The goal of this paper is to promote what I call ‘the embedded thesis’ as a general constraint on how moral reasons behave. Dancy’s reason holism will be used as a foil to illustrate the thesis. According to Dancy’s reason holism, moral reasons behave in a holistic way; that is, a feature that is a moral reason in one context might not be so in another or might even be an opposite reason. The way a feature manages to switch its (...) reason status is by the help of a so-called enabler/disabler. The enabler in itself is not part of the reason, according to Dancy’s reason holism, for it can be either present or absent while the reason feature is present. To put the idea somewhat differently, Dancy’s reason holism presupposes what I call ‘reason individuation’, the view that features that function as reasons can be individuated from those that function as enablers. Yet, reason individuation cannot hold, or so I will argue, due to what I call ‘the embedded thesis’. According to the embedded thesis, the feature that serves as a moral reason in a context cannot be individuated independently from its embedded context while still retaining its reason status. If I am right about the embedded thesis, this will take the wind out of the sails of Dancy’s reason holism. More importantly, it will constitute, I argue, a general constraint on how moral reasons behave. (shrink)

Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) maintain that “being conscious is a basic liberty,” and infer from this that without informed consent, deep sedation, by intruding upon one’s consciousness, is an in...

Moral perception, for the purposes of this article, is taken to be the perception of moral properties, unless contexts dictate otherwise. While both particularists and generalists agree that we can perceive the moral properties of an action or a feature, they disagree, however, over whether rules play any essential role in moral perception. The particularists argue for a ‘no’ answer, whereas the generalists say ‘yes’. In this paper, I provide a limited defense of particularism by rebutting several powerful generalist arguments. (...) It is hoped particularism can thus be made more attractive as a theory of moral perception. Positive arguments for particularism will also be provided along the way. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 61-62, July 2012.

Contemporary analytic aesthetics has seen a heated debate about whether there are general critical principles that determine the merits/demerits of an artwork. The so-called generalists say ‘yes’, whereas the so-called particularists say ‘no’. On the particularists’ view, a feature that is a merit in one artwork might well turn out to be a defect in another, so critical principles purporting to define merits and defects are pretty much in vain. Against this, the generalists argue that while some features change their (...) status in the way suggested by the particularists not all features do; there are still some features that remain merits or defects across different contexts; these are what the generalists call ‘primary features’. If so, the generalists maintain that there are still general critical principles generated by these primary features. In this article, I provide a limited defence of particularism by critically assessing three arguments for the existence of such primary features. I first argue that Beardsley’s invariable and explanatory conception of primary features is too strong, such that there is no compelling reason for us to believe in their existence. I then argue that Sibley’s prima facie conception and Dickie’s isolation conception of primary features are both too weak—in other words, even if primary features of these kinds exist, they do not generate the sort of critical principles that the particularists reject. Finally, I argue that Connolly and Haydar’s recent attempt to revive the Beardsleyan conception fails. As a result, I contend that there is reason to believe that particularism remains as a live option. (shrink)

Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, and Philip Pettit contend in their 2000 paper that an argument from supervenience deals a fatal blow to shapeless moral particularism, the view that the moral is shapeless with respect to the natural. A decade has passed since the Canberrans advanced their highly influential supervenience argument. Yet, there has not been any compelling counter-argument against it, as far as I can see. My aim in this paper is to fill in this void and defend SMP against (...) the Canberrans’ supervenience argument. Such being the case, I will firstly re-construct the Canberrans’ supervenience argument in detail and push it as far as it can go. In fact, I will defend it against a number of existing objections respectively from Garfield, Dancy, and McDowell. Next, I will argue, however, that the supervenience argument, despite its initial plausibility, has one major pitfall: it hinges on an overly permissive conception of ‘shape’ such that it does not generate the right kind of moral principles the shapeless moral particularists are concerned to refute. I thus conclude that the seemingly scathing supervenience argument turns out to be toothless against SMP. Although this would not prove SMP to be right, for it might attract criticisms from other fronts, yet, until they come up, SMP, contrary to prevalent conceptions, remains alive and kicking. (shrink)

The original version of this article unfortunately contained an error. The acknowledgement of the funding sources was inadvertently omitted by the author. The funding statement is shown below.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 6, Page 45-46, June 2011.

Particularism is widely conceived to endorse the view that moral reason is context-dependent. This being so, it is often accused of flattening the moral landscape—treating the feature of promise-keeping as constituting no more of a (moral) reason for action than the feature of wearing a yellow shoelace in advance of the considerations of the contexts. In reply, Dancy maintains that his particularism allows some features such as promise-keeping to have a reason status by default, ontologically speaking; it is just that (...) their default reason status might get ‘switched off’ in some contexts. In this paper, I will argue that Dancy's ontological understanding of default reason wouldn't help the particularists address the flattening objection, due to a violation of what Tsu calls ‘the embedded thesis’, which is a general constraint on how moral reason behaves. However, once the nature of default reason is correctly understood as psychological, particularism will be enabled to deflate the flattening objection, or so I will argue. (shrink)

Against the reason holists (e.g. Dancy 2014), it has been contended by many reason atomists that while many features might well change their reason statuses or valences in different contexts in the way suggested by reason holists, they are merely secondary rather than primary reasons. In these atomists’ scheme of things, there are features that function as primary reasons whose reason statuses remain invariant across contexts. Moreover, these features provide the ultimate source of explanations for why some features, qua secondary (...) reasons, are variable in their reason statuses. Against the background of reason holism, this two-level picture of moral reason has been highly influential as an alternative theory of how moral reasons behave, and has been championed by several eminent philosophers such as Roger Crisp, Brad Hooker, David McNaughton and Piers Rawling. Call this theory ‘primary reason atomism’ (or PRA). Since its advancement, it has been met with lots of challenges, yet most, if not all, of these challenges remain unaddressed, insofar as I could see. This article will pick up the slack, and argues that none of its existing powerful criticisms works that can be derived from Swanton’s target-center view of the virtues, Stangl’s virtue variabilism, Dancy’s bottom-up holism, and coverage challenge, McKeever & Ridge, and Väyrynen’s double-counting objection, and Scanlon’s buck-passing account of values. This may not prove PRA to be right, but at least shows PRA to be a serious contender for the right theory of how moral reason behaves. (shrink)

Moral particularism, on some interpretations, is committed to a shapeless thesis: the moral is shapeless with respect to the natural. (Call this version of moral particularism ‘shapeless moral particularism’). In more detail, the shapeless thesis is that the actions a moral concept or predicate can be correctly applied to have no natural commonality (or shape) amongst them. Jackson et al. (Ethical particularism and patterns, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) argue, however, that the shapeless thesis violates the platitude ‘predication supervenes on (...) nature’—predicates or concepts apply because of how things are, and therefore ought to be rejected. I defend shapeless moral particularism by arguing that Jackson et al’s contention is less compelling than it firstly appears. My defense is limited in the sense that it does not prove shapeless moral particularism to be right and it leaves open the possibility that shapeless moral particularism might attract criticisms different from the ones advanced by Jackson et al. But at the very least, I hope to say enough to undermine Jackson et al’s powerful attack against it. The plan of this paper is as follows. Section 1 glosses the view of moral particularism and why it is taken to be essentially committed to the shapeless thesis. Section 2 examines a Wittgensteinian argument for the shapeless thesis. I shall argue that the Canberrans’ counter-arguments against it on grounds of disjunctive commonality and conceptual competence do not succeed. Section 3 explicates Canberrans’ predication supervenience argument against the shapeless thesis. Section 4 offers my criticisms of the Canberrans’ predication supervenience argument. In view of the above discussions, in Sect. 5, I conclude that there is no compelling argument (from the Canberrans) to believe that the shapeless thesis fails (as I have argued in Sect. 4). In fact, there is some good reason for us to believe it (as I have argued in Sect. 2). If so, I contend that moral particularism, when construed as essentially committed to the shapeless thesis, still remains as a live option. (shrink)

I take the debate between the particularists and the principlists to be centered on the issue of whether there are true moral principles. One argument the principlists often appeal to in support of their claim that there are true moral principles is the argument from supervenience. Roughly, the argument is made up of the following three statements: (P1) If the thesis of moral supervenience holds, then there are true moral principles. (P2) The thesis of moral supervenience holds. (C) There are (...) true moral principles, and hence particularism is false. In this paper, I argue that the above argument is not sound by attacking (P1). I hold that no general supervenient/resultance base has a robust enough configuration of contextual features as to ground the existence of true moral principles. If I am right about this, I think it would be indicative of a reason to be less confident about the truth of principlism and more confident about the truth of particularism. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 57-59.

Biomedical moral enhancement, or BME for short, aims to improve people’s moral behaviors through augmenting, via biomedical means, their virtuous dispositions such as sympathy, honesty, courage, or generosity. Recently, it has been challenged, on particularist grounds, however, that the manifestations of the virtuous dispositions can be morally wrong. For instance, being generous in terrorist financing is one such case. If so, biomedical moral enhancement, by enhancing people’s virtues, might turn out to be counterproductive in terms of people’s moral behaviors. In (...) this paper, we argue, via a comparison with moral education, that the case for the practice of biomedical moral enhancement is not weakened by the particularists’ stress on the variable moral statuses of the manifestations of our virtues. The real challenge from the particularists, we argue, lies elsewhere. It is that practical wisdom, being essentially context-sensitive, cannot be enhanced via biomedical means. On the basis of this, we further argue that BME ought to be used with great caution, for it may wrongly enhance, for instance, a terrorist financier’s generosity, a robber’s courage, or an undercover detective’s honesty. Finally, we sketch how boundaries can be set on the use of BME, and address some potential objections to our position. (shrink)

In this paper, I will examine the debate between the principlists and the particularists with special focus on the question of whether there is any true and coherent set of moral principles that codifies the moral landscape metaphysically speaking. My stance on this issue is an extreme sort of particularism which gives a ‘no’ answer to the above question. Yet it is significantly different from the positions of other extremists like John McDowell, Jonathan Dancy and Margaret Little. In section 2, (...) I will explain how my position is distinguished from theirs and why it is worth exploring. In section 3, I elucidate the meaning of ‘codify’. In section 4, I examine four types of principlism that claim to codify morality and argue that none of them succeeds. In section 5, I distinguish between four models of virtue and explore what implications the failure of principlism has for normative ethics and applied ethics. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 41-42, December 2011.

Through a wide-ranging international collection of papers, this volume provides theoretical and historical insights into the development and application of phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology and offers detailed examples of research into social phenomena from these standpoints. All the articles in this volume join together to testify to the enormous efficacy and potential of both phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology.

The difficulties of philosophy reflects the nature of reality. Here it is proposed that the inability of scholastic philosophers to solve philosophical problems is a clear indication that neither philosophy nor reality is as complicated as they believe, but that its conceptual simplification cannot be achieved when we reject nondualism and endorse extreme and partial world-theories.

This paper is a review of work on Newman's objection to epistemic structural realism (ESR). In Section 2, a brief statement of ESR is provided. In Section 3, Newman's objection and its recent variants are outlined. In Section 4, two responses that argue that the objection can be evaded by abandoning the Ramsey-sentence approach to ESR are considered. In Section 5, three responses that have been put forward specifically to rescue the Ramsey-sentence approach to ESR from the modern versions of (...) the objection are discussed. Finally, in Section 6, three responses are considered that are neutral with respect to one's approach to ESR and all argue (in different ways) that the objection can be evaded by introducing the notion that some relations/structures are privileged over others. It is concluded that none of these suggestions is an adequate response to Newman's objection, which therefore remains a serious problem for ESRists. Introduction Epistemic Structural Realism 2.1 Ramsey-sentences and ESR 2.2 WESR and SESR The Objection 3.1 Newman's version 3.2 Demopoulos and Friedman's and Ketland's versions Replies that Abandon the Ramsey-Sentence Approach to ESR 4.1 Redhead's reply 4.2 French and Ladyman's reply Replies Designed to Rescue the Ramsey-Sentence Approach 5.1 Zahar's reply 5.2 Cruse's reply 5.3 Melia and Saatsi's reply Replies that Argue that Some Structures/Relations are Privileged 6.1 A Carnapian reply 6.2 Votsis' reply 6.3 The Merrill/Lewis/Psillos reply Summary CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This paper applies Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy to the management practice of leadership. Specifically, it focuses on servant leadership, which is considered the most dyadic other-oriented style. While often viewed altruistically, servant leadership can still be egological if it totalizes followers to a leader’s interests and to organizational ends. This paper conceptualises an enriched version of servant leadership using key ideas taken from Levinas’ understanding of the infinite Other and then describes this style using relevant examples. This novel approach, Servant-Leadership-for-the-Other, offers (...) a theoretical lens by which to enrich existing leadership practices as well as providing a style of leadership better suited for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The so-called "Theology of Aristotle" is a translation of the Enneads of Plotinus, the most important representative of late ancient Platonism. It was produced in the 9th century CE within the circle of al-Kindī, one of the most important groups for the early reception of Greek thought in Arabic. In part because the "Theology" was erroneously transmitted under Aristotle's authorship, it became the single most important conduit by which Neoplatonism reached the Islamic world. It is referred to by such thinkers (...) as al-Fārābī, in an attempt to demonstrate the agreement between Platonism and Aristotelianism, Avicenna, who wrote a set of comments on the text, and later on thinkers of Safavid Persia including Mullā Ṣadrā. Yet the "Theology" is not just a translation. It may in fact more accurately be described as a creative paraphrase, which takes frequent liberties with the source text and even includes whole paragraphs' worth of new material. Adamson's book offers a philosophical interpretation of the changes introduced in the Arabic version. It is argued that these changes were in part intended to show the relevance of Plotinus' thought for contemporary Islamic culture, for instance by connecting the Neoplatonist theory of the First Principle to theological disputes within Islam over the status of God's attributes. At the same time the paraphrase reflects a tendency to harmonize the various strands of Greek thought, so that a critique by Plotinus of Aristotle's theory of the soul is subtly changed into a defense of Aristotle's theory against a possible misinterpretation. The upshot, or so Adamson argues, is that the "Theology" needs to be read as an original philosophical work in its own right, and understood within the context of the ʿAbbāsid era. (shrink)

Introduction Max Horkheimer was born on February in Stuttgart. By the time he died, on 7 July in Nuremberg, he had played a decisive role in launching and ...

No argument from the Arabic philosophical tradition has received more scholarly attention than Avicenna's ‘flying man’ thought experiment, in which a human is created out of thin air and is able to grasp his existence without grasping that he has a body. This paper offers a new interpretation of the version of this thought experiment found at the end of the first chapter of Avicenna's treatment of soul in theHealing. We argue that it needs to be understood in light of (...) an epistemological theory set out elsewhere by Avicenna, which allows that all the constitutive properties of an essence will be clear to someone who understands and considers that essence. On our reading, this theory is put to work in the ‘flying man’: because the flying man would grasp that his own essence has existence without grasping that he has a body, connection to body cannot be constitutive of the essence. (shrink)

The Collective Imagination explores the social foundations of the human imagination. A comprehensive audit of the creativity claims of the post-modern age - that finds them badly wanting and looks to the future - this book will appeal to sociologists and philosophers concerned with cultural theory, cultural and media studies and aesthetics.

There are two reasons, I claim, scientists do and should ignore standard philosophical theories of objective evidence: (1) Such theories propose concepts that are far too weak to give scientists what they want from evidence, viz., a good reason to believe a hypothesis; and (2) They provide concepts that make the evidential relationship a priori, whereas typically establishing an evidential claim requires empirical investigation.

Progress Unchained reinterprets the history of the idea of progress using parallels between evolutionary biology and changing views of human history. Early concepts of progress in both areas saw it as the ascent of a linear scale of development toward a final goal. The 'chain of being' defined a hierarchy of living things with humans at the head, while social thinkers interpreted history as a development toward a final paradise or utopia. Darwinism reconfigured biological progress as a 'tree of life' (...) with multiple lines of advance not necessarily leading to humans, each driven by the rare innovations that generate entirely new functions. Popular writers such as H. G. Wells used a similar model to depict human progress, with competing technological innovations producing ever-more rapid changes in society. Bowler shows that as the idea of progress has become open-ended and unpredictable, a variety of alternative futures have been imagined. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and his seminal text Being and Time is considered one of the most significant texts in contemporary philosophy. Yet his name has also been mired in controversy because of his affiliations with the Nazi regime, his failure to criticize its genocidal politics and his subsequent silence about the holocaust. Now, according to Heidegger's wishes, and to complete the publication of his multi-volume Complete Works, his highly (...) controversial and secret 'Black Notebooks' have been released to the public. These notebooks reveal the extent to which Heidegger's 'personal Nazism' was neither incidental nor opportunistic, but part of his philosophical ethos. So, why would Heidegger, far from destroying them, allow these notebooks, which contain examples of this extreme thinking, to be published? In this revealing new book, Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's complete works in German, confronts these questions and, by way of a compelling study of his theoretical work, shows that Heidegger was committed to a conception of freedom that is only beholden to the judgement of the history of being; that is, that to be free means to be free from the prejudices, norms, or mores of one's time. Whoever thinks the truth of being freely exposes themselves to the danger of epochal errancy. For this reason, Heidegger's decision to publish his notebooks, including their anti-Jewish passages, was an exercise of this anarchical freedom. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion of Heidegger's views on truth, ethics, the truth of being, tragedy and his relationship to other figures such as Nietzsche and Schmitt, Trawny provides a compelling argument for why Heidegger wanted the explosive material in his Black Notebooks to be published, whilst also offering an original and provocative interpretation of Heidegger's work. (shrink)