This article focuses on the moral assumptions underpinning the notion of social responsibility implied in the above slogan. It critically examines arguments which derive obligations to meet needs from shared moral agency and from social relations of reciprocity. Obligations to contribute according to ability are established by a series of arguments which justify regarding undeserved natural abilities and socially produced abilities as common assets, and which demonstrate that under certain conditions the maxim ‘ought implies can’ is reversible as ‘can implies (...) ought’. The problem of motivation and voluntary action is tackled by arguing that there are intrinsic and extrinsic incentives to contribute unconnected with special rewards and that moral incentives replace material incentives to produce.The notion of responsibility is an essential concept for social life, but since its justification and adoption depends on an inclusive moral community with overlapping ends and purposes, it is not surprising that the duty to contribute is absent from liberal theory, and had no positive connotations in liberal society. Politicians of every hue are increasingly appealing to the responsibilities citizens are expected to fulfil; yet they fail to account for the conditions for their development and exercise. For this reason, the assumptions expressed in the socialist slogan are an important corrective to liberal perspectives. (shrink)

Conceptions of desert and responsibility have had a powerful influence in justifying economic inequality. Currently, they are being reaffirmed in policies advocated by the centre left in Britain. In contrast, luck egalitarianism, one of the dominant theoretical positions in contemporary political philosophy, puts equality at the top of the agenda and notoriously undermines traditional notions of desert and rejects the conception of personal responsibility on which traditional ideas rely. Although luck egalitarians are sceptical about desert and redefine responsibility to reduce (...) its role in arguments for just distribution, they nevertheless retain a commitment to holding people responsible for the distributive consequences of what they freely choose to do. They attempt to demonstrate that equality can be reconciled with responsibility. I will argue that luck egalitarians have not gone far enough in eliminating desert and responsibility from the armoury of social justice, and that their own arguments should have led them to do so. My aim in this article is to push the ideas implicit in luck egalitarian's arguments to their logical conclusion. I argue that for practical and conceptual reasons, they should have formulated their theories as though hard determinism is true, or nearly true, even if it is not. Denying the pertinence of judgements of desert and responsibility to questions of distributive justice removes an obstacle to egalitarian aims by suggesting a more egalitarian distribution than one that is hostage to voluntary choice. It could be accepted that luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the concept of personal responsibility without accepting the conclusion that considerations of responsibility should be abandoned. However, any plausible account of responsibility would demonstrate that existing inequalities are undeserved, and that these inequalities make a mockery of politicans current emphasis on personal responsibility. (shrink)

'A well argued and clearly written critique of liberal political theory, organized around its leading concepts -very accessible for student use.'.

Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judgments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interac- tion pattern in people’s judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particular factor is a cause, there should be an interaction between (a) the degree to which that factor violates a norm and (b) the degree to which another factor in the (...) situation violates norms. A study of moral norms (N = 1000) and norms of proper functioning (N = 3000) revealed robust evidence for the predicted interaction effect. The implications of these patterns for existing theories of causal judgments is discussed. (shrink)

Mereological principles are sometimes used to support general claims about the structure and arrangement of objects in the world. I focus initially on one such mereological principle, the weak supplementation principle (WSP). It is not obvious that (WSP) is prescribed by ordinary thinking about parthood. Further, (WSP) is not needed for a fairly strong formal characterization of the part–whole relation. For these reasons, some arguments relying on (WSP) might be countered by simply denying (WSP). I argue more generally that there (...) is no reason to assume that one core mereology functions as a common basis for all plausible metaphysical theories. (shrink)

I argue that Kotzee’s model of meta- debate succeeds in identifying illegitimate or fallacious charges of bias but has the unintended consequence of classifying some legitimate and non-fallacious charges as fallacious. This makes the model, in some important cases, counter-productive. In particular, cases where the call for a meta- debate is prompted by the participant with epistemic privilege and a charge of bias is denied by the participant with social advantage, the impasse will put the epistemically advantaged at far greater (...) risk. Therefore, I propose treating epistemic privilege as a variety of expert opinion specifically in cases where meta- debate participants come to an impasse in deliberation. My proposal exposes the problem of interpreting debate contexts as both adversarial and free from social power differentials. (shrink)

The medical profession and medical ethics currently place a greater emphasis on physician responsibility than patient responsibility. This imbalance is not due to accident or a mistake but, rather is motivated by strong moral reasons. As we debate the nature and extent of patient responsibility it is important to keep in mind the reasons for giving a relatively minimal role to patient responsibility in medical ethics. It is argued that the medical profession ought to be characterized by two moral asymmetries: (...) (1) Even if some degree of responsible behavior from patients is called for, placing the dominant emphasis on professional responsibility over patient responsibility is largely correct. The value of protecting the right to refuse treatment and arguments against paternalism block a more expansive account of patient responsibility and support a strong notion of professional responsibility. (2) Insofar as we do want to encourage an increase in patient responsibility, we have good reasons to emphasize prospective rather than retrospective notions of responsibility in clinical practice. Concerns about patient vulnerability along with the determined factors in disease leave little room for blame at the bedside. These two asymmetries generate normative limits on any positive account of patient responsibility. (shrink)

This research examines how the fit between employees moral development and the ethical work climate of their organization affects employee attitudes. Person-organization fit was assessed by matching individuals' level of cognitive moral development with the ethical climate of their organization. The influence of P-O fit on employee attitudes was assessed using a sample of 304 individuals from 73 organizations. In general, the findings support our predictions that fit between personal and organizational ethics is related to higher levels of commitment and (...) job satisfaction and lower levels of turnover intent. Ethical P-O fit was related to higher levels of affective commitment across all three ethical climate types. Job satisfaction was only associated with ethical P-O fit for one of the three P-O fit variables and turnover intentions were significantly associated with two of the ethical P-O fit variables. The most consistent effect was found for the Conventional - Caring fit variable, which was significantly related to all three attitudes assessed. The weakest effect was found for the Preconventional - Instrumental fit variable, which was only predictive of affective commitment. The pattern of findings and implications for practice and future research are discussed. (shrink)

This paper examines the bond between humans and dogs as demonstrated in the life and work of Emily Brontë . The nineteenth century author, publishing under the pseudonym, Ellis Bell, evinced, both in her personal and professional life, the complex range of emotions explicit in the human-dog bond: attachment and companionship to domination and abuse. In Wuthering Heights, Brontë portrays the dog as scapegoat, illustrating the dark side of the bond found in many cultures. Moreover, she writes with awareness of (...) connections - unknown in the nineteenth century - between animal abuse and domestic violence. In her personal life, Brontë's early power struggles with her companion animal mastiff, Keeper, evolve into a caring relationship. In a human-dog bond transformation that survives Brontë's death, Keeper, becomes both bridge and barrier to other human relationships. A dog may, and in this case Keeper does, take on a comprehensive role in which he both mourns his own loss and comforts others in their collective grief. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on three issues intertwined in current debates between endurantists and perdurantists—(i) the dimension of persisting objects, (ii) whether persisting objects have timeless, or only time-relative, parts, and (iii) whether persisting objects have proper temporal parts. I argue that one standard endurantist position on the first issue is compatible with standard perdurantist positions on parthood and temporal parts. I further argue that different accounts of persistence depend on the claims about objects' dimensions and not on the (...) auxiliary claims about parthood and temporal parts. (shrink)

In _Politics and Progress_, Muir aims to outline the political and social aims of liberalism and how it differs from conservatism and socialism as well as philosophising what a truly liberal society would look like. Originally published in 1923, this study details the political situation as it stood then, the past achievements of liberalism and what immediate problems society is facing that need to solved. This title will be of interest to students of politics.

In her 2007 book "Epistemic Injustice" Miranda Fricker argues that "the silent by products of residual prejudice in a liberal society" are often the most difficult biases to eradicate. In this essay, I provide several examples of the kind of residual prejudice Fricker describes. I then propose a principle of "intellectual empathy" (with four component elements) as a methodological remedy for eradicating this kind of bias in good critical thinking.

This article argues that traditional, regulative principles of research ethics offer insufficient guidance for research in the narrative study of lives. These principles presuppose an implicit epistemology that conceives of research participants as data sources, a conception that is argued not tenable for narrative research. The case is made by drawing on recent discussions of research ethics in the qualitative and narrative research literature. This article shows that narrative ethics is inextricably entwined with epistemological issues--namely, issues of narrative ownership and (...) the multiplicity of narrative meaning. Finally, practical recommendations are made for the ethical treatment of research participants in narrative research. The article concludes by situating our approach with respect to the broad range of contemporary perspectives on research ethics. (shrink)

According to the prevalent 'sum view' of stuffs, each portion of stuff is a mereological sum of its subportions. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the sum view in the light of a modal temporal mereology which distinguishes between different varieties of summation relations. While admitting David Barnett's recent counter-example to the sum view, we show that there is nonetheless an important sense in which all portions of stuff are sums of their subportions. We use our summation relations (...) to develop, as an alternative to the sum view, an analysis of stuffs that distinguisher between the ways in which different sorts of stuffs are sums of their subportions. (shrink)

Human life is operationally defined by the onset and cessation of organismal function. At postnatal stages of life, organismal integration critically and uniquely requires a functioning brain. In this article, a distinction is drawn between integrated and coordinated biologic activities. While communication between cells can provide a coordinated biologic response to specific signals, it does not support the integrated function that is characteristic of a living human being. Determining the loss of integrated function can be complicated by medical interventions that (...) uncouple elements of the natural biologic hierarchy underlying our intuitive understanding of death. Such medical interventions can allow living human beings who are no longer able to function in an integrated manner to be maintained in a living state. In contrast, medical intervention can also allow the cells and tissues of an individual who has died to be maintained in a living state. To distinguish between a living human being and living human cells, two criteria are proposed: either the persistence of any form of brain function or the persistence of autonomous integration of vital functions. Either of these criteria is sufficient to determine a human being is alive. (shrink)

Maureen Whitebrook argues that literature, through both its form and its content, can expose and criticize liberal theory and point beyond it to a new political theory. She describes how 'literary political criticism' might be done, and demonstrates such criticism in four essays that expose the connections between specific political and literary texts. Fiction, Whitebrook concludes, does a better job than liberal political theory of examining the relationship between the individual and the State.

It is often assumed that indeterminacy in mereological relations—in particular, indeterminacy in which collections of objects have fusions—leads immediately to indeterminacy in what objects there are in the world. This assumption is generally taken as a reason for rejecting mereological vagueness. The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between mereological vagueness and existential vagueness. I hope to show that the connection between the two forms of vagueness is not nearly so clear-cut as has been supposed.

Standard theories in mereotopology focus on relations of parthood and connection among spatial or spatio-temporal regions. Objects or processes which might be located in such regions are not normally directly treated in such theories. At best, they are simulated via appeal to distributions of attributes across the regions occupied or by functions from times to regions. The present paper offers a richer framework, in which it is possible to represent directly the relations between entities of various types at different levels, (...) including both objects and the regions they occupy. What results is a layered mereotopology, a theory which can handle multiple layers (analogous to the layers of a lasagna) of spatially or spatiotemporally coincident but mereologically non-overlapping entities. (shrink)

The paper by Magill and Neaves in this issue of the Journal attempts to rebut the "natural potency" position, based on recent advances in direct reprogramming of somatic cells to yield "induced pluripotent stem" (iPS) cells. As stated by the authors, the natural potency position holds that because "a human embryo directs its own integral organismic function from its beginning . . . there is a whole, albeit immature, and distinct human organism that is intrinsically valuable with the status of (...) inviolability and deserving full moral respect" (p. 26). The authors boldly assert that "The recent production of iPS . . . highlights a prima facie absurdity for the natural potentiality argument" (p. 29). Yet the argument against natural potency is both logically flawed and based on a characterization of the scientific evidence that is factually inaccurate. (shrink)

In this article the author explores the ways in which lesbian coparents divide household, child care, and paid labor to learn whether, and the degree to which, they adopt egalitarian work and family arrangements. Informed by a brief overview of U.S. gay liberation and family politics, and the theoretical and empirical work on the household division of labor by gender, this qualitative analysis of 34 Northern California families suggests that equitable practices—a pattern of equal sharing—among these lesbian coparents are the (...) norm. Less frequently, the Rozzie and Harriet pattern of primary breadwinner/primary caregiver emerges, apparently in relation to differences in parents' relative income and their desire to offer children a “sense of family.” The experience of this minority of couples reveals a division of labor that mimics modern heterosexual expectations and highlights the powerful negative effect of economic dependency on women who are full-time caregivers. (shrink)

In this article, we offer a perspective into howCanadian doctoral nursing students’ writing capacity is mentored and, as a result, we argue is disciplined. We do this by sharing our own disciplinary and interdisciplinary experiences of writing with, for and about nurses. We locate our experiences within a broader discourse that suggests doctoral (nursing) students be prepared as stewards of the (nursing) discipline. We draw attention to tensions and effects of writing within (nursing) disciplinary boundaries. We argue that traditional approaches (...) to developing nurses’ writing capacity in doctoral programs both shepherds and excludes emerging scholarly voices, and we present some examples to illustrate this dual role. We ask our nurse colleagues to consider for whom nurses write, offering an argument that nurses’ writing must ultimately improve patient care and thus would benefit from multiple voices in writing. (shrink)

The debate on whether insurance companies should be allowed to use results of individuals’ genetic tests for underwriting purposes has been both lively and increasingly relevant over the past two decades. Yet there appears to be no widely agreed upon resolution regarding appropriate and effective regulation. There exists today a gamut of recommendations and actual practices addressing this phenomenon ranging from laissez-faire to voluntary industry moratoria to strict legal prohibition. One obvious reason for such a variance in views and approaches (...) is that there are competing bases for evaluating the outcomes of restricting insurers’ use of such information. For example, an outright ban on the use of genetic test results may seem the best method for protecting against unfair discrimination, while allowing their use may seem to be the best way to foster efficiency in the market for insurance. However, there is also a lack of understanding about how restricting the use of genetic information would play out in the market through the so-called phenomenon of adverse selection. Using economic analysis, we discuss how the type of adverse selection that occurs in insurance markets affects various arguments both in favour and against an outright ban on insurers’ use of genetic tests for pricing insurance. We review arguments based on moral principles . Practical concerns from the insurance industry based on actuarial principles and economic efficiency are also compared. Each perspective is shown to lead to a range of conflicting recommendations about how genetic information should be regulated and these conclusions depend critically on whether one conducts the analysis from the ex ante temporal perspective , from the interim temporal perspective , or from the ex post temporal perspective. (shrink)

Detailed exploration of the Allegory of the Cave, utilizing notions from film studies, may provide us with insight regarding the identity of the puppet masters in Plato's allegory.

Globalization has the potential to create a network society where “there is a common cultural code of values that forms the glue of the network”. This article explores if common cultural codes of values are emerging in the public relations industry by examining the codes of ethics of 41 professional public relations associations across the world. The method for the analysis was Centering Resonance Analysis, a textual analysis methodology, that uses linguistics theory to assess main concepts, their influence, and their (...) interrelationships. The research team found that six dominant themes emerged from the codes of ethics of professional communication associations: professionalism, advocacy, moral standards, clients’ interests, expertise, and relationships. The findings suggest that global values that will influence organizational relationships with publics are emerging in professional communication practice. (shrink)

Val Plumwood’s 1993 paper, “The politics of reason: towards a feminist logic” (hence- forth POR) attempted to set the stage for what she hoped would begin serious feminist exploration into formal logic – not merely its historical abuses, but, more importantly, its potential uses. This work offers us: (1) a case for there being feminist logic; and (2) a sketch of what it should resemble. The former goal of Plumwood’s paper encourages feminist theorists to reject anti-logic feminist views. The paper’s (...) latter aim is even more challenging. Plumwood’s critique of classical negation (and classical logic) as a logic of domination asks us to recognize that particular logical systems are weapons of oppression. Against anti-logic feminist theorists, Plumwood argues that there are other logics besides classical logic, such as relevant logics, which are suited for feminist theorizing. Some logics may oppress while others may liberate. We provide details about the sources and context for her rejection of classical logic and motivation for promoting relevant logics as feminist. (shrink)

Non-symmetric relations like loves or between can apply to the same relata in non-equivalent ways. For example, loves may apply to Abelard and Eloise either by Abelard’s loving Eloise or by Eloise’s loving Abelard. On the standard account of relations, different applications of a relation to fixed relata are distinguished by the direction in which the relation applies to the relata. But neither Directionalism nor its most popular rival, Positionalism, offer accounts of differential application that generalize to relations of arbitrary (...) symmetry structure. Here, I develop an alternative account, Relative Positionalism, which distinguishes different applications of a relation to fixed relata in terms of the ways in which the relata are characterized relative to one another. In presenting and defending Relative Positionalism, this paper covers some of the same ground as my [2016], but avoids the latter’s algebraic approach and focuses on interpretative issues—in particular, how to make sense of relative property instantiation—that were not addressed in the earlier paper. (shrink)