Did Armstrong Cheat?

In this paper, I explore the idea that under one way of understanding cheating, Armstrong did not fulfill any of the three necessary conditions: (1) that cheating violates a rule—I will make the case that though doping was against the official rules, it was not against the rules the athletes used; (2) that it is cheating if the intent is to obtain an unfair advantage—I will argue that dopers were not attempting to obtain an unfair advantage, at least on one plausible understanding of fairness; and (3) that cheating requires fair enforcement of the rules—I will show that the official rules against doping were hardly enforced at all, much less fairly enforced, and thus lacked enough sufficient normative force to deem breaking them cheating.     

The Impact of Gender and Setting on Perceptions of Others' Ethics

In this article we explore how differences in gender and setting affect individuals' perceptions of others' ethics. We examine 4 hypotheses: first, that men would be perceived as more utilitarian in their ethics and women would be perceived as more formalist; second, individuals would be perceived to be more utilitarian in work settings than in nonwork settings; third, women would be more accurate in their perceptions of others' ethics; fourth, both men and women would be more accurate in their perceptions of women's ethics. Results strongly support the first, refute the second, modestly support the third, and support the fourth. Overall, the data suggest that men and women share very similar perceptions of own-gender and other-gender ethics. However, these shared perceptions are often quite inaccurate.     

Formalism and constitutivism in Kantian practical philosophy

Constitutivists have tried to answer Enoch’s “schmagency” objection by arguing that Enoch fails to appreciate the inescapability of agency. Although these arguments are effective against some versions of the objection, I argue that they leave constitutivism vulnerable to an important worry; namely, that constitutivism leaves us alienated from the moral norms that it claims we must follow. In the first part of the paper, I try to make this vague concern more precise: in a nutshell, it seems that constitutivism cannot provide an adequate account of the relation between the constitutive norms of agency and the particular ends the agent pursues. I then provide a broad outline of an interpretation of Kant’s formalism that is immune to this objection. I conclude that constitutivism is best understood as the upshot of a formalist view of categorical practical principles.     

The Middle Wittgenstein’s Critique of Frege

ABSTRACT

This article aims to analyse Wittgenstein’s 1929–1932 notes concerning Frege’s critique of what is referred to as old formalism in the philosophy of mathematics. Wittgenstein disagreed with Frege’s critique and, in his notes, outlined his own assessment of formalism. First of all, he approvingly foregrounded its mathematics-game comparison and insistence that rules precede the meanings of expressions. In this article, I recount Frege’s critique of formalism and address Wittgenstein’s assessment of it to show that his remarks are not so much a critique of Frege as rather a defence of the formalist anti-metaphysical investment.