Indirectly Free Actions, Libertarianism, and Resultant Moral Luck

Martin Luther affirms his theological position by saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Supposing that Luther’s claim is true, he lacks alternative possibilities at the moment of choice. Even so, many libertarians have the intuition that he is morally responsible for his action. One way to make sense of this intuition is to assert that Luther’s action is indirectly free, because his action inherits its freedom and moral responsibility from earlier actions when he had alternative possibilities and those earlier directly free actions formed him into the kind of person who must refrain from recanting. Surprisingly, libertarians have not developed a full account of indirectly free actions. I provide a more developed account. First, I explain the metaphysical nature of indirectly free actions such as Luther’s. Second, I examine the kind of metaphysical and epistemic connections that must occur between past directly free actions and the indirectly free action. Third, I argue that an attractive way to understand the kind of derivative moral responsibility at issue involves affirming the existence of resultant moral luck

Darwin Rocks Hegel: Does Nature Have A History?

In the popular press and the halls of politics, controversies over evolution are increasingly strident these days. Hegel is relevant in this connection, even though he rejected the theories of evolution he knew about, because he wanted rational understanding but without claims to intelligent design. He is reported to have said that nature has no history, but a closer examination will show that his ideaqs are more nuanced and that there is more room for darwinian ideas than one might expect, though not enough to allow the full Darwinian contingency of form

Constructing grassroots innovations for sustainability

One of the cleavages within sustainable development is division between grassroots environmental action, often deemed good on participation terms, and green innovation, usually centred on technologies in firms and deemed good for ecological modernisation. This special section is dedicated to an obvious and missing connection: grassroots innovation for sustainability. Grassroots innovations typically involve networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development; solutions that respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved (Seyfang and Smith, 2007). What they share is commitment on the part of those involved towards openness and inclusion in the processes of innovation and the outputs of innovation. Research is still needed that considers whether and how grassroots innovators network with one another; the extent to which movements for grassroots innovation approaches exist and how they operate; whether and how innovations diffuse through processes of replication, scaling-up, and translation into institutions; and whether or not these developments constitute alternative pathways for sustainability. The empirical contributions in this special section consider the dilemmas of going to scale, the challenges of moving from innovation to institutionalisation, and the risks of capture and instrumentality when grassroots innovations encounter more powerful political economies of conventional innovation systems (see also Smith et al., 2013). A recurring theme is diversity in innovation for sustainability; which might be served best by resisting pressures to mainstream, yet simultaneously generates accusations of marginality. In highlighting these themes and introducing the special section, we use a particular example, the Brighton Earthship, and which all contributing authors visited as part of a research workshop on grassroots innovation held at Sussex University in May 2012 and that led to the papers here

A new navigation paradigm for virtual reality: the guided visit through a virtual world

The three main navigation paradigms for virtual worlds, i.e., free navigation, automatic tours, and multiuser navigation show important limitations when dealing with guided visits that involve interactive cooperation among several users in 3D virtual worlds over the Internet. In this paper, we present our research into this issue and some important results. We propose a new navigation paradigm denominated guided visit through a virtual world, where the capacity of a user guiding several remote users through the virtual world is enriched with the capacity to dynamically interchange the role of guiding between the connected users. The user that acts as a guide moves freely through the virtual world, and his/her movements are reproduced by the browsers of the other guided users. We also present the architecture and the system we developed that implements this paradigm, as well as its integration in a working realworld application that demonstrates its use

Conceivability and Possibility

Some people might be tempted by modal ontological arguments from the possibility that God exists to the conclusion that God in fact exists. They might also be tempted to support the claim that possibly God exists by appealing to the conceivability of God’s existence. In this chapter, I introduce three constraints on an adequate theory of philosophical conceivability. I then consider and develop both imagination-based accounts of conceivability and conceptual coherence-based accounts of conceivability. Finally, I return to the modal ontological argument and consider whether the premise that possibly God exists can be supported by some conceiving

The Need for Governmental Inefficiency in Plato’s Republic

In book II of Plato’s Republic, Socrates discusses the cities of necessity and luxury (372d-373a). Discussions of these cities have often focused on citizens desiring more than they need, which creates a demand for luxury. Yet the second part of the equation, which is not usually recognized, is that there must be sufficient supply to meet this demand. The focus of this article is on the importance of supply in the discussion of the first two cities in book II of the Republic. This article argues that the way Plato models the cities makes it the case that a surplus above levels of necessity will be generated from time to time. That the unwanted surplus cannot be spontaneously disposed of entails that the first two cities are institutionally incomplete. A government is needed in order to coordinate the disposal of the surplus supply the city will produce

Optimising processes of IT organisation through software products’ configuration management

The present paper is focused on the efficiency of processes within IT firms which design software products, by finding optimum management solutions for these types of activities. In order to achieve this, we focus on software products configuration management, with specific objectives in documenting and ensuring visibility to the product’s configuration and of the stage of achieving its physical and functional characteristics. Through configuration management, technical and administrative rules are established and applied for designing, developing, producing and supporting the elements of the product’s configuration, in each stage of its lifecycle. The conclusions of this research are focused on evaluating economic effects obtained by implementing the quality management system, according to the ISO 9001:2000 quality standard, while developing software products, at the level of IT firm.configuration management, quality management, product lifecycle, software quality