Polytheism is a strange view to hold in modernity. Connected as it is in the popular imagination with archaic, animistic, magical, prescientific systems of thought, we don’t hesitate much before casting it into the dustbin of history. Even if we are not monotheists, we are likely to think of monotheism as the obviously more plausible position. The traditional arguments for the existence of God, which have been enormously influential in Western philosophy of religion, do not necessarily rule out polytheism but (...) they are clearly formulated with monotheism in mind. While there could be multiple first causes, intelligent designers, or beings than which nothing greater can be conceived, the simplest and most natural... (shrink)

The works of Nietzsche's middle period tend to be neglected by Nietzsche scholars. Already, Michael Ure's first book, Nietzsche's Therapy was a welcome exception, and he continues his exploration in this new book, a study of the work Nietzsche called his most personal, The Gay Science.Nietzsche is right to call GS personal, and Ure is right to emphasize it. Its preface explains that Nietzsche wrote the text while recovering from long illness, and many of the first edition's 342 aphorisms allude (...) to his personal experiences. Calling it a "philosophical autobiography", as Ure does, is perhaps an overstatement. Nietzsche wrote one of those—Ecce Homo—and wild as that book is... (shrink)

In this commentary, I will consider the implications of the argument made by Christopher Stratman (2020) in ‘Ectogestation and the Problem of Abortion’. Clearly, the possibility of ectogestation will have some effect on the ethical debate on abortion. However, I have become increasingly sceptical that the possibility of ectogestation will transform the problem of abortion. Here, I outline some of my reasons to justify this scepticism. First, that virtually everything we already know about unintended pregnancies, abortion and adoption does not (...) prima facie support the assumption that a large shift to ectogestation would occur. Moreover, if ectogestation does not lead to significant restrictions to abortion then there is unlikely to be any radical transformation of the practice of abortion. Second, abortion is already associated with stigma and so the presence of ectogestation would need to create additional stigma to modify behaviour. Finally, I argue that ectogestation shifts the debate away from the fetus to the human subject of the artificial womb—the gestateling. Therefore, creating a new category of killing—gestaticide—and this would only reorient the debate rather than end it. (shrink)

A cautionary note -- Introduction -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau : the philosopher as victim -- Arthur Schopenhauer : the rebarbative bodhisattva -- Friedrich Nietzsche : a sickly Übermensch -- Feature : Nietzsche and Nazism -- Bertrand Russell : the mathematics of human behaviour -- Ludwig Wittgenstein : anger and asceticism -- Martin Heidegger : magician, predator, peasant and Nazi -- Feature : The Héloïse complex -- Jean-Paul Sartre : intellectual tyranny, charm and bad faith -- Feature : Women philosophers behaving badly (...) -- Michel Foucault : madness, sex and punishment -- Feature : Demetrius, philosopher king of Athens. (shrink)

The development of artificial womb technology is proceeding rapidly and will present important ethical and theological challenges for Christians. While there has been extensive secular discourse on artificial wombs in recent years, there has been little Christian engagement with this topic. There are broadly two primary uses of artificial womb technology—ectogestation as a form of enhanced neonatal care, where some of the gestation period takes place in an artificial womb, and ectogenesis, where the entire gestation period is within an artificial (...) womb. Ectogestation for the latter weeks or months of pregnancy could be possible within a decade or so, while ectogenesis for humans is far more speculative. Ectogestation is likely to significantly decrease maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality, and so there is a strong case for supporting its development. Ectogenesis, however, may bring a number of challenges, including the commodification of children, and the pathologizing of pregnancy and childbirth. Its long-term effects on those who are created through this process are also unknown. In the event that it becomes ubiquitous, we may also find the central theological significance of pregnancy and birth diminished. The dilemma for Christians is that the development of ectogestation seems likely to normalise the use of artificial gestation, and, in time, pave the way for ectogenesis. (shrink)

The debate regarding the role of conscientious objection in healthcare has been protracted, with increasing demands for curbs on conscientious objection. There is a growing body of evidence that indicates that in some cases, high rates of conscientious objection can affect access to legal medical services such as abortion—a major concern of critics of conscientious objection. Moreover, few solutions have been put forward that aim to satisfy both this concern and that of defenders of conscientious objection—being expected to participate in (...) the provision of services that compromise their moral integrity. Here we attempt to bring some resolution to the debate by proposing a pragmatic, long-term solution offering what we believe to be an acceptable compromise—a quota system for medical trainees in specialties where a conscientious objection can be exercised, and is known to cause conflict. We envisage two main objectives of the quota system we propose. First, as a means to introduce conscientious objection into countries where this is not presently permitted. Second, to minimise or eliminate the effects of high rates of conscientious objection in countries such as Italy, where access to legal abortion provision can be negatively affected. (shrink)

Two key questions lie at the heart of the business challenge for business ethics: is it possible for business and investors to do well while doing good; and if so, how can this be achieved? This paper adopts an international investment perspective to address these questions. It demonstrates that it is possible for business and investors to achieve a triple bottom line of environmental, social and financial performance.A new integrated model of Ethical Business including an Ethical Scorecard performance measurement technology (...) is presented based on international ethical investment criteria and case studies of businesses rated highly by ethical investors. Ethical Performance Scores are presented for these businesses and New Zealand business. Examples from New Zealand are presented to illustrate the Ethical Scorecard and ethical business practice. The model and scoring system provide a basis for international benchmarking of ethical business to assist investors, managers and researchers. (shrink)

1. Sexual Brains and Body Politics 2. Hormones and Hardwiring 3. Making Sense of Brain Organization Studies 4. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Brain Organization 5. Working Backward from “Distinct‘ Groups 6. Masculine and Feminine Sexuality 7. Sexual Orienteering 8. Sex-Typed Interests 9. Taking Context Seriously 10. Trading Essence for Potential.

Stefan Collini's Absent Minds is a rich, critical history of a cliché: that English culture is peculiarly hostile to intellectuals. Despite striking differences in the organization of intellectual life in the U.S. and Britain, precisely the same cliché pervades American writing. The explanation may lie less in structure than in the transnational mobility of the language of the intellectual.

Principles of Philosophy was written in Latin by Rene Descartes. Published in 1644, it was intended to replace Aristotle's philosophy and traditional Scholastic Philosophy. This volume contains a letter of the author to the French translator of the Principles of Philosophy serving for a Preface and a letter to the most serene princess, Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Frederick, King of Bohemia, Count Palatine, and Elector of the Sacred Roman Empire. Principes de philosophie, by Claude Picot, under the supervision of Descartes, (...) appeared in 1647 with a letter-preface to Queen Christina of Sweden. (shrink)

Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...) the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it. I develop what Bernard Williams might call a vindicatory genealogy of envy, thereby allowing us to see that envy, rather than undermining egalitarian intuitions, can in fact play a distinct justificatory role (when it is fitting), which undermines the Envy Objection. (shrink)

Prabhpal Singh has recently defended a relational account of the difference in moral status between fetuses and newborns as a way of explaining why abortion is permissible and infanticide is not. He claims that only a newborn can stand in a parent–child relation, not a fetus, and this relation has a moral dimension that bestows moral value. We challenge Singh’s reasoning, arguing that the case he presents is unconvincing. We suggest that the parent–child relation is better understood as an extension (...) of an existing relationship formed during the gestational period. The change in this relation at birth is not sufficient to justify the radical change in moral status required to rule out infanticide while accepting the permissibility of abortion. Given that the moral status of orphans is also problematic under Singh’s account, we conclude that Singh has not shown that a newborn has greater moral worth than a fetus. (shrink)

Strawson (1994) and Peacocke (1992) introduced thought experiments that show that it seems intuitive that there is, in some way, an experiential character to mental events of understanding. Some (e.g., Siewert 1998, 2011; Pitt 2004) try to explain these intuitions by saying that just as we have, say, headache experiences and visual experiences of blueness, so too we have experiences of understanding. Others (e.g., Prinz 2006, 2011; Tye 1996) propose that these intuitions can be explained without positing experiences of understanding. (...) Call this the debate between Realism and Anti-Realism about experiences of understanding. This paper aims to advance that debate in two ways. In the first half, I develop more precise characterizations of what Realists and Anti-Realists propose. In the second half, I distinguish the four most plausible versions of Anti-Realism and argue that Realism better explains the target intuition than any of them does. (shrink)

What does everyone in the modern world need to know? Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson's answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research. Humorous, surprising and informative, Dr. Peterson tells us why skateboarding boys and girls must be left alone, what terrible fate awaits those who criticize too easily, and why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street. What (...) does the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight (with our shoulders back) and about success in life? Why did ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay careful attention as the highest of gods? What dreadful paths do people tread when they become resentful, arrogant and vengeful? Dr. Peterson journeys broadly, discussing discipline, freedom, adventure and responsibility, distilling the world's wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. [This book] shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith and human nature, while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its readers. (shrink)

Rodger Beehler; The Schools and Indoctrination, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 261–272, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14.

Rodger Beehler; The Schools and Indoctrination, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 261–272, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14.

Friendship between professors and students have the potential for hurting those involved and can be hurtful to the larger society in which they occur. This paper examines what sort of boundary lines can be drawn for appropriate faculty-student relationships by considering three arguments against faculty-student friendships. After rejecting these arguments on the grounds that they rely upon a flawed conceptualization of friendship, the paper, drawing on William Rawlins’s theory of friendship, argues that faculty-student relationships are neither desirable nor undesirable per (...) se. However, if such relationships do arise, it is possible that they can be conducted in an ethically responsible and professionally appropriate way. (shrink)

Police vehicle pursuits are inherently dangerous, rapidly evolving, and require police coordination to safely stop and arrest the suspect. Interviews of three US police officers were conducted and the descriptive phenomenological psychological method was used to analyze their naïve accounts of their lived-experiences. The psychological constituents of the experience of leading a successful chase and capture of a fleeing criminal found are: Alert to Possible Car Chase, Suspect Identified, Anxiety and Excitement About the Chase, Awareness of Primary Chase Role, Radio (...) Coordination with Others to Take Actions to Stop the Suspect, Ongoing Evaluation of Chase Situation and Persistence, Reading the Suspect’s Driving Behaviors, Car Chase Transition to a Coordinated Physical Capture, and Making Sense of the Experience Through Inquiry. Insights garnered from this study may be useful to police, policy makers, trainers and others interested in emergency and crisis decision-making. (shrink)

Introduction RODGERBEEHLER We observe that all nations, barbarous as well as civilized, though separately founded because remote from each other in time and ...

The #MeToo movement generated a feminist insistence that we “believe women.” But the men accused of assault, harassment, and other violations frequently defended themselves with the insistence that they had always “respected women” – sometimes, going so far as to get numerous women to sign letters swearing that these men had always respected them. This common MeToo defense reveals the core inconsistency – and the core entitlement – at the heart of misogyny and sexual injustice: some women deserve respect. But (...) the duty to respect those women relies on an invisible entitlement to disrespect – indeed, to assault, harass, dominate, or exploit – others. This chapter explores consent’s role within the superstructure of misogyny and sexual injustice, arguing what consent is a key apparatus of white supremacy. It argues that consent has been constructed through dynamics of colonial and racist sexual entitlement, mapping some (white) women as deserving of respect and the right to consent, while marking other women as expendable or disposable within the sexual economy. This means not only that consent is historically constructed as white, but also that whiteness, and in particular, white womanhood, is constructed through consent. Thus, white women’s right to consent – or to refuse – is premised upon the inability of other women to do so. In this way, the right to sexual consent does not disrupt the norm of male sexual entitlement. Consent has always been premised on non-consent, from coloniality and slavery to contemporary porn, which offers a vision of the world without proper consent, so that granting consent to actual women is an exceptional practice, an “act of respect.” By including race and class alongside gender in my analysis of consent, I argue that contemporary feminist visions of sexual justice must do more than defend or ameliorate consent, but develop intersectional interrogations of sexual justice that reckon with the complicities of consent. (shrink)

This descriptive scientific-phenomenological study set forth to discover what is like to survive a building collapse as a firefighter. The participants of the study were 3 uniformed and sworn professional firefighters performing interior operations at a commercial building structure fire. The 3 participants all become trapped and had to self-rescue as a result of a structural collapse. The data collected from the participant interviews was analyzed and transformed so as to form the structure of the study.

Matt Zwolinski argues that libertarians “should see the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG)—a guarantee that all members will receive income regardless of why they need it—as an essential part of an ideally just libertarian system.” He regards the satisfaction of a Lockean proviso—a stipulation that individuals may not be rendered relevantly worse off by the uses and appropriations of private property—as a necessary condition for a private property system’s being just. BIG is to be justified precisely because it prevents proviso violations. (...) We deem Zwolinski’s argument a “Direct Proviso-Based Argument” for BIG. We argue that because this sort of argument for the BIG is in tension with other principles libertarians within the Lockean tradition hold dear, specifically prohibitions on seizing legitimately held property and forcing individuals to labor, the Direct Proviso-Based Argument fails. (shrink)

Chemical kinds are generally treated as having timelessly fixed identities. Biological kinds are generally treated as evolved and/or evolving entities. So what kind of kind is a biochemical kind? This article defends the thesis that biochemical molecules are clustered chemical kinds, some of which—namely, evolutionarily conserved units—are also biological kinds. On this thesis, a number of difficulties that have recently occupied philosophers concerned with proteins and kinds are shown to be either resolved or dissolved. 1 Introduction2 Conflicting Intuitions about Kinds (...) of Proteins3 Against Permissive Pluralism4 Against Nominalism, Toward a Duality of Kinds5 Biological Kinds, Chemical Kinds, and Their Relations6 Implications for Biological Individuals7 Implications for Monism and Scientific Practice. (shrink)

Chemical kinds (e.g. gold) are generally treated as having timelessly fixed identities. Biological kinds (e.g. goldfinches) are generally treated as evolved and/or evolving entities. So what kind of kind is a biochemical kind? This paper defends the thesis that biochemical molecules are clustered chemical kinds, some of which–namely, evolutionarily conserved units–are also biological kinds.On this thesis, a number of difficulties that have recently occupied philosophers concerned with proteins and kinds are shown to be resolved or dissolved.

We often feel survivor guilt when the very circumstances that harm others leave us unscathed. Although survivor guilt is both commonplace and intelligible, it raises a puzzle for the standard philosophical account of guilt, according to which people feel guilt only when they take themselves to be morally blameworthy. The standard account implies that survivor guilt is uniformly unfitting, as people are not blameworthy simply for having fared better than others. In this paper, we offer a rival account of guilt, (...) the relational account of guilt, which makes sense of survivor guilt and other forms of guilt without self-blame while preserving the intelligibility of guilt about culpable wrongdoing. According to this account, guilt involves the feeling of being unable to justify ourselves to others, and we lack self-justification when we (however blamelessly) stand on the positive side of an undesirable asymmetry with them. When someone survives something that those around her do not, the disparity in outcome constitutes an asymmetry that is often undesirable, because it arises from luck or violates a requirement of solidarity. Thus, survivor guilt is often fitting. (shrink)

A key requirement for the automatic generation of argumentative or explanatory text is to present the constituent propositions in an order that readers will find coherent and natural, to increase the likelihood that they will understand and accept the author’s claims. Natural language generation systems have standardly employed a repertoire of coherence relations such as those defined by Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Structure Theory. This paper models the generation of persuasive monologue as the outcome of an “inner dialogue”, where the (...) author attempts to anticipate potential challenges or clarification requests. It is argued that certain RST relations such as Motivate, Evidence and Concession can be seen to emerge from various pre-empting strategies. (shrink)

The authors of this volume rethink our usual understanding of the relationship between faith, belief and skepticism. For some, skeptical faith is an oxymoron and faith and skepticism are mutually exclusive states or attitudes. Others argue that there is no proper faith without skepticism about faith. Taking John Schellenberg's recent work on the possibility of a skeptical faith as a starting point, the authors respond to and in some cases seek to go further than Schellenberg. In a variety of ways, (...) the papers take up the following questions: How are we to construe the relationship between faith, belief, and skepticism if we seek to understand what is characteristic of a life of faith, or of unfaith? Is belief in God necessary for faith in God to be possible? Does one need to have sufficient reasons for believing something before one is rationally entitled to having faith in something? In short, what is the relationship between faith and belief, belief and understanding, understanding and experience, and experience and skepticism? (shrink)

This work is a connected series of essays on morality, education, law, and society. All of the essays indeed "think against the grain," challenging some of the dominant thinkers and fashions of our time in a strikingly original and penetrating way. They force the reader to consider our hegemonic values, how we are to live our lives and view our world. Political theorists, social scientists, philosophers, educators, legal scholars, and cultural and literary theorists will find them profitable to study. While (...) the book meets the standards expected by such scholars, its essays are written in a lively and accessible manner, which also makes them of interest to the general educated public. Written by the late Dr. Rodger Beehler, this work imparts the wisdom and insights of writers who instruct and amuse the reader on matters of our predominant values. (shrink)

The Theory, Not the Theorist recovers Karl Marx's social thought from the uncongenial embrace of "Marxism." In order to do this, author Rodger Beehler first establishes that the explanation of historical change implicit in Marx's investigations of feudalism, capitalism, and European imperialism is not the "historical materialist" theory that he frequently claimed to have discovered.

Personalized genomics companies (PG; also called ‘direct-to-consumer genetics’) are businesses marketing genetic testing to consumers over the Internet. While much has been written about these new businesses, little attention has been given to their roles in science communication. This paper provides an analysis of the gene concept presented to customers and the relation between the information given and the science behind PG. Two quite different gene concepts are present in company rhetoric, but only one features in the science. To explain (...) this, we must appreciate the delicate tension between PG, academic science, public expectation, and market forces. (shrink)

The ‘black box problem’ is a long-standing talking point in debates about artificial intelligence. This is a significant point of tension between ethicists, programmers, clinicians and anyone else working on developing AI for healthcare applications. However, the precise definition of these systems are often left undefined, vague, unclear or are assumed to be standardised within AI circles. This leads to situations where individuals working on AI talk over each other and has been invoked in numerous debates between opaque and explainable (...) systems. This paper proposes a coherent and clear definition for the black box problem to assist in future discussions about AI in healthcare. This is accomplished by synthesising various definitions in the literature and examining several criteria that can be extrapolated from these definitions. There are no data in this work. (shrink)