Placing Goodenough and Deacon’s “From Biology to Consciousness to Morality” against the background of the ethical naturalism of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British moral theory, Yeager highlights the contribution the authors make to the moral sense tradition as well as indicating the limitations of such accounts of moral agency, judgment, and conduct. Yeager also identifies two strands of the essay that seem to open toward a more comprehensive account than the authors actually give. The first concerns the “interplay between self-interest and (...) pro-sociality,” and the other concerns the ethical implications of coevolution. On the latter point, the work of G. H. Mead is offered as an illuminating contrast. (shrink)
Numerous articles in the popular press together with an examination of websites associated with the medical, legal, engineering, financial, and other professions leave no doubt that the role of professions has been impacted by the Internet. While offering the promise of the democratization of expertise – expertise made available to the public at convenient times and locations and at an affordable cost – the Internet is also driving a reexamination of the concept of professional identity and related claims of expertise (...) and standards of integrity. This paper begins with a presentation of case studies illustrating the ease by which impostors infiltrate the ranks of professionals. Reports of individuals masquerading as professionals via the Internet often reveal that these imposters cause harm to the unwary victims who rely on assertions of professional expertise. Such reports motivated the authors to examine the origins and evolution of the traditional roles of professions and professionals in today’s society, as well as question how, or whether, the standards for professional practice have been adapted to the challenges posed by technology, i.e., do statements of professional ethics provide a ‘guiding light’ for practitioners and their clients in the cyber age? The authors challenge the professions to consider the notion that technology forces a confrontation between the guild-like aspects of a profession that have served, on the one hand, to protect a profession from encroachment and, on the other hand, have purportedly protected the public. (shrink)
Abstract The paper considers moral and religious education programmes appropriate for Nigeria. Starting with a brief analysis of the current crisis in moral, spiritual and political beliefs, the paper progresses by analysing traditional Nigerian education and the approach to moral education which it advocated. It then analyses the epistemological underpinnings of traditional moral education as well as the social institutions supporting it. A brief section outlining certain shortcomings in traditional education follows. This is then followed by a consideration of contemporary (...) approaches to both moral and religious education by focussing on the question of the possible independence of moral from religious education. Having agreed with certain writers that the two are independent, the paper concludes with a sub?section on the aims of moral education as a distinct activity. (shrink)
Why focus on the work of William Blake in a journal dedicated to religious ethics? The question is neither trivial nor rhetorical. Blake's work is certainly not in anyone's canon of significant texts for the study of Christian or, more broadly, religious ethics. Yet Blake, however subversive his views, sought to lay out a Christian vision of the good, alternated between prophetic denunciations of the world's folly and harrowing laments over the wreck of the world's promise, and (...) wrote poetry as if poetry might mend the world. Setting imagination against the calculations of reason and the comfort of custom, Blake's poems inspire questions about the relationship of ethics to prophecy, and open the possibility that ethics itself would be markedly enriched could it find a place for what Thomas J. J. Altizer has called Christian epic poetry. (shrink)
In this article we assess the extant literature on women’s careers appearing in selected career, management and psychology journals from 1990 to the present to determine what is currently known about the state of women’s careers at the dawn of the 21st century. Based on this review, we identify four patterns that cumulatively contribute to the current state of the literature on women’s careers: women’s careers are embedded in women’s larger-life contexts, families and careers are central to women’s lives, women’s (...) career paths reflect a wide range and variety of patterns, and human and social capital are critical factors for women’s careers. We also identify paradoxes that highlight the disconnection between organizational practice and scholarly research associated with each of the identified patterns. Our overall conclusion is that male-defined constructions of work and career success continue to dominate organizational research and practice. We provide direction for a research agenda on women’s careers that addresses the development of integrative career theories relevant for women’s contemporary lives in hopes of providing fresh avenues for conceptualizing career success for women. Propositions are identified for more strongly connecting career scholarship to organizational practice in support of women’s continued career advancement. (shrink)
The Clinical Ethics Credentialing Project (CECP) was intiated in 2007 in response to the lack of uniform standards for both the training of clinical ethics consultants, and for evaluating their work as consultants. CECP participants, all practicing clinical ethics consultants, met monthly to apply a standard evaluation instrument, the “QI tool”, to their consultation notes. This paper describes, from a qualitative perspective, how participants grappled with applying standards to their work. Although the process was marked by resistance and disagreement, it (...) was also noteworthy for the sustained engagement by participants over the year of the project, and a high level of acceptance by its conclusion. (shrink)
After recognizing that technologies are socially constructed, questions arise concerning how technologies should be constructed, by what processes, and granting how much influence to whom. Because partisanship, uncertainty, and disagreement are inevitable in trying to answer these questions, reconstructivist scholarship should embrace the desirability of thoughtful partisanship, should focus on strategies for coping intelligently with uncertainties, and should make central the study of social processes for coping with disagreement regarding technoscience and its utilization. That often will entail siding with have-nots, (...) meaning that reconstructivist scholars often will be opposing the behaviors of government, business, and technoscientific elites. Because reconstructivists normally will be outnumbered, we need to devote more systematic professional attention to setting our collective agenda concerning what is most worth researching. (shrink)
Moral inversion, the fusion of skepticism and utopianism, is a preoccupying theme in Polanyi’s work from 1946 onward. In part 1, the author analyzes Polanyi’s complex account of the intellectual developments that are implicated in a cascade of inversions in which the good is lost through complicated, misguided, and unrealistic dedication to the good. Parts 2 and 3 then address two of the most basic of the objections to Polanyi’s theory voiced by Zdzislaw Najder. To Najder’s complaint that Polanyi is (...) not clear in his use of the term “moral,” the author replies that the pivotal distinction in Polanyi’s moral theory is not the moral against the intellectual, but the passions against the appetites. In considering Najder’s complaint that Polanyi’s argument represents a naive instance of ethnocentric absolutism, the author undertakes to show Polanyi’s consistency and perspectival self-awareness by focusing on Polanyi’s account of authority and dissent within a tradition, as well as on Polanyi’s treatment of persuasion as a heuristic passion. (shrink)
The article presents examples of economists pressing methodologies on students and professional colleagues without actually articulating, and thus exposing to critical examination, the methodological precepts being urged. Such behavior has twisted economic research and doctrine. Topics discussed (with various degrees of approval and disapproval) include the ?Cartesian? appeal to first principles, justificationism, supposed rigor, modeling, the decorative use of symbols, the parade of technique, abuses of econometrics, nonquantitative evidence, competition among hypotheses, fallacy-mongering, fads and frontiersmanship, academic incentives and games, the (...) supposed analogy between markets for academic research and for ordinary goods, and clarity versus obscurantism. The article calls for exposing and examining tacit preachments. It calls on economists to support each other in resisting inappropriate pressures. (shrink)
In The Political Limits of Environmental Regulation: Tracking the Unicorn, Bruce Yandle identifies some of the key weaknesses of federal environmental regulation, including its regressive effects, its tendency to better serve selected political interests than the cause of environmental protection, and the EPA's failure to follow sensible priorities. Additional problems may also be cited, including the tendency to exclude citizens? voices from deliberations regarding the degree of pollution control. But Yandle's conclusion regarding the likely superiority of decentralized and market?sensitive alternatives (...) to centralized regulation is overstated. Any such alternatives necessarily will continue to be grounded in relatively uniform national standards. Moreover, in the context of American political economy, market?based controls would continue to deny many citizens real voice and choice. The quest continues to be for the combination of controls that best preserves both the environment and liberty. (shrink)
The social novel ought not to be confused with didacticism in literature and ought not to be expected to provide prescriptions for the cure of social ills. Neither should it necessarily be viewed as ephemeral. After examining justifications of the social novel offered by William Dean Howells (in the 1880s) and Jonathan Franzen (in the 1990s), the author explores the way in which social novels alter perceptions and responses at levels of sensibility that are not usually susceptible to rational argument, (...) push back moral horizons, contribute to the creation of social conscience, and expose the complexity and contextuality of moral discernment. As a concrete example, Howells's 1889 novel "A Hazard of New Fortunes" is analyzed (and defended against its detractors) in terms of its sophisticated treatment of the dilemmas that arise from a recognition of personal complicity in structural sin, its disclosure of the context-indexed evolution of values, and its attention to the importance and fragility of social trust. (shrink)
ante and Governance brings to the most grandiose of Dante's messages in the ivine Comedy critical viewpoints whose originality would, at any time, constitute an important addition to Dante scholarship, but the book is also notable for an approach which during the course of its composition spontaneously evolved as pragmatic and historical, particularly when seen against much contemporary Dante cricism. It explores Dante's breathtaking ambition to convince Europe's rulers and their subjects to create and embrace a universal peace, guaranteed by (...) Pope and Holy Roman Emperor, which might afford serenity for mankind fully to develop its wonderful potentialities. In that context, a group of scholars, internationally known for their expertise not only in Dante studies but also in medieval literature and history, was invited to Oxford to discuss the poet's objectives. Each chose to argue a case from a close reading of Dante's own texts, using clear and jargon-free lamguage. Those deliberations created a well-focused and coherent group of papers on a variety of subjects, ranging from an aesthetic appreciation of Dante's depiction of free-will and moral responsibility, to a feminist perception of his attitude to the role of women in fourteenth-century Florentine public life. (shrink)
Working from an integration of Michael Polanyi‘s image of learning as self-destruction and Max Weber’s analysis of the ethics of scholarship, the author explores the implications of Polanyi’s argument concerning “the depth to which the . . . person is involved even in . . . an elementary heuristic effort” (367). In the process, the author raises questions about current expectations concerning faculty “performance” and current methods of assessing faculty success in the classroom.
Ranging himself against philosophical and theological traditions that he considered “bankrupt,” William H. Poteat sought to set philosophy back on its feet by exemplifying the way one might reason philosophically from a different set of assumptions. His project can, in this respect, be usefully compared to that of F. H. Jacobi two centuries earlier. Poteat and Michael Polanyi offered attuned critiques of philosophical presuppositions and practices. Constructively, both were committed to bringing home the agent and knower who had been evacuated (...) by depersonalized and abstracted accounts of being and knowing. (shrink)
This article discusses the specific ethical dilemma of obtaining informed consent and ensuring confidentiality and participant well-being while conducting a qualitative research study with novice ESL teachers in a Teacher Study Group. The discussion outlines their process of resolution of the ambiguities inherent in the research process – in essence the researchers’ personal journey of discovery. The article concludes with the broader implications for making the research process more transparent for other academic researchers working in the field of language-teacher cognition.
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 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)
Descartes is often accused of having fragmented the human being into two independent substances, mind and body, with no clear strategy for explaining the apparent unity of human experience. Deborah Brown argues that, contrary to this view, Descartes did in fact have a conception of a single, integrated human being, and that in his view this conception is crucial to the success of human beings as rational and moral agents and as practitioners of science. The passions are pivotal in (...) this, and in a rich and wide-ranging discussion she examines Descartes' place in the tradition of thought about the passions, the metaphysics of actions and passions, sensory representation, and Descartes' account of self-mastery and virtue. Her study is an important and original reading not only of Descartes' account of mind-body unity but also of his theory of mind. (shrink)
This is a book about Aristotle's philosophy of language, interpreted in a framework that provides a comprehensive interpretation of Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology and science. The aims of the book are to explicate the description of meaning contained in De Interpretatione and to show the relevance of that theory of meaning to much of the rest of Arisotle's philosophy. In the process DeborahModrak reveals how that theory of meaning has been much maligned.
Research on detrimental workplace behaviors has increased recently, predominantly focusing on justice issues. Research from the integrity testing literature, which is grounded in trait theory, has not received as much attention in the management literature. Trait theory, agency theory, and psychological contracts theory each have different predictions about employee performance that is harmful to the organization. While on the surface they appear contradictory, this paper describes how each can be (...) integrated to increase our understanding of detrimental workplace behaviors.Deborah L. Kidder is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management at Towson University, in Towson, MD, USA. Her Ph.D. is in Industrial Relations from the University of Minnesta. Her research interests involve issues of trust and equity, perceptions of (un) fairness at work, and the consequences of (un)fair treatment for employees and organizations. She teaches courses in Human Resource Management, Organizational Behavior, Leadership, and Negotiation. (shrink)
This article constitutes excerpts of a videotaped discussion hosted by the New England Journal of Medicine on January 14, 2008, concerning a range of topics on lethal injection prompted by the United States Supreme Court's January 7 oral arguments in Baze v. Rees. Dr. Atul Gawande moderated the roundtable that included two anesthesiologists - Dr. Robert Truog and Dr. David Waisel - as well as law professor Deborah Denno. The discussion focused on the drugs used in lethal injection executions, (...) whether physicians should participate, potential alternatives, and some of the legal parameters of Baze. (shrink)
Deborah Schiffrin looks at two important tasks of language--presenting 'who' we are talking about (the referent) and 'what happened' to them (their actions and attributes) in a narrative--and explores how this presentation alters in relation to emergent forms and meanings. Drawing on examples from both face-to-face talk and public discourse, she analyzes a variety of repairs, reformulations of referents, and retellings of narratives, ranging from word-level repairs within a single turn-at-talk, to life story narratives told years apart.
Bakhtin and the Visual Arts is the first book to assess the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas as they relate to painting and sculpture. First published in the 1960s, Bakhtin's writings introduced the concepts of carnival and dialogue or dialogism, which have had significant impact in such diverse fields as literature and literary theory, philosophy, theology, biology, and psychology. In his four early aesthetic essays, written between 1919 and 1926, and before he began to focus on linguistic and literary categories, (...) Bakhtin worked on a larger philosophy of creativity, which was never completed. Deborah Haynes's in-depth study of his aesthetics, especially his theory of creativity, analyses its applicability to contemporary art theory and criticism. The author argues that Bakhtin, with such categories as answerability, outsideness and unfinalisability, offers a conceptual basis for interpreting the moral dimensions of creative activity. (shrink)
According to a widely accepted constraint on the content of intentions, here called the exclusivity constraint, one cannot intend to perform another agent’s action, even if one might be able to intend that she performs it. For example, while one can intend that one’s guest leaves before midnight, one cannot intend to perform her act of leaving. However, Deborah Tollefsen’s (2005) account of joint activity requires participants to have intentions-in-action (in John Searle’s (1983) sense) that violate this constraint. I (...) argue that the exclusivity constraint should not be accepted as an unconditional constraint on the contents of intentions-in-action: one may intend to perform a basic action that belongs both to oneself and to another agent. Based on the phenomenology of tool use, I first argue that intentions-in-action of one’s basic actions may be technologically extended, meaning that their contents are not restricted to concern the agent’s bodily movements. In analogy with this, I then argue that the phenomenology of some skillful joint activities supports the idea that one’s basic intentions-in-action may be socially extended, in violation of the widely accepted exclusivity constraint. Tollefsen’s account is specifically constructed to account for the joint activities of infants and toddlers who lack the capacity to think of others as planning agents and grasp their plan-like intentions (a capacity required by Michael Bratman’s (1992, 1993, 2009a, b) influential account of joint activity). At the end of the paper, I raise some doubts regarding the extent to which infants and toddlers have socially extended intentions-in-action. (shrink)
In modern, Western societies the purpose of schooling is to ensure that school-goers acquire knowledge of pre-existing practices, events, entities and so on. The knowledge that is learned is then tested to see if the learner has acquired a correct or adequate understanding of it. For this reason, it can be argued that schooling is organised around a representational epistemology: one which holds that knowledge is an accurate representation of something that is separate from knowledge itself. Since the object of (...) knowledge is assumed to exist separately from the knowledge itself, this epistemology can also be considered ‘spatial.’ In this paper we show how ideas from complexity have challenged the spatial epistemology’ of representation and we explore possibilities for an alternative ‘temporal’ understanding of knowledge in its relationship to reality. In addition to complexity, our alternative takes its inspiration from Deweyan ‘transactional realism’ and deconstruction. We suggest that ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’ should not be understood as separate systems which somehow have to be brought into alignment with each other, but that they are part of the same emerging complex system which is never fully ‘present’ in any (discrete) moment in time. This not only introduces the notion of time into our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and reality, but also points to the importance of acknowledging the role of the ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘incalculable’. With this understanding knowledge reaches us not as something we receive but as a response, which brings forth new worlds because it necessarily adds something (which was not present anywhere before it appeared) to what came before. This understanding of knowledge suggests that the acquisition of curricular content should not be considered an end in itself. Rather, curricular content should be used to bring forth that which is incalculable from the perspective of the present. The epistemology of emergence therefore calls for a switch in focus for curricular thinking, away from questions about presentation and representation and towards questions about engagement and response. (shrink)
Kuhn maintains that what marks the transition to a science is the ability to carry out ‘normal’ science—a practice he characterizes as abandoning the kind of testing that Popper lauds as the hallmark of science. Examining Kuhn's own contrast with Popper, I propose to recast Kuhnian normal science. Thus recast, it is seen to consist of severe and reliable tests of low-level experimental hypotheses (normal tests) and is, indeed, the place to look to demarcate science. While thereby vindicating Kuhn on (...) demarcation, my recasting of normal science is seen to tell against Kuhn's view of revolutionary science. (shrink)
I document some of the main evidence showing that E. S. Pearson rejected the key features of the behavioral-decision philosophy that became associated with the Neyman-Pearson Theory of statistics (NPT). I argue that NPT principles arose not out of behavioral aims, where the concern is solely with behaving correctly sufficiently often in some long run, but out of the epistemological aim of learning about causes of experimental results (e.g., distinguishing genuine from spurious effects). The view Pearson did hold gives a (...) deeper understanding of NPT tests than their typical formulation as accept-reject routines, against which criticisms of NPT are really directed. The Pearsonian view that emerges suggests how NPT tests may avoid these criticisms while still retaining what is central to these methods: the control of error probabilities. (shrink)
This article discusses some``historical milestones'' in computer ethics, aswell as two alternative visions of the futureof computer ethics. Topics include theimpressive foundation for computer ethics laiddown by Norbert Wiener in the 1940s and early1950s; the pioneering efforts of Donn Parker,Joseph Weizenbaum and Walter Maner in the1970s; Krystyna Gorniak's hypothesis thatcomputer ethics will evolve into ``globalethics''; and Deborah Johnson's speculation thatcomputer ethics may someday ``disappear''.
Throughout his work, Adorno contrasted liberal ideology to the newer and more pernicious form of ideology found in positivism. The paper explores the philosophical basis for Adorno's contrast between liberal and positivist ideology. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno describes all ideology as identity-thinking. However, on his view, liberal ideology represents a more rational form of identity-thinking. Fearing that positivism might obliterate our capacity to distinguish between what is and what ought to be, Adorno sought a more secure foundation for his critique (...) of existing conditions. He found this basis in liberal discourse. In the concept of freedom, for example, Adorno located ideas or ideals that negate and transcend the given. One of the conditions for the possibility of critical thought lies in such ideas; critical thinking consists in wielding the more emphatic content of concepts against the pathic rationality of existing conditions. Far from prescribing mimesis as the antidote to a damaged social, political and economic reality, then, Adorno advocates a more dialectically inflected use of concepts as the basis for social criticism. Key Words: Adorno • Critique • Identity • Ideology • Liberalism • Positivism. (shrink)
The article explores the character of Adorno’s materialism while fleshing out his Marxist-inspired idea of natural history. Adorno offers a non-reductionist and non-dualistic account of the relationship between matter and mind, human history and natural history. Emerging from nature and remaining tied to it, the human mind is nonetheless qualitatively distinct from nature owing to its limited independence from it. Yet, just as human history is always also natural history, because human beings can never completely dissociate themselves from the natural (...) world, nature is inextricably entwined with human history. Owing to the entwinement of mind and matter, humanity and nature, a version of dialectical materialism can be found in Adorno’s work. Key Words: body • dialectics • Hegel • history • idealism • Marx • materialism • mind • nature • Timpanaro. (shrink)
