Asymmetry Thesis Research Articles

The Morality of Remote Warfare: Against the Asymmetry Objection to Remote Weaponry

Remote weapons, such as precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and drones, regularly play an important part in contemporary military operations, but they are extremely controversial on moral grounds. Although critics of these weapons have raised a number of objections against their use, many rely on some variation of the asymmetry thesis. This is the claim that it is immoral to wage war using weapons that allocate risk asymmetrically, allowing those who use these weapons to minimise their exposure to risk while their opponents can be easily attacked. In this article, it is demonstrated that the asymmetry thesis fails as a moral objection to the use of remote weapons by exploring three different variants of the asymmetry thesis and showing that each suffers from serious limitations.

If terrorism and insurgency are the “weapons of the weak,” why do they sometimes win?

It has been argued that terrorism and insurgency are weapons of the weak. It is thus surprising that there are clear instances where the weaker actor, adopting such tactics, has emerged victorious. This paper identifies three arguments put forth in the current literature to explain this phenomenon. First Mack’s interest asymmetry thesis, second Arreguin-Toft’s strategic interaction approach, and finally the role of external support as identified by Record. This paper however proposes that while all of these are true in certain circumstances, single factor explanations are rarely useful when considering conflict outcomes. Rather, the literature has a predisposed bias toward the stronger actor. The literature presupposes that wars should be won by the stronger actor, and that consequently the fight is lost by the power with the most material capability, not won by the weaker side. This paper argues however that the focus on material capabilities is misguided, and does not offer any true predictive accuracy....

To Be or Never to Have Been: Anti-Natalism and a Life Worth Living

David Benatar argues that being brought into existence is always a net harm and never a benefit. I disagree. I argue that if you bring someone into existence who lives a life worth living (LWL), then you have not all things considered wronged her. Lives are worth living if they are high in various objective goods and low in objective bads. These lives constitute a net benefit. In contrast, lives worth avoiding (LWA) constitute a net harm. Lives worth avoiding are net high in objective bads and low in objective goods. It is the prospect of a LWA that gives us good reason to not bring someone into existence. Happily, many lives are not worth avoiding. Contra Benatar, many are indeed worth living. Even if we grant Benatar his controversial asymmetry thesis, we have no reason to think that coming into existence is always a net harm.

On the Tension between Sex Equality and Religious Freedom

When, if ever, is it legitimate for law to ban sex discrimination by religious institutions? It is best to approach this question by noticing that most of the time, ordinary civil and criminal law are legitimately applied to such institutions. For example, members of religious organizations cannot commit torts, even if the commission of torts is said to be part of their religious practices. Many people seem to accept what might be called an Asymmetry Thesis, which holds that sex equality principles may not be applied to religious institutions, whereas ordinary civil and criminal law may indeed be applied to them. This essay argues that the Asymmetry Thesis cannot be defended, and that much of the time, sex equality principles are properly applied to religious institutions. Discussion is also devoted to the controversial idea that facially neutral laws may be applied to religious institutions even if they have a severe adverse effect on religious practices.

Does doxastic responsibility entail the ability to believe otherwise?

Whether responsibility for actions and omissions requires the ability to do otherwise is an important issue in contemporary philosophy. However, a closely related but distinct issue, namely whether doxastic responsibility requires the ability to believe otherwise, has been largely neglected. This paper fills this remarkable lacuna by providing a defence of the thesis that doxastic responsibility entails the ability to believe otherwise. On the one hand, it is argued that the fact that unavoidability is normally an excuse counts in favour of this thesis. On the other hand, three objections against this thesis are discussed and criticized. First, one might think that what suffices for doxastic responsibility is control over or influence on certain desirable or undesirable properties of beliefs. It is argued that this objection misrepresents the issue under consideration. Second, it may be objected that the thesis is contradicted by our intuitions in doxastic analogues of Frankfurt-style scenarios. It is argued that distinguishing between belief-universals and belief-particulars helps to see why this argument fails. Third and finally, one might draw an analogy with the asymmetry thesis in ethics by arguing that even if blameworthy belief requires the ability to believe otherwise, praiseworthy belief does not. It is argued that the main arguments in favour of this presumed asymmetry are wanting, partly because they fail to distinguish between two different kinds of praiseworthiness. Finally, the author sketches three implications of the thesis that doxastic responsibility entails the ability to believe otherwise: counterfactual construals of responsible belief might be tenable, the deontological conception of epistemic justification needs revision on an important point, and there might be an important asymmetry between beliefs on the one hand and actions and many non-doxastic consequences on the other.

Moral Expertise

Abstract This paper surveys recent work on moral expertise. Much of that work defends an asymmetry thesis according to which the cognitive deference to expertise that characterizes other areas of inquiry is out of place in morality. There are two reasons why you might think asymmetry holds. The problem might lie in the existence of expertise or in deferring to it. We argue that both types of arguments for asymmetry fail. They appear to be stronger than they are because of their focus on moral expertise regarding all-in judgments about rightness. We reject this emphasis on all-in judgment in favor of an account of moral expertise as typically multi-stranded and domain limited. This account of moral expertise is better able to address the problem of how to identify those who have expertise. It also offers a more nuanced picture of the contrast between accepting a moral claim on one's own and accepting it on testimony.

Virtual worlds and moral evaluation

Consider the multi-user virtual worlds of online games such as EVE and World of Warcraft, or the multi-user virtual world of Second Life. Suppose a player performs an action in one of these worlds, via his or her virtual character, which would be wrong, if the virtual world were real. What is the moral status of this virtual action? In this paper I consider arguments for and against the Asymmetry Thesis: the thesis that such virtual actions are never wrong. I also explain how the truth of the Asymmetry Thesis is closely aligned with the possibility of what Edward Castronova has called closed synthetic worlds. With some qualifications, the ultimate conclusion is that the Asymmetry Thesis is false and that these closed worlds are impossible.

A Modest Defense of Aesthetic Testimony

Like many interested in the history of ballet, I have read various things about the life and career of Vaslav Nijinsky. And I happen to accept much of what I have read. Among other things, I believe that he was born in Urkraine, had an affair with Sergei Diaghilev, starred in Petrushka, choreographed The Afternoon of a Faun, suffered from mental illness, and died in 1950. 1 accept all of this, and much else, solely on the basis of testimony, and most would think that I am warranted in doing so, indeed, even that I thereby know these things about Nijinsky. And it is clear that I stand no chance of knowing them otherwise.1 But I believe other things about him as well, among them, that he was a brilliant performergraceful, dynamicone of the greatest danseurs of Russian ballet. This too, I accept on nothing more than the word of others. And, again, it is clear that I could have no other basis for doing so. But are these beliefs similarly warranted? Do I know that Nijinsky was a great dancer through accepting the testimony of those who witnessed his performances, now so long ago? Many would hesitate to think so. In everyday life, we often exhibit a resistance to aesthetic testimony, quite unlike our instinctive credulity regarding nonaesthetic reports. And there is a formidable tradition in the philosophy of art that is deeply sympathetic to this attitude. Many philosophers flatly deny that we can learn from aesthetic testimony.2 And even those who resist this sweeping assessment still urge that we should exercise special caution in assessing such reports or conclude that we learn from them only very rarely.3 In short, the asymmetry thesis, or AT, that aesthetic testimony is epistemically inferior to nonaesthetic testimony, is firmly entrenched in both common sense and philosophical tradition. There is, however, an important distinction to be drawn among proponents of the thesis. On many defensible positions, aesthetic testimony fails to transmit knowledge, unlike nonaesthetic reports, simply because no one has any aesthetic knowledge to begin with. This includes expressivist views that deny aesthetic claims are truth-apt and the error theory, which maintains that aesthetic claims are all false.4 A modest sort of realism, which accepts that there are aesthetic truths but ultimately despairs the possibility of knowing them, similarly dismisses aesthetic testimony. AT is just an afterthought on these forms of aesthetic skepticism. More interestingly though, other philosophers embrace the possibility of aesthetic knowledge, but still urge that aesthetic testimony is uniquely problematic. Indeed, it is these philosophers who make a point to single out aesthetic reports as epistemically handicapped. In this article, I focus exclusively on their position. My aim is to defend aesthetic testimony in an important, but limited, way. Specifically, I suggest that if one accepts aesthetic knowledge via other means, it is difficult to maintain that there is any interesting epistemic contrast between aesthetic and nonaesthetic testimony. In short, if one rejects aesthetic skepticism, then AT seems unwarranted. I will not pretend to decide the much greater issue of whether aesthetic skepticism, in its various guises, can be rejected. To be sure, the ultimate fate of aesthetic testimony clearly hinges on this. The point I stress here is just that this is all it hinges on. I begin by examining the three asymmetrical positions currently found within the literature. I present the arguments given on their

Proving BDI Properties of Agent-Oriented Programming Languages

In this paper, we consider each of the nine BDI principles defined by Rao and Georgeff based on Bratman's asymmetry thesis, and we verify which ones are satisfied by Rao's AgentSpeak(L), a logic programming language inspired by the BDI architecture for cognitive agents. In order to set the grounds for the proofs, we first introduce a rigorous way in which to define the informational, motivational, and deliberative modalities of BDI logics for AgentSpeak(L) agents, according to its structural operational semantics that we introduced in a recent paper. This computationally grounded semantics for the BDI modalities forms the basis of a framework that can be used to further investigate BDI properties of AgentSpeak(L) agents, and contributes towards establishing firm theoretical grounds for a BDI approach to agent-oriented programming.

CUBAN EXCEPTIONALISM: Group-based Hierarchy and the Dynamics of Patriotism in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba

This paper examined the interface between “racial” and national identity from the perspective of two competing theoretical frameworks: the ideological asymmetry hypothesis and the thesis of Iberian Exceptionalism. In contrast to previous results found in the United States and Israel, use of survey data from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba showed some support for both theoretical positions. Consistent with the asymmetry thesis, there was strong and consistent evidence of racial hierarchy within all three Caribbean nations. However, contradicting the asymmetry hypothesis and more in line with the Iberian Exceptionalism perspective, there was a general tendency for all “races” to be equally attached to the nation in both the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Somewhat unexpectedly, Cuban Blacks tended to be slightly more positively attached to the nation than Cuban Whites. These results suggest that the precise interface between racial and national identity will be acutely influenced by the specific socio-political context within each nation.

Proving the Asymmetry Thesis Principles for a BDI Agent-Oriented Programming Language

In this paper, we consider each of the nine principles of BDI logics as defined by Rao and Georgeff based on Bratman's asymmetry thesis, and we verify which ones are satisfied by Rao's AgentSpeak(L), a computable logic language inspired by the BDI architecture for cognitive agents. This is in line with Rao's original motivation for defining AgentSpeak(L): to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of BDI agent systems. In order to set the grounds for the proof, we first introduce a particular way in which to define the informational, motivational, and deliberative modalities of BDI logics for AgentSpeak(L) agents, according to its structural operational semantics (that we introduced in a recent paper). This provides a framework that can be used to investigate further properties of AgentSpeak(L) agents, contributing towards giving firm theoretical grounds for BDI agent programming.

Preface

Preface

The Asymmetry Thesis and the Diversity of "Invalid" Argument-Forms

According to the Asymmetry Thesis, whereas there are many kinds of argument-forms that make at least some of their instances valid, there is none that makes any of its instances invalid. To refute this thesis, a counterexample has been produced in the form of an argument-form whose premise-form's instances are all logically true and whose conclusion form's instances are all logically false. The purpose of this paper is to show that there are many more kinds of argument-forms that make some of their instances invalid and that, hence, are counterexamples refuting the Asymmetry Thesis.

Persons and their Properties

According to what I call ‘the asymmetry thesis’, persons, though they are the direct bearers of the properties expressed by mental predicates, are not the direct bearers of properties such as those expressed by ‘weighs 135 pounds’ or ‘has crossed legs’. A number of different views about persons entail the asymmetry thesis. I first argue that the asymmetry thesis entails an error theory about our discourse involving person‐referring terms. I then argue that it is further threatened by consideration of the grounds we have for self‐ascribing mental and physical predicates.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness

The Asymmetry Thesis

In a series of articles1 Gerald Massey has defended asymmetry the thesis that the present stage of logical theory our ability to prove validity totally eclipses our ability to show invalidity.2 My initial strategy in discussing this thesis will be to close in on it gradually by con sidering, sometimes summarily but sometimes in greater detail, various distinguishable theses in the neighborhood, gradually approximating the thesis which Massey wishes to defend. For starters, the thesis is an epistemological one and certainly does not involve any claim to the effect that there is no adequate account of what the distinction between valid and invalid arguments is. In accepting what he calls the Principle of Logical Form (Arguments that instantiate valid argu ment forms are valid) and, albeit somewhat less enthusiastically, its con verse (Valid arguments instantiate valid argument forms),3 Massey evidently endorses something like the following account of the distinction: an argument is valid if and only if it instantiates a validating form.4 Once the distinction between arguments and forms is broached, it becomes important to emphasize that Masseyan scepticism about invalidity concerns arguments rather than forms; he has no evident scruples, for ex ample, about instancing affirming the consequent as not being a validating form.5 So the thesis is an epistemological thesis, a thesis about what we can know, and a thesis about arguments rather than forms. Distinctions still need to be made, however. Massey has no evident objection to saying on the basis of that various egregiously bad arguments are bad.6 Evidently he would not, or at least he need not, object to the claim that our intuition that the following argument is invalid amounts to knowledge that it is:

Enjoying and suffering

THAT 'pleasure' is not the opposite of 'pain' has come to be widely regarded as a philosophical truism. And this view has usually been thought to depend to some extent on the equally widely accepted view that 'pleasure' is not the name of a sensation. I do not believe that these two views necessarily entail each other in the way in which they have been thought to do so. I believe, that is, that it may be possible to admit that 'pleasure' is not the name of a sensation without being committed to the rejection of the claim that 'pleasure' is the opposite of 'pain'. I shall try to show in what follows not only that the denial of this claim is not a truism, but that it is false. How can a false claim come to be regarded as a truism? I believe that in the case in question this has come about largely because many influential philosophers have argued very cogently against the possibility that 'pleasure' could be the name of a sensation without any accompanying scrutiny of our assumption that 'pain' is such a name. For in most of the discussions I have in mind the question of the status of 'pleasure' has been raised in a way which presupposes, where it does not actually state, that there is a radical asymmetry between the behaviour of 'pain' and 'pleasure' concepts. There is thus a philosophical thesis waiting to be unearthed and challenged. I shall call this the 'asymmetry thesis' (henceforth the 'a-thesis'). Typical arguments to show that 'pleasure' is not the name of a sensation can be found in Professor Ryle's discussion of the question in his book Dilemmas and also in his contribution to the symposium on Pleasure in the Aristotelian Society Supplement for 1954. Ryle's discussion proceeds from the assumption that the logically prior notion in terms of which pleasure concepts are to be elucidated is that of the enjoyment of an activity. That Ryle at least presupposes the a-thesis in arguing that 'pleasure' can't be the name of a sensation can, I think, be shown by these examples: Ryle regards 'one minute ago I had a pain' as unexceptionable but finds an absurdity in 'one minute ago I had a pleasure'. This is because we tell a doctor where it hurts, but not where it pleases. Now of course we don't tell the doctor where it pleases. But this is because pleasures are not normally regarded as indices (though they may be the causes) of illness. We go to doctors about things we want to be rid of. And pains, but not pleasures, are things of this kind, I am inclined to say, by definition. But I find no difficulty in imagining 153