Tsiyune derekh be-filosofyah ha-yehudit be-sugiyot ha-ʻam ha-nivḥar.

Maimonides’ attitude to animals in his ethical teachings is not the same in all his works. His cosmological outlook changed over the years, as shown in the justification he gives for the existence of animals. In a youthful work he presents a teleological, anthropocentric viewpoint, according to which animals are merely a means to an end and were created solely to serve man. However, in The Guide of the Perplexed, written in his old age, he argues that every creature was (...) created for its own sake, since existence is good in itself. Another difference is the expansion of his rationalistic approach to the precepts of the Torah. Only in his late works does he argue that every divine command can be explained. As a consequence, one finds in The Guide of the Perplexed ethical explanations of precepts concerning animals, as well as the argument that there is sometimes no difference between the suffering of animals and human beings. In his earlier works, however, he had stated that such precepts were entirely arbitrary. (shrink)

The present paper is devoted to a detailed presentation of a new Military Ethics doctrine of fighting terror. It is proposed as an extension of the classical Just War Theory, which has been meant to apply to ordinary international conflicts. Since the conditions of a fight against terror are essentially different from the conditions that are assumed to hold in the classical war (military) paradigm or in the law enforcement (police) paradigm, a third model is needed. The paper proposes such (...) a model in the form of principles that should govern the activity of a democratic state when faced with terror. Eleven principle are proposed. Two are on the level of the state, including the Principle of Self-Defense Duty. Six are related to military preventive acts against activities of terror, including new formulations of a Principle of Military Necessity, a Principle of Distinction, and a Principle of Military Proportionality. Principles of Low Probabilities, Time Span Considerations and Professional Understanding are also included. Finally, three principles that are related to consciousness-directed activities against terror are added: a Principle of Permanent Notice, a Principle of Compensation, and a Principle of Operational Deterrence. The exposition of the principles is accompanied by arguments about their moral justification. The doctrine has been developed on the background of the IDF fight against acts and activities of terror performed by Palestinian individuals and organizations. (shrink)

There are better and worse ways to blame others. Likewise, there are better and worse ways to blame yourself. And though there is an ever-expanding literature on the norms that govern our blaming practices, relatively little attention has been paid to the norms that govern expressions of self-blame. In this essay, I argue that when we blame ourselves, we ought not do so privately. Rather, we should, ceteris paribus, express our self-blame to those we have wronged. I then explore how (...) this norm can contribute to our understanding of the ethics of self-blame as well as the nature of blameworthiness itself. (shrink)

Up against capacity‐based approaches to animal ethics, Cora Diamond has put the idea of animals as our fellow creatures. The aim of this article is to explore the implications of this concept for our treatment of fish. Fish have traditionally been placed at the borders or even outside of the moral community, although there is growing evidence that they have perceptual and social capacities comparable to animals that are considered morally significant. Given that a fellow creature's approach is not primarily (...) concerned with capacities, fish may pose a challenge: Can fish be seen as our fellow creatures, and if so, on what grounds? In exploring these questions, we defend Diamond against Jeff McMahan's critique of her account and its implications that the fellow creature‐concept is reducible to either capacities or special relationships and leaves no room for argument‐based moral reform. We suggest that moral attention is key to grasping the moral significance of fish and discuss how scientific research can support such attention. In so doing, we demonstrate how Diamond's approach to animal ethics provides a viable alternative to the dominant animal ethics approaches. Finally, we indicate how this approach can be useful for discussions on industrial fish farming. (shrink)

We are grateful to Professors Nick Fotion, Bashshar Haydar and David L. Perry for their illuminating discussions of our paper, ?Military ethics of fighting terror: An Israeli perspective?, published in the present issue of the Journal of Military Ethics. We also thank the editors of the Journal for allowing us to add the present response. Professors Fotion, Haydar and Perry raise many significant issues. We will, however, presently address just a few of them, leaving the discussion of the other interesting (...) points to other occasions. (shrink)

Auf den ersten Blick haben Hannah Arendt und Michel Foucault kaum etwas gemein. Tatsächlich beziehen sie sich jedoch auf die identischen Topoi der Philosophiegeschichte - wenn ihre Auslegungen der Quellen auch denkbar verschieden sind. Als Grund hierfür bestimmt Hannah Holme die komplementären Perspektiven der beiden, die sie als Aneignungen des heideggerschen Sorgebegriffs deutet: die ethische Sorge um sich Foucaults und die politische Sorge um die Welt Arendts. Am Ende steht ein Plädoyer für eine Verbindung des machtkritischen Ethos der (...) Sorge um sich mit der Macht des politischen Handelns, das der Sorge um die Welt unterstellt ist. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to portray the nature of public trust in a military force within a democratic state and explain its importance. On grounds of a general conception of 'profession' and 'professional ethics', it is argued that a military force in a democratic state ought to nurture genuine public trust in itself, to take the form of a commonly or at least very broadly held presumption of proper functioning in all professional respects, including effectiveness, improvement and ethics. (...) It is also argued that external inquiry commissions, sometimes appointed to investigate a recent failure, within the framework of a military force, are counterproductive as attempts to enhance the required public trust. (shrink)

We explore multi-scale relations in artificial intelligence (AI) use in order to identify difficulties with coordinating relations between users, machine learning (ML) processes, and “sociobuilt contexts”—specifically in terms of their applications to medical technologies and decisions. We begin by analyzing a recent COVID-19 machine learning case study in order to present the difficulty of traversing the detailed causal topography of “sociobuilt contexts.” We propose that the adequate representation of the interactions between social and built processes that occur on many scales (...) ought to drive interdisciplinary approaches for ML modification. Next, we describe ML algorithm development as a process that is partly dependent on methodological stabilization for reliability and partly on coordinating relations. In the coordination between user, ML process, and sociobuilt contexts, we propose that new methods can be explored that promote the inclusion of patients and communities for the purpose of cross-checking portions of the ML process. Finally, we suggest that the advantages of responsible innovation emerge through the iterative entanglement of ethical, methodological, and ontological considerations within the broader conceptual infrastructure of epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

James E. Taylor As the title of this book makes clear, the essays contained in it are unified by their focus on models of God and alternative ultimate realities. But what is ultimate reality, what does 'God' mean, and what would count as a model ...

I defend the normativity of meaning against recent objections by arguing for a new interpretation of the ‘ought’ relevant to meaning. Both critics and defenders of the normativity thesis have understood statements about how an expression ought to be used as either prescriptive or semantic. I propose an alternative view of the ‘ought’ as conveying the primitively normative attitudes speakers must adopt towards their uses if they are to use the expression with understanding.

The issue of hemispheric processing of art works, either alone or in relation to a certain aspect of language, was investigated in normal subjects. Three experiments were performed. In the first, memory for surrealistic versus realistic pictures was investigated. In the second, memory for metaphoric versus literal titles of these pictures was measured. In the third, memory for the paintings was determined as a function of the same titles. The results of the first experiment showed a right visual field (RVF) (...) advantage for the surrealistic pictures. No field difference emerged for the realistic pictures. The results of the second experiment indicated a RVF advantage in memory for metaphoric titles. Moreover, in the RVF, there was an advantage for titles from surrealistic-metaphoric pairs over all other pairings. Results of experiment three showed a RVF advantage in remembering pictures from surrealistic-metaphoric pairs and in the left visual field (LVF) there was advantage for pictures with literal titles. Taken together, the results suggest left hemisphere advantage in processing meaningful, yet incongruous arrays, both pictorial and linguistic. The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain. (shrink)

This article examines the inherently ethical nature of resource allocation in policing. Decision-makers must make trade-offs between values such as efficiency vs. equity, individual vs. collective benefit, and adopt principles of distribution which allocate limited resources fairly. While resource allocation in healthcare has been the subject of extensive discussion in both practitioner and academic literature, ethical resource allocation in policing has received almost no attention. We first consider whether approaches used in healthcare settings would be suitable for policing. Whilst there (...) are some high-level similarities in the relevant ethical considerations and processes—such as aiming for efficient and equitable resource deployment—there are also fundamental differences between the two settings, which we argue necessitate a different approach. These differences include: (1) greater diversity and incommensurability of the benefits of policing, (2) more frequent non-linearity in returns on policing investment, (3) greater “ethical divisibility” (permissible scaling down) of programs in policing, (4) a requirement to assess “need” for policing resources at the collective (rather than individual) level, and (5) clearer primacy of equity considerations in policing. Having drawn out the implications of these differences, we sketch some tentative proposals for ethical resource allocation in policing. (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as indispensable (...) for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

Imagination comes with varying degrees of sensory accompaniment. Sometimes imagining is phenomenologically lean (cognitive imagining); at other times, imagining involves or requires sensory presentation such as mental imagery (sensory imagining). Philosophers debate whether contradictions can obtain in fiction and whether cognitive imagining is robust enough to explain our engagement with fiction. In this paper, I defend the Principle of Poetic License by arguing for the Permissive View of fictional truth: we can have fictions in which a contradiction is true, everything (...) is true, or nothing is true. I show that imagination-based worries about impossible, unlimited, and empty fictions can be shown to be about sensory imagination and that sensory imagination isn’t necessary for fictional truth. (shrink)

African Ethics: Gĩkũyũ Traditional Morality by Hannah Kinoti was prompted by the author’s concern about the decline of moral standards among the Gĩkũyũ in modern Kenya. Western education and increased interaction with other cultures had made the society more complex and sophisticated. At the same time, social evils like corruption, robbery, prostitution, broken homes and sexual promiscuity were on the increase. “While this is happening,” says the author, “African culture is often referred to in the past tense as if (...) it is no longer relevant.” She wished to discover what were the virtues that, prior to the introduction of western civilization, held society together and formed the basis of its morality. She decided to examine some of the key virtues that were highly valued in traditional Gĩkũyũ culture. She then compared the understanding and practice of these virtues by three groups: old people , middle-aged people and young people. The results of this study should appeal to researchers and teachers of African traditions, culture, religion and ethics. Equally, students of comparative ethics should find this a valuable source of information on traditional ways of maintaining behaviour that made for harmony in society. Young Africans wishing to get a deeper understanding of their roots should also find this work of great interest. (shrink)

The study examines the employment experience of workers with intellectual disability in the hotel sector in Australia. Through a qualitative case study, we interviewed managers and WWID, and held focus groups with supervisors and colleagues at three hotels. We have used the theoretical framework of corporate social responsibility to investigate HR practices that create an ethical climate which promote authentic work experiences for WWID. The study found that participative work practices provide evidence of how WWID fit in at the workplace. (...) When workers are confronted with work-related anxieties, the pragmatic nature of existential authenticity becomes a reality. Our findings reveal that managing workers ethically can lead to more authentic work experiences. In turn, this may promote social inclusion of WWID and improve their reported well-being. (shrink)

Debates about empathy's role in morality are notoriously complex. On the one hand, proponents of empathy argue that it plays a crucial role in the process of making moral judgments, moral motivation, moral development, and the cultivation of meaningful personal relationships. On the other hand, critics of empathy warn that it is especially susceptible to a number of morally troubling biases and motivational shortcomings. Yet there is little consensus about what empathy is or what it might be good for from (...) a moral point of view. As a result, critics and proponents of empathy alike often wind up talking past each other and debates about empathy's role in morality reach an impasse. This paper proposes a typology of empathy's affective, cognitive, and motivational dimensions and the different forms that empathy can take depending on the nature and degree of prominence of these. It argues that different forms of empathy are well equipped to handle some moral tasks as well as ill‐equipped to handle others. Its aim in doing so is to clarify an otherwise conceptually thorny set of debates and to amplify future research on empathy and its role in the moral life. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to do two things: first, introduce Juche, the official philosophy of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (“North Korea”), and second, defend Juche against Alzo David-West’s allegation that it is a nonsensical philosophy. I organize David-West’s complaints into two major strands—that Juche’s axiom is too vague to be of philosophical use and that Juche makes too stark a distinction between human vs. everything else—and offer responses to both strands. My goal isn’t to defend the regime, (...) but to present its ideology in the most charitable way so its merits and demerits can be seen more clearly in future engagements. (shrink)

The correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers begins in 1926, when the twenty-year-old Arendt studied philosophy with Jaspers in Heidelberg. It is interrupted by Arendt's emigration and Jasper's 'inner emigration' and resumes in the fall of 1945. From then until Jaspers's death in 1969, the initial teacher-student relationship develops into a close friendship. Three countries figure prominently in the correspondence: Germany, Israel, and the United States. Among the topics are Fascism, the atom bomb and the threat of global (...) destruction, German guilt for the Holocaust, Jewishness, the State of Israel, American politics and American universities, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Arendt and Jaspers discuss people both famous and obscure. They gossip, joke complain, and argue. They commiserate with each other over the illnesses and infirmities of old age. And they converse about the world's great philosophers: Spinoza, Kant, Marx, Max Weber, Heidegger. Here is a fascinating dialogue between a woman and a man, a Jew and a German, a questioner and a visionary, both uncompromising in their examination of our troubled century. (shrink)