In this fine collection, Bob Dylan at 80, Gary Browning and Constantine Sandis have curated a book which is Janus-faced. It develops a simple premise, to reflect on the career of Dylan and the mult...

This essay brings Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico’s thought to bear on the issue of contemporary populism. Contemporary populism can be refected in Vico’s cyclical philosophy of the three ages of civilisation: the divine, heroic and human ages. Contemporary populism represents a return to the barbarism of the heroic age through the descent into individualism and private interest, the return of divinely ordained rulers and the recourse to myth, violence and morality. Humankind’s reason has become corrupted by the complexity of (...) highly developed society, releasing the destructive forces of contemporary populism and a descent into a ‘barbarism of refection’. Corsi e ricorsi illustrates how contemporary populism remains but a stage in the Vichian cycle, alluding to how it represents an essential form of political life throughout history. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Christ’s second love command implies not only that people’s volitions and actions be Christ-like, but also that their affective-motivational dispositions be Christ-like. More specifically, I argue that the command implies that people have aretaic obligations to strive to cultivate a merciful heart with the kind of affective depth described by St. Isaac of Syria in his 71st ascetical homily—i.e., one that is disposed to becoming inflamed, such that it is gripped by “strong and vehement (...) mercy.”. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In February 2016 a twelve-month-old asylum seeker, who came to be know as Baby Asha, was transferred from Nauru and hospitalized in Brisbane. This case came to public attention after Doctors refused to discharge Asha as she would have been returned to detention on Nauru. What in other circumstances would have been considered routine clinical care, quickly turned into an act of civil disobedience. This paper will discuss the ethical aspects of this case, along with its implications for clinicians and (...) the broader healthcare community. (shrink)

Philosophical Perspectives, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 206-228, December 2021.

People with the kind of preferences that give rise to the St. Petersburg paradox are problematic---but not because there is anything wrong with infinite utilities. Rather, such people cannot assign the St. Petersburg gamble any value that any kind of outcome could possibly have. Their preferences also violate an infinitary generalization of Savage's Sure Thing Principle, which we call the *Countable Sure Thing Principle*, as well as an infinitary generalization of von Neumann and Morgenstern's Independence axiom, which we call *Countable (...) Independence*. In violating these principles, they display foibles like those of people who deviate from standard expected utility theory in more mundane cases: they choose dominated strategies, pay to avoid information, and reject expert advice. We precisely characterize the preference relations that satisfy Countable Independence in several equivalent ways: a structural constraint on preferences, a representation theorem, and the principle we began with, that every prospect has a value that some outcome could have. (shrink)

This volume contains ten chapters, each of which takes up a different question in contemporary moral or political philosophy. The volume has three parts: meta-ethics, issues in freedom and autonomy, and contemporary political philosophy. In the meta-ethical section, the chapters address issues concerning acts and their value, the plausibility of aggregation and counting with respect to the value of human lives, and the role of moral character in causing and explaining moral behavior. In the second section, the chapters take up (...) questions about the connection between moral imagination and a plausible account of integrity, the connection between autonomy and rights to property, and the difficulties facing internalist accounts of autonomy. In the final section, the chapters address issues concerning feminist critiques of Rawlsian liberalism, the limits of liberalism and communitarianism, the importance of understanding Rawls's social contract as a contract for institutions, and the morality of nationalist movements. These chapters reflect a cross-section of the issues concerning value that are of contemporary scholarly interest in Canada and the United States. (shrink)

The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from both the phenomenal (...) conception of evidence and the knowledge-first view of evidence. (shrink)

How should the opinion of a group be related to the opinions of the group members? In this article, we will defend a package of four norms – coherence, locality, anonymity and unanimity. Existing results show that there is no tenable procedure for aggregating outright beliefs or for aggregating credences that meet these criteria. In response, we consider the prospects for aggregating credal pairs – pairs of prior probabilities and evidence. We show that there is a method of aggregating credal (...) pairs that possesses all four virtues. (shrink)

This paper examines the resilience of farmers markets in Michigan to the system shock of the global COVID-19 pandemic, questioning how the response fits into market goals of food sovereignty. Adapting to shifting public health recommendations and uncertainty, managers implemented new policies to create a safe shopping experience and expand food access. As consumers directed their shopping to farmers markets looking for safer outdoor shopping, local products, and foods in short supply at grocery stores, market sales skyrocketed with vendors reporting (...) selling more than ever before, but the longevity of this change remains unclear. Our data collected via semi-structured interviews with market managers and vendors, and survey data from customers from 2020 to 21, suggest that despite the widespread impact of COVID-19, there is not sufficient evidence consumers will continue to shop at farmers markets at the rates they did in 2020-21. Furthermore, reasons consumers flocked to farmers markets do not align with market priorities for increased food sovereignty, as increased sales alone are not a sufficient driver for this goal. We question how markets can contribute to broader sustainability goals or serve as alternatives to capitalist and industrial modes of agricultural production, problematizing the role of markets in the food sovereignty movement. (shrink)

The fine-tuning argument purports to show that particular aspects of fundamental physics provide evidence for the existence of God. This argument is legitimate, yet there are numerous doubts about its legitimacy. There are various misgivings about the fine-tuning argument which are based on misunderstandings. In this paper we will go over several major misapprehensions, and explain why they do not undermine the basic cogency of the fine-tuning argument.

Many philosophers think that given the choice between saving the life of an innocent person and averting any number of minor ailments or inconveniences, it would be better to save the life. How, then, should one compare the risk of an innocent person’s life to such minor ailments and inconveniences? If lives are infinitely more important than insignificant factors then any risk cannot be outweighed, and that is untenable. An alternative approach seems more promising: let the values of such insignificant (...) factors be bounded, as then there will be well-behaved tradeoffs between insignificant things and the risk to an innocent life. We argue, however, that bounding the values of insignificant factors poses myriad problems. (shrink)

David Builes presents a paradox concerning how confident you should be that any given member of an infinite collection of fair coins landed heads, conditional on the information that they were all flipped and only finitely many of them landed heads. We argue that if you should have any conditional credence at all, it should be 1/2.

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 128-145, October 2021.

Kevin Dorst (2019) uses the ‘manifest unassertability’ of conditionals of the form ‘If I don’t know p, then p’ as a new motivation for the KK thesis. In this paper we show that his argumentation is misguided. Plausible heuristics offer a compelling and nuanced explanation of the relevant infelicity data. Meanwhile, Dorst relies on tools that, quite independently of KK, turn out to be rather poor predictors of the infelicity of indicative conditionals.

Johnson and colleagues (2015) report a retrospective review of the experience of an ethics consultation service at a single, highly specialized children's hospital over an 11-year period. Despite i...

Ginger Schultheis offers a novel and interesting argument against epistemic permissivism. While we think that her argument is ultimately uncompelling, we think its faults are instructive. We explore the relationship between epistemic permissivism, Margin-for-Error principles, and an epistemological version of Dominance reasoning.

In this paper, we elucidate the moral psychology and what we might call the moral sociology of Mencius and of Hume, and we argue for three claims. First, we demonstrate that there are strong similarities between Mencius and Hume concerning some of the principal psychological sources of the virtue of humanity. Second, we show that there are strong similarities between the two concerning some of the principal social sources of the virtue of humanity. Third, we argue that there are related, (...) though weaker, similarities between Mencius and Hume concerning some of the principal cognitive sources of the virtue of humanity. We conclude by suggesting that the number and nature of these similarities demonstrate the need for future research on the conceptual connections between Confucian and Humean moral philosophy, especially on the psychological and social sources of benevolent moral development. (shrink)

Research on gender and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) beyond women’s biological susceptibility is limited. A gender and equity lens in AMR research is necessary to promote gender equality and support the effectiveness, uptake, and sustainability of real-world AMR solutions. We argue that it is an ethical and social justice imperative to include gender and related intersectional issues in AMR research and implementation. An intersectional exploration of the interplay between people’s diverse identities and experiences, including their gender, socio-economic status, race, disability, age, (...) and sexuality, may help us understand how these factors reinforce AMR risk and vulnerability and ensure that interventions to reduce the risk of AMR do not impact unevenly. This paper reports on the findings of a systematic scoping review on the interlinkages between AMR, gender and other socio-behavioural characteristics to identify priority knowledge gaps in human and animal health in LMICs. The review focused on peer-reviewed and grey literature published between 2017 and 2022. Three overarching themes were gendered division of caregiving roles and responsibilities, gender power relations in decision-making, and interactions between gender norms and health-seeking behaviours. Research that fails to account for gender and its intersections with other lines of disadvantage, such as race, class and ability, risks being irrelevant and will have little impact on the continued and dangerous spread of AMR. We provide recommendations for integrating an intersectional gender lens in AMR research, policy and practice. (shrink)

This volume explores new and urgent applications of collective action theory, such as global poverty, the race and class politics of urban geography, and culpable conduct in organizational criminal law. It draws attention to new questions about the status of corporate agents and new approaches to collective obligation and responsibility.

La multiplicidad de informaciones que reciben los seres humanos en la actualidad a través de las diversas fuentes existentes puede contribuir a crear incertidumbre a la hora de discernir dónde está la verdad. En los últimos años, la noción de posverdad, que se creó para definir esta situación, ha sufrido una perversión que está provocando el desgaste del término. Esta investigación pretende realizar un acercamiento crítico al concepto de posverdad, tal como se entiende habitualmente, para señalar los usos que pueden (...) resultar reaccionarios e inmovilizantes, en vez de fomentar nuestra capacidad examinadora a través de la idea de la condición narrativa del ser humano, que tiene la capacidad para devolver al concepto su potencialidad crítica. Nos proponemos despejar la confusión que se ha organizado en torno a la idea de posverdad para encaminarla hacia una vía mucho más próspera. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to revisit the proposal made by Dag Westerståhl a decade ago when he provided a modern reading of the traditional square of opposition and of related structures. We propose a formalization of this modern view and contrast it with the classical one. We discuss what may be a modern hexagon of opposition and a modern cube, and show their interest in particular for relating quantitative expressions.

This paper first investigates logical characterizations of different structures of opposition that extend the square of opposition in a way or in another. Blanché’s hexagon of opposition is based on three disjoint sets. There are at least two meaningful cubes of opposition, proposed respectively by two of the authors and by Moretti, and pioneered by philosophers such as J. N. Keynes, W. E. Johnson, for the former, and H. Reichenbach for the latter. These cubes exhibit four and six squares of (...) opposition respectively. We clarify the differences between these two cubes, and discuss their gradual extensions, as well as the one of the hexagon when vertices are no longer two-valued. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the use of these structures of opposition for discussing the comparison of two items. Comparing two items usually involves a set of relevant attributes whose values are compared, and may be expressed in terms of different modalities such as identity, similarity, difference, opposition, analogy. Recently, J.-Y. Béziau has proposed an “analogical hexagon” that organizes the relations linking these modalities. Elementary comparisons may be a matter of degree, attributes may not have the same importance. The paper studies in which ways the structure of the hexagon may be preserved in such gradual extensions. As another illustration of the graded hexagon, we start with the hexagon of equality and inequality due to R. Blanché and extend it with fuzzy equality and fuzzy inequality. Besides, the cube induced by a tetra-partition can account for the comparison of two items in terms of preference, reversed preference, indifference and non-comparability even if these notions are a matter of degree. The other cube, which organizes the relations between the different weighted qualitative aggregation modes, is more relevant for the attribute-based comparison of items in terms of similarity. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a neo-Humean response to the problem of moral inclusion by bringing Humean moral philosophy into deep and serious dialogue with Latin American philosophy. Our argument for achieving this two-fold aim unfolds as follows. In section one, we elucidate Mia Sosa-Provencio’s conception of a mestiza ethics of care. We begin by highlighting its fundamental elements, especially its concern with what we refer to as the cultural embeddedness both of moral agents and of moral patients. We then (...) explain how this aspect of the mestiza ethic poses a distinctive challenge for Humean moral philosophy. In section two, we develop a neo-Humean response to this challenge. We begin by highlighting the strengths and limits of trying to develop a response by appealing to Hume’s conceptions of sympathy and humanity. We then present what we take to be the most plausible way for a neo-Humean conception of moral philosophy to offer a satisfactory reply to the challenge posed by the mestiza ethics of care, by appealing to two key concepts from outside the system of Hume’s moral philosophy: namely, sympathetic understanding and relational humility. (shrink)

Out of 288 Hong Kong cancer patients, 92.3% include themselves in decision-making, 71% prefer joint decision-making: with family, with doctor, with doctor plus family, with family minus doctor, and with doctor minus family. <5% want decision-making by “doctor-alone” and <1% desire decision-making by “family-alone”. Harmony, communication and responsibility are reasons for family participation. Most patients prefer “specialist” for information, followed by “family”, “friends”, and “GP”. Trust in doctors and prospects for controlling/curing disease are important factors in decision-making. Patients want to (...) participate and be listened to rather than make decisions. Doctors should not disclose information to family without patients’ permission, nor withhold information from patient [End Page 109] on family’s request. Only 25% of patients have discussed post-competent treatment with others and 7% have heard of Advance Directive ; 24% refuse to discuss it. After AD has been explained to them, 66% remain reluctant to sign one, preferring to leave oral instructions or appoint family as proxy decision-makers. The family’s decision-making role increases when patients become incompetent. The top reason for signing AD is to receive preferred post-competent treatments, and for not signing it, difficulty with making a prospective decision. The implications of these findings will be discussed. (shrink)

In this essay, Heidegger's theses on art, as he develops them in the text "On the Origin of the Work of Art," are reconstructed, interpreted, and critically evalua- ted. In doing so, we pursue a threefold goal. First, his theses on art are put in relation to the main theme of his philosophy: the question of being. Second, the different ways in which Heidegger takes art to be epistemically valuable are dif- ferentiated and reconstructed in detail. Third, Heidegger's theses are (...) related to the contemporary debate on the epistemic value of art and critically discussed. (shrink)