Enth.: Dugoald Stewart's account of Adam Smith / ed. by I.S. Ross.

Recently, there has been an increased interest in folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility from both philosophers and psychologists. We aim to extend our understanding of folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility using an individual differences approach. Building off previous research suggesting that there are systematic differences in folks’ philosophically relevant intuitions, we present new data indicating that the personality trait extraversion predicts, to a significant extent, those who have compatibilist versus incompatibilist intuitions. We argue that identifying groups (...) of people who have specific and diverse intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility offers the possibility for theoretical advancement in philosophy and psychology, and may in part explain why some perennial philosophical debates have proven intractable. (shrink)

In the past few years, the subject of AI rights—the thesis that AIs, robots, and other artefacts (hereafter, simply ‘AIs’) ought to be included in the sphere of moral concern—has started to receive serious attention from scholars. In this paper, I argue that the AI rights research program is beset by an epistemic problem that threatens to impede its progress—namely, a lack of a solution to the ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness: the problem of explaining why certain brain states give rise (...) to experience. To motivate this claim, I consider three ways in which to ground AI rights—namely: superintelligence, empathy, and a capacity for consciousness. I argue that appeals to superintelligence and empathy are problematic, and that consciousness should be our central focus, as in the case of animal rights. However, I also argue that AI rights is disanalogous from animal rights in an important respect: animal rights can proceed without a solution to the ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness. Not so with AI rights, I argue. There we cannot make the same kinds of assumptions that we do about animal consciousness, since we still do not understand why brain states give rise to conscious mental states in humans. (shrink)

Joshua Knobe (2003a) has discovered that the perceived goodness or badness of side effects of actions influences people's ascriptions of intentionality to those side effects. I present the paradigmatic cases that elicit what has been called the Knobe effect and offer some explanations of the Knobe effect. I put these explanations into two broad groups. One explains the Knobe effect by referring to our concept of intentional action. The other explains the Knobe effect without referring to our concept of intentional (...) action. I discuss some problems with these explanations and conclude with some possible avenues for future research. (shrink)

The importance of being ambiguous -- Interlude : ambiguity, order and the deity -- Notation and its limits -- Interlude : the Israelite red heifer and the edge of power in China -- Ritual and the rhythms of ambiguity -- Interlude : crossing the boundaries of empathy -- Shared experience -- Interlude : experience and multiplicity.

Transdisciplinarity includes the assumption that within new institutional settings, scientific research becomes more closely responsive to practical problems and user needs and is therefore often subject to considerable application pressure. This raises the question whether transdisciplinarity affects the epistemic standards and the fruitfulness of research. Case studies show how user-orientation and epistemic innovativeness can be combined. While the modeling involved in all cases under consideration was local and focused primarily on features of immediate practical relevance, it was informed by theoretical (...) insights from basic research. Conversely, industrial research turns out sometimes to produce theoretical understanding. These findings highlight an interactive relationship between science and technology (moderate emergentism), which is distinct from the traditional view of a one-sided dependence of technology on science (cascade model) and from the newly received independence account (emergentism). (shrink)

"[An] important essay by a philosopher who more convincingly than any other I can think of demonstrates the continuing significance of his vocation in the life of our culture."—Karsten Harries, _The New York Times Book Review_ With _The Presence of Myth_, Kolakowski demonstrates that no matter how hard man strives for purely rational thought, there has always been-and always will be-a reservoir of mythical images that lend "being" and "consciousness" a specifically human meaning. "Kolakowski undertakes a philosophy of culture which (...) extends to all realms of human intercourse—intellectual, artistic, scientific, and emotional.... [His] book has real significance for today, and may well become a classic in the philosophy of culture."—_Anglican Theological Review_. (shrink)

We study the lattice of extensions of four-valued Belnap–Dunn logic, called super-Belnap logics by analogy with superintuitionistic logics. We describe the global structure of this lattice by splitting it into several subintervals, and prove some new completeness theorems for super-Belnap logics. The crucial technical tool for this purpose will be the so-called antiaxiomatic (or explosive) part operator. The antiaxiomatic (or explosive) extensions of Belnap–Dunn logic turn out to be of particular interest owing to their connection to graph theory: the lattice (...) of finitary antiaxiomatic extensions of Belnap–Dunn logic is isomorphic to the lattice of upsets in the homomorphism order on finite graphs (with loops allowed). In particular, there is a continuum of finitary super-Belnap logics. Moreover, a non-finitary super-Belnap logic can be constructed with the help of this isomorphism. As algebraic corollaries we obtain the existence of a continuum of antivarieties of De Morgan algebras and the existence of a prevariety of De Morgan algebras which is not a quasivariety. (shrink)

The United Nations Since its foundation in international relations has become a core system. From the United Nations restrictions on the use of force, peacekeeping and monitoring operations of the rapid expansion of the controversy surrounding the reform of the Security Council and international standards and guidelines for the four in terms of advocacy, the United Nations has played an irreplaceable role, and will remain in the international transformation of society play an important role. The United Nations has become one (...) of the central institutions since its foundation. This study takes into account some important issues in appraising the role of the United Nations in international relations including: the UN's restriction on the use of force, the rapid expansion of UN peacekeeping and election-monitoring activities, the debates concerning the reform of the Security Council and the UN's promotion on international standards and norms. It reaches a conclusion that the United States has played an irreplaceable role and will still been so in the transformation of international society. (shrink)

Scheler’s main objection against Kant’s ethical system was that it was a formal system, not material. Ethics should deal with actual deeds, intentions, values, etc., not with a form, but with a content. Scheler separated values from goods and made them immutable and imperishable ideal objects that become real only when manifesting themselves ingoods. The world of values is hierarchical and is founded on the value of God. However, the principal moral values – good and evil – are not included (...) in this hierarchy; they come into play when actualizing other values. Values are accessible to humans through an emotive intuition and are inaccessible to reason, which is a fairly serious weakness of Scheler’s system. The person, defined as the unity of actions, is the original carrier of good and evil. Moral goodness of a person becomes a reality when nonmoral positive values are actualized. There is a measure of innateness in Scheler’s system. Not only the entire emotive apparatus is built into the human being – strivings, preference, will, and feelings with the dominating character of love and hate – but also general rules or hierarchy of values and the rules or axioms of application of values. The general aspect of such rules means that formal ethics is innate, and this formal aspect of ethics acquires material dimension in life according toa particular social milieu. In this way, Kant’s framework of formal ethics is moved to the inborn level of emotive machinery. (shrink)

The philosophical case for extended cognition is often made with reference to ‘extended-memory cases’ ; though, unfortunately, proponents of the hypothesis of extended cognition as well as their adversaries have failed to appreciate the kinds of epistemological problems extended-memory cases pose for mainstream thinking in the epistemology of memory. It is time to give these problems a closer look. Our plan is as follows: in §1, we argue that an epistemological theory remains compatible with HEC only if its epistemic assessments (...) do not violate what we call ‘the epistemic parity principle’. In §2, we show how the constraint of respecting the epistemic parity principle stands in what appears to be a prima facie intractable tension with mainstream thinking about cases of propositional memory. We then outline and evaluate in §3 several lines of response. (shrink)

In the process of implementing an ethical code of conduct, a business organization uses formal methods. Of these, training, courses and means of enforcement are common and are also suitable for self-regulation. The USA is encouraging business corporations to self regulate with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (FSG). The Guidelines prescribe similar formal methods and specify that, unless such methods are used, the process of implementation will be considered ineffective, and the business will therefore not be considered to have complied with (...) the guidelines. Business organizations invest enormous funds on formal methods. However, recent events indicate that these are not, by themselves, yielding the desired results. Our study, based on a sample of 812 employees and conducted in an Israeli subsidiary of a leading multinational High-Tech corporation headquartered in the US, indicates that, of the methods used in the process of implementation, one of the informal methods (namely, the social norms of the organization) is perceived by employees to have the most influence on their conduct. This result, when examined against employee tenure, remains relatively stable over the years, and stands in contradistinction to the formalistic approach embedded in the FSG. We indirectly measure the effectiveness of the percieved most influential implementation process methods by analyzing their impact on employee attitudes (namely, personal ethical commitment and employees'' commitment to organizational values). Our results indicate that the informal methods (manager sets an example or social norms of the organization) are likely to yield greater commitment with respect to both employee attitudes than the formal method (training and courses on the subject of ethics). The personal control method (my own personal values) differs significantly from all the other methods in that it yields the highest degree of personal ethical commitment and the lowest degree of employees'' commitment to organizational values. (shrink)

If p is false, it isn't evidence for anything. This view is central in one important response to a familiar sceptical argument. I consider and reject various motivations for refusing to accept this view – proposals arising from, e.g., our practice of providing rationalising explanations of people's beliefs, various locutions appearing to relativise evidence to persons, the significance of people's mental states for attributions of reasons to them, and the role of evidence in epistemic principles and requirements. I close by (...) considering responses to the ‘New Evil Demon Argument’. What emerges is an affirmation of the principle that p doesn't provide evidence unless it is true, a response to an important version of the Evil Demon argument for scepticism, and also a deeper interpretation of our epistemic practice. (shrink)

Most accounts of “logical empiricism in America” take logical empiricism to be a monolithic, or at least a one-dimensional, philosophical group. This picture of logical empiricism has come under well-reasoned attack during the past two decades, but some of the relevant conclusions for the reception-history of the movement were not drawn, or were not drawn as thoroughly as they could have been. Thus, if we want to understand the reception of logical empiricism, we should not talk about the reception of (...) logical empiricism as such; rather, we should provide a more stratified and differently balanced account. This article aims to draw the contours of one more stratified account by pointing out differences in the reception-history of logical empiricism with respect to pragmatism in particular. Namely, I will examine and defend an account according to which the more pragmatist-naturalist wing of logical empiricism was welcomed by the majority of American pragmatists while the more technical wing came immediately under pragmatist attack from various sides. (shrink)

In these essays, we are concerned with virtue in journalism and the media but are mindful of the tension between the commercial foundations of publishing and broadcasting, on the one hand, and journalism's democratic obligations on the other. Adam outlines, first, a moral vision of journalism focusing on individualistic concepts of authorship and craft. Next, Craft attempts to bridge individual and organizational concerns by examining the obligations of organizations to the individuals working within them. Finally, Cohen discusses the importance (...) of resisting the powerful corporate logic that pervades the news media in the United States and calls on journalists to be courageous. (shrink)