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People pursue the environmental rewards that come with proximity to water despite associated flood risks. Governments are complicit in this exposure to flood hazards and prevailing institutional arrangements support it, begging the question of why all these actors keep making decisions that serve to reproduce risk in a society that should know better. This paper seeks to address the question by broadening the ontology of social reproduction. It draws on three disparate “imaginaries” of risk—the production of risk, risk and the social contract, and risk at the intersection of capital and rule—to make conceptual links between the production of nature, capitalist production, and social reproduction. This approach is then applied to a study of flood risk on Toronto Island, Canada. Investigating how residents there interact with environmental amenities and acute flood hazards, and how those institutionally-supported interactions are shaped by the Indigenous, environmental, and recent histories of the island, calls for a broadened social reproduction theory to hold together the general and the particular in the contingent geographies of risk. It reveals that flood risk is socially reproduced by processes working in concert to facilitate powerful groups of people in their pursuit of environmental rewards while marginalizing others, exclude some groups of people from the social contract, and situate risk as an organizing point around which lopsided bets are made within the capitalist political economy.

A dialectical conception of justification helps conciliationists about peer disagreement establish the symmetry considerations on which their account is premised. On this conception, appeals to personal or hidden forms of evidence fail to provide a symmetry breaker that would allow one to dismiss a conflicting peer opinion. Furthermore, the act of citing the same evidence repetitively tends to illegitimately beg the question against the peer, no matter how accurate one’s own overall assessment of this evidence. However, the dialectical conception of justification does not automatically vindicate conciliationism. In many of the most interesting cases of peer disagreement there are vast bodies of dialectically sharable evidence that can ultimately provide enough non-question-begging epistemic resources to settle the dispute, even if appealing to those resources violates the independence requirement—a further premise of conciliationism. Absent modifications to the independence requirement, it would therefore be premature to embrace conciliationism.

§13 of Principia Ethica contains G. E. Moore’s most famous open question arguments (OQAs). Several of Moore’s contemporaries defended various forms of metaethical nonnaturalism—a doctrine Moore himself endorsed—by appeal to OQAs. Some contemporary cognitivists embrace the force of Moore’s OQAs against metaethical naturalism. And those who posit noncognitivist meaning components of ethical terms have traditionally used OQAs to fuel their own emotivist, prescriptivist, and expressivist metaethical programs. Despite this influence, Moore’s OQAs have been ridiculed in recent decades. Their deployment has been labeled “accident prone,” “simple to dismiss,” and just plain invalid. Critics accuse Moore of begging the question. Others argue that his OQAs founder upon the paradox of analysis. And still others argue that Moore’s open question argumentation is incompatible with the Kripke–Putnam causal theory of reference and thus it “simply fails; it is bankrupt”. I aim to show that there is something of continuing value in Moore’s open question efforts. I present and criticize Nicholas Sturgeon’s influential interpretation of Moore’s OQAs as a means to motivate and explicate my own interpretation of Moore’s thoughts in §13 of Principia Ethica. I then articulate the role that OQAs are intended to play in Moore’s overall argumentative strategies to undermine metaethical naturalism and thereby provide some theoretical support for metaethical nonnaturalism. Finally, I attend to the most prominent objections to Moore’s theorizing and attempt to evaluate the extent to which Moore’s efforts are successful. My hope is to display both the promising portions of Moore’s metaethical argumentation in Principia Ethica as well as its limitations.

What constitutes a solution to the problem of skepticism? It has been traditionally held that one must produce an argument that would rationally persuade skeptical philosophers that they are mistaken. But there is a trend in recent epistemology toward the idea that we can solve the problem without giving skeptics any good reason to change their minds. This is what I call unambitious epistemology. This paper is a critique of that project.

Given CEOs’ substantial equity portfolios, much recent literature on CEO incentives regards cash-based bonus plans as largely irrelevant, begging the question of why nearly all CEO compensation plans include such bonuses. We develop a new measure of bonus plan incentives and show that performance sensitivities are much greater than prior estimates. We also test hypotheses regarding the role of bonuses in providing executives with individualized and team incentives. We find little evidence supporting the individualized incentives hypotheses but find consistent evidence that bonus plans appear to be used to encourage mutual monitoring and to facilitate coordination across the top management team as a whole.

Expectations for online distance delivery of higher education courses and programmes are increasing globally, begging the question, ‘Does modality matter?’ Pedagogic research comparing online and f...

Pacific Islanders in diaspora are disproportionately contracting COVID‐19, experience hospitalization and develop complications In Utah, Pacific Islanders have the highest contraction rate in the state Pacific Islanders constitute only 2% of the state's population, but represent 4% of the those infected with COVID‐19, begging the question how we might explain the high rates of contraction? As community engaged scholars and practitioners, we offer discussion, insight, and commentary on the COVID‐19 pandemic affecting Pacific Islanders in Utah Grounding this discussion is a history of the Pacific Islander community as an essential workforce that dates back to the 1850s, before statehood We argue that historical discrimination against these early Pacific Islanders shaped the way this group is racialized as essential laborers today The authors offer this assertion along with practices and protocols that honour cultural norms of socialization, which we see is the pathway to provide safe measures that are relevant to the Utah Pasifika community

In contrast to Darwinian evolution, which is founded on the material competition between organisms, cellular epigenetic evolution focuses on cell-cell communication of data from one stage of life to another-developmentally, phylogenetically, as injury-repair - ultimately governed by the First Principles of Physiology. By merging ontogeny and phylogeny, since both are based on cell-cell communication mediated by soluble growth factors and their receptors, evolution complies as one holistic, unified process. As such, the material aspects of the organism can be seen as 'means' instead of 'ends', begging the question as to just what the 'ends' of evolution are ? Once the superficial material aspect of lifeforms is eliminated, only the flow of energy is left, within and between generations. Contemporary biology and physics are at a critical phase, unable to reduce their problems to practice. A paradigm shift to evolution as energy flow is proposed as the solution.

Most interpretations of Quantum Mechanics alternative to Copenhagen interpretation try to avoid the dualistic flavor of the latter. One of the basic goals of the former is to avoid the ad hoc introduction of observers and observations as an inevitable presupposition of physics. Non-Copenhagen interpretations usually trust in decoherence as a necessary mechanism to obtain a well-defined, observer-free transition from a unitary quantum description of the universe to classicality. Even though decoherence does not solve the problem of the definite outcomes, it helps to explain why we do not observe superpositions and, according to Zurek’s existential interpretation, why a specific preferred basis emerges through system–environment interactions. The aim of this paper is to show why such interpretation ends up begging the question and provides little progress in understanding the quantum-to-classical transition; the ultimate reason being that preferred bases always correlate to human observation. Benefitting from the technical discussion, some remarks will be offered in the last section regarding the role of classical observations as a necessary condition to make workable the formalism of Quantum Mechanics and scientific activity itself.

Novel assisted reproductive technologies (ART) are poised to present our society with strange new ethical questions, such as whether lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) couples should be allowed to produce children biologically related to both parents, or whether trans-women who want to experience childbirth should be allowed to receive uterine transplants. Clinicians opposed to offering such technologies to LGBT couples on moral grounds are likely to seek legal shelter through the conscience clauses enshrined in U.S. law. This paper begins by briefly discussing some novel ART on the horizon and noting that it is unclear whether current conscience clauses will permit fertility clinics to deny such services to LGBT individuals. A compromise approach to conscience is any view that sees the value of respecting conscience claims within limits. I describe and critique the constraints proposed in the recent work of Wicclair, NeJaime and Siegel as ultimately begging the question. My purpose is to strengthen their arguments by suggesting that in the controversial situations that elicit claims of conscience, bioethicists should engage with the metaphysical claims in play. I argue that conscience claims against LGBT individuals ought to be constrained because the underlying metaphysic-that God has decreed the LGBT lifestyle to be sinful-is highly implausible from the perspective of a naturalized metaphysic, which ought to be the lens through which we evaluate conscience claims.

I shall show that the main argument forms of Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason are Modus Tollens. I shall then argue that the main arguments of both books beg the question by addressing only one sub-argument in each, although it is still in controversy whether begging the question is a genuine fallacy.

La importancia de los valores epistémicos en la adopción ya sea de la postura realista o de la anti-realista (o empirista) en el ámbito de la filosofía de la ciencia se ilustra con tres debates. Los debates en cuestión son: i) aquel sobre si debemos buscar explicar o no la extraordinariamente baja entropía del universo temprano, ii) el debate sobre si las regularidades nómicas empíricas requieren o no de explicación vía leyes de la naturaleza y iii) el debate entre Clarke y Leibniz sobre la naturaleza del espacio físico. En estos debates los realistas en general priorizan la búsqueda de explicaciones causales y por ende buscan minimizar el número de hechos brutos, mientras que los anti realistas priorizan minimizar el número de entidades científicas inobservables; en tanto que este desacuerdo parece ser irresoluble sin recurrir a la petición de principio, o a la estipulación en favor de una o la otra de estas metas, entonces isostenia, es decir los argumentos en favor de ambas posturas parecen estar equilibrados, parecen ser igualmente convincentes y de esto se sigue la consecuente suspensión del juicio sobre cuál de estas posturas es la objetivamente correcta, así como un voluntarismo epistémico con relación a cuál de estas posturas adoptar.

Among contemporary philosophers, there is widespread (but not universal) consensus that begging the question is a grave argumentative flaw. However, there is presently no satisfactory analysis of what this flaw consists of. Here, I defend a notion of question-begging in terms of analyticity. In particular, I argue that an argument begs the question just in case its conclusion is an analytic part of the conjunction of its premises.

Dialetheism is the view that some true sentences have a true negation as well. Defending dialetheism, Graham Priest argues that the correct account of negation should allow for true contradictions (sentences of the form $$\alpha $$ and $$\lnot \alpha $$ ) without entailing triviality. A negation doing precisely that is said to have ‘surplus content’. Now, to defend that the correct account of negation does have surplus content, Priest advances arguments to hold that classical Boolean negation (which rules out surplus content) does not even make sense without begging the question against the dialetheist. We shall argue that Priest’s arguments may be turned upon themselves, and that he may also be accused of begging the question against the classical logician. We then advance an argument to the effect that Priest’s account of negation falls short of satisfying his own desiderata on a correct account of a negation: a theory of negation that attempts to represent contradictions cannot coherently allow surplus content, and vice-versa, a negation allowing for surplus content bans contradiction.

ACCOUNTS OF MORAL responsibility come in two main flavors. There are accounts that hold that an agent is responsible for something (an act, omission, attitude, and so on) just in case that agent has--directly or indirectly--chosen that thing, and there are accounts that hold that an agent is responsible for something just in case that thing is appropriately attributable to her. Each kind of account explains many cases well, and each captures a great many of our pretheoretical intuitions about responsibility; each also yields, occasionally, somewhat counterintuitive results. Call these accounts volitionist and attributionist accounts of moral responsibility. Attributionism has a number of distinguished and able defenders. However, I shall argue, it is wrong: Volitionism is superior, because it alone can accommodate the relatively stringent epistemic conditions that any adequate theory of moral responsibility must recognize, and it alone can accommodate the intuitively powerful distinction between bad agents and blameworthy agents. Before outlining the contending accounts of moral responsibility, let me say a few words about what they are accounts of. In order to avoid the twin risks of begging the question against either account or simply talking past one another, we need a shared notion of moral responsibility. A fully adequate definition must await the development of a complete theory of moral responsibility, but the following condition upon such a theory will serve to guide our quest: To say that an agent is morally responsible (for an act, omission or attitude) is to say that the Strawsonian reactive attitudes are justified in relation to her with regard to that act, omission or attitude (Strawson 1962). That is, it is appropriate for observers to have certain attitudes in relation to her and her act, especially the attitudes, partly cognitive and partly constituted by emotion, of praise and blame. (1) It is a further question whether it would be appropriate to punish or reward the agent for her act, or even whether it would be appropriate to express the judgment. It may be that the expression of the reactive attitudes is justified under stronger, or merely different, conditions than those under which it is appropriate merely to have them, and it is with the latter that we are here exclusively concerned. (2) Attributionist and Volitionist Accounts of Moral Responsibility In a well-known paper, Gary Watson (2004b) distinguishes what he calls the two faces of responsibility. The first, which he calls the aretaic or attributability aspect of responsibility, is intimately linked to a self-disclosure view of moral responsibility. Someone is responsible, in this sense, if her action is expressive of who she is and where she stands on questions of value. The second face of responsibility Watson calls the accountability aspect. Watson argues that someone is accountable for an action if sanctions (or benefits; from now I shall concentrate on the negative case) are fairly applied to them as a consequence of it. We have defined moral responsibility in such manner as to exclude the question of the appropriateness of sanctions. That issue aside, Watson's distinction seems to map neatly onto the distinction between responsibility as understood by attributionism and responsibility as understood by volitionism. Whereas an act is attributable to an agent if it is expressive of who she is, agents are accountable for actions only if they had a reasonable opportunity directly or indirectly to avoid infringing the standards for the violation of which they are held responsible (Watson, 2004b: 276). Agents are able directly to avoid such an infringement if they are able to conform their acts to the relevant standard; they are able indirectly to avoid infringement if they were able to avoid being held to that standard at all. Thus, agents can be responsible for their failed actions in the absence of a capacity to conform to the relevant standard just in case they could have avoided the requirement in the first place--for instance, someone who accepts the role of a doctor, knowing what kinds of skills are required to occupy it competently, is not excused responsibility for harming her patients on the grounds that she lacked the skill to do better, so long as she had the opportunity to avoid accepting the role. …

A popular critique of the kalām cosmological argument is that one argument for its second premise (what I call the Impossible Formation Argument, IFA) illicitly assumes a finite starting point for the series of past temporal events, thereby begging the question against opponents. Rejecting this assumption, opponents say, eliminates any objections to the possibility that the past is infinitely old and undermines the IFA’s ability to support premise 2. I contend that the plausibility of this objection depends on ambiguities in extant formulations of the IFA and that we may resolve these ambiguities in a way that does not presuppose a finite staring point. I also argue that this disambiguation allows us to construct an argument demonstrating that the concept of an infinite past entails a contradiction.

Direct selling (DS) is simultaneously a business model, a channel of distribution, and an activity engaged in by its distributors. In this paper, we provide a framework for analyzing and discuss academic research on the DS distribution model. We focus in particular on research that develops economics-based analytic models to examine business and legal issues. This focus is motivated by the fact that analytic models are sometimes used as part of the assessment of whether a DS firm operates a legitimate DS channel or an illegal pyramid scheme. These models potentially have a significant economic impact on, and affect the outcomes of legal cases against, the affected DS firms. They may also be cited in the business press and in academic circles, influencing opinions of the viability or legality of the DS business and distribution model. It is therefore particularly important that such research be carefully grounded in sound logical and analytic bases, and that it appropriately reflect whatever key facts about the firm (or about DS in general) are relevant to the model’s scope of analysis. We first describe direct selling as an economic activity and business model. We contrast illegal pyramid schemes with legitimate DS firms and outline the key definition of an illegal pyramid scheme. This definition is distinguished from the many possible indicia of pyramid schemes that can result from pyramid scheme operation, but do not themselves prove the existence of a pyramid scheme. We next define and discuss various logical and analytic errors that can lead to the mis-diagnosis of a legitimate DS firm as an illegal pyramid scheme operator. While many such error types are possible, we focus on four that we find to be particularly important in evaluating the analytic literature on DS and pyramid schemes: • The “Begging the Question” fallacy, in which the research in effect presumes the existence of a pyramid scheme through its (implicit and/or explicit) assumptions, and as an unsurprising result, concludes the existence of a pyramid scheme; • A variant on the “Begging the Question” fallacy in which the research effectively models a pyramid scheme through its omission and/or misrepresentation of substantive facts on which the determination of legality versus illegality depends; • The “Fallacy of the Converse,” in which the converse of a true if-then logical statement is incorrectly asserted to be true on the grounds that the original if-then statement is true. For example, even if the statement {if a firm operates a pyramid scheme, then one can expect to see some or all of a set of resulting indicia at some point in time} is reasonably true, it is not automatically true that the converse statement {if one observes a set of pyramid scheme indicia at some point in time, then the firm must be operating a pyramid scheme} is also true; and • A special case on the “Fallacy of the Converse,” in which the research ignores standard policies and protections that characterize legitimate DS firms, and therefore starts with an inaccurate premise that these policies and protections do not exist. All of these modeling errors are substantive. This means that correcting any of these errors overturns the model’s results. Such a model is thus not a reliable tool to assess whether a DS firm does, or does not, operate a pyramid scheme. We apply this framework to the analysis of a recent working paper, “The Alchemy of a Pyramid: Transmutating Business Opportunity Into a Negative Sum Wealth Transfer” by Andrew Stivers, Douglas Smith, and Ginger Zhe Jin (“SSJ”). We find that this research begs the question, omits and/or misrepresents substantive DS firm facts, and commits a fallacy of the converse by omitting consideration of standard DS firm policies that mitigate a pyramid scheme analysis. Specifically, SSJ “begs the question” of whether or not a DS firm operates an illegal pyramid scheme by explicitly assuming a pyramid scheme in its list of “stylized assumptions” – which duplicate the conditions for a pyramid scheme defined in the Koscot case. Thus, the authors cannot deliver on their research goal of answering the question “What makes an MLM firm a pyramid?”, because they have already assumed the pyramid scheme outcome from the beginning. Further, SSJ commits another “begging the question” error in explicitly assuming that the firm in its model commits fraud by purposefully misrepresenting the business opportunity to its prospects and distributors. Because a pyramid scheme cannot persist through time without such fraud, the authors again essentially presume a pyramid scheme outcome. These first two critiques fully invalidate the SSJ research, whose authors state that its goal is to answer the question: “What makes an MLM firm a pyramid?” One cannot achieve this research goal by assuming a pyramid scheme as the basis for a model that then produces the inevitable result that a pyramid scheme exists. Nevertheless, other errors further weaken the SSJ analysis. Many substantive facts about DS firms – which are important to the resolution of the model’s claimed purpose – are omitted or misrepresented. Among them are: • Its omission of any income sources to a distributor other than bonus awarded for mere recruitment without regard to sales (such as retail markup income or the economic benefit of personal consumption at wholesale prices); • Its misrepresentation of the basis on which bonus/commission income is awarded by DS firms, by assuming they are only awarded for pure recruitment; • Its omission of products that have market value to consumers; • Its omission of consideration of distributor differences on substantive dimensions that matter for the research question at hand; • Its omission of active choices by distributors concerning what to sell, how hard to work, how to price products for retail sale, how much to invest in training, whether or not to seek to recruit other distributors, or how much to personally consume; • Its misrepresentation of the DS firm’s objective as the maximization of one-period profit, with no consideration of the legal implications of the fraud it implies; and • Its omission of consideration of standard consumer and distributor protections offered by legitimate DS firms. • We discuss other substantive and technical problems with the SSJ model in Appendix B. The SSJ paper concludes with a set of recommendations to control pyramid scheme threats. Because of the shortcomings we find in the model and analysis, we find that any such recommendations similarly rest on shaky foundations and are unreliable as cures for the question at hand. We use our framework to offer an analysis of a subset of other economics-based analytic modeling papers in the DS area in Appendix A. We emphasize that our goal is not to argue that all such analyses are flawed. Indeed, economics-based analytic models are productively used in many applications and should continue to be applied to analyze firms’ operations, participants’ decisions, profitability, and growth. We hope that assessment of these efforts will be aided by applying guidelines for reliable and applicable scientific inquiry into various aspects of the DS distribution model.

I use mechanized verification to examine several first- and higher-order formalizations of Anselm’s Ontological Argument against the charge of begging the question. I propose three different but related criteria for a premise to beg the question in fully formal proofs and find that one or another applies to all the formalizations examined. I also show that all these formalizations entail variants that are vacuous, in the sense that they apply no interpretation to “than which there is no greater” and are therefore vulnerable to Gaunilo’s refutation.

Issues of sexual abuse, predation and rape have received an increased degree of attention over the last decade and as a result have overshadowed similarly offensive crimes. Various highly publicized cases of sexual violence against women and children have gripped both the United States and the United Kingdom and have resulted in the implementation of sexual violence laws. Media coverage of an ‘epidemic’ of sexual violence has led some to question whether the frenzy surrounding these publicized cases has created a “fear factor” among parents and caregivers, begging the question as to whether the incidence of sexual violence has increased or whether the heightened sensitivity is a result of increased media reporting. This article examines approximately 12 years of aggregate sexual abuse prevalence data (crimes reported to the police) in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and compared prevalence change points and sexual offense law implementation. The article then examines the possible theory of whether Sarah’s Law could potentially to be a result of increased fear or a moral panic. Findings indicate sex crime rates were declining prior to the law’s implementation, lending cautious support to the proposition that the genesis of Sarah’s Law may have been due to fear, rather than actual increases in sexual crimes.

The article distinguishes between subjectivist and objectivist interpretations of scientific method, links subjectivism with good reasons, and argues its uselessness for our understanding of science. It applies the distinction to the method of falsification, explains why objectivism regards falsification to be conjectural, immune to the Duhem–Quine thesis, and immune to the problem of underdetermination. It confronts the falsifying mode of inference with the fallacy of begging the question and with the paradox of inference, and suggests how modus tollens helps scientists to find out that a tested theory is false, in spite of the fact that the falsity of the theory is asserted in its premises.