TERRORISM AND SEVERAL MORAL DISTINCTIONS

Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in Terrorism

A Moral Analysis of Effective Prediction Markets on Terrorism

Predicting terrorist attacks with prediction markets has been accused of being immoral. While some of these concerns are about the likely effectiveness of prediction markets on terrorism (PMsoT), this paper discusses the three main reasons why even effective prediction markets on terrorism might be considered immoral. The authors argue that these three reasons establish only that PMsoT cause of...

Abduction and its Distinctions

What distinguishes abductive inference from other modes of inference? What distinguishes the different forms of abductive inference? These are perhaps the key questions that face the student of abduction, and the core of Lorenzo Magnani’s book is devoted to them. The book contains, among other things, a defence of several putative distinctions, and it touches on an impressively wide range of pe...

Philosophical Ambiguities in Ostensibly Unambiguous Times: the Moral Evaluation of Terrorism

The title of my lecture, "Philosophical Ambiguities in Ostensibly Unambiguous Times: The Moral Evaluation of Terrorism," is meant to signal, among other things, a certain apprehension I feel about addressing this subject in the aftermath of September 11. I can imagine some in the audience becoming impatient with what they are about to hear, impatient, that is, with philosophical reflection on t...

Mechanistic Distinctions

The notion of autocatalysis actually covers a large variety of mechanistic realisations of chemical systems. From the most general definition of autocatalysis, that is a process in which a chemical compound is able to catalyze its own formation, several different systems can be described. We detail the different categories of autocatalyses, and compare them on the basis of their mechanistic, ki...