ABSTRACT. It is essential for the Kantian programme that he can develop principles for the seeking and finding of knowledge. This requires Kant to combine the openness that is required for discovering genuinely novel knowledge with the necessity of principles. This combination of extreme methodological openness with strong principles should also add to our understanding of Kant’s position vis-à-vis empiricism and rationalism. It will be shown that Kant indeed develops an open methodology that gives direction to our cognitive practices without determining their results. This implies a revision of the standard understanding of ideas of reason in their regulative use: Kant’s imagery of “horizons” and “mirrors” suggests that, in principle, all concepts can function as regulative ideas. In the absence of clear ways of categorizing philosophers as being “empiricists” or “rationalists” in Kant’s period, these methodological issues help to consolidate our picture of the way how Kant positions himself within the field of options that became labelled via these terms.

ABSTRACT. Business ethics intersects with many other areas of practical philosophy, from political philosophy to normative ethical theory to moral psychology. The OZSW business ethics working group will present work showcasing this variety. We are especially interested in receiving comments and establishing more connections with practical philosophers who usually work in other areas. Topics: 1) Epistemic Injustice in Business, by Boudewijn de Bruin. 2) Moral praise for Business Persons: Kantian Thinking Against Cynicism and Moral Purism, by Wim Dubbink. 3) Communicative Action and Beyond: Towards a Richer Conceptualization of Stakeholder Dialogue, by Teunis Brand and Vincent Blok.

ABSTRACT. Almost half a century ago, David Lewis argued that conventions are means to solve social coordination problems. In this symposium we will apply Lewis’ insights to areas of philosophical theorizing to which it has not yet been applied: self-talk, solitary action and mindshaping. We will argue that philosophical work on language and cognition still needs to take into account the connection between conventions and coordination and discuss the extent to which new work in the philosophy of cognition allows us to change our views on concepts that are central to Lewis’ account, such as commitment and common knowledge.

ABSTRACT. In philosophy of literature, the cognitive value of literary fiction is generally understood in terms of truth and knowledge. However, the no-truth theory of Peter Lamarque has challenged the idea that the cognitive value is essential for the aesthetic value of the literary work. From this perspective, the symposium intends to address anew the central questions on the cognitive value of literature: Is truth an adequate concept to explain the cognitive value of literary fiction? How to describe the cognitive value of literary fiction? Is it possible to make a clear distinction between the novel’s cognitive and aesthetic value?

ABSTRACT. I introduce and defend a kind of debunking argument, which I term the argument from inconsistent variability, that has so far been neglected in the literature and deserves treatment in its own right. This argument, I argue, illuminates our epistemic status with regard to a class of propositions in the moral domain. I discuss the advantages this argument has over potentially similar arguments, including etiological debunking arguments and some arguments from peer disagreement, particularly in the context of evaluating the epistemic status of moral beliefs.

ABSTRACT. Although metaethics and applied ethics are distinct fields, I argue that the use of a certain style of argument that is ubiquitous in applied ethics (Singer, 1972, 1975; Thomson, 1971), arguments from irrelevance, has metaethical implications. Because of the conceptual character of these arguments understanding them requires a metaethical perspective. Such a perspective suggests that content restrictions on what can be morally relevant can provide a proper understanding of the arguments from irrelevance. However, these content restrictions are not easily incorporated by all metaethical theory. Non-cognitivism especially seems to struggle with doing so (Blackburn, 1984, 1993; Gibbard, 2003).

ABSTRACT. One of the divides in meta-ethics that really stands out, is that between moral realists and anti-realists. Although realists have trouble justifying their belief in the existence of moral entities, the realist position remains dominant because it, allegedly, is the only position that satisfies one of the important desiderate for any moral theory: moral objectivity. In this paper, I argue that if we adopt conceptual role semantics (as both influential realists and anti-realists have recently done), the force of the objectivity argument diminishes: given CRS, realists have the same kind of problems satisfying objectivity as anti-realists have.

ABSTRACT. The most popular argument against moral realism is the argument from disagreement: if there are mind-independent moral facts, then we would not expect to find lots of moral disagreement; but we do; therefore, moral realism is false. In this paper, I will develop what could be called the argument from agreement: if there are mind-independent moral facts, then we would expect to find lots of moral disagreement; but we do not; therefore, moral realism is false. I defend these two premises and explain what makes this challenge novel and powerful.

ABSTRACT. Whistleblowers are members of organizations who, coming to know, or reasonably believing, the occurrence of wrongful or hazardous behaviors, decide to voice their concerns either to higher-level management (through internal channels) or, if this proves ineffective, by going public. In this paper, I try to show that ‘whistleblowing’ refers to a distinctive duty to report. It is ‘distinctive’ in two senses. First, whistleblowing is not a mere instrument to discharge other familiar moral and legal duties. Second, whistleblowing is of fundamental importance to stop wrongdoings, or to prevent them from occurring; therefore, without blowing the whistle, certain wrongdoings will occur or keep occurring.

ABSTRACT. Barry and Øverland argue that an agent has moral reasons against overdetermining harm (conduct which make no difference to the harm, like an individual’s GHG emissions). The reason to refrain is the probability that the agent will become an element of the set of actual conditions that in fact brings about the outcome. This paper aims to show that by focusing on outcome-related considerations, Barry and Øverland base their account on the wrong reasons. It renders their account limited in its applicability and stringency and the probability of being in the set may be too insignificant to be morally relevant.

ABSTRACT. Why act if one’s act is superfluous, and its effects are negligible? According to complicity accounts, one might have a reason to act in certain ways - that is, even if one’s act is superfluous - if by acting one will avoid complicity in harm. For example, by boycotting meat products, one might not make any difference for the better, though one might still avoid complicity in factory farming. Julia Nefsky has argued that accounts of this kind suffer from the co-called “superfluity problem.” In this paper, we defend an improved complicity account that survives Nefsky’s challenge.

ABSTRACT. Book symposium on Monica Meijsing's book: "Where was I while I wasn’t there?" When will we still be there, and when will we finally stop existing? What are we, ultimately? Dualist intuitions about what we are, are deeply ingrained in our culture. They have been made explicit by Descartes and Locke. I will show, on the basis of some neuropathological cases, that these intuitions about ourselves are wrong. I will argue that what we most fundamentally are, is a living human organism, and we exist as long as that organism lives. Even our most cherished identity, that of being a person, may not last as long as we exist. It is more fragile, and thoroughly relational.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this talk is to trace a line of thought from a widespread methodological starting point to a non-reductive metaphysics of perspectival facts. The methodological starting point is that of evaluating theories against the way the world manifests itself to us. The key here is an externalist understanding of what is manifest, according to which the manifest world does not consist in ‘commonsense’ beliefs, experiences or utterances, but in worldly facts and events. It will be argued that any reductive account of perspectival facts implies that the manifest world is pervasively misleading. Endorsing a theory that implies that the manifest world is pervasively misleading requires that one first abandons the methodology of checking theories against the manifest facts and events. If this is right, then a widely shared methodological starting point implies a non-reductive metaphysics of perspectival phenomena.

ABSTRACT. In this talk I want to reconnect scientific and historical explanation by suggesting that causal explanations just are a specialized kind of historical narrative. Taking this perspective has a number of benefits of great interest to contemporary philosophers, two of which I will discuss here. First, it explains the otherwise puzzling fact about explanatory discourse that we do not, in a sense to be explained, semantically distinguish between causal explanations and reasons-based explanations. Second, it sheds new light on synchronicity as a source of skepticism about metaphysical explanations.

ABSTRACT. Most contemporary philosophers believe that time and space are conceptually prior to causation. Although the claim is rarely defended explicitly, it is implicit in most contemporary theories of causation. Against this implicit consensus, I argue, first that we have to accept as an a priori principle the claim that the causal order is identical to the temporal order; and, second, that the a priori status of this principle cannot be explained in ways that are congenial to the conceptual priority of time to causation.

ABSTRACT. I argue for the use of truth-makers in Bayesian epistemology and philosophy of science. More specifically, I argue that if as Bayesians, we model propositions as sets of truth-makers rather than sets of possible-worlds, then we can define many new and fruitful concepts with natural applications to problems affecting Bayesianism. To illustrate, I consider some applications in Bayesian confirmation theory, where I argue that conditional probabilities defined in terms of truth-makers rather than possible-worlds can help us tackle the so-called ``tacking-paradoxes'' in a natural and fruitful way.

ABSTRACT. Subjective Bayesianism states that our credences should be probabilities. But suppose we hold incoherent credences: how are we to correct them? I explore different possible corrective methods and conclude that the normative force of Bayesian epistemology need not be limited to stating that credences should be probabilities; there is also much to be said about how to transform them into probabilities. While the best corrective method might need to be determined on a case-by-case basis, I argue that, in general, we must focus on the internal relation between the incoherent credences and preserve what information this relation contains.

ABSTRACT. An epistemically circular argument ascribes reliability to a doxastic faculty employed in believing the argument’s premises. It often is considered to be significantly different from logically circular arguments, i.e. arguments involved in the fallacy of petitio principii. Their exact relation, however, received scant attention. This paper argues that (1) it is unclear how the two are significantly different, (2) there are good reasons to think of epistemically circular arguments as being reducible to logically circular arguments, and (3) whatever their exact relation, the same reasons to reject logical circular arguments as fallacious apply to epistemically circular arguments as well.

ABSTRACT. Published scientific results turn out to have a low level of replicability and there is an ongoing debate on potential counter measures and merits of statistical methods. I would like to contribute to this debate through a literature investigating of a ‘what if’ questions as a complement to Gigerenzer’s 'Mindless Statistics'. What if science’s use of the currently ubiquitous measure of evidence (i.e., the p-value) is like an addiction, instead of an (mindless) ritual?

ABSTRACT. The metaphysical argument for the disunity of science is often accompanied by a call for ontological and/or epistemological pluralism. The general idea of pluralism is that some natural phenomena cannot be fully explained by a single theory or fully investigated using a single approach. However, it is not always clear how the details of this pluralism are to be hashed out in practice. This interdisciplinary symposium is presented by four speakers with diverse backgrounds in philosophy of science. We are all interested in to what extent monism and pluralism coexist on a local level, and under which conditions. To explore this question, we discuss a range of case studies from history of science, anthropology, biology and current debates about natural kinds.

ABSTRACT. The concept of conventional truth belongs to the doctrine of the two truths —"conventional" and "ultimate"— developed by Buddhist philosophers. We propose that acquaintance with the concept of conventional truth has educational value. The two truths doctrine encourages both not getting overly attached to one preferred perspective or discipline and taking everyday reality seriously, as it does not postulate a domain that is more real than everyday reality. If there is no ultimate truth that can be “poured” into one's audience, a dialogue is needed. We will discuss what is conventional truth and how it works in a dialogue context.

ABSTRACT. We defend the claim that an agent can only be morally responsible for an outcome if one of her intentions promoted it. The promoting influence can be strong, weak or very weak, but intentionality needs to play some role in order to make an agent responsible for an outcome. We defend the claim against two possible counter examples; one where it looks like responsibility can be traced back to a mistaken belief, and one where the right intention is not formed under the influence of time pressure. We argue that it is problematic to dismiss the role of intentions and to resort to general normative conditions on moral agency.

ABSTRACT. Moral responsibility seems to presuppose personal identity. However, there are problems with this view, original raised by Derek Parfit and recently sharpened by David Shoemaker. This paper defends the claim that moral responsibility presupposes personal identity against these problems. It argues, first, that only reductionist views about personal identity have problems with the connection between responsibility and identity, which suggests that PERSONAL IDENTITY is a non-reductionist concept. Second, it argues that while non-reductionism is problematic, there is a novel view, non-representationalism about personal identity, that is equally well-positioned to rescue the connection as non-reductionism, without suffering from non-reductionism’s problems.

ABSTRACT. The Frankfurt debate revolves around the question whether there are successful Frankfurt-cases that undermine the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). We present a definition of moral responsibility that offers a formal compromise between the Frankfurt-cases and a refined version of the PAP. First, we avoid ambiguity by using the formal language of structural equations modelling. Second, we formulate a generic definition of responsibility that can be made specific in a variety of ways. Third, we make no assumptions regarding the nature of free will, but let the Frankfurt-cases and the PAP guide us to plausible conditions for moral responsibility.

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces a framework that has as its core that people dispose over moral capacities that allow the construction of narratives that give normative meaning to experiences of a person, these meanings are translated into preferable courses of actions which are forwarded in the form of moral emotions. Six moral capacities will be presented of which three pertain to the individual self, while the other three relate to the social environment in which this self is embedded. These capacities are: the unitary body; the unitary mind; the unitary character; sensing the other; group identification; and transcendental experience.

ABSTRACT. The self-control model of agency assumes that our practical self-relation is defined by an act of distance-taking: agents deliberate about what to do by taking distance towards our motivational states. I will argue that distance-taking is only one metaphor of our practical self-relation among others. I contrast distance-taking with a diamond metaphor to show how aspects of our practical relation stay hidden under the distance-taking metaphor: f.e., distance-taking implies that we can step back to a normatively neutral zone; the diamond metaphor offers a different image: we reflect from non-neutral perspectives in which the same aspect of ourselves appears differently.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this symposium is to investigate how historical studies (and in particular the history of philosophy and science) can benefit from or be affected by the use of grand narratives. Following Lyotard, we assume that grand narratives provide the historical framework for understanding single events and characters. As a case study, we examine the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution by focusing on (1) the distinction between experimental and speculative natural philosophy; (2) the concept of mathematization of nature; (3) the possibility of tracing a computational history of early modern science.

ABSTRACT. This presentation defends two points. (1) Political legitimacy is a prescriptive concept, rather than an evaluative one. That is: contrary to what the dominant literature defends, legitimacy does not mean ‘sufficiently like a fully just society’. Instead of evaluating a status quo, to make a legitimacy judgment it must be determined whether state agents use their coercive power in a justifiable way. (2) State agents must use their coercive power to best fulfil the purpose of the state. The purpose of the state is plausibly construed as securing the safe cooperation and community of its members and protecting their rights.

ABSTRACT. With the rise of big data, the traditional credit-scoring is becoming more and more ‘social’ - businesses scrutinize not only individuals’ purchases, but also their everyday behaviors, lifestyle, and even public statements. Moreover, the scores of credit may be used to determine what quality of public resources, jobs, and education etc. that people can receive. All these remind us that the credit systems are more than a naive tool, but is potentially a powerful surveillance. Many have argued for a participation-based approach to ensure the accuracy and fairness of credit-scoring systems. But I argue that the approach fails to explore how social powers actually intrude on the conditions for the participation. To do that, I will give three accounts to explain why citizenship for democratic participation is increasingly undermined within the credit-scoring surveillance.

ABSTRACT. If a global consequentialist theory like utilitarianism is correct, do philosophers have any business opining about politics, beyond declaring that we should prefer whatever arrangements maximize utility? Specifically, is there any place for the philosophical project of "ideal theory," which attempts to identify the best humanly attainable political arrangements? I approach these questions by pressing certain criticisms of Rawlsian ideal theory that should be especially compelling to consequentialists. I then propose an alternative understanding of ideal theory as part of a heuristic procedure for estimating the expected value of pursuing long-range, ambitious political objectives.

ABSTRACT. Across Europe, populist-, anti-establishment- and far-right parties and political movements enjoy unprecedented levels of support. A common explanation is that people are feeling less and less represented by their representatives and the system in which they function. Pierre Rosanvallon provides us with the conceptual framework to counter this ‘crisis of representation’. What his framework also provides, even though Rosanvallon does not mention it, is a strong argument for supplementing electoral representation with representation by means of sortition. Using his conceptual framework, I will make a case for the implementation of sortition as an addition or supplement to electoral-representational democracy.

ABSTRACT. The debate about the place of concepts in cognitive science is caught between two paradigms: concept pluralism, which takes “concept” to be a superordinate kind that subsumes postulated explanatory representations; and concept eliminativism, which takes “concept” to be no kind at all. In this paper, I develop an intermediary position: the dispositional theory of concepts (DTC). According to DTC, concepts are dispositional kinds that are token-identical to the properties of postulated, explanatory representations. DTC remains neutral about whether “concept” is a kind of scientific interest, preferring instead to let the answer depend upon whether cognitive scientific explanations should be representationally-general or representationally-specific.

ABSTRACT. According to McDowell (1994) perceptual judgements are justified by perceptions that are completely describable by concepts. In perception concepts are passively brought into play; these concepts are at the same time under scrutiny of reflective reason. The question then arises what justifies perceptual conceptual judgements; their being passively activated in perception or their fitness for a coherent embedding in a unified conceptual scheme about the world? In this paper these issues will be addressed with special emphasis on the historical ancestors of McDowell's position.

ABSTRACT. The causal exclusion problem is still out there, and the sole aim of my presentation is to introduce a new way of articulating it. I do so using a light-hearted parable featuring an intrepid young boy named Jack. He is a big fan of virtual reality (VR) and decides to thoroughly study his favorite virtual reality: Kosmos. In effect, Jack starts to do metaphysics of Kosmos. The parable then introduces, from Jack's naive perspective, the basics of a system of metaphysics in as far as it is required for articulating the causal exclusion problem.

ABSTRACT. Are contemporary analytic meta-ethicists and Wittgensteinian moral philosophers able to engage in a fruitful philosophical discussion, or is any attempt to discuss meta-ethical questions with one another in vain? In current debates between moral realists, quasi-realists, anti-realists and so forth, Wittgensteinian moral philosophers are remarkably absent. We attempt to start a conversation between a Wittgensteinian moral philosopher and a proponent of one of the contemporary meta-ethical theories, moral error theory. We explore the plausibility of a Wittgensteinian response to that theory, which requires us to reject a number of basic assumptions about what meta-ethics is and ought to be.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I take up the question, “What is a hard choice?” My answer consists of two parts. First, I motivate the need to ask this question with a critique of the predominant way in which this question has been answered in the literature – the incommensurability or incomparability view. Second, and more positively, I proceed to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for a choice situation to constitute a hard choice. In particular, I argue that a choice situation where an agent can make an optimal selection does not constitute a hard choice, even if that selection is indeterminate or inconsistent.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I identify, analyze, and situate an unacknowledged ethical concept: presumptuous inference. We can say that an inference about a person's aims is presumptuous if the inference is based crucially on the premise that the person will have aims similar to other people to whom she bears some superficial similarity. I provide examples of presumptuous inference to motivate inquiry about it. Then I offer two arguments that presumptuous inference is a kind of disrespect. Finally, I further distinguish presumptuous inference by showing that the disrespect it constitutes is not due to inaccuracy, violation of autonomy, or stereotyping.

ABSTRACT. Love and morality can be connected in an evolutionary framework. We depart from a multi-level view of morality based on Darwall’s second-personal theory of moral obligation (Darwall, 2006) and Tomasello's account of the evolution of morality (Tomasello & Vaish, 2013). In this resulting evolutionary picture, morality comprises deontic reactive attitudes, which seek mutual accountability; and “second-personal attitudes of the heart”, which seek mutual openness (Darwall, 2016). On this basis, we defend: (a) that both attitudes make up morality, against some authors that exclude “second-personal attitudes of the heart” from the realm of morality (Darwall, 2016); and (b) that love (agape), as a second-personal attitude of the heart, might specially foster morality in that it makes us sensitive to each other's needs and demands. The role of love in the evolution of morality is highlighted.

ABSTRACT. Fake news is all the rage these days. In this paper, I draw on resources from contemporary social epistemology to explain what’s so bad about fake news, at least from an epistemic perspective, i.e., from the perspective of knowledge acquisition, retention, and distribution. First, I analyze what fake news is and then I investigate what’s bad about it. In doing so, I introduce the notion of a well-functioning epistemic environment, which is characterized by features that make it easier for us to acquire and sustain knowledge. I show how fake news detracts from these features.

ABSTRACT. Evidentialists argue that the norms guiding our belief formation practices are epistemic oughts. Pragmatists about belief argue that in certain circumstances, what one is permitted (or even obligated) to believe depends on non-evidential grounds (e.g. in cases of friendship, religion, etc.). In this paper, we critically examine recent pragmatist proposals, and show them wanting. Based on, among others, new theoretical and empirical work in psychology, we subsequently develop an alternative argument for pragmatism. We argue that under certain conditions, one should be permitted to adopt beliefs that ‘rationalize’ themselves, absent evidentially impeccable grounds.

ABSTRACT. This paper explore whether trust can be voluntary. First, I make the main question more precise by qualifying it in various ways and specifying which kind of trust I am talking about. Then, I formulate an important constraint on trust that has to do with one’s evidence base. Next, I consider to what extent trust is voluntary if trust, as some philosophers have argued, is a particular kind of belief. This is a minority view among philosophers working on trust, but even if it is correct, it only works if so-called doxastic compatibilism is true. After that, I explain what counts in favor of the thesis that trust is voluntary. I show that there are three different ways in which trust can be under our control: reliance is often under our control, resilience to evidence is often under our control, and there are situations in which we know that trusting actually sufficiently raises a person’s trustworthiness so that we can choose to trust.

ABSTRACT. In order to understand why something is the case is to, in some way, grasp why it is the case. Thus, it seems that in order to shed light on the nature of understanding epistemologists should turn to the nature of grasping. However, not everyone agrees. Reductionists about understanding claim that grasping is just code for believing-that x is why p. Reductionists claims that any novel account of grasping does not give any explanatory benefits into the nature of understanding. In this talk I put forward a view of grasping that meets the reductionist’s explanatory challenge.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines whether partisanship, commonly cited as one source of the rise of fake news in the political setting, is inimical to our reasoning with one another, democratically.  Defining partisanship initially as involving a self-consciously partial self-identification that is outcome-oriented and has at least a modicum of ideological unity, I argue that the degree to which it blocks joint political reasoning depends upon whether there are robust procedural norms in place that curb its effects and whether the ideologies in question block any shared identification with a shared democratic project.  But these reasonably optimistic observations force us, in turn, to mark out a more disturbing phenomenon, in which there is self-consciously partial identification but neither an outcome orientation not any ideological unity:  this arises when a politician is seeking simply to create and exploit a division or divisions between friends and enemies—a division that Carl Schmitt claimed was definitive of “the political.”  This phenomenon, which I call “Trumpism,” does necessarily threaten democratic reasoning.

ABSTRACT. Is it possible to develop a moral theory in which existing rival theories can find their place? The idea of this paper is to build this alternative moral theory on the notion of a ‘transformative dialogue’. This is a dialogue in which dialogue partners come to new identifications of who they are. The paper clarifies the concept of a transformative dialogue, presents existing (institutional) practices, distinguishes the features of a moral theory on its basis and starts to develop arguments for this theory by relating its conditions to the conditions and assumptions of other moral theories.

ABSTRACT. There are many examples of claims about unjust aspects of our global economy. However, it is unclear which considerations of distributive justice, if any, apply to our global economy. In this paper I will explore to what extend the trade relations within our global economic system do generate demands of distributive justice. I will argue that the global economy does generate demands of socio-economic fairness in its own right, independent of humanitarian concerns or basic human rights. I will show that the global economy does raise such concerns as a matter of fairly dividing the surplus of international economic cooperation.

ABSTRACT. This paper attempts to explore the relation between the Presocratic thoughts and the ancient Greek vase paintings. From some Presocratic fragments of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, the philosophical reflection on the riddle of life and death can be read as a theme. And this theme can be traced earlier back to the vase paintings in the Dark Ages rather than just to the written records of Hesiod and Homer. The geometric patterns and funeral images etc. on the decorated pottery of the Dark Ages symbolize the cosmological contemplation on the same theme.

ABSTRACT. Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory and critical theory are usually seen as opposing and mutually exclusive persuasions in social philosophy. In this paper, I address the problem that for Luhmann, social theory cannot have any normative intent, since the scientific system is merely oriented toward the distinction between truth/falsity rather than political distinctions like justice/injustice or power/non-power. I argue against Luhmann that his very own epistemology leads to a kind of pragmatist critical theory, which opens the door for a promising critical systems theory.

ABSTRACT. In the past decades, the technique of recording and reviewing neonatal resuscitation developed itself as a multipurpose tool, now operating in several domains of health care: patient care, education, quality assurance and research. These domains all have a distinct moral framework, resulting in conflicting requirements and conditions concerning parental and provider consent, data storage, impact on providers and parents, privacy, and medicolegal consequences. In order to advance the technique and as such improve neonatal resuscitation, we need to explore these ethical conflicts more thoroughly. By doing so we contribute to the bioethical debate about new techniques in health care.

ABSTRACT. Since some governments are malevolent or simply incapable of protecting human rights, a commitment to human rights requires a commitment to the freedom of individuals to move to states where they can live a minimally decent life. Thus, migration has a special status as a meta-human right: a right that other core human rights depend upon. Refugees present an international moral emergency that trumps the usual considerations of national statecraft such as budgetary controls and political unpopularity.

ABSTRACT. In this article the author deals with the phenomenon of borders viewed from the perspective of Carl Schmitt. The author argues that according to Schmitt borders are seen as an integral part of a human existence. In other words, according to Schmitt, borders and certain type of exclusion that goes with it are deeply based in a human nature. In order to show that, the author is trying to reconstruct Schmitt’s political anthropology. If Schmitt’s understanding of a human nature is correct, it means not only that world without borders is impossible, but also that relative peace and security are conceivable only in the world where distinct and firm borders between the nation-states are maintained.

ABSTRACT. The rapid development of mobile devices and social media opens up tremendous opportunities for support systems that promote a healthier lifestyle by helping to change the user’s behavior. These systems have an enormous potential for preventing chronic illnesses and reducing healthcare costs. They are also becoming increasingly personalized. As data gathered on individual behavior patterns increase in depth and breadth, opportunities arise for more personally tailored solutions for behavior change – including solutions tailored to personal habits, social, and physical contexts, time variant events, and physiological patterns. However, widespread adoption of apps for health self-management remains low. In this study we address three key issues that are crucial for the success of mobile support systems for health behavior: trust, consent, and intrinsic motivation. Mobile technologies are “nebulous” in the sense that they involve both a “cloud” of data and a set of physical devices, their effects are often unpredictable, and the underlying decision mechanisms by which they achieve their effects are opaque to users. This makes it difficult to trust them and to consent to their use. We aim to develop new ways in which users can trust nebulous mobile systems and a new model to consent to their use. We also address an important concern with these systems: that they may change the intrinsic motivation for healthy behavior to a less powerful extrinsic motivation based on external rewards. These topics are studied in an interdisciplinary way, using expertise from ethics, psychology and artificial intelligence/cognitive science.

ABSTRACT. https://fairlimits.nl/

In contemporary normative political philosophy, questions of distributive justice have focused on meeting minimal needs of persons, prioritizing the worst-off and reducing inequalities. In philosophy, these views are called ‘sufficientarianism’, ‘prioritarianism’ and ‘egalitarianism’. Fair Limits shifts the focus to ‘limitarianism’, the view that there should be upper limits to how much each person could have of valuable goods. In this project, we will investigate the plausibility of limitarianism in the area of economic and ecological resources. We will analyse whether such a view can be justified, that is, supported by robust philosophical argumentation, and what limitarian institutions could look like.

ABSTRACT. http://www.evoethics.com/

The NWO-funded research programme (2014-2018) aims at investigating the philosophical implications of recent empirical research on the evolutionary origin of human morality. Since Charles Darwin in his Descent of Man(1871) sketched an evolutionary explanation of what he called our ‘moral sense’, ever new insights concerning the evolution of human morality have been gained by various scientific and scholarly disciplines, such as evolutionary biology, comparative behavioural biology, cultural anthropology, history, and, according to some, functional neuro-imagining studies of moral decision-making. This quickly developing field of interdisciplinary research raises several philosophical questions concerning the implications of evolutionary explanations for normative ethics and meta-ethics, which the members of the project address in their respective research programmes.

ABSTRACT. With the advance of algorithmic techniques such as data mining, more and more attention is being paid to the dangers of human biases being hidden in these algorithms. However, less attention is being paid to the epistemic concerns related to data mining. The use of data mining is different from other kinds of statistical research because it is often intertwined with the practice it is investigating. Your local groceries store uses data mining to see which products are often bought together. On the basis of this, they change the layout of the store so that the customer will find the one product close to the other. This will mean that new data mining will show that these products are bought together even more often. However, it will be hard to find out to which extent this outcome was caused by the policy of the store, or by the wishes of the customer. This may not be a problem for a commercial actor like your grocery store, but should be a major concern for government branches using the same kind of data tools. When the algorithm is in place, it will influence the new data that will consequently be used by the same algorithm to produce new data. This paper investigates how substantial these epistemic concerns related to the use of data mining for public policy are and reflects on possible ways to overcome these concerns. It will conclude that, though these epistemic concerns may not outweigh the possible benefit data mining could cause, increased awareness and understanding of possible dangers is necessary.

ABSTRACT. I make an analysis of the relationship between questions and answers by means of the question “Does Valium answer this question?”. I look at a Realist approach, where an answer is just some subset of true propositions that describe the world based on work by Groenendijk and Stokhof. I will argue that this type of answering. leads to a type of Agrippa trilemma, where either we can make continuously higher-order questions about our questions, we get a question that requires its own answer to understand how it can be answered or where find some foundation from which we can answer a question.  This foundation can be found in two forms, the first is what I will call the Pragmatist approach, where a question is answered by what dissolves the question in any possible way in line with James and Wittgenstein, which can yield counterintuitive results. The second is a Transcendental approach, where a question is answered by the presuppositions of answering the question, this would be in line with Descartes and Stroud. This approach suffers from the notion that we ought to have some clear foundational perspective of the question that allows us to pose it, which seemingly cannot be questioned itself without resorting to regress.   The problem of regress leads me to the Heideggerian approach for which the question is a way of understanding exactly what we normally take as assumptions without acknowledging this step. Here the answer is not of primary importance, but if these assumptions are not taken as answers (renewing the problem), it seems hard to say what a question could mean in this sense. In conclusion, all four approaches have their own benefits and their own problems, their respective answer are thus: No, Yes, Maybe? and Not of primary importance. 

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I critically asses Timothy O’Connor’s theory of free action. O’Connor argues that agents have the power to cause action-triggering intentions, which in turn cause the occurrence of action. The agent is free because she controls the action through her agent-causal powers. I discuss the coherence of O’Connor’s theory, his account of freedom and reasons for actions and whether his theory fits with empirical data. I conclude that the theory is coherent and intelligible, but that some of its explanations concerning human action are not satisfactory. O’Connor’s account of the relation between reasons and action is the weakest part of his overall theory. Where some of his other explanations were merely unsatisfactory, his theory of reasons and actions is, as it stands, completely inadequate. Overall, it would be a mistake to dismiss O’Connor’s theory lightly since it generally is a coherent theory that can give us an explanation concerning free will. But, given the fact that a number of O’Connor’s explanations are unsatisfactory, I suggest looking for alternative theories that can provide us with better results.

ABSTRACT. The ontological argument for the existence of god as used by Anselm and Descartes has often been taken to be an analytic argument that simply defines god as existing. We would like to draw attention to various comments by Anselm and Descartes that indicate that they did not see their argument in this way. We would also like to point out systematic reasons to believe the argument does not work that way. We think these authors took their argument to have a substantive premise: that god ‘exists in the mind’ or that the idea of god is in the mind. This fact was not considered to be trivial as both authors indicate that they consider this idea as a gift from god. Had god not given this to us we would have never been able to come up with the idea of god. Understanding the argument as based on this substantive premise will help us understand how these authors thought of the mind and of corresponding philosophical methodology. This will help us contrast their views to those of later authors who thought the ontological argument was analytic (eg Kant). The existence of this substantive premise also explains why Descartes needed his cogito argument and didn’t remedy his scepticism with the ontological argument directly. Descartes, we will argue, took the existence of the cogito to be established, not primarily by an argument but by being ‘revealed by a natural light’ that we possess. In our view, the use of this natural light establishes that there are ideas, specifically the idea of god and only after that, the ontological argument can begin. 

ABSTRACT. Libertarianism is characterised by wanting a minimal government and the maximum exercise of Millian liberties, provided that this does not harm others. In this paper an educational reform proposed by the Dutch liberal party, the VVD, will be discussed. First, the proposed voucher system will be discussed, where individuals directly receive government funding to pay tuition fees at any formal educational institution they please to attend – whether non-profit or for-profit, in the Netherlands or abroad. The aimed results of this system are a greater (Pareto) efficiency in schools, a wider variety of educational philosophies, and an improvement of the quality of education. Objections to the voucher system often start from egalitarian beliefs or an opposition to increasing income or racial segregation. However, given that these objections rely on assumptions that even the more contemporary and nuanced libertarians do not hold, in this paper an objection will be presented that the libertarian system is inherently inconsistent in its aimed results. Second, certain market failures of this system will be discussed that should be improved in order to approach Pareto efficiency. It is argued that necessary for remedying these failures is the establishment of a central organ to improve informational symmetry and to internalise the current external costs of education. This central organ need not be governmental, but nevertheless will monitor and to a certain extent prescribe educational practice, which diminishes the freedom of education. Therefore, a voucher system in education can either promote Millian freedom to a great extent, or improve Pareto efficiency, but not both. 

ABSTRACT. What kinds of Nudges should we use? Nudge Theory has had enormous influence since the publication of Thaler & Sunstein’s 2008 book Nudge: the US, UK, Japan, Australia, and Germany have all created “Nudge units” to offer behavioural insights into policymaking, and Richard Thaler has recently earned the Nobel Prize for Economics. With Nudging becoming so prevalent, it is important to discuss the implications of Nudging, and identify and evaluate various types of Nudges. In my paper I establish a precise definition of Nudge, in order to reduce ambiguity for the following discussion. Then I consider the following two key features of Nudges. Firstly, Nudges are inevitable because there is no neutral way to organise choice architecture. Secondly, in many contexts individuals do not have stable preferences outside of the choice architecture: their preferences in these cases are endogenous.  Because of these two factors, deciding what kinds of Nudges we should use requires careful reflection. I employ Berlin’s philosophical analysis of Positive and Negative Liberty, and the Value Pluralism that underlies it, to suggest that we should prefer Nudges that attempt to activate people’s deliberative systems so that they make choices that they are consciously aware of: I call these ‘Negative Nudges’. To employ Nudges that try to guide people’s behaviour based on what is deemed best by the Nudger’s moral theory (‘Positive Nudges’) is problematic because it disrespects the right of the individual to make radical choices between different values. While ‘Positive Nudges’ may be justified in certain situations, we should prefer ‘Negative Nudges’ in general. 

ABSTRACT. Structural injustices are forms of injustice which constrain people’s possibilities and which do not emerge from specific wrongful actions, but from social structures. Especially in a globalizing world, examples of these complex forms of injustice are numerous (e.g. sweatshops labor and climate change due to pollution). Because structural injustices emerge from complex systems that are social structures, it is difficult to point out the culpable wrongdoer. Iris Marion Young argues that the commonly used model to evaluate injustices, the liability model, is not fit to blame wrongdoers in structural injustices. She proposes her social connection model to assign agents in structural injustices “responsibility” instead of “guilt”, which is used in the liability model. The ascription of responsibility is a less severe form of blame and calls for collective action to reorganize the structure and resolve the injustice. In this thesis, I argue, by investigating the conditions needed to be guilty or responsible, that Young fails to make an accurate distinction between guilty and responsible agents due to her wrong conceptualization of “causality” and “traceability” of the connection between the agent and the injustice. As a result, her model cannot adequately evaluate connections that are forms of overdetermination, or express vagueness and probability. There are, in contrast to what Young argues, agents guilty for the structural injustice. Young assigns responsibility to agents that seem guilty of the injustice. In conclusion, I argue that Young is right in distinguishing between guilty and responsible agents, but the social connection model needs a better conceptualization of causality and traceability to accurately differentiate between guilty and responsible agents. A more accurate distinction between guilty and responsible agents is necessary to hold the right agents accountable and to resolve these complex forms of injustice.