Weinberg's 1972 work, in his description, had two purposes. The first was practical to bring together and assess the wealth of data provided over the previous decade while realizing that newer data would come in even as the book was being printed. He hoped the comprehensive picture would prepare the reader and himself to that new data as it emerged. The second was to produce a textbook about general relativity in which geometric ideas were not given a starring role for (...) (in his words) too great an emphasis on geometry can only obscure the deep connections between gravitation and the rest of physics. (shrink)

Is there one univocal or generic notion of ground? Monists answer yes, while pluralists answer no. Pluralists argue that monism cannot meet plausible constraints on an adequate theory of ground. My aim in this paper is to articulate a monist theory of ground that can satisfy the pluralist constraints in a way that leaves the pluralists with no reasons not to endorse the monist picture of ground. I do this by adopting a tripartite conception of ground and then showing that (...) it has the resources to vindicate monism while satisfying the pluralist constraints on a theory of ground. (shrink)

This paper presents a way of thinking about how to respond to the pluralism of modern societies that avoids any commitment to contractualist norms of political justification. The argument developed appeals to the notion of a constitutional settlement. Constitutional settlements are complex on-going social practices that both express certain values to which political societies are committed and establish procedures for resolving disputes among members of these societies. As such, they are a product of both moral commitment and the balance of (...) power. The paper shows how constitutional settlements relate to issues of stability and non-subjugation in politics, and explains how they can ground a distinction between justice and legitimacy. (shrink)

In the only two articles on the topic of which I am aware, Chad Carlson and Scott Aikin have leveled three objections against fantasy sports—namely, that participation in fantasy sports elicits...

In this paper, I build on Wittgenstein’s metaphor of a toolbox to introduce the metaphor of ‘tool confusion’ – how differing conceptual constructs may be applied, or misapplied, to one another and the effect that such applications have on the advancement of management theory. Moving beyond metaphor, I investigate a theory of management through two specific philosophical lenses (Popper and Lyotard). This analysis tests both the theory and the philosophies with regard to how each philosophy may be applied as a (...) tool to advance theory towards more effective application. Preliminary conclusions confirm that the application of partial philosophies is not as useful as the application of complete philosophies. Deeper contemplation, however, suggests that there is no upper limit to the completeness of philosophies. Thus, the problem of completeness is inescapable. In place of completeness, I explore the use of perceptual tools that are more specific, foundational and concise. Engaging in a second investigation, I use structures of logic (circular, linear, branching and co-causal) to investigate the subject theory. This investigation suggests at least two important insights relating to the structure of theory and the fuzziness of theory. Combined, these investigations and related conversations suggest rigorous methods for advancing theories and a more normative role for the philosophy of management that will support the accelerated advancement of management theory and practice. (shrink)

We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God’s soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day saint theology has the resources (...) to endorse a strong soul-making non-identity theodicy. We then introduce two complications for this account rooted in the problem of horrendous evils. First, horrendous evils threaten to undermine our confidence that God is good to each created person within the context of their life. And second, horrendous evils raise concerns about the value of persons whose existence depends on the occurrence of those evils. We may wonder whether those whose existence depends on the occurrence of horrendous evils are valuable enough to motivate God’s allowance of those evils. We show that by attending to important structural features of a post-mortem, pre-eschatological state called the spirit world, Latter-day Saints can ameliorate these concerns about horrendous evils . (shrink)

In her paper, “True Faith: Against Doxastic Partiality about Faith (in God and Religious Communities) and in Defense of Evidentialism,” Katherine Dormandy argues against the view that there is a partiality norm on faith. Dormandy establishes this by showing that partiality views can’t give the right responses to encounters with stubborn counter evidence. Either they (anti-epistemic-partiality views) recommend flouting the evidence altogether in order hold on to positive beliefs about the object of faith or they (epistemic-partiality views) lower the epistemic (...) standards in objectionable ways to alleviate the epistemic pressure imposed by the counterevidence. However, one cannot have praiseworthy faith when one refuses to really grapple with the evidence against the goodness of the faith’s object. So, partiality norms, far from constituting what makes for great faith, importantly stand in its way. Thus, we should reject any partiality norms on faith. We argue that cases of praiseworthy faith involve dispositions to confront the object of faith when presented with stubborn counter evidence against their goodness. Recognizing this enables us to endorse a partiality norm while avoiding Dormandy’s worries. We argue that dispositions to confront the object of faith presuppose positive beliefs about it, thus vindicating partiality. We further argue that the confrontation makes an epistemic demand of the object of faith: produce high confidence in whether it is still worth having faith in, thus carving out a central role for evidentialist norms. (shrink)

Are liberalism and perfectionism compatible? In this study Steven Wall presents and defends a perfectionist account of political morality that takes issue with many currently fashionable liberal ideas but retains the strong liberal commitment to the ideal of personal autonomy. He begins by critically discussing the most influential version of anti-perfectionist liberalism, examining the main arguments that have been offered in its defence. He then clarifies the ideal of personal autonomy, presents an account of its value and shows that (...) a strong commitment to personal autonomy is fully compatible with an endorsement of perfectionist political action designed to promote valuable pursuits and discourage base ones. (shrink)

In a number of publications, Gerald Gaus has presented an ambitious account of political morality that gives the ideal of public justification pride of place. This article critically discusses Gaus’s characterization and defense of the ideal of public justification in politics. It also presents an account and an argument in support of first-person political justification.

There is a puzzle about divine justice stemming from the fact that God seems required to judge on the basis of criteria that are vague. Justice is proportional, however, it seems God violates proportionality by sending those on the borderline of heaven to an eternity in hell. This is Ted Sider’s problem of Hell and Vagueness. On the face of things, this poses a challenge only to a narrow class of classical Christians, those that hold a retributive theory of divine (...) punishment. We show that this puzzle can be extended to the picture of divine judgement and the afterlife found in Mormon theology. This is significant because at first glance, the Mormon picture of the afterlife looks like it fails to co-operate with Sider’s puzzle. In Mormon theology, there are not two afterlife states, but three: a low, a middle, and a high kingdom. There is no afterlife state quite like Hell, and the states that function similarly to Hell aren’t places of eternal suffering. We argue that appearances are misleading. While it may be true that no place in the Mormon afterlife is bad in the sense that its inhabitants suffer eternal bodily harm, it is true that many of the places in the Mormon afterlife are bad in the sense that their inhabitants lack access to significant goods. This allows Sider’s puzzle to re-engage as a puzzle about distributive Justice. After setting out this alternative version of the puzzle, we argue that Mormon theology has sufficient resources to reject proportionality as a constraint on divine judgment by adopting a nuanced version of universalism called escapism. (shrink)

While examining the important role of imagination in making moral judgments, John Dewey and Moral Imagination focuses new attention on the relationship between American pragmatism and ethics. Steven Fesmire takes up threads of Dewey's thought that have been largely unexplored and elaborates pragmatism's distinctive contribution to understandings of moral experience, inquiry, and judgment. Building on two Deweyan notions—that moral character, belief, and reasoning are part of a social and historical context and that moral deliberation is an imaginative, dramatic rehearsal (...) of possibilities—Fesmire shows that moral imagination can be conceived as a process of aesthetic perception and artistic creativity. Fesmire's original readings of Dewey shed new light on the imaginative process, human emotional make-up and expression, and the nature of moral judgment. This original book presents a robust and distinctly pragmatic approach to ethics, politics, moral education, and moral conduct. [The downloadable sample is Chapter Seven, "The Moral Artist."]. (shrink)

In ancient times, when persuasion played the role of public force, eloquence was necessary. Of what use would it be today, when public force has replaced persuasion. One needs neither art nor metaphor to say such is my pleasure. Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Robotization is an increasingly pervasive feature of our lives. Robots with high degrees of autonomy may cause harm, yet in sufciently complex systems neither the robots nor the human developers may be candidates for moral blame. John Danaher has recently argued that this may lead to a retribution gap, where the human desire for retribution faces a lack of appropriate subjects for retributive blame. The potential social and moral implications of a retribution gap are considerable. I argue that the retributive (...) intuitions that feed into retribution gaps are best understood as deontological intuitions. I apply a debunking argument for deontological intuitions in order to show that retributive intuitions cannot be used to justify retributive punishment in cases of robot harm without clear candidates for blame. The fundamental moral question thus becomes what we ought to do with these retributive intuitions, given that they do not justify retribution. I draw a parallel from recent work on implicit biases to make a case for taking moral responsibility for retributive intuitions. In the same way that we can exert some form of control over our unwanted implicit biases, we can and should do so for unjustifed retributive intuitions in cases of robot harm. (shrink)

Governments around the world have faced the challenge of how to respond to the recent outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease. Some have reacted by greatly restricting the freedom of citizens, while others have opted for less drastic policies. In this paper, I draw a parallel with vaccination ethics to conceptualize two distinct approaches to COVID-19 that I call altruistic and lockdown. Given that the individual measures necessary to limit the spread of the virus can in principle be achieved voluntarily (...) as well as through enforcement, the question arises of how much freedom governments ought to give citizens to adopt the required measures. I argue that an altruistic approach is preferable on moral grounds: it preserves important citizen freedoms, avoids a number of potential injustices, and gives people a much-needed sense of meaning in precarious times. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 6, Page 687-698, July 2022.

`Fluid, readable and accessible ... I found the overall quality of the book to be excellent. It provides an overview of major (and preceding) developments in the field of science studies. It examines landmark works, authors, concepts and approaches ... I will certainly use this book as one of the course texts' Eileen Crist, Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society, Virginia Tech Science is at the heart of contemporary society and is therefore central to the social sciences. Yet science (...) studies has often encountered resistance from social scientists. This book attempts to remedy this by giving the most extensive, thorough and best argued account of the field and explaining to social scientists why science matters to them. This is a landmark book that demystifies science studies and successfully bridges the divide between social theory and the sociology of science. Illustrated with relevant, illuminating examples, it provides the ideal guide to science studies and social theory. (shrink)

In an unusual instance of lay participation in biomedical research, U.S. AIDS treatment activists have constituted themselves as credible participants in the process of knowledge construction, thereby bringing about changes in the epistemic practices of biomedical research. This article examines the mechanisms or tactics by which these lay activists have constructed their credibility in the eyes of AIDS researchers and government officials. It considers the inwlications of such interventions for the conduct of medical research; examines some of the ironies, tensions, (...) and limitations in the process; and argues for the importance of studying social movements that engage with expert knowledge. (shrink)

Moralization is a social-psychological process through which morally neutral issues take on moral significance. Often linked to health and disease, moralization may sometimes lead to good outcomes; yet moralization is often detrimental to individuals and to society as a whole. It is therefore important to be able to identify when moralization is inappropriate. In this paper, we offer a systematic normative approach to the evaluation of moralization. We introduce and develop the concept of ‘mismoralization’, which is when moralization is metaethically (...) unjustified. In order to identify mismoralization, we argue that one must engage in metaethical analysis of moralization processes while paying close attention to the relevant facts. We briefly discuss one historical example and two contemporary cases related to COVID-19 that we contend to have been mismoralized in public health. We propose a remedy of de-moralization that begins by identifying mismoralization and that proceeds by neutralizing inapt moral content. De-moralization calls for epistemic and moral humility. It should lead us to pull away from our tendency to moralize—as individuals and as social groups—whenever and wherever moralization is unjustified. (shrink)

An introduction to and critique of the latest trends in critical theory.

Editors provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible.

The distinction between presentism and eternalism is usually sought in some formula like ‘Only presently existing things exist’ or ‘Past, present, and future events are equally real’. I argue that ambiguities in the copula prevent these slogans from distinguishing significant opposed positions. I suggest in addition that one can find a series of significant distinctions if one takes spacetime structure into account. These presentisms and eternalisms are not contradictory. They are complementary elements of a complete naturalistic philosophy of time.

:The ideal of public justification holds, at a minimum, that the most fundamental political and legal institutions of a society must be publicly justified to each of its members. This essay proposes and defends a new account of this ideal. The account defended construes public justification as an ideal of rational justification, one that is grounded in the moral requirement to respect the rational agency of persons. The essay distinguishes two kinds of justifying reasons that bear on politics and shows (...) how they inform the ideal of public justification. It also decouples public justification from contractualist political morality. The result is a novel account of public justification that departs markedly from how the ideal is commonly characterized, but shows how it retains its distinctiveness as an ideal of politics. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.THE PURE THEORY OF PUBLIC JUSTIFICATIONVolume 32, Issue 2Steven Wall DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000170Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. THE PURE THEORY OF PUBLIC JUSTIFICATIONVolume 32, Issue 2Steven Wall DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000170Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. THE PURE THEORY OF PUBLIC JUSTIFICATIONVolume 32, Issue 2Steven Wall DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000170Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Preventive vaccination can protect not just vaccinated individuals, but also others, which is often a central point in discussions about vaccination. To date, there has been no systematic study of self- and other-directed motives behind vaccination. This article has two major goals: first, to examine and distinguish between self- and other-directed motives behind vaccination, especially with regard to vaccinating for the sake of third parties, and second, to explore some ways in which this approach can help to clarify and guide (...) vaccination debates and policy. I propose conceiving of vaccination in terms of three basic elements: the vaccination decision-maker, the vaccine recipient and the primary beneficiary. I develop a taxonomy based on the relations between these elements to distinguish four kinds of vaccination: self-protective, paternalistic, altruistic and indirect. I finally discuss the case of human papillomavirus vaccine regulation for men and women to show how each kind of vaccination is associated with and raises specific ethical questions. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is a relatively recent discipline that employs experimental methods to investigate the intuitions, concepts, and assumptions behind traditional philosophical arguments, problems, and theories. While experimental philosophy initially served to interrogate the role that intuitions play in philosophy, it has since branched out to bring empirical methods to bear on problems within a variety of traditional areas of philosophy—including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. To date, no connection has been made between developments in experimental philosophy (...) and philosophy of technology. In this paper, I develop and defend a research program for an experimental philosophy of technology. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the field of metatheory with two goals. My first goal is to present a clear understanding of what metatheory “is” based on a collection of over twenty definitions of the term. My second goal is to present a preliminary investigation into how metatheory might be understood as a science. From that perspective, I present some strengths and weaknesses of our field and suggest steps to make metatheory more rigorous, more scientific, and so make more of (...) a contribution to the larger community of the social sciences. (shrink)

Among the many peculiarities of schizophrenics perhaps the most obvious is their tendency to say odd things. Indeed, for most clinicians, the hallmark of schizophrenia is “thought disorder”. Decades of clinical observations, experimental research, and linguistic analyses have produced many hypotheses about what, precisely, is wrong with schizophrenic speech and language. These hypotheses range from assertions that schizophrenics have peculiar word association hierarchies to the notion that schizophrenics are suffering from an intermittent form of aphasia. In this article, several popular (...) hypotheses are critically assessed. Work in the area turns out to be flawed by errors in experimental method, faulty observations, tautological reasoning, and theoretical models that ignore the complexities of both speech and language. This does not mean that schizophrenics are indistinguishable from nonschizophrenics. They are clearly deviant in many situations. Their problem, however, appears to be in processing information and in selective attention, not in language itself. (shrink)

The potential for vaccines to prevent the spread of infectious diseases is crucial for vaccination policy and ethics. In this paper, I discuss recent evidence that the current COVID-19 vaccines have only a modest and short-lived effect on reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission and argue that this has at least four important ethical implications. First, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 should be seen primarily as a self-protective choice for individuals. Second, moral condemnation of unvaccinated people for causing direct harm to others is unjustified. (...) Third, the case for a harm-based moral obligation to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is weak. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, coercive COVID-19 vaccination policies (e.g., measures that exclude unvaccinated people from society) cannot be directly justified by the harm principle. (shrink)

The obligatory chapter -- My, how clever: what is humor and what humor is -- Joking matters -- Comedy tonight -- Killing it: humor and comedy aesthetics -- Can't you take a joke?: humor ethics -- Am I blue?: the ethics of dirty jokes -- Is that a Mic in your hand or are you just happy to see me?: comedy ethics.

This new book proposes a way out of the crisis by letting go of the idea that psychology needs ‘new’ foundations or a new identity, whether biological, discursive, or cognitive. The psychological is not narrowly confined to any one aspect of human experience; it is quite literally ‘everywhere’. Drawing on a range of influential thinkers including Michel Serres, Michel Foucault, AN Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze, the book proposes a strong process-oriented approach to the psychological, which studies ‘events’ or ‘occasions.’.

Vaccination can protect vaccinated individuals and often also prevent them from spreading disease to other people. This opens up the possibility of getting vaccinated for the sake of others. In fact, altruistic vaccination has recently been conceptualized as a kind of vaccination that is undertaken primary for the benefit of others. In order to better understand the potential role of altruistic motives in people’s vaccination decisions, we conducted two focus group studies with a total of 37 participants. Study 1 included (...) three focus groups on the subject of HPV vaccination for boys. Study 2 included three focus groups on the subject of pertussis and measles vaccination for childcare workers. We found substantial evidence of other-regarding motives across all focus groups, which suggests that altruistic motives could be an important factor when it comes to people’s vaccination decisions. We address the significance of these findings for vaccination policy surrounding HPV vaccination for boys and vaccination for childcare workers. We also extend the findings to normative work on vaccination for the sake of others more generally. (shrink)

J. M. E. McTaggart, in a famous argument, denied the reality of time because he thought that passage or temporal becoming was essential for the existence of time and that passage was a self-contradictory concept. This denial of passage has provoked a vast literature, two of the most important contributions being C. D. Broad’s painstaking defence of passage in his Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy and D. C. Williams’ dazzling condemnation of it “The Myth of Passage.” -/- A careful reading of (...) these apparently opposed essays reveals that there is a common notion of passage that both philosophers endorse, the successive occurrence of sets of simultaneous events (assuming classical or Newtonian spacetime structure as background). This unexpected agreement provides a notion of the passage of time that, I claim, is lean enough to survive the criticisms of passage-deniers yet robust enough to satisfy the requirements of passage-affirmers. I undertake to describe and defend this notion. -/- . (shrink)

From a Kuhnian perspective, a paradigmatic revolution in management science will significantly improve our understanding of the business world and show practitioners (including managers and consultants) how to become much more effective. Without an objective measure of revolution, however, the door is open for spurious claims of revolutionary advance. Such claims cause confusion among scholars and practitioners and reduce the legitimacy of university management programs. Metatheoretical methods, based on insights from systems theory, provide new tools for analyzing the structure of (...) theory. Propositional analysis is one such method that may be applied to objectively quantify the formal robustness of management theory. In this chapter, I use propositional analysis to analyze different versions of a theory as it evolves across 1,500 years of history. This analysis shows how the increasing robustness of theory anticipates the arrival of revolution and suggests an innovative and effective way for scholars and practitioners to develop and evaluate theories of management. (shrink)

In his late work, Rawls makes strong claims about the status of political liberty. These claims, if accepted, would have significant implications for the content of "justice as fairness." I discuss the nature of these claims, clarifying Rawls's fair value guarantee of the political liberties and critically discussing the arguments that he and others have given for assigning special importance to the political liberties. I conclude that justice as fairness, properly understood, is not a deeply democratic conception of justice.

What can the art of living after Foucault contribute to ethics in relation to the mediation of human existence by technology? To develop the relation between technical mediation and ethics, firstly the theme of technical mediation is elaborated in line with Foucault’s notion of ethical problematization. Every view of what technology does to us at the same time expresses an ethical concern about technology. The contemporary conception of technical mediation tends towards the acknowledgement of ongoing hybridization, not ultimately good or (...) bad but ambivalent, which means for us the challenge of taking care of ourselves as hybrid beings. Secondly, the work of Foucault provides elements for imagining this care for our hybrid selves, notably his notions of freedom as a practice and of the care of the self. A conclusions about technical mediation and ethics is that whereas the approaches of the delegation of morality to technology by Latour and mediated morality by Verbeek see technical mediation of behavior and moral outlook as an answer in ethics, this should rather be considered the problem that ethics is about. (shrink)