Equivalence Thesis Research Articles

Towards a polarized semantics for assertion and denial

Abstract Recent logic and linguistic literature suggest that certain forms of denial cannot be reduced to a simple assertion of negation. In particular, the existence of mathematical and empirical conjectures offers a basis for refuting Frege’s thesis of equivalence between denial and assertion of negation. Following this line of thought we develop a formal framework with two primitive illocutionary operators for assertion and denial, where denial is not a simple negation of assertion. We introduce a semantics for the operators mentioned above. Finally, we discuss the relations between asserted and denied contents.

Expanding the Use of Continuous Sedation Until Death and Physician-Assisted Suicide.

The controversy over the equivalence of continuous sedation until death (CSD) and physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia (PAS/E) provides an opportunity to focus on a significant extended use of CSD. This extension, suggested by the equivalence of PAS/E and CSD, is designed to promote additional patient autonomy at the end-of-life. Samuel LiPuma, in his article, "Continuous Sedation Until Death as Physician-Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia: A Conceptual Analysis" claims equivalence between CSD and death; his paper is seminal in the equivalency debate. Critics contend that sedation follows proportionality protocols for which LiPuma's thesis does not adequately account. Furthermore, sedation may not eliminate consciousness, and as such LiPuma's contention that CSD is equivalent to neocortical death is suspect. We not only defend the equivalence thesis, but also expand it to include additional moral considerations. First, we explain the equivalence thesis. This is followed by a defense of the thesis against five criticisms. The third section critiques the current use of CSD. Finally, we offer two proposals that, if adopted, would broaden the use of PAS/E and CSD and thereby expand options at the end-of-life.

Carbon Offsetting

ABSTRACT Do carbon-offsetting schemes morally offset emissions? The moral equivalence thesis is the claim that the combination of emitting greenhouse gasses and offsetting those emissions is morally equivalent to not emitting at all. This thesis implies that in response to climate change, we need not make any lifestyle changes to reduce our emissions as long as we offset them. An influential argument in favor of this thesis is premised on two claims, one empirical and the other normative: (1) When you emit + offset, the net result is the same as that of not emitting. (2) With emissions, the net result is what matters morally. I argue against both premises. The net result of emitting + offsetting is never equivalent to that of not emitting, and even if it were equivalent, the net result is not the only thing that matters morally. My conclusion is that although we should offset our emissions, avoiding emissions is morally preferable. This conclusion supports a stronger claim: that carbon offsets cannot relieve us of our duty to make significant lifestyle changes so as to reduce emissions and thus lesson our contribution to the harms of climate change.

The theoretical and practical arguments against the unilateral withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment during crisis standards of care: Does the Knobe effect apply to unilateral withdrawal?

Some argue that it is ethically justifiable to unilaterally withdraw life-sustaining treatment during crisis standards of care without the patient's consent in order to reallocate it to another patient with a better chance of survival. This justification has been supported by two lines of argument: the equivalence thesis and the rule of the double effect. We argue that there are theoretical issues with the first and practical ones with the second, as supported by an experiment aimed at exploring whether the Knobe effect, which affects the folk concept of intention, applies to situations of unilateral withdrawal. Fifty-two critical care physicians from one university were asked to ascribe intention in two hypothetical scenarios A and B in which outcomes differ-the patient from whom life-sustaining treatment is withdrawn dies in scenario A but survives in scenario B-but the intention, to save the other patient regardless of the outcome of the other, is the same. The survey was administered via a web-based survey and all answers were anonymous. A paired proportion test was used to compare responses to both questions. All 52 surveyed individuals responded in scenario A and 30 (57.7%) ascribed intention when outcomes were unfavorable, whereas 50 responded in scenario B and 8 (16%) ascribed intention when outcomes were favorable, a difference that was statistically significant (p < 0.001). There are theoretical and practical issues with the arguments proposed to justify the unilateral withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment based on the equivalence thesis and the rule of double effect.

Vindicating Avowal Expressivism: A Note on Rosenthal’s Performance-Conditional Equivalence Thesis

The paper comments on David Rosenthal’s claim that saying “p” is performance-conditionally equivalent to saying “I believe that p”. It is argued, by way of counterexamples, that the proposed performance-conditional equivalence does not hold in this generality. The paper further proposes that avowal expressivism gives necessary conditions for the performance-conditional equivalence: it holds only if the speaker’s utterance of “p” is a non-explicit expressive act expressive of the belief that p and the utterance of “I believe that p” is an explicit expressive act expressive of the very same belief. If that is correct, the performance-conditional equivalence thesis provides an argument against Rosenthal’s preferred avowal descriptivism and in favor of avowal expressivism.

The Equivalence Thesis and the Last Ventilator

ABSTRACTThe potential shortage of ventilators during the COVID‐19 crisis has resulted in guidelines being published denying any moral difference between withholding and withdrawing medical treatment. This reflects some ethicists' support for ‘the equivalence thesis’, the idea that wherever it is permissible to withhold treatment, it is permissible to withdraw it, and vice versa. Some ethicists claim that doctors' opposition to the equivalence thesis discourages treatment withdrawal, leading to unnecessary loss of life amid pronounced scarcity. But first we need to ascertain whether the equivalence thesis is true. If it is, then we can work out what to do about the negative impacts of doctors opposing it. In this article, we argue that the equivalence thesis is false. There is a difference between withholding and withdrawing in that there can be instances in which an act of one type would be permissible while an act of the other type would be wrong, even though all other things are equal. We use Heidi Malm's distinction between comparison and conflict cases to show that equivalence proponents and opponents may be talking past one another, with proponents focussing on comparison cases and opponents rightly thinking of conflict cases as well.

Moral equivalence theory in neonatology

This article explores the ethical concept of “the equivalence thesis” (ET), or the idea that withdrawing and withholding life sustaining treatments are morally equivalent practices, within neonatology. We review the historical origins, theory, and clinical rationale behind ET, and provide an analysis of how ET relates to literature that describes neonatal mode of death and healthcare professional and parent attitudes towards end-of-life care. While ET may serve as an ethical tool to optimize resource allocation in theory, its clinical utility is limited given the complexity of end-of-life care decisions.

Moral difference between humans and robots: paternalism and human-relative reason

According to some philosophers, if moral agency is understood in behaviourist terms, robots could become moral agents that are as good as or even better than humans. Given the behaviourist conception, it is natural to think that there is no interesting moral difference between robots and humans in terms of moral agency (call it the equivalence thesis). However, such moral differences exist: based on Strawson’s account of participant reactive attitude and Scanlon’s relational account of blame, I argue that a distinct kind of reason available to humans—call it human-relative reason—is not available to robots. The difference in moral reason entails that sometimes an action is morally permissible for humans, but not for robots. Therefore, when developing moral robots, we cannot consider only what humans can or cannot do. I use examples of paternalism to illustrate my argument.

Coronavirus Disease 2019: Withdrawing Mechanical Ventilation to Reallocate Life Support Under Crisis Standards of Care-Nonequivalence of the Equivalence Thesis.

Coronavirus Disease 2019: Withdrawing Mechanical Ventilation to Reallocate Life Support Under Crisis Standards of Care-Nonequivalence of the Equivalence Thesis.

Private Law, Double Distortion Argument, and Property-Owning Democracy

The article discusses an argument against the use of private law for distributive purposes, Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell’s double distortion argument (Kaplow and Shavell, 1994). It is sought to ascertain whether one of the theses on which this argument rests, the thesis of equivalence, can be confirmed in the light of John Rawls’s theory of justice. According to the thesis of equivalence, an arrangement constituted by a private law sensitive to distributive justice can be replaced, without loss to justice, by an arrangement containing an efficient private law and measures of taxation and transfer of income to achieve distributive objectives. The paper tests this thesis against two interpretations of the difference, emphasized by Rawls in late writings, between two types of institutional regime, property-owning democracy and welfare state capitalism. The idea is to verify whether an efficient private law (accompanied by taxation and transfer measures) is compatible with property-owning democracy. It is argued that Rawls’s ideas about this type of regime refute the thesis of equivalence, with varying implications depending on how the difference between property-owning democracy and welfare state capitalism is understood.

Ulysses Contracts in psychiatric care: helping patients to protect themselves from spiralling

This paper presents four arguments in favour of respecting Ulysses Contracts in the case of individuals who suffer with severe chronic episodic mental illnesses, and who have experienced spiralling and...

Torts as Self-Defense

My claim in this paper is that two instances of liability — liability to pay compensation and liability to defensive harming — are on a par. People who are about to suffer harm are sometimes allowed to act in self-preservation or self-defense — that is, to take measures to avert this harm, even if these measures are likely to impose a burden on others. Similarly, people who have suffered harm are sometimes allowed to extract reparations — that is, to make themselves as well as they were before having suffered the harm, even if the only means of doing so is by imposing a certain burden on other people. In this paper, I argue for the Equivalence Thesis: the claim that (at least in the state of nature) the conditions of permissibility for imposing a burden on someone through acting in self-defense and through the extraction of reparations are the same.

Are kin and group selection rivals or friends?

Kin selection and group selection were once seen as competing explanatory hypotheses but now tend to be seen as equivalent ways of describing the same basic idea. Yet this 'equivalence thesis' seems not to have brought proponents of kin selection and group selection any closer together. This may be because the equivalence thesis merely shows the equivalence of two statistical formalisms without saying anything about causality. W.D. Hamilton was the first to derive an equivalence result of this type. Yet Hamilton was aware of its limitations, and saw that, while illuminating, it papered over some biologically important distinctions. Attending to these distinctions leads to the concept of 'K-G space', which helps us see where the biological disagreements between proponents of kin selection and group selection really lie.

Beyond the Equivalence Thesis: how to think about the ethics of withdrawingand withholding life-saving medical treatment.

With few exceptions, the literature on withdrawingand withholding life-saving treatment considers the bare fact of withdrawing or withholding to lack any ethical significance. If anything, the professional guidelines onthis matter are even more uniform. However, while no small degree of progress has been madetoward persuading healthcare professionals to withhold treatments that are unlikely to provide significant benefit, it is clear that a certain level of ambivalence remainswith regard to withdrawing treatment. Given that the absence of clinical benefit means treating patients is not only ethically questionable but alsotaxing on resources that could meet the needs of others, thisambivalence is troubling. Equally, the enduring ambivalence of professionals might be takento indicate that the issue warrants further attention. In this paper, we review the academic literature on the ethical equivalence of withdrawing and withholding medical treatment. While we are not in outright disagreement with the arguments presented, we suggest that asserting theoretical and decontextualized claims about the ethical equivalence of withdrawing and withholding life-saving treatment does not fully illuminate the moral questions associated with the relevant clinical realities. We argue that what is required is a broader perspective, one rooted in an understandingthat withdrawing and withholding life-saving treatmentare different practices, the meanings of whichare fully comprehensibleonly through an appreciation of their place within the practice of healthcare more generally. Such an account suggests that ifone is to engage withthe inappropriate protraction of life-saving treatment resulting from healthcare professionals' disinclination to withdraw it,then the differences between these practicesshould be taken seriously.

Confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis

According to a widespread but implicit thesis in Bayesian confirmation theory, two confirmation measures are considered equivalent if they are ordinally equivalent --- call this the ``ordinal equivalence thesis'' (OET). I argue that adopting OET has significant costs. First, adopting OET renders one incapable of determining whether a piece of evidence substantially favors one hypothesis over another. Second, OET must be rejected if merely ordinal conclusions are to be drawn from the expected value of a confirmation measure. Furthermore, several arguments and applications of confirmation measures given in the literature already rely on a rejection of OET. I also contrast OET with stronger equivalence theses and show that they do not have the same costs as OET. On the other hand, adopting a thesis stronger than OET has costs of its own, since a rejection of OET ostensibly implies that people's epistemic states have a very fine-grained quantitative structure. However, I suggest that the normative upshot of the paper in fact has a conditional form, and that other Bayesian norms can also fruitfully be construed as having a similar conditional form.

Are Enabling and Allowing Harm Morally Equivalent?

It is sometimes asserted that enabling harm is morally equivalent to allowing harm (the moral equivalence thesis). In this article, I criticize this view. Positively, I show that cases involving self-defence and cases involving people acting on the basis of a reasonable belief to the effect that certain obstacles to harm will remain in place, or will be put in place, show that enabling harm is harder to justify than allowing it. Negatively, I argue that certain cases offered in defence of the moral equivalence thesis fail, because either (1) their similarity with the archetypal trolley case limits their relevance to an assessment of this thesis, or (2) they are compromised by their reliance on the elusive notion of a situation being completely stable.

The Conventionality of Parastatistics

Nature seems to be such that we can describe it accurately with quantum theories of bosons and fermions alone, without resort to parastatistics. This has been seen as a deep mystery: paraparticles make perfect physical sense, so why don’t we see them in nature? We consider one potential answer: every paraparticle theory is physically equivalent to some theory of bosons or fermions, making the absence of paraparticles in our theories a matter of convention rather than a mysterious empirical discovery. We argue that this equivalence thesis holds in all physically admissible quantum field theories falling under the domain of the rigorous Doplicher–Haag–Roberts approach to superselection rules. Inadmissible parastatistical theories are ruled out by a locality-inspired principle we call charge recombination. 1 Introduction2 Paraparticles in Quantum Theory3 Theoretical Equivalence 3.1 Field systems in algebraic quantum field theory 3.2 Equivalence of field systems4 A Brief History of the Equivalence Thesis 4.1 The Green decomposition 4.2 Klein transformations 4.3 The argument of Drühl, Haag, and Roberts 4.4 The Doplicher–Roberts reconstruction theorem5 Sharpening the Thesis6 Discussion 6.1 Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics 6.2 Structuralism and haecceities 6.3 Paraquark theories

Metalinguistic Descriptivism for Millians

Metalinguistic descriptivism is the view that proper names are semantically equivalent to descriptions featuring their own quotations (e.g., ‘Socrates’ means ‘the bearer of “Socrates”’). The present paper shows that Millians can actually accept an inferential version of this equivalence thesis without running afoul of the modal argument. Indeed, they should: for it preserves the explanatory virtues of more familiar forms of descriptivism while avoiding objections (old and new) to Kent Bach's nominal description theory. We can make significant progress on Frege's puzzle and Plato's beard without committing ourselves one way or the other on the semantic values of proper names. The view on offer can also be motivated by analogy with Tarski's schema T, inviting the idea that the equivalence between a name and the associated nominal description has more to do with the semantics of representational locutions than it does with names per se. My response to the modal argument exploits the Kripkean distinction between reference at a world and reference in a world, and can be accepted by metalinguistic descriptivists and Millians alike.

Unexpected Consequences ofRicardian Expectations

AbstractThe Ricardian equivalence thesis maintains that, given the time‐path of government spending, a change in taxation does not alter the set of feasible lifetime consumption plans of the households and affects neither the demand for commodities and services nor the rate of interest, provided the households act rationally. This note establishes that the very expectations the thesis proposes (‘Ricardian expectations') are invalidated if households act rationally. The divergence from Ricardian equivalence is traced to the omission of interest payments on public debt as part of the households' disposable income. The non‐equivalence is valid in a wide class of models.

Pannonia Imperilled: Why Danilo Kiš Still Matters

AbstractThis essay explores the significance of the works of the Serbian–Jewish–Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš (1935–89) more than twenty years after his untimely passing. To understand Kiš's place in Serbian culture today, it is necessary to revisit the controversies that bedevilled his public reception in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s; to understand Kiš's place in Central European history today, though, it is necessary to broaden our familiarity with his increasingly accessible corpus of writing and recontextualize his proverbially anti‐nationalistic and apolitical positions. With an expanded reading of Kiš, he emerges as a useful source of information and critique on Yugoslavia's ‘self‐managing’ socialist system itself as well as a proponent of expanded notions of both East European and Central European identity and of an emotionally authentic if controversial thesis of totalitarian equivalence between fascism and communism.