Unfinished Business

According to an intriguing though somewhat enigmatic line of thought first proposed by Jonathan Bennett, if humanity went extinct any time soon this would be unfortunate because important business would be left unfinished. This line of thought remains largely unexplored. I offer an interpretation of the idea that captures its intuitive appeal, is consistent with plausible constraints, and makes it non-redundant to other views in the literature. The resulting view contrasts with a welfare-promotion perspective, according to which extinction would be bad because it would come at a massive opportunity cost in terms of feasibly achievable welfare over the lifetime of our species.

Can art promote understanding? A review of the psychology and neuroscience of aesthetic cogntivism

Art promotes knowledge and understanding. Philosophers have debated this proposition, which is referred to as aesthetic cognitivism. Despite its intuitive appeal, few empirical investigations have tested the validity of this claim. In our review, we outline philosophical arguments for and against aesthetic cognitivism. Then, we discuss how empirical aesthetics and neuroscience can contribute to conversations about aesthetic cognitivism, with a focus on visual art. We propose that engagement is necessary to acquire new knowledge and understanding, describe motivational states associated with engagement, and posit who is most likely to experience these states and engage with art. We conclude with a discussion on how aesthetic cognitivism might be measured and modeled. By grounding aesthetic cognitivism in empirical aesthetics, researchers can construct testable hypotheses about art’s role in promoting knowledge and understanding.

Can art promote understanding? A review of the psychology and neuroscience of aesthetic cognitivism

Art promotes knowledge and understanding. Philosophers have debated this proposition, which is referred to as aesthetic cognitivism. Despite its intuitive appeal, few empirical investigations have tested the validity of this claim. In our review, we outline philosophical arguments for and against aesthetic cognitivism. Then, we discuss how empirical aesthetics and neuroscience can contribute to conversations about aesthetic cognitivism, with a focus on visual art. We propose that engagement is necessary to acquire new knowledge and understanding, describe motivational states associated with engagement, and posit who is most likely to experience these states and engage with art. We conclude with a discussion on how aesthetic cognitivism might be measured and modeled. By grounding aesthetic cognitivism in empirical aesthetics, researchers can construct testable hypotheses about art’s role in promoting knowledge and understanding.

No normative free lunch: relevance and the autonomy of the normative domain

The autonomy thesis is the claim that one cannot get a normative statement from purely descriptive statements. But despite its intuitive appeal a precise formulation of the thesis has remained elusive. In a recent paper, Maguire (2015) makes the promising suggestion that the thesis should be understood in terms of ground. But Maguire’s formulation, I argue, is based on controversial taxonomic assumptions that make the autonomy thesis into a non-substantive claim. I develop an alternative ground-based formulation of the autonomy thesis that appeals to the notion of normative relevance, which is in turn understood using the tools of truthmaker semantics. This formulation of the autonomy thesis avoids well-known counterexamples to other formulations and has significant advantages over Maguire’s formulation.

On conceptualizing grammatical change in a Darwinian framework

Approaching language change within a Darwinian framework constitutes a long-standing tradition within the literature of diachronic linguistics. However, many publications remain vague, omitting conceptual details or missing necessary terminology. For example, phylogenetic trees of language families are regularly compared to biological speciation, but definitions on mechanisms of inheritance, i.e. how linguistic information is transferred between individuals and cohorts, or on the linguistic correlates to genotype and phenotype are often missing or lacking. In light of this, Haider’s attempts to develop this approach into a theoretically more precise position, closely mirroring principles of Darwinian natural selection in the dimension of diachronic grammatical change, but contrasting this with non-Darwinian lexical change. He draws a comparison to viral replication, essentially positing that grammar variants act as mental viruses, competing for replication in new hosts, i.e. children during critical periods of language acquisition. Haider proposes that in light of this competition for replication, the unconscious fixation of an individual’s grammar leads to diachronic grammatical change largely mirroring Darwinian natural selection. Despite the intuitive appeal this mode of reasoning may feature, the following response paper identifies and discusses a suit of shortcomings to this conceptualization. Some problems arise from underspecified theoretical notions, others due to the incomplete or inaccurate adoption of biological principles, and yet more through a partial incompatibility with empirical data. These criticisms do not amount to a dismissal of the Darwinian framework Haider is following, but to a rejection of Haider’s current position. Albeit it remains unclear if a truly Darwinian approach to language change can be reached, suggestions on how Haider’s theoretical notions could be further developed are made and pertinent efforts may ultimately lead to a productive theory.

Who will receive the last ventilator: why COVID-19 policies should not prioritise healthcare workers

Policies promoted and adopted for allocating ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic have often prioritised healthcare workers or other essential workers. While the need for such policies has so far been largely averted, renewed stress on health systems from continuing surges, as well as the experience of allocating another scarce resource—vaccination—counsel revisiting the justifications for such prioritisation. Prioritising healthcare workers may have intuitive appeal, but the ethical justifications for doing so and the potential harms that could follow require careful analysis. Ethical justifications commonly offered for healthcare worker prioritisation for ventilators rest on two social value criteria: (1) instrumental value, also known as the ‘multiplier effect’, which may preserve the ability of healthcare workers to help others, and (2) reciprocity, which rewards past usefulness or sacrifice. We argue that these justifications are insufficient to over-ride the common moral commitment to value each person’s life equally. Institutional policies prioritising healthcare workers over other patients also violate other ethical norms of the healthcare professions, including the commitment to put patients first. Furthermore, policy decisions to prioritise healthcare workers for ventilators could engender or deepen existing distrust of the clinicians, hospitals and health systems where those policies exist, even if they are never invoked.

Representing Reasons

This chapter assesses the worry that desire-as-belief raises the bar too high for desiring since it excludes many animals from having desires. In response, the chapter first sketches a general theory of how normative beliefs get their contents: a version of conceptual role semantics according to which the content of a given normative belief is determined by the inputs and outputs to that state. Then, with this theory in hand, the chapter argues that animals count as borderline cases of creatures with desires, since they are borderline cases of creatures with reasons beliefs. This conclusion has some intuitive appeal, and remaining resistance may be undercut by appeal to the distinction between desires and likings, and by appeal to the fact that “wants” is sometimes used merely to mean “needs”.

Genome Editing in Livestock, Complicity, and the Technological Fix Objection

Genome editing in livestock could potentially be used in ways that help resolve some of the most urgent and serious global problems pertaining to livestock, including animal suffering, pollution, antimicrobial resistance, and the spread of infectious disease. But despite this potential, some may object to pursuing it, not because genome editing is wrong in and of itself, but because it is the wrong kind of solution to the problems it addresses: it is merely a ‘technological fix’ to a complex societal problem. Yet though this objection might have wide intuitive appeal, it is often not clear what, exactly, the moral problem is supposed to be. The aim of this paper is to formulate and shed some light on the ‘technological fix objection’ to genome editing in livestock. I suggest that three concerns may underlie it, make implicit assumptions underlying the concerns explicit, and cast some doubt on several of these assumptions, at least as they apply to the use of genome editing to produce pigs resistant to the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome and hornless dairy cattle. I then suggest that the third, and most important, concern could be framed as a concern about complicity in factory farming. I suggest ways to evaluate this concern, and to reduce or offset any complicity in factory farming. Thinking of genome editing’s contribution to factory farming in terms of complicity, may, I suggest, tie it more explicitly and strongly to the wider obligations that come with pursuing it, including the cessation of factory farming, thereby addressing the concern that technological fixes focus only on a narrow problem.

First estimates of inequality benchmark incomes for a range of countries

It is known that virtually all inequality measures imply the existence of a ‘benchmark income’, above which adding incremental income increases inequality, and below which it decreases inequality. Benchmark incomes can be interpreted as social reference levels that identify the richest individual for whom it would be just to subsidize their income. Despite the intuitive appeal of benchmark incomes, there have been hardly any empirical applications to date. This paper provides the first estimates of benchmark incomes for a range of contrasting countries and different inequality measures. All benchmark incomes lie far above official national poverty lines. The results suggest that economic growth together with falling inequality need not necessarily be poverty reducing.