Does autonomous moral reasoning favor consequentialism?

This paper addresses an important issue that has been commonly debated in moral psychology, namely the normative and metaethical implications of our differing intuitive responses to morally indistinguishable dilemmas. The prominent example of the asymmetry in our responses is that people often intuitively accept pulling a switch and deny pushing as a morally permissible way of sacrificing an innocent person to save more innocent people. Joshua Greene traces our negative responses to actions involving “up close and personal” harm back to our evolutionary past and argues that this undermines the normative power of deontological judgments. I reject Greene’s argument by arguing that our theoretical moral intuitions, as opposed to concrete and mid-level ones, are independent of direct evolutionary influence because they are the product of autonomous (gene-independent) moral reasoning. I then explain how both consequentialist and deontological theoretical intuitions, which enable us to make important moral distinctions and grasp objective moral facts, are produced by the exercise of autonomous moral reasoning and the process of cultural evolution. My conclusion will be that Greene is not justified in his claim that deontology is normatively inferior to consequentialism.

¿A quién pertenece la naturaleza? Sintiencia, ética ambiental e intervención en la naturaleza

¿A quién pertenece la naturaleza? La pregunta podría ser menos importante que la cuestión de la reducción del sufrimiento en ella. Da igual si la naturaleza no pertenece a nadie (o nos pertenece a todos) o si pertenece solo a algunos, dado que en ambos casos debería haber limitaciones ligadas con el bienestar animal a lo que debemos hacer en la naturaleza. Los seres con capacidad de sentir tienen intereses que debemos considerar al diseñar políticas medioambientales. Como ni los ecosistemas ni las plantas poseen intereses, conservar la naturaleza es menos importante que reducir el sufrimiento en ella. La cuestión moralmente importante, entonces, consiste en saber qué sucede a los animales sintientes en la naturaleza, diseñando políticas para reducir sus sufrimientos. Esto significa que tenemos la obligación moral de intervenir en la naturaleza con el fin de reducir los sufrimientos que los animales padecen en ella, por lo que políticas medioambientales de conservación de la naturaleza como las defendidas por los ecologistas son moralmente inaceptables.

Future pain as present concern

Pain is multidimensional, complex; it affects the ontological structures of the human being and exceeds spatio-temporal boundaries. Therefore, it is universally felt with an impact in the past, moving to the present, and projecting to the future. There are efforts to ease or completely eliminate the impact of pain, however, a good understanding of its biological and anthropological dimensions is necessary for proper orientation of such undertakings. This article identifies some social, cultural, medical-scientific, and individual factors that account for the changes in modes of experiencing and managing pain. It posits that there is a general unpreparedness on the physical, psychological, and spiritual levels for continued pain in the future. It thus analyses factors that need to be learnt in order to promote favourable alterations in mental attitudes, pain sensitivity, and tolerance to pain. Preparing for a future of pain requires interdisciplinary reflection on the bodily, emotional, and spiritual components that constitute the pain experience so as to re-direct its trajectory.

¿Es la bioética una ciencia?

Este artículo se cuestiona si la bioética normativa puede ser una ciencia. El artículo se propone abordar las condiciones de posibilidad para que la bioética sea considerada una ciencia, sin responder directamente la pregunta. El artículo se centra en dos condiciones que típicamente asociamos a nuestro concepto común de ciencia: verdad y conocimiento, por un lado, y naturalización, por el otro. La bioética tendría que ser capaz de darnos verdades morales y, por lo tanto, conocimiento moral para que pudiéramos hablar de ella como una ciencia. Por otro lado, el carácter normativo de la bioética motiva la pregunta de si es posible naturalizarla y hacerla compatible con una perspectiva científica. El artículo argumenta que para que la bioética normativa pudiera considerarse una ciencia, debería tomarse una postura cognoscitivista y naturalista en ética.

¿Es posible una ontología procesual de las entidades bioquímicas? Consideraciones a partir del caso de los receptores celulares y la señalización celular

Las macromoléculas biológicas, consideradas como los ítems del dominio bioquímico, son típicamente concebidas bajo la categoría ontológica de individuos sustanciales. En este trabajo argumentaré que el marco filosófico de la ontología procesual, según el cual el mundo viviente no está poblado de individuos sino de una jerarquía dinámica de procesos, resulta más adecuado para dar cuenta de la estructura y funcionamiento de las macromoléculas. En particular, analizaré su aplicación al fenómeno de la señalización celular y a uno de sus conceptos claves, los receptores celulares. Los conocimientos actuales en bioquímica permiten concebir los receptores como entidades procesuales y dinámicas, estabilizadas relacionalmente y no separadas del fenómeno bioquímico del que forman parte.

Can there be an input from philosophical debates on a better use of nature? Towards an improvement of nature rights in environmental economics

This contribution will deal with granting rights to nature. We will define nature rights as a social process of creating institutions which are linked to philosophical discourses on nature perceptions. The idea is to use different narratives in order to understand how nature rights have and can be accomplished/derived by humans. Then we will give hints for future directions of right detection embedded in eco-systems. We will specifically focus on right derivation needed for contracting with nature. We take beaver, wolf and black tern as examples and generalize on case specific findings. All of them need habitats and landscapes in which they can live. The mes­sage is that landscapes and habitats are part of nature rights and that they must be also addressed, not only nature rights for individual species. Additionally, we will use different strains of thought to get hints on practical nature rights establishment.

Deleuze’s reading of the Critique of Pure Reason

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason such as it appears in his 1963 monographic work La Philosophie critique de Kant. We will show that the originality of Deleuze’s reading lies in reading the critical project in retrospect, taking the sensus communis problem from the Critique of the Power of Judgment and applying it to the first Critique. In so doing, he points out the survival of a pre-established harmony, now interiorized, both between heterogeneous faculties and between the matter of phenomena and the Ideas of reason. This implies a reinterpretation of the critical project that has passed unnoticed within Kantian studies and that places the Third Critique as the ground of the previous ones, unveiling common sense as a condition of possibility of knowledge.

The Sonderkommando photographs: a possibility for reconciled commemoration of a sublime historical event

In this paper I consider the four images from Auschwitz analyzed by Didi-Huberman in Images in spite of all —the so-called Sonderkommando photographs— through the lens of the “historical sublime” as proposed by historian Eelco Runia. From this standpoint, these photographs are taken as an example of a possible reconciled aesthetic experience with an “unimaginable” past that horrifies us. Moreover, I argue that aesthetic depictions are able to champion a model of historical commemoration which makes these events imaginable again. In order to show this, I will first employ the concept of the “sublime historical event” which Runia proposes to interpret the Holocaust’s historical catastrophe. Runia’s “historical sublime” provides a framework to understand the process of becoming what “we are no longer” through the invention of new identities that defy our former ones and explain historical discontinuities. Secondly, I will proceed to a reading of the Sonderkommando photographs by applying Runia’s notion of commemoration to the viewer’s aesthetic experience of these images. Moreover, I will finally suggest the possibility of a reconciliation with our former identities, those who committed sublime historical acts with which we no longer identify, thanks to this aestheticized experience of commemoration.

Feeling the past: beyond causal content

Memories often come with a feeling of pastness. The events we remember strike us as having occurred in our past. What accounts for this feeling of pastness? In his recent book, Memory: A self-referential account, Jordi Fernández argues that the feeling of pastness cannot be grounded in an explicit representation of the pastness of the remembered event. Instead, he argues that the feeling of pastness is grounded in the self-referential causal content of memory. In this paper, I argue that this account falls short. The representation of causal origin does not by itself ground a feeling of pastness. Instead, I argue that we can salvage the temporal localization account of the feeling of pastness by describing a form of egocentric temporal representation that avoids Fernández’s criticisms.

Memory and perception, insights at the interface: editors’ introduction

The recent development of specialized research fields in philosophy of memory and philosophy of perception invites a dialogue about the relationship between these mental capacities. Following a brief review of some of the key issues that can be raised at the interface of memory and perception, this introduction provides an overview of the contributions to the special issue, and outlines possible directions for further research.