Defenders of the Psychological Approach to Personal Identity (PAPI) insist that the possession of some kind of mind is essential to us. We are essentially thinking beings, not living creatures. We would cease to exist if our capacity for thought was irreversibly lost due to a coma or permanent vegetative state. However, the onset of such conditions would not mean the death of an organism. It would survive in a mindless state. But this would appear to mean that before the loss of cognition and the destruction of the person, the organism and the person were spatially coincident entities – two beings composed of the same matter at the same time and place. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of positing spatially coincident material entities is that it would seem to result in there being one too many thinkers. Since the person can obviously think, the organism should also have such a capacity as a result of possessing the same brain as well as every other atom of the person. This means that there now exist two thinking beings under the reader’s clothes! Jeff McMahan and Ingmar Persson independently proposed that the problems presented by spatially coincident thinkers could be avoided by treating the person as a proper part of the organism.1 The organism would then only think in a derivative and unproblematic way as a result of having a thinking being as a part. There wouldn’t be two distinct thinkers, atom for atom the same. Instead, there would be two entities of different size. The smaller one, the person, is described as the minimally sufficient subject of thought. The much larger entity, the organism, has its cognitive properties derivatively because it has the person as a part. My contention is that the Persson-McMahan solution just amounts to moving around the bulge in the metaphysical carpet. The earlier problems of person/organism spatial coincidence will reappear with 2 person/cerebrum coincidence.

Although the predominant view is that vagueness is due to our language being imprecise, the alternative idea that objects themselves do not have determinate borders has received an occasional hearing. But what has failed to be appreciated is how this idea can avoid a puzzle Peter Unger named “The Problem of the Many.”i Unger’s problem of the many arises when it is assumed that entities have a determinate boundary, although this border occurs in a grey area where the object’s component stuff falls off, i.e., becomes scarcer. For instance, a cloud consists mostly of water droplets grouped together. At the cloud’s center, the droplets are tightly bunched together. As we move away from the clear center of the cloud, the water droplets will gradually lessen. It is the thinning of the droplets on the outskirts of the cloud that pose a problem: How do we determine the exact border of the cloud in this grey area? And a cloud must have a border or our entire world would just consist of cloud-like stuff.

Hylomorphism offers a third way between animalist approaches to personal identity that maintain psychology is irrelevant to our persistence and neo-Lockean accounts that deny we are animals. A Thomistic-inspired account is provided that explains the intuitive responses to thought experiments involving brain transplants and the transformation of organic bodies into inorganic ones without having to follow the animalist in abandoning the claim that it is our identity that matters in survival nor countenance the puzzles of spatially coincident entities that plague the neo-Lockean. The key is to understand the human being as only contingently an animal. This approach to our animality is one that Catholics have additional reason to hold given certain views about Purgatory, our uniqueness as free and rational creatures, and our having once existed as zygotes.

I. Introduction. The debt/atonement model of punishment seeks to reconcile the criminal with his direct victim, as well as the larger community, through restorative mechanisms of restitution and atonement.1 As a result, it has certain advantages over better known rivals.2 Unlike retribution, reform and deterrence, the approach does some good, first and foremost, for the victim of the crime. But it can also benefit the victimizer and indirectly victimized members of the larger community. Competing theories usually profit but one of the three. They also fail to do as well in removing the tension between justice and mercy. Yet even when mercy is not an option, retribution, reform and deterrence can dictate punishments that are intuitively excessive. But the problem isn’t just that of excess. At others times, it seems they will endorse inappropriately lenient responses to crime. I will argue that a properly construed debt/atonement approach, despite its stress on punishment taking the form of restitution, can handle three common objections that it is incapable of providing appropriate punishments. The first is that it cannot justify punishing murder for the dead cannot be compensated. Even if this turns out to be true, surprisingly, it bestows no relative advantage upon rival accounts for if the dead cannot be benefited, then they cannot be harmed, and thus punishing killers who did not harm those they killed will be difficult for any theory to justify. The second objection is that it cannot accommodate our practice of publishing failed attempts where there appears to be no harm when the target didn’t even know the attempt transpired. Ironically, it turns out that only the advocated approach can justify our practice of punishing failed attempts less severely than successes. The third objection is that the theory sometimes advocates making criminals suffer in order to satisfy the vindictive desires of their victims. I’ll 2 argue that so harming criminals is a defensible way to extract the debt payment they owe their victims...

Offered are two epistemic accounts of deliberative democracy which suggest the reasonable minority has epistemically sound reasons to willingly follow a reasonable majority position. One of these accounts suggests that the truth will be on the side of an overwhelming rational majority. This is because it is less likely that there is a widespread cognitive failure that “contaminates” the moral intuitions of rational majority than a rational minority. The second account suggests that where there is a rational disagreement, instead of assuming: a) one side is right and the other wrong or b) that they are both failing to discover what justice dictates, or c) that there is no moral fact of the matter, it is sometimes plausible to conclude that both views are compatible with justice. While the competing views can’t both be simultaneously realized, it is not contradictory to assert they are both compatible with justice.

One often hears Catholic and non-Catholic politicians and private citizens claim “I am personally opposed to abortion …” but add that it is morally permissible for others to accept abortion. We consider a Rawlsian defense of this position based on the recognition that one’s opposition to abortion stems from a comprehensive doctrine which is incompatible with Public Reason. We examine a second defense of this position based upon respecting the autonomy of others and a third grounded in the harm to the unwilling mother overriding that to the aborted fetus. We look at a fourth and fifth defense based upon our epistemic ignorance regarding the burdens on others of unwanted pregnancies and the ontological and moral status of embryo. We find most versions of these defenses to be wanting and conclude that only if the position’s proponents are subjectivist about morals, which few are, can they offer a coherent defense. I. Introduction We’re all familiar with claims about abortion that begin with the following phrase: “I am personally opposed but….” Sometimes what follows is “I don’t want to impose my view of abortion on others.” We hear on other occasions “…abortion is a decision best left to the person’s own conscience,” or “…the government should not be telling pregnant women what to do with their bodies” or “…every pregnant women’s situation is different.” The most alarmist version is “I am personally opposed but if abortion is banned then women will die in a botched back alley abortions.” These all amount to roughly the same position: it would be morally wrong for me to have (or advocate) an abortion, but morally permissible for others to do so. Some of the individuals asserting this position have been prominent Catholic Politicians. Our concern here, however, is not to establish that opposition to abortion is right or wrong, rather, we are interested in whether it is coherent to be personally opposed but accepting of the abortions of others. That...

Laws requiring autopsies have generated little controversy. Yet it is considered unconscionable to take organs without consent for transplantation. We believe an organ draft is justified if mandatory autopsies are. We reject the following five attempts to show why a mandatory autopsy policy is legitimate but organ conscription is not: 1) The social contract gives the State a greater duty to protect its citizens from each other than from disease. 2) There is a greater moral obligation to prevent murders than disease-caused deaths because killing people is morally worse than allowing people to die. 3) Autopsies don’t confiscate body parts while organ transplants do. 4) The citizenry’s knowledge that their organs are very likely to be taken will generate more anxiety than the remote possibility of a mandatory autopsy. 5) A religious conviction that one’s organs will be needed in order to be resurrected is threatened by organ transplantation but not by autopsies that “return” body parts.

There remains a need to properly analyze the metaphysical assumptions underlying two alternative organ procurement policies: presumed consent and organ sales. Our contention is that if one correctly understands the metaphysics of both the human body and material property, then it will turn out that while organ sales are illiberal, presumed consent is not. What we mean by illiberal includes violating rights of bodily integrity, property, or autonomy, as well as arguing for or against a policy in a manner that runs afoul of Rawlsian public reason.

Morality is one of those basic aspects of humanity, like sexuality and eating, that can’t fit into one or two academic fields. Morality is unique, however, in having a kind of spell that disguises it and protects its secrets. We all care about morality so passionately that it’s hard to look straight at it. We all look at the world through some kind of moral lens, and because most of the academic community uses the same lens, we validate each other’s visions and distortions. I think this problem is particularly acute in some of the new scientific writing about religion.

According to Hume (2007: 145), our concepts of causation, resemblance, and contiguity are the foundation of all of our reasoning concerning matters of fact, and “to us the cement of the universe”. As Carroll (1994: 118) puts the point: “With regard to our total conceptual apparatus, causation is at the center of the center”. Causation is certainly central to the law. Many liability doctrines in both criminal law and torts explicitly require that the defendant has caused harm to the plaintiff (c.f. Moore 2009: 3). Thus—given that the law uses “cause” in the ordinary sense, and not its own stipulatively defined sense—our concepts of causation and of legal liability can illuminate each other.

THE MAIN OBJECTIVES of the following discussions are, first, to show the logical inconsistency of Hegel’s theory of the necessity of private property and, second, to show its exegetical inconsistency with the most plausible and consistent interpretations of Hegel’s theory of the self and its relation to the state in Ethical Life. I begin with the latter objective, by distinguishing three basic conceptions of the self that can be gleaned from various passages in the Philosophy of Right. I suggest viable connections between each of these three conceptions and three respective interpretations of what I call the Hegelian requirement, i.e., that the individual be able to identify his personal interests and values with those of the state [141, 147, 147r, 151, 155].1 This can be understood as the requirement that the individual be capable of transcending certain limits of individuality in the service of broader and more inclusive political goals. I argue that Hegel’s theory of Personality and the requirements of Ethical Life in the state commit him to a conception of the self as capable of achieving such selftranscendence through action, despite appearances to the contrary that suggest that self-transcendence is to be primarily achieved through acquisition of various kinds. I then try to demonstrate the logical inconsistency of Hegel’s theory of the necessity of private property. I argue that the fallacies inherent in his exposition of this theory can be explained by his presupposing a conception of the self which both is inadequate to meet the criteria of Hegel’s theories of Personality and Ethical Life and also, therefore, fails the Hegelian requirement.

The aim of this discussion is twofold.* First, I shall scrutinize certain prevailing rationales for enlisting for military service and show that these justifications are inadequate to meet the military's recruiting needs. Larger numbers of enlistees who are fully equipped, both in technical skills and morale, for combat readiness are in great demand, but the arguments used to recruit potential enlistees are self-defeating. I shall show how and why they attract volunteers who are rendered singularly unfit to meet these demands by those very arguments themselves.

The Humean conception of the self prevalent in the contemporary literature in moral and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and action theory has yielded a persuasive model of human action that has contributed considerably to our understanding of moral motivation, rational action, and many other issues. But it has also generated certain problems. I should like to take issue with this conception, first by describing it in some detail and charting its connection with two such interrelated problems in moral psychology. Then I shall propose an alternative conception, cribbed in its essentials from Kant’s metaphysics, that purports to do an even better job of explaining the psychological phenomena. Finally I shall argue that on the suggested alternative, these two problems do not arise.

Contemporary Kantian ethics has given a wide berth to Kant's analyses of reason and the self in the Critique of Pure Reason.2 Perhaps this can be ascribed to P. F. Strawson's influential fulminations against Kant's transcendental psychology in The Bounds of Sense.3 Strawson's view was an expression – one of many – of a postwar behaviorist sensibility, in which the best conceptual analysis of interior mental life was no analysis at all. In recent years this sensibility has become increasingly anachronistic, both in ethics and in philosophy of mind, and is in need of reappraisal on these grounds alone. The neglect by contemporary Kantian ethicists of Kant's first Critique has been particularly unfortunate. It forecloses a deeper understanding of Kant's own ethical views, and robs us of valuable resources for addressing contemporary issues in metaethics and applied moral philosophy. It is virtually impossible to understand Kant's conception of the categorical imperative in isolation from his account of reason in the first Critique's Transcendental Dialectic; or his distinction between autonomy and heteronymy in isolation from his inchoate but suggestive formulation of the Two Standpoints Thesis in the Solution to the Third Antinomy; or his elaboration of that thesis itself in Chapter III of the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals4 in isolation from the chapter on Noumena and Phenomena, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Fourth Paralogism in the A Edition of the Critique. Of course this is not to deny that these concepts can be put to excellent and fruitful use independently of ascertaining what Kant himself meant by them. Moreover, the first Critique offers a developed conception of the self that provides a needed resource for defending Kantian ethics against Anti-Rationalist criticisms, such as that it is too abstract, alienating, altruistic, or detached from ordinary personal concerns to guide actual human behavior. The conception of the...

In 1951 John Rawls expressed these convictions about the fundamental issues in metaethics: [T]he objectivity or the subjectivity of moral knowledge turns, not on the question whether ideal value entities exist or whether moral judgments are caused by emotions or whether there is a variety of moral codes the world over, but simply on the question: does there exist a reasonable method for validating and invalidating given or proposed moral rules and those decisions made on the basis of them? For to say of scientific knowledge that it is objective is to say that the propositions expressed therein may be evidenced to be true by a reasonable and reliable method, that is, by the rules and procedures of what we may call "inductive logic"; and, similarly, to establish the objectivity of moral rules, and the decisions based upon them, we must exhibit the decision procedure, which can be shown to be both reasonable and reliable, at least in some cases, for deciding between moral rules and lines of conduct consequent to them.1 In this passage Rawls reconfigured the issue of moral objectivity and so reoriented the practice of metaethics from linguistic analysis to rational methodology. In so doing, his work has provided inspiration to philosophers as disparate in normative views as Thomas Nagel,2 Richard Brandt3, Alan Gewirth4, and David Gauthier.5 Rawls replaced the Moorean question, Do moral terms refer? with the Rawlsian question, Can moral judgments be the outcome of a rational and reliable procedure? He later gave a resoundingly positive answer to this question6 and later still, a more tentative one.7 Rawls' considered qualification of his earlier enthusiasm about the extent to which moral philosophy could be "part of the theory of rational choice"8 is a tribute to the seriousness with which he took his critics' objections.

This essay attempts to render intelligible (you will pardon the pun) Kant's peculiar claims about the intelligible at A 539/B 567 – A 541/B 569 in the first Critique, in which he asserts that (1) ... [t]his acting subject would now, in conformity with his intelligible character, stand under no temporal conditions, because time is only a condition of appearances, but not of things in themselves. In him no action would begin or cease. Consequently it would not be subjected to the law of all determination of everything alterable in time: everything which happens finds its causes in the appearances (of the previous state). In a word, his causality, in so far as it is intellectual, would not stand in the series of empirical conditions which the event in the world of sense makes necessary. (A 539/B 567 - A 540/B 568) ... in so far as it is noumenon, nothing happens in him, no alteration which requires dynamical determination in time .... One would quite rightly say of him, that it of itself begins his effects in the world of sense, without the action's beginning in him himself ... (A 541/B 569)2 What does Kant mean by claiming that intellectual causality is such that in one's intelligible character as noumenal agent, actions neither begin nor end, nor does anything happen in one? Do these claims have meaning merely by contrast to the familiar experience of empirical causality, in which actions have discrete durations and events occur? Is he merely inferring from this familiar sensible experience an ontologically and metaphysically independent, epistemically inaccessible "world," which can be conceptualized only through the negation of those terms and propositions that characterize this one? Or is he offering a...

By transcendental aesthetic, Kant means “the science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). 1 These, he argues, are the laws that properly direct our judgments of taste (B 35 – 36 fn.), i.e. our aesthetic judgments as we ordinarily understand that notion in the context of contemporary art. Thus the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic, enumerates the necessary presuppositions of, among other things, our ability to make empirical judgments about particular works of art. These presuppositions are sensible rather than intellectual because on Kant’s view, all intellection that considers objects of any kind, whether abstract or concrete, must at base connect to actual, material objects with which we come into direct contact; and this we can do only through sensibility (A 19/B 33). Thus the following discussion explores what Kant claims must be true of us in order to make the sorts of aesthetic judgments we make, rather than any particular class or quality of aesthetic judgments itself. On Kant’s view, what must be true of us in order to make aesthetic judgments is not different from what must be true of us in order to make any other kind of judgment about empirical objects. This last point is worth emphasizing, in order to correct an interpretation of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment2 that wrongly reads Kant as claiming that aesthetic judgments do not have to satisfy the same basic requirements of judgment that any other kind of judgment also must satisfy, such as the synthetic subsumption of such objects under certain necessary and hard-wired concepts of understanding, the internal coherence of such judgments with other, non-aesthetic ones of a more abstract and comprehensive character, the unified consciousness within which such judgments are intelligibly made, and the like. Of course Kant recognizes the special character of aesthetic judgments and unpacks it in the * Both versions ©APRA Foundation. Adrian M...

Seit kurzem wird des öfteren in Deutschland die Ansicht geäußert, Deutschland solle nun seine fremdenfeindliche Vergangenheit im Zweiten Weltkrieg endlich hinter sich lassen und von nun ab als >>normalisiertes<< Land der Zukunft gegenübertreten. Diese Meinung entsteht aus der Voraussetzung, daß Deutschland durch seine Geschichte von Xenophobie und Genozid im Zweiten Weltkrieg als abnormal, als ungewöhnlich gekennzeichnet ist. Aber das ist nicht wahr. Deutschlands blutige Geschichte ist mit derjenigen der Vereinigten Staaten, Großbritanniens, der Niederlande, Rußlands, Chinas, Japans, der Türkei, Vietnams, Kambodschas, Somalias, Ruandas, des Irak, des Kosovo, Bosniens, und anderer Länder vergleichbar. Zu vergleichen bedeutet weder zu relativieren, noch zu entschuldigen, sondern bloß anzuerkennen, daß die Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit, die in verschiedenen Ländern stattfinden, einige gemeinsame Eigenschaften haben.

Our ordinary view of material things1 has two aspects. One the one hand such things typically have parts. This desk has its legs, its top, and so forth. On the other hand such things typically have locations. This desk is located at some particular region of spacetime in the office. The composition and the location of the desk are, on this view, two quite separable aspects of it. One may therefore change its composition without changing its location, for instance by swapping in a new leg, or change its location without changing its composition, for instance by moving it to the other side of the office. This view of material things remains largely intact in metaphysical inquiries into their natures. On the one hand we have the theory of composition, mereology, which considers what it is for some bits of wood to compose a desk. On the other hand we have the theory of location,2 which considers what it is for the desk to occupy a region of spacetime.