Alexis Mundy

Atheism is a familiar kind of skepticism about religion. Moral error theory is an analogous kind of skepticism about morality, though less well known outside academic circles. Both kinds of skeptic face a "what next?" question: If we have decided that the subject matter (religion/morality) is mistaken, then what should we do with this way of talking and thinking? The natural assumption is that we should abolish the mistaken topic, just as we previously eliminated talk of, say, bodily humors and unicorns. The fictionalist, however, offers a less obvious recommendation. According to the fictionalist, engaging in the topic in question provides pragmatic benefits that do not depend on its truth-in a way roughly analogous to engaging with a novel or a movie. The religious fictionalist maintains that even if we were atheists, we should carry on talking, thinking, and acting as if religion were true. The moral fictionalist maintains a similar view regarding moral talk, thought, and action. Both forms of fictionalism face serious challenges. Some challenges can be levelled at either form of fictionalism (or at any form of fictionalism), whereas others are problems unique to moral fictionalism or to religious fictionalism. There are important questions to be asked about the relationship between these two kinds of fictionalism. Could moral fictionalism be plausible even if religious fictionalism is not (or vice versa)? This is a volume of thirteen previously unpublished papers on the topics of religious fictionalism, moral fictionalism, and the relation between these views.

Can the meaning of an artwork change over time? ;A standard account suggests that an artwork's meaning remains constant over time. If anything has changed, we have. We have simply made new discoveries about what it meant all along. Our epistemic access to the work's meaning expands, but the work itself does not. ;Against the standard view, my dissertation advances a strong historicist account according to which the meaning of artworks is determined in part by its art-historical context. Strong historicism allows for an artwork's meaning to change as art history evolves. An artwork itself can acquire new meanings in virtue of entering into new causal relations with works that appear later in art history. ;I make my case for the foregoing in the context of defending Arthur Danto from several well-known misinterpretations of his influential philosophy of art history. On some major issues, however, I take issue with him---his well-known thesis that art history has ended, for instance. ;Strong historicism provides a novel way of explaining how an artwork's stylistic predicates emerge and evolve over time. Because an artwork's features evolve as new artworks emerge, our conception of art will evolve as well. Arthur Danto had originally proposed what he called a "Style Matrix" to explain this phenomenon, but later rejected it as simultaneously both overly historicist and overly ahistoricist. But, I argue that the problem with the Style Matrix lies with Danto's account of art, rather than with his conception of a Style Matrix. So, strong historicism can save the Style Matrix from these criticisms. This reveals an important sense in which the philosophy of art is intimately tied to the history of art. ;Strong historicism also explains how our conception of art seems to expand with each new movement in art. It grants that the features of art may change and evolve, and thereby allows for an explanation of the natural intuition that we now see artworks differently than before: new artworks bring with them a new vocabulary with which to understand art, and allow us to appreciate previous art in ways we could not have before

One of the common domains in health care in which the concept of vulnerability is used is end-of-life care, including euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS). Since different uses and implications of the notion have been recognised in the literature on EAS, this paper aims to analyse them and reflect on who is the most vulnerable in the context of EAS. A prior exploratory review of the literature has served as a starting point for the discussion. We concluded that vulnerability is a complex, multi-perspective and multi-layered concept, which implies the vulnerability of different stakeholders involved in EAS practices and vulnerability in different aspects of being human (i.e., physical, mental, moral, social and spiritual). A comprehensive understanding of the notion of vulnerability, which balances as well as complements the concept of autonomy, seems to be an indispensable element of the discourse on EAS.

Michael Clark has recently argued that the slippery slope argument against voluntary euthanasia is ‘entirely consequentialist’ and that its use to justify continued prohibition of voluntary euthanasia involves a failure to treat patients who request assistance in ending their lives as ends in themselves. This article agues that in fact the slippery slope is consistent with most forms of deontology, and that it need not involve any violation of the principle that people should be treated as ends, depending upon how that principle is construed. It is concluded that supporters of voluntary euthanasia cannot dismiss the slippery slope argument on the basis of deontological principles but must take seriously the consequences that it postulates and engage in factual argument about their likely extent and about the likely effectiveness of any proposed safeguards.

The article examines the so-called slippery slope argument (SSA) against the legalization of active voluntary euthanasia (AVE). According to the SSA, by legalizing AVE, the least morally controversial type of euthanasia, we will take the first step onto a slippery slope and inevitably end up in the moral abyss of widespread abuse and violations of the rights of the weakest and most vulnerable patients. In the first part of the paper, empirical evidence to the contrary is presented and analyzed: None of the forecasted regrettable trends can be elicited from the body of existing statistical data. Accordingly, we have no good reason to believe either that we already are, or are sooner or later going to be, sliding into a moral abyss. A related question is then considered: Would it not be wiser and safer to stick to the status quo and preserve the existing legal ban on AVE even if the risk of its abuse is uncertain and may well turn out to be relatively low? It is argued that such an appeal to precautionary reasoning fails to justify an outright legal ban on AVE for at least two reasons: (i) it grossly underestimates the hidden moral costs of current legal arrangements (competent terminal patients suffer both disrespect for their autonomous will and deprivation of the good of a timely death) and (ii) the ban is both too inefficient and disproportionate to qualify as a reasonable measure of precaution.

Slippery slope arguments have been important in the euthanasia debate for at least half a century. In 1957 the Cambridge legal scholar Glanville Williams wrote a controversial book, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, in which he presented the decriminalizing of euthanasia as a modern liberal proposal taking its rightful place alongside proposals to decriminalize contraception, sterilization, abortion, and attempted suicide (all of which the book also advocated).1 Opposition to these reforms was in turn presented as exclusively religious and particularly Roman Catholic. Thus Williams asserted that "euthanasia can be condemned only according to religious opinion" (1957, p. 312).The following year, in ..

Singer returns to the major arguments and examples of his seminal 1975 work and brings us to the current moment. This edition, revised from top to bottom, covers important reforms in the European Union, and now in various U.S. states. On the flip side, Singer shows the impact of the expansion of factory farming due to demand for animal products in China. Singer describes how meat consumption is taking a toll on the environment, and factory farms pose a profound risk for spreading new viruses even worse than COVID-19. Animal Liberation Now includes alternatives to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. Framed as an appeal to conscience, fairness, decency, and justice, it is intended for the supporter and the skeptic alike. -- Provided by publisher.

Opponents of voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide often maintain that the procedures ought not to be accepted because ending an innocent human life would both be morally wrong in itself and have unfortunate consequences. A gravely suffering patient can grant that ending his life would involve such harm but still insist that he would have reason to continue living only if there were something to him in his abstaining from ending his life. Though relatively rarely, the notion of meaning of life has figured in recent medical ethical debate on voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. And in current philosophical discussion on meaning of life outside the medical ethical debate on voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide several authors have argued that being moral and having a meaningful existence are connected to each other. In this article, I assess whether his intentionally refraining from causing the harm related to voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide would involve something to such a patient in the sense that it would promote the meaningfulness of his life.