How Indirect Can Indirect Utilitarianism Be?*

Most act‐utilitarians now reject the direct utilitarianism of Bentham. They do so because they are convinced of what I call the paradox of utilitarianism—the thought that one cannot maximize happiness if one is trying to maximize happiness. Instead, they adopt some form of indirect utilitarianism (IU), arguing that the optimal decision procedure may differ markedly from the criterion of rightness for actions. Here I distinguish between six different versions of indirect utilitarianism, arguing that the weaker versions of IU also fall prey to the paradox of utilitarianism, while the stronger versions of IU violate an overwhelmingly plausible moral principle, the principle that one ought to V only if one can V intentionally.     

Could There Be a Superhuman Species?

Transhumanism is the school of thought that advocates the use of technology to enhance the human species, to the point where some supporters consider that a new species altogether could arise. Even some critics think this at least a technological possibility. Some supporters also believe the emergence of a new, improved, superhuman species raises no special ethical questions. Through an examination of the metaphysics of species, and an analysis of the essence of the human species, I argue that the existence of an embodied, genuinely superhuman species is a metaphysical impossibility. Finally, I point out an interesting ethical consideration that this metaphysical truth raises.     

How Valuable Is It?

The Journal of Value Inquiry -     

How Does It Feel to Be a Star?

Over the past three decades, research on the social dimensions of emotions has grown exponentially, particularly in the area of “emotion management.” In this project, we will attempt to add to this body of research by studying the social aspects of labeling or “instantiating” feelings. The data for the project come from televised red-carpet interviews conducted with celebrities immediately prior to awards ceremonies. By focusing on the generic aspects of the emotional claims-making put forth by interviewers and interviewees, we demonstrate how the labeling of emotions is an interpretive, interactive task.

Is the Reasonable Person a Person of Virtue?

Res Publica - The ‘reasonable person standard’ (RPS) is often called on in difficult legal cases as the last resource to be appealed to when other solutions run out. Its complexity...     

How Superduper Does a Physicalist Supervenience Need to Be?

The standard formulations of the supervenience relation present the supervenience of one set of properties on another in terms of property correlations, without placing any constraints on the dependency relation concerned. This does not ensure that properties supervening upon phys-icalistically acceptable base properties are not themselves emergent in a way at odds with materialism. So physicalism needs 'superdupervenience'. I argue that, where supervenient and base properties are instantiated in the same individuals, Horgan's requirement of robust explanation is neither sufficient nor necessary for superdupervenience. His paradigm case is compatible with the supervenient property's being emergent. This and other unacceptable possibilities may be ruled out by means of a metaphysical constraint on the supervenience relation, which must be internal. Each individual causal power in the set associated with a given supervenient property must be numerically identical with a causal power in the set associated with its base property. Satisfying this condition is all that is needed to render supervenience superduper. In fact a wide variety of non-reductive physicalist accounts are implicitly or explicitly designed to meet this condition, and so are more similar than they seem.     

How Many Parents Should There Be in a Family?

In this article, I challenge the widespread presumption that a child should have exactly two parents. I consider the pros and cons of various numbers of parents for the people most directly affected – the children themselves and their parents. The number of parents, as well as the ratio of parents to children, may have an impact on what resources are available, what relationships can develop between parents and children, what level of conflict can be expected in the family, as well as the costs involved in parenting and the experience of parenting a child. Indirectly, there is also an effect on who will have the opportunity to be a parent, as well as on wider social issues that I mention but do not discuss. Having considered all these factors, I conclude that there is some reason to believe that three or more parents is usually better than one or two, especially if children are to have siblings, which is typically beneficial. However, these reasons are not strong enough to support a general presumption in favor of any particular number. We should therefore jettison the two-parent presumption and make different numbers of parents more socially accepted as well as legally possible.     

How is Christ Present to the World?*

Abstract: The issue of how Christ is present to the world covers many themes. Christ is the proper presence of God, made known to the world through the witnessing activity of the church. In this, the Holy Spirit plays an important role. Furthermore, in so far as it is God's intention to be present to the world in this way, we may see a link between the notions of God's presence in Christ, providence and sacramentality.     

How Could There Be True Causal Claims Without There Being Special Causal Facts in the World?

Some philosophers of physics recently expressed their skepticism about causation (Norton 2003b, 2007). However, this is not new. The view that causation does not refer to any ontological category perhaps can be attributed to Hume, Kant and Russell. On the other hand, some philosophers (Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe) view causation as a physical process and some others (Cartwright) view causation as making claims about capacities possessed by objects. The issue about the ontological status of causal claims involves issues concerning the ontological status of capacity, modality and dispositional claims. In this paper, my goal is to show that without engaging metaphysical debates about the ontological status of causal claims, it can be shown that we can objectively assign truth values to these statements. I argue that for causal claims to be objective we don't need to postulate the existence of special facts (specific to causal claims) in addition to ordinary physical facts described by physical theories. This, I think, is enough to justify the usefulness of this concept in certain branches (may be all) of science. Once this is achieved, there is no need to engage in unnecessary metaphysical debates. So, even if advanced physical theories don't mention this notion, causal reasoning can still be important in understanding the world not in the sense that science discovers special ontological category called causation but in the sense that we come to know certain facts about the world.     

Can There Be Full Excuses for Morally Wrong Actions?*

Most people (and philosophers) distinguish between performing a morally wrong action and being blameworthy for having performed that action, and believe that an individual can be fully excused for having performed a wrong action. My purpose is to reject this claim. More precisely, I defend what I call the “Dependence Claim”: A's doing X is wrong only if A is blameworthy for having done X. I consider three cases in which, according to the traditional view, a wrong action could be excused: duress, mental illness, and mistake. I try to show that the reasons for excusing in either case are not relevantly distinguishable from the reasons for claiming that the prima facie wrong action is not wrong all things considered.     

How Can That Be Me? Developmental Disruption in a Young Adult

A young adult who experiences a psychotic break is at high risk of feeling that his or her life and sense of Self before the de-compensation were fraudulent. This article describes a young man who suffered such a trauma and deeply felt this sense of fraudulence and covers how his treatment developed. We established a dual narrative: one that explicated the precursors to his break and one that showed how the life that he had previously held to be his personal story were both authentic. The capacity to integrate the two created a sense of wholeness that permitted him to re-establish himself in his everyday life.     

How Kantian Must Kantian Constructivists Be?

Kantian constructivists locate the source of normativity in the rational nature of valuing agents. Some further argue that accepting this premise thereby commits one to accepting the intrinsic or unconditioned value of rational nature itself. Whereas much of the critical literature on this “regress on conditions” argument has focused either on the cogency of the inference from the value‐conferring capacity of the will to the unconditional value of that capacity itself or on the plausibility of the initial constructivist premise, my aim is to press the argument from a different direction by asking just how Kantian the constructivist needs to be in order to support a regress on conditions argument. Specifically, I maintain that the argument succeeds only given a full‐fledged Kantian moral psychology, including a presupposition of transcendental freedom. If correct, this could have implications regarding the compatibility of Kantian ethics and philosophic naturalism.     

How Can Decision Making Be Improved?

ABSTRACT— The optimal moment to address the question of how to improve human decision making has arrived. Thanks to 50 years of research by judgment and decision-making scholars, psychologists have developed a detailed picture of the ways in which human judgment is bounded. This article argues that the time has come to focus attention on the search for strategies that will improve bounded judgment because decision-making errors are costly and are growing more costly, decision makers are receptive, and academic insights are sure to follow from research on improvement. In addition to calling for research on improvement strategies, this article organizes the existing literature pertaining to improvement strategies and highlights promising directions for future research.