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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Relevance was one of the most important concerns in the philosophy of Alfred Schutz. In a sequence of articles dealing with a number ...
Human beings have a tendency to transform geographical spaces into dwelling places which assume significance in terms of their social, cultural and personal identities. The authors describe (...) the ways in which this occurs, how it is disrupted by a natural disaster - an Australian bushfire - and how the reciprocal relationship between place and person can contribute to personal and communal healing. The discussion draws on a doctoral thesis conducted by the principal author, and is illuminated by excerpts from narratives provided by those who experienced the bushfire. The discussion is informed by insights from phenomenological geography and ecological philosophy. (shrink)
This article represents the first of a projected series of annotated translations of the Mahārthamañjarīparimala of Maheśvarānanda, a Śaiva Śākta author active in Cidambaram around the turn (...) of the fourteenth century of the Common Era. The present translation includes excerpts from the text’s presentation of two of the levels of reality ( tattvas ), puruṣa and prakṛti . These two tattvas , the apex of the older Sāṃkhya scheme incorporated centuries earlier by the Śaivas, provide for Maheśvarānanda the centerpiece and climax of his understanding of the structure of the Śaiva cosmos. Fundamental to the rhetoric of Maheśvarānanda’s idiosyncratic presentation is his reliance upon a simultaneous strategy of integration and distinction of his argument within the wider world of Śaiva doctrinal common sense. He seeks to integrate the characteristic meditative structure of his Krama or Mahārtha system within a theological framework shared by all Śaiva theists. It can be seen that Maheśvarānanda’s interpretation of the junction between these two reality levels delineates a picture of what it is to be a human being, equipped with an inner life and a personality. The article also reviews the quality of the published editions of the Mahārthamañjarī , discusses its textual history, and offers a number of suggested emendations to the passages translated. (shrink)
In the proposed gynecentric aesthetic, which follows the work of Heide Göttner-Abendroth and Alan Lomax, aesthetic activity would function to integrate the individual and society. Intellect, (...) class='Hi'>emotion and action would combine to achieve a synthesis of body and spirit. Song and dance would involve the equal expressions of all participants, and aesthetic structures would reflect this egalitarianism. The erotic would be expressed as a vital, positive force, divorced from repression and pornography. The emphasis would be off aesthetic objects to be coveted, hoarded and contemplated, and on dynamic process, fully engaging and socially significant. (shrink)
In this essay, I trace the enabling conditions for the major statement of the subversive subtext in Bilhaṇa’s Vikramāṅkadevacarita (VDC) by unpacking the operation of the (...) class='Hi'>work’s patent, eulogistic text. In particular, I will explore the place given to the depiction of male intimacy as a poetic substitute or simulacrum for the political alliances central to Vikramāditya’s coming to the throne, as described in the mahākāvya’s fourth through sixth sargas . My intention in focusing on the intense friendships between men is to highlight a significant rhetorical strategy of Bilhaṇa’s, which allowed the poet both to introduce and to buffer the poem’s most explicit statement of his skepticism towards royal power. It is this charged affective theme—one that occupied only a tenuous position within the regnant critical discourse of literary emotion at the time—that sets up Bilhaṇa’s most powerful and explicit denunciation of kingship. The explicit theme of royal praise and the subtext of its denunciation can thus be seen as contrapuntally related, which goes some way towards explaining how the court poet was able to successfully carry off his potentially incendiary literary project. (shrink)
Abstract This article takes a critical look at the contents of the previous edition of The Journal of Moral Education, noting the points of agreement and the (...) divergencies in the six essays it contains. Unresolved issues in the debate about the relationship of moral education and religious education are identified and matters which require further investigation and discussion are tabulated. (shrink)
This volume looks outward to the new century and to the dynamics of this first truly global age. It asks the fundamental question: how might human societies (...) live? In contrast to the orthodoxies of academic Philosophy and International Relations in much of the twentieth century, which marginalised or rejected the study of ethics, the contributors here believe that there is nothing more political than ethics, and therefore deserving of scholarly analysis. By exploring in the newest context some of the oldest questions about duties and obligations within and beyond humanly constructed boundaries, the essays help us ponder the most profound question in world politics today: who will the twenty-first century be for? (shrink)
In this paper we explore the connections between ethics and decision theory. In particular, we consider the question of whether decision theory carries with it a bias (...) towards consequentialist ethical theories. We argue that there are plausible versions of the other ethical theories that can be accommodated by "standard" decision theory, but there are also variations of these ethical theories that are less easily accommodated. So while "standard" decision theory is not exclusively consequentialist, it is not necessarily ethically neutral. Moreover, even if our decision-theoretic models get the right answers vis-à-vis morally correct action, the question remains as to whether the motivation for the non-consequentialist theories and the psychological processes of the agents who subscribe to those ethical theories are lost or poorly represented in the resulting models. (shrink)
This paper examines several issues regarding deception in advertising. Some generally accepted definitions are considered and found to be inadequate. An alternative definition is proposed for legal/ (...) class='Hi'>regulatory purposes and is related to a suggested definition of the term deception as it is used in everyday language. Based upon these definitions, suggestions are offered for detecting and regulating deception in advertising. This paper additionally considers the grounds for the generally held but largely unquestioned assumption that deceptive advertising is unethical. It is argued that deceptive advertising can be shown to be morally objectionable, on the weak assumption that it is prima facie wrong to harm others. Finally, the implications of this analysis with respect to current regulation of deceptive advertising by the FTC are considered. (shrink)
Hilary Putnam and Nelson Goodman are two of the twentieth century's most persuasive critics of metaphysical realism, however they disagree about the consequences of rejecting metaphysical (...) class='Hi'>realism. Goodman defended a view he called irrealism in which minds literally make worlds, and Putnam has sought to find a middle path between metaphysical realism and irrealism. I argue that Putnam's middle path turns out to be very elusive and defend a dichotomy between metaphysical realism and irrealism. (shrink)
In this paper, I develop an objection to agent-based accounts of right action. Agent-based accounts of right action attempt to derive moral judgment of actions from (...) class='Hi'> judgment of the inner quality of virtuous agents and virtuous agency. A moral theory ought to be something that moral agents can permissibly use in moral deliberation. I argue for a principle that captures this intuition and show that, for a broad range of other-directed virtues and motives, agent-based accounts of right action fail to satisfy this principle. (shrink)
Clinical delusions are difficult to investigate in the laboratory because they co-occur with other symptoms and with intellectual impairment. Partly for these reasons, researchers have recently (...) class='Hi'>begun to use hypnosis with neurologically intact people in order to model clinical delusions. In this paper we describe striking analogies between the behavior of patients with a clinical delusion of mirrored self misidentification, and the behavior of highly hypnotizable subjects who receive a hypnotic suggestion to see a stranger when they look in the mirror. Based on these analogies, we argue that the use of hypnosis is a reliable method to investigate the surface features of clinical delusions. But to what extent can hypnosis successfully recreate delusions? Can it also contribute to a better understanding of delusion formation? Although clinical delusions and hypnotically induced beliefs are different in etiology, some analogies can be identified in the underlying processes that characterise them, based on the two-factor theory of delusion formation. (shrink)
There is no satisfactory account for the general phenomenon of confabulation, for the following reasons: (1) confabulation occurs in a number of pathological and non-pathological conditions; ( (...) class='Hi'>2) impairments giving rise to confabulation are likely to have different neural bases; and (3) there is no unique theory explaining the aetiology of confabulations. An epistemic approach to defining confabulation could solve all of these issues, by focusing on the surface features of the phenomenon. However, existing epistemic accounts are unable to offer sufficient conditions for confabulation and tend to emphasise only its epistemic disadvantages. In this paper, we argue that a satisfactory epistemic account of confabulation should also acknowledge those features which are (potentially) epistemically advantageous. For example, confabulation may allow subjects to exercise some control over their own cognitive life which is instrumental to the construction or preservation of their sense of self. (shrink)
Preface -- Defining religion -- Historical background -- Philosophical phenomenology and the social sciences -- Stages in the phenomenological method -- The phenomenological method : a case study -- Myths and rituals (...) class='Hi'> -- Religious practitioners and art -- Scripture and morality -- The special case of belief -- The place of the phenomenology of religion in the current and future academic study of religion. (shrink)
The historical antecedents of Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy ofthe commons” are generally understood to lie in the common grazing lands of medieval and post-medieval England. The concept (...) class='Hi'> of the commons current in medieval England is significantly different from the modem concept; the English common was not available to the general public but rather only to certain individuals who inherited or were granted the right to use it, and use ofthe common even by these people was not unregulated. The types and in some cases the numbers of animals each tenant could pasture were limited, based at least partly on a recognition of the limited carrying capacity of the land. The decline of the commons system was the result of a variety offactors having little to do with the system’s inherent worth. Among these factors were widespread abuse of the rules goveming the commons, land “reforms” chiefly designed to increase the holdings of a few landowners, improved agricultural techniques, and the effects of the industrial revolution. Thus, the traditional commons system is not an example of an inherently flawed land-use policy, as is widely supposed, but of a policy which succeeded admirably in its time. (shrink)
This study investigates the pattern of institutional shareholding in the U.K. and its relationship with socially responsible behavior by companies within a sample of over 500 (...) class='Hi'>UK companies. We estimate a set of ownership models that distinguish between long- and short-term investors and their largest components and which incorporate both aggregated and disaggregated measures of corporate social performance (CSP). The results suggest that long-term institutional investment is positively related to CSP providing further support for earlier studies by Johnson and Greening (1999, Academy of Management Journal 42, 564–576) and Graves and Waddock (1994, Academy of Management Journal 37, 1034–1046). Disaggregation of CSP into its constituent components suggests that the pattern of institutional investment is also related to the form which CSP takes. Investigation of the impact of investment screens on the selection of stocks suggests that long-term institutional investors select primarily through exclusion, rejecting those firms which have the worst CSP. (shrink)
Rejecting the notion that Picasso's representations of faces should always be considered in a biographical context as portraits, it is argued that in considering them as (...) class='Hi'>human faces we encounter a crisis in the idea of an essential humanity. The essay then discusses Picasso's faces relation to Georges Bataille's treatment of vernacular portrait photography and of animality in human emotional expression, arguing that Picasso's human faces court the inhuman. This inhuman countenance, bred so effectively in the artist's work in the 1930s and 1940s, raises in turn the question of the origin of the human in the inhuman. Turning to Bataille's discussion of the cave of Lascaux, discovered in 1940 and made to stand for the question of humanity posed so brutally by the war, the essay analyses the irruption of the origin of the human ideal in the sovereign act of the depiction of animality. A double refusal of destinies, of animality and of humanity, is caught before our eyes in such depictions. This temporal suspension of destinies is read back into Picasso's (in)human faces. (shrink)
Models of recognition memory have traditionally struggled with the puzzle of criterion setting, a problem that is particularly acute in cases in which items for study and (...) test are of widely varying types, with differing degrees of baseline familiarity and experience (e.g., words vs. random dot patterns). We present a dynamic model of the recognition process that addresses the criterion setting problem and produces joint predictions for choice and reaction time. In this model, recognition decisions are based not on the absolute value of familiarity, but on how familiarity changes over time as features are sampled from the test item. Decisions are the outcome of a race between two parallel accumulators: one that accumulates positive changes in familiarity (leading to an ‘‘old’’ decision) and another that accumulates negative changes (leading to a ‘‘new’’ decision). Simulations with this model make realistic predictions for recognition performance and latency regardless of the baseline familiarity of study and test items. (shrink)
This study examines the extent to which corporate responsibility influences the demand for shares by institutions. The study follows Bushee (Account Rev 73(3):305–333, 1998 ) in (...) class='Hi'> categorising institutions as dedicated or transient. The demand for shares is organised according to three factors: a long-term factor, corporate responsibility; a short-term factor, market liquidity; and a time-independent factor, portfolio theory. The rank and importance of the factors for the different types of institutional investor are analysed. For one of two types of dedicated institution, corporate responsibility is as important as portfolio theory in influencing the demand for shares. For all dedicated institutions, corporate responsibility influences the demand for shares more than market liquidity. For two of the three types of transient institution, market liquidity is the most important factor in share selection. For all transient institutions, the least important factor is corporate responsibility. Findings suggest that corporate responsibility positively and significantly influences the demand for shares by dedicated institutions. The discussion considers the extent to which these trends are constitutive of significant shifts in ethicality within the context of institutional investment. Looking at this from within a highly institutionalised Anglo market model, dedicated institutions’ commitment to broader and longer-term concerns could be interpreted as a small but significant step towards a more axiologically informed ethical business practice. Such a form of engagement calls for sensitive attention to a fuller range of features deemed to be relevant to investment decisions, as opposed to more narrow reliance on legislation, codes of practice and fiduciary principles. (shrink)
Given an ideal $I$ , let $\mathbb{P}_{I}$ denote the forcing with $I$ -positive sets. We consider models of forcing axioms $MA(\Gamma)$ which also have a (...) normal ideal $I$ with completeness $\omega_{2}$ such that $\mathbb{P}_{I}\in \Gamma$ . Using a bit more than a superhuge cardinal, we produce a model of PFA (proper forcing axiom) which has many ideals on $\omega_{2}$ whose associated forcings are proper; a similar phenomenon is also observed in the standard model of $MA^{+\omega_{1}}(\sigma\mbox{-closed})$ obtained from a supercompact cardinal. Our model of PFA also exhibits weaker versions of ideal properties, which were shown by Foreman and Magidor to be inconsistent with PFA. Along the way, we also show (1) the diagonal reflection principle for internally club sets ( $\mathit{DRP}(IC_{\omega_{1}})$ ) introduced by the author in earlier work is equivalent to a natural weakening of “there is an ideal $I$ such that $\mathbb{P}_{I}$ is proper”; and (2) for many natural classes $\Gamma$ of posets, $MA^{+\omega_{1}}(\Gamma)$ is equivalent to an apparently stronger version which we call $MA^{+\operatorname{Diag}}(\Gamma)$. (shrink)
We initially describe a feature-rich discriminative Conditional Random Field (CRF) model for Information Extraction in the workshop announcements domain, which offers good baseline performance in the (...) class='Hi'>PASCAL shared task. We then propose a method for leveraging domain knowledge in Information Extraction tasks, scoring candidate document labellings as one-value-per-field templates according to domain feasibility after generating sample labellings from a trained sequence classifier. Our relational models evaluate these templates according to our intuitions about agreement in the domain: workshop acronyms should resemble their names, workshop dates occur after paper submission dates. These methods see a 5% f-score improvement in fields retrieved when sampling labellings from a Maximum-Entropy Markov Model, however we do not observe improvement over a CRF model. We discuss reasons for this, including the problem of recovering all field instances from a best template, and propose future work in adapting such a model to the CRF, a better standalone system. (shrink)
One night about fifteen years ago, I found myself driving a rental car up and down the main street of a tiny Connecticut town, feverishly hunting for (...) an address. I had gotten lost on my trip into the hinterland, and by the time my car turned hesitantly up the drive of an old house that seemed to match the numbers on my notepad, I was hours late for my appointment. When the thick door creaked open, I started my apologies, but the woman I had come to interview paid no attention. “Come out to the kitchen,” she said. Muriel Hall, former researcher for Time-Life, knew how to treat other researchers. She had kept the food warm and the drinks cold, and before the night was over, I saw her lift the top of an old wooden box and start laying out the treasure I had hoped to find—the papers of Isabel Paterson. (shrink)
This paper documents for the first time tournament incentives of pension fund managers and their preferences for social and environmental security characteristics. Using a comprehensive data set (...) on pension fund security holdings, differences in manager tournaments are distinguished by sorting pension funds into portfolios based on the number of concurrent managers each pension fund employs. Results indicate that the way pension schemes structure portfolio manager tournament incentives is important in explaining the social and environmental portfolio firm characteristics of pension fund held stock. (shrink)
Abstract After defining a moral stance, the article considers whether teachers are required, by virtue of their office, to adopt a publicly approved moral stance or are (...) able to allow their teaching to be guided by their personal ethical opinions. If the former, there is difficulty in a pluralistic society of knowing what is being asked of them. Since teachers are also members of society the possibility of wide divergence is not great. Modern educational theories, however, imply that a teacher should not try to transmit a moral stance, but lead the pupils to a search for personal autonomy, and the teacher's own opinions may be less significant than in a didactic situation. When there are agreed ethical theories of society, the teacher is justified in teaching about them alongside the moral values implied in the idea of education. Finally the type of teacher that can meet these demands is discussed. (shrink)
Recently a number of AIDS/AZT research studies, carried out by U.S. universities, have come under intense ethical scrutiny. In these studies, control groups of HIV-positive (...) pregnant women were being given a placebo rather than AZT. Such research protocols would be illegal if practiced in the U.S. I examine a number of lamentable ethical lapses in the studies, and conclude that at least some of these ethical problems are traceable to a troubling contradiction between differing international codes of ethics. In a word, some international codes mandate that all research subjects (including control groups) receive the best standard of care available in the country sponsoring the research, while others suggest that providing only a “Iocal” standard of care is ethically appropriate. I argue that these two ethical mandates cannot both be satisfied, and that host country populations will remain subject to exploitation unless this contradiction is resolved. (shrink)
In “A Refutation of Environmental Ethics” Janna Thompson argues that by assigning intrinsic value to nonhuman elements of nature either our evaluations become (1) arbitrary, and therefore (...) unjustified, or (2) impractical, or (3) justified and practical, but only by reflecting human interest, thus failing to be truly intrinsic to nonhuman nature. There are a number of possible responses to her argument, some of which have been made explicitly in reply to Thompson and others which are implicit in the literature. In this discussion I describe still another response, one which takes Thompson’s concerns about value seriously, but does not assign nature intrinsic or nonanthropocentric value. I suggest a relational environmental ethic as the basis for a genuinely ethical stance toward nature in which our relations to nature are a principal object of ethical concern. (shrink)
We present a machine learning approach to robust textual inference, in which parses of the text and the hypothesis sentences are used to measure their asymmetric “similarity”, (...) and thereby to decide if the hypothesis can be inferred. This idea is realized in two different ways. In the first, each sentence is represented as a graph (extracted from a dependency parser) in which the nodes are words/phrases, and the links represent dependencies. A learned, asymmetric, graph-matching cost is then computed to measure the similarity between the text and the hypothesis. In the second approach, the text and the hypothesis are parsed into the logical formula-like representation used by (Harabagiu et al., 2000). An abductive theorem prover (using learned costs for making different types of assumptions in the proof) is then applied to try to infer the hypothesis from the text, and the total “cost” of proving the hypothesis is used to decide if the hypothesis is entailed. (shrink)
One significant way in which place is represented is through books based on old photographs and postcards. Recontextualised in such books, historical photos can be used to (...) create mesmeric myths about a locality. This paper explores the genre through four works about areas in Sheffield, a city in the north of England. The book for the well to do suburb, Crosspool, constructs a quaint rural past. Two representations of a working class district are perhaps a little more successful in recovering a personally significant past. The history of a local steel firm avoids issues of social conflict and exploitation by adopting a documentary tone. Thegenre trades on the active interest of seeing familiar scenes as they were in the past, but fails to develop interpretative strategies, such as asking about the context of photos’ original creation or reflecting on how they have been reused. (shrink)
Computer-based logic proofs are a form of unnatural language in which the process and structure of proof generation can be observed in considerable detail. We have (...) class='Hi'>been studying how students respond to multimodal logic teaching, and performance measures have already indicated that students' pre-existing cognitive styles have a significant impact on teaching outcome. Furthermore, a large corpus of proofs has been gathered via automatic logging of proof development. This paper applies a series of techniques, including corpus statistical methods, to the proof logs. The results indicate that students' cognitive styles influence the structure of their logical discourse, via their differing methods of handling abstract information in diagrams, and transferring information between modalities. (shrink)
Beyond the clash of civilizations -- Martin Luther King, Jr. and the spirit of non-violence -- The market economy and the role of religion -- The age of (...) class='Hi'>the internet: interplay of danger and promise -- Rapidly changing times: return to the origins of religion -- Courageous heroes of non-violence -- The future of China and India : great spiritual heritages -- The future of university education -- Mahayana Buddhism and twenty-first century civilization -- Religion, values and politics in a religiously pluralistic world. (shrink)
Abstract The myths engendered by the Titanic disaster suggest the essentially literary character of myths, the importance of individuals in their creation and consumption, the frequent insistence (...) of their consumers on literal?historical truth, and thus the importance of discerning whether, and why, the creators of a myth distort the truth. The myth of the Titanic should be understood as a literal?historical myth with an especially strong literary character and claim to truth; a myth whose interest has not been exhausted by time because it raises perennial existential issues, and more superficially because it reflects the widespread assumption that disaster is readily avoidable and can be explained only by reference to stupidity or malfeasance. (shrink)
Abstract This paper explores the grounds upon which moral judgment of a person's beliefs is properly made. The beliefs in question are non-moral beliefs and the (...) class='Hi'> objects of moral judgment are individual instances of believing. We argue that instances of believing may be morally wrong on any of three distinct grounds: (i) by constituting a moral hazard, (ii) by being the result of immoral inquiry, or (iii) by arising from vicious inner processes of belief formation. On this way of articulating the basis of moral judgment of belief it becomes clear that rational and epistemic norms do not exhaust the kinds of normative judgment properly made of a person's state of believing. We argue that there are instances of believing that are both rational and true and yet morally wrong. (shrink)
Some propositions add more information to bodies of propositions than do others. We start with intuitive considerations on qualitative comparisons of information added . Central to these are (...) class='Hi'> considerations bearing on conjunctions and on negations. We find that we can discern two distinct, incompatible, notions of information added. From the comparative notions we pass to quantitative measurement of information added. In this we borrow heavily from the literature on quantitative representations of qualitative, comparative conditional probability. We look at two ways to obtain a quantitative conception of information added. One, the most direct, mirrors Bernard Koopman’s construction of conditional probability: by making a strong structural assumption, it leads to a measure that is, transparently, some function of a function P which is, formally, an assignment of conditional probability (in fact, a Popper function). P reverses the information added order and mislocates the natural zero of the scale so some transformation of this scale is needed but the derivation of P falls out so readily that no particular transformation suggests itself. The Cox–Good–Aczél method assumes the existence of a quantitative measure matching the qualitative relation, and builds on the structural constraints to obtain a measure of information that can be rescaled as, formally, an assignment of conditional probability. A classical result of Cantor’s, subsequently strengthened by Debreu, goes some way towards justifying the assumption of the existence of a quantitative scale. What the two approaches give us is a pointer towards a novel interpretation of probability as a rescaling of a measure of information added. (shrink)
Cox’s theorem states that, under certain assumptions, any measure of belief is isomorphic to a probability measure. This theorem, although intended as a justification of the (...) class='Hi'>subjectivist interpretation of probability theory, is sometimes presented as an argument for more controversial theses. Of particular interest is the thesis that the only coherent means of representing uncertainty is via the probability calculus. In this paper I examine the logical assumptions of Cox’s theorem and I show how these impinge on the philosophical conclusions thought to be supported by the theorem. I show that the more controversial thesis is not supported by Cox’s theorem. (shrink)
To the Editor: The sensitive discussion by Courtney Campbell and Jessica Cox on hospice care and physician-assisted death (“Hospice and Physician-Assisted Death: Collaboration, Compliance, and Complicity (...) class='Hi'>,” September-October 2010) is a model blend of ethical analysis, empirical study, and policy assessment in bioethics. The legalization of physician aid in dying has raised important ethical issues for hospice that go to the broader question of its evolving mission and its place in the landscape of end-of-life care in our society. Hospice began, one might say, as a philosophy of care of the dying that formed a countercultural movement. It offered a systematic and holistic approach to care involving not .. (shrink)
In this article we use proportional hazards models to examine how low-level processes affect the probability of making a saccade over time, through the period of (...) class='Hi'>fixation, during reading. We apply the Cox proportional hazards model to investigate how launch distance (relative to word beginning), fixation location (relative to word center), and word frequency affect the hazard of a saccadic response. This model requires that covariates have a constant impact on the hazard over time, the assumption of proportional hazards. We show that this assumption is not supported. The impact of the covariates changes with the time passed since fixation onset. To account for the non-proportional hazards we fit step functions of time, resulting in a model with time-varying effects on the hazard. We evaluate the ability to predict the timing of saccades on held-out fixation data. The model with time-varying effects performs better in predicting the timing of saccades for fixations as short as 100 ms and as long as 500 ms, when compared both to a baseline model without covariates and a model which assumes constant covariate effects. This result suggests that the time-varying effects model better recovers the time course of low-level processes that influence the decision to move the eyes. (shrink)
Guidelines for Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) or research ethics committees exist at national and international levels. These guidelines are based on ethical principles and establish an internationally (...) acceptable standard for the review and conduct of medical research. Having attained a multinational consensus about what these fundamental guidelines should be, IRBs are left to interpret the guidelines and devise their own means of implementing them. Individual and community values bear on the interpretation of the guidelines so different IRBs attain different levels of effectiveness. In the Caribbean and Pan American regions there are few IRBs. Obstacles to the establishment and function of IRBs are exacerbated in developing regions like these by differences in language, literacy, and local value systems; education, administrative expertise, facilities, and access to information are also limited. A regional IRB network might facilitate more uniform ethical review in developing countries, and simplify IRB procedures. (shrink)
Climate change harms health and damages and diminishes environmental resources. Gradually it will cause health systems to reduce services, standards of care, and opportunities to express patient (...) autonomy. Prominent public health organizations are responding with preparedness, mitigation, and educational programs. The design and effectiveness of these programs, and of similar programs in other sectors, would be enhanced by greater understanding of the values and tradeoffs associated with activities and public policies that drive climate change. Bioethics could generate such understanding by exposing the harms and benefits in different cultural, socioeconomic, and geographic contexts, and through interdisciplinary risk assessments. Climate change is a bioethics problem because it harms everyone and involves health, values, and responsibilities. This article initiates dialog about the responsibility of bioethics to promote transparency and understanding of the social values and conflicts associated with climate change, and the actions and public policies that allow climate change to worsen. (shrink)
In psychiatry some disorders of cognition are distinguished from instances of normal cognitive functioning and from other disorders in virtue of their surface features rather than in (...) virtue of the underlying mechanisms responsible for their occurrence. Aetiological considerations often cannot play a significant classificatory and diagnostic role, because there is no sufficient knowledge or consensus about the causal history of many psychiatric disorders. Moreover, it is not always possible to uniquely identify a pathological behaviour as the symptom of a certain disorder, as disorders that are likely to differ both in their causal histories and in their overall manifestations may give rise to very similar patterns of behaviour. -/- Consider delusions as an example. It wouldn’t be correct to define delusions as those beliefs people form as a result of a neurobiological deficit and a hypothesis-evaluation deficit (as some versions of the two-factor theory of delusions suggest), because for some delusions no neurobiological deficit may be found, and reasoning biases and motivational factors may be contributors to the formation of the delusion (e.g. McKay et al., 2005). Moreover, it would be a mistake to define delusions as symptoms of schizophrenia alone, because they occur also in other disorders, including dementia, amnesia, and delusional disorders. Thus, aetiological considerations may appear in the description and analysis of delusions, but do not feature prominently in their definition. -/- In this paper I argue that the surface features used as criteria for the classification and diagnosis of disorders of cognition are often epistemic in character. I shall offer two examples: confabulations and delusions are defined as beliefs or narratives that fail to meet standards of accuracy and justification. Although classifications and diagnoses based on features of people’s observable behaviour are necessary at these early stages of neuropsychiatric research, given the variety of conditions in which certain phenomena appear, I shall attempt to show that current epistemic accounts of confabulations and delusions have limitations. Epistemic criteria can guide both research and clinical practice, but fail to provide sufficient conditions for the identification of delusions and confabulations, and fail to demarcate pathological from non-pathological narratives or beliefs. -/- Another limitation of current epistemic accounts – which I shall not address here – is the excessive focus on epistemic faults of confabulations and delusions at the expense of their epistemically neutral or advantageous features (see Bortolotti and Cox, 2009). This may lead to a misconception of delusions and confabulations, and to an oversimplification in the assessment of the needs of people who require clinical treatment for their psychotic symptoms. (shrink)
Machine generated contents note: Chronology; Introduction John M. Najemy; 1. Niccol- Machiavelli: a portrait James B. Atkinson; 2. Machiavelli in the Chancery Robert Black; 3. Machiavelli, Piero (...) Soderini, and the Republic of 1494-1512 Roslyn Pesman; 4. Machiavelli and the Medici Humfrey Butters; 5. Machiavelli's Prince in the epic tradition Wayne A. Rebhorn; 6. Society, class, and state in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy John M. Najemy; 7. Machiavelli's military project and the Art of War Mikael Hörnqvist; 8. Machiavelli's History of Florence Anna Maria Cabrini; 9. Machiavelli and Rome: the Republic as ideal and as history J. G. A. Pocock; 10. Philosophy and religion in Machiavelli Alison Brown; 11. Rhetoric and ethics in Machiavelli Virginia Cox; 12. Machiavelli and poetry Albert Russell Ascoli and Angela Matilde Capodivacca; 13. Comedian, tragedian: Machiavelli and traditions of Renaissance theatre Ronald Martinez; 14. Machiavelli and gender Barbara Spackman; 15. Machiavelli's afterlife and reputation to the eighteenth century Victoria Kahn; 16. Machiavelli in political thought from the Age of Revolutions to the present Je;re;mie Barthas; Index. (shrink)
Many people believe that there is a Dutch Book argument establishing that the principle of countable additivity is a condition of coherence. De Finetti himself did not, (...) but for reasons that are at first sight perplexing. I show that he rejected countable additivity, and hence the Dutch Book argument for it, because countable additivity conflicted with intuitive principles about the scope of authentic consistency constraints. These he often claimed were logical in nature, but he never attempted to relate this idea to deductive logic and its own concept of consistency. This I do, showing that at one level the definitions of deductive and probabilistic consistency are identical, differing only in the nature of the constraints imposed. In the probabilistic case I believe that R.T. Cox's scale-free axioms for subjective probability are the most suitable candidates. 1 Introduction 2 Coherence and Consistency 3 The Infinite Fair Lottery 4 The Puzzle Resolved—But Replaced by Another 5 Countable Additivity, Conglomerability and Dutch Books 6 The Probability Axioms and Cox's Theorem 7 Truth and Probability 8 Conclusion: Logical Omniscience CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)
In management theory and business practice, the dealing with diversity, especially a diverse workforce, has played a prominent role in recent years. In a globalizing economy companies (...) recognized potential benefits of a multicultural workforce and tried to create more inclusive work environments. However, many organizations have been disappointed with the results they have achieved in their efforts to meet the diversity challenge [Cox: 2001, Creating the Multicultural Organization (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco)]. We see the reason for this in the fact that while much attention has been paid to the strategic dimension of diversity policies, systems, and processes, much less thought has been given to the normative dimension, the norms and values involved. Given the fact that diversity is essentially about cultural norms and values, appropriate reflection work becomes a fundamental task to create a truly inclusive work environment where people from diverse backgrounds feel respected and recognized. Therefore, we focus in this article on the challenge of building an inclusive diversity culture showing that such a culture of inclusion has to be built on solid moral grounds. We present a conceptual framework of inclusion based on a moral theory of recognition and introduce the founding principles of reciprocal understanding, standpoint plurality and mutual enabling, trust and integrity. After revealing barriers that hinder a culture of inclusion from emerging we shed light on the process of developing such a culture which involves four essential transformational stages: The first phase focuses on raising awareness, building understanding and encouraging reflection. The second phase deals with the development of a vision of inclusion as an important step to define the change direction. In a third phase key management concepts and principles should be re-thought. This leads to the fourth, action-oriented phase, that focuses on an integrated Human Relations Management (HRM)1 system that helps implement change by doing both, translating the founding principles via competencies into observable and measurable behavior and fostering the development, reinforcement and recognition of inclusive behavior. (shrink)
Bioethics at the Movies explores the ways in which popular films engage basic bioethical concepts and concerns. Twenty philosophically grounded essays use cinematic tools such as character (...) and plot development, scene-setting, and narrative-framing to demonstrate a range of principles and topics in contemporary medical ethics. The first section plumbs popular and bioethical thought on birth, abortion, genetic selection, and personhood through several films, including The Cider House Rules, Citizen Ruth, Gattaca, and I, Robot. In the second section, the contributors examine medical practice and troubling questions about the quality and commodification of life by way of Dirty Pretty Things, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and other movies. The third section's essays use Million Dollar Baby, Critical Care, Big Fish, and Soylent Green to show how the medical profession and society at large view issues related to aging, death, and dying. A final section makes use of Extreme Measures and select Spanish and Japanese films to discuss two foundational matters in bioethics: the role of theories and principles in medicine and the importance of cultural context in devising care. Structured to mirror bioethics and cinema classes, this innovative work includes end-of-chapter questions for further consideration and contributions from scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Israel, Spain, and Australia. Contributors: Robert Arp, Ph.D., Michael C. Brannigan, Ph.D., Matthew Burstein, Ph.D., Antonio Casado da Rocha, Ph.D., Stephen Coleman, Ph.D., Jason T. Eberl, Ph.D., Paul J. Ford, Ph.D., Helen Frowe, M.A., Colin Gavaghan, Ph.D., Richard Hanley, Ph.D., Nancy Hansen, Ph.D., Al-Yasha Ilhaam, Ph.D., Troy Jollimore, Ph.D., Amy Kind, Ph.D., Zana Marie Lutfiyya, Ph.D., Terrance McConnell, Ph.D., Andy Miah, Ph.D., Nathan Norbis, Ph.D., Kenneth Richman, Ph.D., Karen D. Schwartz, LL.B., M.A., Sandra Shapshay, Ph.D., Daniel Sperling, LL.M., S.J.D., Becky Cox White, R.N., Ph.D., Clark Wolf, Ph.D. (shrink)
Deborah Mayo's view of science is that learning occurs by severely testing specific hypotheses. Mayo expounded this thesis in her (1996) Error and the Growth of (...) class='Hi'>Experimental Knowledge (EGEK). This volume consists of a series of exchanges between Mayo and distinguished philosophers representing competing views of the philosophy of science. The tone of the exchanges is lively, edifying and enjoyable. Mayo's error-statistical philosophy of science is critiqued in the light of positions which place more emphasis on large-scale theories. The result clarifies Mayo's account and highlights her contribution to the philosophy of science -- in particular, her contribution to the philosophy of those sciences that rely heavily on statistical analysis. The second half of the volume considers the application (or extension) of an error-statistical philosophy of science to theory testing in economics, causal modelling and legal epistemology. The volume also includes a contribution to the frequentist philosophy of statistics written by Mayo in collaboration with Sir David Cox. (shrink)
One of the themes running through this issue of the Hastings Center Report is the complexity of how private moral commitments cash out in the public sphere. (...) It's a theme I find both fascinating and important.The lead article is about how hospices in Oregon have dealt with the state's law permitting physician-assisted death. Most patients who have sought physician-assisted death in Oregon did so while in hospice, suggesting to some people that hospices are centrally involved in physician-assisted death—both in patients' decision-making and in administering the medications. In fact, their involvement is much more limited and circumspect, as authors Courtney Campbell and Jessica Cox document.The focus of the article .. (shrink)
This study of philanthropy among large Black-owned businesses provides insights into a sector of business giving which has not been studied. Results indicate that philanthropy and (...) class='Hi'>ethical justifications play a more important role in minority business enterprises than in non-minority firms studied previously. (shrink)
In a recent critique of informed consent, Robert Veatch argues that the practice is in principle unable to attain the goals for which it was developed. We (...) argue that Veatch's focus on the theoretical impossibility of determining patients' best interests is misapplied to the practical discipline of medicine, and that he wrongly assumes that the patient-physician communication fails to provide the knowledge needed to insure the patient's best interests. We further argue that Veatch's suggested alternative, value-based patient-professional pairing, is, on his own terms, impossible to implement. Finally, we reexamine the philosophical and practical justifications for informed consent and conclude that the practice should be retained. (shrink)
