This paper explores the role of moral uncertainty in explaining the morally disruptive character of new technologies. We argue that existing accounts of technomoral change do not fully explain its disruptiveness. This explanatory gap can be bridged by examining the epistemic dimensions of technomoral change, focusing on moral uncertainty and inquiry. To develop this account, we examine three historical cases: the introduction of the early pregnancy test, the contraception pill, and brain death. The resulting account highlights what we call “differential (...) disruption” and provides a resource for fields such as technology assessment, ethics of technology, and responsible innovation. (shrink)

What makes human beings intentional and thinking subjects? How does their intentionality and thought connect with their social nature and their communal experience? How do the answers to these questions shape the assumptions which it is legitimate to make in social explanation and political evaluation? These are the broad-ranging issues which Pettit addresses in this novel study. The Common Mind argues for an original way of marking off thinking subjects, in particular human beings, from other intentional systems, natural and artificial. (...) It holds by the holistic view that human thought requires communal resources while denying that this social connection compromises the autonomy of individuals. And, in developing the significance of this view of social subjects--this holistic individualism--it outlines a novel framework for social and political theory. Within this framework, social theory is allowed to follow any of a number of paths: space is found for intentional interpretation and decision-theoretic reconstruction, for structural explanation and rational choice derivation. But political theory is treated less ecumenically. The framework raises serious questions about contractarian and atomistic modes of thought and it points the way to a republican rethinking of liberal commitments. (shrink)

Paul L. Lehmann (1906–1994) was one of the leading Protestant theologians and ethicists of his generation. Working directly from archival sources and early writings, this article offers an account of the formation of key features of his distinctive theological perspective up to and including the first decades of his professional career. It argues that Lehmann prosecutes a distinctive and markedly Protestant form of public theology, centred on an understanding of the Word of God as a present, dynamic and humanising power, (...) to which Christian faith, life and thought give witness and serve catalytically. In this, Lehmann shows himself to be a premier advocate for lines of thinking he first encountered in the work of Karl Barth and of his friend, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (shrink)

The claims of Mt. 5:17—20 are often taken to provide the interpretive key to the ethical claims of the Sermon on the Mount as a whole. The theological issue at stake here is the determinative relation between Christ's person and work and his teaching. This article explores the vital role played by the identity of Christ as the `fulfiller of the law' and `bringer of the Kingdom' in the exegesis of the Sermon offered by Eduard Thurneysen and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in (...) their respective works Die Bergpredigt (1936) and Nachfolge (1937). Both readings assert that the force and nature of the claims of the Sermon cannot be understood aright apart from constant attention to the difference made by the fact that Christ is the preacher. Out of this shared conviction, both theologians advance a reading of the Sermon as `the gospel itself' in the light of the eschatological identity of Jesus. Such readings of the Sermon, arising amidst the German Kirchenkampf of the 1930s, represent substantial contributions to the `responsible interpretation' of the Barmen Declaration (1934) whose second article states that, `As Jesus Christ is God's assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so in the same way and with the same seriousness is he also God's mighty claim upon our whole life.'. (shrink)

Christian ethicist Nancy Duff has suggested that an apocalyptic hearing of the gospel elicits a parabolic understanding of the Christian moral life. How might the theological basis and rationale of this claim be elaborated? What is it about human life funded by the gospel of God’s apocalypse in Jesus Christ that makes ‘parable’ an apt description of the quality of its action? And how might these notions be elaborated to enrich our understanding of responsible moral action more generally? This article (...) explores these questions by way of a running conversation with the work of J. Louis Martyn, Christopher Morse and Paul Ricoeur. It concludes by showing the salience of these themes in relation to Bonhoeffer’s later reflections upon the distinctive quality of Christian life in the wreckage of Christendom. Overall, the solid currency of a parabolic construal of the character of Christian moral action for the present pursuit of theological ethics is recommended. (shrink)

This paper argues that Calvin provides an account of the radical unmaking of the human moral subject at the hands of sin and its even more radical remaking at the hands of divine grace. The moral significance of human continuity during this soteriological transit, including such things as reason and will as such, is shown to be overreached by that of what becomes of the human creature in its history at the hands of both sin and God’s grace. Calvin’s treatment (...) of the first and third uses of the law confirms and illumines this claim decisively. Insight into this matter is aided by consideration of J. Louis Martyn’s discussion of the status of the moral subject in Pauline paraenesis A Reformed theological ethic that takes its cues from Calvin’s teaching in this regard will thus regard the adventitious realities of sin and grace, and their serial consequences for the constitution of the human moral agent, to represent the most important meta-ethical realities to be considered. (shrink)

In this work, the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking to offers major new accounts of the foundations of the state and the nature of justice. In doing so Pettit builds a new theory of what the state is and what it ought to be, addresses the normative question of how justice serves as a measure of the success of a state, and the way it should operate in relation to its citizens and other people.

A person sometimes forms moral beliefs by relying on another person''s moral testimony. In this paper I advance a cognitivist normative account of this phenomenon. I argue that for a person''s actions to be morally good, they must be based on a recognition of the moral reasons bearing on action. Morality requires people to act from an understanding of moral claims, and consequently to have an understanding of moral claims relevant to action. A person sometimes fails to meet this requirement (...) when she relies on another person''s moral testimony, and so there are moral limits on such reliance. (shrink)

Do studies of perception without awareness and studies of perception without attention address a similar underlying concept of awareness? To answer this question, we compared qualitative differences in performance across variations in stimulus quality with qualitative differences in performance across variations in the direction of attention . The qualitative differences were based on three different phenomena: Stroop priming, false recognition, and exclusion failure. In all cases, variations in stimulus quality and variations in the direction of attention led to parallel findings. (...) These results suggest that perception with and without awareness and perception with and without attention are equivalent ways of describing the same underlying process distinction. (shrink)

Cognitivists about intention hold that intending to do something entails believing you will do it. Non-cognitivists hold that intentions are conative states with no cognitive component. I argue that both of these claims are true. Intending entails the presence of a belief, even though the intention is not even partly the belief. The result is a form of what Sarah Paul calls Non-Inferential Weak Cognitivism, a view that, as she notes, has no prominent defenders.

Hilbert's program attempts to show that our mathematical knowledge can be certain because we are able to know for certain the truths of elementary arithmetic. I argue that, in the absence of a theory of mathematical truth, Hilbert does not have a complete theory of our arithmetical knowledge. Further, while his deployment of a Kantian notion of intuition seems to promise an answer to scepticism, there is no way to complete Hilbert's epistemology which would answer to his avowed aims.

We define a propositionally quantified intuitionistic logic Hπ + by a natural extension of Kripke's semantics for propositional intutionistic logic. We then show that Hπ+ is recursively isomorphic to full second order classical logic. Hπ+ is the intuitionistic analogue of the modal systems S5π +, S4π +, S4.2π +, K4π +, Tπ +, Kπ + and Bπ +, studied by Fine.

People sometimes think they have reasons for action. On a certain naive view, what makes them true is a connection between the action and the agent’s good life. In a recent article, David Velleman argues for replacing this view with a more Kantian line, on which reasons are reasons in virtue of their connection with autonomy. The aim in what follows is to defend the naive view. I shall first raise some problems for Velleman's proposal and then fend off the (...) objection that serves as his rationale for braving the depths of Kantianism. (shrink)

Avalanche studies have undergone a transition in recent years. Early research focused mainly on environmental factors. More recently, attention has turned to human factors in decision making, such as behavioural and cognitive biases. This article adds a social component to this human turn in avalanche studies. It identifies lessons for decision making by groups of skiers from the perspective of social choice theory, a sub-field of economics, decision theory, philosophy and political science that investigates voting methods and other forms of (...) collective decision making. In the first part, we outline the phenomenon of wisdom of crowds, where groups make better decisions than their individual members. Drawing on the conceptual apparatus of social choice theory and using idealised scenarios, we identify conditions under which wisdom of crowds arises and also explain how and when deciding together can instead result in worse decisions than may be expected from individual group members. In the second part, we use this theoretical understanding to offer practical suggestions for decision making in avalanche terrain. Finally, we make several suggestions for risk management in other outdoor and adventure sports and for outdoor sports education. (shrink)

We review some fundamental questions concerning the real line of mathematical analysis, which, like the Continuum Hypothesis, are also independent of the axioms of set theory, but are of a less ‘problematic’ nature, as they can be solved by adopting the right axiomatic framework. We contend that any foundations for mathematics should be able to simply formulate such questions as well as to raise at least the theoretical hope for their resolution.The usual procedure in set theory is to add so-called (...) strong axioms of infinity to the standard axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel, but then the question of their justification becomes to some people vexing. We show how the adoption of a view of the universe of sets with classes, together with certain kinds of Global Reflection Principles resolves some of these issues. (shrink)

The ArgumentWhile there has been muchattention given to experiment in modern science studies, there has been astoundingly little concern spared over the practice ofquanitataivemeasurment.Thus myths about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematice in science still abound. This paper presents: An explicit mathematical model of the stabilization of quantitative constants in a mathematical science to rival older Bayesian and classical accounts;a framework for writing a history of pracitces with regard to treatment of quantitative measurement erroe; resourece for the comparative sociology of differing (...) discipliness in this regard;and a prolegonmena to a critique of orthodox economics and accounting theories. The key to all these diverse themes is the realization that no one individual alone is capable of fixing the magnitude of a quantitative error estimate, and therefore the social construction of error must be given a more precise meaning, an therefore the social construction of error must be given a more precise menaing, and that this occurs through the istrumentality of meta-analysis. (shrink)

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

We develop a mathematical and interpretative foundation for the enterprise of decision-theoretic (DT) statistical causality, which is a straightforward way of representing and addressing causal questions. DT reframes causal inference as “assisted decision-making” and aims to understand when, and how, I can make use of external data, typically observational, to help me solve a decision problem by taking advantage of assumed relationships between the data and my problem. The relationships embodied in any representation of a causal problem require deeper justification, (...) which is necessarily context-dependent. Here we clarify the considerations needed to support applications of the DT methodology. Exchangeability considerations are used to structure the required relationships, and a distinction drawn between intention to treat and intervention to treat forms the basis for the enabling condition of “ignorability.” We also show how the DT perspective unifies and sheds light on other popular formalisations of statistical causality, including potential responses and directed acyclic graphs. (shrink)

This paper develops a 'conceptual map' by which to chart contemporary developments in policy on school diversity. In part this has been prompted by the prospect in England of (private) Steiner schools becoming more closely involved in mainstream state-funded education. Whilst generated principally by policy developments within the UK, the conceptual thinking may also have wider applicability. We conceptualise diversity in the context of a differentiating public domain and a concern with existential questions which, arguably, persists in educational policy even (...) where narrow 'performative' criteria are dominant. Four diversity models are outlined and a policy path over time suggested in relation to these. We suggest that this may be leading towards diversity policy which affords greater recognition to different conceptions of valued learning and encourages co-operative exploration of these, though it is acknowledged that there remain strong contrary pressures. (shrink)

This paper is underpinned by an epistemological question: What are the types and ways of knowing that can be entailed in reflective leadership in its fullest sense? The question is explored through a mapping exercise which outlines a geography of reflective leadership in terms of three variables: type of knowledge, problem focus, and mode of learning (incorporating the notion of embodied learning). Particular attention is given to recognising within the terrain of reflective leadership the epistemic credentials of spiritual learning and (...) experiential awareness of spirituality. This paper was given the award of best paper at the Philosophy of Management Conference, University of Oxford, 11th–14th July 2008. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with Immanuel Kant's mature philosophy as a whole. My aim is to show the systematic relationship among Kant's three Critiques, and the continuity of these with the Inaugral Dissertation. I use recent interpretations of Kant's projects in the Critique of Pure Reason and I offer my own interpretation of the Critique of Judgment, in which I highlight the importance of the final Appendix in that work, to argue that the goal of these three works taken together (...) is to replace traditional metaphysics with a new approach entirely. In place of the traditional approach in which the principles of metaphysics are supposed to be principles of the objective order of things quite apart from the way they appear to us, Kant argues in favour of a system of subjective principles that he believes will nevertheless allow us to achieve the goals of metaphysics. The new metaphysics will not be knowledge-based, as traditional metaphysics had been. Rather Kant's system is primarily ethics-based. That is, the primary principles of Kant's metaphysical system are those of his rational ethics, which have the function of regulating our activity in, and organization of, the world. Instead of knowledge, ethics, and theology being uneasily coordinated parts of philosophy, as they are in traditional metaphysical systems, all three become integrated within an ethical, and essentially teleological, framework in Kant's system. Showing the role of the Critique of Judgment in bringing about this change, as well as showing the importance of teleology for Kant's philosophy, are both important goals of the thesis. (shrink)

Western thought has for several hundred years been plagued by the reductionist malady, one form of which is that men and animals are nothing but complex machines. Having failed in this direction, some have invented machines and then promptly endowed them with human attributes. Plato would have been charmed by the ironic twist Other cases include electric current flow, which it appears we have to conceive as consisting of three dimensional objects in motion, the strange idea in biology that the (...) first living entity must be both simple and astonishingly complex, and the psychological notion that every notion is the consequent of antecedent causal chains. All four ideas involve basic contradictions which it would have delighted Socrates and his friends to discuss. (shrink)

Consider syllogisms in which fraction (percentage) quantifiers are permitted in addition to universal and particular quantificrs, and then include further quantifiers which are modifications of such fractions (such as "almost ½ the S are P" and "Much more than ½ the S are P"). Could a syllogistic system containing such additional categorical forms be coherent? Thompson's attempt (1986) to give rules for determining validity of such syllogisms has failed; cf. Carnes & Peterson (forthcoming) for proofs of the unsoundness and incompleteness (...) of Thompson's rules. Building on Peterson (1985), the coherence of such a syllogistic can, however, be demonstrated with an algebra which provides its semantics; e.g., "almost ¾ the S arc P'" is represented as " -(3(SP) » SP)". (shrink)

Does the ability to know one's own mind depend on the ability to know the minds of others? According to the 'theory theory' of first-person mentalizing, the answer is yes. Recent alternative accounts of this ability, such as the 'monitoring theory', suggest otherwise. Focusing on the issue of introspective access to propositional attitudes , I argue that a better account of first-person mentalizing can be devised by combining these two theories. After sketching a hybrid account, I show how it can (...) do justice to competing intuitions about the nature of introspective self-awareness. I close by drawing some methodological morals about the study of mentalizing and the role of introspective evidence in cognitive science. (shrink)

Teaching Ethics in Schools provides a fresh approach to moral education. Far from prescribing a rigid set of mandated values, codes of conduct, behaviour management plans, or religious instruction, Philip Cam skilfully presents ethical thinking and reasoning as a dynamic and essential aspect of school life. The first section of the book provides a clear introduction to the theoretical premise of reflection and collaborative enquiry. It draws on the history of philosophy in succinct terms, and relates this to contemporary (...) school contexts, to support teachers in their conceptual understanding. In Part Two, an array of activities, exercises and discussion points are provided as stimuli for teachers to adapt and apply across diverse subject areas, throughout all stages of school. The focus lies in preparing students to think reflectively, to question and probe, and ultimately develop their own enhanced capacity for ethical reasoning and considerate behaviour and conduct. Teaching Ethics in Schools shows how an ethical framework forms a natural fit with recent educational trends. It demonstrates how an ethics-based model can influence habits of mind and underpin teaching practices to stimulate ethical enquiry, to encourage students to think for themselves and develop good moral judgment, and to promote social values and beneficial outcomes both within the classroom and beyond. (shrink)