The Consistency of Probabilistic Regresses. A Reply to Jeanne Peijnenburg and David Atkinson

In a recent paper, Jeanne Peijnenburg and David Atkinson [Studia Logica, 89(3):333-341 (2008)] have challenged the foundationalist rejection of infinitism by giving an example of an infinite, yet explicitly solvable regress of probabilistic justification. So far, however, there has been no criterion for the consistency of infinite probabilistic regresses, and in particular, foundationalists might still question the consistency of the solvable regress proposed by Peijnenburg and Atkinson.     

A Reply to Groves

In this article, I respond to the criticisms of my ideas made by Christopher Groves in his piece “Logic of Choice or Logic of Care? Uncertainty, Technological Mediation and Responsible Innovation”, which was published in this journal. In my refutation of his objections, I firstly argue that, thanks to the work of the European Court of Human Rights, human rights are continuously evolving in Europe and therefore constitute a framework that is open to the future. Secondly, I argue that, through codes of conduct, guidelines, etc., human rights give rise to moral practices, for example in the business sphere, and that they are not abstract and universal like natural rights, but contextual and actuated at the world-regional level, in particular. Finally, I show that a human rights framework is more effective than an ethics of care when it comes to dealing with certain aspects of intergenerational relationships, such as genetic enhancement in humans.     

The Limits of Self-Effacement: A Reply to Wittwer

Philosophical Studies - This article is concerned with the interconnection between three arguments: the Moral Explanatory Dispensability Argument (Moral EDA), the Epistemic Explanatory...     

The Evil of Death: A Reply to Yi

In previous work we have presented a reply to the Lucretian Symmetry, which has it that it is rational to have symmetric attitudes toward prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. Our reply relies on Parfit-style thought-experiments. Here we reply to a critique of our approach by Huiyuhl Yi, which appears in this journal: Brueckner and Fischer on the evil of death. We argue that this critique fails to attend to the specific nature of the thought-experiments (and our associated argument). More specifically, the thought-experiments seek to elicit attitudes about (say) past pleasures per se, and not insofar as such pleasures are connected to more pleasures in the future or a greater total amount of pleasures in one’s life overall.