ABSTRACTIn this article, I examine the extent to which military officers are morally responsible for the actions of others by virtue of shared membership in various groups. I argue that career military officers share membership in morally relevant groups that include their branch of service, Department of Defense and the entire Executive Branch of Government, and I outline the circumstances under which career officers bear moral culpability for the actions of members of this group. A number of implications arise from (...) these findings. The first and most important is that military officers have an interest in ensuring the moral rectitude of government agents specifically as it pertains to their official capacities. Additionally, military officers have a duty not only to be informed about problematic government policies but also to educate themselves on the pertinent legal jurisprudence or ethical considerations. Finally, the Constitutional Paradigm of Military Ethics may be an insufficient guide for the part.. (shrink)

Current norms among professional military officers that govern obedience and dissent strongly discourage officers from offering public criticism of policy enacted by civilian authorities, even if that policy is immoral, illegal, or unconstitutional. We identify a set of circumstances that create a moral imperative for an officer to take action and we leverage prevailing ethical guidelines to argue that in certain cases, even individual officers not directly involved in the execution of the policy have moral standing to offer public criticism (...) of it. We consider the consequences of relaxing norms prohibiting public dissent and explore the trade-off between tolerating immoral policy and the likelihood of mistakenly criticizing appropriate policy. Finally, we offer evidence that current military-civilian relations in the United States are such that placing higher value on dissent would benefit professional military officers and may improve policy. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of twelve new essays, authored by leading philosophers and legal theorists, examining the central conceptual and normative questions underlying our institutions of criminal law.

Rawls's “public reason” has not been without its critics. One criticism is that public reason is “conservative.” Public reason must rely on those beliefs that are “widely shared” among citizens. But if public reason relies on widely shared beliefs, how can it change without departing from those beliefs, thus violating public reason? In part one of my essay, I introduce the conservatism objection and describe two unsatisfactory responses to it. Part two argues that there are aspects of public reason which (...) diminish the force of the conservatism objection: first, that public reason is historical, and second, that it is mutable. (shrink)

Modern analytical political philosophy—characterized most notably by the work of John Rawls—has had very little to say about how punishment in particular and criminal law more generally might be justified. This is a puzzling omission, as punishment can be seen as the most serious use of coercive state power and therefore the one in greatest need of philosophical justification. With the idea of filling this gap, this chapter analyzes several major political theories of recent decades and examines how criminal justice (...) might fit into their thought. After discussing the various political theories of libertarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, Marxism, and republicanism, I offer a limited defense of one such theory, Rawls’s “political liberalism,” as offering a suitable way to approach issues of criminal justice and punishment in modern society. More broadly, my chapter invites political philosophers to speak more often and more specifically about how criminal justice fits within their theories. (shrink)

The article argues for a conception of the justification of punishment that is compatible with a modern, politically liberal regime. Section I deals with what some have thought are the obvious soci...

La distinction entre les crimes qui impliquent un mal en soi et les crimes qui sont mauvais parce que la loi les désigne ainsi a longtemps intrigué les théoriciens. Le présent article soutient que cette distinction, bien qu’elle touche une différence réelle, est fondée sur une erreur. Cette erreur est commise tant par ceux qui considèrent le mal moral comme une condition nécessaire de la criminalité que par ceux qui croient que le simple fait de rendre une chose illégale suffit (...) à la rendre criminelle. Aucune de ces positions n’est correcte. Plutôt, ce qui rend un acte criminel, c’est le fait que cet acte implique la violation d’une loi qui a été justifiée en termes de «raison publique». (shrink)

The prohibition on “cruel and unusual” punishments, found in the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, has long puzzled scholars. If punishments are cruel, why is that not sufficient to prohibit them? What does “unusual” add? Scholars have also disagreed on how to understand “cruel.” Should “cruel” refer only to those things that the authors of the Constitution believed were cruel, or does it extend to those things that are actually cruel? This chapter gives an overview of these debates and (...) describes the United States Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in the area. A concluding part takes a look at the possibility that some contemporary forms of punishment (e.g., imprisonment) are cruel and unusual, and even that punishment itself might be cruel and unusual. (shrink)

In his paper “Public Reason and the Justification of Punishment,” Zachary Hoskins develops and defends an idea of “public reason” that might be applicable to debates over punishment in the Western world. This short reply takes issue with some of Hoskins’ conclusions (while agreeing with many of his premises), and suggests that contra Hoskins, many versions of retribution are not compatible with the ideal of public reason as Rawls articulated it. Instead, debates over criminal justice and punishment should properly revolve (...) around the goods of public safety and harm reduction—rather than around any of the supposed metaphysical goods achieved by retributive punishment. (shrink)

Death penalty debates appear to be intractable because what is obvious to one side is just as obviously not the case to the other. One side finds it unconscionable that a murderer can still be walk...

This ambitious book presents a new interpretation of Chinese thought guided both by a philosopher's sense of mystery and by a sound philosophical theory of meaning. That dual goal, Hansen argues, requires a unified translation theory. It must provide a single coherent account of the issues that motivated both the recently untangled Chinese linguistic analysis and the familiar moral-political disputes. Hansen's unified approach uncovers a philosophical sophistication in Daoism that traditional accounts have overlooked. The Daoist theory treats the imperious intuitionism (...) that alienates critical thinkers as a feature of Confucianism alone. Freed from the view that Confucianism is the core of Chinese thought and from myopic Confucian interpretations, Chinese thinkers emerge as unmistakably philosophical. (shrink)

In this chapter, I make the case for platonic realism, the thesis that there are properties that lack spatial locations. After criticizing the one-over-many argument for realism and Lewis's argument for realism, I endorse a modal argument that derives the existence of platonic properties from considerations involving necessary truth. I then defend this argument from various objections. Finally, I argue that epistemic considerations and considerations of parsimony favor a weak form of platonic realism on which there are platonic properties, but (...) each property could have had an instance, and would have been located in its instances if it had any. (shrink)

Pinillos’ Why We Doubt presents a powerful critique of such global skeptical assertions as “I don’t know I am not a brain-in-a-vat (BIV)” by introducing a cognitive mechanism that is sensitive to error possibilities and a Bayesian rule of rationality that this mechanism is designed to approximate. This multifaceted argument offers a novel counter to global skepticism, contending that our basis for believing such premises is underminable. In this work, we engage with Pinillos’ adoption of Bayesianism, questioning whether the Bayesian (...) principle that he invokes truly does fail to generate the verdict that we don’t we aren’t BIVs, contrary to what Pinillos asserts. Furthermore, we argue that Pinillos’ empirical argument is not empirical enough; we need a lot more empirical work if we are going to counter global skepticism and win over neutral bystanders. (shrink)

We present three experiments that explore the robustness of the _authentic-apparent effect_—the finding that participants are less likely to attribute knowledge to the protagonist in apparent- than in authentic-evidence Gettier cases. The results go some way towards suggesting that the effect is robust to assessments of the justificatory status of the protagonist’s belief. However, not all of the results are consistent with an effect invariant across two demographic contexts: American and Indian nationalities.

In this book, Chad Jorgenson challenges the view that for Plato the good life is one of pure intellection, arguing that his last writings increasingly insist on the capacity of reason to impose measure on our emotions and pleasures. Starting from an account of the ontological, epistemological, and physiological foundations of the tripartition of the soul, he traces the increasing sophistication of Plato's thinking about the nature of pleasure and pain and his developing interest in sciences bearing on physical (...) reality. These theoretical shifts represent a movement away from a conception of human happiness as a purification or flight of the soul from the sensible to the intelligible, as in the Phaedo, towards a focus on the harmony of the individual as a psychosomatic whole under the hegemonic power of reason. (shrink)

Sackris and Beebe (2014) report the results of a series of studies that seem to show that there are cases in which many people are willing to attribute knowledge to a protagonist even when her belief is unjustified. These results provide some reason to conclude that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. In this paper, we report a series of results that can be seen as supporting this conclusion by going some way (...) towards ruling out an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the knowledge attributions that they witnessed largely stem from protagonist projection, a phenomenon in language use and interpretation in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. With that said, we do caution the reader against drawing the conclusion too strongly, on the basis of results like those reported here and by Sackris and Beebe. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives the observed knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before, on the basis of such results, we can conclude with much confidence that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

Pinillos’ Why We Doubt presents a powerful critique of such global skeptical assertions as “I don’t know I am not a brain-in-a-vat (BIV)” by introducing a cognitive mechanism that is sensitive to error possibilities and a Bayesian rule of rationality that this mechanism is designed to approximate. This multifaceted argument offers a novel counter to global skepticism, contending that our basis for believing such premises is underminable. In this work, we engage with Pinillos’ adoption of Bayesianism, questioning whether the Bayesian (...) principle that he invokes truly does fail to generate the verdict that we don’t we aren’t BIVs, contrary to what Pinillos asserts. Furthermore, we argue that Pinillos’ empirical argument is not empirical enough; we need a lot more empirical work if we are going to counter global skepticism and win over neutral bystanders. (shrink)

Explores the embodied aspects of ownership and private property as these emerge in a range of American literary texts across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Explores the embodied aspects of ownership and private property as these emerge in a range of American literary texts across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

It is widely held that for a life to be conferred meaning it requires the appropriate type of agency. Call this the agency requirement. The agency requirement is primarily motivated in the philosophical literature by the assumption that there is a widespread pre-theoretical intuition that humans have the capacity for meaning whereas animals do not; and that difference must come down to their agency or lack thereof. This paper aims to undercut the motivation for the agency requirement by arguing our (...) pre-theoretical intuitions actually run opposite; that animals, and even objects, can have meaningful lives/existences. The argument is twofold. First, I extend an existing argument for animals as having a capacity for meaning to objects. Second, I argue maintaining that only humans have the capacity for meaning results in the more counterintuitive upshot that all animals and objects have, by definition, meaningless existences. Since we pre-theoretically believe that anything can be meaningful—even things which by definition lack agency—then we have strong reason for being sceptical about an agency requirement for meaning in life. (shrink)

Positively re-assesses the relationship between body and soul in Plato's later dialogues, focusing on the harmony between them.

We present experimental results that support the claim that the folk concept of knowledge how is an epistemological hybrid, encompassing both intellectualist and praxist elements.