Towards an epistemology of religious traditions

Summary Starting from the acceptance of the Egalitarian Principle I exhibited a version which I considered too lax (BEP) and one I considered too strict (NEP), arriving at a version (MEP) which allows that there can be tolerance-limiting reasons for adhering to traditions but only if they are based on unreasoned knowledge claims. In fact, I hold that the situation most of us find ourselves in restricts such claims on religious topics to very general ones. Hence the choice between NEP and MEP is not significant. It follows that we should take up one of two positions concerning religious traditions: either we argue from the shared assumptions of a variety of traditions without genuine participation in any of them; or we justify participation in one of them by noting various marks of reliability, such as serendipitous understanding. A version of this paper was read at the Faith and Reason Conference held at the Catholic Institute in Strathfield, October 5 and 6, 1996. I would like to thank all who participated in the discussion of my paper on that occasion. I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for Sophia for their helpful comments.     

Raising Hope: Hope Inducement and Voter Turnout

Politicians routinely invoke hope on the campaign trail, presumably because they believe that inducements of hope attract supporters and impel citizens to the polls. Social psychologists and political scientists similarly posit that activating positive emotions like hope and other powerful psychological mechanisms has the capacity to stimulate prosocial behavior, like voting in elections. In this study, I subject these claims to empirical scrutiny by designing and implementing a series of randomized field experiments to examine whether inducing hope raises electoral participation. Overall, I find little evidence that hope affects voting behavior, but I acknowledge the null effects may reflect the [im]potency of the treatment.     

“Paid to Endure”: Paid Research Participation,Passivity, and the Goods of Work

A growing literature documents the existence of individuals who make a living by participating in phase I clinical trials for money. Several scholars have noted that the concerns about risks, consent, and exploitation raised by this phenomenon apply to many (other) jobs, too, and therefore proposed improving subject protections by regulating phase I trial participation as work. This article contributes to the debate over this proposal by exploring a largely neglected worry. Unlike most (other) workers, subjects are not paid to produce or achieve anything but to have things done to them. I argue that this passivity is problematic for reasons of distributive justice. Specifically, it fails to enable subjects to realize what Gheaus and Herzog call “the goods of work”—a failure not offset by adequate opportunities to realize these goods outside of the research context. I also consider whether granting subjects worker-type protections would accommodate this concern.     

Overlapping Consensus or Marketplace of Religions? Rawls and Smith

In this paper, I examine the claim that Rawls’s overlapping consensus is too narrow to allow most mainstream religions’ participation in political discourse. I do so by asking whether religious exclusion is a consequence of belief or action, using conversion as a paradigm case. After concluding that this objection to Rawls is, in fact, defensible, and that the overlapping consensus excludes both religious belief and action, I examine an alternative approach to managing religious pluralism as presented by Adam Smith. I show that Smith’s so-called “marketplace of religions” assumes and encourages religious conversion. I then offer objections to Smith’s approach from Rawls’s point of view, concluding that, while Rawls cannot adequately respond to the Smithian challenge, in the end the two positions are complimentary.     

Non-visual consciousness and visual images in blindsight

In a recent response paper to Brogaard (2011a), Morten Overgaard and Thor Grünbaum argue that my case for the claim that blindsight subjects are not visually conscious of the stimuli they correctly identify rests on a mistaken necessary criterion for determining whether a conscious experience is visual or non-visual. Here I elaborate on the earlier argument while conceding that the question of whether blindsight subjects are visually conscious of the visual stimuli they correctly identify largely is an empirical question. I conclude by sketching a method for testing whether blindsight subjects have visual consciousness of stimuli presented to them in their blind field.     

Life Stories of Latvian Lutheran Pastors

I have interviewed leading Latvian pastors and present here a series of autobiographical tributes in grateful recognition of their work. When I look at the typed pages on my table, it seems strange to me that it could all fit on a few sheets of paper: the pain, the suffering, the love and the victory, many victories. These pages are the fruit of long conversations with people I had known for many years - now I think I had not really known them before. Their deepest thoughts and longings had been hidden from the casual enquirer. For the first time in my life I have played the part of the journalist, one who enquires with the purpose of understanding and communicating this knowledge to others. A mysterious, even sacramental world has revealed itself to me: the world of the human soul, the world of a pastor's soul as he leads his flock through vicissitudes to the green pastures of heavenly life here on earth. I asked myself whether the pastors had always known the way, whether they had always seen the mighty hand of God in action. I was reminded that these people are our neighbours too; that as human beings it is they who sometimes need our help. The Latvian people owe their freedom to their pastors. I would like this brief collection to be a gesture of thanks to all the other pastors whose stories have not been told.     

Valuing, Desiring and Normative Priority

Judgement internalism claims that our evaluative judgements will motivate us to act appropriately, at least in so far as we are rational. I examine how this claim should be understood, with particular focus on whether valuing enjoys a kind of 'normative priority' over desiring. I consider and reject views according to which valuing something provides one with a reason to be moved; this claim of normative priority and the readings of internalism it suggests are too strong. I also reject an interpretation which eschews claims of normative priority, whilst maintaining that valuing nevertheless rationally commits or requires one to be motivated; this rejection of normative priority and the reading of internalism it supports are too weak. In the final sections I sketch the understanding of judgement internalism I favour, and defend it against objections.     

Proper environment and the SEP account of biological function

The survival enhancing propensity (SEP) account has a crucial role to play in the analysis of proper function. However, a central feature of the account, its specification of the proper environment to which functions are relativized, is seriously underdeveloped. In this paper, I argue that existent accounts of proper environment fail because they either allow too many or too few characters to count as proper functions. While SEP accounts retain their promise, they are unworkable because of their inability to specify this important feature. However, I suggest that this problem can be overcome by the application of a new strategy for specifying proper environment that is grounded in the operation of natural selection and I conclude by offering a first approximation of such an account.     

Keeping Out Extremists: Refugees,Would-Be Immigrants,and Ideological Exclusion

Many people want to live in liberal democracies because they are liberal and democratic. Yet it would be mistaken, indeed naïve, to assume that this applies to all would-be residents. Just as some inhabitants of liberal democracies oppose one or more fundamental liberal-democratic values and principles (e.g. the rule of law, freedoms of conscience and speech, rights to private property and to political participation), so there are foreign would-be residents who do so, who might include individuals with e.g. Jihadist, Neo-Nazi, and radical anarchist views. Proceeding on the assumption that there exists no unconditional moral right to immigrate, this article asks whether it is ever morally permissible for liberal democracies to deny residence to nonnationals based on evidence that they personally hold extremist views. I argue that this is sometimes the case. Specifically, my contention is that even if we adopt a cosmopolitan perspective on which states are not allowed to prioritise the interests of their own citizens and residents over those of foreign nonresidents, there are two conditions under which such exclusions are justified even when refugees are being refused admission (although, as I suggest, states might be morally required in such cases to admit other refugees instead).     

Fiduciary Duties and the Ethics of Public Apology

The practice of official apology has a fairly poor reputation. Dismissed as ‘crocodile tears’ or cheap grace, such apologies are often seen by the public as an easy alternative to more punitive or expensive ways of taking real responsibility. I focus on what I call the role‐playing criticism: the argument that someone who offers an apology in public cannot be appropriately apologetic precisely because they are only playing a role. I offer a qualified defence of official apologies against this objection, considering them through the lens of fiduciary duties. This focus draws our attention to formal or impersonal relationships that are nevertheless normatively rich, capable of sustaining trust, concern, and care. At the same time, I highlight several pitfalls for fiduciary apologisers, including the tension between apology as a mode of truth telling and the duty of confidentiality. I consider whether the fiduciary apologiser, in reflecting on her fiduciary obligations, has ‘one thought too many’ for genuine apology, and argue that the issue of mixed motives is not limited to fiduciary contexts, cautioning against excessive idealism in our conception of apology. I conclude with some reflections on possible conflicts between fiduciary obligations and the conscientious desire to apologise.     

The Value of Choice and the Choice to Value: Expanding the Discussion about Fetal Life within Prochoice Advocacy

In this essay, I provide evidence that a new generation of prochoice advocates wishes to move away from defending abortion rights via the view that fetal life has little or no value (for example, as Mary Anne Warren does in her “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”) and toward a more complex view of abortion rights. This newer view simultaneously grants that fetuses are more than simply “clumps of cells,” that they are, to some extent, entities that possess some degree of value, and also that women still have the right to decide whether they wish to continue a pregnancy (for example, as can be found in the writings of Rosalind Hursthouse, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Margaret Olivia Little). Prima facie, this may sound like an impossible task—an instance of “having your cake and eating it too”—but I will show throughout my paper that, and how, such a task can indeed be accomplished.     

A strategy for assessing closure

This paper looks at an argument strategy for assessing the epistemic closure principle. This is the principle that says knowledge is closed under known entailment; or (roughly) if S knows p and S knows that p entails q, then S knows that q. The strategy in question looks to the individual conditions on knowledge to see if they are closed. According to one conjecture, if all the individual conditions are closed, then so too is knowledge. I give a deductive argument for this conjecture. According to a second conjecture, if one (or more) condition is not closed, then neither is knowledge. I give an inductive argument for this conjecture. In sum, I defend the strategy by defending the claim that knowledge is closed if, and only if, all the conditions on knowledge are closed. After making my case, I look at what this means for the debate over whether knowledge is closed.     

Gamete donation and parental responsibility

Abstract Unlike surrogacy and cloning, reproduction via gamete donation is widely assumed to be morally unproblematic. Recently, a number of authors have argued that this assumption is mistaken: gamete donors, they claim, have parental responsibilities that they typically treat too lightly. In this paper I argue that the 'parental neglect' case against gamete donation fails. I begin by examining and rejecting the view that gamete donors have parental responsibilities; I claim that none of the current accounts of parenthood provides good reason for ascribing parenthood to gamete donors. I then argue that even if gamete donors do have parental responsibilities for 'their' children, it is not clear that they treat these responsibilities too lightly. I conclude the paper by examining the wider question of just what kind of responsibilities gamete donors might have towards the children that they have a role in creating.     

Linguistics and the explanatory economy

I present a novel, collaborative, methodology for linguistics: what I call the ‘explanatory economy’. According to this picture, multiple models/theories are evaluated based on the extent to which they complement one another with respect to data coverage. I show how this model can resolve a long-standing worry about the methodology of generative linguistics: that by creating too much distance between data and theory, the empirical credentials of this research program are tarnished. I provide justifications of such methodologically central distinctions as the competence/performance and core/periphery distinction, and then show how we can understand the push for simplicity in the history of generative grammar in this light.

     

Prisoners on the Fireline: The Application of Ethical Principles and Guidelines to Prison Fire Camps

Our society gives certain rights and protections to those who are punished and incarcerated, deeming them a vulnerable group in need of additional protections because they are under state control. Despite these protections, prisoners are still susceptible to mistreatment and abuse. This paper delves into one area in which prisoners are particularly vulnerable—the use of prison labor to fight wildfires in the western United States. In this paper, I first broadly discuss prison labor, before going into the current ethical principles and guidelines in the field of corrections that address the treatment of prisoners and prison labor. I argue that these principles and guidelines should be augmented to help those in corrections to make decisions about what is ethical; suggesting that how researchers evaluate proposed research projects could serve as a model for decision-making. I then introduce prison fire camps, considering whether they are ethical by research ethics principles, and suggesting how they can be changed to better reflect the values professed by our society.     

Touched by genius: on animals and madmen

Abstract

The paper starts with the question, posed by Wittgenstein, whether animals can feign or act as if they are performing in a theatre. It is argued that the idea that they cannot is widespread, not only in philosophy but also in biology or poetry. Animals are generally considered to be too honest for that. A second question is whether there are people who are too honest for feigning or acting. Foucault’s famous discussion about madmen sheds some light on this question. Two concepts play an important role in his discussion: ‘innocence’ and ‘genius’. These concepts are not only discussed in relationship to Foucault but also in relationship to Lorenz and Nietzsche. It will be argued that both concepts play an important role in combating an overly rationalist or logocentric ethics. According to the thinkers discussed in this article, an ethics which denies the animality in man is nothing else but dangerous.     

An examination of the assumptions in the demand characteristics thesis: With special reference to the Velten mood induction procedure

We examine the assumptions that are generally made when it is argued that a set of experimental findings is due to the subjects' compliance to demand characteristics. There is little evidence supporting many of these assumptions: that many experimental subjects disbelieve the cover story given them, that they are eager to search for clues revealing the study's actual purpose, that they are highly sophisticated in making inferences on the basis of any cues they detect, and that they are motivated to confirm the experimenter's hypothesis, whether to aid science or to make their participation meaningful. Our argument is applied to studies contending that results obtained with the Velten mood induction procedure are substantially affected by demand compliance. In particular, we question an assumption often made by these studies and point out the following: A demonstration that subjects can accurately mimic the reactions of participants given the Velten statements when they are explicitly asked to do so, or when they are instructed how to simulate these reactions, does not necessarily mean that subjects will voluntarily engage in such accurate play-acting when they are not asked to engage in this make-believe. Research has also noted that a number of Velten-induced reactions are probably too subtle to have been deliberately faked.     

Emigration and community

In this paper I consider Gillian Brock’s and Michael Blake’s discussion of emigration in Debating Brain Drain in relation to the particular case of South Africa, and explore whether skilled white people have a duty to remain in the country. Focusing on the role of community in this debate, I argue that communities and allegiances in South Africa are still too divided and antagonistic for them to play the duty-grounding role that Brock requires.     

The Primary Self and Related Concepts in Jung, Klein, and Isaacs

In this paper, I have tried to re-examine my understanding of early psychic processes and contents. This has involved comparing and contrasting the ideas of Jung, Klein, Isaacs, and Fordham, with an emphasis on the contributions of Fordham. Fordham's postulate of a primary self that deintegrates and reintegrates is a model of the mind that combines structure and dynamics, and which, moreover, helps to describe what is observed in infant observations and infant research. Infant observation has been used to illustrate these concepts, and clinical material used to show how the same concepts can be used to describe impairments to psychic development. To pursue this study I have had to construct for myself models that describe and explain. I am aware that they are just as inaccurate as they might be accurate, because they imply that there is an answer to the questions I am asking, and that there is a way of describing and explaining what 'the answer' is. 'Nature is always too strong for principle', wrote Hume (Hume 1751, p. 121), and this is particularly true of the ultimately unknowable self.     

On Typologies for Relating Science and Religion

Geoffrey Cantor and Chris Kenny have criticized attempts to classify various ways of relating science and religion. They hold that all typologies are too simple and too static to illuminate the complex and changing historical interactions of science and religion. I argue that typologies serve a useful pedagogical function even though every particular interaction must be seen in its historical context. I acknowledge the problems in making distinctions between categories of classification and examine some alternative typologies that have been proposed. I leave as an open question whether my fourfold typology is applicable to differing religious traditions. Finally I consider some parallels between typologies for science‐religion interactions and typologies for relationships between religions. Can our discussions be both interdisciplinary and interreligious without the danger of imposing the conceptual framework of one discipline or religious tradition on another discipline or tradition?