Bradford Skow

Is double prevention causation? Some say yes and some say no, but the answer is yes and no. Interrupting double prevention, where A prevents B from continuing to prevent something, is causation, while blocking double prevention, where A intervenes before B has begun preventing anything, is not. I present two arguments for this thesis. First, it sorts canonical examples of double prevention correctly. Second, well-known theoretical arguments that double prevention is not causation only show that blocking double prevention is not causation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Groll on Bionormativity and the Value of Genetic KnowledgeBradford Skow (bio)1. IntroductionShould people who plan to use donated sperm and/or eggs to conceive a child use an open donor who agrees ahead of time that any resulting children may be told who the donor is? In Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation (Groll 2021), Daniel Groll answers yes. He argues that using an anonymous donor would be wrong. Groll does not discuss adoption in detail, but his ideas also support the claim that people who adopt a child should adopt from parents who agree ahead of time that their child may be told who their biological parents are. It is not OK to have a closed adoption, in which information about the child's biological parents that would otherwise be public (for example, information on their original birth certificate) is kept secret by the government, and where (in some cases) the biological parents are promised that their children will never learn who they are. I was adopted in a closed adoption and met my biological family when I was twenty, and I think Groll's answer to his main question is right. That, however, does not mean I agree with all of his reasons. Here I examine those reasons and sketch some places where I would depart from them.2. The argument in outlineThe basic outline of Groll's argument, in simple terms, is as follows.1. If a child's knowing who their genetic parents are will likely benefit them—that is, if it will make their life go better, or increase their wellbeing—and if this is foreseeable, then that is a reason for parents to make the child's learning this possible (at some "appropriate" time).2. That knowledge will likely benefit the child …3.. … and this is foreseeable. [End Page 182]4. This reason favoring parents making genetic knowledge possible is strong enough that, except in maybe very special circumstances, parents should make this knowledge possible.The first point is hard to dispute. If the second point is true, then the third point is also plausible, since it is foreseeable that a child born from gamete donation (or an adopted child) will likely try to learn who their genetic (or biological) parents are. These searches are common and widely known to occur. Most of the action, therefore, is in the second point. Why think that knowing who your genetic or biological parents are is likely to make your life go better? Here the path diverges into a wood.3. First try: getting what you want makes your life go betterThe simplest way to argue that knowing who your genetic parents are is a benefit is to note that many, if not most, people conceived through gamete donation (or adoption) will, at some point, want—intensely want—to know who their genetic (or biological) parents are. One can then appeal to the idea that getting what you want makes your life go better, other things being equal.1Groll does not like this justification. His objection is that it does not show "that there is anything resembling a deep connection between genetic knowledge and well-being" (Groll 2021, 65). On Groll's view, knowing who your genetic (biological) parents are is a benefit, but this is not simply because it is something you want to know. I might know ahead of time that my child will want to live in a red house, and they might therefore be better off if they get to, and I might do my best to make that possible; but the reason I have to make genetic knowledge available to them is much stronger and much weightier than my reason to help them live in the right colored house. (It may be that this is where the fourth point of the argument, about the strength of reasons, comes in.)So why is the reason to provide genetic knowledge stronger? Groll, I think, holds that some things are more worth wanting than others. Getting what you want may benefit you, but getting what you want when what you want is something...

Sometimes, a proposition is fictional in a story in virtue of the fact that other fictional truths are good evidence for it. Cases are presented in which this evidential rule, and not some rule that invokes counterfactuals or intentions, is what explains what is fictional. Applications are made to the question of interpretive pluralism and the problem of imaginative resistance. In the background is pluralism about fictionality: the evidential rule is one of a variety of rules that are needed to account for what is fictional in a story.

It is widely accepted that readers will resist imagining that a character in a story did something morally wrong, even if the story endorses this judgement. This paper argues, first, that readers will not resist if the question of whether that act was wrong is not salient as they read; and, second, that asking a certain question can be part of correctly appreciating a story—even if that question is not in the foreground of the story, and even if the story itself discourages readers from asking it, as is common in some forms of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’.

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] don’t like sports, but it is a sports metaphor that comes to mind: if my team were out of the playoffs, I’d be rooting for Cameron. Unlike Cameron, I think that The Block Universe Theory of Time is true, but like Cameron I’ve argued that the best alternative, the theory it should be squaring off against in the World Series of The Philosophy of Time, is The Moving Spotlight Theory. I came to Cameron’s book, therefore, curious about how his argument for this claim was going to go.1...Parts of the book really opened my eyes. I’m thinking especially of Cameron’s discussion of the argument that the presentist can, while the moving spotlight theorist cannot, accept the claim that they know that they are...

© The Authors 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] time pass? Well of course it does. Iconoclasts and gadflies might deny it, but they’re just looking for negative attention. It is therefore frustrating to be told, as I have been, that one's theory of time is false because it leaves out the passage of time. In a way, Objective Becoming is a defence of the theory I prefer against this accusation. That theory is the block universe theory of time.1...The bumper-sticker version of the block universe theory says that time is a dimension of reality that is a lot like space. Since space does not move, or flow, neither does time. But that’s okay; time does not need to move or flow in order for it...

© The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Cameron thinks that MST-Supertime, MST-Supertense and MST-Time are defective as versions of the moving spotlight theory and goes on to describe what he thinks they are missing. But I don’t think they are defective; and what Cameron says is missing from these theories is actually present in a version of MST-Time that appears in the book.Cameron thinks that MST-Supertime, to start with, is inconsistent, and so the worst of the lot. He thinks McTaggart’s argument shows it to be inconsistent. But the theory is not inconsistent. We can draw a picture of what reality is like according to the theory, and the picture doesn’t confuse us the way M. C. Escher's pictures of inconsistent situations do. Figure 1 contains such a picture: the arrows...

In this paper I distinguish interpretations of the question ``How fast does time pass?’’ that are important for the debate over the reality of objective becoming from interpretations that are not. Then I discuss how one theory that incorporates objective becoming—the moving spotlight theory of time—answers this question. It turns out that there are several ways to formulate the moving spotlight theory of time. One formulation says that time passes but it makes no sense to ask how fast; another formulation says that time passes at one second per supersecond; and a third says that time passes at one second per second. I defend the intelligibility of this final version of the theory

Possible-worlds talk obscures, rather than clarifies, the debate about haecceitism. In this paper I distinguish haecceitism and anti-haecceitism from other doctrines that sometimes go under those names. Then I defend the claim that there are no non-tendentious definitions of ‘haecceitism’ and ‘anti-haecceitism’ using possible-worlds talk. That is, any definition of ‘haecceitism’ using possible-worlds talk depends, for its correctness, on a substantive theory of the nature of possible worlds. This explains why using possible-worlds talk when discussing haecceitism causes confusion: if the parties to the discussion presuppose different theories of the nature of possible worlds, then they will mean different things by ‘haecceitism’.

A desert-sensitive moral theory says that whether people get what they deserve, whether they are treated as they deserve to be treated, plays a role in determining what we ought to do. Some popular forms of consequentialism are desert-sensitive. But where do facts about what people deserve come from? If someone deserves a raise, or a kiss, in virtue of what does he deserve those things? One plausible answer is that what someone deserves depends, at least in part, on how well he meets his moral requirements. The wicked deserve to suffer and the decent do not. Shelly Kagan (2006) has argued that this plausible answer is wrong. But his argument for that conclusion does not succeed. I will show how to formulate a desert-sensitive moral theory (and also a desert-sensitive version of consequentialism) on which this answer is correct

This book first argues that what philosophers are really after, or at least should be after, when they seek a theory of explanation, is a theory of answers to why-questions. The book's main thesis, then, is a theory of reasons why. Every reason why some event happened is either a cause, or a ground, of that event. Challenging this thesis are many examples philosophers have thought they have found of "non-causal explanations." Reasons Why uses two ideas to show that these examples are not counterexamples to the theory it defends. First is the idea that not every part of a good response to a why-question is part of an answer to that why-question. Second is the idea that not every reason why something is a reason why an event happened is itself a reason why that event happened.

Bohmian mechanics faces an underdetermination problem: when it comes to solving the measurement problem, alternatives to the Bohmian guidance equa- tion work just as well as the official guidance equation. Dürr, Goldstein, and Zanghì have argued that of the candidate guidance equations, the official guid- ance equation is the simplest Galilean-invariant candidate. This symmetry argument—if it worked—would solve the underdetermination problem. But the argument does not work. It fails because it rests on assumptions about how Galilean transformations act on the wavefunction that are unwarranted. My discussion has larger morals about the phys- ical significance of certain mathematical results in non-orthodox interpretations of quantum mechanics.

No one denies that time and space are different; and it is easy to catalog differences between them. I can point my finger toward the west, but I can’t point my finger toward the future. If I choose, I can now move to the left, but I cannot now choose to move toward the past. And (as D. C. Williams points out) for many of us, our attitudes toward time differ from our attitudes toward space. We want to maximize our temporal extent and minimize our spatial extent: we want to live as long as possible but we want to be thin.1 But these differences are not very deep, and don’t get at the essence of the difference between time and space. That’s what I want to understand: I want to know what makes time different from space. I want to know which difference is the fundamental difference between them.

Local versions of the (special) principle of relativity say that if the same type of experiment is conducted in two isolated, unaccelerated laboratories, then the outcomes of those experiments must be the same. Global versions of the principle say that if you take a physically possible world and boost the entire material content of that world, you get another physically possible world. Some authors say that the local and the global principles are logically independent, and that the local version is more important. These authors are wrong. I argue that the global version entails the local version, and discuss why a counterexample to this entailment offered by Tim Budden fails