In the last two decades, there have been numerous calls for a culturally sensitive bioethics. At the same time, bioethicists have become increasingly involved in empirical research, which is a sign of dissatisfaction with the analytic methods of traditional bioethics. In this article, I will argue that although these developments have broadened and enriched the field of bioethics, they can easi...

Here is a simple and inviting picture: the semantic values of sentences, relative to contexts, are sets of possible worlds. These are the truth conditions of assertions of those sentences in contexts. They are thus the contents of assertions, or the objects of attitudes we might take towards such contents. There have been many questions raised about the simple picture. For instance, sets of wor...

Many scholars and activists favor banning illicit businesses, especially given that such businesses constitute a large part of the global economy. But these businesses are commonly operated as if they are subject only to the ethical norms their management chooses to recognize, and as a result they sometimes harm innocent people. This can happen in part because there are no effective legal const...

A recent article pointed out that `̀ past research has paid relatively little attention to the sources of individuals’ moral philosophies from either a conceptual or an empirical standpoint’’ and investigated the determinants of idealism and relativism among American marketers. A literature review indicates that there is even less theoretical and empirical crosscultural investigation of moral ph...

Thesis (1) appears in two papers published in 1963.1 Theses (2) and (3) appear in later works under the joint rubric of internal realism.2 Putnam has not explained how the semantic theses that constitute internal realism fit together with his earlier, reliabilist conception of scientific inquiry. Nor have his followers. Barrels of philosophical ink have been spilled on (3) in complete isolation...