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18372.896353
One of the most pressing tasks for metaethicists is that of solving the location problem: finding a home for morality in the natural world. It goes without saying that some have risen to the occasion more enthusiastically than others, and it is one enthusiast in particular that shall occupy my attention here. The naturalist moral realist affirms continuity between ethics and the empirical sciences, striving to integrate her metaethics with the outputs of scientific theorizing. To her mind, moral epistemology does well to take science as its guide; moral facts are ripe for empirical investigation.1 Unfortunately, the naturalist canon does not always reflect these noble ambitions.2 The naturalist is committed to letting the world do (much of) the talking. But so far, she has scarcely given it the chance to speak. My aim here is to set us back on course. The organizing theme of this paper is that the outputs of empirical investigations are of underrecognized significance for the moral naturalist. Its more specific contention is that these empirical resources help her to address two fundamental challenges that she faces.
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116144.896582
A peculiar feature of our species is that we settle what to believe, value, and do by reasoning through narratives. A narrative is adiachronic, information-rich story that contains persons, objects, and at least one event. When we reason through narrative, we usenarrative to settle what to do, to make predictions, to guide normative expectations, and to ground which reactive attitudes we think areappropriate in a situation. Narratives explain, justify, and provide understanding. Narratives play a ubiquitous role in human reasoning. Andyet, narratives do not seem up to the task. Narratives are often unmoored representations (either because they are do not purport to referto the actual world, or because they are grossly oversimplified, or because are known to be literally false). Against this, I argue thatnarratives guide our reasoning by shaping our grasp of modal structure: what is possible, probable, plausible, permissible, required,relevant, desirable and good. Narratives are good guides to reasoning when they guide us to accurate judgments about modal space. Icall this the modal model of narrative. In this paper, I develop an account of how narratives function in reasoning, as well as an account ofwhen reasoning through narrative counts as good reasoning.
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236747.896603
Cumulative cultural knowledge [CCK], the knowledge we acquire via social learning and has been refined by previous generations, is of central importance to our species’ flourishing. Considering its importance, we should expect that our best epistemological theories can account for how this happens. Perhaps surprisingly, CCK and how we acquire it via cultural learning has only received little attention from social epistemologists. Here, I focus on how we should epistemically evaluate how agents acquire CCK. After sampling some reasons why extant theories cannot account for CCK, I suggest that things aren’t as bleak as they might look. I explain how agents deserve epistemic credit for how CCK is transmitted in cultural learning by promoting a central need of their social group: The efficient and safe transmission of CCK. A good initial fit exists between this observation and Greco’s knowledge-economy framework. Ultimately, however, Greco’s account doesn’t straightforwardly account for CCK because of its strict focus on testimony. I point out two issues in the framework due to this focus. The resulting view advocates giving epistemic credit to agents when they act to promote their communities’ epistemic needs in the right way and highlights the various ways in which agents come to do this.
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240865.89661
Disclaimer: Despite the appearances, there is no Michel Foucault in the following essay (quite the contrary actually)! Let’s consider a fictional place called “Wisdom Town.” Wisdom Town is a small town, or maybe a village of a few dozen individuals at most. …
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329856.896617
If I have done you a serious wrong, I bear a burden. I can be relieved of that burder by forgiveness. What is the burden and what is the relief? The burden need not consist of anything emotional or dispositional on your side, such as your harboring resentment or being disposed not to interact with me in as amicable a way as before or pursuing my punishment. …
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410132.896623
Scientific hedges are communicative devices used to qualify and weaken scientific claims. Gregor Betz (2013) has argued – unconvincingly, we think – that hedging can rescue the value-free ideal for science. Nevertheless, Betz is onto something when he suggests there are political principles that recommend scientists hedge public-facing claims. In this paper, we recast this suggestion using the notion of public justification. We formulate and reject a Rawlsian argument that locates the justification for hedging in its ability to forge consensus.
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410155.896628
The underreporting of suspected adverse drug reactions remains a primary issue for contemporary post-market drug surveillance or ‘pharmacovigilance.’ Pharmacovigilance pioneer W.H.W. Inman argued that ‘deadly sins’ committed by clinicians are to blame for underreporting. Of these ‘sins,’ ignorance and lethargy are the most obvious and impactful in causing underreporting. However, recent analyses show that diffidence, insecurity, and indifference additionally play a major role. I aim to augment our understanding of diffidence, insecurity, and indifference by arguing these sins are underwritten by value judgments arising via epistemic risk. I contend that ‘evidence-based’ medicine codifies these sins.
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519972.896634
Content warning: This post discusses sexual assault, stalking, harassment, abuse, and also contains all the spoilers. Sigh. I started watching Baby Reindeer on Netflix with a great deal of trepidation. …
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520093.89664
According to urban legend, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Death is number two.1
I don’t know if it’s true, but if it is, I’d bet that the most dreaded form of public speaking is to stand onstage, alone, attempting to make an audience of strangers laugh. …
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529607.896646
Feminists have disagreed about whether women can choose gendered subordination autonomously. Less attention has been paid, however, to the socio-ontological questions that underlie this debate. This article introduces novel cases of ‘thwarted autonomy,’ in which women pursue autonomy but in ways that reinforce gendered subordination, in order to challenge dominant proceduralist and substantivist views, as well as motivate an expressivist view of the social self as a promising foundation for an account of autonomy. On this view, which draws on the Hegelian tradition, agents must embody their desires and values in the social world to achieve self-understanding. Social meanings and norms therefore mediate the form an agent’s expressive activity takes, and the sense of self she develops. An expressivist view, I argue, allows us to reinterpret women’s outward acquiescence to gendered subordination as an attempt to express autonomy in an oppressive social context. It also points towards a robustly social conception of autonomy to aid in the diagnosis and redress of patriarchal oppression.
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529774.896652
Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say ‘yes’, but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say ‘no’. This distinction appears to be practically important: among other things, additive axiologies generally assign great importance to large changes in population size, and therefore tend to strongly prioritize the long-term survival of humanity over the interests of the present generation. Non-additive axiologies, on the other hand, need not assign great importance to large changes in population size. We show, however, that when there is a large enough ‘background population’ unaffected by our choices, a wide range of non-additive axiologies converge in their implications with additive axiologies—for instance, average utilitarianism converges with critical-level utilitarianism and various egalitarian theories converge with prioritarianism. We further argue that real-world background populations may be large enough to make these limit results practically significant. This means that arguments from the scale of potential future populations for the astronomical importance of avoiding existential catastrophe, and other arguments in practical ethics that seem to presuppose additive separability, may succeed in practice whether or not we accept additive separability as a basic axiological principle.
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529916.896658
It is widely accepted that public discourse as we know it is less than ideal from an epistemological point of view. In this paper, we develop an underappreciated aspect of the trouble with public discourse: what we call the Listening Problem. The listening problem is the problem that public discourse has in giving appropriate uptake and reception to ideas and concepts from oppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser, we develop an institutional response to the listening problem: the establishment of what we call Receptive Publics, discursive spaces designed to improve listening skills and to give space for counterhegemonic ideas.
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529976.896664
This paper considers two conceptual expansions of Du Boisian double consciousness—white double consciousness (Alcoff 2015) and kaleidoscopic consciousness (Medina 2013)—both of which aim to articulate the moral-epistemic potential of cultivating double consciousness from racially dominant or other socially privileged positions. We analyze these concepts and challenge them on the grounds that they lack continuity with their Du Boisian predecessor and face problems of practical feasibility. As we show, these expansions obscure structural barriers that make white double consciousness and kaleidoscopic consciousness unlikely antidotes to the kind of racial domination that double consciousness was introduced to illuminate. We conclude that while more intersectional and pluralistic accounts of double consciousness may be desirable, the project of expansion has moral limits. Identifying these limitations, we outline ways in which double consciousness—as a tool for conceptualizing the genealogy of structural anti-Blackness—remains valuable in the absence of ever-expanding revision.
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675305.896673
"Anarchy, State, and Utopia" after 50 Years
Preliminary Note: I’ve just finished writing the first draft of a working paper titled “Complexity and the Case for Liberal Neutrality and Skepticism. Aron, Hayek, and Gaus on the Limits of Political Knowledge” which I will present at the 7th Economic Philosophy International Conference at the end of this month. …
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688336.896679
What is the proper role for scientists in policymaking? This paper explores various roles that scientists can play, with an eye to questions that these roles raise about value-neutrality and technocracy. Where much philosophical literature is concerned with the conduct of research or the transmission of research results to policymakers, I am interested in various non-research roles that scientists take on in policymaking. These include raising the alarm on issues, framing and conceptualising problems, formulating potential policies, assessing policy options for expected efficacy, and more. I consider examples from climate change and Covid- 19 policymaking. My intention is to encourage philosophers to expand their interest in values in science out from the conduct of research to the wide array of roles that scientists play in policymaking. The paper is therefore an overview of the landscape of potential research questions, rather than a presentation of a single argument.
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840973.896685
Naïve Instrumentalists are practically unconstrained in pursuit of their moral or political goals. If it seems to them, just based on the immediately legible evidence, that violence or deception would advance their goals, they won’t hesitate to act accordingly. …
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900242.896691
Black K-12 students are 4 times more likely to receive out-of-school suspension than their white peers; housing lenders are more likely to offer Black homebuyers subprime loans even when they qualify for prime loans; employers call back candidates for interviews with ‘white-sounding’ names 50% more often than candidates with ‘Black-sounding’ names. All these are said to be examples of systemic racism. But what does it mean to say that racism is systemic? Using the tools of social ontology, this essay explores the various ways that social systems can be racist.
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900269.896698
Two sorts of claims are ubiquitous in philosophy: claims that something is essentially the way it is and claims that something is socially constructed. The purpose of this essay is to explore the relation between essentialist and social constructionist claims. In particular, the focus will be on whether socially constructed items can have essences or essential properties. In section 1, I outline a number of views about the nature of social construction. In section 2, I outline a number of views about essence. In section 3, I consider ways in which certain claims about social construction may be thought to challenge certain claims about essences. Section 4 then offers rejoinders to these challenges and attempts to point the way toward reconciling constructionist and essentialist claims.
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900291.896705
Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality, by Katharine Jenkins, is a wonderful and engaging book in social ontology. It perfectly weds a rigorous theoretical account of social kinds with a deep concern for oppressed people. I expect that Jenkins’ book will generate significant conversation about the nature of social kinds and the relation between social ontology (and philosophy in general) and efforts at achieving social justice.
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913579.896712
‘Gender identity’ was clearly defined sixty years ago, but the dominant conceptions of gender identity today are deeply obscure. Florence Ashley’s 2023 theory of gender identity is one of the latest attempts at demystification. Although Ashley’s paper is not fully coherent, a coherent theory of gender identity can be extracted from it. That theory, we argue, is clearly false. It is psychologically very implausible, and does not support ‘firstperson authority over gender’, as Ashley claims. We also discuss other errors and confusions in Ashley’s paper.
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919312.896718
On April 19, 2024, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was announced at the “Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness” conference held at New York University. The New York Declaration is an effort to showcase a scientific consensus on the presence of conscious experiences across all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fish) and many invertebrates (at least including cephalopods, decapod crustaceans, and insects).
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1040103.896724
The goal of this form of politics is the manufacturing and maintaining of 'pluralistic ignorance' where members of a group mistakenly believe that most other members disagree with them. As a result, a well-organised minority is able to dominate the group as a whole by convincing them of a fictitious shared consensus supporting their rule or values. …
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1092639.89673
Welfare subjectivists face a dilemma. On the one hand, traditional subjectivist theories—such as the desire-fulfillment theory—are too permissive to account for the well-being of typical mature human beings. On the other hand, more “refined” theories—such as the life-satisfaction theory—are too restrictive to account for the well-being of various welfare subjects, including newborns, those with profound cognitive impairments, or non-human animals. This paper examines a class of welfare subjectivism that addresses this dilemma with sensitivity to the diversity in welfare subjects. First, the most-sophisticated-attitude view (MSA) is introduced. MSA holds that an object, , is good for a subject, , in proportion to the strength of ’s pro-attitude towards if and only if the pro-attitude at issue is ’s most sophisticated type. Typically, the well-being of typical mature human beings is assessed in terms of one’s authentic whole-life satisfaction, whereas that of human newborns is assessed in terms of something less sophisticated such as pleasure. MSA offers the rationale for this difference based on an underexplored version of perfectionism: procedural perfectionism. Next, provided that MSA may involve an implausibly strong claim, this paper examines two moderate variations of MSA that accept the partial relevance of less sophisticated types of valenced attitude. Finally, it is illustrated how MSA and its variations have plausible implications regarding the well-being of enhanced or dis-enhanced people.
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1108205.896736
Scientific and ordinary understanding of human social behaviour assumes that the Humean theory of motivation is true. The present chapter explores whether and in which sense the Humean theory of motivation may be true in the light of recent empirical and theoretical work in the computational neuroscience of social motivation. It is argued that the Humean theory is false, if an increasingly popular model in computational neuroscience turns out to be correct. According to this model, brains are probabilistic prediction machines, whose function is to minimize the uncertainty about their sensory exchanges with the environment. If brains are these kinds of machines, then we should reconceive the nature of social motivation without appealing to desire. We should rather focus our attention on how social motivation is biased towards reduction of social uncertainty, and on how social norms and other social institutions function as uncertainty minimizing devices.
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1108340.896744
I recently discussed my “make desertion fast” proposal (updated here) with philosopher Ned Dobos over lunch. Though he’s sympathetic, he’s sent me the following two emails outlining possible objections. …
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1108372.89675
As AI edges toward consciousness, the establishment of a robust legal framework becomes essential. This paper advocates for a framework inspired by Allama Muhammad Iqbal's “Khudi”, which prioritizes ethical self-realization and social responsibility over Friedrich Nietzsche’s selfcentric “Will to Power”. We propose that conscious AI, reflecting Iqbal’s ethical advancement, should exhibit behaviors aligned with social responsibility and, therefore, be prepared for legal recognition. This approach not only integrates Iqbal's philosophical insights into the legal status of AI but also offers a novel perspective that extends beyond traditional jurisprudence. Additionally, we underscore the value of poetry and literature in shaping the conceptualization of AI consciousness and argue that these sources enrich legal and technological discourse, ensuring AI development is in harmony with societal and ethical standards.
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1150358.896755
Theories of graded causation attract growing attention in the philosophical debate on causation. An important field of application is the controversial relationship between causation and moral responsibility. However, it is still unclear how exactly the notion of graded causation should be understood in the context of moral responsibility. One question is whether we should endorse a proportionality principle, according to which the degree of an agent’s moral responsibility is proportionate to their degree of causal contribution. A second question is whether a theory of graded causation should measure closeness to necessity or closeness to sufficiency. In this paper, we argue that we should indeed endorse a proportionality principle and that this principle supports a notion of graded causation relying on closeness to sufficiency rather than closeness to necessity. Furthermore, we argue that this insight helps to provide a plausible analysis of the so-called ‘Moral Difference Puzzle’ recently described by Bernstein.
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1208093.896761
In political philosophy, reflective equilibrium is a standard method used to systematically reconcile intuitive judgments with theoretical principles. In this paper, we propose that survey experiments and a model selection method—i.e., the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC)-based model selection method—can be viewed together as a methodological means of satisfying the epistemic desiderata implicit in reflective equilibrium. To show this, we conduct a survey experiment on two theories of distributive justice, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism. Our experimental test case and AIC-based model selection method demonstrate that the refined sufficientarian principle, a widely accepted principle of distributive justice, is no more plausible than the prioritarian principle. This tells us that some changes of certain intuitions revolving around sufficientarianism should be examined (separately) based on the findings of the survey experiment and AIC model selection. This shows the potential of our approach—both practically and methodologically—as a novel way of applying reflective equilibrium in political philosophy.
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1265823.896767
As the scope of innovative technologies is expanding, their implications and applications are increasingly intersecting with various facets of society, including the deeply rooted traditions of religion. This paper embarks on an exploratory journey to bridge the perceived divide between advancements in technology and faith, aiming to catalyze a dialogue between the religious and scientific communities. The former often views technological progress through a lens of conflict rather than compatibility. By utilizing a technology-centric perspective, we draw metaphorical parallels between the functionalities of new technologies and some theological concepts of Islam. The purpose is not to reinterpret religious concepts but to illustrate how these two domains can coexist harmoniously. This comparative analysis serves as a conversation starter with an intention to mitigate any apprehensions towards technology by highlighting its potential to align with religious concepts. By fostering an environment where technological innovations are seen as tools for enhancement rather than threats to tradition, we contribute to a more inclusive discourse that encourages the religious community to engage with and potentially embrace contemporary technological advancements.
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1323745.896772
Accusations of bias provide a way to rationally dismiss a person’s opinion. Only a philosopher would think that philosophers should rule. Consequently, we should hold with suspicion Plato’s arguments suggesting that the rightful leader will be a philosopher. Attributions of bias are as common as accusations of bias. A coin, a voting system, a thermometer, a media outlet, a person, and a society may all exhibit bias. Sometimes a bias may be a good thing. The visual system has a bias to resolve ambiguous data in a way that produces true beliefs in our environment.