Challenging Good-For Monism

‘Challenging Good-For Monism’ takes on the good-for monist, who maintains that both value dualism and Mooreanism get things wrong. For the good-for monist there is one fundamental final value, and it is final goodness-for. The first challenge to this kind of monism concerns value aggregation. It is showed why value dualism has an advantage over good-for monism when dualism explains why we should favour what common sense dictates in certain cases involving aggregation. A second challenge concerns good-for monism’s understanding of certain thick value concepts. The argument here is simple, but it nonetheless requires some unravelling. The point is that to be appropriately analysed, certain thick value concepts require impersonal goodness or at least impersonal normativity. Finally, the chapter considers whether good-for monism is able to avoid some of its problems by endorsing a popular subjectivist strategy for analysing good-for. This strategy fails, however. To conclude, good-for monism fails to provide us the tools with which to understand a common response to core issues in normative ethics. It also bars us from making some evaluations involving thick evaluative terms, which, in principle, we should be able to endorse or reject on substantive grounds.

The realization of the right to freedom of speech on the Internet

The expression of opinions on the Internet has a number of features in comparison with traditional means of information dissemination. Firstly, imposition of classical measures of legal liability can be difficult due to the peculiarities of cyber space: anonymity and erasure of jurisdictional boundaries. In this regard, a new mechanism of restrictions has appeared, which consists in the withdrawal of information that violates the law or the rights of other citizens from the Internet at the direction of state bodies. The trends in this area are the predominance of the administrative procedure for making decisions on the withdrawal of information from public access, and the use of vague and evaluative terms as grounds for restrictions. Secondly, in most cases, in the process of realizing freedom of speech, intermediaries are involved — companies that provide a public forum for millions of users. The activities of these companies are also associated with new mechanisms for restricting freedom of speech: from blocking content to deleting users’ accounts. Such companies have a dual responsibility: to monitor the placement of content in order to prevent abuse of freedom of speech and to prevent violations of freedom of expression with their own corporate rules. The purpose of this article is to identify, through the method of analytical jurisprudence, the problems that arise when restricting freedom of speech, implemented in the digital environment, and to establish the reasons for their occurrence. To do this, the author has carried out a review of Russian legislation and the practice of its application, as well as the practice of restrictions, applied by corporations, and an analysis of foreign literature.

Metasemantics for the Relaxed

This chapter discusses how to meet the ‘generalized integration challenge’ as a relaxed moral realist by providing a metasemantics of moral vocabulary which is compatible with relaxing about moral metaphysics and epistemology. Employing normative inferentialism and focussing on evaluative moral terms in particular, it is suggested that evaluative moral terms function to explain proprieties of language exit transitions, where having this function amounts to systematizing language exit transitions through a process of reflective equilibrium. Crucially, this inferentialist take on explanatory function does not engender any substantive metaphysical commitments about moral properties. Moreover, the systematization process on which it is based is undertaken from within moral discourse. As such, understanding evaluative terms as tools that systematize language exits fits perfectly with the relaxed take on moral discourse.

A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

Conceptualisations of ugly and beautiful

The aim of this paper is to study conceptualisations of two Persian evaluative terms, namely zesht (ugly) and zibâ (beautiful), by focusing on their use at the metapragmatic level in evaluations of im/polite act. To achieve this aim, by drawing on natural and authentic examples from Persian speakers, the relationship between the use of the metapragmatic markers zesht and zibâ and the im/polite (non)linguistic act is addressed and the types of im/polite behaviours that licence the use of these metapragmatic markers is further explored. It will also be argued that conceptualisations of im/politeness seem to be expressed predominantly in terms of aesthetic terms which are situationally constructed and are morally informed. The examples reveal that the use of the aesthetic markers as metapragmatic markers originates from a set of cultural conceptualisations, which are part of the moral order, and in fact, shape and are, over time, shaped by the norms of im/politeness that exist at multiple levels of society. These socially and culturally shared conceptualisations greatly influence the practices by which judgments and evaluations of impoliteness arises in different types of interaction.

Negotiating Value

Sundell (2016) presents the grounds to undermine the claim that so called evaluative terms are semantically different from other gradable terms—i.e., that they are genuinely evaluative and/or that it is encoded in their semantics the relativization to a standard determined by an experiencer/appraiser. In order to undermine the claim, Sundell argues that the persistence of evaluative disagreements can be explained without assuming that aesthetic terms are indeed evaluative when one takes into account metalinguistic negotiations—disagreements about how one should use a word or expression. By showing that metalinguistic negotiations do all the needed work without requiring that one assumes that aesthetic adjectives are literally evaluative, Sundell’s expanded argument can be stated in the following way: for the sake of parsimony, one should treat evaluative terms as descriptive gradables. In the paper, I argue that metalinguistic negotiations cannot be the whole story by showing that, if one denies that evaluative terms are literally evaluative, metalinguistic negotiations do not account for the important connection between valuewords and social interactions about value.

The scope of psychiatric ethics

Ethical decision-making is no easy matter, as absolutes of right and wrong, good and bad, should and ought, and other evaluative terms are elusive. Both providing the best attainable care for the patient and conducting scientific research guided by lofty ethical principles are paramount. This chapter, an introduction to the fifth edition of Psychiatric Ethics, outlines how the book aims to promote the moral agency of psychiatrists and mental health professionals when relating to patients and their families, colleagues, professional associations, and other organizations, and the society in which they work. It summarizes theoretical frameworks used in ethical decision-making and the range of topics discussed in the other 24 chapters, and offers guidelines to mental health students and graduate clinicians about how to master the field of ethics in psychiatry.

Reactive Concepts

This chapter recommends that we consider a kind of concept which bears a relation like the one traditional accounts of concepts bear to beliefs, but instead bears it to states individuated not only by their causal inputs, but also by their direct causal outputs. They will be called reactive representations, RRs for short. They are partially representational states which are reactive inasmuch as they bypass interaction with distinct desires to directly motivate behaviour. Associated with these representations are abilities that will be called Reactive Concepts. The chapter argues that taxonomizing mental states this way casts light on the nature of a range of phenomena, including hate speech, crypto-evaluative terms, and phenomenal concepts.

The invention of the Mideu: redefining American television in South Korea

This article examines the ways in which South Korean media redefined and reevaluated American television between 2006 and 2008, when the dominance of domestic series in entertainment television was purportedly challenged by the resurging popularity of American shows. By analyzing traditional and digital newspaper articles published on this phenomenon, this article demonstrates how the local media produced and disseminated a coherent discourse that transformed American television series into the localized concept of mideu. This process involved the reframing of American television as an idealized alternative to the local counterpart, the reinterpretation of evaluative terms such as diversity and narrative strength, and the selective inclusion and exclusion of certain genres and programs. A close investigation of the construction of the mideu discourse offers an insight into how the local mass media function as the cultural intermediary that translates transnational media to the existing conditions of the local media industry and culture.