Objections to hospital philosophers.

Objections to hospital philosophers.

Like morally sensitive hospital staff, philosophers resist routine simplification of morally complex cases. Like hospital clergy, they favour reflective and principled decision-making. Like hospital lawyers, they refine and extend the language we use to formulate and defend our complex decisions. But hospital philosophers are not redundant: they have a wider range of principles and categories a...

Conscientious objections to reform.

Dutch Objections to Evolutionary Ethics

While strolling the streets of Amsterdam, Sidney Smith, the renowned editor of the Edinburgh Review, called the attention of his companion to two Dutch housewives who were leaning out of their windows and arguing with one another across the narrow alley that separated their houses. Smith remarked to his companion that the two women would never agree. His friend thought the seasoned editor had i...

Objections to Computationalism. A Short Survey

In this paper, I review the objections against the claim that brains are computers, or, to be precise, informationprocessing mechanisms. By showing that practically all the popular objections are based on uncharitable (or simply incorrect) interpretations of the claim, I argue that the claim is likely to be true, relevant to contemporary cognitive (neuro)science, and non-trivial.

The Diversity of Objections to Inequality

goal-conformity to a certain pattern-to which special moral value is auached.2 I will begin by distinguishing what seem to me to be the fundamental moral reasons lying behind our objections to various forms of inequality. I will then illustrate these ideas by showing how they figure in various ways in Rawls's views about distributive justice. Finally, I will return to examine one of these value...