When Thomas Nagel originally coined the expression “moral luck,” he used the term “luck” to mean lack of control. This use was a matter of stipulation, as Nagel’s target had little to do with luck itself, but the question of how control is related to moral responsibility. Since then, we have seen several analyses of the concept of luck itself, and recent contributors to the moral luck literature have often assumed that any serious contribution to the moral luck debate must (...) begin with a robust concept of luck simpliciter. I argue here that this assumption is a mistake, on the basis of three reasons: the issue was originally conceived as an issue about responsibility and control, analyses of luck tend to distort and needlessly to complicate what is at issue when shoehorned into the moral luck debate, and these analyses have very little (if anything) to contribute to the discussion. (shrink)

Children’s preferences about medical treatment—like the preferences of other patients—hold moral weight in decision-making that is independent of considerations of autonomy or best interests. In light of this understanding of the moral value of patient preferences, the American Academy of Pediatrics could strengthen the ethical foundation for its formal guidance on pediatric assent.

Autonomist accounts of cognitive science suggest that cognitive model building and theory construction (can or should) proceed independently of findings in neuroscience. Common functionalist justifications of autonomy rely on there being relatively few constraints between neural structure and cognitive function (e.g., Weiskopf, 2011). In contrast, an integrative mechanistic perspective stresses the mutual constraining of structure and function (e.g., Piccinini & Craver, 2011; Povich, 2015). In this paper, I show how model-based cognitive neuroscience (MBCN) epitomizes the integrative mechanistic perspective and concentrates (...) the most revolutionary elements of the cognitive neuroscience revolution (Boone & Piccinini, 2016). I also show how the prominent subset account of functional realization supports the integrative mechanistic perspective I take on MBCN and use it to clarify the intralevel and interlevel components of integration. (shrink)

Philosophers from Plato and Augustine to Heidegger, Nozick, and Baudrillard have warned us of the dangers of living on too heavy a diet of illusion and make-believe. But contemporary cultural life provides broader, more attractive opportunities to do so than have existed at any other point in history. The gentle forms of self-deceit that such experiences require of us, and that so many have regarded as ethically unwholesome or psychologically self-destructive, can in fact serve as vital means to political reconciliation, (...) cultural enrichment, and even (a kind of) utopia. -/- The first half of the book provides a highly schematic definition of simulated experience and compares it with some claims about the nature of simulation made by other philosophers about what it is for one thing to be a simulation of another. The author then provides a critical survey of the views of some major authors about the value of certain specific types of simulated experience, mainly in order to point out the many puzzling inconsistencies and ambiguities that their thoughts upon the topic often exhibit. In the second half of the book, the author defends an account of the positive social value of simulated experience and compares his own position to the ideas of a number of utopian political thinkers, as well as to Plato's famous doctrine of the "noble lie." He then makes some tentative practical suggestions about how a proper appreciation of the value of simulated experience might influence public policy decisions about such matters as the justification of taxation, paternalistic "choice management," and governmental transparency. (shrink)

Many people have been enraged lately by the enormous increases in certain generic prescription drugs. But free marketeers defend these prices by arguing that they simply represent what the market will bear, and in a capitalist society there is accordingly nothing wrong with charging them. This paper argues that such a defense is actually contrary to the very principles that free marketeers claim to embrace. These prices are not only unjust and exploitative, but government interference with them would not render (...) the market less free, at least if what it means for a market to be “free” is properly understood. Everyone, even free marketeers with a libertarian or neoliberal bent, should accordingly be against this kind of profiteering. (shrink)

The most cursory examination of the history of artificial intelligence highlights numerous egregious claims of its researchers, especially in relation to a populist form of ‘strong’ computationalism which holds that any suitably programmed computer instantiates genuine conscious mental states purely in virtue of carrying out a specific series of computations. The argument presented herein is a simple development of that originally presented in Putnam’s monograph, “Representation & Reality”, which if correct, has important implications for turing machine functionalism and the prospect (...) of ‘conscious’ machines. In the paper, instead of seeking to develop Putnam’s claim that, “everything implements every finite state automata”, I will try to establish the weaker result that, “everything implements the specific machine Q on a particular input set ”. Then, equating Q to any putative AI program, I will show that conceding the ‘strong AI’ thesis for Q opens the door to a vicious form of panpsychism whereby all open systems,, must instantiate conscious experience and hence that disembodied minds lurk everywhere. (shrink)

Since the mid-1960s, the carceral population in the US has increased around 900%. This article analyses that increase from a Marxist framework. After interrogating the theories of Michelle Alexander and Loïc Wacquant, I lay out a theoretical framework for a Marxist theory of mass incarceration. I then offer a historical analysis of mass incarceration in keeping with this theoretical framework, emphasising the carceral system’s relationship to the class struggle and the large-scale economic dislocations of post-Fordism. Finally, I emphasise how private (...) prison companies, increasingly central to the story of mass incarceration, are influencing current efforts to reform the prison system and shift to ‘alternatives to incarceration’. (shrink)

The common sense that heavily informs the epistemology of Thomas Reid has been recently hailed as instructive with regard to some of the most fundamental issues in epistemology by a burgeoning segment of analytic epistemologists. These admirers of Reid may be called dogmatists. I highlight three ways in which Reid's approach has been a model to be imitated in the estimation of dogmatists. First, common sense propositions are taken to be the benchmarks of epistemology inasmuch as they constitute paradigm cases (...) of knowledge. Second, dogmatists follow Reid in taking common sense propositions to provide boundaries for philosophical theorizing. Inasmuch as philosophical theorizing leads one to deny a common sense proposition, such theorizing is stepping outside of the bounds of what it can or should do. Third, dogmatists follow Reid in focusing heavily on the problem of skepticism and by responding to it by refusing to answer the demand for a meta-justification that the skeptic wants. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator”(2006-08) involved NBC staff working with police and a watchdog group called “Perverted Justice” to televise “special intensity” arrests of men who were lured into meeting adult decoys posing as young children, presumably for a sexual encounter. As reality television, “To Catch a Predator” facilitates public shaming of those caught in front of the cameras, which distinguishes it from fictional representations. In one case, a Texas District Attorney, Louis Conradt, shot himself on film, unable to (...) bear the public humiliation of cameras airing his arrest. The show engenders conflicting responses: Did the show fulfill a public service by informing the public about real dangers and deterring potential predators, or was it an insensitive effort to garner ratings by taking advantage of human weaknesses? Is the sort of public shaming it imposes an appropriate form of punishment given the legitimate purposes of punishment? Did the show portray justice, or did it entrap victims? How did NBC’s working relationship with local police bear on the answer to that question? This paper addresses these questions and develops three objections to the show: that NBC in effect metes out unjust punishment; that it invades privacy; and that it entraps. (shrink)

Evaluates a criticism based on privacy and other ethical grounds of Bond's study using 61 million persons on Facebook to determine whether political mobilization messages shared on social media can influence voting behavior.

In Naked, Krista K. Thomason offers a multi-faceted account of shame, covering its nature as an emotion, its positive and negative roles in moral life, its association with violence, and its provocation through invitations to shame, public shaming, and stigmatization. Along the way, she reflects on a range of examples drawn from literature, memoirs, journalism, and her own imagination. She also considers alternative views at length, draws a wealth of important distinctions, and articulates many of the most intuitive objections to (...) her own view in order to defend it more thoroughly. As such, the book’s subtitle, The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life, undersells its scope and ambition. This is an exploration not just of shame’s dark side but a kaleidoscopic appreciation of both the nature and the (dis)value of shame and shaming. Somewhat undercutting this breadth, Thomason relies heavily on Kantian intuitions about equal respect and recognition for persons and their dignity; in several key arguments, she tells us to disregard predictable and systematic consequences of emotions, practices, and institutions so that we can better focus on their constitutive or internal aspects. Of course, every philosopher inevitably brings theoretical commitments to bear when writing about moral psychology, but non-Kantian readers should be forewarned that — despite the fact that Thomason says that she does “not assume any particular moral theory” — her ethical conclusions about shaming and stigmatizing are likely to be plausible only to those who are already snugly tied into a web of “Kantian commitments” (p. 9). (shrink)

Talk at the Philosophy [in:of:for:and] Digital Knowledge Infrastructures online workshop (08/09/2022).

Reasoning is the iterative, path-dependent process of asking questions and answering them. Moral reasoning is a species of such reasoning, so it is a matter of asking and answering moral questions, which requires both creativity and curiosity. As such, interventions and practices that help people ask more and better moral questions promise to improve moral reasoning.

In many countries throughout the world, regulators are struggling to determine whether and how to introduce competition into regulated industries. This essay exam- ines the complexities involved in the liberalization process. While stressing the impor- tance of case-specific analyses, this essay distinguishes liberalization policies that generally are procompetitive from corresponding anticompetitive liberalization policies.

Heterogenous flows across system boundaries continue to pose significant problems for efficient resource allocation especially with respect to long term strategic planning and immediate problems about allocation to address particular resource shortages. The approach taken here to modelling such flows is an engineering change prediction one. This enables margin modelling by producing system models in dependency matrices with different linkage types. Change prediction approaches from engineering design can analyse where these bottlenecks in integrated systems would be so that resources can (...) be deployed flexibility to avoid them and address them when they occur. Current state of the art of margin research can be furthered by identifying margins on multiple levels of system composition. It can usefully be complemented by a category theory based approach which allows representation of variable and constant properties of models under changing conditions, and the identification of flows within models. Category theory is useful for formalising such explanatory frameworks as it can both structure systems and permit analysis of their applications in a complementary way. (shrink)

This volume offers selected papers exploring issues arising from scientific discovery in the social sciences. It features a range of disciplines including behavioural sciences, computer science, finance, and statistics with an emphasis on philosophy. The first of the three parts examines methods of social scientific discovery. Chapters investigate the nature of causal analysis, philosophical issues around scale development in behavioural science research, imagination in social scientific practice, and relationships between paradigms of inquiry and scientific fraud. The next part considers the (...) practice of social science discovery. Chapters discuss the lack of genuine scientific discovery in finance where hypotheses concern the cheapness of securities, the logic of scientific discovery in macroeconomics, and the nature of that what discovery with the Solidarity movement as a case study. The final part covers formalising theories in social science. Chapters analyse the abstract model theory of institutions as a way of representing the structure of scientific theories, the semi-automatic generation of cognitive science theories, and computational process models in the social sciences. The volume offers a unique perspective on scientific discovery in the social sciences. It will engage scholars and students with a multidisciplinary interest in the philosophy of science and social science. (shrink)

SAINT JOAN OF NEW YORK is a novel about a math prodigy who becomes obsessed with discovering the Theory of Everything. Joan Cooper, a 17-year-old genius traumatized by the death of her older sister, tries to rebuild her shattered world by studying string theory and the efforts to unify the laws of physics. But as she tackles the complex equations, she falls prey to disturbing visions of a divine being who wants to help her unveil the universe’s mathematical design. Joan (...) must enter the battle between science and religion, fighting for her sanity and a new understanding of the cosmos. (shrink)

This article explores a variety of techniques for “cutting through the clutter” in an era of information glut: body language, neuromarketing, and data mining. It traces connections between these different strategies by arguing that they converge on an understanding of the social, political, and economic roles of information, which challenge the empowering promise of the digital information revolution. The attempt to short-circuit the discursive content of communication in order to get straight at the underlying sentiment is symptomatic of an impasse (...) that Slavoj Zizek describes in terms of the demise of symbolic efficiency. The promise of direct access to emotional truths modeled, for example by deception detection experts on the show Lie to Me compensates for what might be described as a vernacular postmodernism in which representations are understood to be not only subject to contrivance, but completely reducible to it. The result, this article argues, is a shift in the relationship of information to power, and thus in strategies for challenging or resisting it. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study of reporting by UK national newspapers of Gipsies, Roma and Travelers offers a macro-analysis to complement existing discourse analyses. The results show a significant imbalance...

Agreement morphology is the single most important way of satisfying this requirement, the other being incorporation. (1) implies that in a polysynthetic language like Mohawk, all verbs necessarily agreement with subjects, objects, and indirect objects, except for the special case when the direct object is incorporated into the verb. This accounts elegantly for paradigms like the following, found also in languages like Nahuatl and Chukchee.

This paper shows that a VP in English is only a VP at the outset of a derivation, and that VP- preposing in English is in fact preposing of the internal arguments of the verb, followed by remnant movement of the original VP. Therefore, English looks much more like German (Muller (1998)), than it appears at first glance The evidence for the non-constituency of the verb and its original arguments in preposed position comes from its solution to what has been (...) termed Pesetsky’s Paradox, in that an object of a preposed VP can bind into an adverbial at the end of a sentence. The paradox results from the incompatibility of the phenomenon with the conjunction of two assumptions: (i) binding requires c-command; (ii) only constituents move.. Assumption (i) requires the object to be higher than the adverbial, but the preposing of the verb and object to the exclusion of the adverbial would then require that a non-constituent (the verb and object) prepose. The paradoxical nature of the phenomenon rests on the two assumptions, and the paper presents additional evidence that binding requires c-command, showing the contrasts between topicalized VPs and topicalized PPs. The full set of binding phenomena can be accounted for with a ccommand requirement on binding, but cannot be accounted for with a rival account of command that makes reference to grammatical functions, known as o-command within HPSG (Pollard and Sag (1992, 1994) or ranking (Bresnan (2002)) or f-command (Dalrymple (1999)). (shrink)

We have a practical, not merely theoretical interest in freedom. The question that is considered in this paper, is what it is that we value about freedom. It is proposed that what we value is being able to get what we most want (or value), because that is what we most want (or value). This account is compatible with determinism. Certain accounts opposed to determinism are considered and rejected. On these accounts freedom requires either a particular sort of indeterminism, or (...) requires a special form of causation, agent‐causation, or requires that the agent be a certain sort of self‐constituting entity. It is argued that even if these accounts were less metaphysically problematic than they are, they would not give us a ‘freedom’ that we would value, nor would they secure conditions under which an action would be praise – or blameworthy. It is also argued, that a certain sort of capacity to control ourselves is not a precondition for freedom, though such a capacity would add to the scope of our freedom. (shrink)

Music analysis raises interesting problems for the theory of mental representation and meaning, and poses new challenges for epistemology. When an analysis purports to show the structure an analyst or reader hears a piece as having, what relation must thereby hold between hearing and analysis, and how does the analyst or reader know that it does? A paradox of analysis arises: if an analysis correctly captures the information content of a hearing, then it is bound to be uninformative. The solution (...) is to distinguish different levels of content, where analysis and hearing share content on one level and diverge on another. The question then arises of how an analyst or reader knows that she hears a piece in the way described by an analysis. The nature of this (apparently a priori) knowledge is an important, and heretofore unappreciated, problem for epistemology. Music analysis is, finally, a fertile ground for investigating the age-old problem of the relation between perception and concepts. (shrink)

The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings provides the definitive anthology of early Christian texts from ca. 100 CE to ca. 650 CE. Its volumes reflect the cultural, intellectual, and linguistic diversity of early Christianity, and are organized thematically on the topics of God, Practice, Christ, Community, Reading, and Creation. The series expands the pool of source material to include not only Greek and Latin writings, but also Syriac and Coptic texts. Additionally, the series rejects a theologically normative view by (...) juxtaposing texts that were important in antiquity but later deemed 'heretical' with orthodox texts. The translations are accompanied by introductions, notes, suggestions for further reading, and scriptural indices. The fourth volume focuses on early Christian reflection on Christ as God incarnate from ca. 450 CE to the eighth century. It will be an invaluable resource for students and academic researchers in early Christian studies, history of Christianity, theology and religious studies, and late antique Roman history. (shrink)