David S. Oderberg

This is a brief response to Stephen Buckle's paper 'Biological Processes and Moral Events', Journal of Medical Ethics 14 (1988): 144-7, in which Buckle argues that the continuity of early human development does not preclude there being 'morally significant' events, such as syngamy, that set boundaries for the permissibility of human embryo experimentation. I reply to Buckle that the very continuity at issue does indeed preclude the existence of such 'morally significant' events, and that the Australian Senate Select Committee on Human Embryo Experimentation (1985) was, contra Buckle, not confused about this matter. ERRATUM: middle column, line 3 from bottom: 'fifteen days later' should read 'one day later'.

I explore the increasingly important issue of cooperation in immoral actions, particularly in connection with healthcare. Conscientious objection, especially as pertains to religious freedom in healthcare, has become a pressing issue in the light of the US Supreme Court judgement inHobby Lobby. Section ‘Moral evaluation using the basic principles of cooperation’ outlines a theory of cooperation inspired by Catholic moral theologians such as those cited by the court. The theory has independent plausibility and is at least worthy of serious consideration—in part because it is an instance of double-effect reasoning, which is also independently plausible despite its association with moral theology. Section ‘Case study:Burwell v. Hobby Lobby’ examinesHobby Lobbyin detail. Even if the judgement was correct in that case the reasoning was not, as it involved applying a ‘mere sincerity’ test to the cooperation question. The mere sincerity test leads to absurd consequences, whereas a reasonableness test applied using the theory of cooperation defended here would avoid absurdity. Section ‘A question of remoteness: “accommodations” and opt-outs’ explores the post-Hobby Lobbyproblem further, examining opt-outs and accommodations: theLittle Sisters of the Poorcase shows how opt-outs are misunderstood on a mere sincerity test, which the court rightly rejected. Section 'Application to the medical field:Doogan and Wood’ discusses the UK case ofDoogan and Wood, concerning participation in abortion. Again, a judicially recognised ethic of cooperation, if it were part of the fabric of legal reasoning in such cases, would have enabled the conscientious objectors in this and similar situations to have their freedom of conscience and religion respected in a way that it currently is not.

Kants Theorie des reinen Geschmacksurteils By Christel Fricke Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 1990 (Quellen und Studien zur Philosophie, 26). Pp. 196. ISBN 3?11?012585?4. DM98.00 The Ontology of Physical Objects By Mark Heller Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. iv + 162. ISBN 0?521?38544?X. £25.00. Theory of Knowledge By Keith Lehrer Routledge, 1990. Pp. xii + 212. ISBN 0?415?05407?9. £30.00 hbk. £9.99 pbk. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body By Jana Sawicki Routledge, 1991. Pp. xii + 130. ISBN 0?415?90187?1. £30.00 hbk. £8.99 pbk

Abstract   The idea of disembodied communication has received widespread discussion in the context of the various kinds of online interaction. Electronic mail is probably the purest form of text-based communication where interlocutors are present in mind rather than body. I argue that this online model provides a way of understanding and defending the possibility of a certain kind of public religious experience, contra the many critics of the very coherence of genuine religious experience. I introduce the concept of ‘telic possibility’, a specific kind of modality, applying it to e-mail. I argue that we can reasonably move from the telic possibility of disembodied communication in mundane e-mail exchanges to the epistemic possibility of communication from a divine being in cases where the content of the messages is sufficiently extraordinary. Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0051-6 Authors David S. Oderberg, Department of Philosophy, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AA UK Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433.

Over the course of a career that has spanned more than fifty years, philosopher Fred Sommers has taken on the monumental task of reviving the development of Aristotelian (syllogistic) logic after it was supplanted by the predicate logic of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. The enormousness of Sommers's undertaking can be gauged by the fact that most philosophers had come to believe - as David S. Oderberg writes in his preface - that "Aristotelian logic was good but is now as good as dead." A revival of traditional syllogistic logic would involve not only its restatement but its refashioning into a system that could rival the elegance and deductive power of predicate logic. Building on work by medieval scholastic logicians, Leibniz, and nineteenth-century algebraic logicians, Sommers accomplished this renovation and rehabilitation of syllogistic logic with his magnum opus The Logic of Natural Language, published in 1982. In The Old New Logic, essays by a diverse group of contributors show how widely influential Sommers's work has been-not only in logic, but in category theory and other areas. Scholars in psychology, linguistics, and computer science join philosophers and logicians in discussing aspects of Sommers's contributions to philosophy. Sommers himself provides an intellectual autobiography at the beginning and in the final chapter offers comments on the contributions. This collection should help bring to Sommers's work the attention it deserves from the wider philosophical and intellectual community.

You might be wondering what an article 0n animal rights is doing in a journal devoted to the defence of human life. It turns out that the connections are closer than you may think. Grasping them is crucial to a proper understanding of just why innocent human life must be defended, of why the killing of even the tiniest, youngest member of the human species is an unspeakable crime. For it is by analysing the issue of whether animals have rights that we come to see the core differences between humans and other animals1—-the differences in the nature of humans and animals that mean..

A common argumentative strategy employed by anti-reductionists involves claiming that one kind of entity cannot be identified with or reduced to a second because what can intelligibly be predicated of one cannot be predicated intelligibly of the other. For instance, it might be argued that mind and brain are not identical because it makes sense to say that minds are rational but it does not make sense to say that brains are rational. The scope and power of this kind of argument — if valid — are obvious; but if it turns out that ‘It makes sense to say that...’ creates an opaque context, such arguments will fail. I analyze a possible counterexample to validity and show that it is not conclusive, as it depends on what syntactical construction is given to the premises. This leads to the general observation that the argument form under consideration works for some constructions but not others, and thus to the conclusion that further analysis of intelligibility is called for before it can be known whether the argumentative strategy is open to the anti-reductionist or not

The world of science was stunned, and the hopes of many people dashed, when Professor Hwang Woo Suk of Seoul National University was recently found guilty of massive scientific fraud. Until January 2006 he was considered one of the world’s leading experts in cloning and stem cell research. Yet he was found by his own university to have fabricated all of the cell lines he claimed, in articles published in Science in 2004 and 2005, to have derived from cloned human embryos. By the time he was exposed, Hwang had been given the title of leading scientist in Korea by his government. A postage stamp had been issued in his honour, showing a paralysed man leaping out of a wheelchair to embrace his lady love. Schoolchildren read specially produced stories of the indefatigable scientist who supposedly worked 365 days a year for the sake of saving humanity from disease and disability. When I spoke on the ethical wrongness of human embryonic stem cell research at a major conference in San Francisco in 2005, I overheard scientists — professors of high repute and excited graduate students alike — speaking in awed tones of the incredible technical skill that Hwang and his team were thought to have displayed. He told N din re Medicine that his dexterity was a cultural inheritance: "This work can be done much better in Oriental hands. We can pick up very slippery corn or rice with steel chopsticks.'.

There is a famous saying, whose origin is uncertain, that no good deed goes unpunished. Although not cited by him, this was no doubt the thought that inspired George Mavrodes’s (1986) well-known article “Religion and the Queerness of Morality.” In it he argued that although not logically incoherent, a certain sort of world in which moral obligations existed would be “absurd . . . a crazy world” (Mavrodes 1986, 581). The world he had in mind was what he called “Russellian,” after a notorious passage in Bertrand Russell’s essay “The Free Man’s Worship” (Russell 1903). There, Russell portrayed us as living in a wholly materialistic universe governed by impersonal forces and “accidental collocations of atoms,” with no objective purpose or meaning to existence. The greatest of human achievements would ultimately be buried “beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.” We could only, concluded Russell, safely build the “soul’s habitation” [sic] on a “firm foundation of unyielding despair” (Russell 1903, 32). In such a world, according to Mavrodes, the performance of moral obligations does, at least sometimes, lead to no net Russellian benefit, that is, any benefit to the agent that is possible within a Russellian world. Indeed, such actions sometimes confer a net Russellian loss. “We have,” he says, “moral obligations whose fulfillment will result in a net loss of good to the one who fulfils them” (Mavrodes 1986, 581). That such a world would be “queer,” “crazy” and “absurd,” according to Mavrodes, should only strike those who believe that moral obligations are wholly objective and run deep in the fabric of reality. He does not purport to address the sceptic, the subjectivist, the expressivist, the nihilist or the existentialist. His aim is at those who believe in a rational moral..

Distinguished metaphysicians examine issues central to the high-profile debate between philosophers over how to classify the natural world, and discuss issues in applied ontology such as the classification of diseases. Leading metaphysicians explore fundamental questions related to the classification and structure of the natural world An essential commentary on issues at the heart of the contemporary debate between philosophy and science Interweaves discussion of overarching themes with detailed material on applied ontology.

abstract This paper re‐examines some well‐known and commonly accepted arguments for the non‐individuality of the embryo, due mainly to the work of John Harris. The first concerns the alleged non‐differentiation of the embryoblast from the trophoblast. The second concerns monozygotic twinning and the relevance of the primitive streak. The third concerns the totipotency of the cells of the early embryo. I argue that on a proper analysis of both the empirical facts of embryological development, and the metaphysical importance or otherwise of those facts, all three arguments are found wanting. None of them establishes that the embryo is not an individual human being from the moment of conception.

Few moral theorists would disagree that the fundamental principle of morality – perhaps of practical rationality itself – is “ Do good and avoid evil. ” Yet along with such an uncontroversial principle comes a major question: Can you fulfi l both halves satisfactorily across your life as a moral agent? We all have opportunities to perform acts that do good with no accompanying evil, but these are not as common as we might think. We can avoid evil by doing nothing, but doing nothing implies doing no good either. Clearly the fundamental principle does not require that you go about your life doing good on any and every possible occasion any more than that you sit on your hands and abstain from action out of fear of doing evil. The principle tells us to avoid evil, not to refrain from ever causing it. And the simple fact is that the complexities of life make it inevitable that, much of the time when we go about doing good, we will also be doing evil. Further, they are such that sometimes we can avoid evil only at the cost of not performing a good act which reasonable people would regard as at least permissible, if not sometimes obligatory. So how, as rational, morally responsible agents, are we to satisfy the fundamental principle in an adequate, harmonious fashion, given life ’ s exigencies? This is where the so - called ‘ doctrine of double effect ’ comes into play. Some call it a doctrine, infl uenced by the fact that Catholic ethicists and moral theologians have, since the Middle Ages, codifi ed and ratifi ed it as something akin to a doctrine of Catholic moral philosophy. Others call it the ‘ principle of double effect, ’ though it breaks down into a set of principles unifi ed by a common idea. Yet other writers see it simply as a kind of reasoning about certain types of hard case in ethics. Whatever the preferred nomenclature, the DDE, as I will call it here, is – for all its critics and the diffi culties it faces – a keystone of sound moral thinking, without which the fundamental principle would remain nothing but a high ideal with little consistent applicability. So consider a simple example..

I am grateful to Dr Stammers and Professor Vacek for their thoughtful commentaries on my paper.1 I will take their points one by one, though in no special order. Given the space available, I will confine myself to their most important remarks. Dr Stammers accuses me of aligning religion and conscience too closely.2 I agree with him that conscience is broader than religion and that the issue of conscientious objection should be framed so as to handle wholly non-religious ethical objections. I wrote, ‘It is essential for the ethics of cooperation not to be seen as necessarily religious in nature in order for it to have proper application to disputed cases, whether or not brought by religious litigants’.3 A potential draftee might be a pacifist and not a religious adherent; the same in healthcare, where one might oppose abortion or euthanasia, say, on secular grounds. The main purpose of my paper is to show that a viable ‘ethics of cooperation’ can be used in all conscientious objection cases where complicity is at stake, whether the objection is religious or not. It is of course right, as Dr Stammers observes, that my ‘methodological neutralist’ will likely bridle at the claim that a top-level primary ethical or religious belief, such as that abortion at 12 weeks is immoral, is beyond a reasonableness test. Notoriously, in our secularised and diverse liberal society, a proposition that seems patently clear to one side of a major ethical debate can seem anything but clear to the other side, who will …

Proponents of physical intentionality argue that the classic hallmarks of intentionality highlighted by Brentano are also found in purely physical powers. Critics worry that this idea is metaphysically obscure at best, and at worst leads to panpsychism or animism. I examine the debate in detail, finding both confusion and illumination in the physical intentionalist thesis. Analysing a number of the canonical features of intentionality, I show that they all point to one overarching phenomenon of which both the mental and the physical are kinds, namely finality. This is the finality of ‘final causes’, the long-discarded idea of universal action for an end to which recent proponents of physical intentionality are in fact pointing whether or not they realise it. I explain finality in terms of the concept of specific indifference, arguing that in the case of the mental, specific indifference is realised by the process of abstraction, which has no correlate in the case of physical powers. This analysis, I conclude, reveals both the strength and weakness of rational creatures such as us, as well as demystifying the way in which powers work.

This paper is a detailed study of what are traditionally called the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. I defend what I call the Cardinality Thesis, that the traditional four and no others are cardinal. I define cardinality in terms of three sub-theses, the first being that the cardinal virtues are jointly necessary for the possession of every other virtue, the second that each of the other virtues is a species of one of the four cardinals, and the third that many of the other virtues are also auxiliaries of one or more cardinals. I provide abstract arguments for each sub-thesis, followed by illustration from concrete cases. I then use these results to shed light on the two fundamental problems of the acquisition of the virtues and their unity, proving some further theses in the latter case.