Objectives To understand the ethical principles guiding college students’ abstention from pharmacological cognitive enhancement, and to determine the correlates associated with endorsing different principles. Design One-stage cluster sampling was used to implement a paper-based survey among undergraduate students attending one university in the U.S. Thematic analysis was used to explore the ethical principles guiding PCE abstention. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to examine sociodemographic correlates associated with endorsed ethical principles. Participants Of the 499 eligible students who completed the survey, (...) 259 students had a negative attitude towards PCE, did not engage in PCE, and provided reasons for abstention. Results The thematic analysis resulted in the identification of eight themes, with respondents often endorsing more than one theme per response. The three themes most endorsed were non-malfeasance, disapproval of drugs and dosage beneficence. The sociodemographic correlates associated with endorsing each theme varied across themes. Conclusions Students abstain from PCE for a multitude of reasons, many of which are guided by ethical principles. These findings may be incorporated into future prevention programming messages. (shrink)

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...) such norms are false because they are insensitive to the potentially ambitious epistemic goals that agents may permissibly bring to bear on an inquiry. Focusing particularly on knowledge-oriented versions of the norm, I argue that ignorance has a positive role to play in epistemic life by licensing prolonged inquiry into questions that we especially care about. (shrink)

Trust is a central concept in the philosophy of science. We highlight how trust is important in the wide variety of interactions between science and society. We claim that examining and clarifying the nature and role of trust (and distrust) in relations between science and society is one principal way in which the philosophy of science is socially relevant. We argue that philosophers of science should extend their efforts to develop normative conceptions of trust that can serve to facilitate trust (...) between scientific experts and ordinary citizens. The first project is the development of a rich normative theory of expertise and experience that can explain why the various epistemic insights of diverse actors should be trusted in certain contexts and how credibility deficits can be bridged. The second project is the development of concepts that explain why, in certain cases, ordinary citizens may distrust science, which should inform how philosophers of science conceive of the formulation of science policy when conditions of distrust prevail. The third project is the analysis of cases of successful relations of trust between scientists and non-scientists that leads to understanding better how ‘postnormal’ science interactions are possible using trust. (shrink)

Unlike first-person Moorean sentences, it’s not always awkward to assert, “p, but you don’t know that p.” This can seem puzzling: after all, one can never get one’s audience to know the asserted content by speaking thus. Nevertheless, such assertions can be conversationally useful, for instance, by helping speaker and addressee agree on where to disagree. I will argue that such assertions also make trouble for the growing family of views about the norm of assertion that what licenses proper assertion (...) is not the initiating epistemic position of the speaker but the resulting epistemic position of the audience. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers rely almost exclusively on quantitative surveys that potentially misrepresent participants’ multifarious judgments. To assess the efficacy of qualitative methods in experimental philosophy and reveal limitations with quantitative surveys, a study was conducted on the Kantian principle that ‘ought implies can’, which limits moral obligation to actions that agents can do. Specifically, the think aloud method and a follow-up interview were employed in a modified version of a prominent experiment that recorded participants’ judgments of ability, blame, and obligation using (...) quantitative surveys. The modified version produced quantitative results similar to the original experiment along with qualitative data that reveal that the surveys fundamentally misrepresented participants’ judgments. The qualitative transcripts from 40 participants are analyzed to show that ‘ought implies can’ judgments are complex and multifarious, that ‘ought implies can’ judgments are misrepresented by quantitative survey questions, and that the majority of participants uphold or preserve ‘ought implies can.’ The results suggest that experimental philosophers can more accurately capture judgments by using qualitative methods, and that studies which rely on quantitative surveys possibly misrepresent participants’ judgments. (shrink)

The recent edition of theThebaidby Hall, Ritchie, and Edwards launched a successful attack on thecommunis opinioof a bipartite manuscript tradition, with one clearly superior family, and relatively few textual problems. In doing so, they underscored the need for renewed editorial work on the poem. Here I discuss five passages fromThebaid2 that have not received adequate attention from editors.

Ideas for How to Take Wicked Problems Seriously Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9348-9 Authors Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Paul B. Thompson, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Virgil Should Have Said KYLE GERVAIS Mortem infelicem canimus famamque perennem Sidoniae praeclara ducis quae sustulit alte moenia—multum illa et furiis iactata et amore saucia, deseruit cum foedera barbarus hospes, vique deum quassa et fratris, dum conderet ensem fatiferum profugi sub pectore et iret ad umbras, arma virumque ciens magnam contundere Romam. I sing the tragic death and endless glory Of Sidon’s exiled queen, the famous walls (...) She raised on high, her wild and wounded love When savage guest betrayed his bonded word And gods and brother shook her—till she took The fateful sword he left and sought the shades To call a man in arms to topple Rome. note With thanks to Sarah Shaughnessy for the idea and advice, and to Michael Putnam, who taught me that Dido never really dies in the Aeneid. arion 28.2 fall 2020... (shrink)

Drawing inspiration from the notion of evocation employed in inferential erotetic logic, we defend an ‘evoked questions norm’ on inquiring attitudes. According to this norm, it is rational to have an inquiring attitude concerning a question only if that question is evoked by your background information. We offer two arguments for this norm. First, we develop an argument from convergence. Insights from several independent literatures (20th-century ordinary-language philosophy, inferential erotetic logic, inquisitive epistemic logic, and contemporary zetetic epistemology) all converge on (...) the evoked questions norm. Second, we show that suitably interpreted, the evoked questions norm correctly predicts several underappreciated kinds of bad questions. It does this, in part, by recovering versions of previously defended ignorance and knowledge norms. Some of those bad questions cannot be predicted by either norm singly, but only when corporately taken to reflect a common normative category. We identify this category as evocation. (shrink)

The current literature on norms of inquiry features two families of norms: norms that focus on an inquirer’s ignorance and norms that focus on the question’s soundness. I argue that, given a factive conception of ignorance, it’s possible to derive a soundness-style norm from a version of the ignorance norm. A crucial lemma in the argument is that just as one can only be ignorant of a proposition if the proposition is true, so one can only be ignorant with respect (...) to a question if the question is sound. (shrink)

Though many ethicists have the intuition that we should leave nature alone, Kyle Johannsen argues that we have a duty to research safe ways of providing large-scale assistance to wild animals. Using concepts from moral and political philosophy to analyze the issue of wild animal suffering (WAS), Johannsen explores how a collective, institutional obligation to assist wild animals should be understood. He claims that with enough research, genetic editing may one day give us the power to safely intervene without (...) perpetually interfering with wild animals’ liberties.---------------Questions addressed include: In what way is nature valuable and is interference compatible with that value? Is interference a requirement of justice? What are the implications of WAS for animal rights advocacy? What types of intervention are promising?---------------Expertly moving the debate about human relations with wild animals beyond its traditional confines, Wild Animal Ethics is essential reading for students and scholars of political philosophy and political theory studying animal ethics, environmental ethics, and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

Recently, a number of epistemologists (notably Feldman [2007], [2009] and White [2005], [2013]) have argued for the rational uniqueness thesis, the principle that any set of evidence permits only one rationally acceptable attitude toward a given proposition. In contrast, this paper argues for extreme rational permissivism, the view that two agents with the same evidence may sometimes arrive at contradictory beliefs rationally. This paper identifies different versions of uniqueness and permissivism that vary in strength and range, argues that evidential peers (...) with different interests need not rationally endorse all the same hypotheses, argues that evidential peers who weigh the theoretic virtues differently can sometimes rationally endorse contradictory conclusions, and finally defends the permissivist appeal to standards against objections in the works of Feldman and White. (shrink)

Knowledge is good, ignorance is bad. So it seems, anyway. But in this dissertation, I argue that some ignorance is epistemically valuable. Sometimes, we should suspend judgment even though by believing we would achieve knowledge. In this apology for ignorance (ignorance, that is, of a certain kind), I defend the following four theses: 1) Sometimes, we should continue inquiry in ignorance, even though we are in a position to know the answer, in order to achieve more than mere knowledge (e.g. (...) understanding) while minimizing the effects of confirmation bias. 2) It’s false that we should believe every proposition such that we are guaranteed to be right about it (and even such that we are guaranteed to know it) if we believe it. 3) Being in a position to know is the norm of assertion: importantly, this does not require belief or (thereby) knowledge, and so proper assertion can survive speaker-ignorance. 4) It can be permissible and conversationally useful to tell audiences things that it is logically impossible for them to come to know: Proper assertion can survive (necessary) audience-side ignorance. Cumulatively, this project suggests that, properly understood, ignorance has an important role to play in the good epistemic life. (shrink)

According to the doctrine of infallibility, one is permitted to believe p if one knows that necessarily, one would be right if one believed that p. This plausible principle—made famous in Descartes’ cogito—is false. There are some self-fulfilling, higher-order propositions one can’t be wrong about but shouldn’t believe anyway: believing them would immediately make one's overall doxastic state worse.

I argue that popular understandings of white nationalist double speak strategies do not fully represent the practice of these strategies, and identify a linguistic tactic used by white nationalists that I call sugar-coating. Sugar-coating works by packing an otherwise unacceptable utterance together with some kind of reward, thereby promoting uptake. I contrast this with existing notions of double speak, such as figleaves (Saul 2017, 2021), dogwhistles (Haney-López 2014), and bullshit (Kenyon and Saul 2022). I argue that sugar-coating more accurately reflects (...) the practice of white nationalist recruitment rhetoric, as described in the Daily Stormer Style Guide. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples often embrace different versions of the concept of food sovereignty. Yet some of these concepts are seemingly based on impossible ideals of food self-sufficiency. I will suggest in this essay that for at least some North American Indigenous peoples, food sovereignty movements are not based on such ideals, even though they invoke concepts of cultural revitalization and political sovereignty. Instead, food sovereignty is a strategy of Indigenous resurgence that negotiates structures of settler colonialism that erase the ecological value (...) of certain foods for Indigenous peoples. (shrink)

The nearly omnipotent character known only as “Q” dramatically enters the Star Trek universe when he puts all humanity in the person of Captain Jean‐Luc Picard, on trial in the first episode of TNG. Acting as self‐professed prosecutor, judge, and jury, Q promises Picard an “absolutely equitable” trial, only to coerce Picard into pleading “guilty” by threatening to kill his crew. Q could be like the “Leviathan” of Thomas Hobbes (1588‐1679), an absolute sovereign who has the power to keep people (...) from warring with each other, but who can't be held accountable or subject to any civil law in the use of that power. Enlisting Hobbes and Locke, this chapter examines the motives behind Q's enigmatic actions and sees what Q, deep down, might believe about justice. Hobbes begins with a basic right of nature that all people possess: our liberty to ensure the preservation of our own life. (shrink)

Sex selection and disability avoidance receive opposed treatment in bioethics literature, legislative practice and public opinion. However, some theorists question this state of affairs by drawing analogies between the harmful consequences of these practices. This paper shares their disapproval of gender selection and disability avoidance, but bases its resistance to these practices on an examination of the concepts of gender and disability. Here it identifies conceptual confusions as another cause of approval of sex selection and disability avoidance. Further, in clarifying (...) the nature of the concepts at issue, and their relationship with the subjects that they apply to, this discussion highlights the existence of relevant analogies between the concepts of gender and disability. Here the social construction and universality of gender and disability allow their differential treatment to be resisted at the conceptual level, creating a strong foundation for more consequentialist arguments against sex selection and disability avoidance. (shrink)

Shane Carruth's 2013 film Upstream Colour provides a model for considering identity and subject formation in what Steven Shaviro calls the “network society.” Shaviro argues that our contemporary mo...

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 172-187, June 2012.

Indigenous ethics and feminist care ethics offer a range of related ideas and tools for environmental ethics. These ethics delve into deep connections and moral commitments between nonhumans and humans to guide ethical forms of environmental decision making and environmental science. Indigenous and feminist movements such as the Mother Earth Water Walk and the Green Belt Movement are ongoing examples of the effectiveness of on-the-ground environmental care ethics. Indigenous ethics highlight attentive caring for the intertwined needs of humans and nonhumans (...) within interdependent communities. Feminist environmental care ethics emphasize the importance of empowering communities to care for themselves and the social and ecological communities in which their lives and interests are interwoven. The gendered, feminist, historical, and anticolonial dimensions of care ethics, indigenous ethics, and other related approaches provide rich ground for rethinking and reclaiming the nature and depth of diverse relationships as the fabric of social and ecological being. (shrink)

Recent work by philosophers such as Harry Chalmers and Hallie Liberto has called into question the moral permissibility of monogamy. In this article, I defend monogamy on a number of grounds, including practical reasons and reasons relating to commitment, specialness, and jealousy. I also attempt to reframe the debate about monogamy as not just relating to the permissibility of restricting one’s partner but as equally about one’s freedom to leave a relationship. Finally, I make a case against Liberto’s claim that (...) monogamous agreements are over-extensive. (shrink)

Environmental tourism is a growing practice in indigenous communities worldwide. As members of indigenous communities, what environmental justice framework should we use to evaluate these practices? I argue that, while some of the most relevant and commonly discussed norms are fair compensation and participative justice, we should also follow Robert Figueroa’s claim that “recognition justice” is relevant for environmental justice. I claim that from Figueroa’s analysis there is a “norm of direct participation,” which requires all environmental tourism practices to feature (...) a forum for meaningful representation andconsideration. This claim motivates a distinction between practices that should be termed “mutually advantageous exploitation” and those that should be termed “environmental coalition development.” We need to ask ourselves whether we should continue to tolerate mutually advantageous exploitation and how we can increase the number of practices that develop coalitions. (shrink)

Turner and Feldman address an important environmental justice issue: ‘Under conditions of social and economic inequality, only some people…will have the clout and the funding to get the powers...

My aim is to propose a better way to understand moral demandingness: a counterfactual view that requires us to consider the demands that moral theories make across other possible worlds. Seemingly, the demandingness of any moral theory or principle should be evaluated in terms of that theory’s general demandingness. This, in turn, implies that we ought to be concerned about the possible demandingness of moral theories and not just about how demanding they actually are. This counterfactual view might also have (...) some surprising implications about how demanding commonsense morality really is. After all, commonsense morality might be extremely demanding in many possible worlds. This consideration, in turn, risks undermining the commonsense moral theorist's ability to make purely cost-based demandingness objections against consequentialism, giving us strong reasons to worry about the purely cost-based demandingness objection’s viability in general. (shrink)

_Lux: A Decade of Artists' Film and Video_ Edited by Steve Reinke and Tom Taylor Toronto: YYZ Books, 2000 ISBN 0-920397-26-3 373 pp.

talk presented at the Workshop on Coordination, Subordination and Ellipsis, Tubingen, June 2007.

1. Preliminary Reconnaissance: Realism, Instrumentalism, and Interpretation On the one hand, I think it is fair to say that philosophers recognize a special problem or question about how we are to “interpret” scientific theories only in light of their concerns about whether we are really entitled to believe what those theories say when they are interpreted in what we see as the most natural or straightforward or intuitive way. On the other hand, this fundamental worry reaches all the way back (...) to the inception of scientific inquiry itself, no matter how liberally we conceive of that enterprise. Before the relatively recent professionalization of academic fields, such concerns were well-represented among the figures who served simultaneously as both the leading practitioners and the leading philosophers of science. This is nicely illustrated by the strident debates throughout this community in the 18th and 19th centuries concerning whether only pure inductive methods were legitimate for scientific inquiry and/or whether the competing “method of hypothesis” could produce any genuine knowledge of nature (see Laudan 1981 Ch. 8). (shrink)

There are potentialities to be harnessed in a fusion between elements of Alicia Juarrero’s views and a Polanyian framework. In this brief response piece, I address the latent Polanyian dimensions of Juarrero’s ontic approach to dynamical systems.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008) contend that mandated choice is the most practical nudge for increasing organ donation. We argue that they are wrong, and their mistake results from failing to appreciate how perceptions of meaning can influence people's responses to nudges. We favor a policy of default to donation that is subject to immediate family veto power, includes options for people to opt out (and be educated on how to do so), and emphasizes the role of organ procurement (...) organizations and in-house transplant donation coordinators creating better environments for increasing the supply of organs and tissues obtained from cadavers. This policy will provide better opportunities for offering nudges in contexts where in-house coordinators work with families. We conclude by arguing that nudges can be introduced ethically and effectively into these contexts only if nudge designers collaborate with in-house coordinators and stakeholders. (shrink)

I give an account of the compositional semantics of unconditionals that explains their relationship to if -conditionals in the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim tradition. Unconditionals involve an alternative-denoting adjunct that supplies domain restrictions pointwise to a main-clause operator such as a modal. The differences from if -clauses follow from the structure of the adjuncts; both are conditionals in the Lewisian sense. In the course of treating unconditionals, I provide a concrete implementation of conditionals where conditional adjuncts in general are a species of correlative, (...) and show what detaching this hypothesis from if involves. (shrink)

Patient requests for a healthcare provider of a particular race or sexual orientation create a conflict of obligations. On the one hand, providers have a duty to deliver clinically indicated care consistent with patient preferences. On the other hand, providers have legal, professional, and organizational assurances that they should not suffer workplace discrimination. Protecting healthcare providers from harm while maintaining obligations to patients requires unambiguous messaging to both parties. Providers need to be clear that their organization will not be complicit (...) in discrimination against them, instead supporting their needs and preferences for management of the situation. In a context of patient-centered care, harm principle-based boundaries of respect for autonomy must be defined. A Caregiver preference guideline developed and used at University Health Network, Toronto provides a standardized way for the organization to decide when it will honor patient requests for providers of a particular background. This process stresses dialogue, assessment of clinical feasibility, and empowerment and support for affected care providers. (shrink)

Venturing into novel terrain poses physical risks to a female and her offspring. Females have a greater tendency to avoid physical harm, while males tend to have larger range sizes and often outperform females in navigation-related tasks. Given this backdrop, we expected that females would explore a novel environment with more caution than males, and that more-cautious exploration would negatively affect navigation performance. Participants explored a novel, large-scale, virtual environment in search of five objects, pointed in the direction of each (...) object from the origin, and then navigated back to the objects. We found that females demonstrated more caution while exploring as reflected in the increased amounts of pausing and revisiting of previously traversed locations. In addition, more pausing and revisiting behaviors led to degradation in navigation performance. Finally, individual levels of trait harm avoidance were positively associated with the amount of revisiting behavior during exploration. These findings support the idea that the fitness costs associated with long-distance travel may encourage females to take a more cautious approach to spatial exploration, and that this caution may partially explain the sex differences in navigation performance. (shrink)

This paper defends a theory of fictional truth. According to this theory, there is a fact of the matter concerning the number of hairs on Sherlock Holmes' head, and likewise for any other meaningful question one could ask about what's true in a work of fiction. We argue that a theory of this form is needed to account for the patterns in our judgments about attitude reports that embed fictional claims. We contrast our view with one of the dominant approaches (...) to fictional truth, which originates with David Lewis. Along the way we explore the relationship between fiction, counterfactuals, and vagueness. (shrink)