The advent of the new media technology introduces many ways to cultivate sexual connections between and among individuals across boundaries and geographical territories. Various forms of relationships, which several decades ago would not have been possible, have been cultivated. These apparent changes in sexuality and/or relationships brought implications and ramifications to modern social lives. Aggressions and exploitations among men and women of various nationalities, including Filipinos, have been observed by scholars and academics in the past 10 years. To explore this (...) situation, this research paper had the following objectives: (1) Describe the phenomenology of virtual relationships through the testimonies of Filipino women and men who are indulging themselves in this kind of relationships; 2. Explore the motivations and drives of Filipino men and women in indulging in virtual relationships; 3. Describe and classify sexual deviations and sexual neurosis that may likely develop from virtual relationships; and 4. Explain the possible exploitations of Filipino men and women that may be caused by these sexual interactions through the digital and internet technology. (shrink)

Joseph J. Kockelmans provides a clear and systematic treatment of the central themes and topics of Heidegger's later writings, focusing on the all-important question of the relationship of truth and Being. If we are to understand Heidegger's thought, Kockelmans explains, we must conceive it as a path or way, rather than as a finished system. Adopting this approach himself, Kockelmans leads us with scholarly care through the wide range of issues that Heidegger wrote about between roughly 1935 and 1965. (...) After a discussion of Heidegger's own effort to learn to think, subsequent chapters present Heidegger's views on such matters as the meaning of Being; the ontological difference; heaven and earth; gods and mortals; and language, art, science, technology, ethics, and politics. In conclusion, Kockelmans reflects on the task of thinking in an age when classical philosophy has reached its logical end. (shrink)

The human factor in information systems is a large vulnerability when implementing cybersecurity, and many approaches, including technical and policy driven solutions, seek to mitigate this vulnerability. Decisions to apply technical or policy solutions must consider how an individual’s values and moral stance influence their responses to these implementations. Our research aims to evaluate how individuals prioritise different ethical principles when making cybersecurity sensitive decisions and how much perceived choice they have when doing so. Further, we sought to use participants’ (...) responses to cybersecurity scenarios to create profiles that describe their values and individual factors including personality. Participants (n = 193) in our study responded to five different ethically sensitive cybersecurity scenarios in random order, selecting their action in that scenario and rating and ranking of the ethical principles (i.e., Beneficence, Non-Maleficence, Justice, Autonomy, Explicability) behind that action. Using participants’ demographics, personality, values, and cyber hygiene practices, we created profiles using machine learning to predict participants’ choices and the principle of most importance to them across scenarios. Further, we found that, generalising, for our participants Autonomy was the most important ethical principle in our scenarios, followed by Justice. Our study also suggests that participants felt they had some agency in their decision making and they were able to weigh up different ethical principles. (shrink)

In Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology, Joseph J. Kockelmans provides the reader with a biographical sketch and an overview of the salient features of Husserl's thought. Kockelmans focuses on the essay for the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1928, Husserl's most Important effort to articulate the aims of phenomenology for a more general audience. Included are Husserl's text -- in the original German and in English translation on facing pages -- a synopsis, and an extensive commentary that relates Husserl's work as a whole (...) to the essay for the Encyclopedia. (shrink)

For Henry More, witchcraft served as an empirical confirmation of the existence of immaterial substances. Yet while he takes great care to make his reports as trustworthy as possible and argues against the claim that the effects of witchcraft are only the illusions of people suffering from melancholy, he almost completely ignores the possibility that such effects may be caused by natural magic. In More’s natural philosophical writings, discussions of magic are very much downplayed, as well. This may seem surprising, (...) as a crucial component of More’s metaphysical system is his doctrine of the Spirit of Nature, a sort of world-soul whose action is nonmechanical, vital, and magical. The essay argues that this deeply ambivalent approach to natural magic is due to the fact that More uses traditional magical notions to supplement the shortcomings of mechanicism and at the same time tries to divorce these notions from the potentially problematic background from which they originated. In the end, the essay suggests, More’s ambivalence toward magic is only one manifestation of a much deeper problem wherein he adopts an immanentist position while trying to avoid its more problematic, potentially pantheistic, consequences. (shrink)

In this book, Joseph Millum explains how parental rights and responsibilities are acquired, what they consist in, and how parents should go about making decisions on behalf of their children. In doing so, he provides a set of frameworks to help solve pressing ethical dilemmas relating to parents and children.

ABSTRACT Generative artificial intelligence is transforming the way we make, and think about, art. With prompting from human users, these generative systems now produce aesthetically compelling and seemingly creative works in a variety of artistic domains. In doing so, they challenge the ways we think about artistic credit, about creativity, and about the mechanism of legal copyright, which is meant to protect and promote creativity in a capitalist art market. All of this is currently at play in the courtroom, as (...) artists contest the ways in which their artworks can be rightfully fed into these artificial systems (“the problem of the inputs”), and other artists are challenged over whether they might be credited for the visual images these systems generate (“the problem of the outputs”). Here, we explore these problems as they arise in visual art. We argue that the contested legal landscape surrounding these artificial systems reflects the ways they challenge our received notions of artistic credit and creativity. And we suggest that clarifying or changing the application of copyright in light of their generative capacities will ultimately involve revising our conception of art. (shrink)

Conflict zone entrepreneurs—local entrepreneurs running small businesses in conflict settings—have paradoxical impacts on stability: holding the ability both to foster peace but also to enhance conflict. Prior scholarly work has been unable to explain this divergence, as existing entrepreneurial indicators do not account for fundamental peacebuilding elements. In response, the article consolidates divergent fields of study, applies paradox theory to analyze underlying tensions in the field, and reframes entrepreneurship through a peacebuilding lens based on intergroup inclusivity and value-creating business practices. (...) Using several cases, this article shows how entrepreneurial activity in conflict zones can foster sustainable peace, limited peace, or conflict, arguing that entrepreneurship based on value-creating and inclusive practices can result in pro-peace outcomes. The article offers policy recommendations for local governments and the humanitarian sector seeking to use entrepreneurship in conflict zones to promote peace. (shrink)

Most parents lie to their children. They do it for fun, as a method of behaviour control, and to protect children from what they consider to be dangerous truths. At the same time, most parents bring their children up with the message that honesty is a virtue and that lying is usually wrong. How should our practice and our preaching be reconciled? In this paper, I examine the ethics of parental lies. Most philosophers who have written on the ethics of (...) deception have focused on deception of and by autonomous adults. I therefore begin by surveying this literature. Contemporary philosophers have given three types of reason to explain what makes lying wrong (when it is wrong): negative consequences, breaches of trust, and interference with autonomy. I briefly analyze what constitutes a breach of trust and identify four factors that affect how bad a breach is. I then explicate how lying can constitute a wrongful interference with autonomy. A long-running debate concerns whether lying is ethically different than other forms of deception. I argue—briefly—that we do not need to resolve this debate in order to evaluate parental deception. Armed with a framework for what makes lying to autonomous adults wrongful, I turn to the special case of parental lying. Since the parent-child relationship is typically very close, lying to one’s child is a relatively serious breach of trust. This is exacerbated in the case of serious lies that implicate the parent-child relationship or the child’s identity. On the other hand, at least for young children, concerns about autonomy are less significant than for autonomous adults. I close by applying my analysis, along with data on the consequences of parental deception, to different types of parental lie. I argue that lying to one’s child is more rarely justified than is commonly thought, and delineate the circumstances in which it can be justified. (shrink)

Liberals writing about the family frequently cite the child's ‘right to an open future’ in discussions of the ethics of parental decision-making for young children. This purported right grounds certain claims on behalf of children in considerations related to their future autonomy. In this article, I argue that there is no compelling argument in favor of a distinctive ‘right to an open future’ construed as either a negative or a positive right. Insofar as claims made about the content of this (...) purported right are justified, they can be grounded in the interests of the child or in other uncontroversial rights. Talk of a ‘right to an open future’ serves only to obscure the ethical considerations that actually matter and citing the right is not helpful in deciding what may or should be done. I illustrate this claim by reference to two examples of how the ‘right to an open future’ has been applied: one regarding genetic testing for adult-onset disorders and one regarding selection for disabilities. (shrink)

This paper deals with Filipino values and cultural realities that must be considered by the government, policymakers, health care providers, and decision-makers when coming up with a response strategy to address the problems related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We gave particular focus to the following Filipino values: umpukan, pakikipagkapwa, mano po, lamay, close family ties, utang na loob, and collectivist culture, among others. These Filipino values are culturally ingrained and socially practiced, even in this age of modern technology. This paper (...) argues that we can resolve ethical dilemmas and make culturally anchored decisions by considering the salient features of these values during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Robert Pippin has long defended the Hegelian ‘satisfactions of self‐consciousness’ against virtually all attacks, including Heidegger's. He now concedes in a striking reversal that ‘Heidegger is right’. Pippin diagnoses his past allegiance to the Western rationalist tradition culminating in Hegel as resting on ‘a misplaced confidence in the inescapably self‐reflective character of any orientation or attunement to the meaningfulness of Being’. What were once the satisfactions of self‐consciousness have become its dissatisfactions. But does Pippin's presentation of the rationalist position ultimately (...) make it too easy for Heidegger to topple it? Will the rationalist impulse, interpreted more charitably, rest undisturbed by Pippin's Heideggerian challenge? I identify three assumptions Pippin's Heidegger makes about the role of reason in our orientation towards the world. If these assumptions are considered not only optional but falsifying by any sound rationalist, this will damage the power of Pippin's Heidegerrian critique. For it is only against the background of a credible picture of the presence of reason in human life that the dissatisfactions of self‐consciousness can emerge to reveal a genuine alternative. (shrink)

The principle of sufficient reason (PSR) says every fact has an explanation. But van Inwagen argues the PSR is false—otherwise all facts are necessary facts. Consider the conjunction of all contingent facts, which we can call the Big Contingent Conjunction. If every fact has an explanation, then presumably the Big Contingent Conjunction had better have an explanation too. But what fact could explain its truth—is the Big Contingent Conjunction explained by a necessary fact or a contingent one? Trouble ensues either (...) way. If the Big Contingent Conjunction is explained by a necessary fact, then it is hard to see why it should be contingent. (After all, if something follows from what is necessary, it too would seem to be necessary.) On the other hand, if the Big Contingent Conjunction is explained by a contingent fact, then the explanation appears circular since the explanans itself is among the facts it explains in the Big Contingent Conjunction. This paper explores an assumption of this argument rarely subjected to scrutiny—namely, the distribution principle, which asserts that if a fact explains a conjunction, then it explains each of its conjuncts. Though superficially plausible, close consideration of this principle reveals some reasons to reject it, potentially saving the PSR from van Inwagen’s challenge. (shrink)

The book integrates humans’ biological lives as animals with acculturation and interaction within diverse social worlds. Recent work in evolutionary biology, the social theory of practices, and cognition as embodied and enactive shows how aspects of human life often treated as social or cognitive are integrated “naturecultural” phenomena. Human evolution enables people’s varied biological development in practice-differentiated environments sustained by ongoing niche reconstruction. These naturecultural aspects of human life include language and other expressive repertoires; cultivated bodily skills; differentiated practical and (...) cultural domains and their associated settings and equipmental complexes; critical assessment of lives and practices; and power and resistance. This interdependent, practice-differentiated way of life explains how humans are accountable and responsive to diverse normative concerns. Our moral, social, practical, skillful, epistemic, conceptual, aesthetic, and other normative concerns are evolved, “two-dimensional” transformations of other animals’ one-dimensional biological success or failure in sustaining their lineages. These diverse normative concerns are not already-determinate norms, however. They indicate what is at issue and at stake in the ongoing development of various practices and their mutual interdependence, including how people express and reason about those issues discursively. Social power is thereby also a normative phenomenon, expressing how causal capacities and actions reconfigure the normative significance of other people’s situations. The book primarily addresses the biological significance of people’s situated involvement with one another. It nevertheless also highlights the social-ecological interdependence of people’s practice-differentiated ways of life with many non-human companion species, from microbial symbionts and pathogens to domesticated or commensal plants and animals. (shrink)

Life increasingly is understood in terms of information. I consider two attempts to formulate life in terms of mathematical information theory. G. J. Chaitin proposes to define life in terms of the relation between order and algorithmic compressibility in biological information. More recently, William Dembski, Winston Ewart, and Robert J. Mark’s suggest that Dembski’s notion of specified complexity can be mathematically expressed in information-theoretic terms through the concept of algorithmic specified complexity. The mathematical approaches are similar and in both cases (...) essentially dependent on the concept of randomness deficiency in algorithmic information theory: to subtract out the degree of randomness from an informational measure, yielding a remainder of organization (Chatin) or specified complexity (Dembski, Ewart, and Marks). I argue that these attempts must fail due the information-theoretic indistinguishability of organization and randomness. The failure is instructive, however, because it illustrates the inability of mathematical information theory to register biological organization. (shrink)

Birch (2022a) proposes a theory-light methodology for studying whether invertebrates have the capacity for (phenomenal) consciousness. The success of any such methodology turns on the positive markers it proposes, and whether they are genuinely ecumenical. After providing an account of what it is for a marker to be ecumenical, it is argued that one of the more influential set of markers offered – unlimited associative learning – clearly counts as positive evidence for consciousness on only a small handful of theories, (...) rendering Birch???s theory-light approach tacitly theory-heavy. What emerges is a broader lesson concerning what exactly is required for the theory-light framework to be successful. (shrink)

Aspects of the world are normative in as much as they or their existence constitute reasons for persons, i.e. grounds which make certain beliefs, moods, emotions, intentions or actions appropriate or inappropriate. Our capacities to perceive and understand how things are, and what response is appropriate to them, and our ability to respond appropriately, make us into persons, i.e. creatures with the ability to direct their own life in accordance with their appreciation of themselves and their environment, and of the (...) reasons with which, given how they are, the world presents them. An explanation of normativity would explain the various puzzling aspects of this complex phenomenon. In particular it would explain how it is that aspects of the world can constitute reasons for cognitive, emotive, and volitional responses; how it is that we can come to realise that certain cognitive, emotional or volitional responses are appropriate in various circumstances, and inappropriate in others; and how it is that we can respond appropriately. This paper explores an aspect of the last of these questions. (shrink)

Concepts of an organism’s biological environment and of niche construction as how organisms alter their environment and that of other organisms now play prominent roles in multiple sub-fields of biology, including ecology, evolution, and development. Some philosophers now use these concepts to understand the dynamics of scientific research. Others note divergences among the concepts of niche and niche construction employed in these biological fields, with implications for their possible conceptual integration. My (Rouse, 2015) account of scientific research as niche constructive (...) and of laws and lawful invariance in scientific practice illuminates these conceptual differences and their implications for integrating those domains of biological research in two ways. First, it accounts for the partial autonomy of these domains and their concepts as characteristic of scientific conceptual development. Second, it provides a more complex understanding of how research domains can be integrated, which shows how those different conceptions of niches and niche construction do not block their appropriate integration. The conclusion situates my account and its application to niche concepts both amid other philosophical uses of niche concepts to understand research environments and as exemplifying my revisionist conception of philosophical naturalism. (shrink)

The Ontological Question seems to be the main source of controversy in the Anti-intentionalism versus Intentionalism debate. The Ontological Question asks what determines the meaning of an artwork? Intentionalists argue that the intention of the artist determines the meaning of the artwork, while Anti-intentionalists argue that the artwork alone determines its own meaning. In this article I answer this question as it relates to film analysis. I propose a Biosemantic variety of film analysis, rooted in semantic externalist philosophy of language. (...) Via this Biosemantic approach, and with the help of a case study of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, I provide an answer to the Ontological Question which refutes two main varieties of Intentionalism and supports Anti-intentionalist film analysis. (shrink)

The privilege of having three sets of extensive and hard-hitting comments on one's work is as welcome as it is rare, and especially so on this occasion as the lectures were, for me, but thefirst (well, not entirely first) stab at a subject I hope to explore at greater length. The reflectionsthat follow will respond to some of the criticisms, but will not be a point by point reply. I will use the occasion to clarify some obscurities in the lectures, (...) and to contrast my view with some of my critics' own positions. I will proceed thematically, starting with some observations about method and about ontology, proceeding to explore several questions about the relations between social dependence and relativism, between genre, value, and normativity, and concluding with a fewwords on pluralism and liberal values. (shrink)

Standard accounts of mental powers are forward-looking: They individuate powers through their potential manifestations. In this article, the authors argue that mental powers are backward-looking as well. The backward-looking dimension of a power—what they call its lineage—opens up and constrains possibilities for potential manifestations, and in doing so, individuates mental powers just as readily as standard, forward-looking accounts. The idea of lineages thus incorporates standard accounts of mental powers, even while broadening the theoretical, rhetorical, and practical reach of an empowered (...) account. (shrink)

ExcerptTo invoke the term “morality” in the same sentence as Carl Schmitt will undoubtedly baffle some of his critics. Indeed, his more strident ones will probably be greatly offended by any such juxtaposition of Schmitt and morality. His name is still too often associated with a theory of—even despicable admiration for—the exercise of amoral political power, or an equally repugnant supple amoral opportunism emanating from a kind of nihilistic existentialism.

There is now a robust literature on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) that pertains largely to non-military issues – issues of, among other things, bias, fairness, and unintended consequences. There is less published work, however, on how these lessons from industry and academia might inform the ethics of AI in the military context. In this article, I take small steps to demonstrate the ways in which the field of AI ethics might be relevant to military applications. Ultimately, I argue (...) that even though the outcomes of AI failures might look very different in the non-military context versus in the military context, the causes of those failures can be very similar; and addressing those potential causes of AI failures in the development of military AI systems will result in fewer ethical failures after deployment. (shrink)

We investigate the causal effects of religious service attendance on prosocial behaviours using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of 33,198 New Zealanders collected between 2018 and 2021. Our study innovates in three ways: (1) we use longitudinal rather than cross-sectional data; (2) we incorporate measures of help received alongside self-reported giving; and (3) our statistical models are designed to address causal questions, rather than simply to describe change over time. We model causal contrasts for three hypothetical interventions – (...) increasing, decreasing, or maintaining religious service attendance – and assess their effects on eight distinct prosocial domains. Study 1 focuses on self-reported charitable donations and volunteering. Studies 2 and 3 examine receiving help – both personal and financial – from family, friends, and the wider community. Across all analyses, we find that the causal effects of religious service attendance are notably smaller than cross-sectional correlations suggest. However, even modest increases in regular attendance would result in charitable donations equivalent to approximately 4% of the New Zealand Government’s annual spending – a considerable public benefit. By applying robust methods for causal inference to national-scale panel data, our study provides insights that can inform public policy about the social functions of religious participation and advances a methodological framework for investigating the social consequences of cultural practices. (shrink)

Husserl's Original View on Phenomenological Psychology* JOSEPH J.KOCKELMANS Some forty years ago Edmund Husserl spoke publicly for the first time of a ...

Recent studies suggest that learners who are asked to predict the outcome of an event learn more than learners who are asked to evaluate it retrospectively or not at all. One possible explanation for this “prediction boost” is that it helps learners engage metacognitive reasoning skills that may not be spontaneously leveraged, especially for individuals with still-developing executive functions. In this paper, we combined multiple analytic approaches to investigate the potential role of executive functions in elementary school-aged children's science learning. (...) We performed an experiment that investigates children's science learning during a water displacement task where a “prediction boost” had previously been observed—children either made an explicit prediction or evaluated an event post hoc (i.e., postdiction). We then considered the relation of executive function measures and learning, which were collected following the main experiment. Via mixed effects regression models, we found that stronger executive function skills (i.e., stronger inhibition and switching scores) were associated with higher accuracy in Postdiction but not in the Prediction Condition. Using a theory-based Bayesian model, we simulated children's individual performance on the learning task (capturing “belief flexibility”), and compared this “flexibility” to the other measures to understand the relationship between belief revision, executive function, and prediction. Children in the Prediction Condition showed near-ceiling “belief flexibility” scores, which were significantly higher than among children in the Postdiction Condition. We also found a significant correlation between children's executive function measures to our “belief flexibility” parameter, but only for children in the Postdiction Condition. These results indicate that when children provided responses post hoc, they may have required stronger executive function capacities to navigate the learning task. Additionally, these results suggest that the “prediction boost” in children's science learning could be explained by increased metacognitive flexibility in the belief revision process. (shrink)

Temporal externalists expand Putnam’s and Burge’s semantic externalisms to argue that later uses of words transform the semantic significance of earlier uses. Conflicting intuitions about temporal externalism often turn on different conceptions of linguistic practice, which have mostly not been thematically explicated. I defend a version of temporal externalism that replaces the familiar regularist and normative-regulist conceptions of linguistic practice or use. This alternative identifies practices neither by regularities of use, nor by determinate norms governing their constituent performances, but by (...) the ways those performances bear upon and are accountable to one another. Performances are intelligible as part of a larger pattern of practice, but different performances extend that pattern in partially conflicting ways. The essentially anaphoric concepts of “issues” and “stakes” allow us to talk about how alternative extensions of past performance conflict or otherwise mis-align , and what differences it would make to extend the practice in one way rather than another . The result is to recognize both the interdependence of linguistic performances, and the open texture of concepts, by situating them within broader patterns of discursive interaction with changing circumstances. (shrink)

The film Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987) begins to answer the startling question, “How could being human be superior to enjoying an angelic existence?” The film’s elevation of ordinary humanity is so persuasive that a few angels forego eternity, “take the plunge,” and become mortals. The first layer of human attraction is found in the uncomplicated pleasures of physical embodiment. To the enjoyment of bodily sensations such as warming our hands on a chilly day, the film adds the ecstasy (...) of romantic love, including the social intimacy of conjugal union. The third layer of human life is the stratum of meaning that purposeful action contributes. Finitude demands that we must decide how to spend our limited time as not all options can or will remain open. This animates life with the hope of positive outcomes and the trepidation of mishap. The meaning that accrues to experience, then, depends on the temporality and limitations inherent within life and definitive of mortal existence as such. (shrink)

Self-identified adherents of freedom and democracy (hereafter ‘liberals’) increasingly accuse each other as being harmful, illiberal actors. To explain, I argue that present day liberals adhere to different sets of rules on public discourse (discourse regimes), and that adherents of one regime frame those of another as false liberals, who allow or commit rights violations. I illustrate with diverging discourse regimes within and among advanced, OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) democracies.