Objectionable Features Research Articles

Modal Knowledge for Expressivists

What does ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, according to which ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ is equivalent to ‘it is consistent with everything that Smith knows that it is raining’ or ‘Smith doesn’t know that it isn’t raining’. Pernicious transparency has direct counterexamples and undermines vanilla principles of epistemic logic, such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can be true without one knowing it might be. I re-frame the challenge in precise terms and propose a novel expressivist formal semantics that meets it by exploiting (i) the topic-sensitivity and fragmentation of knowledge and belief states and (ii) the apparent context-sensitivity of epistemic modality. The resulting form of assertibility semantics advances the state of the art for state-based bilateral semantics by combining attitude reports with context-sensitive modal claims, while evading various objectionable features. In appendices, I compare the proposed system to Beddor and Goldstein’s ‘safety semantics’ and discuss its analysis of a modal Gettier case due to Moss.

Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and the Haiti revolt (1791–1804): Transatlantic print chronicles of race in an age of colonial market exchange

This work contributes to recent transdisciplinary efforts to view the Haitian slave revolt (1791–1804) as the historical inspiration for Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Reconstructions offered by contemporary postcolonial scholars argue that the Haitian revolt was chronicled in Minerva as Hegel raced to finish his Phenomenology. Benhabib recently recognized the Hegel-Haiti thesis as entailing the sort of inclusive dialogical learning process necessary to validate subaltern experiences. The thesis has also drawn its share of sceptical scrutiny as Badiou claims that it risks forcing an unnecessary moral dissymmetry, neglects objectionable features of enslavement and imposes a mismatch between apolitical subject and revolutionary. In reply, we appeal to the pioneering work of Tavares to show that the asymmetrical construction of classification schemes for persons of mixed-racial statuses accords with decades of documented literary exchanges between Hegel and Gregoire. We then turn to the work of James on the role of mixed-race merchants in the testimonial accounts of late 18th century French historians to show that European literate publics were well aware of the extremely coercive forms of commodified labour found in Saint-Domingue. We then invoke the archival work of Du Bois on French, British and American parliamentary proceedings that show the provisional colonial identities ascribed to Caribbean subjects did not hinder their self-conscious exercise of political agency. Viewing Hegel in terms of the historiographic records of the racial ontologies of early modern transatlantic literary exchanges helps explain how he adapted these tropes concerning mixed-race subjects in a manner that better explains many of the anomalous features of the dialectic. However, conferring the Haitian revolution its proper world-historical warrant as inspiration for his infamous master-slave dialectic need not lead us to overlook Hegel’s complicity with many of the epistemic and ontological flaws of colonial tropes held in early modern transatlantic print.

On 'Confetti Regulation''”: The Wrong Way to Regulate Gamified Investing

Zero-commission investing apps like Robinhood have a business model that requires clients to trade as much as possible. To that end, these apps incorporate design features sometimes called “gamification”: behavioral prompts and flashy casino-like design elements that encourage trading. Securities regulators have focused on elements that encourage repeat engagement and trading. In principle there are many ways both to define the problem and to address it through policy. In this Essay, we focus on one approach to the problem—direct regulation of software design—and warn securities regulators away from it. Regulators might find it tempting to ban objectionable design features like a burst of confetti after the successful execution of a trade, or what we call “confetti regulation.” There are two problems with “confetti regulation.” It may be hard to implement and justify. But to our mind the greater problem is that it would attract a lot of deregulatory energy from technology attorneys who cast informational molehills as free-speech mountains. Securities regulation is largely about information and communication—yet it has somehow avoided serious First Amendment scrutiny (read: judicial interference) for decades. The SEC, meanwhile, has lost many important appeals before the Supreme Court. And in light of recent changes to First Amendment law, in our view it would be unwise for the agency to pursue regulatory strategies that would precipitate more deregulatory constitutional challenges. We argue that in addressing gamification regulators should avoid asserting direct control over “bad” software design, and instead focus on the business model that drives it. In addition, regulators should justify regulatory action in terms of settled policies that are technology-neutral. Our essay discusses these implications and tees up for future preliminary components of a framework for assessing behavioral design against the securities laws’ goals.

Domination and misframing in the refugee regime

ABSTRACT The current practices of refugee protection refugees largely leave the burdens of the refugee regime to lie where they fall. Those states which are geographically proximate to refugee-producing regions, already amongst the least advantaged, bear the bulk of these burdens. In this paper, I critically assess two proposals which seek to address this maldistribution: a market in asylum services and a principle of comparative advantage. I argue that from the standpoint of justice, these proposals share two objectionable features. First, they enable relations of domination between states, because they ignore the background relations of inequality upon which they depend for their effectiveness. Second, they institute an injustice of ‘misframing,’ in that they preclude consideration of refugees’ legitimate claims to be hosted (or not to be hosted) in a particular state. The failings of these approaches are illuminating and, I argue, provide us with some theoretical desiderata for a positive account of justice in the distribution of responsibilities to refugees.

Anger: Scary Good

I argue that recent attempts to vindicate blame have failed to fully face the vengeful feelings and angry outbursts that have led to scepticism about blame’s ethical status. This paper endeavours to fill that gap. I claim that feelings of angry blame are characteristically responsive to threats to social status, and that angry expressions are distinctive because of their scariness. Still, I conclude, there is an important place for angry blame in good lives and good relationships. In offering a defence of angry feelings and expressions, I argue that blame’s seemingly objectionable features are crucial to its expressive and restorative power.

Rhetoric and Economics, Analysis and History

Rhetoric and Economics, Analysis and History

Avoiding Alien Intelligence: A Plea for Caution in the Use of Predictive Systems

The aliens land. Imagine beneficent aliens who come in peace. One of their first acts is to provide us with an analytics/artificial intelligence program that predicts future thought and action. Call the program AI, for alien intelligence. We have no explanation or understanding of why AI predicts what it does. Even the best human computer science experts find large parts of the AI program completely unintelligible. It appears to involve programming and statistical techniques unknown to us. Its predictions are more accurate than ours but, like ours, still have a fairly high error rate. Humans — businesses, governments, and individuals — embrace the program, and many (humans) propose using AI systematically in the widest possible range of contexts as a basis for prediction and action. We contend that it would be extremely unwise to do so. To the extent that human-created predictive systems are similar to AI, it is also unwise to use them across a wide range. We assume AI has three features, all shared to some extent with human-created systems. First, it is unintelligible. We cannot figure out how or why it reaches the conclusions it does. Second, like human-created systems, AI analyzes extensive data to detect statistical regularities that hold for people in certain categories. To do so, it abstracts from the contextually rich narratives that render people’s individual arcs through the world intelligible. This makes significant misclassification inevitable. Third, the aliens caution us that AI cannot detect its own misclassification. There are no feedback mechanisms that detect and correct errors. Given these features, it would be a serious mistake to use AI across the board as a basis for prediction and action. To begin with, AI will create winners and losers — a very large number of winners and losers since AI governs the widest possible range of contexts. Once negatively categorized, losers will face great difficulty in escaping the categorizations that condemn them to that role. The high error rate means that many of the categorizations are wrong, and the lack of feedback ensures that AI will not correct its errors. AI’s unintelligibility means that there is no way to explain to losers why such treatment is not capricious and arbitrary. Such a predictive system is both profoundly unjust and a serious threat to social stability. This raises three questions. To what extent are current human-created systems like AI? What can we ensure that our current systems do not have the objectionable features of AI? And, to what extent and in which cases should we forgo the use of our systems?

Donation without Domination: Private Charity and Republican Liberty

Contemporary republicans have adopted a less-than-charitable attitude toward private beneficence, especially when it is directed to the poor, worrying that rich patrons may be in a position to exercise arbitrary power over their impoverished clients. These concerns have led them to support impartial public provision by way of state welfare programs, including an unconditional basic income (UBI). In contrast to this administrative model of public welfare, I will propose a competitive model in which the state regulates and subsidizes a decentralized and nonstatist provision of support for the poor. This model will fix the historically objectionable features of private provision by having the state prevent collusion among private charities, deliver information to recipients about alternative sources of assistance, and give substantial grants to charities as well as tax incentives and vouchers to donors. I will contend that such an approach would do a better job of minimizing domination of the poor than traditional welfare states and may prove more politically feasible than a UBI, at least in the near term in certain national contexts.

Civics, Policy, and Demoralization

Civics can be distinguished from policy. Civics concerns basic principles and institutions of political and legal order. Policy concerns specific ways in which particular ends are pursued by the state. Different conceptions of civics involve different views of criminal sanction, its justification, and its aims. The discussion highlights some of the main contrasts between different conceptions of criminal justice and the relation of criminal justice to a more comprehensive conception of justice. However, current carceral practice (in the U.S. and also the U.K.) has several morally objectionable features that impede and erode prisoners’ capacities for participating successfully in civil society. In addition, former prisoners face obstacles that, in effect, continue their punishment after completion of sentence. Those are respects in which current practices cause demoralization. The morally objectionable features of demoralization merit being addressed regardless of the state of the debate between rival conceptions of civics and the relationship of criminal justice to justice more comprehensively understood.

Donation Without Domination: Private Charity and Republican Liberty

Contemporary republicans have adopted a less-than-charitable attitude toward private beneficence, especially when it is directed to the poor, worrying that rich patrons may be in a position to exercise arbitrary power over their impoverished clients. These concerns have led them to support impartial public provision by way of state welfare programs, including an unconditional basic income (UBI). In contrast to this administrative model of public welfare, I will propose a competitive model in which the state regulates and subsidizes a decentralized and nonstatist provision of support for the poor. This model will fix the historically objectionable features of private provision by having the state prevent collusion among private charities, deliver information to recipients about alternative sources of assistance, and give substantial grants to charities as well as tax incentives and vouchers to donors. I will contend that such an approach would do a better job of minimizing domination of the poor than traditional welfare states and may prove more politically feasible than a UBI, at least in the near term in certain national contexts.

Designing ETPIMs around ECHR Review or Normalisation of ‘Preventive’ Non‐Trial‐Based Executive Measures?

This article considers the transition in 2012 from control orders to more ECHR‐compliant ‘terrorism prevention and investigation measures’ under the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011. It argues that the interaction between security and liberty over the post 9/11 years has the appearance of a dialogue between courts and the executive that has resulted in a diminution in the repressive character of non‐trial based preventive measures. But such an impression, it will be contended, is obscuring the recalibration of ECHR rights that has occurred, easing the path to the introduction of the enhanced version of TPIMs, under the Enhanced Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill. The proposed ETPIMs exhibit many of the objectionable features of control orders and are currently ready to introduce if the threat level rises.

William Wordsworth and Philosophical Necessity

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt both testified that William Wordsworth in his radical years believed in the doctrine of philosophical necessity. Prompted by that testimony, this essay undertakes a detailed reconstruction of Wordsworth’s necessitarianism. Wordsworth was most probably converted to necessity by his reading of William Godwin’s Political Justice . As a convert to the doctrine in its Godwinian formulation, Wordsworth would have accepted several ideas implicated in the necessitarian infrastructure of Political Justice : the human mind’s deterministic obligation to reasoned preference, the principle of universal benevolence, a marginalization of human agency and guilt, a prospective approach to ethical questions, and the inevitable triumph of reason and social reform. Wordsworth apparently believed in this complex of ideas only briefly, for the moral pessimism of Adventures on Salisbury Plain intimates a lapsing of the poet’s Godwinism, including his loss of faith in necessity, by late 1795. By 1797, however, Coleridge allowed Wordsworth to reclaim his necessitarianism by introducing him to an alternate version of the doctrine indebted to Hartleyan associationism and freed from its objectionable Godwinian features. Wordsworth grandly expounds this new version of philosophical necessity in 1798 poetry written for The Recluse , but then suddenly seems to lose interest in the idea. In concluding, the essay invokes both Coleridge’s 1799 dissatisfaction with necessity and Wordsworth’s later writing, especially The Excursion , to speculate about the poet’s reasons for finally rejecting the doctrine of philosophical necessity in late 1798.

The retention of Class II cases -- The staple and hook sectional retainer

Ladies and Gentlemen, If there is any part of the retention of the teeth after correction which has been, and still is, an annoyance and a puzzle to most of us, it is that part directly relating to the retention of the teeth where a Class II malocclusion has been present and corrected. There are many forms of retainers used today by different men to accomplish his work, but the experience of all goes to show that the retainers used, which accomplish the purpose of retention as we intend they shall, and as they should, are very few. There are some forms which aid very nicely in retaining these cases, but they have still some drawbacks which we would like to overcome. Today I wish to present to you some new principles in appliances which I am making use of and with excellent results. As far as I can see the most objectionable features of some other retainers are overcome with these principles and the good features of the others are preserved and seemingly improved. Retention of the teeth means the use of certain forces, whether natural or mechanical, which will antagonize and counterbalance the forces which tend to draw the various tissues and teeth to their former positions. This force may be slight or very great. In Class II cases we find as much movement taking place during the treatment of the case as we have in any other Class. This movement must be retained and the retention of these cases is as difficult as is the retention of any other class. If we are able to successfully retain Class II cases, we can safely assume we can retain the others. In Class II cases we find that the lower arch and body of the mandible is in distal …

MORAL AND EPISTEMIC OPEN‐QUESTION ARGUMENTS

MORAL AND EPISTEMIC OPEN‐QUESTION ARGUMENTS

Tożsamość etyka, czyli uprawianie etyki jako problem moralny

This article may be included in the category of conviction ethics. In it the author considers the problem of the moral evaluation of ethical activity as a potential moral mentor. Ethics, even reductionist and naturalist ethics, which polemicize with eudaimonism, has been dominated by the ideal of “practical philosophy”, which assumes that a moral theory can be morally edifying. Whether they support or oppose this program, ethicists continue to revolve around the idea of “practical philosophy”, making their own intellectual contribution to the quality of moral life. However, this idea leads to doubts of a moral nature because of the ambiguous position of the moral mentor, who formulates general ideas but refrains from making concrete moral verdicts. Yet the goal of “practical philosophy” is the potential formulation of criteria regarding the moral good, and thus making moral evaluations. However, it does not accomplish this task and does not even intend to. The attachment to evaluational is an archaic and dogmatic feature of classical ethical systems, which consists in their focusing not on concrete acts, but on motives and consequences. The article points out the moral difficulties that arise from the classical attitude of ethics and also the objectionable features of ethical theories, if they are to be applied to the justification of action. The eudaimonistic, hedonistic, deontological discourses, as well as others, are subjected to moral evaluation. In general the article intends to inaugurate the meta-ethical perspective in ethics.

K-nets and Hierarchical Structural Recursion

By incorporating Lewin’s Tj and Ij transformations, K-nets have been used to demonstrate recursion at different hierarchical levels. Michael Buchler has discussed some of the issues surrounding recursive networks with a special focus on the way they have been applied in analysis. The following discussion expands upon his argument, focusing particularly on objectionable features that are intrinsic to the analytical tool itself. It includes an evaluation of the significance of inversional relationships and inversional subscripts in the context of K-nets, with emphasis on the potentially problematic Ij transformations.

Terrorism, Shared Rules and Trust*

WHAT is the moral significance of terrorism? To answer this question, I begin with the following assumptions, for which I offer no argument: all acts of terrorism are morally objectionable and there is at least one (non-moral) feature that makes all acts of terrorism morally objectionable (that is, all acts of terrorism are morally objectionable in at least one and the same way). This does not rule out the possibility that some acts of terrorism may be morally permissible or even morally required. Permissible and obligatory acts may nonetheless fail to be morally “pure.” They may have some morally objectionable features. In this way, a terrorist act is like all acts to which “thick” predicates are applicable. For example, all brutal acts are morally objectionable. But there might be cases in which a brutal act is nonetheless excusable or even morally required. A rude comment is always objectionable (although perhaps not morally so), but there might be some cases in which it is excusable to be rude. In such instances, we might say that it is regrettable that such actions had to be taken and we might condemn those who put us in the position to have to resort to such objectionable measures even if they are the same people who are the objects of our morally objectionable act (and we therefore end up in a sense blaming the victim). We might say, with only modest inaccuracy, that good people are being forced to do bad (which is to say, morally objectionable) things. Let us call the ineliminable moral objectionableness of all terrorist acts the special objectionableness of terrorism. So we can put the question addressed in this paper in the following way: What accounts for the special objectionableness

The German Retirement Benefit Formula: Drawbacks and Alternatives

We identify several objectionable features of the German retirement benefit formula. Groups of insureds with higher than average life expectancy are subsidized by the rest of the members because the formula neglects differences in group-specific life expectancy. Moreover, undesirable long-run effects arise if the earnings ceiling is raised or mandatory membership is extended, or if life expectancy rises or the rate of population growth declines. We present three alternative formulas. In particular, a return-rate formula that rewards contributions with the internal rate of return of the pay-as-yougo pension system is superior to the current formula. This formula corresponds to the concept of notional defined contribution pensions that has been recently introduced in several countries.

SOME FEASIBLE ALTERNATIVES TO CONVENTIONAL CAPITALISM

The collapse of Communism and the retreat from, in theory as well as practice, even moderate forms of collectivism have left even the non-Marxist forms of socialism in disarray. While it is true that forms of collectivism have remarketed themselves under meretricious, insubstantial doctrinal headings such as the “Third Way,” an unstable amalgam of capitalism, communitarianism, and welfarism, there has been little original work on how an economy and society might organize itself so as to have neither the superficially objectionable features of modern capitalism nor the economically untenable and morally odious properties of full-blooded socialism. The former might include vast inequality in resource ownership, the unequal political power such inequality might generate, the increasing alienation produced by the soulless possessive individualism that is allegedly engulfing the world, and a myriad of other complaints that are regularly leveled at capitalism.

Why modal interpretations of quantum mechanics must abandon classical reasoning about physical properties

Modal interpretations of quantum mechanics propose to solve the measurement problem by rejecting the orthodox view that in entangled states of a system which are nontrivial superpositions of an observable's eigenstates, it is meaningless to speak of that observable as having a value or corresponding to a property of the system. Though denying this is reminiscent of how hidden-variable interpreters have challenged orthodox views about superposition, modal interpreters also argue that their proposals avoid any of the objectionable features of physical properties that beset hidden-variable interpretations, like contextualism and nonlocality. Even so, I shall prove that modal interpreters of quantum mechanics are still committed to giving up at least one of the following three conditions characteristic of classical reasoning about physical properties: (1) Properties certain to be found on measuring a system should be counted as intrinsic properties of the system. (2) If two propositions stating the possession of two intrinsic properties by the system are regarded as meaningful, then their conjunction should also correspond to a meaningful proposition about the system possessing a certain intrinsic property; and similarly for disjunction and negation. (3) The intrinsic properties of a composite system should at least include (though need not be exhausted by) the intrinsic properties of its parts. Conditions 1–3 are by no means undeniable. But the onus seems to be on modal interpreters to tell us why rejecting one of these is preferable to an ontology of properties incorporating contextualism and nonlocality.