695 research outputs found
Rethinking Greed
In this paper I attempt to clarify the nature of the vice of greed, focusing on what can be called “modest greed”. Agents who are modestly greedy do not long for material goods or wealth with intense desires. Rather, they have quite modest desires, but ones whose satisfaction they pursue excessively relative to other goods. Greed - including modest greed - emerges as a particularly troubling and problematic vice
On Complacency
This paper begins by drawing attention to inadequacies in common characterizations of the vice of complacency. An alternative account is presented that avoids these flaws. The distinctive nature of complacency is then clarified by contrasting it with related vices, including apathy, resignation, akrasia, excessive pride, and hypocrisy
Autonomy, agency, and the value of enduring beliefs
My central thesis is that philosophers considering questions of epistemic value ought to devote greater attention to the enduring nature of beliefs. I begin by arguing that a commonly drawn analogy between beliefs and actions is flawed in important respects, and that a better, more fruitful analogue for belief would be desire, or a similarly enduring state of an agent. With this in hand, I argue that treating beliefs as enduring, constitutive states of agents allows us to capture the importance of accessible, justified, and true beliefs to sustaining personal identity, autonomy, self-control, and authenticity. We thus arrive at a significant value to such beliefs through their crucial role in our personal, practical identities
In Defense of the Primacy of the Virtues
In this paper I respond to a set of basic objections often raised against those virtue theories in ethics which maintain that moral properties such rightness and goodness (and their corresponding concepts) are to be explained and understood in terms of the virtues or the virtuous. The objections all rest on a strongly-held intuition that the virtues (and the virtuous) simply must be derivative in some way from either right actions or good states of affairs. My goal is to articulate several distinct, though related, objections grounded in this intuition, and to argue that virtue ethicists have ample resources to respond to these worries. The explanatory primacy of the virtuous over the right or the good emerges as a distinct and viable position
Electron Electric Dipole Moment induced by Octet-Colored Scalars
An appended sector of two octet-colored scalars, each an electroweak doublet,
is an interesting extension of the simple two Higgs doublet model motivated by
the minimal flavor violation. Their rich CP violating interaction gives rise to
a sizable electron electric dipole moment, besides the quark electric dipole
moment via the two-loop contribution of Barr-Zee mechanism.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure
SO(10) SUSY GUT for Fermion Masses : Lepton Flavor and CP Violation
We discuss the results of a global analysis of a simple SO(10) SUSY
GUT with family symmetry and low energy R parity. The model describes
fermion mass matrices with 14 parameters and gives excellent fits to 20
observable masses and mixing angles in both quark and lepton sectors, giving 6
predictions. Bi-large neutrino mixing is obtained with hierarchical quark and
lepton Yukawa matrices; thus avoiding the possibility of large lepton flavor
violation. The model naturally predicts small 1-3 neutrino mixing, with . In this paper we evaluate the predictions for
the lepton flavor violating processes, , and and also the electric dipole moment of the
electron, , muon and tau, assuming universal squark and slepton masses,
, and a universal soft SUSY breaking A parameter, , at the GUT
scale. We find is naturally below present bounds, but
may be observable by MEG. Similarly, is below present bounds; but is
within the range of future experiments. We also give predictions for the light
Higgs mass (using FeynHiggs). We find an upper bound given by
GeV, with an estimated GeV theoretical uncertainty. Finally we present
predictions for SUSY particle masses in the favored region of parameter space.Comment: 25 pages, 18 figures, several typos in captions of tables 2 and 3
corrected, acknowledgments adde
The Minimal Model for Dark Matter and Unification
Gauge coupling unification and the success of TeV-scale weakly interacting
dark matter are usually taken as evidence of low energy supersymmetry (SUSY).
However, if we assume that the tuning of the higgs can be explained in some
unnatural way, from environmental considerations for example, SUSY is no longer
a necessary component of any Beyond the Standard Model theory. In this paper we
study the minimal model with a dark matter candidate and gauge coupling
unification. This consists of the SM plus fermions with the quantum numbers of
SUSY higgsinos, and a singlet. It predicts thermal dark matter with a mass that
can range from 100 GeV to around 2 TeV and generically gives rise to an
electric dipole moment that is just beyond current experimental limits, with a
large portion of its allowed parameter space accessible to next generation EDM
and direct detection experiments. We study precision unification in this model
by embedding it in a 5-D orbifold GUT where certain large threshold corrections
are calculable, achieving gauge coupling and b-tau unification, and predicting
a rate of proton decay just beyond current limits.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures. v2: Minor typos and Reference errors corrected.
Modified explanation of the KK mode contribution to runnin
- …