What effect does creativity have on individuals, groups and societies, and on the fundamental values on which they base their actions and institutions? What constitutes good and evil, right and wrong, and how does creativity disrupt these beliefs? The Ethics of Creativity brings together an impressive collaboration of thinkers from several countries and disciplines to illuminate the thorny issues that arise when novel ideas and products brought forth by creativity collide with the rules and norms of what we believe to (...) be 'right' or 'good'. This book tackles questions of why most people claim to love creativity yet, in practice, may quash creative intentions, how creative innovations can create new ethical problems, when creativity and ethics tend to coincide and when they tend to conflict, and how both creativity and ethics might be harnessed to support a brighter future for all. (shrink)

Creativity plus ethics anticipated a greater common good -- Gadget controllers -- Body shapers -- Emotion tuners -- Self definers -- Social connectors.

The notion of ‘bipolar’ or ‘second‐personal’ normativity is often illustrated by such situations as that of one person addressing a complaint to another, or asserting some right, or claiming some authority. This paper argues that the presence of speech acts of various kinds in the development of the idea of the ‘second‐personal’ is not accidental. Through development of a notion of ‘illocutionary authority’ I seek to show a role for the ‘second‐personal’ in ordinary testimony, despite Darwall's argument that the notion (...) of the ‘second‐personal’ marks a divide between practical and theoretical reason. (shrink)

The unconscionability doctrine in contract law enables a court to decline to enforce a contract whose terms are seriously one-sided, exploitative, or otherwise manifestly unfair. It is often criticized for being paternalist. The essay argues that the characterization of unconscionability doctrine as paternalist reflects common but misleading thought about paternalism and obscures more important issues about autonomy and social connection. The defense responds to another criticism: that unconscionability doctrine is an inappropriate, because economically inefficient, egalitarian tool. The final part discusses (...) more interesting but neglected questions about the scope of accommodation necessary to support fully meaningful autonomous activity. (shrink)

Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran argues (...) for a reconception of the first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and constitutive of the very concept and life of the person.Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, the book explores the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being ''objective'' toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of relations to oneself and relations to others. (shrink)

Japa Pallikkathayil persuasively argues that abortion prohibitions treat impregnable people as less than equal citizens, subject to different treatment than other citizens whose bodies are protected from compulsory service for the benefit of others. Pallikkathayil's argument could be modified to avoid a tension with arguments for conscription, to stress that democratic equality is inconsistent with requisitioning a citizen's body to serve the needs of another specific citizen. Pallikkathayil also contends that ‘[t]he changes we would need to make to our other (...) laws and practices to bring them into line with restrictive abortion laws are intuitively unattractive’. To complement her approach, I contend that consistency would require that if we subject minors to involuntary pregnancy and labor, then we should enfranchise minors. We lowered the voting age to 18 on the grounds that if military conscripts were ‘old enough to fight’, they were ‘old enough to vote’. Abortion restrictions conscript impregnable minors and subject them to involuntary bodily intrusions, major life disruptions, and responsibility over life and death decisions. Old enough to carry; old enough to vote. If that conclusion is unpalatable because minors seem too immature to vote, then perhaps they are too immature to be forced to carry a pregnancy and to give birth. (shrink)

I’m grateful to Professors Langton and Owens for their probing comments and to Mind for providing the occasion for this exchange. Both Langton and Owens helpfully push me to tackle interesting problems that I did not wrestle with in the book. I am game to try to answer them, but some of my responses are tentative and roughly hewn, offered more in the spirit of exploratory conversation than firm conviction.

Semantic Leaps explores how people combine knowledge from different domains in order to understand and express new ideas. Concentrating on dynamic aspects of on-line meaning construction, Coulson identifies two related sets of processes: frame-shifting and conceptual blending. Frame-shifting is semantic reanalysis in which existing elements in the contextual representation are reorganized into a new frame. Conceptual blending is a set of cognitive operations for combining partial cognitive models. By addressing linguistic phenomena often ignored in traditional meaning research, Coulson explains how (...) processes of cross-domain mapping, frame-shifting, and conceptual blending enhance the explanatory adequacy of traditional frame-based systems for natural language processing. The focus is on how the constructive processes speakers use to assemble, link, and adapt simple cognitive models underlie a broad range of productive language behavior. (shrink)

To understand one another as individuals and to fulfill the moral duties that require such understanding, we must communicate with each other. We must also maintain protected channels that render reliable communication possible, a demand that, Seana Shiffrin argues, yields a prohibition against lying and requires protection for free speech. This book makes a distinctive philosophical argument for the wrong of the lie and provides an original account of its difference from the wrong of deception. Drawing on legal as (...) well as philosophical arguments, the book defends a series of notable claims—that you may not lie about everything to the "murderer at the door," that you have reasons to keep promises offered under duress, that lies are not protected by free speech, that police subvert their mission when they lie to suspects, and that scholars undermine their goals when they lie to research subjects. Many philosophers start to craft moral exceptions to demands for sincerity and fidelity when they confront wrongdoers, the pressures of non-ideal circumstances, or the achievement of morally substantial ends. But Shiffrin consistently resists this sort of exceptionalism, arguing that maintaining a strong basis for trust and reliable communication through practices of sincerity, fidelity, and respecting free speech is an essential aspect of ensuring the conditions for moral progress, including our rehabilitation of and moral reconciliation with wrongdoers. (shrink)

Authority and Estrangement addresses a set of questions about self-knowledge and seeks to answer them in the context of the broader differences between the first-person and third-person perspectives on oneself. Attention to these broader differences takes the discussion from epistemology to moral psychology, and seeks to relate some of the issues of contemporary philosophy of mind to the concerns with self-consciousness in post-Kantian thought.

This chapter contains section titled: I II III Acknowledgement.

Sophia Moreau contends that an important dimension of the wrong of discrimination lies in burdens on deliberative freedom.1 Discrimination may burden deliberative freedom by limiting or otherwise b...

This article offers an alternative reading of the Abbé Sieyès and the modern ‘nation-state’ problématique. I argue that the subject/object that is constituted in the early days of modernity is the incomplete society: an impossible-possibility ideal of congruency of population, authority and space. I suggest reading this ideal of congruency as a fantasy in that it offers a certain ‘fullness to come’, the promise of jouissance that can never be attained and is thus constantly re-envisioned and reinvoked. Drawing on discourse-analytical (...) and psychoanalytical tools I explain the logic of fantasy before analysing Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, as I show how he critiques and fragments the old model of the state and how his reading of the nation is fantasmatic, a continuous project towards impossible congruency. (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas commences his study distinguishing the types of order that exist and with these he determines that moral philosophy studies, on one hand, the order of voluntary acts and, on the other hand, the human acts as ordered together and as orderd towards an end. The social character of the human being and the type of help he gives and receives in the order of the whole and the part is attended, and this leads to Aquinas dividing moral (...) philosophy in three parts: the monastic, which orders the acts towards an end; the economic, which orders the acts of the domestic multitude; and the politic, which orders the acts of the civil multitude. (shrink)

El nacimiento del concepto de Seguridad y Defensa Común Europeo ha dado origen a la creación de numerosas organizaciones que contribuyen a potenciar la capacidad operativa conjunta de las Fuerzas Aliadas. La idea de este artículo es dar a conocer una de esas nuevas organizaciones, el Grupo Aéreo Europeo (EAG), que actualmente favorece la interoperabilidad y la capacidad de empleo conjunto de los efectivos aéreos de sus miembros. Entre dichos miembros, desde el año 1998, se encuentra España, actualmente en proceso (...) de adhesión, pendiente exclusivamente de que el Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores tramite y deposite el «Instrumento de Adhesión». También se definen los objetivos del EAG, su financiación y organización, su modo de funcionamiento, los programas y proyectos en los que ha participado y continúa haciéndolo, así como la normativa que le es de aplicación.El artículo narra el nacimiento del Grupo a través de acuerdos bilaterales que con su consolidación y ampliación le constituyen en el embrión de la futura Fuerza Aérea Europea. De su plan de trabajo citaremos, por su importancia, el proyecto ATARES (para intercambio de servicios de transporte aéreo y de reabastecimiento en vuelo) que es apoyado por el EACC (Célula de Coordinación del Transporte Aéreo Europeo). Es también digno de mención el hecho de que ya esté en funcionamiento el acuerdo EUROFIGHT para el desarrollo de maniobras combinadas, a fin de facilitar la preparación y entrenamiento en temas de Defensa y que cuenta con varios grupos de trabajo en diferentes áreas, algunos ya muy avanzados. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to epistemology by studying the psychoanalytic notion of transference. Contrary to previous philosophical research on Freud, I claim that traditional models of interpretation or translation are insufficient to explain psychoanalytic understanding. After exploring the conceptual roots of this mistake, which I define as generic, I focus on the notion of transference and claim that it should be viewed as a unique form of understanding that enables the emergence of unconscious meaning or truth. I elaborate this (...) claim with a detailed study of the development of this notion in Freud’s texts. Transference is thus delineated as a form of understanding which is closely related to the matrix of love and defined in relation to the following parameters: intersubjectivity; visuality; and performativity. (shrink)

The book defends the intimate connection between democracy and law by focusing on how democracy permits us to be co-authors of our common community through the use of law. It argues that democratically forged laws are articulate public commitments we make to one another and they are uniquely capable of conveying our mutual respect for one another. For this reason, democratic law is morally imperative and morally inspirational.

The reversal of Roe v. Wade raises the prospect that other due process guarantees upon which individuals have organised their lives, including the constitutional rights to same-sex intimacy and marriage, will be overturned. These potential upheavals in the hard-won legal infrastructure of basic social status call for a careful look at reliance arguments for sustaining constitutional precedent. When does reliance on a judicial decision provide reason for a court to sustain a precedent in the face of substantial doubts or convictions (...) that the original decision was importantly mistaken?Our commitments to democratic law pose distinctive challenges for reliance arguments in the public law domain that do not burden reliance arguments in the private law domain. A persuasive reliance argument in the public law context must offer a merits-independent rationale identifying limited circumstances in which reliance would justify honouring a prior (mistaken) decision and honouring it prospectively, into the future. I detail the challenges and offer a democratic account to identify when overturning a mistaken decision would impose an unfair and inequitable hardship. On this account, abortion, contraception, and same-sex intimacy rights warrant continued affirmation given reliance behaviours, but not other rights, including rights to gun ownership and freedom of contract. (shrink)

This fictional case study examines a person’s right to privacy, including the protection of their name, voice, and image, in the event that they decide to work at the same establishment where they and/or their relatives receive mental health-related therapeutic care.

The power to promise is morally fundamental and does not, at its foundation, derive from moral principles that govern our use of conventions. Of course, many features of promising have conventional components—including which words, gestures, or conditions of silence create commitments. What is really at issue between conventionalists and nonconventionalists is whether the basic moral relation of promissory commitment derives from the moral principles that govern our use of social conventions. Other nonconventionalist accounts make problematic concessions to the conventionalist's core (...) instincts, including embracing: the view that binding promises must involve the promisee's belief that performance will occur; the view that through the promise, the promisee and promisor create a shared end; and the tendency to take promises between strangers, rather than intimates, as the prototypes to which a satisfactory account must answer. I argue against these positions and then pursue an account that finds its motivation in their rejection. My main claim is: the power to make promises, and other related forms of commitment, is an integral part of the ability to engage in special relationships in a morally good way. The argument proceeds by examining what would be missing, morally, from intimate relationships if we lacked this power. (shrink)

Legal domains concerned with deception often recognize and regulate cases of negligent deception. The philosophical discussion of deception should follow suit, shifting from an exclusive focus on deception-as-wrongful-manipulation to a broader panorama that includes negligent deception and contemplates cases in which negligent deception may be wrong even when intentional deception about the same information may be permissible. Interesting philosophical questions then arise about what distinguishes negligent deception from mere misunderstandings and mistakes. Those questions require further thought about how relationships involve (...) epistemic cooperation and interdependence, and when such relationships generate responsibility for others’ mental contents. (shrink)

The paper argues for the centrality of believing the speaker (as distinct from believing the statement) in the epistemology of testimony, and develops a line of thought from Angus Ross which claims that in telling someone something, the kind of reason for belief that a speaker presents is of an essentially different kind from ordinary evidence. Investigating the nature of the audience's dependence on the speaker's free assurance leads to a discussion of Grice's formulation of non-natural meaning in an epistemological (...) light, concentrating on just how the recognition of the speaker's self-reflexive intention is supposed to count for his audience as a reason to believe P. This is understood as the speaker's explicitly assuming responsibility for the truth of his statement, and thereby constituting his utterance as a reason to believe. (shrink)

Standard responses to the knowledge argument grant that Mary could know all of the physical facts even while trapped inside her black‐and‐white room. What they deny is that upon leaving her black‐and‐white room and experiencing red for the first time, Mary learns a genuinely new fact. This paper develops an alternate response in a grounding physicalist framework, on which Mary does not know all of the physical facts while trapped inside the room. The main thesis is that Mary does not (...) know certain phenomenal facts while trapped inside the room, whereby these facts classify as physical due to being wholly and fully metaphysically grounded in the underlying fundamental facts which are themselves entirely physical. (shrink)

Dermot Moran provides a lucid, engaging, and critical introduction to Edmund Husserl's philosophy, with specific emphasis on his development of phenomenology. This book is a comprehensive guide to Husserl's thought from its origins in nineteenth-century concerns with the nature of scientific knowledge and with psychologism, through his breakthrough discovery of phenomenology and his elucidation of the phenomenological method, to the late analyses of culture and the life-world. Husserl's complex ideas are presented in a clear and expert manner. Individual chapters (...) explore Husserl's key texts including _Philosophy of Arithmetic_, _Logical Investigations_, _Ideas_ I, _Cartesian Meditations_ and _Crisis of the European Sciences_. In addition, Moran offers penetrating criticisms and evaluations of Husserl's achievement, including the contribution of his phenomenology to current philosophical debates concerning consciousness and the mind. _Edmund Husserl_ is an invaluable guide to understanding the thought of one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century. It will be helpful to students of contemporary philosophy, and to those interested in scientific, literary and cultural studies on the European continent. (shrink)

Standard, familiar models portray harms and benefits as symmetrical. Usually, harm is portrayed as involving a worsening of one's situation, and benefits as involving an improvement. Yet morally, the aversion, prevention, and relief of harms seem, at least presumptively, to matter more than the provision, protection, and maintenance of comparable and often greater benefits. Standard models of harms and benefits have difficulty acknowledging this priority, much less explaining it. They also fail to identify harm accurately and reliably. In this paper, (...) I develop these problems, argue that we should reconsider our commitment to the standard models, and then merely gesture at the direction in which we might locate a superior approach, one that better accounts for the moral significance of harm and its relation to autonomy rights. (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas explains that, according to the method followed by the Philosopher in metaphysics, it is convenient in science to treat first the determinations in the most common and general fashion in order to attend later to what is proper to each species. And it is in these sense that, according to Aquinas, the De Anima studies the most general and common affairs of the animated realities in order to treat later, in other books, about what is proper of (...) the animated in particular. (shrink)

One way in which the characteristic gestures of philosophy and criticism differ from each other lies in their involvements with disillusionment, with the undoing of our naivete, especially regarding what we take ourselves to know about the meaning of what we say. Philosophy will often find less than we thought was there, perhaps nothing at all, in what we say about the “external” world, or in our judgments of value, or in our ordinary psychological talk. The work of criticism, on (...) the other hand, frequently disillusions by finding disturbingly more in what is said than we precritically thought was there. In our relation to the meaningfulness of what we say, there is a disillusionment of plentitude as well as of emptiness. And no doubt what is “less” for one discipline may be “more” of what someone else is looking for.In recent years, metaphor has attracted more than its share of both philosophical and critical attention, including philosophical denials of the obvious, as well as critical challenges to the obviousness of the ways we talk about metaphor. In this paper I discuss a problem of each sort and suggest a complex of relations between them. The particular denial of the obvious that I’m interested in is the claim recently made by Donald Davidson that “a metaphor doesn’t say anything beyond its literal meaning ,” nor is it even correct to speak of metaphor as a form of communication.1 There’s disillusionment with a vengeance; and even if not strictly believable, it is still not without its therapeutic value, as we shall see. 1. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks , p. 30; hereafter abbreviated “WMM.” Davidson’s view has found supporters among both philosophers and literary theorists. It is, for example, important to the early argument of Richard Rorty’s recent book. See his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity , p. 18. Richard Moran is an assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He is currently working on a book on subjectivity and contemporary concepts of personhood. (shrink)