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46626.315321
I discuss the right to participate in science, which is part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (1966). Building on my previous work on this right as an ‘epistemic-cultural’ right, in this paper my goal is to clarify how fulfilling this right requires engaging with varieties of local knowledges that are too often severed in scientific narratives. I tease out three main varieties of local knowledges and highlight their distinctive features and their intersectionalities. In the second part of the paper, I argue that a more careful appreciation of varieties of local knowledges is not only key for the fulfilment of the right to participate in science but also for other human rights. I focus my attention here selectively on the right to food, and right to clean water. I conclude by highlighting the implications of this discussion for ongoing legal debates on rights of nature.
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172717.315389
The Jews have been subject to hatred and suspicion throughout history, culminating in one nation’s serious effort to literally kill all of them during World War II. The Holocaust was the worst of it, but there had been a long history of anti-Semitism before that. …
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257933.315401
|The Scrooge McDuck model of obscene wealth, as propagated by inequality activists |
There are supposedly more than 2,500 billionaires in the world these days. While I certainly agree that these people are very very rich, it is important to be clear that they are not as rich as the infographics put about by the likes of Oxfam imply. …
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317152.315411
It seems as though we have a duty to read the news—that we are doing something wrong when we refuse to pay attention to what is going on in the world. But why? I argue that some plausible justifications for a duty to read the news fail to fully explain this duty: it cannot be justified only by reference to its consequences, or as a duty of democratic citizenship, or as a self-regarding duty. It can, however, be justified on the grounds that we have a positive, imperfect duty of respect for strangers, even when our actions do not affect them directly. Reading the news is a key way, sometimes the only way, that we can respect those who are strangers to us. I close by considering some of the implications and limitations of this duty.
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317175.315421
I Used to Live in a City Where Live a Great Story Kept Appearing on Abandoned Buildings. It Turned Out to Be the Handiwork of an Instagram Influencer-Slash-Entrepreneur, but It Speaks to Something Many of Us Have Probably Felt: That Our Lives Can Be Understood as Stories, with Characters and Plots and Themes. If I Live a Great Story, Maybe Something with Compelling Adventures or a Sense of Purpose, I’Ll Have Had a Good Life.
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331682.315432
Modelling systems of oppression and domination with the structure of graded inequality helps us understand the operation of these systems. In this paper, I will focus on how it illuminates mechanisms by which systems of oppression and domination stabilize themselves in ways that a binary model does not. First, it shows how even people disadvantaged overall by systems of oppression and domination can nonetheless have some group interest in maintaining it. Second, it reveals the stabilizing role of what I will call affective misdirection the redirection within the system of affective energies that could be otherwise devoted toward undermining the whole system. These are illustrations of the more general point that social structures shape the moral psychology of those agents who live, think, feel, and act within those structures in ways that stabilize those social structures. So as a general methodological point, understanding structures of oppression and domination involves understanding the moral psychology of the people within those structures. Social philosophy should be connected to moral psychology.
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331701.315441
of which might even cause disastrous failures, meaningless sacrifices, or irreparable losses. Obviously, we cannot rewind time and change the past, but the idea of redemption suggests a possibility of salvaging bad episodes in our life. Despite the religious connotation, redemptive narratives are prevalent in secular movies, novels, and even real-life stories. While some philosophers in the literature on well-being mention or briefly discuss the idea of redemption, none of them has attempted to provide a systematic account of it. This by no means indicates that redemption has nothing philosophically interesting to theorize about. What does it mean to redeem the past in secular settings, and why does redemption even matter without the religious underpinnings?
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331719.315448
This challenging text has been interpreted in a variety of ways. One prominent approach is an “anthropological interpretation,” which purports to take Kant’s naturalistic language seriously. First advanced by Sharon Anderson-Gold, this interpretation takes radical evil to be an intrinsically communal phenomenon; it refers to the antisocial elements of human nature that arise in us once we enter society. Allen Wood compares it both to Rousseau’s account of amour propre and to the concept of “unsocial sociability,” taken from Kant’s own philosophy of history. In this way, commentators have situated Kant’s account of radical evil in the context of his writings on history, politics, and religion, and not just within his moral philosophy.
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331760.315457
Rousseau proposes the idea of the general will as an answer for a problem regarding humans’ interdependence. Insofar as we depend upon others’ cooperation to meet our needs, we are subject to their wills and hence seemingly unfree. Rousseau suggests, though, that each person can enjoy the benefits of society and “nevertheless obey only himself and remain as free as before.” The key is to be ruled by the general will. If all are subject only to the general will, and if the general will is the will of each citizen, then each citizen is subject only to his own will — and therefore free.
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331783.315465
In work on the imagination, it is a commonplace that imagination is heterogeneous, and that we must draw numerous important distinctions in order even to discuss it — conceding at least temporarily that there is an “it” to discuss. Besides a basic distinction between sensory and propositional or attitudinal imagination, we also find cross-cutting distinctions between creative and re-creative imagination, hypothetical and dramatic imagination, imagining as mental representation or as a constructive process, as well as distinctions between different kinds of imaginative use. We must also acknowledge, independently of these distinctions, that the range of activities taken to involve imagination is simply very broad. Standard examples in the literature run from basic quasi-sensory experiences such as imagining a red patch, to evaluating remote counterfactuals, engaging with narrative art, “mindreading,” empathy, planning one’s future, make-believe, fantasy, and more.
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510125.315473
Bet On It reader Tanmay Khale sent me a critique of Open Borders that I hadn’t heard before. Reprinted with permission. I’ll post my reply in the coming weeks. Dear Prof. Caplan,
I have a quick question regarding your arguments in favor of open borders, and particularly the influence of adverse selection. …
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738366.315481
Eugenic arguments are not a thing of the past. In 2016 prominent geneticist Michael Lynch published an article in Genetics arguing that human physical and mental performance is currently and will continue to decline at a rate of 1% per generation, if nothing is done to stop it. This estimate is not based on measurements of physical and mental performance, but on an argument from mutational load: medical interventions are relaxing selection on the human population which will lead to a buildup of deleterious mutations, dragging down human fitness. No policy recommendations were made, but the implication of the argument is clear. In this paper I show that the simple argument from relaxation of selection to fitness declines is invalid. When the argument is made valid it is not clear that there are any significant consequences to human population health.
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764690.315489
This transcript has been edited for clarity. Editor in Chief: Let’s start with some fan mail. Readers have asked about the recent cluster of essays touching, in one way or another, on religion. Can you talk about where they came from? …
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781665.315496
David Estlund has recently asked: how can structural injustice warrant resentment and indignation, given that it cannot fully be traced to culpable conduct? This article answers Estlund’s question. I propose that a social structure is an object that persists through time and is materially constituted by humans in relation. I use accounts of the point of blame to vindicate attitudes of resentment and indignation that target social structures themselves, without necessarily targeting their human constituents.
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796018.315504
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and begin all over again. – Andre Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse
Thus reads one of the very few epigraphs that I remember well. …
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911449.315512
It is greatly to the credit of Anneli Je erson that she has managed to write a book on this oft-discussed topic that is actually interesting. It is also short and readable, twin virtues that make it an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a way into the debate or for a text to assign students. Je erson moves uently through the intellectual terrain, objecting to some versions of what ‘brain disorder’ might mean, before proposing her own version and then discussing the implications of her account for questions of agency and moral responsibility. This nal discussion on issues around moral responsibility is likely to make the book especially attractive for students and practitioners who want not just to learn about the metaphysics of psychopathology but also to get a wider sense of why it matters, and to connect the ontology with moral psychology. Philosophers of psychiatry are building connections with phenomenology and also looking for relevance in more applied areas, and the last chapter of the book will help anyone starting out to understand the literature connecting philosophical psychopathology with debates over agency and moral responsibility. I recommend that chapter heartily. Like much of the book, it is a model of clear, painstaking discussion of the issues, and you will bene t from reading it. I am going to focus, though, on the debate over whether mental disorders are brain disorders, which forms the core of the book.
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911465.315522
Very few researchers will have failed to notice that computing technology has been advancing rapidly, so that the landscape of computational tools and resources at our disposal looks completely di erent than a generation ago. Some researchers from the humanities and social sciences have embraced new ways of doing research, while many others have only a partial or passing awareness of the emerging computational research programmes within their elds. This book provides a fairly gentle and broad introduction to the new possibilities. This is a valuable contribution, since it would be a shame for the signi cant potential of computers to go untapped simply because people aren’t aware of this potential. For some sub- elds (such as social epistemology), computers have already been a game-changer.
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911481.315533
Sepkoski has written a history of the ‘extinction imaginary’, the immense variety of cultural ideas and expectations surrounding what has happened and what could (catastrophically) happen to life on Earth. As he skilfully argues, this has enabled ‘Western culture’s imaginary’ more broadly to seamlessly connect present ecological worries with narratives about ‘deep time’, from the earliest discovery of extinction to the contemporary claim, now taken to be self-evident, that biodiversity conservation is a good thing.
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911497.315563
In Science on a Mission, Naomi Oreskes aims to document how US Navy funding shaped research in oceanography from the twentieth century through to the present. The book seeks ‘to determine whether Navy patronage a ected the content of the scienti c work that was done and, if so, how’ (p. 9). Oreskes’s short answer to this question is ‘yes’. Her long answer consists of meticulous case studies on how the Navy’s interests came to shape the priorities and practices of American oceanography.
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911529.315577
Reproduction, after all, is a good yardstick for biological success. Organisms succeed when they leave more of their descendants in future generations. It is not, however, the only measure. Lineage persistence is another. On such a metric, the four extant species of horseshoe crabs are remarkably successful, having crawled around since the Ordovician. Though there are noticeable di erences, these two measures have a great deal in common. Both are about the continuation of lineages. This may be the lineage constituted by one’s o spring (and their o spring, and their o spring, and so on) in a breeding population. Or the lineage at stake might be the ‘meta-populational lineage’ of interbreeding organisms sticking it out over the generations.
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911597.315587
There is a story told over history and philosophy of biology camp res of a terror that once roamed these parts and scared biologists and philosophers alike: the essence monster. This was an ironic name, since if things have essences, monsters are the things that don’t, so the philosophers especially appreciated the paradox. However, like a good number of camp re stories, it is a fairy tale, mostly useful for scaring younglings. The essence monster is supposed to have killed progress in biology until Darwin freed us from the misperception that it was real. After that, the essence monster was itself killed o by the knights of the modern synthesis, until Michael Devitt revived it. Or so the new story goes. But you shouldn’t believe everything you hear over a camp re.
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911616.315597
Heyes returns us to arguments about the nature and extent of heritable specialization (henceforth, domain speci city) in the cognitive phenotype synthesized in the 1990s by Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 9–16). Evolutionary Psychology integrates evidence about developmental canalization, selective de cits and dissociations, neural localization, inheritance, encapsulation of so-called system 1 from system 2 processes, learning theory, and evolutionary modelling, and argues that domain speci city is the result of genetic evolution. Of course, domain speci city associated with any or all of these ‘markers’ does not entail genetic evolution. However, Evolutionary Psychology links these considerations to the poverty of stimulus argument for innateness to provide an inference to the best explanation that genetic evolution explains domain speci city.
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923036.315606
Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) was the most prominent
rationalist of the black American enlightenment thinkers in the
nineteenth-century. He stands out among his
contemporaries—Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T.
Washington, most notably—for his robust defense of the central
place of reason in moral agency. His attempts to work out the
consequences of that view for the nature of language and history lends
his philosophy a breadth and depth not matched by other enlightenment
thinkers. The prominence of his protégé, W. E. B. Du
Bois, helped ensure Crummell’s continuing influence during the
rise of pragmatism, but he eventually fell out of favor as such
relativistic thinkers as Alain LeRoy Locke and Zora Neale Hurston
emerged.
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1075122.315614
The received view is that Kant denies all moral luck. But I show how Kant affirms constitutive moral luck in passages concerning radical evil from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. First, I explicate Kant’s claims about radical evil. It is a morally evil disposition that all human beings have necessarily, at least for the first part of their lives, and for which they are blameworthy. Second, since these properties about radical evil appear to contradict Kant’s even more famous claims about imputation, ‘ought implies can’, and free will, I unpack Henry Allison’s proof of radical evil and show how it is consistent with interpretations of Kant’s broader views about morality. Third, I define and illustrate the category of constitutive moral luck and argue that Kant embraces the existence of constitutive moral luck given Allison-style interpretations of radical evil. This provides a reason for philosophers to reject the received view, and it creates an occasion for Kantians and Kant scholars to check their reasons if they deny moral luck.
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1120795.315625
This highly accessible series of Elements provides brief but comprehensive introductions to the most central topics in metaphysics. Many of the Elements also go into considerable depth, so the series will appeal to both students and academics. Some Elements bridge the gaps between metaphysics, philosophy of science, and epistemology.
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1201548.315635
|A common sight in Europe: |
poor person searching bare-handed through
garbage bins in search of deposit bottles
They are mistaken. While bottle deposit systems are superficially attractive they are a horrendously expensive way to do not much good, while also creating degrading and fundamentally worthless work for the poor. …
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1254135.315643
This chapter provides a theoretical lens on conceptual disruption. It offers a typology of conceptual disruption, discusses its relation to conceptual engineering, and sketches a programmatic view of the implications of conceptual disruption for the ethics of technology.
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1254204.315651
Generative AI enables automated, effective manipulation at scale. Despite the growing general ethical discussion around generative AI, the specific manipulation risks remain inadequately investigated. This article outlines essential inquiries encompassing conceptual, empirical, and design dimensions of manipulation, pivotal for comprehending and curbing manipulation risks. By highlighting these questions, the article underscores the necessity of an appropriate conceptualisation of manipulation to ensure the responsible development of Generative AI technologies.
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1254221.315659
Franke, in Philosophy & Technology, 37(1), 1–6, (2024), connects the recent debate about manipulative algorithmic transparency with the concerns about problematic pursuits of positive liberty. I argue that the indifference view of manipulative transparency is not aligned with positive liberty, contrary to Franke’s claim, and even if it is, it is not aligned with the risk that many have attributed to pursuits of positive liberty. Moreover, I suggest that Franke’s worry may generalise beyond the manipulative transparency debate to AI ethics in general.
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1371984.315667
Mark Antony’s funeral oration is the turning point of Julius Caesar. Brutus had just finished his own speech, and seemed to persuade the people that the killing of Caesar was the justified killing of a tyrant. …