Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed. These volumes provide a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. They offer a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighboring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. This book is the 13th volume in (...) the series. It is divided into three parts. Part I concerns parts and pluralities. It begins with Peter van Inwagen’s proposed paraphrase techniques to help nihilists handle certain challenging sentences. In chapter two, Simon Thunder defends manyism: the view that each composite object is simply its many parts. The third chapter presents Joshua Spencer’s puzzle that affects prominent answers to the Special Composition Question. Part II looks at causation, counterfactuals, and essence. It opens with chapter four, where Bradford Skow categorizes varieties of causal relevance and compares them to varieties of relevance found in other domains. In chapter five, John Hawthorne and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri propose a novel translation scheme from the language of quantified model logic into the language of counterpart theory. In chapter six, Sungil Han argues against the definitional model of essence. Topics in Part III include persistence, time, and change. Chapter seven, by Kristie Miller and Caroline West, contends that the normative argument against perdurantism fails. In chapter eight, Martin Pickup proposes a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. Then, in the final chapter of the volume, Alexander Kaiserman articulates a novel tense logic and uses it to argue that past alteration is possible. (shrink)

The National Health Service (NHS) was the first healthcare system globally to declare ambitions to become net carbon zero. To achieve this, a shift away from metered-dose inhalers which contain powerful greenhouse gases is necessary. Many patients can use dry powder inhalers which do not contain greenhouse gases and are equally effective at managing respiratory disease. This paper discusses the ethical issues that arise as the NHS attempts to mitigate climate change. Two ethical issues that pose a barrier to moving (...) away from metered-dose inhalers are considered: patients who decline an inhaler with a smaller carbon footprint and increased cost. I argue that while a patient is not morally justified in refusing a more environmentally sustainable inhaler due to the expected harms, a doctor may still prescribe a metered-dose inhaler if they believe that switching without consent might undermine trust or substantially worsen the patient’s health. Turning to cost, I argue that the imperative to combat climate change means the NHS should accept small increased financial costs for lower carbon inhalers, even though this provides no additional direct benefit for the patient. I then go on to consider the implications of the preceding analysis for policy and practice. I argue for a policy that minimises the impact of inhalers on the climate by advocating for a principle of environmental prescribing and explore decision-making in practice. While the arguments here pertain primarily to inhalers, the discussion has broader implications for debates around healthcare’s responsibility to be environmentally sustainable. (shrink)

Private companies provide by far the most funding for scientific research and development. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been paid to the dynamics of industry‐funded research by philosophers of science. This paper addresses this gap by providing an overview of the major strengths and weaknesses of industry research funding, together with the existing recommendations for addressing the weaknesses. It is designed to provide a starting point for future philosophical work that explores the features of industry‐funded research, avenues for addressing concerns, (...) and strategies for making research funded by the private sector as fruitful as possible. (shrink)

To a first approximation, ‘bodily skill’ refers to the capacity to successfully utilize the body in the world to achieve goals. But the body is complex, and bodily skill manifests in many different ways. Further, work on bodily skill spans the philosophy of mind, action, and cognitive science, as well as the sciences of motor control and perception. This chapter aims to provide an overview of recent themes and key ideas. First, we review work on the nature of skill as (...) such. Second, we discuss ways theorists have discussed the implementation of skill in the human body, and a theoretical difficulty associated with explanations of implementation. Third, we discuss the importance of the idea of a hierarchical representational architecture for understanding skill’s implementation, and various ways this architecture can be made more sophisticated. Fourth, we discuss work that attempts to understand skill execution on-the-fly, and in particular, work that attempts to understand the connection between intentions and motor representations, and the connection between implicit sensorimotor adaptation and explicit planning and executive control. Fifth, we discuss work on the models that assist fine-grained skill execution, as well as the idea that even at rapid, fine-grained motoric levels, one finds intelligent systems and mechanisms supporting skill. Finally, we consider the place of bodily awareness in an account of bodily skill. (shrink)

This paper begins by consider a straightforward question in the metaphysics and morality of markets: Are there cases in which it is morally permissible to freely give x (i.e. without exchange for valuable consideration), but impermissible to give x in exchange for valuable consideration? To address this question, this paper raises the issue of the difference between giving freely and giving in exchange for valuable consideration. It argues that the distinction lies in whether the receipt of valuable consideration acts as (...) a reason for the giver. If S receiving some valuable consideration for x is not a reason for S to give x, then x is not engaging in an exchange. This illuminates the discussion around the morality of markets. Instead of supposing that x transforms when it is exchanged (rather than given), the difference can be assessed in terms of the giver’s reasons. As such, S freely giving x may be morally permissible and S exchanging x impermissible if S taking a valuable consideration as a reason makes the act wrong. The paper illustrates this with cases where individuals may give x only for certain reasons, and therefore are not permitted to exchange x. Finally, the paper concludes with an analysis of how this approach to analyzing exchange can contribute to the discussion of the metaphysics of markets, and create a fine-grained analysis of the different varieties of impermissible exchanges in terms of the moral analyses we do for other acts; it connects the discussion of the morality of giving and exchanging some x to the morality of other actions, and giving their permissibility in terms of justificatory reasons, consequences, etc. In doing so, the paper represents a contribution to the broader discussion of the morality of markets by illustrating a way to develop an analysis of the morality of exchanges (an important constituent of markets). This analysis circumvents approaches in the metaphysics of markets that have raised skepticism, e.g. certain goods transform when placed on a market. While compatible with claims about transformative goods, this theory allows for an explanation of moral prohibitions against certain kinds of exchange only on the basis of the justificatory reasons of the agents involved in the exchange; this is a much more stable metaphysical base from which to evaluate the morality of markets and exchanges. (shrink)

This collection brings together prominent thinkers from numerous disciplines to address the legacy of Gillian Rose for political theology today. Rose’s work is notorious for its eclectic range, difficult style, and iconoclastic defiance of the conventions of postmodern critical theory. The theologians, religious scholars, ethicists, and theorists in this collection discuss Rose’s relationship to such topics as the Frankfurt School, social theory, feminism, literature, law, Hegel, Kant, and psychoanalysis. They situate her work within the wider context of political theology, as (...) it is understood in religious studies and continental philosophy. Though attentive to the theoretical issues raised by Rose’s work, these essays are also engage the role that work may play in political action today, examining issues such as refugee immigration in Europe, the rise of nationalism, and anticapitalist political organizing. The collection is a vital contribution to the rising body of literature on Rose and her importance to political philosophy, ethics, and theology, but it will also serve as an important orienting guide for readers new to Rose’s work and its demanding style. (shrink)

Philosophy is often depicted as generically distinct from literature, myth, and history, as a discipline that eschews narration and relies exclusively on abstract reason. This book takes issue with that assumption, arguing instead that political philosophers have commonly presented their readers with a narrative, rather than a logic, of politics. The book maintains that philosophical texts frequently persuade through the creation of a 'role' that they invite their audience to inhabit. The author also investigates the place of narrative in politics (...) in two ways. It offers a hypothesis of a broad connection between political identity and narrative, and it analyzes three major figures in the history of political thought - Locke, Hegel, and Nietzsche - to demonstrate that their work is best understood through the hypothesis. The author argues that each of these philosophers rewrites the past in an attempt to direct the future. (shrink)

In our society, some aspects of life are off-limits to commerce. We prohibit the selling of children and the buying of wives, juries, and kidneys. Tainted blood is an inevitable consequence of paying blood donors; even sophisticated laboratory tests cannot supplant the gift-giving relationship as a safeguard of the purity of blood. Like blood, health care is too precious, intimate, and corruptible to entrust to the market.The hospice movement in the United States is approximately 40 years old. During these past (...) four decades, the concept of holistic, multidisciplinary care for patients who are suffering from a terminal illness has evolved from a modest, grassroots constellation of primarily volunteer-run and community-governed endeavors to a multimillion dollar industry where the surviving nonprofits compete with for-profit providers, often publicly traded, managed by M.B.A.-trained executives, and governed by corporate boards. The relatively recent emergence of for-profit hospice reflects an increasing commercialization of health care in the United States, the potentially adverse impact of which has been well documented. (shrink)

The law has taken a long-standing interest in the mind. Cognitive neuroscience, the study of the mind through the brain, has gained prominence in part as a result of the advent of functional neuroimaging as a widely used tool for psychological research. Existing legal principles make virtually no assumptions about the neural bases of criminal behavior, and as a result they can comfortably assimilate new neuroscience without much in the way of conceptual upheaval: new details, new sources of evidence, but (...) nothing for which the law is fundamentally unprepared. Neuroscience challenges ultimately reshape our intuitive sense of justice. It draws a familiar distinction between the consequentialist justification for state punishment, according to which punishment is merely an instrument for promoting future social welfare, and the retributivist justification for punishment, according to which the principal aim of punishment is to give people what they deserve based on their past actions. (shrink)

In our paper ‘The ethical case for non-directed postmortem sperm donation’ we argued that it would be ethical for men to donate sperm after death for use by strangers. In their thoughtful response Fredrick and Ben Kroon lay out practical concerns regarding our proposal. They raise issues regarding the quality of sperm collected postmortem based on empirical studies. Second, they claim that concerns about quality would make women unlikely to use sperm collected after death. In this response we explore issues (...) of sperm quality in both living and dead donors. We consider whether there might be ways to ensure quality in both. Finally, we question whether quality should be a barrier to women choosing to use sperm donated after death. (shrink)

People of faith, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, worship corporately at least as often, if not more so, than they do individually. Why do they do this? There are, of course, many reasons, some having to do with personal preference and others having to do with the theology of worship. But, in this paper, we explore one reason, a philosophical reason, which, despite recent work on the philosophy of liturgy, has gone underappreciated. In particular, we argue that corporate worship enables (...) a person to come to know God better than they would otherwise know him in individual worship. (shrink)

Julia Markovits has recently argued for what she calls the ‘Coincident Reasons Thesis’: the thesis that one’s action is morally worthy if and only if one’s motivating reasons for acting mirror, in content and strength, the reasons that explain why the action ought, morally, to be performed. This thesis assumes that the structure of motivating reasons is sufficiently similar to the structure of normative reasons that the required coincidence in content and strength is a genuine possibility. But because motivating reasons (...) have only one dimension of strength, while normative reasons have both justifying and requiring strength, one’s motivating reasons can no more coincide with the normative reasons of relevance to one’s action than a line can coincide with a square, or a square with a cube. It is possible to amend the Coincident Reasons Thesis so that it concerns only one dimension of normative strength: for example, requiring strength. But such an amended thesis yields implausible verdicts. In particular it requires us either to deny the existence of supererogatory action, or—still less plausibly—to hold that such action has less moral worth than does doing the morally required minimum. (shrink)

A diverse collection of essays, which reflect the breadth of Judith Jarvis Thomson's philosophical work. The diversity of topics discussed in this book reflects the breadth of Judith Jarvis Thomson's philosophical work. Throughout her long career at MIT, Thomson's straightforward approach and emphasis on problem-solving have shaped philosophy in significant ways. Some of the book's contributions discuss specific moral and political issues such as abortion, self-defense, the rights and obligations of prospective fathers, and political campaign finance. Other contributions concern the (...) foundations of moral theory, focusing on hedonism, virtue ethics, the nature of nonconsequentialism, and the objectivity of moral claims. Finally, contributions in metaphysics and epistemology discuss the existence of sets, the structures reflected in conditional statements, and the commitments of testimony. Contributors Jonathan Bennett, Richard L. Cartwright, Joshua Cohen, N. Ann Davis, Catherine Z. Elgin, Gilbert Harman, Barbara Herman, Frances Myrna Kamm, Claudia Mills, T.M. Scanlon, Ernest Sosa. (shrink)

To help frame the Festschrift for Gyula Klima (Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind), this appreciation offers perspective on the scholar's person and project. Drawing on biographical details and reflecting on signal contributions, it seeks to honor a distinguished philosopher who deserves to be celebrated by friends and introduced to a new generation of readers. Download with frontmatter from: link[dot]springer[dot]com/content/pdf/bfm:978-3-031-15026-5/1?pdf=chapter%20toc.

A theological treatment of the role of affections such as joy, compassion, and shame in contemporary politics. Hordern discusses what affections are and how they play a role in parts of political life such as representation and law. He shows that affections have an intelligent role to play in fostering loyalty, trust and public moral reasoning.

In this article, I defend a version of ontological pluralism, specifically with an eye toward laying metaphysical groundwork for an account of divine naming inspired by Avicenna. I try to show (1) that Avicenna’s pluralism is well-motivated as a metaphysical thesis and (2) that it offers substantive philosophical support for a correlatively pluralist approach to divine naming. My argument proceeds by identifying two influential objections to ontological pluralism, and then offering replies to these objections with the help of Avicenna. The (...) first objection pertains to pluralism as a position in general metaphysics, whereas the second pertains to pluralism as a position in theological epistemology or divine naming. To the extent that these replies are successful, I argue that Avicennian pluralism is compelling on both counts as a philosophical position. (shrink)

Sentimental cosmopolitans argue that cultivating empathy for distant others is necessary in order to motivate action to address global injustices. This paper accepts the basic premises of the senti...

Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz continue in the tradition of Plato with their work on the role of education in a just society. Both argue that a just society depends on education enabling citizens to realize democratic or civic equality and that this equality depends on sufficiency in the distribution of educational goods. I agree that education is important to preparing democratic citizens, but I disagree about the plausibility of sufficiency here, especially in the educational context. My argument is two‐fold: (...) I first reconsider a generic positional goods objection to educational inequality, I then argue that plausible sufficientarian replies to this objection fail insofar as they are premised on an impoverished conception of class and power that treats all statuses more like socio‐cultural traits when they should instead be referencing the material conditions someone has inside a social structure. One cannot bring an individual X into the halls of power and simultaneously have X represent or compensate those who are presently disadvantaged in the way that X had formerly been disadvantaged. In short, we should worry about the realistic possibility of securing and sustaining a civic‐minded elite because elites have the power and motivation to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us. For the sufficientarian story to work, we need more that explains the realistic possibility of a benevolent ruling elite, until then, democratic equality seems to be better realized by aiming for equal educations, adequacy isn't enough. (shrink)

Abstract“Poems That Kill” examines the connection between poetry and revolution in Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art” (1965) and in general. The article tracks how Baraka uses poetry to start or advance a revolution in his own life, in the lives of his contemporaries, in poetry, in our present moment, and in the future. The article also discusses poetic address (how poems address readers), sincerity, ambiguity, and hate speech.

This article highlights and discusses the Ehrenfests’ use of toy models to explore irreversibility in statistical mechanics. In particular, we explore their urn and P–Q models and highlight that, while the former was primarily used to provide a simple counter-example to Zermelo’s objection to Boltzmann’s statistical mechanical underpinning of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the latter was intended to highlight the role and importance of the Stoßzahlansatz as a cause of the tendency of systems to exhibit entropy increase. We also (...) explain the sense in which these models are toy models and why agents can use them, as the Ehrenfests’ did, to carry out this important work, despite the fact that they do not represent any real system. (shrink)

How many minds do you have? If you are a normal human, I think only one, but a number of dual-process theorists have disagreed. As an explanation of human irrationality, they divide human reasoning into two: Type-1 is fast, associative, and automatic, while Type-2 is slow, rule-based, and effortful. Some go further in arguing that these reasoning processes constitute (or are partly constitutive of) two minds. In this paper, I use the Star Trek ‘Trill’ species to illuminate the condition for (...) the existence of “two minds in one brain” (Evans 2010, 3). After carefully outlining the two dominate versions of dual-process theory (default-interventionism, espoused by Evans, Stanovich, and Kahneman, and parallel-competitive theory, espoused by Sloman, Frankish, and Carruthers) and contrasting each with a one-system alternative, I argue that these three views should be understood as existing on a continuum: there are some theories that could plausibly be characterized as either one-system or default-interventionist, and the distinction between default-interventionism and parallelcompetitive theory is not as clean-cut as usually assumed. I then argue, using the conceptual claims I defended using the science fiction cases, that default-interventionist dual-process theory is not compatible with the claim that humans have two minds (contra Evans and Stanovich). (shrink)

Quantitative health risk assessment is a procedure for estimating the likelihood that exposure to environmental contaminants will produce certain adverse health effects, most commonly cancer. One instance of its use has been a California air toxics public “right-to-know” law. This article examines the ways in which credible health risk measurements were produced and challenged during the implementation of the California public policy. Fieldwork and documentary analysis finds that stakeholders negotiated within the formal constraints of the risk assessment procedures but still (...) expressed their competing visions for the implementation of the risk communication policy. The abstract results of the method were contextualized according to different time frames and allocations of uncertainty. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the political process privileged consistency of measurement over accuracy, revealing political negotiations at a fundamentally technical level. The struggle and variation in interpretations can be explained best by the demand to organize the program around the discordant values of democratic accountability and technical efficiency. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Setting specific, challenging goals motivates employees to exert greater effort in their jobs. However, goal-setting may have unintended consequences of also motivating unethical behavior. The present study explores these consequences in the context of other features of goal-setting in organizations, how goals are framed and rewarded, to determine the tradeoff between performance and ethical behavior. Undergraduate students were incentivized to complete math problems using different outcome frames and incentive structures and were also provided an opportunity to cheat. Findings demonstrate (...) that when goals rewarded with piece-rate incentives are framed as a loss, performance increased, though cheating behavior increased as well. (shrink)

Amartya Sen has suggested that the moral significance of freedom undermines the view that well-being alone possesses fundamental moral worth. Sen’s efforts to establish this claim, however, seem to fall short: he attempts to establish freedom’s independent moral significance by pointing to the value of autonomy, but explains the value of autonomy in terms of its role as an element of well-being. Nonetheless, I take it that Sen is very much on the right track: well-being is not the only fundamental (...) moral value, and an examination of freedom’s moral significance really will bring this out. I thus offer my own version of the freedom-based critique of well-being’s exclusive moral claim, focusing not on autonomy but what Sen has called “well-being freedom.” The value of this variety of freedom derives, I will suggest, not from the value of well-being itself but the value of well-being potential. Well-being freedom matters not only because promoting it is a way of promoting human well-being, but also because respecting it is a way of respecting the dignity of human nature. The freedom-based critique of well-being’s moral uniqueness succeeds even if Sen’s particular version of it does not. (shrink)

We develop the concept “political residency” in this essay to highlight both the foundational role of built environments in our political life as well as how access to, and displacement from, built environments is therefore a central feature of political harms and goods. The example of housing and housing displacement is instructive for developing our concept because it is central to most people’s everyday life, yet residential security and stability—having control with other inhabitants over shared, built spaces—is often missing from (...) peoples’ lives, especially those who are most socially and politically vulnerable. (shrink)

Against the neo-Darwinian assumption that genetic factors are the principal source of variation upon which natural selection operates, a phenotype-first hypothesis strikes us as revolutionary because development would seem to constitute an independent source of variability. Richard Watson and his co-authors have argued that developmental memory constitutes one such variety of phenotypic variability. While this version of the phenotype-first hypothesis is especially well-suited for the late metazoan context, where animals have a sufficient history of selection from which to draw, appeals (...) to developmental memory seem less plausible in the evolutionary context of the early metazoans. I provide an interpretation of Stuart Newman’s account of deep metazoan phylogenesis that suggests that spandrels are, in addition to developmental memory, an important reservoir of phenotypic variability. I conclude by arguing that Gerd Müller’s “side-effect hypothesis” is an illuminating generalization of the proposed non-Watsonian version of the phenotype-first hypothesis. (shrink)

Numerous approaches have been taken in an effort to find a non-anthropocentric ethic that will lead to greater consideration of animals. Most of the recent approaches in this area have been rights-based. It is argued here that a rights-based approach alone fails both theoretically and in practical applications. It is shown that in theory these approaches can lead to unsound conclusions and cannot handle uncertainty. In addition, in practice the rules of the rights-based approaches will often be violated. A utility (...) approach with unequal weighting for different species subject to certain rights or obligations is proposed as an alternative. This approach is intended to be operational rather than purely theoretical and therefore would be based on a negotiated consensus rather than a priori theory. (shrink)

In 1997, a court in Cyprus jailed Pavlos Georgiou for fifteen months for knowingly infecting a British woman, Janet Pink, with HIV-1 through unprotected sexual intercourse. Pink met Georgiou in January 1994 whilst on holiday. She discovered that she had contracted the virus from him in October 1994 but continued the relationship until July 1996 when she developed AIDS. She returned to the UK for treatment and reported Georgiou to the Cypriot authorities.1There have been a number of legal cases involving (...) deliberate transmission of HIV, but most have involved forced exposure to infected bodily fluids for example, rape or biting, and have been dealt with using the existing legislation for rape or assault. While it is often difficult to prove responsibility for transmission in cases of forced exposure to HIV, it is even more contentious in cases like those of Janet Pink where an individual has consented to sex but claims that he/she was not forewarned of his/herpartner's HIV-positive status. At present there is no specific criminal offence of having unprotected sexual intercourse without disclosing one's HIV-positive status but a prosecution could possibly be brought under any one of a number of existing offences.2 Perhaps a change of policy needs to be considered. The Home Office has issued a consultation document which outlines a proposal that will allow the criminalisation of intentional transmission of diseases, like HIV, that are likely to cause serious harm. This revised legislation would cover all other potentially fatal diseases but seems primarily to be targeted at HIV transmission. Should transmission of HIV through consensual sex, without the HIV-positive status of the individual being disclosed, be an offence? This question, and that of whether there is a moral obligation to disclose a positive HIV status prior to having a sexual relationship is the subject of this paper. (shrink)