Damian Cox

• Bond University

The gamer’s dilemma, initially proposed by Luck (Ethics and Information Technology 11(1):31–36, 2009) posits a moral comparison between in-game acts of murder and in-game acts of paedophilia within single-player videogames. Despite each activity lacking the obvious harms of their real-world equivalents, common intuitions suggest an important differ...

In attempting to debunk moral realism through an appeal to evolutionary facts, debunkers face a series of problems, which we label the problems of scope, corrosiveness, and post‐hoc justification. To overcome these problems, debunkers must assume certain metaphysical or epistemological positions, or otherwise pre‐establish them. In doing so, they m...

The first season of the Netflix series Mindhunter (2017) poses a question: what does it take to understand the mind of a serial killer? The season explores contrasting forms of understanding: practical understanding, as represented by the character of Bill Tench; categorical and causal knowledge, as represented by the character of Wendy Carr. A thi...

This book investigates the interrelations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics in a variety of visual media forms ranging across art installations, film and television, interactive documentaries, painting, photography, social media and videogames. An international mix of emerging and established authors, with interdisciplinary expertise, explor...

This paper contrasts two forms of violence depicted in film: entertainment violence and moral violence. To a first approximation, moral violence is a form of interpersonal aggression aimed at causing moral injury. We claim that what distinguishes entertainment violence from moral violence is that entertainment violence is a satisfying or fitting ob...

Intercultural Mirrors: Dynamic Reconstruction of Identity contains (auto)ethno-graphic chapters and research-based explorations that uncover the ways our intercultural experiences influence our process of self-discovery and self-construction. The idea of intercultural mirrors is applied throughout all chapters as an instrument of analysis, an heuri...

Competition and contest underpin academic life in many ways, not all of them constructive or valuable. In this paper I make a start on the task of distinguishing valuable academic competition from its opposite and suggest reforms of academic institutions that would diminish the prevalence of destructive competition and approach more nearly the egal...

While some may argue that universities are in a state of crisis, others claim that we are living in a post-university era; a time after universities. If there was a battle for the survival of the institution it is over and done with. The buildings still stand. Students enrol and may attend lectures, though most do not. But virtually nothing real re...

Posthumanist film and television is both a vehicle for reflection on discrimination and prejudice and a means of gratifying in fantasy deeply imbedded human impulses towards prejudice. Discrimination lies at the heart of posthuman narratives whenever the posthuman coalesces around an identifiable group in conflict with humans. We first introduce th...

These music articles were commissioned by an editorial board as part of our former online-only review article series. We are offering them here as a freely available collection.

In this paper, I develop a solution to the puzzle of mirror perception: why do mirrors appear to reverse the image of an object along a left/right axis and not around other axes, such as the top/bottom axis? I set out the different forms the puzzle takes and argue that one form of it - arguably the key form - has not been satisfactorily solved. I o...

Extract: Hilary Putnam has advanced an argument against metaphysical realism which takes its cue from a phenomenon he calls “conceptual relativity”. The argument is both simple and perplexing. My first aim in this paper is to understand the argument. My second aim is to show that it does not work. © Copyright Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1997.

Extract Conventional wisdom has it that epistemic conceptions of truth are versions of antirealism. I have argued that conventional wisdom is right. Uncompromisingly antirealist epistemic theories – those tying truth to presently available warrant – entail uncompromisingly antirealist conceptions of reality. One may compromise one’s antirealist the...

Without Abstract

This paper defends an argument from interpretation against the possibility of massive error. The argument shares many important features with Donald Davidson's famous argument, but also key differences. I defend the argument against claims that it begs the question against scepticism and that it leaves the sceptic with an obvious means of escape.

Extract: Integrity is the virtue par excellence of the professional politician. It is the virtue a politician is apt to hold most precious; a virtue they are likely to defend above all others. To cast doubt upon the courage, foresight, knowledge, wisdom, compassion or good-sense of a contemporary politician is one thing, to cast doubt upon their in...

Without Abstract

In "A Refutation of Environmental Ethics" Janna Thompson argues that by assigning intrinsic value to nonhuman elements of nature either our evaluations become (1) arbitrary, and therefore unjustified, or (2) impractical, or (3) justified and practical, but only by reflecting human interest, thus failing to be truly intrinsic to nonhuman nature. The...

This paper argues that theories of truth which seek to specify the ontological ground of true statements by appealing to an ontology of truth-makers face a severe and possibly insurmountable obstacle in the form of logically complex statements. I argue that there is no apparent way to develop an account of logically complex truth within the confine...