One major line of attack against probabilistic approaches to the philosophy of science has been to argue that certain results of theirs are in conflict with intuitive notions of confirmation. Thus for example, some have suggested not only that the Hempelian raven paradox1 counts against standard, preprobabilistic notions of scientific confirmation but also that it demonstrates a problem with approaches based on confirmation theory: since P(nonblack object being a nonraven|all ravens are black) is 1, it follows from Bayes’s theorem that the observation of a nonblack nonraven constitutes evidence that all ravens are black.2 Those who find the raven paradox persuasive, and who retain their intuition that such an observation does not even slightly confirm the black raven thesis, ought to find this a compelling argument against Bayesianism, for the probabilistic account contradicts the ostensible commonsense intuition. Others see this as a strength of Bayesianism— that Bayesianism accepts the otherwise plausible equivalence condition3 yet also accounts for the fact that we do not hold such observations to significantly confirm the black raven thesis. The reason for this is that the probability of a nonblack object being a nonraven given that not all ravens are black is trivially close to 1, even though it is not 1. This means that the observation— a nonblack nonraven— is to be expected with a high degree of probability regardless of whether all ravens are black. So the increase in the epistemic probability of the black raven thesis is negligible.
{"title":"Defeating Objections to Bayesianism by Adopting a Proximal Facts Approach","authors":"Calum Miller","doi":"10.5840/QD20188210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20188210","url":null,"abstract":"One major line of attack against probabilistic approaches to the philosophy of science has been to argue that certain results of theirs are in conflict with intuitive notions of confirmation. Thus for example, some have suggested not only that the Hempelian raven paradox1 counts against standard, preprobabilistic notions of scientific confirmation but also that it demonstrates a problem with approaches based on confirmation theory: since P(nonblack object being a nonraven|all ravens are black) is 1, it follows from Bayes’s theorem that the observation of a nonblack nonraven constitutes evidence that all ravens are black.2 Those who find the raven paradox persuasive, and who retain their intuition that such an observation does not even slightly confirm the black raven thesis, ought to find this a compelling argument against Bayesianism, for the probabilistic account contradicts the ostensible commonsense intuition. Others see this as a strength of Bayesianism— that Bayesianism accepts the otherwise plausible equivalence condition3 yet also accounts for the fact that we do not hold such observations to significantly confirm the black raven thesis. The reason for this is that the probability of a nonblack object being a nonraven given that not all ravens are black is trivially close to 1, even though it is not 1. This means that the observation— a nonblack nonraven— is to be expected with a high degree of probability regardless of whether all ravens are black. So the increase in the epistemic probability of the black raven thesis is negligible.","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86931528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Genuine democracy . . . can come into being and develop only on the basis of the equality of all its members. Before the demands of morality we are all absolutely equal. An alliance between democracy and ethical relativism would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible. Indeed, “if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.” St. John Paul the Great, Veritatis Splendor
{"title":"Two Cheers for Democracy from St. John Paul the Great: Rhonheimer, Kraynak, and the Unfinished Agenda of Dignitatis Humanae","authors":"Gregory R. Beabout, Daniel Carter","doi":"10.5840/QD20189116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20189116","url":null,"abstract":"Genuine democracy . . . can come into being and develop only on the basis of the equality of all its members. Before the demands of morality we are all absolutely equal. An alliance between democracy and ethical relativism would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible. Indeed, “if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.” St. John Paul the Great, Veritatis Splendor","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76235933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
At the end of Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II underscores that his purpose in writing the encyclical is to evaluate “certain trends in moral theology today” that reject transcultural Christian moral norms.1 In contrast with these trends, the pontiff reaffirms the continued validity of absolute moral norms— specifically, norms that proscribe Christian persons from performing the kinds of acts that are judged to involve intrinsic moral evil.2 The pontiff ’s concern is occasioned by contemporary ethical theories that interpret traditional moral commandments not in an absolute or immutable manner but rather as precepts that are “always relative and open to exceptions.”3 The doctrine proscribing intrinsic moral evils had been a matter of significant academic debate during the postconciliar milieu leading up to John Paul II’s promulgation of the encyclical. Moral theologian James Keenan explains that this controversy was between moral “revisionists and neomanualists.”4 He describes Veritatis Splendor itself as a preeminent expression of the latter approach to moral reflection.5
{"title":"Transcultural Moral Truth in Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio: Resources for Discerning Revisionist Concerns","authors":"Matthew R. McWhorter","doi":"10.5840/QD20189114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20189114","url":null,"abstract":"At the end of Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II underscores that his purpose in writing the encyclical is to evaluate “certain trends in moral theology today” that reject transcultural Christian moral norms.1 In contrast with these trends, the pontiff reaffirms the continued validity of absolute moral norms— specifically, norms that proscribe Christian persons from performing the kinds of acts that are judged to involve intrinsic moral evil.2 The pontiff ’s concern is occasioned by contemporary ethical theories that interpret traditional moral commandments not in an absolute or immutable manner but rather as precepts that are “always relative and open to exceptions.”3 The doctrine proscribing intrinsic moral evils had been a matter of significant academic debate during the postconciliar milieu leading up to John Paul II’s promulgation of the encyclical. Moral theologian James Keenan explains that this controversy was between moral “revisionists and neomanualists.”4 He describes Veritatis Splendor itself as a preeminent expression of the latter approach to moral reflection.5","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85020648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intrinsically Evil Acts and the Relationship between Faith and Reason","authors":"J. Seifert","doi":"10.5840/QD20189117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20189117","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80810058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
It is sometimes difficult to nail down exactly what Distributism is (or entails) as a social and political theory. Nonetheless, it is widely accepted that Distributism is an attempt to develop and apply the Catholic Social Teaching (CST) that began evolving seriously in the nineteenth century through the teaching of Leo XIII and his successors. For instance, in his book Toward a Truly Free Market, John Médaille summarizes his Distributist understanding of the principles of government: “Against the clash of special interests, we assert ‘The Principle of The Common Good’; against the centralizing tendency, we assert ‘The Principle of Subsidiarity’; against the tendency to favor the rich and powerful, we assert ‘The Principle of Solidarity’ ” (ch. 13).1 It seems clear that these three principles— the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity— must be central to the philosophical foundations of any developed Distributist theory.2 Though they are all deeply interrelated and cannot be properly understood apart from one another, in this article, I want to focus on subsidiarity in particular. Without discounting the others, I think subsidiarity is of particular philosophical interest, not least because it has taken on a life of its own in political theorizing outside of Catholic teaching— for instance, in the debates about the structure of the European Union. Even so, to properly understand subsidiarity requires seeing how it developed in the context of CST, which is its true home.3
{"title":"The Philosophical Foundations of Distributism: Catholic Social Teaching and the Principle of Subsidiarity","authors":"M. Lu","doi":"10.5840/QD20178110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20178110","url":null,"abstract":"It is sometimes difficult to nail down exactly what Distributism is (or entails) as a social and political theory. Nonetheless, it is widely accepted that Distributism is an attempt to develop and apply the Catholic Social Teaching (CST) that began evolving seriously in the nineteenth century through the teaching of Leo XIII and his successors. For instance, in his book Toward a Truly Free Market, John Médaille summarizes his Distributist understanding of the principles of government: “Against the clash of special interests, we assert ‘The Principle of The Common Good’; against the centralizing tendency, we assert ‘The Principle of Subsidiarity’; against the tendency to favor the rich and powerful, we assert ‘The Principle of Solidarity’ ” (ch. 13).1 It seems clear that these three principles— the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity— must be central to the philosophical foundations of any developed Distributist theory.2 Though they are all deeply interrelated and cannot be properly understood apart from one another, in this article, I want to focus on subsidiarity in particular. Without discounting the others, I think subsidiarity is of particular philosophical interest, not least because it has taken on a life of its own in political theorizing outside of Catholic teaching— for instance, in the debates about the structure of the European Union. Even so, to properly understand subsidiarity requires seeing how it developed in the context of CST, which is its true home.3","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82850080","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Distributism is the rather awkward name given to a program of political economy formulated chiefly by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. . . . Both Catholics, they sought to turn the social teaching of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI into a concrete program of action. They rejected socialism, believing that private property was an essential component of human flourishing, but they also rejected the existing capitalist system as concentrating private property in far too few hands.1
{"title":"Four Moral Grounds for the Wide Distribution of Capital Endowment Goods","authors":"John J. Davenport","doi":"10.5840/QD20178111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20178111","url":null,"abstract":"Distributism is the rather awkward name given to a program of political economy formulated chiefly by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. . . . Both Catholics, they sought to turn the social teaching of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI into a concrete program of action. They rejected socialism, believing that private property was an essential component of human flourishing, but they also rejected the existing capitalist system as concentrating private property in far too few hands.1","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75889741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There’s not a vast philosophical literature on Distributism. My question in this piece is prompted by an online discussion, not a philosophical journal.1 I trust, however, that the question is sufficiently interesting in its own right to sustain a philosophical essay. Moreover, it’s a question that has been with us for a long time— I suppose for as long as Distributism has been with us (as a matter of explicit doctrine rather than lived experience).2 So let’s get to it. First things first: Is Distributism agrarianism? This question has a simple answer: no. The two are not the same thing, even if Distributism is agrarian. There could be an agrarian communist or an agrarian capitalist society. So what is agrarianism? Let me suggest the following: an agrarian society is one in which agriculture and its practitioners have a determinative influence on society. Agrarianism, then, is the notion that society ought to be agrarian. You can combine this notion with additional motivation— typically, an agrarian will suggest something like this: “Agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society.”3 (Why else would you think a society ought to be agrarian?) But you don’t need to, and for my purposes, that’s not involved in agrarianism, properly speaking. Agrarianism does not suggest that everyone ought to be a farmer (or otherwise engaged in agricultural pursuits). It doesn’t set an arbitrary lower
{"title":"Is Distributism Agrarian?","authors":"P. Toner","doi":"10.5840/QD20178114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20178114","url":null,"abstract":"There’s not a vast philosophical literature on Distributism. My question in this piece is prompted by an online discussion, not a philosophical journal.1 I trust, however, that the question is sufficiently interesting in its own right to sustain a philosophical essay. Moreover, it’s a question that has been with us for a long time— I suppose for as long as Distributism has been with us (as a matter of explicit doctrine rather than lived experience).2 So let’s get to it. First things first: Is Distributism agrarianism? This question has a simple answer: no. The two are not the same thing, even if Distributism is agrarian. There could be an agrarian communist or an agrarian capitalist society. So what is agrarianism? Let me suggest the following: an agrarian society is one in which agriculture and its practitioners have a determinative influence on society. Agrarianism, then, is the notion that society ought to be agrarian. You can combine this notion with additional motivation— typically, an agrarian will suggest something like this: “Agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society.”3 (Why else would you think a society ought to be agrarian?) But you don’t need to, and for my purposes, that’s not involved in agrarianism, properly speaking. Agrarianism does not suggest that everyone ought to be a farmer (or otherwise engaged in agricultural pursuits). It doesn’t set an arbitrary lower","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73538432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Distributism and natural law thought seem like they should be natural allies: the early architects of distributism, Chesterton and Belloc, must to some extent have been influenced by Aquinas— Chesterton, of course, wrote a book about St Thomas.1 And so must have been the architects of the Catholic Church’s Social Teaching (CST), as it was developed in and from Rerum Novarum. I suspect most distributists would say that distributism is an application of the natural law as well as CST. But certainly not every natural law thinker would identify as a distributist, including those deeply shaped by the Thomistic strand of natural law. Moreover, in the work of contemporary natural law theorists such as John Finnis and Germain Grisez, distributism is not mentioned even in passing, and the indexes of Natural Law and Natural Rights, and Grisez’s threevolume Way of the Lord Jesus Christ contain not a single reference to distributism, to Chesterton, or to Belloc. In consequence, I think it is worth exploring the relationship between natural law theory (including, and perhaps especially, “new” natural law theory) and distributism, understood in a very broad way, as encompassing not just Chesterton and Belloc and those directly influenced by them but also agrarians, localists, and conservatives— Burkean and Kirkian— where these seem to overlap with distributism. I’ll proceed in the following way: I’ll identify a cluster of ideas I take to be important to distributism and allied forms of thought and then I’ll say something about how natural law theory addresses these ideas, or could, or should address them and, occasionally, how such treatment does or might diverge from characteristically distributist treatment. Here are the ideas I take to be centrally important: (1) private property, (2) localism, (3) agrarianism, (4) the family, (5) an antipathy toward war (at least modern war), and (6) beauty and the imagination. Numbers five and six are perhaps a little more peripheral but nevertheless interesting. In what follows, I’ll try to identify some characteristic claims made by distributists about these ideas and, in each case, then address them from the natural law standpoint. As will be clear, I have varying degrees of sympathy with the claims I’ll discuss.
{"title":"Distributism and Natural Law","authors":"C. Tollefsen","doi":"10.5840/QD20178115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20178115","url":null,"abstract":"Distributism and natural law thought seem like they should be natural allies: the early architects of distributism, Chesterton and Belloc, must to some extent have been influenced by Aquinas— Chesterton, of course, wrote a book about St Thomas.1 And so must have been the architects of the Catholic Church’s Social Teaching (CST), as it was developed in and from Rerum Novarum. I suspect most distributists would say that distributism is an application of the natural law as well as CST. But certainly not every natural law thinker would identify as a distributist, including those deeply shaped by the Thomistic strand of natural law. Moreover, in the work of contemporary natural law theorists such as John Finnis and Germain Grisez, distributism is not mentioned even in passing, and the indexes of Natural Law and Natural Rights, and Grisez’s threevolume Way of the Lord Jesus Christ contain not a single reference to distributism, to Chesterton, or to Belloc. In consequence, I think it is worth exploring the relationship between natural law theory (including, and perhaps especially, “new” natural law theory) and distributism, understood in a very broad way, as encompassing not just Chesterton and Belloc and those directly influenced by them but also agrarians, localists, and conservatives— Burkean and Kirkian— where these seem to overlap with distributism. I’ll proceed in the following way: I’ll identify a cluster of ideas I take to be important to distributism and allied forms of thought and then I’ll say something about how natural law theory addresses these ideas, or could, or should address them and, occasionally, how such treatment does or might diverge from characteristically distributist treatment. Here are the ideas I take to be centrally important: (1) private property, (2) localism, (3) agrarianism, (4) the family, (5) an antipathy toward war (at least modern war), and (6) beauty and the imagination. Numbers five and six are perhaps a little more peripheral but nevertheless interesting. In what follows, I’ll try to identify some characteristic claims made by distributists about these ideas and, in each case, then address them from the natural law standpoint. As will be clear, I have varying degrees of sympathy with the claims I’ll discuss.","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82513798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This conflict is between the unnatural progeny of inventive genius and men. It is a war to the death between technology and the ordinary functions of living. The rights to these human functions are the natural rights of man, and they are threatened now, in the twentieth, not in the eighteenth, century for the first time. Unless man asserts and defends them he is doomed, to use a chemical analogy, to hop about like sodium on water, burning up his own energy. But since a power machine is ultimately dependent on human control, the issue presents an awful spectacle: men, run mad by their inventions, supplanting themselves with inanimate objects. This is, to follow the matter to its conclusion, a moral and spiritual suicide, foretelling an actual physical destruction.1
{"title":"Technology as a Threat to Ordinary Human Life in Households Today","authors":"J. Cuddeback","doi":"10.5840/QD20178113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20178113","url":null,"abstract":"This conflict is between the unnatural progeny of inventive genius and men. It is a war to the death between technology and the ordinary functions of living. The rights to these human functions are the natural rights of man, and they are threatened now, in the twentieth, not in the eighteenth, century for the first time. Unless man asserts and defends them he is doomed, to use a chemical analogy, to hop about like sodium on water, burning up his own energy. But since a power machine is ultimately dependent on human control, the issue presents an awful spectacle: men, run mad by their inventions, supplanting themselves with inanimate objects. This is, to follow the matter to its conclusion, a moral and spiritual suicide, foretelling an actual physical destruction.1","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72782634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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