Terrorism,War, and The Killing of the Innocent

Commonsense moral thought holds that what makes terrorism particularly abhorrent is the fact that it tends to be directed toward innocent victims. Yet contemporary philosophers tend to doubt that the concept of innocence plays any significant role here, and to deny that prohibitions against targeting noncombatants can be justified through appeal to their moral innocence. I argue, however, that the arguments used to support these doubts are ultimately unsuccessful. Indeed, the philosophical positions in question tend to misunderstand the justification of both the prohibition against targeting noncombatants, and that of the permission to attack combatants, for which the paper offers a new account. Such misunderstandings make it all too easy to justify both terrorist actions and morally objectionable actions on the part of nations at war. Taking proper account of the role of innocence in the context of armed conflict will alter our ordinary ways of thinking about the ethics of war, with respect to both jus in bello and jus ad bellum.

Militant Islam and Weber’s Social closure: interrelated secular and religious codes of exclusion

Weber’s concept of social closure can help to illuminate the social processes that result in the development of militant Muslim groups. Adapting and applying the concept helps to establish the interrelationships between secular processes and Islamification that are designed by the militants to exclude others and usurp governments. These processes include the implementation of secularisation, conversely concessions to religion and the reinvigoration of Islamic concepts that are used as codes of closure to unite followers and ostracize other Muslims and religious denominations.

Blair on Rodin: Rejoinder

The article is a brief response to Jacob Blair’s critique of David Rodin’s argument in War and Self-Defense that there are circumstances in which war conceivably could be justified not as self-defence, but as law enforcement or punishment. It argues that while Rodin’s position potentially is less dilemmatic than Blair suggests, Blair nevertheless usefully highlights tensions within it. Blair’s own argument in favour of ar as law-enforcement is suggestive, but in no way conclusive.

Construction, reconstruction, deconstruction: The fall of the Soviet Union from the point of view of conceptual history

The fall of the Soviet Union is analysed in conceptual terms, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte. The author seeks to interpret the instrumental role of the concepts perestrojka, glasnost′, reform, revolution, socialist pluralism, and acceleration in the Soviet collapse. The semantics and pragmatics are related to a wider intellectual and political context, and the conceptual perspective is used to help explain the progress of events. The author argues that the common notion of the reform policy concepts as clichés is not valid.

Tensions in a Certain Conception of Just War as Law Enforcement

Many just war theorists (call them traditionalists) claim that just as people have a right to personal self-defense, so nations have a right to national-defense against an aggressive military invasion. David Rodin claims that the traditionalist is unable to justify most defensive wars against aggression. For most aggressive states only commit conditional aggression in that they threaten to kill or maim the citizens of the nation they are invading only if those citizens resist the occupation. Most wars, then, claimed to be justified by the traditionalist fail to meet the proportionality criterion. Thus, a just war, for Rodin, is best conceived of as a punitive war of law enforcement, not as a war of national-defense. I argue that Rodin does not have a case against the traditionalist. If national-defense is a disproportionate response to conditional aggression, then punitive war is a disproportionate response as well. Furthermore, the belief that punitive war is a proportionate response to conditional aggression underscores the traditionalist’s view that self-determination, cultural identity and the like are of sufficient value to defend by means of lethal force. I end the paper by very briefly sketching an account, different from that of Rodin’s, of how individual nations can be justified in waging wars of law enforcement.

Factors affecting responses to Likert type questionnaires: introduction of the ImpExp,a new comprehensive model

The major purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive model describing the effects of response sets within the theory framework of the stages of responding to questionnaires, and taking into account the effects of collectivist and individualist attributes within cross-cultural contexts. The introduction of this model aims to provide a construct that may help minimize biases in questionnaire-based research as well as providing new directions for theoretical and empirical research in the field of response sets.

Apologia Pro Intermundia Sua

As a disquisition, Apologia Pro Intermundia Sua discusses a study of seven members of the clergy who have made or are making the transition out of parish ministry to engage the world as part of mainstream culture and their experience of being between worlds, or intermundia. This paper traces a path of using an imaginal approach by means of an alchemical hermeneutic methodology and transference dialogues to extend beneath the complexity of our knowledge and the knowledge of our complexity enfolded by reverie and fantasy. This paper also offers for consideration a proposal for an interventionless approach to the intermundia of clergy transitioning out of parish ministry.

Marriage,Morality, and Institutional Value

This paper develops a Kantian account of the moral assessment of institutions. The problem I address is this: while a deontological theory may find that some legal institutions are required by justice, it is not obvious how such a theory can assess institutions not strictly required (or prohibited) by justice. As a starting-point, I consider intuitions that in some cases it is desirable to attribute non-consequentialist moral value to institutions not required by justice. I will argue that neither consequentialist nor virtue-ethical accounts account for these intuitions, suggesting that a distinctive deontological account is needed. The account I give is drawn from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals; I distinguish it from Kantian views of institutions developed by Barbara Herman and Onora O’Neill. Throughout, I use marriage as an example.

Essentiality conferred

In this article I introduce a certain kind of anti-realist account of what makes a property essential to an object and defend it against likely objections. This account, which I call a ‘conferralist’ account, shares some of the attractive features of other anti-realist accounts, such as conventionalism and expressivism, but I believe, not their respective drawbacks.

Shanahan on Symbolization

In his article ‘A New View of Language, Emotion and the Brain,’ Dan Shanahan claims that the post-war Cognitive Turn focused mainly on information processing and that little attention was paid to the dramatic role played by emotion in human cognition. One key argument in his defence of a more comprehensive view of human cognition rests upon the idea that the process of symbolization—a unique capacity only developed by humans—combines, right from the start, information processing and feelings. The author argues that any theory ignoring this fact would miss the whole point, just as mainstream cognitive science has done since Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, exactly 50 years ago.

Supreme Emergencies Without the Bad Guys

This paper discusses the application of the supreme emergency doctrine from just-war theory to non-antagonistic threats. Two versions of the doctrine are considered: Michael Walzer’s communitarian version and Brian Orend’s prudential one. I investigate first whether the doctrines are applicable to non-antagonistic threats, and second whether they are defensible. I argue that a version of Walzer’s doctrine seems to be applicable to non-antagonistic threats, but that it is very doubtful whether the doctrine is defensible. I also argue that Orend’s version of the doctrine is applicable to non-antagonistic threats, but that his account is not defensible, regardless of whether the threats are antagonistic or not.

Two Theories of Just War

As it is traditionally conceived, Just War Theory is not well suited for dealing with nation vs non-nation wars. It thus makes sense to create a second Just War Theory to deal with these wars. This article explores the differences and similarities between the two theories.

Ibn Sina and the status of moral sentences

There are some texts about moral sentences in the Islamic logical literature especially in the logical books of Ibn Sina that have been interpreted in completely opposite ways. Relying on these texts, some scholars take Ibn Sina to be proposing a non-cognitive theory of ethics and to the contrary some scholars hold that he is a proponent of a sort of moral intuitionism. Reflecting on the alleged textual evidence in Ibn Sina’s books, I propose a middle way in the interpretation that accepts the cognitive status of the moral sentences but at the same time rejects intuitionism.

An Early Buddhist Text on Logic: Fang Bian Xin Lun

The Fang Bian Xin Lun is a text on Buddhist logic which is thought to be the earliest one still to be extant. It appears in Chinese only (T1632). The great Italian indologist Giuseppe Tucci, believing that the text was originally a Sanskrit text, translated it into Sanskrit and gave it the title Upāyahṛdaya. The paper provides the historical background of the development of logic in Classical India up to the time of this text, summarizes its content and translates its first section.

Intuitions are inclinations to believe

Advocates of the use of intuitions in philosophy argue that they are treated as evidence because they are evidential. Their opponents agree that they are treated as evidence, but argue that they should not be so used, since they are the wrong kinds of things. In contrast to both, we argue that, despite appearances, intuitions are not treated as evidence in philosophy whether or not they should be. Our positive account is that intuitions are a subclass of inclinations to believe. Our thesis explains why intuitions play a role in persuasion and inquiry, without conceding that they are evidential. The account also makes predictions about the structure of intuitions that are confirmed by independent arguments.

The Train Paradox

When two omnipotent beings are randomly and sequentially selecting positive integers, the being who selects second is almost certain to select a larger number. I then use the relativity of simultaneity to create a paradox by having omnipotent beings select positive integers in different orders for different observers.

The many minds account of vagueness

This paper presents an new epistemicist account of vagueness, one that avoids standard arbitrariness worries by exploiting a plenitudinous metaphysic.

The New Rhetoric’s Inheritance. Argumentation and Discourse Analysis

This paper aims at showing how the New Rhetoric’s insights allow for an integration of argumentation studies in linguistic investigation, and more specifically in discourse analysis. Claiming that argumentativity is a constitutive feature of discourse, it endeavors to explore logos as both reason and language by analyzing patterns of reasoning in their discursive actualization. In this approach, the attempt at influencing the audience’s representations is analyzed in the complexity of a discourse explored in its formal and socio-institutional dimensions.

Moral Expertise and the Credentials Problem

Philosophers have harbored doubts about the possibility of moral expertise since Plato. I argue that irrespective of whether moral experts exist, identifying who those experts are is insurmountable because of the credentials problem: Moral experts have no need to seek out others’ moral expertise, but moral non-experts lack sufficient knowledge to determine whether the advice provided by a putative moral expert in response to complex moral situations is correct and hence whether an individual is a bone fide expert. Traditional accounts of moral expertise require that moral experts give reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification, an account which, I argue, is too lean in allowing for the possibility of a moral expert who is motivationally indifferent to her own moral judgments and advice. Yet even if the proposition that a moral expert is an individual who provides reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification and is necessarily motivated by that advice exhausts the necessary and sufficient conditions for moral expertise, this proposition cannot function as an applicable criterion for non-experts to use in appraising would-be experts’ claims to expertise. The credentials problem thus remains unanswered.