Training on the Law of armed conflict employs different rationales to motivate soldiers and to induce their compliance with LOAC rules. Of these, none is as controversial, or as potentially...

This essay defends the asymmetry between the badness of spontaneous and induced abortions in order to explain why anti-abortionists prioritize stopping induced abortions over preventing spontaneous abortions. Specifically, it argues (1) the distinction between killing and letting-die is of more limited use in explaining the asymmetry than has sometimes been presumed, and (2) that accounting for intentions in moral agency does not render performances morally inert. Instead, anti-abortionists adopt a pluralist, nonreductive account of moral analysis which is situated against a (...) backdrop that sees the limits of our ability to control the process of fertility as themselves valuable. Although this view is complex, the paper concludes by arguing that it has the advantage of explaining features of the anti-abortion outlook that have sometimes been overlooked. First, it accounts for why the pre-Roe regime of abortion restrictions primarily imposed penalties on doctors who induced abortions rather than the women who seek them. Second, it explains why the advent of ectogestation will not prompt anti-abortionists to compromise on ‘disconnect abortions,’ which putatively let the embryo die by extracting it from the mother’s womb. (shrink)

The philosophy of mathematics plays a vital role in the mature philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. Peirce received rigorous mathematical training from his father and his philosophy carries on in decidedly mathematical and symbolic veins. For Peirce, math was a philosophical tool and many of his most productive ideas rest firmly on the foundation of mathematical principles. This volume collects Peirce’s most important writings on the subject, many appearing in print for the first time. Peirce’s determination to understand matter, the (...) cosmos, and "the grand design" of the universe remain relevant for contemporary students of science, technology, and symbolic logic. (shrink)

While many political theorists have focused on the question of whether states have a duty to grant citizenship to noncitizens, this article examines the issues associated with the state’s withdrawal of citizenship. Denationalization powers have recently emerged as a controversial political issue in a number of liberal states, making their ethical scrutiny important. I begin by considering the historical practice of banishment and how denationalization power emerged and became consolidated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the first (...) half of the twentieth century. I then discuss the nature of liberal objections to the power. My focus next shifts to the United Kingdom’s Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002, which attempted to create a “liberal” denationalization power. In the final section of the article, I discuss whether the Act successfully addresses liberal concerns and in so doing shed light on the possibility of reconciling liberal principles with conditional citizenship. (shrink)

The focus of much sensory language research has been on vocabulary and codability, not how language is used in communication of sensory perceptions. We make a case for discourse-oriented research about sensory language as an alternative to the prevailing vocabulary orientation. To consider the language of sound in authentic textual data, we presented participants with 20 everyday sounds of unknown sources and asked them to describe the sounds in as much detail as possible, as if describing them to someone who (...) could not hear them. We explored how the participants use language to describe these sounds. Do they describe their listening experiences (stressful), sound properties (intermittent beeping), and/or the events that caused the sounds (eating an apple)? The results show that out of these three soundscape elements, events are the most frequent and most indispensable element. We let the results from the study illustrate the need for more discursive data in studies of sensory language and argue that there is no designated language of sound. Our study highlights that in order to account for sensory language use, we need an analytical framework that accommodates discursive language in a non-trivial way beyond stable couplings between individual words and meanings. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel conception of freedom of thought as the right to epistemic self-realization. The recognition of this right is characterized here as a modally robust normative status that I think one has as a potential knower in an epistemic community. It is a status that one cannot enjoy without a specific form of institutionalized intellectual respect and support. To explain and defend this conception of freedom of thought, it is contrasted here with more traditionally “negative” conceptions of (...) freedom of thought, in terms of not being interfered with. It is also contrasted here with a “positive” conception of freedom of thought derived from a recently prominent account of doxastic agency as grounded in the rational capacity to self-determine one's own response to reasons. In both cases, the crux of the argument in this paper is that a conception of freedom of thought as a right to epistemic self-realization makes better sense of why we fear the counter-liberatory forces of propaganda and regulated thinking, and also why we hold out hope for the liberating potential of education and critical engagement with expertise in the public sphere. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on postphenomenology and material engagement theory to consider the material and emergent character of sociality in Homo faber. I approach this through the context of the bow and arrow, which is a technology that has received recent attention in cognitive archeology as a proxy for assessing criteria that made early human cognition distinct from that of other hominins. Through an ethnographic case study, I scrutinize the forms of knowledge that are required to use the technology (...) in the dynamic field of environmental practices that constitute the hunt. I demonstrate that the learning of the skill is a transformational process where beginners develop self and intentionality by attuning subjective capacities for sensory awareness and creative responsiveness. Through mutual participation, the bow and arrow aligns disposition and rapport among those whose life processes are shaped by the skill. As a mechanism of shared experience, the bow and arrow generates a community can together perceive and act creatively in an impermanent world. Through these observations, I argue that early human sociality was built not on a pre-evolved capacity for symbolic representation but on technical experience, and I consider important questions this raises about the nature of evolutionary processes at work in the development of communities through time. (shrink)

This essay explores the theological and anthropological significance of birth, in order to discern what might be lost with the adoption of complete ectogestation (“artificial wombs”). Specifically, it considers both Saint Augustine and Karl Barth’s respective accounts of humanity’s whence—that is, their theological answer to the question of the nature and significance of our origins as individuals. I suggest that Augustine’s account of his origins emphasizes both his epistemic and biological dependency on his mother and nurses, while Barth’s stresses the (...) individual’s immediate derivation from God. Those disparate answers affect how they construe the relationships of parents and children and work themselves throughout their theological visions and imaginations. I conclude that careful consideration of humanity’s whence cannot answer whether we ought to pursue ectogestation; but it does help us account for how our understanding of God and ourselves might be altered if we gestate human life outside the womb. (shrink)

Minkoff et al.’s contention that Dobbs threatens pregnant women’s right to refuse medical treatments that would risk the embryo’s life offers a bracing set of challenges to ethicists who affirm the...

We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a present that is pervasively mediated by data materialities, deeply rooted dataist ideologies that entrench processes of datafication as (...) granting objective access to truth and attendant practices of tracking, data analytics, algorithmic prediction, and data-driven targeting of individuals and communities. This collection of papers explores how data is figuring in the making of the discourses, lived realities, and systemic inequalities of the uneven impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. (shrink)

*Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author's and should not be ascribed to the American Medical Association.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Conflicts—and Consensus—about Conflicts of Interest in MedicineMatthew K. Wynia and Bette–Jane Crigger*This fascinating collection of essays about individual experiences of conflict of interest leaves little doubt that physicians remain divided about the importance, impact and meaning of conflicts of interest in their work. These essays offer differing views about what conflicts of interest look and feel like “on the ground” and about whether specific conflicts of interest are bad, (...) just a fact of life, or maybe even good.Conflict, Conflict EverywhereThese essays situate conflict of interest in a variety of contexts: the treatment recommendations a physician makes for an individual patient; the relationship between teaching physician and medical student or practicing physician and health care organization; the interaction between academic researchers and industry collaborators or professional bodies and industry supporters. In this, the narratives taken together reflect the scope of concern about conflict of interest in medicine familiar in the literature. In his classic 1993 essay, Dennis Thompson noted that concerns about conflict of interest encompass issues of physician self–referral, risk sharing between physicians and health care institutions, gifts from industry, hospital purchasing practices, as well as sponsored research and research with patients (Thompson 1993). To that list have subsequently been added relationships with industry in medical education at all levels, physicians’ service as consultants to industry or members of industry speakers bureau, and development of clinical practice guidelines (Lo & Fields 2009).That almost none of these essays draw attention to some widely publicized situations of conflict of interest—for example, gifts to physicians or the provision of drug samples—should, we think, be seen more as an artifact of the authors’ varied individual experiences than as a failure by the authors to engage key concerns in the ongoing professional and public debate. It could also be that the authors, asked to submit personal stories, assumed that yet another essay about the ‘traditional’ issues in the conflicts of interest literature would be seen as redundant, routine or even boring. Or, there is the tantalizing possibility that the absence of some of the more familiar conflicts from these narratives is the early fruit of efforts to address these traditional issues through policies governing interactions between physicians and industry promulgated by academic medical centers and health systems, medical specialty societies, and industry.One significant area of concern that has emerged in recent years is conflict of interest in the development of clinical practice guidelines. E.g., Choudry et al. 2002; Sniderrman & Furberg 2009; Guyatt et al. 2010. Although none of the essays in this [End Page 101] collection address it head on, Perlmutter touches on several key issues. His depiction of how an FDA committee process limited the input he was able to provide as an expert, undermined his potential to contribute to the professional dialogue, and raised concerns about the objectivity of the drug approval process echoes concerns about objectivity, the role of expert opinion, and the presence on guideline development panels of individuals with financial interests in the recommendations to be developed that have been explored at some length in the literature, most recently by the Institute of Medicine in reports on evidentiary standards (Eden et al 2011) and principles for guideline development (Graham et al. 2011).Conflict of Interest or Dual Agency?Several essays set out physicians’ experience in navigating situations of diverging expectations. Bierut, for example, reflects on the disjunction between the goals and products of academic researchers and commercial sponsors. She saw herself advancing basic knowledge and was forced to grapple with the reality of sponsors’ goals to advance commercial ends as well. Nagldinne and Mikulec each recall struggles to reconcile their obligation to exercise professional judgment on behalf of patients with the demands of health care organizations focussed also on the bottom line. Cruz–Flores attests to the challenge of making recommendations for care when one is both a practicing clinician and a clinical investigator engaged in research that might offer benefit to a patient for whom there are limited options.Thompson defined conflicts of interest as “a set of conditions in which professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as a patient’s welfare or the validity of... (shrink)

This article brings together two sets of insights about deliberative democracy and uses them to develop a novel epistemic justification for the importance of testimony. Some democratic theorists have argued persuasively that a deliberative process limited to formal argumentation is exclusionary and thus undermines democratic legitimacy; they have made a compelling case for testimony on grounds of democratic inclusion. Others have made the case that deliberation has important epistemic benefits. Those theorists emphasize the give and take of reasons as a (...) means to arrive at well-informed collective decisions. The author’s central claim is that there is an important epistemic value to the inclusion of testimony. It can introduce new information into the deliberative process. It can enable deliberators to grasp connections between the particular and the general. And it can invite them to imaginatively engage with the experiences of others. These epistemic benefits provide a new set of reasons for including testimony in democratic deliberation. (shrink)

Confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States increased exponentially, quickly leading to a pandemic in 2020, which created a serious public-health emergency. During the period in which the COVID-1...

The project of comparing Stoicism and Buddhism may appear to be an improbable one. While the latter determines that we strive for an enlightenment that contributes to the liberation of all living beings, the doctrines of the former would seem to entail that this is impossible. Though both strongly affirm principles of causality and cyclicity in the constitution of the world, Buddhism apparently grants considerably more freedom of human agency than does Stoicism. Their conception of eternal return in the strict (...) and literal sense is foreign to the Buddhist notion of the bodhisattva's ongoing spiritual progress through numberless lives. These distinctions, moreover, sometimes issue in markedly different ethical orientations: the Buddhist elevation of compassion in the constellation of cardinal virtues finds its Stoic pendant in a more restrained attitude of commiseration. (shrink)

Most philosophical defences of the state’s right to exclude immigrants derive their strength from the normative importance of self-determination. If nation-states are taken to be the political institutions of a people, then the state’s right to exclude is the people’s right to exclude – and a denial of this right constitutes an abridgement of self-determination. In this paper, I argue that this view of self-determination does not cohere with a group-agency view of nation-states. On the group-agency view that I defend, (...) a nation-state is the kind of group-agent that does not supervene on the intentionality of member/citizens. If we think that a nation-state is an intentional group-agent in its own right, then we should think that self-determination resides with the institutions of the state rather than with the citizens. If nation-states do not supervene on the intentionality of citizens, then it is unclear why citizens might have the right to control membership in the state as a feature of self-determination. (shrink)

In response to scholarship which has shown that seventeenth-century Scottish scholasticism was influenced by John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308), Jean-Pascal Anfray has argued that Scottish scholasticism was only indirectly influenced by Scotism, especially by Jesuit thinkers like Francisco Suárez (1548–1618), using the Aberdeen Doctor James Sibbald (1595–1647) and his theory of the body-soul composite as a litmus test. In reply to Anfray’s claims, this article undertakes three interconnected tasks. First, it renews calls for philosophical Scotism to be defined according to a (...) principles-based approach focusing on Scotus’s metaphysics of essence in contrast to a quasi-falsificationist approach. Second, it shows how Sibbald adopts the Scotist metaphysics of essence over the very different Suárezian metaphysics of essence. Third, it demonstrates how Sibbald endorses Scotus’s qualified pluralism in accounting for the body-soul composite. Sibbald thus turns out to be more directly Scotist (and less Suárezian) than first thought. (shrink)

Public pressure is essential for providing multinational enterprises (MNEs) with motivation to follow the standards of human rights conduct set in soft-law instruments, such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. But how does the public judge MNE involvement in human rights violations? We empirically answer this question drawing on an original survey of American adults. We asked respondents to judge over 12,000 randomly generated scenarios in which MNEs may be considered to have been involved in (...) human rights violations. Our findings reveal substantial gaps between public judgments and the standards set in soft law and the normative literature. We identify the attributes of episodes of human rights violations involving MNEs that influence public judgments, including the relationship between the MNE and the perpetrator, the practice of due diligence, and the type of abuse. These results provide insights as to when we might expect public pressure to drive MNE compliance with soft-law instruments, and they direct attention to specific standards that will likely require stronger, ‘hard’ law approaches or broader efforts to shift the public’s view. (shrink)

Old habits die hard; so, it seems, do old arguments. Proponents of thoracoabdominal normothermic regional perfusion (TA-NRP, but more commonly referred to as NRP) continue to proffer arguments and...

In 2014, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote: ‘Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don't matter in today's great debates … I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career and deeply admire the wisdom found on university campuses. So, professors, don't cloister yourselves like medieval monks – we need you!’ At that time, a group of academics were working to launch (...) the International Panel on Social Progress, with the aim of preparing a report analysing the current prospects for improving our societies.1 It gathered about 300 researchers from more than 40 countries and from all disciplines of the social sciences, law and philosophy. (shrink)

The following article consists of an introduction by the first author, an annotated translation by the second, and then an analysis by the first, of the earliest known Scandinavian response to the Vampire phenomenon of Medvedia in 1732 by Nicolaus Boye, a state-employed physician residing in Stockholm. The translation shows that Boye’s own article, which constitutes a complete refutation of Johann Flückinger’s claims, was meticulously organised, abstracting and arguing against the major themes which he observed in the Visum et Repertum, (...) while the analysis shows that Boye was working under the topical medical theories of the Dutch botanist and physician Herman Boerhaave. The analysis also demonstrates the extent to which Boye’s rationalism in refuting the Visum at Repertum is informed by his Lutheranism and belief in the Day of Judgement, and concludes by showing examples of the impact his work exerted on other academics in the 1730s. (shrink)

The self-indication assumption (SIA) claims that given that one exists, one should think that the universe has many people, for a universe that has more people is more likely to contain any particular person. SIA is attractive to many because it diffuses the infamous doomsday argument, and avoids the problems of its main rival, the self-sampling assumption (SSA), which instructs one to reason as if they’re randomly selected from the people in their reference class. Here, I will go further than (...) the traditional argument for SIA from its ability to avoid the doomsday argument: I will show that any view other than SIA must accept the soundness of the doomsday argument and certain even stranger conclusions. Additionally, I’ll argue that the main objection to SIA, the presumptuous philosopher case, is unconvincing. Together then, these considerations give one a strong reason to adopt SIA. (shrink)

In the attempt to understand the norms governing believers, epistemologists have tended to focus on individual belief as the primary object of epistemic evaluation. However, norm governance is often assumed to concern, at base, things we can do as a free exercise or manifestation of our agency. Yet believing is not plausibly conceived as something we freely do but rather as a state we are in, usually as the mostly automatic or involuntary result of cognitively processes shaped by nature, bias, (...) and ideology. In this paper, I sketch a response to this tension. This response is based on rejecting the traditional theoretical focus on an individual’s particular beliefs as the primary object of normative epistemic evaluation. If we shift our focus from the particular beliefs of individuals to the community and its information managing practices, we may lessen the tension between norm governance and automaticity and involuntariness in a way that construes autonomous cognitive agency as a resultant of rather than a precondition for our norm-governed epistemic sociality. (shrink)

I have vigorously absorbed the negative element of the age in which I live, an age that is, of course, very close to me, which I have no right ever to fight against, but as it were a right to represent. The slight amount of the positive, and also of the extreme negative, which capsizes into the positive, are something in which I have had no hereditary share. I have not been guided into life by the hand of Christianity – (...) admittedly now slack and failing – as Kierkegaard was, and have not caught the hem of the Jewish prayer shawl – now flying away from us – as the Zionists have. I am an end or a beginning.1. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 603-604 [Access article in PDF] Irving Singer. George Santayana, Literary Philosopher. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 217. Cloth, $25.00. In a prefatory comment, Irving Singer affirms that George Santayana, Literary Philosopher is "an introduction to the part of Santayana's philosophy that has meant the most to me" (xii). The locus of this personal interest, he goes on (...) to say, is in the "humanistic relevance" of Santayana's work. Singer's fruitful reflections on Santayana's literary genius, as well as the great philosopher's depth of critical insight with regard to aesthetics, literature, and love, all testify to this humanistic interest.Singer's examinations of Santayana's critical and fictional works are as accessible as they are interesting, a characteristic which alone recommends the book for readers interested in gaining an introductory understanding. Equally important however is the fact that Singer's reflections lend themselves to a much larger academic audience as well. Santayana's work is revealed, correctly, to be not only relevant to the philosophical community, but to contain contributional elements that are of interest to criticism in both literature and art.This does not mean that Singer avoids criticizing Santayana's philosophy. To the contrary, he levels a key criticism that begs response. Singer believes Santayana is incapable of accounting for interpersonal love. According to Singer, Santayana's deficiency in this regard is due to his belief that "[other] individuals are merely the vehicle [End Page 603] to some cherished ideal" (124). More specifically, Singer holds that Santayana's account of the realization of interpersonal love is restricted by an unnecessary dualism: the gratification of material desires (like Freud), and the distanced contemplation of an ideal (like Plato).This familiar dualism might be referred to as the "desire-renunciation" formula Santayana employs throughout his work in an attempt to pay equal respect to the material ground, and the contrasting ideal groundlessness of all things. For Santayana, the oscillation between desire and renunciation is so obviously reflected in individual aspirations, and in the general course of every human life that, for the philosopher, the task is not to attempt to justify one or the other, but to reconcile them. For Singer however, Santayana ultimately fails in this attempt: "...[Santayana's] attempt to unify Platonism and naturalism fails as philosophy..." (x). He charges that the structure of Santayana's philosophy "fails to show us how people can overcome the split between matter and spirit." Thus, Singer's divergence from Santayana derives from an overall rejection of the philosophical soundness of his work (favoring its humanistic appeal), and from his feeling that Santayana's philosophy never achieves the reconciliation it sets out as its goal. But these charges are unjust, and they seem to arise from an insufficient account of Santayana's doctrine of essence as it relates to his understanding of love.For Singer, "persons" rather than essences (or ideals) are the irreducible themes of human interest: "...loving is not the same as desiring. We desire things or persons for what they can give us, for satisfactions we hope they will provide. In loving anyone, however, we take an interest in that person, as a person and not just as a vehicle to something else" (91). But the implicit charge of this claim, namely, that Santayana's preference for essences as the irreducible themes of human interest results in the view that humans are incapable of loving persons-qua-persons (but only qua-essences), is simply wrong; and, importantly, reflective of a misunderstanding of Santayana's doctrine of essence.Santayana is consistent in his affirmation that in youth, when the demand to act is acute, it is sane to cry and to beat one's fists against the world, while with time and experience, such heated displays become tragic and even unbecoming. The same is true for Santayana with respect to love. It is wisdom reflective of the love of all things to laugh (ironically) at what was in youth an irremediable demand for the love of particular... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of VirtueMatthew SimpsonJoseph R. Reisert. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 211. Cloth, $42.50.This important book is an interpretation and defense of Rousseau's theory of moral education, in which the author explains and justifies Rousseau's ideas about what virtue is, why it is important, and how it can be cultivated.Briefly, this is his reading: in (...) advanced societies, people come to possess intense and incoherent passions, enflamed by amour-propre, which set them at odds with themselves and with each other, making bourgeois existence unsatisfying and exploitive. To create a better life, people must learn to restrain their desires in a way that promotes their own happiness; they must be taught virtue, which Reisert defines as, "the strength of character to rule over one's passions, so that one can make oneself do what one knows one ought to do" (8). Finally, the best model for the moral educator is not ruler to ruled, but friend to friend.The book is both a defense of this interpretation of Rousseau, and a defense of Rousseau's social and psychological theory itself, most notably against Aristotle, Locke, and Buffon. While the two lines of argument do not go together seamlessly, Reisert offers a number of contributions to Rousseau scholarship and to social thought, especially as it intersects with liberal political theory. He divides the work into two parts. The first explains Rousseau's theory of human nature and his diagnosis of the ills of society. The second interprets and defends his ideas about how to remedy that condition through the cultivation of virtue by means of friendship. The final chapter discusses the importance of virtue for contemporary liberal politics.The first half of the book, on Rousseau's "physics of the soul," touches on self-love, pity, vanity, and conscience. For some reason, Reisert limits his discussion largely to the meaning of amour-propre in the second Discourse and Emile to the exclusion of other issues and other books. Even so, he gives an interesting interpretation of amour-propre, and how it leads to the restless, banal misery that both authors think is characteristic of modern life.The problems of this section come when Reisert attempts to defend Rousseau. He argues that his theory of human nature is to be preferred because it answers questions that others cannot, such as how essentially asocial beings have come to live in societies. Yet, this question and some others he discusses come into being only because of Rousseau's own assumptions, for example that people are asocial in the first place. So, Rousseau's ability to solve puzzles that exist only on the basis of his own principles cannot be taken as evidence for those principles without begging the question.The second half of the work is more innovative. Reisert makes two basic arguments: that only virtue can alleviate the dissatisfactions of bourgeois existence; and that only the relationship of friendship can bring about this "education to virtue" (141). The first is less controversial given that he defines virtue simply as the power to restrain irrational desires for the sake of happiness; yet he goes on to make an interesting distinction between the virtue of Socrates who does not have irrational desires to begin with, and that of Emile who has them but can control them.The most original part of the book is his argument that only the relationship of friendship can foster virtue. He says that the amour-propre which makes people miserable also makes them resistant to efforts to improve their character. "A friend," on the other hand, "can, through force of personality and the power of example, exert a potent influence on his friend without thereby provoking resistance or inspiring resentment" (171). He gives a fascinating account of how a friend can be a kind of better self through whose eyes one sees the source of one's own dissatisfaction and the need for virtue to make life enjoyable. His most path breaking suggestion is that in his writings, especially Emile, Rousseau intended to be such a friend to... (shrink)

Does a flourishing life involve pursuing passionate attachments? Can we choose what these passionate attachments will be? This book offers an original theory of how we can actively cultivate our passionate attachments. The author argues that not only do we have reason to view passionate attachments as susceptible to growth, change, and improvement, but we should view these entities as amenable to self-cultivation. He uses Pierre Hadot's and Michel Foucault's accounts of Hellenistic self-cultivation as vital conceptual tools to formulate a (...) theory of cultivating our passionate attachments. First, their accounts offer the conceptual resources for a philosophical theory of how we can cultivate our passionate attachments. Second, the exercises of self-cultivation they focus on allow us to outline a practical method though which we can cultivate our passionate character. Doing this brings out a significantly new dimension to the role of the passionate attachments in the flourishing life and offers theoretical and practical accounts of how we can cultivate them based on the Hellenistic conception of self-directed character change. Cultivating Our Passionate Attachments will be of interest to advanced students and scholars working in virtue ethics, moral philosophy, and ancient philosophy. (shrink)

This Article provides a comprehensive, critical overview of proposals to use happiness surveys for steering public policy. Happiness or “subjective well-being” surveys ask individuals to rate their present happiness, life-satisfaction, affective state, etc. A massive literature now engages in such surveys or correlates survey responses with individual attributes. And, increasingly, scholars argue for the policy relevance of happiness data: in particular, as a basis for calculating aggregates such as “gross national happiness,” or for calculating monetary equivalents for non-market goods based (...) on coefficients in a happiness equation. But is individual well-being equivalent to happiness? The happiness literature tends to blur or conflate important concepts: well-being, subjective well-being, happiness, utility, satisfaction. A preference-realization account of well-being denies the equivalence of happiness and welfare, since someone can have preferences for non-mental attributes, such as health, autonomy, goal-fulfillment, knowledge or the quality of her relationships. It is critical, therefore, to differentiate two potential policy roles for happiness surveys. First, the survey response may provide prima facie evidence of the respondent’s preference-utility: the extent to which her preferences are realized. Second, it may indicate her experience-utility: the quality of her mental states. The Article clarifies these two, very different, ideas. It then criticizes, in turn, the preference-utility and the experience-utility defenses of the policy relevance of happiness surveys. Enthusiasm about happiness is premature. (shrink)

The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics(EJPE) interviewed Adler about his formative years (section I); his work on the theoretical foundations of public policy, zooming in onwelfare-consequentialism and social welfare functions(section II), welfarism and interpersonal comparisons(section III), the ethical deliberator and the role of the philosopher (section IV); and, finally,his views and visions for interdisciplinary work in law, economics, and philosophy,as well as his advice for graduate students in the field (section V).

This chapter contains sections titled: Physician‐Assisted Suicide Refusing Life‐Saving Medical Treatment Organ Donation: Opt‐in or Opt‐out? Autonomy and the Body.

We praise and admire creative people in virtually every domain from the worlds of art, fashion and design to the fields of engineering and scientific endeavour. Picasso was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Einstein was a creative scientist and Jonathan Ive is admired the world over as a great designer. We also sometimes blame, condemn or withhold praise from those who fail creatively; hence we might say that someone's work or ideas tend to be rather (...) derivative and uninspired. Institutions and governmental advisory bodies sometimes aspire, claim or exhort us to enable individual creativity, whether this is held to be good for the individual as such or in virtue of promoting wider socio-economic goods. It is at least a common thought that people are more self-fulfilled if they are creative and society more generally is held to be all the better for enabling individual creativity. (shrink)

The idea of philosophy as a 'way of life' is not a new one. From the first recorded philosophy by Plato, there has been a tradition of thinking about philosophy as pointing us towards the good life, happiness and an ethical existence. But where does this notion that philosophy has anything to offer in terms of guiding us in how to live and live well come from? In this first ever introduction to philosophy as a way of life, Matthew (...) Sharpe and Michael Ure take us us through the history of the idea from Plato and the Buddha to Foucault, Hadot and Zizek. They examine the kinds of practical exercises each thinker recommended and practiced to transform their philosophy into manners of living and acting. Philosophy as a Way of Life also examines the recent resurgence of thinking about philosophy as a practical, lived reality and why this ancient tradition still has so much relevance and power in the contemporary world. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between two types of persuasive force arguments can have in terms of two different connections between arguments and inferences. First, borrowing from Pinto, an arguer's invitation to inference directly persuades an addressee if the addressee performs an inference that the arguer invites. This raises the question of how invited inferences are determined by an invitation to inference. Second, borrowing from Sorenson, an arguer's invitation to inference indirectly persuades an addressee if the addressee performs an inference guided by (...) the argument even though it is uninvited. This raises the question of how an invitation to inference can guide inferences that the arguer does not use the argument to invite. Focusing on belief-inducing inference, the primary aims here are to clarify what is necessary for an addressee's belief-inducing inference to be invited by an argument used as an instrument of persuasion; and to highlight the capacity of arguments to guide such inferences. The paper moves beyond Pinto's discussion by using Boghossian's Taking Condition in service of and in way that illustrates how epistemically bad arguments can rationally persuade addressees of their conclusions. (shrink)