Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of London, 1996. / Title from e-book title screen (viewed October 15, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (p. 281-292) and index.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Philosophy, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

International drone goods transportation - Abstract, key words The aim of this work is to explore the possibilities of liability concepts in relation to unmanned aerial vehicles that transport goods in the international transport of goods. For this purpose, a comparison of the normative theory of František Weyr and the way of functioning of formally logical systems is performed within the work. This normative theory has a great impact on the actual functioning of the information system itself, which is exempt from the content of its own rule contained in the norm itself. There are described methods of acknowledging machines and the method of interpretation and application of individual rules contained in norms themselves that are being interpreted by these machines. All this precisely with regard to the fact that unmanned aerial vehicles cannot learn to distinguish between inner values of norms, on which individual legal norms are based. This is because unmanned aerial vehicles cannot achieve this with the help of a tool of pure intelligence alone. Since unmanned aerial vehicles interpret and apply their own internal norms to the outside world only as they are set within their normative setting. This normative setting is also related to the protection against banal evil and the protection of notional...

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Getting Exclusionary Reasons Right offers a defense of exclusionary reasons as originally conceptualised by Joseph Raz. Exclusionary reasons are second-order reasons to refrain from acting for some reasons and are used to explain the ordered nature of practical normativity, and the various normative concepts that are said to follow from it, i.e. mandatory rules, rule-following, authority, and promises to name just a few. Exclusionary reasons differ from other kinds of defeaters in that they exclude valid reasons, i.e. reasons that still justify or make eligible the actions they count for. According to Raz, this is because excluded reasons are defeated not qua reasons, but as reasons we can act for, or that motivate, which explains why exclusionary reasons are reasons to refrain from acting for a reason. However, the coherence and distinctiveness of the idea of an exclusionary reason—understood in this way—has faced serious challenges. I take up these challenges in what follows. Chapter one presents a coherent account of exclusionary reasons as reasons to refrain from acting for a reason, or to ‘not-φ-for-p’. It both clarifies the sense in which exclusionary reasons concern motivations and motivating reasons, and rejects alternative accounts according to which exclusionary reasons have as their object other normative reasons. It is argued that when they are understood as excluding some considerations as reasons that can rationally motivate, exclusionary reasons confer value on or point to an agent’s not acting for otherwise valid reasons. That is, they justify our not being responsive to certain values on some occasions. Chapter two vindicates the notion of acting-for-a-reason on which Raz’s account relies. It considers objections which claim that not acting for otherwise valid reasons presupposes a level of control over our reasons and motivations that is incompatible with the rational constraints on attitudes (beliefs, intentions, etc.), and shows how exclusionary reasons, as they are restated in chapter one, avoids them. Perhaps surprisingly, it is argued that instances where exclusionary reasons are relevant, when properly understood, are not instances where reasoning about what we ought to do involves choice. Getting Exclusionary Reasons Right concludes by considering the implications the account offered herein has for rationalist approaches to obligations and authority. Namely, it makes clear how fully rational agents can ever be moved to act for, or out of an awareness of their obligations. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / Getting Exclusionary Reasons Right investigates the distinctiveness and coherence of the idea of an exclusionary reason—a reason to not act for other reasons (i.e. promises, rules, commands, etc.). It first defends exclusionary reasons as reasons to ‘refrain from acting for some reason(s)’. Understood in this way, exclusionary reasons are relevant where it matters not just what we choose to do, but how we choose to do it. Promises, rules, commands, etc. are features of the world that make it valuable to or justify our not acting for otherwise good reasons when they apply. It then considers what ‘refraining from acting for some reason(s)’ consists in. While exclusionary reasons are thought to be reasons to have motivations of certain kinds, they are not reasons to choose to be motivated in some way. They are instead, reasons that determine for us the reasons we ought to act for. It is argued that while there are some instances where determining what we have reason to do is up to us, exclusion is not one of them. Getting Exclusionary Reasons Right concludes by considering the implications the account offered herein has for rationalist approaches to obligations and authority.

Philippa Foot’s account of natural normativity relies on functions. For Foot, having a function is what distinguishes those traits that can serve as the basis for the evaluation of an organism from those traits that cannot. For example, Foot asserts that a blue-headed tit that lacks the blue spot on its head is merely unusual but a peacock that lacks a brightly colored tail is defective because while the blue spot does not have a function, the brightly colored tail does. Problematically, it is not immediately clear just how Foot understands functions. I argue that Foot’s account of functions requires a distinction between functions and accidents. In Foot’s schema, functions appear similar to contributions to the achievement of ends: in the case of non-human organisms, functional traits contribute to survival and reproduction, while human beings are sui generis in that our ends are not exhausted by survival and reproduction. However, a trait’s contributing to these ends is not sufficient grounds for that trait to have a function. Only those traits that contribute in the right way count as having a functional role and can consequently serve as the basis for evaluations of the organism. Borrowing Reid Blackman’s example, a deer that evades predators through camouflage rather than swiftness is uncharacteristic and not naturally good in Foot’s schema. In such cases, the trait in question makes only an accidental contribution to an end. Furthermore, I argue that in order to maintain a function/accident distinction, Foot must understand functions in terms of kinds. These kinds entail three things for any organism that instantiates the kind: some work or end achieved by the organism, a characteristic story of how that work is achieved, and some sort of purposiveness to the characteristic achievement of that work. In the case of the deer above, its work is survival and reproduction, the story of how it achieves those ends includes eating leaves and avoiding predators through swiftness, and the achievement of survival and reproduction in this way is purposive because it answers to the capacity of living things to be a beneficiary. On one hand, my account of Foot’s natural goodness solves numerous problems in the interpretation of her work. It explains why natural goodness is unique to living things as opposed to entities that admit of similarly structured evaluations by looking at the purposiveness involved in these evaluations. Additionally, my interpretation counters the objection that Foot’s treatment of nature appears ignorant of pertinent empirical scientific evidence. In evaluating organisms as members of kinds, presumably an organism might belong to multiple kinds. Consequently, we can understand and evaluate an organism both as a member of a biological kind whose work is genetic promulgation and as a member of its neo-Aristotelian species whose work, at least in the case of non-human organisms, is survival and reproduction. Seen in this way, the relevant concern is not “how can Foot’s account of organisms avoid the charge of being scientifically uninformed?” but “why should the natural goodness of an organism be evaluated with respect to one kind instead of another?” Some neo-Aristotelians have endeavored to address this difficulty through the following commitments: that the neo-Aristotelian understanding of an organism is special because it is a self-interpretation, that these interpretations do not compete with one another, or that the natural sciences must presuppose a neo-Aristotelian understanding of species in order to have a notion of life. Rather than adopting any of these approaches, I contend that by understanding Foot through this three-part model we can understand the evaluation of an organism as a member of the neo-Aristotelian species as primary in a way that the biological account is not. On the other hand, my interpretation entails epistemological problems for Foot. We seem unable to distinguish accidental contributions to the work of an organism from functional contributions in a well-informed way, and the sui generis nature of human work makes it difficult to establish what counts as a contribution to its achievement. In light of these difficulties, the prospect of our having knowledge of the kinds on which her account depends seems dim. / Philosophy

This thesis calls for a reconfiguration of hate speech as a primarily normative phenomenon. All hate speech strives to weaken the social-moral normative status of its targets and in doing, justifies violence against its target. In light of this normative function, the harm of hate speech is reconsidered. Against traditional defenders of hate speech regulation, I claim that individual and collective harm is a highly likely, but not a necessary consequence of hate speech, while intrinsic harm and reckless risk necessarily follow from hate speech’s normative capacity. In light of the normative origin of such harms, a societal response with normative clout is required. However, while individual responses are insufficient to block the normativity of hate speech, I suggest that the legal system is characteristically well-suited to do so. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Is truth valuable? In addressing this question, one must parse it into questions that are more manageable. Is the property of truth only instrumentally valuable, or is it both instrumentally valuable and noninstrumentally valuable? Is the normativity of the concept of truth an intrinsic or extrinsic property of the concept? In addressing the first of these questions, I show that certain arguments are flawed, arguments that purport to show that truth is not valuable in any kind of way. After establishing that it is reasonable to think that the property of truth is valuable, I show how inflationists and deflationists can agree that the property of truth is noninstrumentally valuable. In addressing the second question, I rely on the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and the resources of moral semantics to claim that the normativity of the concept of truth is an extrinsic feature of the concept. I conclude that the property of truth is both instrumentally and noninstrumentally valuable and that the normativity associated with the concept of truth is an extrinsic property of the concept. In doing so, I suggest that beginning with an investigation about the value and normativity of truth has important ramifications for theories of truth in general.

Within the text of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt circumscribes the concept of natality in ways that tend to conflate its biological, historical, institutional and phenomenological dimensions. This dissertation seeks to clarify this concept and the conceptual territory that surrounds it. Specifically, it is argued that Arendt’s construction of the concept of natality is inherently dual. Each person is delivered into a worldly environment through her primary, biological birth. As soon as she is born, she begins to be conditioned to the accepted normative standards of her community. A gap necessarily exists, however, between the person she is socio-culturally conditioned to be, and who she is explicitly, uniquely and authentically. When deeds and words are employed in service of revealing someone’s individual identity or essence, and thereby showing her to be more than simply a mirror of her cultural conditioning, it heralds a second birth, one which is existential instead of biological. According to Arendt, this existential natality must take place in the presence of other existential agents, and also may be witnessed by a spectator who then seeks to express the significance of what has occurred to those removed from the original event either by space and/or time. This expression takes the form of artifactual objects, including works of art, architectural monuments and various forms of narratives. Arendt’s theory concerning the creation of these objects contains two major problems that are critically addressed within this project. The first problem concerns the spectator’s capacity for making judgments. Works written after The Human Condition are shown to demonstrate Arendt’s attempts to address this issue. The second problem concerns the way in which Arendt portrays the issue of embodiment. This issue must be reconciled both by appealing to work from within her canon, as well as through the introduction of recent scholarship from the field of social cognition. The project concludes with the presentation of a concrete, historical example intended to be illustrative of the preceding theoretical material.

Moral skeptics sometimes argue that science is at odds with morality. These arguments sometimes privilege scientific explanations of moral belief at the expense of objective moral knowledge. More specifically, since morality is (arguably) a biological adaptation involving belief, Richard Joyce and Sharon Street doubt the justification and objective truth of moral belief, respectively. This thesis defends objective normative facts from this empirical problem. Reasons for moral skepticism are not compatible with arguments against objective normativity. Put simply, without objective normativity, skeptics have no ultimate reason to doubt anything in particular, moral or otherwise. So, on pain of incoherence, moral skeptics should doubt the truth, rather than the objective normativity, of moral belief. / Graduate / 0422