Tom Sorell

Seventeenth-century philosophy scholars come together in this volume to address the Insiders--Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Hobbes--and Outsiders--Pierre Gassendi, Kenelm Digby, Theophilus Gale, Ralph Cudworth and Nicholas Malebranche--of the philosophical canon, and the ways in which reputations are created and confirmed. In their own day, these ten figures were all considered to be thinkers of substantial repute, and it took some time for the Insiders to come to be regarded as major and original philosophers. Today these Insiders all feature in the syllabi of most history of philosophy courses taught in western universities, and the papers in this collection, contrasting the stories of their receptions with those of the Outsiders, give an unusual insight into the history of philosophy.

This volume is an exploration of the ethical issues raised by health insurance, which is particularly timely in the light of recent advances in medical research and political economy. Focusing on a wide range of areas, such as AIDS, genetic engineering, screening and underwriting, new disability legislation and the ethics of private and public health insurance, this comprehensive and sometimes controversial book provides an essential survey of the key issues in health insurance. Divided into two parts, the first considers the ethics of underwriting, risk assessment and the acceptance and refusal of insurance risk by insurers. Discussing the unjust treatment of high-risk applicants, the authors identify sources of unfairness to both parties of the insurance contract, indicating how reasonable trade-offs can be made. The second part considers the argument for a mix of public and private insurance for acute and long-term care, offering recommendations for changes in the balance of social insurance, and discussing the shift toward long-term contracts in private health care and pension insurance.

Although there are problems with applying the unexpurgated Hobbes to the demands of modern terrorism and civil war, a toned-down but recognizable version of the theory does lend itself to these kinds of violent challenges to state power. Sober Hobbesianism is my term for the toned-down theory. According to me, this form of Hobbesianism gives security great weight while at the same time limiting the legal repression that is sometimes proposed in the name of security during emergencies. Instead of tracing war to simple difference of opinion, and common or garden self-love, sober Hobbesianism traces war to disagreements in which there are fundamentalist attachments to a point of view or way of life or a person or place. A fundamentalist attachment is an attachment to something one would rather die or kill for than not have. Sober Hobbesianism criminalizes certain expressions of fundamentalist attachments and limits pretexts both for violence and for departures from a normal legal order that simulates some of the features of a liberal order.

Violent video games are not always or perhaps even typically used for recruitment by extremist groups, even when extremists produce their own games. Nevertheless, when not used for recruitment, they have a clear propaganda function, including that of “normalising” extremism behind the façade of a familiar first-person shooter format. There is some evidence that success in violent video games may distinguish players and make them liable to in-person approaches from extremists on game-adjacent platforms. These approaches may radicalize players who are looking for social connection, and may, in a few cases, turn them into real-world fighters. Extremist games also give people with extremist inclinations the opportunity to act them out online. The transition from game violence to real violence is not guaranteed, but extremists encourage it, sometimes through tactical communication over gaming devices, sometimes by using game audio and text for the expression of hate. There are strong and obvious moral objections to this use of games and game-adjacent platforms, and to enlisting games for the common extremist objective of weakening liberal democracy.

We ask whether it is reasonable to delay or refuse to take COVID-19 vaccines that have been shown in clinical trials to be safe and effective against infectious diseases. We consider two kinds of vaccine hesitancy. The first is geared to scientifically informed open questions about vaccines. We argue that in cases where the data is not representative of relevant groups, such as pregnant women and ethnic minorities, hesitancy can be reasonable on epistemic grounds. However, we argue that hesitancy is not reasonable if a vaccine has passed well-conducted clinical trials. The second kind of hesitancy is to do with beliefs about the institutions offering a successfully trialled vaccine and the justifiability of cooperating with those institutions. For example, in the UK, distrust of the UK Government or the National Health Service is identified as a factor in the vaccine hesitancy of minority ethnic populations. We ask whether this sort of hesitation is reasonable given normative requirements of fair co-operation, both with those institutions and the wider population. We suggest that the answer is not straightforward. Sometimes the hesitation is unreasonable but understandable.

Audio and video footage produced with the help of AI can show politicians doing discreditable things that they have not actually done. This is deepfaked material. Deepfakes are sometimes claimed to have special powers to harm the people depicted and their audiences—powers that more traditional forms of faked imagery and sound footage lack. According to some philosophers, deepfakes are particularly “believable,” and widely available technology will soon make deepfakes proliferate. I first give reasons why deepfake technology is not particularly well suited to producing “believable” political misinformation in a sense to be defined. Next, I challenge claims from Don Fallis and Regina Rini about the consequences of the wide availability of deepfakes. My argument is not that deepfakes are harmless, but that their power to do major harm is highly conditional in liberal party political environments that contain sophisticated mass-media.

Hobbes thinks that people who submit to government can not only hope for, but actually experience, something they recognize as a good life. The good life involves the exercise of harmless liberty—activity that the sovereign should not prohibit. The exchange of harmless liberty in the commonwealth for ruthless self-protection in the state of nature is what might be called Hobbes's peace dividend: the liberty of ordinary citizens to buy, sell, choose, and practice a trade as a source of income, and the liberty to keep some of the proceeds if the state does not need resources for public protection.

I shall consider the preferred design of micro-lending (microfinance) institutions in the poorest parts of the world, and also in richer jurisdictions where welfare state provision is shrinking. The institutions needed in these different contexts are, unsurprisingly, different, and part of their design involves interacting with institutions that are not primarily designed to reduce poverty. I shall assume that design considerations also extend to exploiting opportunities thrown up by globally significant recent events: the world banking and financial crisis has altered the image of large mainstream retail and investment banks. The fact that they had a large share of the responsibility for the crisis has prompted many developed country governments to impose punitive taxes on them: some of the proceeds could well be used to support financial services for the poor. Again, some tax incentives could be used to promote certain kinds of partnerships between developed country banks and Southern micro-lending institutions.

In this chapter I defend the construction of inclusive, tightly governed DNA databases, as long as police can access them only for the prosecution of the most serious crimes or less serious but very high-volume offences. I deny that that the ethics of collecting and using these data sets the pattern for other kinds of policing by big data, notably predictive policing. DNA databases are primarily used for matching newly gathered biometric data with stored data. After considering and disputing a number of objections to this practice, I conclude that DNA databases used in this way are ethically acceptable, if not valuable, contributions to legitimate policing.

In this chapter, I begin by taking issue with Rorty over what is involved in the idea of the world's intrinsic nature; then I ask whether it really is advisable to dispense with higher entities and, in Rorty's phrase 'dedivinize culture." I shall suggest that Rorty caricatures the ideas he seeks to discredit and that, in particular, he gives us no very compelling reason to dispense with the idea of the world's intrinsic nature. Turning from the bad onld divinity-worshipping philosophy, science and poetry to their dedivinized successors, I shall suggest that Rorty is without the resources to explain why they are better than what they replace.

Rorty maintains that idealism and realism are dead ends and that somewhere beyond them is a better philosophy--a special kind of pragmatism--without the pretensions or illusions of what it supersedes. Unfortunately, the view of philosophy that Rorty puts forward is neither independently attractive nor easy to understand as a wholesome middle way between idealism and realism. In some ways it is hard to recognise as a view of philosophy at all. I argue for something closer to Thomas Nagel's view of philosophy, and Nagel's realism.

Bulk collection involves the mining of large data sets containing personal data, often for a security purpose. In 2013, Edward Snowden exposed large scale bulk collection on the part of the US National Security Agency as part of a secret counter-terrorism effort. This effort has mainly been criticised for its invasion of privacy. I argue that the right moral argument against it is not so much to do with intrusion, as ineffectiveness for its official purpose and the lack of oversight by security cleared legislators. It also lends itself to government "domination" (in Pettit's sense) of those who are subject to it.

In earlier work, I have expressed scepticism about privacy-based criticisms of bulk collection for counter-terrorism ( Sorell 2018 ). But even if these criticisms are accepted, is bulk collection nonetheless legitimate on balance – because of its operational utility for the security services, and the overriding importance of the purposes that the security services serve? David Anderson’s report of the Bulk Powers review in the United Kingdom suggests as much, provided bulk collection complies with strong legal safeguards ( Anderson 2016 ). I think it is hard to mount a uniformly compelling operational utility argument, because purposes other than counter-terrorism are pursued by the security services with the help of bulk collection. For example, the Intelligence Services Act 1994, section 1(2) says that apart from the interests of national security and the prevention and detection of serious crime, the Secret Intelligence Service may act “in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.”The phrase “interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom” is opento a disturbingly wide range of interpretations, and it is doubtful that these interests justify bulk collection even when relevant “economic interests” are confined to those “also relevant to the interests of national security”, as required by the Investigatory Powers Act (2016) section 204 (3a).

Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is in three parts. One is concerned with the causes of the dissolution of commonwealths. Another is concerned with the rights of properly established sovereigns, where the rights in question remedy the causes of the dissolution of commonwealths. The third part consists of a statement of the duties of sovereigns: constraints on the proper exercise of sovereign rights. Even when the rights of sovereigns are exercised properly, sovereignty is fragile. This is because there are problems of making a sovereign power last beyond the lifetimes of a single sovereign or the leading members of a sovereign assembly, because there are always difficulties with putting the interests of a sovereign's subjects before other interests, and because sovereign rights are exercised in at best a permanent cold war with other sovereigns.

Descartes has an unofficial, as well as an official, philosophy of science. The unofficial philosophy of science can be detected in his letters, in some of the essays that he presented as specimens of his method in 1637, in the closing pages of the Discourse on Method itself, in parts of the Principles of Philosophy, and in his physics treatise, The World. The official philosophy of science is to be found elsewhere: in the Meditations, for example, and in Parts 2 and 4 of the Discourse. There are also expressions of it in the 1647 preface to the Principles. The unofficial philosophy of science is that of a practicing scientist; the official one is that of a metaphysician trying to prepare the ground among theologians for the safe publication of his physics. The unofficial philosophy takes problem solving to be the leading kind of scientific activity. It allows for the legitimate use in science of hypotheses, experiments, and extensive observation. The official philosophy of science, on the other hand, is concerned with the conditions for the rigorous demonstration of a large number of effects from highly evident principles. While not ruling out a scientific use for observation and experiment, it stresses the importance of a certain kind of first principle in physics, the deduction of physical explanations of a very high order of generality, and the possibility of basing principles of physics and physical explanations on principles about the nature and knowability of God. The two philosophies of science have something in common. Both connect science with finding a preferred order in a series of things, or considerations bearing on a particular problem or thing to be demonstrated. The preferred order is always from the “simple” ‐ in Descartes's sense of general and highly evident ‐ to the less simple. Again, both philosophies of science identify scientific understanding with being able to take in a given ordering in a continuous mental survey ‐ what Descartes calls a “deduction.”

I first offer an account of serious crime that goes beyond victimizing crimes committed by individuals against other individuals. This approach extends the well-known framework offered by von Hirsch and Jareborg that relates seriousness of crime to different standards of living that can be enjoyed by victims of crime as the result of crime. The revised account of serious crime is then related to the idea of preventing serious crime by the introduction of offences consisting of steps in the preparation of serious crime.

Bankers have been slow to claim responsibility or apologise for the seismic damage of the 2008 financial crisis. How is this shortcoming to be spelled out? One possibility is by saying that the bankers failed to display what Susan Wolff calls "the nameless virtue" --the disposition to take responsibility for untoward events that occur in one's area of influence, even if we did not intend them or directly cause them. I think this diagnosis is unduly generous to leaders of banks at the centre of the crisis. Even where the nameless virtue has arguably been displayed, it is no substitute for submitting to criminal proceedings for recklessness in financial markets.