain assumptions. They believe that the concept of death is univocal, that death is a biological phenomenon, that it is necessarily irreversible, that it is paradigmatically something that happens to organisms, that we are human organisms, and therefore that our deaths will be deaths of organisms. These claims are supposed to have moral significance. It is, for example, only when a person dies that it is permissible to (...) extract her organs for transplantation.It is also commonly held that our univocal notion of death is the permanent cessation of integrated functioning in an organism and that the criterion for determining when this has occurred in animals with brains is the death of the brain as a whole – that is, brain death. The reason most commonly given for this is that the brain is the irreplaceable master control of the organism's integration. (shrink)

This volume brings together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on a topic of central importance, but which has otherwise tended to be approached from within just one or another disciplinary framework. Most of the essays contained here incorporate some degree of interdisciplinarity in their own approach, but the volume nevertheless divides into three main sections: Philosophical considerations; Humanities approaches; Legal, medical, and therapeutic contexts. The volume includes essays by philosophers, medical practitioners and researchers, historians, lawyers, literary, Classical, and Judaic scholars. (...) The essays are united by a common concern with the question of the human character of suffering, and the demands that suffering, and the recognition of suffering, make upon us. (shrink)

Neuroscientific studies have shown that brain activity correlated with a decision to move can be observed before a person reports being consciously aware of having made that decision . Given that a later event cannot cause an earlier one , such results have been interpreted as evidence that decisions are made unconsciously . We argue that this interpretation depends upon an all-or-none view of consciousness, and we offer an alternative interpretation of the early decision-related brain activity based on models in (...) which conscious awareness of the decision to move develops gradually up to the level of a reporting criterion. Under this interpretation, the early brain activity reflects sub-criterion levels of awareness rather than complete absence of awareness and thus does not suggest that decisions are made unconsciously. (shrink)

A great deal has been written over the past decade defending ‘higher-level’ causes by arguing that overdetermination is more complex than many philosophers initially thought. Although two shooters overdetermine the death of a firing squad victim, a baseball and its parts do not overdetermine the breaking of a window. But while these analyses of overdetermination have no doubt been fruitful, the focus on overdetermination—while ignoring other varieties of causal relation—has limited the discussion. Many of the cases of interest resemble joint (...) causes or a cause necessitating a simultaneous epiphenomenon as much as they resemble overdeterminers. If we are to fully understand higher-level causation, we need to distinguish it from these causal relations as well. This paper is dedicated to the task, focusing especially on the ‘threat’ that higher-level causes are epiphenomena necessitated by lower-level causes. (shrink)

Official apologies and truth commissions are increasingly utilized as mechanisms to address human rights abuses. Both are intended to transform inter-group relations by marking an end point to a history of wrongdoing and providing the means for political and social relations to move beyond that history. However, state-dominated reconciliation mechanisms are inherently problematic for indigenous communities. In this paper, we examine the use of apologies, and truth and reconciliation commissions in four countries with significant indigenous populations: Canada, Australia, Peru, and (...) Guatemala. In each case, the reconciliation mechanism differentiated the goal of reconciliation from an indigenous self-determination agenda. The resulting state-centered strategies ultimately failed to hold states fully accountable for past wrongs and, because of this, failed to transform inter-group relations. (shrink)

Some of the questions Professor Miller addresses are concerned with proportionality, a notion whose complexities are only beginning to be appreciated. My modest ambition in this comment is to try to sharpen these questions and provide some assistance in thinking about them.

This paper exposes a common mistake concerning the division of linguistic labor. I characterize the mistake as an overgeneralization from natural kind terms; this misleads philosophers about which terms are subject to the division of linguistic labor, what linguistic labor is, how linguistic labor is divided, and how the extensions of non-natural kind terms subject to the division of linguistic labor are determined. I illustrate these points by considering Sally Haslanger’s account of the division of linguistic labor for social kind (...) terms and raising an objection to it. Then, I draw on Tyler Burge’s work to characterize a conception of the division of linguistic labor that avoids the mistaken overgeneralization and grounds 1–4 above in social norms and practices. (shrink)

This article argues for a realist conception of human needs. By ‘realist’ we mean that certain fundamental needs are categorically distinct from consumer wants, holding independently of people's subjective beliefs as objective life requirements. These basic needs, we contend, are baseline measures of social justice in the sense that no society that does not prioritise their satisfaction can be legitimate. The paper concludes with a comprehensive response to seven core objections to our position.

Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the (...) early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks. In essays commissioned especially for the book, the contributors offer a wide range of views, addressing not only the issues of anti-Semitism and Nazism but also the broader questions that the notebooks raise. Contributors Babette Babich, Andrew Bowie, Steven Crowell, Fred Dallmayr, Donatella Di Cesare, Michael Fagenblat, Ingo Farin, Gregory Fried, Jean Grondin, Karsten Harries, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Rohkrämer, Tracy B. Strong, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Nancy A. Weston, Holger Zaborowski. (shrink)

Embodied approaches to cognition see abstract thought and language as grounded in interactions between mind, body, and world. A particularly important challenge for embodied approaches to cognition is mathematics, perhaps the most abstract domain of human knowledge. Conceptual metaphor theory, a branch of cognitive linguistics, describes how abstract mathematical concepts are grounded in concrete physical representations. In this paper, we consider the implications of this research for the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics. In the case of metaphysics, we argue that (...) embodied mathematics is neutral in the sense of being compatible with all existing accounts of what mathematical entities really are. However, embodied mathematics may be able to revive an older position known as psychologism and overcome the difficulties it faces. In the case of epistemology, we argue that the evidence collected in the embodied mathematics literature is inconclusive: It does not show that abstract mathematical thinking is constituted by metaphor; it may simply show that abstract thinking is facilitated by metaphor. Our arguments suggest that closer interaction between the philosophy and cognitive science of mathematics could yield a more precise, empirically informed account of what mathematics is and how we come to have knowledge of it. (shrink)

With the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become impossible to avoid Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. There has been the expected controversy with Heideggerians on the defensive and the philosopher’s detractors condemning his work outright. But there has been little serious exploration of the matter aside from several recent works. This article builds on this literature on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and concludes that an anti-Semitic narrative lies at the heart of Heidegger’s history of the oblivion of Being as nihilism. Moreover, Heidegger (...) adopts the narrative framework set up by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality. In the end, we assert that Heidegger advocates a kind of war against Judaism that seeks to eradicate the Jewish influence in the western tradition. Heidegger’s ‘metaphysical’ anti-Semitism aims to overcome the nihilism of the ‘Jewish Christian’ revenge [Rache] against death, a nihilism that has evolved into the technological effort to make everything secure. (shrink)

This article is a study of the interpretive resources developed by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show. Interpretive resources – also called ‘hermeneutical resources’ – are concepts, narratives, conceptual frameworks, etc. that enable subjects to make sense of themselves and their world. Much recent scholarship has explored how a community's interpretive resources influence social interactions or character traits in the community. In Limbaugh's transcripts, we found a pattern of what we call ‘concept doubling’, wherein terms are characterised in a way (...) suggesting that liberals and conservatives express different concepts by their utterances of the same word form. We propose that this promotes an interpretive resource that encourages in those who use it what we call ‘false double consciousness’. We contrast the effects of false double consciousness with those of double consciousness, and we consider the interpretive resources available within false double consciousness. (shrink)

Ethics research literature often uses Rest’s Four Component Model of ethical behavior as a framework to teach business and accounting ethics. Moral motivation, including resolve to have moral courage, is the third component of the model and is the least-tested component in ethics research. Using a quasi-experimental design with pretest and posttest measurements, we compare the effectiveness of several methods (traditional, exhortation, reflection, moral exemplar) for developing resolve to have moral courage in 211 accounting students during one semester. Results show (...) that traditional, reflection, moral exemplar methods increased resolve to have moral courage, and that the reflection and moral exemplar methods were more effective than the other methods. (shrink)

Blanchot often evoked the silence required for literary writing, a silence which he says must “be imposed” on a pre-existing and indistinct murmur of language. Likewise, he evokes this murmur itself as an originary ground of all speech, including literary speech. Less often recognized are the ways in which he also locates this murmur in the realm of public speech and everyday language, the rumor of speech spoken by no one and by everyone, a realm which he in turn links (...) with the exigencies of publication and publicity that bear on the literary work within modern societies marked by mass media and technically mediated communication. Blanchot himself thus points to an unexpected convergence, in these sonic images of impersonal murmuring flows of language, between literary language per se, and a language that is traditionally considered inauthentic, empty, superficial, a chattering nullity. This essay attempts to press on this border by showing Blanchot’s anxious, and probably futile, attempts to maintain the distinction he so profoundly and rigorously effaces. As literature is threatened by the indistinction of language from which it originates, it reveals an unexpected convergence with the leveling modes of language marked by mass media and by technicity in general. (shrink)

Increasingly, beginning in the 1970’s and 1980’s, many philosophers of language found themselves in a difficult situation. On the one hand, many came to believe that, in order to do semantics properly, as well as to give an adequate treatment of the attitudes, one needed to posit certain entities — propositions — which could be the meanings of sentences (relative to contexts), the contents of mental states, and the primary bearers of truth and falsity. However, many — largely due to (...) the arguments of Scott Soames1 — also came to distrust the standard theoretical account of the nature of propositions, which treated them as sets of worlds, and came to think of them instead as structured entities of some sort. (shrink)

The Cuban government has undertaken the task of transforming insect pest and weed management from conventional to organic and more sustainable approaches on a nationwide basis. This paper addresses past programs and current major areas of research and implementation as well as provides examples of programs in insect and weed management. Topics covered include the newly constructed network of Centers for the Reproduction of Entomophages and Entomopathogens (CREEs), which provide the infrastructure for the implementation of biological control on state, cooperative, (...) and private farm operations. CREE programs include the mass rearing and release of Trichogramma spp. to manage insect pests of cassava, tobacco, sugarcane, and improved pasture. The entomopathogens, Bacillus thuringiensis, Beauveria bassiana, Metarhizium anisopliae, and Verticillium lecanii, are being mass produced in the CREEs and applied to control a number of key insect pests. A traditional method employed by peasant farmers of using the predatory ant Pheidole megacephala (Fabricius) in the biological control of sweetpotato and banana insect pests has been further developed and implemented. Efforts are underway to rear nematode species that attack insect pests and identify plant extracts with insecticidal qualities as potential management tools. Weed management has moved away from dependence on herbicides and toward alternative techniques that include weed suppression based on rotation schemes, limited use of selective herbicides, and new tillage equipment and practices. (shrink)

There is a large and growing literature on communal interpretive resources: the concepts, theories, narratives, and so on that a community draws on in interpreting its members and their world. (They're also called “hermeneutical resources” in some places and “epistemic resources” in others.) Several recent contributions to this literature have concerned dominant and resistant interpretive resources and how they affect concrete lived interactions. In this article, I note that “using” interpretive resources—applying them to parts of the world in conversation with (...) others—is “a rule‐governed activity”; and I propose that in oppressive systems, these rules are influenced by the rules of oppression. Section I clarifies some rules governing the use of resources. Section II draws on work by Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. and others to suggest that according to the present rules of our oppressive system, it is permissible for dominantly situated speakers to dismiss interpretive resources developed in marginalized communities. Section III appeals to Charles Mills's work on White ignorance to propose, further, that our system's rules make it impermissible and deserving of punishment to use resistant resources. The conclusion enumerates several further points about such rules governing the use of interpretive resources, their social effects, and some philosophical literatures. (shrink)

Rewards are reinforcement mechanisms that organizations use to shape desirable employee behaviors. However, rewards may also have unintended consequences, such as building expectations for receiving extra benefits and weakening employee barriers to unethical acts. This article investigates the dark side of the reward–behavior association, and exploring what is referred to as the reward–theft parity effect (RTPE). The authors hypothesize that receiving rewards induces a corresponding type of theft. In Study 1, survey results (n = 634) show initial support for the (...) RTPE between rewards and same‐category theft, and that perceptions of procedural justice attenuate this association. Study 2 involved a 2 (reward) × 2 (theft opportunity) between‐subjects experimental design (n = 300) and provides further support for the RTPE by revealing greater theft under a reward–theft parity condition than under a reward–theft disparity condition. Study 3 replicates these findings in a field experiment (n = 285) and finds that the RTPE is exacerbated when the reward–behavior task is perceived as unjust. Collectively, these findings provide new theoretical insights while also giving managers a more complete understanding of the dark side of behavioral reinforcement mechanisms. (shrink)

Researchers have proposed that blocking facial feedback via glabellar-region botulinum toxin injections can reduce depression. Random-effects meta-analyses of studies that administered GBTX...

Some philosophers, most notably Julian Savulescu, have argued that potential parents have a moral reason to do what they can to have a child with the highest expected level of well-being.1 This is not just a reason to do what will make a particular child better off than he or she would otherwise be but also a reason to choose, from among different possible children, the one that has the highest expected well-being. The claim that potential parents have such a (...) reason is then often deployed as a premise in arguments in support of genetic enhancement. Robert Sparrow has argued in response that this claim implies that potential parents have a reason to choose to have female children only, primarily because women are genetically disposed to live, on average, 3–7 years longer than men.2 He takes this implication to be a reductio of this particular form of argument in support of human enhancement. In her paper, Sexual dimorphism and human enhancement, Paula Casal seeks to rebut Sparrow's argument and then goes on to suggest that a better case for the selection of female children could be made on grounds of moral enhancement, since women are far less genetically disposed to be violent and aggressive than men.3 Recognising, however, that the creation of only female children would lead to human extinction, she concludes that the way to achieve the best outcome would be to use techniques of genetic modification, should they become available, to make men more like women in certain respects: smaller, less aggressive, less competitive, less violent, less obsessed with sex, less prone to taking great risks, and less likely to die early from accident, combat, or disease.Like Larry Temkin, I am largely in agreement with Casal on these matters. In this short commentary, I …. (shrink)

In his later lectures, published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault surveys different modalities of obtaining ‘truth’ about one's self and the world: from Socrates to the Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans and early church writers. Genealogically tracing this opposition between knowing self and world, he occasionally invites phenomenological enquiry into how this epistemic couplet bears on education. Drawing on three vignettes familiar to educators, my investigation explores modes of discovering self and world through counselling, distributed governance in the classroom (...) and the arts of writing. In each case we confront a paradox of freedom, in that agency is needed, already, to liberate the self from the world. An exegetical task is to show how Foucault worked through this philosophical problem, of relevance to many situations in education, by re-reading Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger. (shrink)

Key Enlightenment minds are often juxtaposed with their iconic foes, religious conservatives. When discussing the subject of women’s rights, however, this comparison creates a false impression that Enlightenment male thinkers held ideas very much opposed to a dogmatic institution such as the Catholic Church. Ironically, and damaging to their legacy of prejudice-free rationalism, nearly all of the philosophes, many of whom were “freethinking” atheists, viewed woman’s intellectual nature and societal purpose through a prejudice-tainted glass, not unlike the most conservative establishments (...) of their time. Indeed, when it came to the perception of women, the philosophes had less in common with a virulently secular feminist such as Nicholas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, than they do with modern conservative Christians who believe women should be treated more fairly, but still cling to gender stereotypes. (shrink)