According to some recent arguments, if our moral beliefs are products of natural selection, then we do not have moral knowledge. In defense of this inference, its proponents argue that natural selection is a process that fails to track moral facts. In this paper, I argue that our having moral knowledge is consistent with, the hypothesis that our moral beliefs are products of natural selection, and the claim that natural selection fails to track moral facts. I also argue that natural (...) selection is a process that could track moral facts, albeit imperfectly. I do not argue that we do have moral knowledge. I argue instead that Darwinian considerations provide us with no reason to doubt that we do, and with some reasons to suppose that we might. (shrink)

I argue that the idea of ‘quasi-independence’ [Lewontin, R. C. . Adaptation. Scientific American, 239, 212–230] cannot be understood without attending to the distinction between fitness and advantageousness [Sober, E. . Philosophy of biology. Boulder: Westview Press]. Natural selection increases the frequency of fitter traits, not necessarily of advantageous ones. A positive correlation between an advantageous trait and a disadvantageous one may prevent the advantageous trait from evolving. The quasi-independence criterion is aimed at specifying the conditions under which advantageous traits (...) will evolve by natural selection in this type of situation. Contrary to what others have argued [Sterelny, K. . Evolutionary explanations of human behavior. Australian Journal of Philosophy, 70, 156–172, and Sterelny, K., & Griffiths, P. . Sex and death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press], these conditions must involve a precise quantitative measure of the extent to which advantageous traits are beneficial, and the degree to which they are correlated with other traits. Driscoll [Driscoll, C. . Can behaviors be adaptations? Philosophy of Science, 71, 16–35] recognizes the need for such a measure, but I argue that she does not provide the correct formulation. The account of quasi-independence that I offer clarifies this point. (shrink)

In this paper, we address a key question that has been central to discussions on rationality: is the concept of rationality normative or merely descriptive? We present the findings of a corpus-linguistic study revealing that people commonly perceive the concept of rationality as normative.

Sixty‐one million Americans and approximately a billion people worldwide live with some form of disability that limits one or more major life activities. The field of precision medicine continues to grapple with how to best serve disability communities. In this paper, we suggest that precision medicine faces an ethical tension between its goal to treat or cure disabling conditions and views that consider disability as a marginalized identity. We appeal to the concepts of recognition justice and distributive justice to argue (...) that the ELSI community should take a more proactive role in promoting disability inclusion in precision medicine's practice and research. We also highlight two priorities for the ELSI community moving forward: facilitating greater collaboration between genetics and genomic professionals and disability communities and advocating for inclusive research design and disability accommodations in the research process. (shrink)

This collection brings together cutting-edge research on the metaphysics of human nature and soul-body dualism.Kevin Corcoran's collection, Soul, Body, and ...

In light of the diversity of hybrid, social, and faith-based enterprises, the paper aims to deepen and widen the descriptive and normative reach of the theory of the firm. Higher ends of business are core philosophical components for an expanded normative theory of the firm. To regard shareholders, managers, and all stakeholders of a business firm in a fully moral light means expanding one’s view of such roles beyond merely economic and legal conceptions to encompass their full humanity and associated (...) moral obligations and social responsibilities. Any adequate normative theory of the firm will cast business participants not just as economic actors and as legal agents but as flesh-and-blood moral persons with ethical responsibilities. When the theory of the firm is normativized – not privileging moral rights and obligations of stockholders or stakeholders in advance of consideration of balance of reasons -- the false dichotomy of shareholder primacy versus stakeholder primacy falls away, ceasing to provide a basis for giving categorically incompatible accounts of prima facie moral obligations of business participants. (shrink)

‘What is Man?’ That was the half-secret question motivating political theory in the nineties and the aughts.1 Sometimes, critics glossed the question as one of ‘subjectivity’, ‘the theory of the su...

Bayesian reasoning has been applied formally to statistical inference, machine learning and analysing scientific method. Here I apply it informally to more common forms of inference, namely natural language arguments. I analyse a variety of traditional fallacies, deductive, inductive and causal, and find more merit in them than is generally acknowledged. Bayesian principles provide a framework for understanding ordinary arguments which is well worth developing.

Technology companies are increasingly being asked to take responsibility for the technologies they create. Many of them are rising to the challenge. One way they do this is by implementing “guardrails”: restrictions on functionality that prevent people from misusing their technologies (per some standard of misuse). While there can be excellent reasons for implementing guardrails (and doing so is sometimes morally obligatory), I argue that the unrestricted authority to implement guardrails is incompatible with proper respect for user freedom, and is (...) not something we should welcome. I argue instead that guardrails should be implemented for only two reasons: to prevent accidental misuse of the technology, and as a proportionate means of preventing people from using the technology to violate other people’s rights. If I’m right, then we may have to get more comfortable with developers releasing technologies that can, and to some extent inevitably will, be misused; people using technologies in ways we disagree with is one of the costs of liberty, but it is a cost we have excellent reasons to bear. (shrink)

In this paper a look is taken at the relatively new area of culturing neural tissue and embodying it in a mobile robot platform—essentially giving a robot a biological brain. Present technology and practice is discussed. New trends and the potential effects of and in this area are also indicated. This has a potential major impact with regard to society and ethical issues and hence some initial observations are made. Some initial issues are also considered with regard to the potential (...) consciousness of such a brain. (shrink)

The Lottery Paradox has been thought to provide a reductio argument against probabilistic accounts of inductive inference. As a result, much work in artificial intelligence has concentrated on qualitative methods of inference, including default logics, which are intended to model some varieties of inductive inference. It has recently been shown that the paradox can be generated within qualitative default logics. However, John Pollock's qualitative system of defeasible inference, does avoid the Lottery Paradox by incorporating a rule designed specifically for that (...) purpose. I shall argue that Pollock's system instead succumbs to a worse disease: it fails to allow for induction at all. (shrink)

The metaphysics of gender has largely focused on examples of interpersonal, linguistically articulated misrecognition. Cases of linguistic misgendering center an interaction between two people where one person refuses to recognize the gender identity of another. In light of these cases, metaphysicians of gender have devoted substantial attention to defining gender kinds and concepts. In this paper, I consider a different set of examples. I discuss cases of structural, materially articulated violence, patterns of targeted structural violence toward trans and gender-nonconforming people. (...) Specifically, I argue that this kind of structural violence is explained by the gender binary, a social structure that (a) dictates the descriptive expectation that there are two biologically grounded genders, male and female, and (b) divides up social roles based on whether a person is male or female. I claim that metaphysicians of gender need to give a real definition of the gender binary, and I present my own preliminary account. The methodological upshot of this paper is that the metaphysics of gender is not limited to the task of determining who is (or is not) really a member of a gender kind. (shrink)

I have applied a fairly general, learning theoretic perspective to some questions raised by Reichenbach's positions on induction and discovery. This is appropriate in an examination of the significance of Reichenbach's work, since the learning-theoretic perspective is to some degree part of Reichenbach's reliabilist legacy. I have argued that Reichenbach's positivism and his infatuation with probabilities are both irrelevant to his views on induction, which are principally grounded in the notion of limiting reliability. I have suggested that limiting reliability is (...) still a formidable basis for the formulation of methodological norms, particularly when reliability cannot possibly be had in the short run, so that refined judgments about evidential support must depend upon measure-theoretic choices having nothing to do in the short run with the truth of the hypothesis under investigation. To illustrate the generality of Reichenbach's program, I showed how it can be applied to methods that aim to solve arbitrary assessment and discovery problems in various senses. In this generalized Reichenbachian setting, we can characterize the intrinsic complexity of reliable inductive inference in terms of topological complexity. Finally, I let Reichenbach's theory of induction have the last say about hypothetico-deductive method. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LIGHT AND METAPHOR IN PLOTINUS AND ST. THOMAS AQUINAS KEVIN CORRIGAN St. Thomas More College University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan I HAVE TWO CONCERNS in this paper. The first is a broad concern, related to the nature of metaphor, which stems from the destructionist or deconstructionist tendencies in some contemporary phenomenology or phenomenological existentialism. According to these views, the logocentric emphasis of the Western tradition must be shown (...) for what it really is : an attempt to erect a cover upon a fundamental absence. In Nietzsche's well known view, "truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses, coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal." 1 For Jacques Derrida all metaphoricity is caught up in an endless circle, which precludes any privileged vantage-point from which one might determine order, hierarchy and center-point. In particular, the unique heliotropic metaphor which, in Derrida's polemic, determines the whole course of Western philosophy " from the Platonic eidos to the Hegelian idea" 2 rests only upon the infinite absence of circularity, for the movement of transference " which turns the sun into metaphor " also inevitably "turns philosophical metaphor towards the sun." 3 1 Nietzsche, "On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense (1873)," Works 2 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), p. 180. 2 J. Derrida, "White Mythology", trans. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History 6 (1974), 1: 5-74 ["La mythologie blanche" in Rhetorique et philosophie, Poetique 5 (Paris: Editions du Seliu, 1971)], p. 55. a Ibid., p. 51. 187 188 KEVIN CORRIGAN In this paper I shall examine the thought of Plotinus and Aquinas, broadly described as idealist and realist respectively, with a view to determining whether or not this transference from the physical to the metaphysical is only an illicit, covert erasure of the material sense and a forgetting that all metaphor is self-implicating, that there is no non-metaphorical standpoint from which to grasp the order and structure of the metaphorical. My second concern is much more specific. It is, first, to compare Plotinus and Aquinas on light and metaphor-two thinkers who might be considered to be poles apart on these questions: on the one hand, Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonic emanationism with its insistence upon the primacy of divine light and the father, surely too, of the tradition of light-metaphysics in the later, mediaeval period; on the other hand, St. Thomas, staunchly realist in the Aristotelian tradition. Second, I will seek to show that this first impression of the gulf between the two thinkers is not borne out by a close textual analysis, and that their respective theories, despite the admitted significant difference in viewpoint, are in some respects very close indeed. Let us look briefly at the light-metaphysics tradition first. For Robert Grosseteste light is the source of all activity and its diffusion is not a material change or a change in place, but rather an instantaneous and substantial multiplication of itself in three dimensions.4 Thus, for the author of the De Intelligentiis light is the fundamental principle of motion and life: " Est autem prima lucis operatio in sensibilibus quad motum et vitam operatur in viventibus." 5 Since light is the noblest of corporeal things, it therefore has an intermediate place between pure form and matter, and for Grosseteste and also Bonaventure it is consequently named the forma corporeitatis, the fundamental form of body as 4 De philosophischen W erke des Robert Grosseteste, ed. Ludwig Baur, in Clemens Baeumker, Beitriige zur Geschichte der Philosophic des Mittelalters, vol. IX (Munster, 1912), De Luce, p. 51. 5 Clemens Baeumker, Witelo: Ein Philosoph und Naturforscher des XIII Jahrhunderts, Band III, Heft 2 of Beitriige zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters (Munster, 1908), Liber de intelligentiis IX, p. 11. PLOTINUS AND ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 189 such, since light introduces dimension into matter. Light then is the substantial form of the physical universe.6 But how is physical light related to spiritual light? For the light-metaphysics tradition, spiritual light (whether the Uncreated Light which is God himself or the... (shrink)

We further develop the mathematical theory of causal interventions, extending earlier results of Korb, Twardy, Handfield, & Oppy, (2005) and Spirtes, Glymour, Scheines (2000). Some of the skepticism surrounding causal discovery has concerned the fact that using only observational data can radically underdetermine the best explanatory causal model, with the true causal model appearing inferior to a simpler, faithful model (cf. Cartwright, (2001). Our results show that experimental data, together with some plausible assumptions, can reduce the space of viable explanatory (...) causal models to one. (shrink)

This article proposes to elucidate Wilfrid Waluchow’s notion of constitutional morality by explaining how it relates to the classical common law idea of artificial reason. It examines how Waluchow’s effort to reconcile insights from the thought of H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin through the idea of constitutional morality is both reminiscent of the artificial reason of the common law and distinct from it. It shows that constitutional morality evokes the subtle union of custom and reason found in artificial reason, but (...) also that it proposes, under the influence of Hart’s notion of rule of recognition, a narrower understanding of law’s foundation in established practices, and that it gives, consistent with Dworkin’s vision of law as integrity, a greater theoretical scope to law’s rationality. (shrink)

What does it take to be a good democratic citizen? Many scholars emphasize that being a good citizen is difficult because there is so much citizens should know to participate responsibly in politics. These critics implicitly assume that citizens should aspire to be “omnicompetent citizens:” fully informed about the issues of the day, candidates’ stances on them, and relevant scientific knowledge. In this article, I advance an alternative, less demanding standard of good citizenship in which citizens focus their political concern (...) on just a few issues, or even a single one. I defend this model of specialized citizenship from the objection that it licenses myopic and irresponsible decision making by citizens with two complementary arguments. The first draws from the work of Bernard Williams to demonstrate the ethical permissibility of citizens making decisions based on even single issues when they implicate citizens’ fundamental commitments. The second argument suggests that such seemingly blinkered decision-making may, when operating systemically, improve democratic decision making via a division of labor between citizens specializing in different issues. I conclude that there may be less of a tension between the demands of ordinary life and those of a flourishing democracy than previously thought. (shrink)

It is sometimes said there are two ways of formulating Newtonian gravitation theory. On the first, matter gives rise to a gravitational field deflecting bodies from inertial motion within flat spacetime. On the second, matter’s accelerative effects are encoded in dynamical spacetime structure exhibiting curvature and the field is ‘geometrized away’. Are these accounts of Newtonian gravitation theoretically equivalent? Conventional wisdom within philosophy of physics is that they are, and recently several philosophers have made this claim explicit. In this paper (...) I develop an alternative approach to Newtonian gravitation on which the equivalence claim fails, and in the process identify an important but largely overlooked consideration for interpreting physical theories. I then apply this analysis to (a) put limits on the uses of Newtonian gravitation within the methodology of science, and (b) defend the interpretive approach to theoretical equivalence against formal approaches, including the recently popular criterion of categorical equivalence. (shrink)

The proposal for Basic Income (BI) pushed by renowned figures in Mexico sparked a vigorous debate over social policy between 2015 and 2018. This debate was particularly notable, as it challenged the long-standing dominance of conditional cash transfers, which had remained largely unquestioned as the country’s main antipoverty policy since their introduction in the 1990s. Despite the BI proposal getting wide coverage from the media, it not only failed to gain traction on the government’s agenda but also quickly became irrelevant (...) right after the general elections of 2018. This was due to the unsuccessful coalition-building efforts of the BI proponents, who were unable to reconcile their political disagreements, overcome partisan competition, establish communication, and bridge their policy beliefs on various levels. By conducting interviews with relevant stakeholders, I conclude that the inability of the BI supporters to form a unified advocacy coalition made it impossible to promote social policy change. (shrink)

I present and discuss three previously unpublished manuscripts written by Bertrand Russell in 1903, not included with similar manuscripts in Volume 4 of his Collected Papers. One is a one-page list of basic principles for his “functional theory” of May 1903, in which Russell partly anticipated the later Lambda Calculus. The next, catalogued under the title “Proof That No Function Takes All Values”, largely explores the status of Cantor’s proof that there is no greatest cardinal number in the variation of (...) the functional theory holding that only some but not all complexes can be analyzed into function and argument. The final manuscript, “Meaning and Denotation”, examines how his pre-1905 dis­tinction between meaning and denotation is to be understood with respect to functions and their arguments. In them, Russell seems to endorse an extensional view of functions not endorsed in other works prior to the 1920s. All three manuscripts illustrate the close connection between his work on the logical paradoxes and his work on the theory of meaning. (shrink)

What is the relation between the intentionality of states and attitudes which can miss their mark, such as belief and desire, and the intentionality of acts, states and attitudes which cannot miss their mark, such as the different types of knowledge and simple seeing? Two theories of the first type of intentionality, the theory of correctness conditions and the theory of satisfaction conditions, are compared. It is argued that knowledge always involves knowledge of formal objects such as facts and values, (...) that emotions are reactions to (apparently) known values and that beliefs are reactions to known or apparently known facts or to the objects of relational states. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 18-20.

In this paper, I examine the terms on which John Simmons rejects all arguments for a moral obligation to obey the law and so defends “philosophical anarchism.” Although I accept his rejection of several criteria on which others might and often do insist, I criticize his reliance on the conditions of “generality” and “particularity.” In doing so, I propose an alternative to his influential conception of legitimacy.

Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J.; Religion in Bioethics: A Rebirth, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 January 2002, Pa.

The selection from Capreolus's work represented in this translation shows him defending Aquinas's conclusions on faith, hope, charity, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the virtues against such adversaries.

This article is based on an analysis of two types of argument, called utilitarian and educational respectively, which are commonly used to justify the teaching of modern/foreign languages in schools. Serious flaws are identified in the utilitarian arguments often employed to defend the teaching of modern languages and different educational arguments which might be offered as justification for their inclusion in the school curriculum are distinguished and appraised. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of the foregoing analysis (...) for the place of modern languages in the school curriculum. (shrink)

Presburger arithmetic is the first-order theory of the natural numbers with addition. We characterize sets that can be defined by a Presburger formula as exactly the sets whose characteristic functions can be represented by rational generating functions; a geometric characterization of such sets is also given. In addition, ifp= are a subset of the free variables in a Presburger formula, we can define a counting functiong to be the number of solutions to the formula, for a givenp. We show that (...) every counting function obtained in this way may be represented as, equivalently, either a piecewise quasi-polynomial or a rational generating function. Finally, we translate known computational complexity results into this setting and discuss open directions. (shrink)

This book brings together a selection of Kevin Corrigan's works published over the course of some 27 years. Its predominant theme is the encounter with otherness in ancient, medieval and modern thought and it ranges in scope from the Presocratics through Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the late ancient period, on the one hand, and early Christian thought, especially Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and, much later, Aquinas, on the other.

Intensive care units are challenging and technologically advanced environments. Dealing with situations that have an ethical dimension is an intrinsic part of working in such a milieu. When a moral dilemma emerges, it can cause anxiety and unease for all staff involved with it. Theoretical and abstract papers reveal that having to confront situations of ethical difficulty is a contributory factor to levels of poor morale and burnout among critical care staff. Despite this, there is a surprising dearth of published (...) nursing research in the UK that investigates how staff deal with ethical issues in intensive care units. The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss the development of a research framework designed to explore how staff deal with moral dilemmas in a British inten sive care unit. (shrink)

This article examines Śāntarakṣita’s and Kamalaśīla’s understandings of svatantra and prasaṅga proofs in the attempt to clarify how and why Tibetan Prāsaṅgikas came to portray svatantra inference as an instance of the very thing Madhyamaka rejects. The article proceeds in four parts. A brief comparison of Patsap Nyimadrak’s portrayal of svatantra inference with Bhāviveka’s and Candrakīrti’s employment of this expression shows that Patsap expanded the meaning of it, charging its users with embracing a realism at odds with Madhyamaka emptiness. Patsap’s (...) arguments against Śāntarakṣita’s “neither one nor many” proof lead us consider the latter’s and Kamalaśīla’s understanding of svatantra and prasaṅga proofs, which turns out to be consistent with, if more sophisticated than, Bhāviveka’s and Candrakīrti’s usage. An exploration of Kamalaśīla’s development of the proof of the naturelessness of all things, real and imagined, calls into question the svatantra-prasaṅga distinction but still leaves us without a source for Patsap’s characterization. A consideration of Śāntarakṣita’s and Kamalaśīla’s use of svatantra to characterize Mīmāṃsā conceptions of an authorless Veda and “intrinsic validity,” as well as their own view of “self-awareness,” offers potential sources for characterizing valid cognition and, by extension, inference as “autonomous.”. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 9, Page 6-7, September 2012.

Some think of art as opposed to philosophy and science, and indeed sometimes opposed to morality. Here, Wall explores the fundamental ways of pursuing aesthetics, speculation, science, mathematics, and morality. Conceptually these are not opposed. He illustrates the ideas with reference to an array of ancient and modern thinkers.

'This volume will make a lasting contribution to how we address the dilemmas that human rights theory and practice encounter - for instance, between democracy and human rights, negative and positive rights, or individual and group rights. Philosophers have become indispensable to lawyers' arguments about why human rights matter, and how they must be interpreted: this book superbly illustrates why.' - Olivier De Schutter, University of Louvain, Belgium and United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food.