Simon Kirchin

In the life sciences, there is an ongoing discussion about a perceived ‘reproducibility crisis’. However, it remains unclear to which extent the perceived lack of reproducibility is the consequence of issues that can be tackled and to which extent it may be the consequence of unrealistic expectations of the technical level of reproducibility. Large-scale, multi-institutional experimental replication studies are very cost- and time-intensive. This Perspective suggests an alternative, complementary approach: meta-research using sociological and philosophical methodologies to examine researcher trust in data. An improved understanding of the criteria used by researchers to judge data reliability will provide crucial, initial evidence on the actual scale of the reproducibility crisis and on measures to tackle it.

Tourism to sites of war, conflict, terror and violence is hugely popular. All manner of tours and visits are organised worldwide, every day, to both current and historic conflict sites. Some are once-in-a-lifetime events, such as tours of current conflict sites in the Middle East or to the battlegrounds of World War II, some are routine family visits, such as day trips to local castles. Some visits focus on war and battles themselves, others focus on sites that were the centres of conflict in a broader sense, such as notorious prisons or torture chambers. What strikes us is the absence of sustained, critical attention to conflict tourism from philosophers. This paper narrows matters into a more manageable form. We focus on the idea of tourist visits to conflict heritage sites, some of which are adapted for mass, regular, safe tourism. In this chapter we have three aims: first, to raise awareness of the phenomena and show they merit sustained philosophical interest; second, to outline some relevant philosophical questions; third, to offer some initial responses to these questions. Our overall claim, voiced at various intervals, is that one can, at most, develop general, defeasible ideas both about the phenomena and about what one should do.

ABSTRACT Many people argue that disagreements and inconsistencies between Research Ethics Committees are morally problematic and there has been much effort to ‘harmonise’ their judgements. Some inconsistencies are bad because they are due to irrationality, or carelessness, or the operation of conflicting interests, and so should be reduced or removed. Other inconsistencies, we argue, are not bad and should be left or even encouraged. In this paper we examine three arguments to reject the view that we should strive for complete consistency between committees. The first argument is that differences in judgement are not necessarily incompatible with ideas of justice for patients who are potential participants of research reviewed by different committees. We call this ‘the justice argument.’ The second argument is that such committees do not have access to a single moral truth, to which their judgement is supposed to correspond. We call this the ‘moral pluralism argument.’ The third argument is that the process of ethics committee review is also morally relevant and not solely the outcome. We call this the ‘due process argument.’ While we fall short of establishing exactly how much variation and on what substantive issues would be ethically permissible, we show that it is largely inevitable and that a certain amount of variation could be seen as a desirable part of the institution of medical research.

In this critical discussion I summarize Sophie-Grace Chappell’s excellent _Epiphanies_. Doing so leads me to ask a question. She is clearly against ‘moral theory’ and puts forward her preferred account of ‘epiphanic reflection’. But does she seek to wholly replace moral theory with epiphanic reflection or is she seeking to achieve a form of accommodation where both are given their due in our everyday moral lives? After voicing this issue I consider what options there might be in order to help us understand the question better and then to answer it.

We are living through a golden age of drag, with drag kings and queens prominent in our society and media. Drag seems like fun, and a talk about drag in a department seminar may seem as if philosophy is enjoying a jolly time away from more serious topics. However, drag has a serious side. Some critics have recently accused drag of inherent sexism and misogyny, and this has extra bite in an age where concerns about cultural appropriation (and other, similar matters) are high. This talk will detail the challenge and argue that drag is not inherently morally objectionable.

Derek Parfit was one of the world’s leading philosophers. His _On What Matters_ was the most eagerly awaited book in philosophy for many years. _Reading Parfit: On What Matters _is an essential overview and assessment of volumes 1 and 2 of Parfit’s monumental work by a team of international contributors, and includes responses by Parfit himself. It discusses central features of Parfit’s book, including the structure and nature of reasons; the ideas underlying moral principles; Parfit’s discussions of consequentialism, contractualism and Kantian deontology; and his metaethical ideas and arguments. Reading Parfit will be central reading for students of ethics and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of one of the most important works of philosophy published in the last fifty years.

There seems to be an interesting difference between judging someone to be good and judging them to be kind. Both judgements are typically positive, but the latter seems to offer more description of the person: we get a slightly more specific sense of what they are like. Very general evaluative concepts are referred to as thin concepts, whilst more specific ones are termed thick concepts. Examples of the former include good, bad, right and wrong, whilst there are countless examples of the latter: brave, rude, gracious, wicked, sympathetic, mean. Marking this distinction opens up some interesting questions. How do the descriptive and evaluative elements of thick concepts combine? Are these elements separable in the first place? Is there a sharp division between thin and thick concepts? Can we mark interesting further distinctions between how thick ethical concepts work and how their aesthetic and epistemic counterparts work? How, if at all, are thick and thin concepts related to reasons and action?.These questions, and others, touch on some of the deepest philosophical issues about the evaluative and normative. They force us to think hard about the place of the evaluative in a (seemingly) nonevaluative world, and they also raise fascinating issues about how language works.This volume of twelve papers explores the phenomenon of thin and thick concepts. They are accompanied by a large introduction that offers an overview of the current and historic field.Authors: Simon Blackburn, Jonathan Dancy, Timothy Chappell, Matti Eklund, Edward Harcourt and Alan Thomas, Simon Kirchin, Debbie Roberts, Michael Smith, Valerie Tiberius, Pekka Väyrynen Eric Wiland, and Nick Zangwill.

What kind of properties are moral qualities, such as rightness, badness, etc? Some ethicists doubt that there are any such properties; they maintain that thinking that something is morally wrong (for example) is comparable to thinking that something is a unicorn or a ghost. These "moral error theorists" argue that the world simply does not contain the kind of properties or objects necessary to render our moral judgments true. This radical form of moral skepticism was championed by the philosopher John Mackie (1917-1981). This anthology is a collection of philosophical essays critically examining Mackie’s view

Moral particularism is a contentious position at present and seems likely to be so for the foreseeable future. In this Introduction, I outline and detail its essential claim, which I take to be, roughly, that what can be a reason that helps to make one action right need not be a reason that always helps to make actions right. This claim challenges a central assumption on which most, if not all, normative ethical theories are supposedly based. We owe this way of characterizing moral particularism to Jonathan Dancy, around whose writings much of the present debate revolves. Key Words: ethics • generalism • particularism • reasons • valency.

_Arguing about Metaethics_ collects together some of the most exciting contemporary work in metaethics in one handy volume. In it, many of the most influential philosophers in the field discuss key questions in metaethics: Do moral properties exist? If they do, how do they fit into the world as science conceives it? If they don’t exist, then how should we understand moral thought and language? What is the relation between moral judgement and motivation? As well as these questions, this volume discusses a wide range of issues including moral objectivity, truth and moral judgements, moral psychology, thick evaluative concepts and moral relativism. The editors provide lucid introductions to each of the eleven themed sections in which they show how the debate lies and outline the arguments of the papers. _Arguing about Metaethics_ is an ideal resource text for students at upper undergraduate or postgraduate level.

In this excellent, clearly written, and clear sighted book, Terence Cuneo defends moral realism from a variety of different attacks. Cuneo is particularly interested in the charge that the moral facts that realists posit are suspect because they are unnatural and queer. He addresses a number of arguments against realism, not least Mackie's Argument from Queerness. What makes the book distinctive is its strategy. Cuneo is keen to show that moral facts and epistemic facts are very similar, if not inseparably intertwined in many cases, and to argue that we should not find moral realism odd since we do not find epistemic realism odd. Indeed, towards the start he begins with a number of quotations from those who have cast doubt on moral realism, including Mackie, who themselves point out that there could be parallels between the moral and epistemic cases, but who do not pursue those parallels to any great degree. Cuneo aims to fill this gap, and to do so in favour of the realist. I agree entirely with Cuneo's conclusions and …

This paper is a reply to Simon Blackburn's 'Is Objective Moral Justification Possible on a Quasi-realist Foundation?' Inquiry 42, pp. 213-28. Blackburn attempts to show how his version of non-cognitivism - quasi-realist projectivism - can evade the threat of ethical relativism, the thought that all ways of living are as ethically good as each other and every ethical judgment is as ethically true as any other. He further attempts to show that his position is superior in this respect to, amongst other accounts, sensibility theory. According to Blackburn, sensibility theory succumbs easily to the relativistic challenge because it depends on some 'substantive' notion of truth. It is agreed with Blackburn that the threat of relativism is less of a threat to him than at first appears, although I think that it retains some menace, but not agreed that sensibility theorists cannot also counter the threat of relativism. The point is that the threat of ethical relativism depends less on truth than Blackburn supposes. Thus sensibility theorists can counter ethical relativism in much the same way that quasi-realist projectivists can

Derek Parfit was one of the world’s leading philosophers. His _On What Matters_ was the most eagerly awaited book in philosophy for many years. _Reading Parfit: On What Matters _is an essential overview and assessment of volumes 1 and 2 of Parfit’s monumental work by a team of international contributors, and includes responses by Parfit himself. It discusses central features of Parfit’s book, including the structure and nature of reasons; the ideas underlying moral principles; Parfit’s discussions of consequentialism, contractualism and Kantian deontology; and his metaethical ideas and arguments. Reading Parfit will be central reading for students of ethics and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of one of the most important works of philosophy published in the last fifty years.

In this paper, I concentrate on the notion of default valency, drawing on some of the distinctions made and thoughts given in my Introduction. I motivate why the notion is important for particularists to have up their sleeves by outlining a recent debate between particularists and generalists. I then move to the main aim of the piece which is to discuss how anyone, particularist and generalist alike, might seek to distinguish reason-generating features into different types. My main aim is not to argue for a specific way of dividing such features into types but to present various taxonomical options. Key Words: ethics • features • generalism • particularism • valency.

This paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of ethical intuitionism and is an extended critical discussion of an edited collection Rethinking Intutionism (ed.) Stratton-Lake (OUP) that has been much discussed. (My piece is one of the first discussions of it.) Along other matters, I argue for the original and fairly controversial claim that in order for intuitionism to hold water, we must allow that what is involved in full moral understanding can differ from person to person, rather than thinking that if a claim can be intuited rather than proved, everyone who intuits it understands it in the same way