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46688.779723
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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172779.780073
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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257995.780102
|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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317214.780124
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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317237.780153
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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331744.78018
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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331763.780202
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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331781.78022
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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331822.780237
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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510187.780255
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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738428.780276
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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764752.780295
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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764753.780306
One of my more radical meta-philosophical views is that moral philosophers, collectively speaking, don’t have any clear idea of what they’re talking about when they talk about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. There are too many candidate concepts available, and no obvious reason to expect different theorists to have the same one in mind. …
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781727.780316
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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796080.780328
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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911543.780339
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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911559.780353
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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911591.780366
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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923098.78039
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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1024016.780401
We humans think a lot about agency – about what people do, about what they can do, and what they ought to do. I want to highlight four puzzles raised by the way we tend to approach these questions. None of the puzzles is new, but they are usually discussed in isolation; I will argue that they have a common source and a common solution. The first puzzle, to be discussed in sections 2 and 3, arises from two features of the “perspectival ‘ought’ ”. On the one hand, the perspectival ‘ought’ appears to supervene on the agent’s perspective or evidence. On the other hand, this sense of ‘ought’ seems to imply ‘can’. But couldn’t an agent lack information about what they can do?
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1075184.780411
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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1141481.780433
The standard theory of choice in economics involves modelling human agents as if they had precise attitudes when in fact they are often fuzzy. For the normative purposes of welfare economics, it might be thought that the imposition of a precise framework is nevertheless well justified: If we think the standard theory is normatively correct, and therefore that agents ought to be in this sense precise, then doesn’t it follow that their true welfare can be measured precisely? I will argue that this thought, central to the preference purification project in behavioural welfare economics, commits a fallacy. The standard theory requires agents to adopt precise preferences; but neither the theory nor a fuzzy agent’s initial attitudes may determine a particular way in which she ought to precisify them. So before actually having precisified her preferences, the welfare of fuzzy agents may remain indeterminate. I go on to consider the implications of this fallacy for welfare economics.
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1141501.780447
The idea that people make mistakes in how they pursue their own best interests, and that we can identify and correct for these mistakes has been central to much recent work in behavioural economics, and the ‘nudge’ approach to public policy grounded on it. The focus in this literature has been on individual choices that are mistaken. Agreeing with, and building on the criticism that this literature has been too quick to identify individual choices as mistaken, I argue that it has also overlooked a kind of mistake that is potentially more significant: irreducibly diachronic mistakes, which occur when series of choices over time do not serve our interests well, even though no individual choice can be identified as a mistake. I argue for the claim that people make such mistakes, and reflect on its significance for welfare economics.
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1141844.780458
In her Choosing Well, Chrisoula Andreou puts forth an account of instrumental rationality that is revisionary in two respects. First, it changes the goalpost or standard of instrumental rationality to include “categorial” appraisal responses, alongside preferences, which are relational. Second, her account is explicitly diachronic, applying to series of choices as well as isolated ones. Andreou takes both revisions to be necessary for dealing with problematic choice scenarios agents with disorderly preferences might find themselves in. Focusing on problem cases involving cyclical preferences, I will first argue that her first revision is undermotivated once we accept the second. If we are willing to grant that there are diachronic rationality constraints, the preference-based picture can get us further than Andreou acknowledges. I will then turn to present additional grounds for rejecting the preference-based picture. However, these grounds also seem to undermine Andreou’s own appeal to categorial appraisal responses.
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1201610.780469
|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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1254197.78048
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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1254229.780491
We examine whether Thomsonian constitutivism, a metaethical view that analyses value in terms of ‘goodness-fixing kinds,’ i.e. kinds that themselves set the standards for being a good instance of the respective kind, offers a satisfactory explanation of value change and disagreement. While value disagreement has long been considered an important explanandum, we introduce value change as a closely related but distinct phenomenon of metaethical interest. We argue that constitutivism fails to explain both phenomena because of its commitment to goodness-fixing kinds. Constitutivism explains away disagreement and at best explains the emergence of new values, not genuine change. Therefore, Thomsonian constitutivism is not a good fix for realist problems with explaining value disagreement, and value change.
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1254283.780502
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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1372046.780513
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. …
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1478999.780523
It is conventional wisdom that appreciating the role of luck in our moral lives should make us more sparing with blame. But views of moral responsibility that allow luck to augment a person’s blameworthiness are in tension with this wisdom. I resolve this tension: our common moral luck partially generates a duty to forgo retributively blaming the blameworthy person at least sometimes. So, although luck can amplify the blame that a person deserves, luck also partially generates a duty not to give the blameworthy person the retributive blame that he deserves at least sometimes.