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The six themes: \begin{itemize} \item Mind---What good is your perceptual awareness of the objects around you? \item Thought \& Language---What’s special about having two names for one thing? \item Politics---Are you responsible for the harm of world poverty? \item Metaphysics---What is necessary for your personal survival? \item Action---Of the events involving you, what determines which are your actions? \item Ethics---Who, if anyone, has the right to determine whether you should die? \end{itemize}

topic	question
Mind	What good is your perceptual awareness of the objects around you?
Thought & Language	What’s special about having two names for one thing?
Politics	Are you responsible for the harm of world poverty?
Metaphysics	What is necessary for your personal survival?
Action	Of the events involving you, what determines which are your actions?
Ethics	Who, if anyone, has the right to determine whether you should die?

What are the functions of perceptual awareness?

There are different forms of consciousness. For example we sometimes contrast being conscious with being comatose. That’s not the sort of consciousness I’m concerned with. Instead I want to focus on perceptual consciousness of objects. When I talk about consciousness, I mean the sort of consciousness that is often involved when you see an apple’s shape and location. This is perceptual consciousness of objects.

What are the functions of feathers?

heat regulation

display

flight

‘If psychologists can really identify something that deserves to be called perception without awareness,
they must have an operational grasp on not only
what it takes to perceive something,
but on
what it takes to be conscious of it.
If this is really so, philosophers have something to learn from them [...] about what consciousness [...] does’

\citep[p.~148]{Dretske:2006fv}

Dretske, 2006 p. 148

topic	question
Mind	What good is your perceptual awareness of the objects around you?
Thought & Language	What’s special about having two names for one thing?
Politics	Are you responsible for the harm of world poverty?
Metaphysics	What is necessary for your personal survival?
Action	Of the events involving you, what determines which are your actions?
Ethics	Who, if anyone, has the right to determine whether you should die?

topic	question
Mind	What good is your perceptual awareness of the objects around you?
Thought & Language	What’s special about having two names for one thing?
Politics	Are you responsible for the harm of world poverty?
Metaphysics	What is necessary for your personal survival?
Action	Of the events involving you, what determines which are your actions?
Ethics	Who, if anyone, has the right to determine whether you should die?

Nationality is ethically irrelevant. So what?

Nationality is ethically irrelevant. What follows?

Caplan & Weinersmith, 2019 p. 13

In this book, Caplan & Weinersmith are arguing that it’s in citizens of rich countries interests to have open borders. This is just fairly simple economics. (Albeit revealling, for it shows citizens of rich world countries’ in-group loyalty, their desire to keep ‘us’ and ‘them’ separate, trumps their greed.)

But here is a more philosophically interesting part of their argument. Immigration laws are discriminatory in a way that is immoral unless you believe nationality is ethically relevant.

I would have taken this issue as a topic, but it seems to me so simple and obvious that it can be delt with in a single page. In fact there are only 50 words on this page. And personally, I find that excessive. It could probably be written in 25 words.

Aside: Bear this in mind when I give you 500 word assignments.

Singer: positive ethical duties (to aid)

Peter Singer argues that

Pogge: negative ethical duties (not to harm)

By contrast, Thomas Pogge is arguing that citizens of rich countries have a moral obligation to

‘The usual moral debates concern the stringency of our moral duties to help the poor abroad. Most of us believe that these duties are rather feeble, meaning that it isn’t very wrong of us to give no help at all. Against this popular view, some (Peter Singer, Henry Shue, Peter Unger) have argued that our positive duties are quite stringent and quite demanding; and others (such as Liam Murphy) have defended an intermediate view according to which our positive duties, insofar as they are quite stringent, are not very demanding. Leaving this whole debate to one side, I focus on what it ignores: our moral duties not to harm. We do, of course, have positive duties to rescue people from life-threatening poverty. But it can be misleading to focus on them when more stringent negative duties are also in play: duties not to expose people to life-threatening poverty and duties to shield them from harms for which we would be actively responsible’ \citep[p.~5]{pogge:2005_world}.

‘The common assumption [...] is that reducing severe poverty abroad at the expense of our own affluence would be generous on our part, not something we owe, and that our failure to do this is thus at most a lack of generosity that does not make us morally responsible for the continued deprivation of the poor’

\citep[p.~2]{pogge:2005_world}

Pogge, 2005 p. 2

topic	question
Mind	What good is your perceptual awareness of the objects around you?
Thought & Language	What’s special about having two names for one thing?
Politics	Are you responsible for the harm of world poverty?
Metaphysics	What is necessary for your personal survival?
Action	Of the events involving you, what determines which are your actions?
Ethics	Who, if anyone, has the right to determine whether you should die?

scene from altered carbon where couple gets daughter back in old body

Relevant because one is a familiar person in an unfamiliar body; the other is an unfamiliar person in a familiar body (Ortega’s boyfriend’s).

Introduce the task for the seminars ...

first seminar task

(due Friday of this week or Monday of week 2)

yyrama + tablua

feedback

Do the lecture themes match the seminars?

topic	question
Mind	What good is your perceptual awareness of the objects around you?
Thought & Language	What’s special about having two names for one thing?
Politics	Are you responsible for the harm of world poverty?
Metaphysics	What is necessary for your personal survival?
Action	Of the events involving you, what determines which are your actions?
Ethics	Who, if anyone, has the right to determine whether you should die?

topic	question
Mind	What good is your perceptual awareness of the objects around you?
Thought & Language	What’s special about having two names for one thing?
Politics	Are you responsible for the harm of world poverty?
Metaphysics	What is necessary for your personal survival?
Action	Of the events involving you, what determines which are your actions?
Ethics	Who, if anyone, has the right to determine whether you should die?

‘there is a presumption in favor of deferring to a person’s judgment on the subject of [her] own good’

Therefore:

‘a person has the right to make [her] own life shorter in order to make it better’

Velleman, 1999 p. 607

Will consider another argument

‘A Kant-inspired variant on this latter position has been advanced by Velleman (1999). He considers that a person’s well-being can only matter if she is of intrinsic value and so that it is impermissible to violate a person’s rational nature (the source of her intrinsic value) for the sake of her well-being. Accordingly, he holds that it is impermissible to assist someone to die who judges that she would be better off dead and competently requests assistance with dying. The only exception is when a person’s life is so degraded as to call into question her rational nature, albeit he thinks it unlikely that anyone in that position will remain competent to request assistance with dying. This position appears to be at odds with the well-established right of a competent patient to refuse life-prolonging medical treatment, at least when further treatment is refused because she considers that her life no longer has value for her and further treatment will not restore its value to her’ \citep{young:2019_voluntary}.

topic	question
Mind	What good is your perceptual awareness of the objects around you?
Thought & Language	What’s special about having two names for one thing?
Politics	Are you responsible for the harm of world poverty?
Metaphysics	What is necessary for your personal survival?
Action	Of the events involving you, what determines which are your actions?
Ethics	Who, if anyone, has the right to determine whether you should die?

Weekly exercises (yyrama) due Fridays or Mondays

first one due this week (or Monday next week)

3x in-term assessments

topic	question
Mind	What good is your perceptual awareness of the objects around you?
Thought & Language	What’s special about having two names for one thing?
Politics	Are you responsible for the harm of world poverty?
Metaphysics	What is necessary for your personal survival?
Action	Of the events involving you, what determines which are your actions?
Ethics	Who, if anyone, has the right to determine whether you should die?

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