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108252.738138
Angelic visitations in our world are at best rare, and at worst they never occur at all. Not so in Neil Fisk’s world. There, angelic visitations are common – and often deadly. Neil lost his wife to such a visitation, and he’s hated God ever since. The problem with this hatred is that Neil is quite sure his wife is in heaven, as he saw her soul ascending and has never seen her walking around in hell during the frequent glimpses the living are given of the underworld. Since Neil thinks he cannot willingly become devout, he must rely on a divine glitch; those who are caught in heaven’s light during an angelic visitation involuntarily become devout, and thus go to heaven. Luckily for Neil, he drives into a beam of heaven’s light, loses his sight, and becomes devout. Unluckily for Neil, God sends him to hell anyway.
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129908.738312
A recent interviewer asked Tyler Cowen to explain falling birth rates, and he puckishly responded, “Do you have kids?” His point: Anyone who knows what kids are actually like can instantly understand why adults are reluctant to have them. …
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550465.738326
This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Herman Cappelen’s 2023 book The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment. In that book, Cappelen develops a theory of abandonment—a theory of why and how to completely stop using particular linguistic expressions—and then uses that theory to argue for the general abandonment of the words “democracy” and “democratic”. In this paper, I critically discuss Cappelen’s arguments for the abandonment of “democracy” and “democratic” in political theory specifically.
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568529.738335
We all perform experiments very often. When I hear a noise and deliberately turn my head, I perform an experiment to find out what I will see if I turn my head. If I ask a question not knowing what answer I will hear, I am engaging in (human!) …
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571502.738344
There’s something deeply wrong with the world, when the median US college graduate’s starting salary is a dozen times higher than the price to save another person’s entire life. The enduring presence of such low-hanging fruit reflects a basic societal failure to allocate resources in a way that reflects valuing those lives appropriately. …
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599256.738352
PEA Soup is pleased to introduce this month’s Ethics discussion, featuring Elselijn Kingma and Fiona Woollard’s paper Can You Do Harm to Your Fetus? Pregnancy, Barriers, and the Doing/Allowing Distinction, with a précis from Elizabeth Harman. …
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619915.738364
In metaethics, we ask various questions about ethics (or, more broadly, normativity): metaphysical questions like are there ethical (or normative) facts and properties, are they objective, and how do they relate to other kinds of facts and properties, epistemological questions like do we have ethical (or normative) knowledge and how so, and philosophy of mind and language questions like what are we doing when we make ethical (or normative) judgments, are we expressing beliefs that can be true or false or other kinds of attitudes that, strictly speaking, can’t be true or false, and are ethical judgments necessarily motivating?
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630498.738385
The most common theoretical approaches to defining mental disorder are naturalism, normativism, and hybridism. Naturalism and normativism are often portrayed as diametrically opposed, with naturalism grounded in objective science and normativism grounded in social convention and values. Hybridism is seen as a way of combining the two. However, all three approaches share a common feature in that they conceive of mental disorders as deviations from norms. Naturalism concerns biological norms; normativism concerns social norms; and hybridism, both biological and social norms. This raises the following two questions: (a) Are biological and social norms the only sorts of norms that are relevant to considerations of mental disorder? (b) Should addressing norm deviations continue to be a major focus of mental healthcare? This paper introduces several norms that are relevant to mental disorder beyond the biological and social. I argue that mental disorders often deviate from individual, well-being, and regulatory norms. I also consider approaches which question mental healthcare’s focus on addressing norm deviations in the first place, including the neurodiversity paradigm, social model of disability, and Mad discourse. Utilizing these critical approaches, I contend that whether mental health intervention is justified depends, in part, on the type of norm deviation being intervened upon.
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660142.738395
Let me get the praise out of the way at the start. This is a fabulous book. It develops a sweeping meta-ethical vision and does so with impressive attention to detail. It is packed full of novel ideas about representation, truth, reasoning, and other topics, all of which fit together to support the big picture. The scope of the book is really quite dazzling—it doesn’t miss the forest for the trees, nor the trees for the forest.
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741823.738404
When you’re investigating reality as a scientist (and often as an ordinary person) you perform experiments. Epistemologists and philosophers of science have spent a lot of time thinking about how to evaluate what you should do with the results of the experiments—how they should affect your beliefs or credences—but relatively little on the important question of which experiments you should perform epistemologically speaking. …
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746049.738413
Prior research has unveiled a pathologization effect where individuals perceived as having bad moral character are more likely to have their conditions labeled as diseases and are less often considered healthy compared to those viewed as having a good moral character. Moreover, these individuals are perceived as less unlucky in their affliction and more deserving of it. This study explores the broader impacts of moral character on such judgments, hypothesizing that these effects reach deeper and extend to both negative and positive moral evaluations. The pathologization effect also raises concerns about potential discrimination and the overmedicalization of normal health variations, so we also examine whether providing more detailed descriptions of conditions mitigates the influence of judgments of moral character. The methodology and broader implications of our findings are discussed, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of how moral judgments might influence patient care.
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794018.73844
Questions about our knowledge of other minds have occupied far less philosophical attention than have questions about our knowledge of the material world. The major reason for this is the underlying assumption that the resources we should appeal to in explaining such knowledge are the same as those we appeal to in explaining our knowledge of the material world, namely observation and inference. Given this, accounting for our knowledge of other minds is not of much additional interest, epistemologically speaking. There can be debates about the kinds of inference required, and, indeed about whether perception on its own suffices for knowledge, but there is nothing fundamentally different here from debates and claims about our knowledge of the material world. Hence, it warrants only a page or two, or, at most, a chapter, in general treatises about our knowledge of the ‘external’ world. Call this the Nothing Special Claim.
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846335.738456
There is growing concern that inhabitants of wealthy societies are falling into an increasingly lonely condition (Holt-Lunstad et al, 2017). Social scientists have offered a variety of competing explanations for what is often characterized as an epidemic of loneliness (Umberson et. al, 2010; Bianchi and Vohs 2016). By ‘loneliness’ we mean unchosen social isolation and deprivation of subjectively desired goods that would typically result from social contact and close personal relationships. Loneliness is generally regarded as one of the worst misfortunes that can befall us, and it is accompanied by a range of terrible personal and social consequences. As such it would be good if AI technologies could help alleviate our increasingly lonely condition. Given the prevalence and harmfulness of loneliness it is tempting, for Bianchi and Vohs explain that income predicts the nature of social contact. “People with higher incomes spent less time with their families and neighbors and spent more time with their friends. These findings suggest that income is associated with how and with whom people spend their time” (Bianchi and Vohs 2016). Other factors that cause loneliness such as immigration, increased engagement with technology, race, educational level and so on have all been widely discussed. Given this large body of empirical evidence and variety of competing explanations, it is safe to assume that people are lonelier than they used to be decades ago in the United States.
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846355.738469
This article reviews Matthew Liao’s edited volume Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Liao’s volume consists of seventeen essays organized into four sections: Building Ethics into Machines, The Near Future of AI, The Long-Term Impact of Superintelligence, and Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness and Moral Status. The core arguments and issues discussed in Liao’s volume remain philosophically interesting. The book's insights into the theoretical foundations of AI ethics, the potential impact of superintelligence, and the moral status of AI, continue to be valuable contributions. What it is missing from this volume and what we have seen explored in detail in the intervening years is engagement with questions around the broader social impacts of AI. The main topics of recent work have been fairness and algorithmic bias, privacy, and the impacts on human interactions. In this review, I focus on some of the most interesting arguments from the volume and I make some suggestions about the ways that the field has changed in the years following its publication.
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863546.738478
Flannery O’Connor’s stories are, by her own account, “preoccupied with the grotesque.” The reason, some argue, is that the grotesque is fascinating to the southern imagination. And indeed her grotesques have many southern precedents, most notably those of William Faulkner, whose novel The Sound and the Fury is famously narrated in part by an idiot. …
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1144293.738486
Many people believe that individual actors should and can respond to social and environmental problems by making ethical or conscientious decisions in the marketplace. They encourage consumers to purchase fair trade coffee, buy locally-grown produce, avoid shopping in stores with union-busting tactics, boycott exploitative soda manufacturers, and so on. In this paper I argue against the idea that demand-side decisions on the part of individual consumers can adequately capture the complicated moral dimensions of any given product. I argue this position by pointing to two intermingled features of consumer choice: value incommensurability and market indeterminacy.
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1303823.738498
In this paper, I argue that facts about an individual’s sexual identity are partially or fully grounded in facts about their sexual orientation, where an individual’s sexual identity (e.g. being queer, being straight) has to do with the social position they occupy, and their sexual orientation (e.g. being homosexual, being heterosexual) has to do with the sexual dispositions they have. The main argument for this orientation-based theory is that it gets the right results in cases in which an individual hasn’t come out yet to themselves or others. I reply to Matthew Andler’s argument against the orientation-based theory, which is that it gets the wrong results in cases having to do with (a) intergenerational gay friendship and (b) “str8 dudes,” men who have sex with men but who present themselves online as straight. I also argue that, at least in the case of being queer, Andler’s own cultural theory is consistent with sexual identity facts being partially grounded in sexual orientation facts.
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1317992.738506
This week represents the convergence of so many plotlines that, if it were the season finale of some streaming show, I’d feel like the writers had too many balls in the air. For the benefit of the tiny part of the world that cares what I think, I offer the following comments. …
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1324507.738514
I always enjoy teaching Scanlon’s classic (1982) ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’ in my Ethical Theory seminar. It’s such a rich paper, I get something new out of it upon each re-read. Last time, I posted about how Scanlon misdefined “philosophical utilitarianism”.1 This year, we focused more on the question of how many levels of moral explanation we should expect there to be. …
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1495710.738522
Moral philosophers argue that mechanisms such as reciprocal altruism and indirect reciprocity can result in the evolution of shared interests and a ‘moral sense’ in humans. This article discusses the need to broaden that view when considering the consequences of genetic conflict, in particular, the conflict associated with mate selection. An alternative application of evolutionary arguments to morality has been suggested by biologists such as Richard Alexander, who argue that ethical, moral and legal questions arise purely out of conflicts of interest, and that moral systems (consisting of societal rules or laws) exist to ameliorate those conflicts. Following Alexander, a novel societal rule is proposed that could lessen the negative consequences to men of reproductive conflicts with women.
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1779413.738531
Nathan enjoys spending time on X. He finds discussions on this platform entertaining, though sometimes rude. He thinks that things have changed since Elon Musk took control of the social network to turn it into a political and ideological weapon. …
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1780212.738539
Genecally complete yet authorless artworks seem possible, yet it’s hard to understand how they might really be possible. A natural way to try to resolve this puzzle is by construcng an account of artwork compleon on the model of accounts of artwork meaning that are compable with meaningful yet authorless artworks. I argue, however, that such an account of artwork compleon is implausible. So, I leave the puzzle unresolved.
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1889940.738547
David Hume famously remarked on a curious response we have to certain
works of art that cause us to feel unhappiness or distress:
It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a
well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other
passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more
they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the
spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the
piece is at an end. (1757 [1987: 216])
This odd connection between the simultaneous pleasure and distress
caused by tragic drama is remarked upon in Aristotle’s
Poetics, the earliest philosophical attempt in the West to
construct an aesthetic theory.
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1948036.738554
Ever seen this famous OkCupid graph? The quick summary is just: “Men rate women more highly than women rate men.”
But the quick summary is quite an understatement! Men don’t just find women more attractive; men’s ratings closely follow a bell curve, with 6% of women getting the minimum rating and 6% getting the maximum rating. …
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2071082.738562
In the third scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Gavin Elster asks his old college pal Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) to spy on his wife, because, Elster says, in what we later learn is a set-up, he suspects she’s been possessed by a dead woman. …
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2275757.73857
“Sing, Muse, the rage of Achilles,” the Iliad says at its start. And what enraged Achilles? The fact that Agamemnon took from him a young woman he had captured in battle, who was originally given to him as part of his prize. The disputes at the start of the Iliad aren’t about whether you can take goods and people captured in battle—nobody doubts that. The question is who among the victors gets what. The English language still has more than one word for these goods, including “booty” and “spoils.” Then there’s predation, which comes from the Latin word for these spoils: praeda. The Greeks had the verb ἁρπάζω (harpadzo); in German, the noun is Kriegsbeute.
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2293959.73858
In November, I chided Austrian economists for neglecting the John Haltiwanger’s empirical work on creative destruction:
Around 2000, I discovered that John Haltiwanger, a very mainstream economist, had a pile of empirical evidence vindicating the importance of Schumpeterian creative destruction. …
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2297869.738587
The other day on LinkedIn the following message (written by a political philosopher whose identity is irrelevant here) came into my feed:
It caught my attention because it indirectly relates to a key question that all societies, especially liberal societies, have to answer: up to which point are we not accountable to others for what we do? …
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2300437.738595
Introduction: Cotard delusion—the delusional belief “I am dead”—is named after the French psychiatrist who first described it: Jules Cotard (1880, 1882). Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998) proposed that the idea “I am dead” comes to mind when a neuropathological condition has resulted in complete abolition of emotional responsivity to the world. The idea would arise as a putative explanation: if “I am dead” were true, there would be no emotional responsivity to the world.
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2468095.738606
Miles Tucker’s (2022) ‘Consequentialism and Our Best Selves,’ defends a “maximizing theory of moral motivation”, on which we should have just those motives (among those “available” to us) that would make things go best. …