The multiverse hypothesis is the leading alternative to the competing fine-tuning hypothesis. The multiverse dispels many aspects of the fine-tuning argument by suggesting that there are different initial conditions in each universe, varying constants of physics, and the laws of nature lose their known arbitrary values; thus, making the previous single-universe argument from fine- tuning incredibly weak. The position that will be advocated will be that a form of multiverse could exist and that any level of Tegmark's multiverse does not (...) circumvent the fine-tuning argument for the existence of a fine-tuner. An argument will be presented suggesting that the multiverse could strengthen the fine-tuning argument by narrowing down the parameters of the data to a more fundamental description needed for the multiverse to function as it does since it may be the case that some physical descriptions are not the same in every universe. That is, the task of explaining how the multiverse mechanism functions cannot be accounted for by the multiverse itself. Fine-tuning by a mind serves as a sufficient and best explanation for the data. (shrink)

Historically, Thomas Aquinas has been controversial for his use of Averroistic-Aristotelian metaphysics. Because of his doctrine of simplicity many of argued that this entails a necessitarian view of nature—a debate that would pass through Spinoza, Descartes, and even to this day. Nevertheless, Thomas would prevail, not only to sainthood, but to become the patron of education and the Teacher of the Church. The task in this paper is to demonstrate that, contrary to many current contentions in Protestant, and especially Evangelical (...) circles, Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics remains a suitable, viable, even preferable framework for Christian Theism and, for the purposes of this paper, scientific thought. The specific focus will be on creation metaphysics and the relationship between current science and Christian thought raised by Lydia Jaeger. I will conclude with an example of the ability of radical contingency in Thomas to both satisfy contemporary physics and frame a consistent and coherent Christian Theism. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 6, September 2019, Page 662-683.

The Rawlsian institutional approach holds that distributive principles apply to socioeconomic institutions rather than transactions within the institutional framework. Critics claim that the approach is baseless. I defend Rawls’s institutionalism by showing that it has a rational basis: Rawls “constructs” a theory of justice from considered judgments, especially ideas found in the political culture and historical conditions of democracy, including the fact of reasonable pluralism, which supports his institutionalism. I use Rawls’s “fact-sensitive constructivism” to interpret his claim that “utilitarianism does (...) not take seriously the distinction between persons.” Rawls’s claim refers to his contrast between impartial spectator reasoning for the classical principle of utility and his original position, which aims to motivate the original position’s use of mutually disinterested parties to an agreement as more accurately reflecting democracy’s fact of reasonable pluralism. Rawls then shows that these original position conditions, meant to reflect separate persons in democracy, justify his egalitarian principles over classical utility. I extend his contrast to act-egalitarianism to show that Rawls’s fact-sensitive constructivism supports his institutionalism. I argue that the original position, which reflects separate persons, only justifies the institutional difference principle and that the natural reasoning for act-egalitarianism does not take seriously the separateness of persons. (shrink)

One of the central problems of personal identity is to determine what we are essentially . In response to this problem, Lynne Rudder Baker espouses a psychological criterion, that is, she claims that persons are essentially psychological. Baker’s theory purports to bypass the problems of other psychological theories such as Dissociative Identity Disorder and the problem of individuating persons synchronically. I argue that the theory’s treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder leads to untenable results, is invalid, and consequently fails to individuate (...) persons. (shrink)

In this article, the important but neglected link between workplace safety-enhancing behavior and ethics is explored. Using data from 237 employees from five manufacturing plants in the Midwest, we investigated how specific local ethical climate types are linked to incidences of injuries and two types of safety-enhancing behaviors: safety compliance and safety participation. It was hypothesized that egoist climates are positively related to injuries and negatively related to safety-enhancing behaviors. In contrast, it is proposed that both benevolent and principled climates (...) have negative relationships with injuries and positive relationships with safety-enhancing behaviors. Results provided support only for our principled climate types while benevolence has the desired negative relationship with injuries. Egoism and benevolence are not related to safety-enhancing behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications of findings are discussed. (shrink)

As evidence that cultural group selection has occurred, Richerson et al. simply retrodict that humans use language, punish each other, and have religion. This is a meager empirical haul after 30 years. This contrasts sharply with the adaptationist approach to human behavior – evolutionary psychology – which has produced scores of novel, specific, and empirically confirmed predictions.

G. A. Cohen argues that Rawls’s difference principle is incompatible with his endorsement of incentives inequality—higher pay for certain professions is just when that pay benefits everyone. Cohen concludes that Rawls must reject both incentives inequality and ‘institutionalism’—the view that egalitarian principles, including the difference principle, apply exclusively to social institutions. I argue that the premises of Cohen’s ‘internal criticism’ of Rawls require rejecting two important parts of his theory: a ‘subjective circumstance of justice’ and a ‘shared conception of justice’. (...) These are important parts of Rawls’s ‘constructivism’. Constructivism is the view that a conception of justice is the solution to a practical interaction problem and is solved in part by examining the facts of the problem. Thus, an upshot of my arguments is that this Cohen/Rawls dispute reduces to another dispute over ‘constructivism’. (shrink)

I examine the main anticosmopolitan Rawslian argument, the ‘basic structure argument.’ It holds that distributive justice only applies to existing basic structures, there are only state basic structures, so distributive justice only applies among compatriots. Proponents of the argument face three challenges: 1) they must explain what type of basic structure relation makes distributive justice relevant only among compatriots, 2) they must explain why distributive justice (as opposed to allocative or retributive) is the relevant regulative concept for basic structures, and (...) 3) they must put forth a plausible concept of distributive justice. I show that Rawlsians support what I will call the ‘division of labor thesis’ to answer the first two challenges. Briefly, the division of labor thesis holds that distributive justice only becomes relevant where members of a division of labor jointly produce some socioeconomic product. To meet the third challenge, Rawlsians seem to accept what Elizabeth Anderson calls the ‘modern systemic concept of distributive justice’ – the idea that distributive justice organizes entire economic systems with respect to their distributive consequences or the relationships they maintain. I argue that if Rawlsians accept the systemic concept, they should reject the anticosmopolitan basic structure argument. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge argues that John Rawls’s priority of liberty rule is not constraining enough: it permits morally unacceptable restrictions of basic liberties. Because of this, Pogge claims that Rawls fails in his two central ambitions: to construct a moral conception that (1) opposes utilitarianism and (2) matches his judgments in reflective equilibrium. Pogge attributes this error to Rawls’s “purely recipient-oriented theorizing”—assessing a society’s basic structure based on how its citizens fare. I argue that Rawls’s theory does not allow restrictions of (...) liberty that are offensive to moral considerations. I then explain how my arguments against Pogge show that Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium is crucial for assessing a society’s basic structure and how it follows from this that Rawls’s theorizing is not purely recipient-oriented. (shrink)

Elements of Folk Psychology; Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind, has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

Are humans too generous and too punitive? Many researchers have concluded that classic theories of social evolution (e.g., direct reciprocity, reputation) are not sufficient to explain human cooperation; instead, group selection theories are needed. We think such a move is premature. The leap to these models has been made by moving directly from thinking about selection pressures to predicting patterns of behavior and ignoring the intervening layer of evolved psychology that must mediate this connection. In real world environments, information processing (...) is a non-trivial problem and details of the ecology can dramatically constrain potential solutions, often enabling particular heuristics to be efficient and effective. We argue that making the intervening layer of psychology explicit resolves decades-old mysteries in the evolution of cooperation and punishment. (shrink)

The writings of the Church Fathers form a distinct body of literature that shaped the early church and built upon the doctrinal foundations of Christianity established within the New Testament. Christian literature in the period c.100–c.400 constitutes one of the most influential textual oeuvres of any religion. Written mainly in Greek, Latin and Syriac, Patristic literature emanated from all parts of the early Christian world and helped to extend its boundaries. The History offers a systematic account of that literature and (...) its setting. The works of individual writers in shaping the various genres of Christian literature is considered, alongside three general essays, covering distinct periods in the development of Christian literature, which survey the social, cultural and doctrinal context within which Christian literature arose and was used by Christians. This is a landmark reference book for scholars and students alike. (shrink)

The relationship between international order and justice has long been central to the study and practice of international relations. For most of the twentieth century, states and international society gave priority to a view of order that focused on the minimum conditions for coexistence in a pluralist, conflictual world. Justice was seen either as secondary or sometimes even as a challenge to order. Recent developments have forced a reassessment of this position. This book sets current concerns within a broad historical (...) and theoretical context; explores the depth and scope of this presumed solidarism amidst the difficulties of acting on the basis of a more strongly articulated liberal position; and underscores the complexity and abiding tensions inherent in the relationship between order and justice. Chapters examine a wide range of state and transnational perspectives on order and justice, including those from China, India, Russia, the United States, and the Islamic world. Other chapters investigate how the order-justice relationship is mediated within major international institutions, including the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the global financial institutions. (shrink)

Clicks, comments, transactions, and physical movements are being increasingly recorded and analyzed by Big Data processors who use this information to trace the sentiment and activities of markets and voters. While the benefits of Big Data have received considerable attention, it is the potential social costs of practices associated with Big Data that are of interest to us in this paper. Prior research has investigated the impact of Big Data on individual privacy rights, however, there is also growing recognition of (...) its capacity to be mobilized for surveillance purposes. Our paper delineates the underlying issues of privacy and surveillance and presents them as in tension with one another. We postulate that efforts at controlling Big Data may create a trade-off of risks rather than an overall improvement in data protection. We explore this idea in relation to the principles of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation as it arguably embodies the new ‘gold standard’ of cyber-laws. We posit that safeguards advocated by the law, anonymization and pseudonymization, while representing effective counter measures to privacy concerns, also incentivize the use, collection, and trade of behavioral and other forms of de-identified data. We consider the legal status of these ownerless forms of data, arguing that data protection techniques such as anonymization and pseudonymization raise significant concerns over the ownership of behavioral data and its potential use in the large-scale modification of activities and choices made both on and offline. (shrink)

Until the time of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, philosophers generally held economics to be an integral element of moral philosophy. These days, the language of values—moral, aesthetic, and cognitive—dominates philosophic discourse, even though contemporary philosophers rarely hold economics to be integral to moral philosophy. Examining the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and the art of Marcel Proust, Edward Andrew provides the first sustained critical analysis of values discourse, an analysis that deconstructs its content and its form.

This article argues that Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology is useful for both science and technology studies and critical theory. The synthesis has political implications. It offers an argument for the rationality of democratic interventions by citizens into decisions concerning technology. The new framework opens a perspective on the radical transformation of technology required by ecological modernization and sustainability. In so doing, it suggests new applications of STS methods to politics as well as a reconstruction of the Frankfurt School’s “rational (...) critique of reason.”. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that it cannot be fitting to be grateful to nature. I start by arguing that gratitude to someone/something can be fitting even if they do not intentionally benefit one. I then argue that a recent view on which it can be fitting to be grateful to nature faces counterexamples. Finally, I argue that it cannot be fitting to be grateful to nature, because it is fitting to be grateful to someone/something only if they manifest the (...) right kind of goodwill or care toward one. In particular, I argue that it is fitting to be grateful to someone/something only if they manifest a level of final care toward one beyond what can be legitimately expected or demanded of them. However, because nature does not manifest any level of goodwill or care, it cannot be fitting to be grateful to nature. I end by noting that it can still be fitting to be grateful that certain things are true about nature (e.g. that it provides many benefits to humans). (shrink)

Republicanism and imperialism are typically understood to be located at opposite ends of the political spectrum. In Imperial Republics, Edward G. Andrew challenges the supposed incompatibility of these theories with regard to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions in England, the United States, and France. Many scholars have noted the influence of the Roman state on the ideology of republican revolutionaries, especially in the model it provided for transforming subordinate subjects into autonomous citizens. Andrew finds an equally important parallel between Rome's (...) expansionary dynamic — in contrast to that of Athens, Sparta, or Carthage — and the imperial rivalries that emerged between the United States, France, and England in the age of revolutions. Imperial Republics is a sophisticated, wide-ranging examination of the intellectual origins of republican movements, and explains why revolutionaries felt the need to 'don the toga' in laying the foundation for their own uprisings. (shrink)

It is common to think that our intimates are required to help us. But it can be problematic to appeal to certain kinds of facts (e.g., previous favors or prudentially relevant facts) in order to entice them to help us—even when those facts provide them with sufficient or decisive reason to help us. This is puzzling because, in these cases, our intimates have sufficient or decisive reason to act in the way we are trying to entice them to act. Moreover, (...) it generally seems more problematic to appeal to certain kinds of facts (e.g., previous favors or prudentially relevant facts) in order to entice our intimates to do things that help us than it is to appeal to these facts in order to entice nonintimates to perform the same actions. This too is puzzling because one is usually permitted to ask more from one's intimates than non-intimates. I argue that these enticements are intuitively problematic because they indicate that one violates a demand of good intimate relationships. In particular, they indicate that one violates a demand for a certain kind of doxastic partiality; that is, one should trust one's intimates to follow what one's intimates know are demands of good intimate relationships. More specifically, one fails to trust one's intimates to be sufficiently motivated to protect or promote one's needs, desires, interests, projects, and well-being for one's own sake. Making such requests of nonintimates is not usually intuitively problematic because one is not required to trust non-intimates to be motivated in this way. (shrink)

Utility maximization is a key element of a number of theoretical approaches to explaining human behavior. Among these approaches are rational analysis, ideal observer theory, and signal detection theory. While some examples of these approaches define the utility maximization problem with little reference to the bounds imposed by the organism, others start with, and emphasize approaches in which bounds imposed by the information processing architecture are considered as an explicit part of the utility maximization problem. These latter approaches are the (...) topic of this issue of the journal. (shrink)

This paper explores the political thought of Andrew Michael Ramsay with particular reference to his highly acclaimed book called A New Cyropaedia, or the Travels of Cyrus (1727). Dedicated to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, to whom he was tutor, this work has been hitherto viewed as a Jacobite imitation of the Telemachus, Son of Ulysses(1699) of his eminent teacher archbishop Fénelon of Cambrai. By tracing the dual legacy of the first Persian Emperor Cyrus in Western thought, (...) I demonstrate that Ramsay was as much indebted to Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet's Discourse on Universal History (1681)as he was to Fénelon's political romance. Ramsay took advantage of Xenophon's silence about the eponymous hero's adolescent education in his Cyropaedia, or the Education of Cyrus (c.380B.C.), but he was equally inspired by the Book of Daniel, where the same Persian prince was eulogised as the liberator of the Jewish people from their captivity in Babylon. The main thrust of Ramsay's adaptation was not only to revamp the Humanist- cum-Christian theory and practice of virtuous kingship for a restored Jacobite regime, but on a more fundamental level, to tie in secular history with biblical history. In this respect, Ramsay's New Cyropaedia, or the Travels of Cyrus, was not just another Fénelonian political novel but more essentially a work of universal history. In addition to his Jacobite model of aristocratic constitutional monarchy, it was this Bossuetian motive for universal history, which was first propounded by the German reformer Philipp Melanchthon in his Chronicon Carionis (1532), that most decisively separated Ramsay from Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, author of another famous advice book for princes of the period, The Idea of a Patriot King (written in late 1738 for the education of Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, but officially published in 1749). (shrink)

I aim to vindicate the claim that we can owe someone gratitude for believing in us and to show how this seemingly prosaic fact has important upshots for the normativity of gratitude. I start by sketching a novel account of what it is to believe in someone according to which it consists in holding an affective attitude of confident optimism toward their general ability in some domain(s). I then argue that people can deserve gratitude for holding this attitude. I close (...) by showing how the possibility of being gratitudeworthy for believing in someone casts down on three commonplaces about when gratitude is owed. (shrink)

Italian critical theorist Giorgio Agamben is well known for his rigorous attempts to redefine political, aesthetic, and theological concepts through messianic categories. For Agamben, the messianic is not concerned with perpetual waiting for a savior to come and redeem the world. Rather, it concerns the radically open potentiality for action within the contemporary moment. While the temporality of the messianic moment has been emphasized both by Agamben and by the vast secondary literature that has provided ample reflections on his body (...) of work, the important concept of messianic space has not been given equal treatment. Space and time must be thought together if we are to appreciate the unique qualities of .. (shrink)

An eloquent and passionate examination of the opposition between Protestant conscience and Enlightenment reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.