I argue that sport hunting is a right thing according to Leopold’s land ethic. First, I argue that what Leopold means by a “thing” (“A thing is right...”) is not a human action, as is generally assumed, but rather a practice of conservation that is an activity connecting humans to the land. Such an “outdoor” activity emphasizes internal rewards and the achievement of excellence according to standards which at least partially define the activity. To say that hunting is a right (...) thing is to say that the practice of sport hunting tends in the direction of the land ethic. The actions of individual hunters are judged to be ethical or not by the standards of the practice; these standards are in turn evaluated by the precepts of the land ethic. Second, I discuss how the practical standards are evaluated. I argue that the concepts of integrity, stability, and beauty, contrary to some interpretations, are not inherent values of the biotic community, but rather labels carefully chosen by Leopold as three conduits for the ecological conscience necessary for the land ethic: the ethical, the ecological, and the aesthetic. I show that Leopold uses this model for his own evaluation of the practice of hunting as well as his evaluation of other practices of conservation. Thus, to ask about whether sport hunting is a right thing is to ask about the historical evolution of the standards of this practice and, of equal importance, about the future direction of these standards with regard to the land ethic. (shrink)

Leopold’s principle of the land ethic has been modified, vilified, and ignored as a useful scientific and ethical insight. Issues concerning the nature of the three properties and their relations to biotic communities are mostly responsible for this problem. An ontology which takes integrity, stability, and beauty as dispositions is both consistent with what Leopold says and, more importantly, clarifies their relations to biotic communities. This approach, which relies on some developments in the philosophy of science, presents a dilemma for (...) defenders of the principle: to retain the scientific reality of the properties, which results in them being largely indistinguishable from each other or to keep them conventionally distinct at the expense of their scientific usefulness. (shrink)

Although controversy concerning the morality of hunting is generally focused on sport hunting, sport hunting itself is not a morally distinctive kind of hunting. The understanding of hunting in general needs to be supplemented with reference to the goods which hunting seeks. Attempts to draw a moral distinction between sport and subsistence hunting are inadequate and historically suspect. Likewise, trying to establish sport hunting as morally distinctive by emphasizing its similarities to other sports also fails. Nevertheless, there are standards accepted (...) by hunters that support ethical judgments about hunting. Ethical hunting requires reentry into a community of nonhuman beings governed by ecology and evolution, not human constructs, the development of virtues such as tenacity, courage, moderation, and discipline, and the achievement of a heightened respect for the biotic community in which the hunt takes place. By means of such standards, we may yet be able to determine what good hunting is even though we are unable to determine whether sport hunting is good. (shrink)

The land ethic of Aldo Leopold has increasingly received attention as an example of an environmental virtue ethic. However, an important remaining question is how to cultivate and transmit environmental virtues. The answer to this question can be found in the pursuit of wild leisure. The classical view of leisure primarily as articulated in Aristotle’s Politics provides a good starting point for an examination of wild leisure. Leopold thought wild leisure was important and associated it with his land ethic. Leopold’s (...) view of wild leisure focused on the role of perception in ecological education and the habituation of virtue. The classical virtue of moderation when habituated by wild leisure becomes the central virtue required by an ecological conscience. Wild leisure educates just those intellectual and scientific virtues necessary for refined perception and prudence. These virtues provide connections between good citizenship and land citizenship. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a (...) basis for generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

The volumes in the Clarendon Aristotle Series seek to meet the needs of philosophically inclined readers who do not know Greek by providing accurate translations of selected Aristotelian texts accompanied by philosophical commentaries. To these ends, Trevor Saunders’s welcome addition to the series, a treatment of the first two books of Aristotle’s Politics, provides a number of useful tools. First there is a new translation of books I and II. Saunders numbers the paragraphs of the translation and the corresponding sections (...) of the commentary to facilitate reference to the text and commentary within the discussion of each chapter, though not across chapters. Saunders provides Greek-English and English-Greek glossaries. These will be especially useful to Greek-less readers, because Saunders is often traditional in his translation of key terms and thus, for example, obscures connections that have to be made explicit. So, for example, Saunders follows the very common practice of rendering the cognates polis, politês, and politeia as ‘state’, ‘citizen’, and ‘constitution’, respectively. Each section of the commentary begins with an introduction and proceeds to discuss each paragraph in turn, often including several recommendations for where to go next in the secondary literature. The book also has a guide to the translation and commentary, a brief but helpful introduction, a short appendix on the alleged oligarchic bias in Plato’s Laws, a list of departures from Ross’s Oxford Classical Text, a bibliography of works cited, and a selective index. Sadly, but in company with most of its companions in the Clarendon Aristotle Series, it lacks an index locorum. (shrink)

As genetic research increasingly focuses on communities, there have been calls for extending research protections to them. We critically examine guidelines developed to protect aboriginal communities and consider their applicability to other communities. These guidelines are based on a model of researcher-community partnership and span the phases of a research project, from protocol development to publication. The complete list of 23 protections may apply to those few non-aboriginal communities, such as the Amish, that are highly cohesive. Although some protections (...) may be applicable to less-cohesive communities, such as Ashkenazi Jews, analysis suggests substantial problems in extending these guidelines in toto beyond the aboriginal communities for which they were developed. (shrink)

The PEIRCE EDITION contains large sections of previously unpublished material in addition to selected published works. Each volume includes a brief historical and biographical introduction, extensive editorial and textual notes, and a full chronological list of all of Peirce’s writings, published and unpublished, during the period covered.

OBJECTIVES: To compare 2005 and 1995 ethics guidelines from journal editors to authors regarding requirements for institutional review board (IRB) approval and conflict-of-interest (COI) disclosure. DESIGN: A descriptive study of the ethics guidelines published in 103 English-language biomedical journals listed in the Abridged Index Medicus in 1995 and 2005. Each journal was reviewed by the principal author and one of four independent reviewers. RESULTS: During the period, the proportion of journals requiring IRB approval increased from 42% (95% CI 32.2% to (...) 51.2%, p<0.001) to 76% (95% CI 66.4% to 83.1%, p<0.001). In 2005, an additional 9% referred to the Declaration of Helsinki or the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' Uniform requirements for ethical guidelines; 15% (95% CI 8.5% to 22.5%, p<0.01) provided ambiguous or no requirements. The proportion of journals requiring COI disclosure increased from 75% (95% CI 66.6% to 83.3%, p<0.05) to 94% (95% CI 89.4% to 98.6%, p<0.05); 41% had comprehensive requirements, while some addressed only funding source (6%), were vague (10%) or both (14%). Criteria for authorship rose from 40% (95% CI 30.5% to 49.5%, p<0.05) to 72% (95% CI 63.3% to 80.7%, p<0.05). Journals with higher impact factors were more likely to require IRB approval (p<0.01). Journals in anaesthesia and radiology all required IRB approval; requirements in other disciplines varied. CONCLUSIONS: Instructions to authors regarding ethical standards have improved. Some remain incomplete, especially regarding the scope of disclosure of COI. The ethical guidelines presented to authors need further clarification and standardisation. (shrink)

Should engineering ethics be taught? Despite the obvious truism that we all want our students to be moral engineers who practice virtuous professional behavior, I argue, in this article that the question itself obscures several ambiguities that prompt preliminary resolution. Upon clarification of these ambiguities, and an attempt to delineate key issues that make the question a philosophically interesting one, I conclude that engineering ethics not only should not, but cannot, be taught if we understand “teaching engineering ethics” to mean (...) training engineers to be moral individuals (as some advocates seem to have proposed). However, I also conclude that there is a justification to teaching engineering ethics, insofar as we are able to clearly identify the most desirable and efficacious pedagogical approach to the subject area, which I propose to be a case study-based format that utilizes the principle of human cognitive pattern recognition. (shrink)

Memory exhibits episodic superposition, an analog of the quantum superposition of physical states: Before a cue for a presented or unpresented item is administered on a memory test, the item has the simultaneous potential to occupy all members of a mutually exclusive set of episodic states, though it occupies only one of those states after the cue is administered. This phenomenon can be modeled with a nonadditive probability model called overdistribution (OD), which implements fuzzy-trace theory's distinction between verbatim and gist (...) representations. We show that it can also be modeled based on quantum probability theory. A quantum episodic memory (QEM) model is developed, which is derived from quantum probability theory but also implements the process conceptions of global matching memory models. OD and QEM have different strengths, and the current challenge is to identify contrasting empirical predictions that can be used to pit them against each other. (shrink)

Despite its importance, the linkage between genetic and cultural evolution has until now been little explored. An understanding of this linkage is needed to extend evolutionary theory so that it can deal for the first time with the phenomena of mind and human social history. We characterize the process of gene-culture coevolution, in which culture is shaped by biological imperatives while biological traits are simultaneously altered by genetic evolution in response to cultural history. A case is made from both theory (...) and evidence that genetic and cultural evolution are inseverable, and that the human mind has tended to evolve so as to bias individuals toward certain patterns of cognition and choice rather than others. With the aid of mathematical models we trace the coevolutionary circuit: The genes prescribe structure in developmental pathways that lay down endocrine and neural systems, imposing regularities in the development of cognition and behavior; these regularities translate upward into holistic patterns of culture, which can be predicted in the form of probability density distributions ; natural selection acts within human history to favor certain epigenetic rules over others; and the selection alters the frequencies of the underlying genes. The effects of genetic and cultural changes reverberate throughout the circuit and are consequently tested with the passage of each life cycle. In addition to modeling gene-culture coevolution, we apply methods from island biogeography and information theory to examine the cultural capacity of the genes, the factors determining the magnitude of cultural diversity, and the possible reasons for the uniqueness of the human achievement. (shrink)

Upshot: Jehane Barton Burns (now Jehane Kuhn) worked with Ernst von Glasersfeld in the 1960’s on semantic analysis for machine translation at Silvio Ceccato’s Centro di Cibernetica at the University of Milan. Among subsequent formative experiences, she lists Italian travels with Howard Burns, historian of architecture (who first told her about Vico), and a decade in the Office of Charles and Ray Eames (where Constraints was a talismanic word). She and Thomas Kuhn married in 1982; she still considers the (...) English language her raison d’être. (shrink)

Research shows that the physician’s personal attributes and social characteristics have a strong association with their end-of-life decision making. Despite efforts to increase patient, family and surrogate input into EOL decision making, research shows the physician’s input to be dominant. Our research finds that physician’s social values, independent of religiosity, have a significant association with physician’s tendency to withhold or withdraw life sustaining, EOL treatments. It is suggested that physicians employ personal social values in their EOL medical coping, because they (...) have to cope with existential dilemmas posed by the mystery of death, and left unresolved by medical decision making mechanisms such as advanced directives and hospital ethics committees. (shrink)

In 1947, Jacques Maritain argued before the UN that “men mutually opposed in their theoretical conceptions can come to a merely practical agreement regarding a list of human rights.” Maritain justified this thesis using a progressive theory of the natural law which rests on a distinction between the natural law as operative in human nature and the natural law as known and articulated. Drawing on Maritain’s 1951 Man and the State, this essay defends a MacIntyrian reading of Maritain’s thesis (...) and its plausibility against four objections from Ralph McInerny, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre himself. (shrink)

Introduction -- Contending for moral first things : Christian social ethics and postconsensus culture -- Natural law and the Christian tradition -- Natural law and the Protestant prejudice -- Moral law, Christian belief, and social ethics -- Contending for moral first things in ethical and bioethical debates : critical categories, part 1 -- Contending for moral first things in ethical and bioethical debates : critical categories, part 2 -- Ethics, bioethics, and the natural law, a test case : euthanasia yesterday (...) and today -- The natural law and public morality : second thoughts on what is at stake. (shrink)