Steven Luper

Chapter 5 takes up the issue of personal identity. Is the particular cow that one kills now identical, in the relevant sense, to the cow that would have lived a couple of more years if she were not killed? According to mentalist accounts, only some mental (or psychological) attributes determine what we fundamentally are. If the cow that would have lived in the future would have been psychologically continuous with the cow that we killed, then it is the same cow in the relevant sense. Is it true that we are fundamentally minds or persons as opposed to animals? If that is true, then we are not, at a fundamental level, animals. The chapter brings forward an argument in support of animalism, the view that we are, fundamentally, animals. It points out animalism’s implications for the ethics of killing animals.

When the topic of international justice did arise, discussion rarely got beyond recommendations about how nations could avoid war, as well as suggestions about when a declaration of war was morally justifiable and what sorts of methods might be used in the course of a justifiable war the topics of so-called just-war theory. Such is no longer the case.To be sure, just-war theory is reaching greater states of sophistication,much of it focused around Michael Walzer's book Just and Unjust Wars.Excerpts from Walzer's book appear here, in Part Two, along with a set of newly written chapters that deal with issues arising from the use of violence among nations. The topics of these chapters are foreign interventionism and states' rights, deterrence and the threat of nuclear reprisal, and terrorism.But issues of international justice other than just-war theory have been discussed by an an ever-increasing group of twentieth-century scholars. These issues deal with what might be called distributive justice, which concerns the distribution of the world's natural resources and the goods produced by laborers across the world, as well as the duties,rights, and liberties possessed by individuals. How such items ought to be distributed within nation-states has been discussed extensively by social and political philosophers. Only in recent years has any attention been paid to the proper distribution of goods internationally. The chapters in Part One all do so. With one exception, all of these chapters are written for this volume. The exception is an excerpt from Charles Beitz's book PoliticalTheory and International Relations, Part Three of which is reproduced here almost in its entirety. The other chapters in this part are devoted to the topics of justice and the distribution of the world's resources, the obligation to assist the needy, the responsibilities of international corporations, and justice and the global environment.

How might we change ourselves without ending our existence? What could we become, if we had access to an advanced form of bioengineering that allowed us dramatically to alter our genome? Could we remain in existence after ceasing to be alive? What is it to be human? Might we still exist after changing ourselves into something that is not human? What is the significance of human extinction? Steven Luper addresses these questions and more in this thought-provoking study. He defends an animalist account, which says that we are organisms, but claims that we are also material objects. His book goes to the heart of the most complex questions about what we are and what we might become. Using case studies from the life sciences as well as thought experiments, Luper develops a new way of thinking about the nature of life and death, and whether and how human extinction matters.

I classify different sorts of natural resources and suggest how these resources may be acquired. I also argue that inventions, whether gadgets or artificial life forms, should not be privately owned. Gadgets and life-forms are not created (although the term 'invention' suggests otherwise); they are discovered, and hence have much in common with more familiar natural resources such as sunlight that ought not to be privately owned. Nonetheless, inventors of gadgets, like discoverers of certain more familiar resources, sometimes should be granted exclusive but temporary control over their inventions as an incentive for making unknown items widely accessible

After critically discussing the traditional account of knowledge and alternatives to it, this thesis offers an account of empirical knowledge and rational belief then applies the proposal to various issues about skepticism and epistemic logic. In the first part, I consider the causal theory, defeasibilism, the conclusive reasons analysis and Robert Nozick's tracking theory. In the second part I propose an account of empirical knowledge. S noninferentially knows that h if, and only if, S's belief that h is caused by a sequence of events each member of which is both a reliable and a conclusive indicator that h, and some member of which is an infallible indicator that h. An event E is a reliable indicator that h if, and only if, in the E-worlds close to the actual world, it is usually the case that E occurs only if h holds. E is a conclusive indicator that h if, and only if, in S's circumstances C, E would not occur unless h held. And E is an infallible indicator that h if, and only if, E would not occur unless h held. S inferentially knows that h if, and only if, S's belief that e is caused by a sequence of events each member of which is both a reliable and a conclusive indicator that h, and some member of which is an infallible indicator that h, and S's inference of h on the basis of e is rational. In the last part of the thesis I defend, against Nozick's important criticisms, the Principle of the Closure of Knowledge Under Entailment. At stake is the skeptic's argument that we cannot know that we are not in a skeptic's scenario sk, such as that we are disembodied brains misled by direct stimulation to believe what we do; so we cannot know anything incompatible with sk because if we did know that e we would, assuming closure, know that not-sk. Nozick agrees that we do not know not-sk but retains our knowledge that e by rejecting closure. I defend closure and explain the sense in which we can always know the consequences of what we know : given that it is via sequence F that we know our belief that e, the consequences of e, including not-sk, hold in all possible F-worlds except those that are far from the actual world.