Joseph Heath (2014) argues that the contribution of competitive markets to Pareto-efficiency generates moral constraints that apply to business managers. Heath argues that ethical behavior on the part of management consists in avoiding profit-seeking strategies which, under conditions of perfect competition, would decrease Pareto-efficiency. I argue that because (1) such conditions do not obtain; and (2) the most efficient result – under imperfect conditions – is not achieved by satisfying the largest possible set of the remaining conditions; it is (3) (...) impossible to draw any substantive ethical guidelines from Heath’s approach. (shrink)

This book provides a look at philosophical practice from the viewpoint of the practitioner or prospective practitioner. It answers the questions: What is philosophical practice? What are its aims and methods? How does philosophical counseling differ from psychological counseling and other forms of psychotherapy. How are philosophical practitioners educated and trained? How do philosophical practitioners relate to other professions? What are the politics of philosophical practice? How does one become a practitioner? What is APPA Certification? What are the prospects for (...) philosophical practice in the USA and elsewhere? Handbook of Philosophical Practice provides an account of philosophy's current renaissance as a discipline of applied practice while critiquing the historical, social, and cultural forces which have contributed to its earlier descent into obscurity. (shrink)

According to tradition, logic is normative for reasoning. Gilbert Harman challenged the view that there is any straightforward connection between logical consequence and norms of reasoning. Authors including John MacFarlane and Hartry Field have sought to rehabilitate the traditional view. I argue that the debate is marred by a failure to distinguish three types of normative assessment, and hence three ways to understand the question of the normativity of logic. Logical principles might be thought to provide the reasoning agent with (...) first-personal directives; they might be thought to serve as third-personal evaluative standards; or they might underwrite our third-personal appraisals of others whereby we attribute praise and blame. I characterize the three normative functions in general terms and show how a failure to appreciate this threefold distinction has led disputants to talk past one another. I further show how the distinction encourages fruitful engagement with and, ultimately, resolution of the question. (shrink)

For each person, some actions are unthinkable: performing them requires crossing a line that one's conscience cannot allow crossing. This article explores what such unthinkability is. In doing so, it introduces a novel categorization of theories of action and practical reason. The article argues that an action is unthinkable if and only if the agent judges that she should never treat any consideration as a reason in favor of performing this action. This view meets two important tests. The first is (...) ‘Failure’: a theory of unthinkable action must allow for the conceptual possibility of doing the unthinkable and explain what is special about the failure implicated in doing the unthinkable, especially in comparison to the failure implicated in akratic action. The second is ‘Incapacity’: a theory of unthinkability must distinguish between not doing something because it is unthinkable and not doing something because of an extremely negative psychological reaction. (shrink)

James Watson February 6, 2002 Genes, Girls, and Gamow Lou Massa: Welcome to Science & the Written Word. I'm Lou Massa. Dr. James D. Watson is President of ...

Benedict de Spinoza is one of the most controversial and enigmatic thinkers in the history of philosophy. His greatest work, Ethics (1677), developed a comprehensive philosophical system and argued that God and Nature are identical. His scandalous Theological-Political Treatise (1670) provoked outrage during his lifetime due to its biblical criticism, anticlericalism, and defense of the freedom to philosophize. Together, these works earned Spinoza a reputation as a singularly radical thinker. -/- In this book, Steinberg and Viljanen offer a concise (...) and up-to-date account of Spinoza’s thought and its philosophical legacy. They explore the full range of Spinoza’s ideas, from politics and theology to ontology and epistemology. Drawing broadly on Spinoza’s impressive oeuvre, they have crafted a lucid introduction for readers unfamiliar with this important philosopher, as well as a nuanced and enlightening study for more experienced readers. (shrink)

In recent years, insurance companies have begun tracking their customers’ behaviors and price premiums accordingly. Based on the Market-Failures Approach as well as the Justice-Failures Approach, I provide an ethical analysis of the use of tracking technologies in the insurance industry. I focus on the use of telematics in car insurance and on the use of fitness tracking in life insurance. The use of tracking has some important benefits to policyholders and insurers alike: it reduces moral hazard and fraud, increases (...) actuarial fairness, and incentivizes safe behavior. These benefits, however, are outweighed by significant moral objections. First, the use of tracking technologies significantly undermines the fairness of the interaction between insurance companies and policyholders. Specifically, the use of tracking eliminates information asymmetries, but in such a way that favors insurers exclusively. Furthermore, tracked behaviors and the ability to choose to behave safely are highly correlated with other variables such as income. Therefore, tracking-based insurance relies on and exacerbates existing inequalities and injustices, which undermines the benefits that tracking is supposed to introduce. (shrink)

Spinoza's Political Psychology advances a novel, comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's political writings, exploring how his analysis of psychology informs his arguments for democracy and toleration. Justin Steinberg shows how Spinoza's political method resembles the Renaissance civic humanism in its view of governance as an adaptive craft that requires psychological attunement. He examines the ways that Spinoza deploys this realist method in the service of empowerment, suggesting that the state can affectively reorient and thereby liberate its citizens, but only if (...) it attends to their actual motivational and epistemic capacities. His book will interest a range of readers in Spinoza studies and the history of political thought, as well as readers working in contemporary political theory. (shrink)

On the face of it, normative conflicts are commonplace. Yet standard deontic logic declares them to be logically impossible. That prompts the question, What are the proper principles of normative reasoning if such conflicts are possible? This paper examines several alternatives that have been proposed for a logic of 'ought' that can accommodate normative conflicts, and finds all of them unsatisfactory as measured against three criteria of adequacy. It then introduces a new logic that does meet all three criteria, and (...) so allows for the possibility of genuine normative conflicts. (shrink)

Logic, the tradition has it, is normative for reasoning. But is that really so? And if so, in what sense is logic normative for reasoning? As Gilbert Harman has reminded us, devising a logic and devising a theory of reasoning are two separate enterprises. Hence, logic's normative authority cannot reside in the fact that principles of logic just are norms of reasoning. Once we cease to identify the two, we are left with a gap. To bridge the gap one would (...) need to produce what John MacFarlane has appropriately called a bridge principle, i.e. a general principle articulating a substantive and systematic link between logical entailment and norms of reasoning. This is Harman's skeptical challenge. In this paper I argue that Harman's skeptical challenge can be met. I show how candidate bridge principles can be systematically generated and evaluated against a set of well‐motivated desiderata. Moreover, I argue that bridge principles advanced by MacFarlane himself and others, for all their merit, fail to address the problem originally set forth by Harman and so do not meet the skeptical challenge. Finally, I develop a bridge principle that meets Harman's requirements as well as being substantive. (shrink)

This work presents a conception of Hume's overall philosophical stance which is derived from a focus on his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. A broad context is provided by frequent references to A Treatise of Human Nature and to An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding as well as to other relevant essays and letters written by Hume. Religious Naturalism is a complex tapestry woven of aesthetic, ethical, epistemological and metaphysical elements. The religious element in Hume's writings, (...) which some commentators see as a transcendent position, is interpreted as an immanentist religiosity akin to that of Spinoza and Einstein. Hume's three "strong natural beliefs" in "self", objects and causality, come together as a metaphysical faith in the ultimate reality of a shared cosmos. Hume's aesthetic response is expressed as a sense of the sublimity of the cosmos even in the midst of skeptical doubt. In Hume's religious naturalism his epistemological skepticism casts doubt on and tempers his metaphysical faith. It is shown that Hume's overriding ethical concern was to further the happiness of humanity by replacing the "pernicious superstition" of supernaturalism with an immanentist position which affirms the inexplicable presence of an eternal cosmos. This position is what is here termed Religious Naturalism. (shrink)

In my Steinberger 2009 I argued that Neil Tennant’s Harmony requirement is untenable because of its failure to account for the standard quantifier rules.1 Instead of justifying the customary rules for the existential and universal quantifiers, Tennant’s account appears to sanction only wholly unrestricted – and so patently disharmonious – quantifier rules. In his characteristically thoughtful response Tennant 2010, Tennant offers a sequent calculus version of his Harmony requirement that rules out such pathological would-be quantifiers. While I agree with Tennant (...) that recasting his Harmony requirement in the sequent format as he proposes blocks the said disharmonious quantifier rules, I submit that Tennant’s revamped Harmony requirement nevertheless misses the mark. I present two objections to substantiate my claim. First, I show that the crucial additional assumption underlying Tennant’s sequent calculus-based account – what I call the admissibility assumption – is excessively strong: so strong, in fact, that it renders otiose the core of Tennant’s original account. Second, I argue that the admissibility assumption, as a global requirement on deductive systems, is ill-suited for the purposes of codifying the intuitive notion of harmony. Fortunately, though, as I will demonstrate, we can dispense with the admissibility assumption altogether. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to shed light on Spinoza’s understanding of the relationship between the citizen and the state by briefly examining two interpretative questions: (1) Is the state an individual? (2) What grounds Spinoza’s claim that the human individual ought always to comply with civil laws? Several scholars, whom I refer to as Restrictive Individualists, have worried that answering (1) in the affirmative would entail an intolerable understanding of (2), according to which the human individual would be engulfed (...) in the functioning of the state. I argue that (1) should be answered affirmatively and that the worries of the Restrictive Individualists are unfounded. I then propose a way of answering (2) that is consistent with the normative priority of the human individual. (shrink)

Spinoza's account of belief entails that if A has two ideas, p and q, with incompatible content, A believes that p if the idea of p is stronger than the idea of q. This seems to leave little space for dominant non-beliefs, or cases in which there is discord between one's beliefs and one's affective-behavioral responses. And yet Spinoza does allow for two classes of dominant non-beliefs: efficacious fictions [fictiones] and ideas that conduce to akrasia. I show how Spinoza can (...) account for dominant non-beliefs within his model of cognition by distinguishing between the doxastic and the affective powers of ideas and by suggesting that doxastic power is best understood diachronically. While other scholars have stressed the elegance of Spinoza's account of ideas, this paper highlights the sophistication and flexibility of his account. (shrink)

This paper explores an apparent tension between two widely held views about logic: that logic is normative and that there are multiple equally legitimate logics. The tension is this. If logic is normative, it tells us something about how we ought to reason. If, as the pluralist would have it, there are several correct logics, those logics make incompatible recommendations as to how we ought to reason. But then which of these logics should we look to for normative guidance? I (...) argue that inasmuch as pluralism draws its motivation from its ability to defuse logical disputes—that is, disputes between advocates of rival logics—it is unable to provide an answer: pluralism collapses into monism with respect to either the strongest or the weakest admissible logic. (shrink)

Vector spaces over fields are pseudofinite, and this remains true for vector spaces over division rings that are finite-dimensional over their center. We also construct a division ring such that the nontrivial vector spaces over it are not pseudofinite, using Richard Thompson's group F. The idea behind the construction comes from a first-order axiomatization of the class of division rings all whose nontrivial vector spaces are pseudofinite.

In ‘Utility of Religion’, Mill argues that a wholly naturalistic religion of humanity would promote individual and social welfare better than supernatural religions like Christianity; in ‘Theism’, however, Mill defends the salutary effects of hope in an afterlife. While commentators have acknowledged this discrepancy, they have not examined the utilitarian value of what Mill terms ‘illusions’. In this essay, I explain Mill's case against the utility of supernatural religious belief and then argue that Mill cannot dismiss the utility of hope (...) in an ultimate justice since it need not pervert the intellect or morality. There are thus utilitarian grounds to support some supernatural illusions, which undermines Mill's defence of an exclusively naturalistic religion. I conclude with the suggestion that while the utility of religious belief leads Mill toward William James's view, they disagree about whether supernatural religious sentiment has any unique, intrinsic force. (shrink)

Epistemic utility theory is generally coupled with veritism. Veritism is the view that truth is the sole fundamental epistemic value. Veritism, when paired with EUT, entails a methodological commitment: norms of epistemic rationality are justified only if they can be derived from considerations of accuracy alone. According to EUT, then, believing truly has epistemic value, while believing falsely has epistemic disvalue. This raises the question as to how the rational believer should balance the prospect of true belief against the risk (...) of error. A strong intuitive case can be made for a kind of epistemic conservatism – that we should disvalue error more than we value true belief. I argue that none of the ways in which advocates of veritist EUT have sought to motivate conservatism can be squared with their methodological commitments. Short of any such justification, they must therefore either abandon their most central methodological principle or else adopt a permissive line with respect to epistemic risk. (shrink)

Almost 60,000 people in the United States with end stage renal disease are waiting for a kidney transplant. Because of the scarcity of organs from deceased donors live kidney donors have become a critical source of organs; in 2001, for the first time in recent decades, the number of live kidney donors exceeded the number of deceased donors. The paradigm used to justify putting live kidney donors at risk includes the low risk to the donor, the favorable risk-benefit ratio, the (...) psychological benefits to the donor, altruism, and autonomy coupled with informed consent; because each of these arguments is flawed we need to lessen our dependence on live kidney donors and increase the number of organs retrieved from deceased donors. An "opting in" paradigm would reward people who agree to donate their kidneys after they die with allocation preference should they need a kidney while they are alive. An "opting in" program should increase the number of kidneys available for transplantation and eliminate the morally troubling problem of "organ takers" who would accept a kidney if they needed one but have made no provision to be an organ donor themselves. People who "opt in" would preferentially get an organ should they need one at the minimal cost of donating their kidneys when they have no use for them; it is a form of organ insurance a rational person should find extremely attractive. An "opting in" paradigm would simulate the reciprocal altruism observed in nature that sociobiologists believe enhances group survival. Although the allocation of organs based on factors other than need might be morally troubling, an "opting in" paradigm compares favorably with other methods of obtaining more organs and accepting the status quo of extreme organ scarcity. Although an "opting in" policy would be based on enlightened self-interest, by demonstrating the utilitarian value of mutual assistance, it would promote the attitude that self-interest sometimes requires the perception that we are all part of a common humanity. (shrink)

This paper presents a neighborhood semantics for logics of entailment. It begins with a minimal system Min that expresses the most fundamental assumptions about the entailment relation, and continues by examining various extensions that reflect further assumptions that might be made about entailment. This leads first to the logic B that is the basic relevant logic, and then to more powerful systems. All of these logics are proved to be sound and strongly complete. With B the neighborhood semantics meets the (...) Routley-Meyer relational semantics for relevant logic; these connections are examined. The minimal and basic entailment logics are shown to have the finite model property, and hence to be decidable. (shrink)

Priority monism is the view that the cosmos is the only independent concrete object. The paper argues that, pace its proponents, Priority monism is in conflict with the dependence of any whole on any of its parts: if the cosmos does not depend on its parts, neither does any smaller composite.

In a series of papers, Christian Nimtz argues for the view that the semantic notion of paradigm termhood lies at the heart of Kripkean philosophy of language and metaphysics. According to Nimtz, th...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 33.1 (2003) 60-79 [Access article in PDF] The Secret Power of Suggestion Scipio Sighele and the Postliberal Subject Suzanne R. Stewart-Steinberg He experiments one by one with about thirty young men. [...] Almost all of them respond immediately to his power of fascination by turning stiff throughout their bodies; their faces become contracted, terrified, sometimes cadaverous; they are at the mercy of the fascinator and follow his (...) movements like a magnet. [...] There is something pitiful, spasmodic in their features, something macabre in their gestures. [...] Donato has them all in his power, he attracts them in threes, in sixes, ten at a time, simply by rapidly staring into their eyes, even against their firm will and their obstinate efforts to resist his suggestion. [...] Donato, in the process, never speaks: he thinks, he wants and points. [...] —an eyewitness account, L'Italia (1886) Young male bodies that turn stiff despite their efforts to do otherwise—such were the events to be seen on the stage of the Teatro Scribe in Turin in 1886, events performed under the direction of "Donato" (the Belgian-born Alfred d'Hont), the new theatrical magnetizer of crowds. Enrico Morselli, one of Italy's leading psychiatrists of the period,1 assisted and himself succumbed to the fascination of Donato. In his important 1886 study on animal magnetism and hypnotic states, Morelli provided a rather positive portrait of the man. Donato, in his opinion, was not a vulgar man. First soldier, then state employee, journalist, novelist, poet, and finally student and apostle of animal magnetism, Donato had revolutionized hypnotic practice through his discovery of a phenomenon called "fascination." Donato was blessed with uncommon physical strength, quick and insistent eyes, a great agility of movement and much spirit. He had exchanged the magician's cap for the more sober tuxedo—quite appropriately, for he [End Page 60]rejects fluids, rejects the power and transmission of will; nor does he trade in somnambulist lucidity, in sight without eyes, in divination. He does not claim to have special secrets or gifts. Instead he claims that it is his quick and insistent "gaze" that produces a rapid and sudden shock to the nervous system of sensitive individuals. Where there is no "orgasm," he told me—but more accurately he should have said "predisposition"—his method does not work. [Morselli, Il magnetismo animale 281] What was then so revolutionary about Donato's method? Why were the spectacles at the Teatro Scribe perceived to be so radically new? And above all, why, as Morselli claims, did these shows come close to producing a political crisis right at the center of Europe [Magnetismo 271]?James Braid's discovery in 1842 that hypnotic sleep could be induced by the simple fixation on a luminous object had revolutionized magnetic theory and practice. Braid's was to prove an important discovery, for it made possible the shift from the putative supernatural powers of the hypnotist—based on the theory of the transmission of magnetic fluids or electric currents—to an analysis of characteristics thought to inhere in the hypnotized subject him- or herself. The real cause of hypnosis, its very effectivity, was to be found, as Morselli remarks, not in the magnetizer but in his subject [Magnetismo 32]. A rethinking, within the late-nineteenth-century literature on hypnotism, of what drives the subject, of what makes him act appears predicated then on a very peculiar form of interiority, of self-causation within the subject himself. At the end of its historical trajectory this rethinking would first result in the idea of auto-hypnosis or auto-suggestion, and then, by the beginning of the new century, it would found the psychoanalytic subject, traversed as he is by conflicting desires and topographically split between ego and superego. In both instances, however, obedience is exacted as a result of an internalized command and—and here lies the peculiarity and utter novelty of this subject—for that reason the subject ceases to be master of his own house.In the remarks that follow, I will leave aside Freud's own contributions... (shrink)

A significant portion of the practice of medicine is dependent on individual acts of medical altruism. Many of these acts, such as the donation of blood, gametes, stem cells, and organs, entail varying degrees of bodily intrusion and, for the altruist, various combinations of discomfort, risk, and expense. Discussion of the ethics of altruism has typically been fragmented under various rubrics such as blood donation, organ and tissue transplantation, health information, and the assisted reproductive technologies. The ethics of these specific (...) examples of altruism are best explored in conjunction with a broader discussion of their relatively neglected mother discipline, altruism in medicine.David Steinberg, M.D., is a board certified internist, hematologist, and oncologist. He is Chief of the Section of Medical Ethics at the Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School.FootnotesThis work was made possible by a grant in memory of Harold Karp by the Karp Family Foundation. (shrink)

Introduction -- What is political judgment? -- Foundations: Plato and Aristotle -- The Kantian Problematic -- The Arendtian Theory of Judgment -- Hermeneutics, tacit knowledge and neo-rationalism.

The relevant modal logic G is a simple extension of the logic RT, the relevant counterpart of the familiar classically based system T. Using the Routley-Meyer semantics for relevant modal logics, this paper proves three main results regarding G: (i) G is semantically complete, but only with a non-standard interpretation of necessity. From this, however, other nice properties follow. (ii) With a standard interpretation of necessity, G is semantically incomplete; there is no class of frames that characterizes G. (iii) The (...) class of frames for G characterizes the classically based logic T. (shrink)

Leibniz argued that God would not create a world unless it was the best possible world. I defend Leibniz’s argument. I then consider whether God could refrain from creating if there were no best possible world. I argue that God, on pain of contradiction, could not refrain from creating in such a situation. I conclude that either this is the best possible world or God is not our creator.

What is good political judgment? Is it a science subject to strict standards of logic and inference, or is it more like an art, the product of intuition, feeling, or even chance? Peter J. Steinberger shows how the seemingly contradictory claims of inference and intuition are reconciled in the concept of political judgment. Resting his argument on the larger notion of judgment itself, Steinberger develops an original model of how political judgments are made and how we justify calling some of (...) them "good." His systematic analysis of such thinkers as Machiavelli, Kant, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Oakeshott introduces an original notion of judgment as "intelligent performance," incorporating both intuition and rational reconstruction. Steinberger's conclusion—that a coherent political society must also be a judgmental one—flies in the face of much contemporary thinking. (shrink)

Technology acceptance by users has been extensively studied in recent years in various fields such as technologies for learning, e-commerce, and business technologies. This review focuses specifically on Human Resource Information Systems and its acceptance by users. Given their widespread use in organisations, HRIS acceptance has been researched but not synthesised in any way. This article aims to review the effectiveness of the classical TAM and UTAUT models commonly used for new technologies and to identify the variables added to these (...) models to better predict HRIS acceptance by employees. It also highlights the importance of the human-machine-organisation relationship to contribute to the understanding of HRIS acceptance in professional environments. This review confirms the effectiveness of the TAM and UTAUT models and proposes to develop them by variables reffering to technological characteristics, user satisfaction with the system, and organisational variables. The discussion focuses on the retroaction possibilities between the different Human-Machine-Organisation relation levels. (shrink)

Although the idea of freedom has been well studied as an ideal in political philosophy, relatively little scholarship has focused on the human experience of freedom. Drawing on ethnographic research between 2012 and 2013, I examine how freedom was achieved by people who practice freeganism and freecycling in Hong Kong. I show that the freedom that these people pursue, either individually or collectively, is not a freedom without constraints but a freedom that must be attained through the exercise of deliberation, (...) restraint, and self-discipline. While freegans seek liberation by withdrawing from the world and practicing self-cultivation (chushi asceticism), freecyclers do so by engaging with worldly affairs in order to create social changes (rushi asceticism). In both cases, by reimagining freedom as ethical practices rather than a right that comes naturally with birth, freegans and freecyclers in Hong Kong are able to experience moments of freedom despite inevitable structural constraints. (shrink)