8,370 research outputs found
Reasons, reflection, and repugnance
In this chapter we draw comparisons between Kass’ views on the normative authority
of repugnance and social intuitionist accounts of moral judgement which are similarly
sceptical about the role of reasoned reflection in moral judgement. We survey the empirical claims made in support of giving moral primacy to intuitions generated by emotions such as repugnance, as well as some common objections. We then examine accounts which integrate intuition and reflection, and argue that plausible accounts of wisdom are in tension with Kass’ claim that our inarticulable emotional responses can be the expression of deep wisdom. We conclude that while repugnance and other emotions have a role to play in informing deliberation and judgement, we have reason to be cautious in giving them normative authority. Affective responses alone cannot discharge the burden of justification for moral judgement and are just one tool relied upon by those we consider wise
Geophysical aspects of very long baseline neutrino experiments
Several proposed experiments will send beams of neutrinos through the Earth
along paths with a source-receiver distance of hundreds or thousands of
kilometers. Knowledge of the physical properties of the medium traversed by
these beams, in particular the density, will be necessary in order to properly
interpret the experimental data. Present geophysical knowledge allows the
average density along a path with a length of several thousand km to be
estimated with an accuracy of about per cent. Physicists planning
neutrino beam experiments should decide whether or not this level of
uncertainty is acceptable. If greater accuracy is required, intensive
geophysical research on the Earth structure along the beam path should be
conducted as part of the preparatory work on the experiments.Comment: 8 pages, uses elsart.cls. Talk given at 3rd International Workshop on
Neutrino Factory based on Muon Storage Rings (NuFACT'01), Tsukuba, Japan,
24-30 May 200
Incompressible Even Denominator Fractional Quantum Hall States in the Zeroth Landau Level of Monolayer Graphene
Incompressible even denominator fractional quantum Hall states at fillings
and have been recently observed
in monolayer graphene. We use a Chern-Simons description of multi-component
fractional quantum Hall states in graphene to investigate the properties of
these states and suggest variational wavefunctions that may describe them. We
find that the experimentally observed even denominator fractions and standard
odd fractions (such as , etc.) can be accommodated within the
same flux attachment scheme and argue that they may arise from sublattice or
chiral symmetry breaking orders (such as charge-density-wave and
antiferromagnetism) of composite Dirac fermions, a phenomenon unifying integer
and fractional quantum Hall physics for relativistic fermions. We also discuss
possible experimental probes that can narrow down the candidate broken symmetry
phases for the fractional quantum Hall states in the zeroth Landau level of
monolayer graphene.Comment: 5 page
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