The cause of ethical failure in organisations often can be traced to their organisational culture and the failure on the part of the leadership to actively promote ethical ideals and practices. This is true of all types of organisations, including the professions, which in recent years have experienced ongoing ethical problems. The questions naturally arise: what sort of professional culture promotes ethical behaviour? How can it be implemented by a profession and engendered in the individual professional? The answers to these (...) questions are of interest to business ethicists since the causes of ethical problems in business are often the same and the professions, as ethically challenged organisations, make useful and informative analogues for the measures to be adopted or avoided when the attempt is made to raise the ethical standards of business.Given this focus on the professions, it will be argued that the usual, direct attempts to control unethical behaviour by using codes of ethics, legislation and self-regulatory regimes, are not successful. (shrink)

We report on the deliberations of an interdisciplinary group of experts in science, law, and philosophy who convened to discuss novel ethical and policy challenges in stem cell research. In this report we discuss the ethical and policy implications of safety concerns in the transition from basic laboratory research to clinical applications of cell-based therapies derived from stem cells. Although many features of this transition from lab to clinic are common to other therapies, three aspects of stem cell biology pose (...) unique challenges. First, tension regarding the use of human embryos may complicate the scientific development of safe and effective cell lines. Second, because human stem cells were not developed in the laboratory until 1998, few safety questions relating to human applications have been addressed in animal research. Third, preclinical and clinical testing of biologic agents, particularly those as inherently complex as mammalian cells, present formidable challenges, such as the need to develop suitable standardized assays and the difficulty of selecting appropriate patient populations for early phase trials. We recommend that scientists, policy makers, and the public discuss these issues responsibly, and further, that a national advisory committee to oversee human trials of cell therapies be established. **NB we did not reccommend a NAC, we think it might be appropriate**. (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

Abstract:This article examines unrecognized points of conceptual and stylistic convergence between the work of Flann O'Brien and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Though operating in quite different generic and discursive modes, both writers critique impulses to metaphysical systems, idealized models of language, and skepticism. O'Brien and Wittgenstein adopt as correctives to these tendencies techniques to train their readers' attention on the zones of overlap in linguistic usage where points of confusion tend to arise. Finally, this comparison with O'Brien casts new (...) light on Wittgenstein's later work as it illuminates satirical and ironizing styles that have often been overlooked. (shrink)

O'Brien, Odhran Review of: Aapologia pro Beata Maria Virgine: John Henry Newman's defence of the Virgin Mary in Catholic doctrine and piety, by Robert M. Andrews, Palo Alto, CA: Academica, 2017, pp. 164, hardback, US$76.95.

Cet article s’intéresse à la masculinité dans deux romans historiques du vingtième siècle, dont l’intrigue se déroule au dix-huitième : Ingenious Pain d’Andrew Miller (1997) et The Giant, O’Brien d’Hilary Mantel (1998). Les deux romanciers inventent des protagonistes qui incarnent des attributs considérés comme typiquement masculins, tels que la résistance à la douleur, la force physique et la masse corporelle, ces attributs étant par ailleurs liés à la possibilité de gagner de l’argent. Dans ces textes, cependant, l’exagération des (...) caractéristiques masculines stéréotypées complexifie le portrait des deux personnages, les faisant paraître à différents moments comme des non-hommes ou des hommes inférieurs : ils ressemblent tantôt à des monstres, tantôt à des victimes pitoyablement faibles – comparés à des enfants, voire à des femmes. Paradoxalement, les qualités associées à la virilité dans ces récits dépouillent les hommes de leur autonomie plutôt que de la leur conférer, de sorte qu’ils se trouvent dépossédés de l’idéal masculin et deviennent la propriété d’autres hommes. (shrink)

The first edition was awarded the '2005 Textbook Award of the Association of University Professors of Management (Verband der Hochschullehrer fur ...

THIS article concerning Mr. Marshall's open letter to Governor Smith does not pretend to be an answer. It suggests some philosophical considerations on the point at issue. The Editor.

How should politicians act? When should they try to lead public opinion and when should they follow it? Should politicians see themselves as experts, whose opinions have greater authority than other people's, or as participants in a common dialogue with ordinary citizens? When do virtues like toleration and willingness to compromise deteriorate into moral weakness? In this innovative work, Andrew Sabl answers these questions by exploring what a democratic polity needs from its leaders. He concludes that there are systematic, (...) principled reasons for the holders of divergent political offices or roles to act differently. Sabl argues that the morally committed civil rights activist, the elected representative pursuing legislative results, and the grassroots organizer determined to empower ordinary citizens all have crucial democratic functions. But they are different functions, calling for different practices and different qualities of political character. To make this case, he draws on political theory, moral philosophy, leadership studies, and biographical examples ranging from Everett Dirksen to Ella Baker, Frances Willard to Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr. to Joe McCarthy. Ruling Passions asks democratic theorists to pay more attention to the "governing pluralism" that characterizes a diverse, complex democracy. It challenges moral philosophy to adapt its prescriptions to the real requirements of democratic life, to pay more attention to the virtues of political compromise and the varieties of human character. And it calls on all democratic citizens to appreciate "democratic constancy": the limited yet serious standard of ethical character to which imperfect democratic citizens may rightly hold their leaders--and themselves. (shrink)

The twelve specially written essays in this volume investigate the neglected topic of mental action, and show its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology of mind. The essays investigate what mental actions are, how we are aware of them, and what is the relationship between mental and physical action.

It is widely accepted that we are answerable in a special way for our intentional actions. And it is also widely accepted that we are thus answerable because we perform intentional actions for reasons. The aim of this chapter is to argue against this ‘reasons’ view of such answerability. First, reasons are distinguished from practical standards. Then, it is argued that the best interpretation of the practices in which we treat agents as answerable is that they fundamentally concern practical standards (...) rather than reasons. This view shows that we are answerable, not just because we are deliberators, but because we are executive agents whose complex executive capacities open us to criticism. (shrink)

We all face death, but how many of us are actually ready for it? Whether our own death or that of a loved one comes first, how prepared are we, spiritually or practically? In Preparing to Die, Andrew Holecek presents a wide array of resources to help the reader address this unfinished business. Part One shows how to prepare one's mind and how to help others, before, during, and after death. The author explains how spiritual preparation for death can (...) completely transform our relationship to the end of life, dissolving our fear and helping us to feel open and receptive to letting go in the dying process. Daily meditation practices, the stages of dying and how to work with them, and after-death experiences are all detailed in ways that will be particularly helpful for those with an interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in Tibetan approaches to conscious dying. Part Two addresses the practical issues that surround death. Experts in grief, hospice, the funeral business, and the medical and legal issues of death contribute chapters to prepare the reader for every practical concern, including advance directives, green funerals, the signs of death, warnings about the funeral industry, the stages of grief, and practical care for the dying. Part Three contains heart-advice from twenty of the best-known Tibetan Buddhist masters now teaching in the West. These brief interviews provide words of solace and wisdom to guide the dying and their caregivers during this challenging time. Preparing to Die is for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for death from a Buddhist perspective, both spiritually and practically. It is also for those who want to learn how to help someone else who is dying, both during the time of illness and death as well as after death. (shrink)

A veteran nurse researcher and educator provides a spiritual perspective on the professional nurse's vocation of caring. Grounding each chapter in Scripture, O'Brien explores the Christian nurse's call to love as Jesus loved: without discrimination, reserve and, sometimes, reward.

A contemporary debate concerning the epistemology of testimony is portrayed by its protagonists as having its origins in the eighteenth century and the respective views of David Hume and Thomas Reid. Hume is characterized as a reductionist and Reid as an anti-reductionist. This terminology has been widely adopted and the reductive approach has become synonymous with Hume. In Sect. 1 I spell out the reductionist interpretation of Hume in which the justification possessed by testimonially-acquired beliefs is reducible to the epistemic (...) properties of perception, memory and inductive inference. This account of testimony is taken to be found in the section ‘On Miracles’ of Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. In Sect. 2 I introduce the distinction between global and local reductionism, and Coady’s interpretation of Hume as a global reductionist. He takes Hume’s position to be untenable. The rest of the paper explores alternative interpretations of Hume. Section 3 develops a local reductionist interpretation of Hume on testimony. It is argued, though, that such an approach is unstable and, in response, Sect. 4 turns to anti-reductionism in its contemporary forms and in Reid’s teleological account. In Sect. 5 I argue for an anti-reductionist account of Hume, one drawn from his discussion of the testimony of history in the Treatise of Human Nature, thus moving away from the usually exclusive focus upon the discussion of miracles in the first Enquiry, upon which the reductionist interpretation is based. Given the standard meaning of ‘Humeanism’ in the current debate, my interpretation amounts to the claim that Hume is not a Humean with respect to testimony. (shrink)

This paper argues that the dominance of linear models has led many sociologists to construe the social world in terms of a "general linear reality." This reality assumes (1) that the social world consists of fixed entities with variable attributes, (2) that cause cannot flow from "small" to "large" attributes/events, (3) that causal attributes have only one causal pattern at once, (4) that the sequence of events does not influence their outcome, (5) that the "careers" of entities are largely independent, (...) and (6) that causal attributes are generally independent of each other. The paper discusses examples of these assumptions in empirical work, consider standard and new methods addressing them, and briefly explores alternative models for reality that employ demographic, sequential, and network perspectives. (shrink)

A Physicalist Manifesto is a full treatment of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so formulated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. Two concluding chapters argue (...) in detail that contemporary science provides no significant empirical evidence against physicalism and some considerable evidence for it. Written in a brisk, candid and exceptionally clear style, this 2003 book should appeal to professionals and students in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Hume is usually taken to have an evidentialist account of testimonial belief: one is justified in believing what someone says if one has empincal evidence that they have been reliable in the past. This account is impartialist: such evidence is required no matter who the person is, or what refotions she may have to you. I, however, argue that Hume has another account of testimony, one grounded in sympathy. This account is partialist, in that empincal evidence is not required in (...) order for one to be justified in believing some of the assertions of one's friends. (shrink)

This introduction to mathematical logic starts with propositional calculus and first-order logic. Topics covered include syntax, semantics, soundness, completeness, independence, normal forms, vertical paths through negation normal formulas, compactness, Smullyan's Unifying Principle, natural deduction, cut-elimination, semantic tableaux, Skolemization, Herbrand's Theorem, unification, duality, interpolation, and definability. The last three chapters of the book provide an introduction to type theory (higher-order logic). It is shown how various mathematical concepts can be formalized in this very expressive formal language. This expressive notation facilitates proofs (...) of the classical incompleteness and undecidability theorems which are very elegant and easy to understand. The discussion of semantics makes clear the important distinction between standard and nonstandard models which is so important in understanding puzzling phenomena such as the incompleteness theorems and Skolem's Paradox about countable models of set theory. Some of the numerous exercises require giving formal proofs. A computer program called ETPS which is available from the web facilitates doing and checking such exercises. Audience: This volume will be of interest to mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers in universities, as well as to computer scientists in industry who wish to use higher-order logic for hardware and software specification and verification. (shrink)

Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to (...) which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Doctors have an ethical and legal duty to respect patient confidentiality. We consider the basis for this duty, looking particularly at the meaning and value of autonomy in health care. Enabling patients to decide how information about them is disclosed is an important element in autonomy and helps patients engage as active partners in their care.Good quality data is, however, essential for research, education, public health monitoring, and for many other activities essential to provision of health care. We discuss whether (...) it is necessary to choose between individual rights and the wider public interest and conclude that this should only rarely be necessary. The paper makes some recommendations on practical steps which could help ensure that good quality information is available for work which benefits society and the public health, while still enabling patients’ autonomy to be respected. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that a majority of people believe that time robustly passes, and that many also report that it seems to them, in experience, as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists deny that time robustly passes, and many contemporary non-dynamists—deflationists—even deny that it seems to us as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists, then, face the dual challenge of explaining why people have such beliefs and make such reports about their experiences. Several philosophers have suggested the stable-self explanation, according to which (...) what partly explains one or both of the explananda is that people believe themselves to have a stable persisting self which is imagined either as moving through time, or as being stationary, with time moving around it. This paper empirically investigates this explanation. We found, however, no evidential support for the stable-self explanation, leaving the non-dynamist but also, we will argue, the dynamist, with an extant explanatory challenge. (shrink)

My aim in this piece is to understand what kinds of acts sneering acts are. I aim to look at what sneering acts do and what social function they perform. In particular, I want to mark them out as acts of ‘making people feel’. I explore the grounds on which we might criticize sneering acts, and ask whether the thing that we do when we sneer is always vicious.

Although connectionism is advocated by its proponents as an alternative to the classical computational theory of mind, doubts persist about its _computational_ credentials. Our aim is to dispel these doubts by explaining how connectionist networks compute. We first develop a generic account of computation—no easy task, because computation, like almost every other foundational concept in cognitive science, has resisted canonical definition. We opt for a characterisation that does justice to the explanatory role of computation in cognitive science. Next we examine (...) what might be regarded as the “conventional” account of connectionist computation. We show why this account is inadequate and hence fosters the suspicion that connectionist networks aren’t genuinely computational. Lastly, we turn to the principal task of the paper: the development of a more robust portrait of connectionist computation. The basis of this portrait is an explanation of the representational capacities of connection weights, supported by an analysis of the weight configurations of a series of simulated neural networks. (shrink)

One kind of successful communication involves the transmission of knowledge from speaker to hearer. Such testimonial knowledge transmission is usually seen as conforming to three widely held epistemological approaches: reliabilism, impartialism and evidentialism. First, a speaker must be a reliable testifier in order that she transmits knowledge, and reliability is cashed out in terms of her likelihood of speaking the truth. Second, if a certain speaker's testimony has sufficient epistemic weight to be believed by hearer1, then it should also be (...) believed by hearer2. Third, the normative constraint here is evidentially grounded: whether or not a hearer should believe a speaker depends on the evidence the hearer has that the speaker is telling the truth. I argue that there are cases of testimonial knowledge transmission that are incompatible with these three claims. This is when one accepts the testimony of an intimate friend. (shrink)

This is a discussion of the state of discussion on pragmatic reasons for belief.

Prediction-based decisions, which are often made by utilizing the tools of machine learning, influence nearly all facets of modern life. Ethical concerns about this widespread practice have given rise to the field of fair machine learning and a number of fairness measures, mathematically precise definitions of fairness that purport to determine whether a given prediction-based decision system is fair. Following Reuben Binns (2017), we take ‘fairness’ in this context to be a placeholder for a variety of normative egalitarian considerations. We (...) explore a few fairness measures to suss out their egalitarian roots and evaluate them, both as formalizations of egalitarian ideas and as assertions of what fairness demands of predictive systems. We pay special attention to a recent and popular fairness measure, counterfactual fairness, which holds that a prediction about an individual is fair if it is the same in the actual world and any counterfactual world where the individual belongs to a different demographic group (cf. Kusner et al. (2018)). (shrink)

This is the first book-length treatment of the relationship between citizenship and the environment. Andrew Dobson argues that ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in terms of the two great traditions of citizenship - liberal and civic republican - with which we have been bequeathed. He develops an original theory of citizenship, which he calls 'post-cosmopolitan', and argues that ecological citizenship is an example and an inflection of it. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and these (...) duties are owed non-reciprocally, by those individuals and communities who occupy unsustainable amounts of ecological space, to those who occupy too little. (shrink)

This book offers an exciting re-interpretation of Auguste Comte, the founder of French sociology. Following the development of his philosophy of positivism, Comte later focused on the importance of the emotions in his philosophy resulting in the creation of a new religious system, the Religion of Humanity. Andrew Wernick provides the first in-depth critique of Comte's concept of religion and its place in his thinking on politics, sociology and philosophy of science. He places Comte's ideas in the context of (...) post-1789 French political and intellectual history, and of modern philosophy, especially postmodernism. Wernick relates Comte to Marx and Nietzsche as seminal figures of modernity and examines key features of modern and postmodern French social theory, tracing the inherent flaws and disintegration of Comte's system. Wernick offers original and fascinating insights in this rich study which will attract a wide audience from sociologists and philosophers to cultural theorists and historians. (shrink)

Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases. The epistemology of vagueness concerns attitudes we should have towards propositions we know to be borderline. On this basis Andrew Bacon develops a new theory of vagueness in which vagueness is fundamentally a property of propositions, explicated in terms of its role in thought.

In this book, Andrew Inkpin considers the disclosive function of language—what language does in revealing or disclosing the world. His approach to this question is a phenomenological one, centering on the need to accord with the various experiences speakers can have of language. With this aim in mind, he develops a phenomenological conception of language with important implications for both the philosophy of language and recent work in the embodied-embedded-enactive-extended tradition of cognitive science. -/- Inkpin draws extensively on the (...) work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, showing how their respective conceptions of language can be combined to complement each other within a unified view. From the early Heidegger, Inkpin extracts a basic framework for a phenomenological conception of language, comprising both a general picture of the role of language and a specific model of the function of words. Merleau-Ponty’s views are used to explicate the generic “pointing out”—or presentational—function of linguistic signs in more detail, while the late Wittgenstein is interpreted as providing versatile means to describe their many pragmatic uses. Having developed this unified phenomenological view, Inkpin explores its broader significance. He argues that it goes beyond the conventional realism/idealism opposition, that it challenges standard assumptions in mainstream post-Fregean philosophy of language, and that it makes a significant contribution not only to the philosophical understanding of language but also to 4e cognitive science. (shrink)