A paedophile is a person with a sexual attraction to children; some paedophiles commit child sex abuse offences. For such acts, they hold moral and legal responsibility, which presupposes that paedophiles are moral agents who can distinguish right from wrong and are capable of self-control. Like any other moral agents, paedophiles have moral duties. Some moral duties are universal, e.g., the duty not to steal. Whether there are any specific moral duties related to paedophilia is the topic of this paper.
The idea that all or nearly all human beings have equal moral status has been a mainstay of modern moral and political thinking. It is widely held that the idea is a shared normative premise of otherwise very different theories such as utilitarianism, egalitarianism and libertarianism, and that it plays a foundational justificatory role in all of them. At the same time, it is also widely understood that as yet no satisfactory account has been given of how equal moral status can be reconciled with the observable disparities in the rational capacities that supposedly ground it.
Hume held the view that “efficacy, agency, power, force, energy, necessity, connexion, and productive quality, are […] nearly synonymous.” (Hume, Treatise, p. 157) The notion of production has been equated with or has been analysed in terms of necessity ever since.
The Department of Philosophy is pleased to announce the successful defense of the PhD Dissertation by Holger Thiel on The Special Phenomenal Composition Question
Supervisor: Howard Robinson Members of the Defense Committee: Barry Dainton (University of Liverpool) Philip Goff (CEU) Chair: Simon Rippon
A warm welcome to our new students, and a warm welcome-back to our continuing students, as the academic year 2017-18 is starting. Zero-week begins on Monday, September 11, and teaching a week later, on September 18. Their schedules can be found here. Other important dates are listed on the department’s Academic Calendar.
I distinguish between 'substantival' and 'functional' forms of vitalism in the eighteenth century. Substantival vitalism presupposes the existence of a (substantive) vital force which either plays a causal role in the natural world as studied scientifically, or remains an immaterial, extra-causal entity. Functional vitalism tends to operate 'post facto', from the existence of living bodies to the search for explanatory models that will account for their uniquely 'vital' properties better than fully mechanistic models can.
ABSTRACT: This paper is concerned with a central strand of P.F. Strawson's effort to show that scepticism about moral responsibility is impossible. Strawson's argument is complex but one crucial aspect is the claim that, given our human nature, we are naturally and inescapably committed to reactive attitudes. I argue that although there are significant features of this argument that are seriously flawed, Strawson presents an interesting challenge to the sceptic - one that demands more careful consideration.
The puzzles surrounding consciousness are some of the deepest in contemporary science and philosophy. How on earth do electro-chemical processes in brains give rise to feelings, sensations and experiences? Not only do we not have an explanation of this, there is no consensus on how to go about looking for one.
Michael Tye has recently argued that when a subject is conscious of an entity, she knows that entity, even if she does not know any truth about it, that is, she knows the entity by acquaintance. For example, if I am conscious of a particular shade of red, I know that shade of red, that is, I am acquainted with it, even if I do not know any truths about that phenomenal quality. He argues that consciousness is epistemically enabling, and that the best explanation of this fact is by appeal to his notion of knowledge by acquaintance.
