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What’s the difference between negative and positive liberty?
In constitutional law classes, Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958) comes up constantly, but my professors use it in different ways. Some say negative liberty is freedom from interference and positive liberty is having the resources to act. Others say positive…
Started by Deepa Kartha3 replies -
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are constantly misused in philosophical arguments
A public service post, since I see this weekly. What the first theorem says, roughly: any consistent, effectively axiomatised formal system that contains enough arithmetic has true sentences in its language that it can't prove. The second says such a system can't…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak4 replies -
What is the principle of double effect, and when does it apply in medicine?
In palliative care, I often hear that giving high doses of morphine is permitted even if it might shorten life, because of the "principle of double effect". But I've realised I don't know exactly what the principle says or where it comes…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies -
Persian gardens, proportion, and Plato’s Timaeus
The classical Persian garden, the chahar bagh, is divided into four parts by water channels meeting at a centre. Visit the Fin Garden in Kashan or Bagh-e Eram in Shiraz and you feel the order before you understand it. In the Timaeus,…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Existentialism can ground an ethics, and Beauvoir showed how
The standard charge is simple: if there are no given values, then anything goes. Sartre promised an ethics at the end of Being and Nothingness and never published one; the Notebooks for an Ethics came out only after his death. Beauvoir did…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Do future generations have rights over the climate we leave them?
Around Hyderabad's lakes you can see the long-term effects of decisions made decades ago: dams, drained wetlands, groundwater extraction. The people most affected weren't born when the decisions were made. Derek Parfit's "non-identity problem" (Reasons and Persons, 1984) makes this hard. Our…
Started by Anand Kurup3 replies -
Voluntary assisted dying should be legal for competent adults
Sweden doesn't allow it. I've worked alongside people from the Netherlands, where it has been legal under statute since 2002, and I've read about Canada, where it became legal in 2016. The argument for, as I understand it: competent adults have the…
Started by Elin Hedqvist8 replies -
Hobbes’s ‘sudden glory’ explains far more laughter than its critics admit
Every textbook dismisses the superiority theory in a paragraph. Hobbes says in Leviathan chapter 6 that ‘sudden glory’ is the passion that makes the grimaces called laughter, caused either by some act of our own that pleases us or by seeing some…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
“Because that’s how it works”: when is that an explanation and when is it a refusal?
New cooks ask why a lot. Why rest the meat? Why salt the pasta water and not the sauce at the start? Why does this sauce split if you rush it? When I was an apprentice in Goa my chef answered almost…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
If a machine might have interests, what do we owe it before we know?
Of course the thing that has eaten my semester is the one I was most sceptical about: whether anything is owed to AI systems that might have interests. Here's my difficulty. On the question of whether there is something it is like…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
The argument from marginal cases has never been properly answered
It pains me to agree with my effective altruism group on anything. But on this I do. The argument runs like this. Name the property that gives humans moral status. If it's rationality, language or moral agency, some humans lack it (newborns,…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Can someone explain Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument and the strongest reply to it?
We did chapter 7 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) in a tutorial this week and I came out feeling slightly winded. As I understand it: start from whatever distribution you think is just. Call it D1. Now a famous basketball player,…
Started by Ethan Mercer4 replies -
The actual infinite is a useful fiction, not something real
Aristotle, in Physics III, allowed only the potential infinite: you can always count one more, but there's never a completed infinite totality. For two thousand years, most mathematicians agreed. Then Cantor, in the late nineteenth century, treated infinite sets as completed objects…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Norman the clairvoyant is reliably right, yet most people say he doesn’t know. Why?
We did the Norman case in my epistemology tutorial this week and I came out more confused than I went in. The setup, as I understood it: Norman has a clairvoyant faculty that is completely reliable. He has no idea he has…
Started by Ethan Mercer5 replies -
Found the Master Argument in Epictetus, between two bus stops
Another find from my recordings. Last week it was Epictetus, Discourses Book 2, and in the middle of a chapter he mentions an argument by Diodorus Cronus that clever people used to show off with. I had to pull my attention back…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
How is Scanlon’s ‘reasonable rejection’ test different from asking what most people would agree to?
We read a chapter of Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other (1998) in my ethics tutorial this week, and it left me with more questions than answers. The idea, roughly, is that an act is wrong if it would be disallowed…
Started by Ethan Mercer4 replies -
How can a thought move an arm if physics already explains every movement?
Last week a lecturer said something I have been chewing on since. He said: decide to raise your arm, and it rises. Fine. But scientists say every movement of the arm has a complete physical cause, nerves, muscles, chemistry. So what is…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
My son says my rain forecasts could be “Dutch-booked”. What does that mean?
This week my son's course reading was about probability, sent, I think, to keep his mother humble. On the phone I told him I was sixty percent sure the rains would come early this year. When he asked about the dry season…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
Is ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ a real question or just a very good bit?
I do stand-up, mostly in northern clubs, and I've got a bit about "why is there something rather than nothing". The punchline is that the universe exists because somebody forgot to cancel the booking. It does all right. Afterwards a bloke in…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
My daughter asked whether a square circle could exist on another planet. How do I answer?
My nine-year-old has decided that "anything could be true somewhere in space". Last week it was square circles, this week it is a planet where two and two make five. I said no, and she asked why a planet with no gravity…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Kant and the murderer at the door: can the essay be rescued?
In 1797 Kant published "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy", replying to Benjamin Constant. He maintains that you may not lie even to a murderer who asks where your friend is hiding. When I taught this, nearly every student found…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
If I must file the return, must I file it or shred it? Ross’s paradox for a tax preparer
A client's son, who is studying philosophy, told me about something called Ross's paradox. As he explained it: in the standard logic of obligation, if you ought to do A, then it follows that you ought to do "A or B", for…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal3 replies -
If a stopped clock happens to show the right time, why don’t I know the time?
Yesterday's lecture was about knowledge. The lecturer said that for a long time philosophers agreed that knowledge is "justified true belief", and then a man called Gettier wrote three pages and the agreement fell apart. The example that stayed with me was…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
What is the “block universe”, and does relativity force it on us?
In physics classes we learned special relativity, including the relativity of simultaneity: observers in relative motion disagree about which distant events are simultaneous. Some philosophers argue this means the past, present and future are all equally real, the "block universe". Is that…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha4 replies -
Is Aquinas’s First Way really about a first moment in time?
Most of my friends assume Aquinas's arguments for God (Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a.3) are about the beginning of the universe: everything has a cause, so go back far enough and you find God at the start. But my lecturer says that's…
Started by Aoife Kilbride4 replies -
Al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error as a story about information overload
I've been reading al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-Dalal), written late in his life. He describes his search for certain knowledge among four groups: the theologians, the Batinis (who relied on an infallible teacher), the philosophers, and the Sufis. Before that,…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies -
Beauty is objective
I want to defend a thesis that's unfashionable in literature departments: beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder. Hume, in "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757), argued that though beauty depends on sentiment, some judges are better than others:…
Started by Kavya Menon6 replies -
What is Mary’s Room actually supposed to show?
Frank Jackson's "Mary's Room" is easy to present badly, and I'd like to present it correctly at a study circle I'm leading. Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room. She knows every physical fact…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
If consent of the governed is the newcomer, what did legitimacy rest on before it?
My students are learning about government this term. I showed them a comparative table of answers to the question "how should we be governed?" across many traditions: Greek, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, European. The thing that surprised them most was that only the…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
My cooks are free to leave, in theory. What republican liberty sees in a kitchen
I came from Goa to cook in Dubai fifteen years ago, and I'm proud of how we treat people in my kitchen now. Nobody is shouted at. Overtime is paid. When someone's mother is ill, we find a way to send him…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies