Although sports and athletics provide a nearly universal social context for the learning of such cherished values as courage, honesty, discipline, communal efforts, and the pursuit of excellence, little attention has been devoted to the philosophy of this important element in human life. In a fascinating survey of the philosophic dimensions of sports and athletics, the author delves into a variety of topics, including game and play theory, play-forms and game principles in history, existentialism and sports, the popularity of (...) sports, its educational values, the function of ethics and moral values, and the role of competition, violence and aggression, self discovery, spirituality, and joy. He also considers recurrent problems such as corruption, the excessive emphasis on winning, and the exploitation of student athletes and suggests specific ways of preserving perspective and integrity. -- From publisher's description. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there (...) is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

Many poor and oppressed people wish to leave their countries of origin in the third world to come to affluent Western societies. This essay argues that there is little justification for keeping them out. The essay draws on three contemporary approaches to political theory - the Rawlsian,the Nozickean, and the utilitarian - to construct arguments for open borders. The fact that all three theories converge upon the same results on this issue, despite their significant disagreements on others, strengthens the (...) case for open borders and reveals its roots in our deep commitment to respect all human beings as free and equal moral persons. The final part of the essay considers communitarian objections to this conclusion, especially those of Michael Walzer. (shrink)

Contract cheating, or plagiarism via paid ghostwriting, is a significant academic ethical issue, especially as reliable methods for its prevention and detection in students’ assignments remain elusive. Contract cheating in academic assessment has been the subject of much recent debate and concern. Although some scandals have attracted substantial media attention, little is known about the likely prevalence of contract cheating by students for their university assignments. Although rates of contract cheating tend to be low, criminological theories suggest that people (...) who employ ghostwriters for their assignments are likely to re-offend, and little is known about re-offence rates in this form of academic misconduct. We combined previously-collected datasets and conducted additional, and previously-unreported, analyses on self-report measures of contract cheating prevalence. We found that few students, on aggregate, ever engaged in contract cheating but this varied substantially among samples. Of those who ever engaged in contract cheating, 62.5% did so more than once. The data also suggested that engagement in contract cheating is influenced by opportunity. These figures may help policy makers, and researchers who are creating contract cheating detection methods, to estimate base rates of contract cheating and the likelihood of re-offence. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there (...) is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

Consciousness is currently a thriving area of research in psychology and neuroscience. While this is often attributed to events that took place in the early 1990s, consciousness studies today are a continuation of research that started in the late 19th century and that continued throughout the 20th century. From the beginning, the effort built on studies of animals to reveal basic principles of brain organization and function, and of human patients to gain clues about consciousness itself. Particularly important and our (...) focus here is research in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s involving three groups of patients—amnesia, split brain, and blindsight. Across all three groups, a similar pattern of results was found—the patients could respond appropriately to stimuli that they denied seeing (or in the case of amnesiacs, having seen before). These studies paved the way for the current wave of research on consciousness. The field is, in fact, still grappling with the implications of the findings showing that the ability to consciously know and report the identity of a visual stimulus can be dissociated in the brain from the mechanisms that underlie the ability to behave in a meaningful way to the same stimulus. (shrink)

"Well-being" signifies the good life, the life which is good for the person whose life it is. I have argued that well-being consists in a wholehearted and successful pursuit of valuable relationships and goals. This view, a little modified, is defended , but the main aim of the article is to consider the role of well-being in practical thought. In particular I will examine a suggestion which says that when we care about people, and when we ought to care (...) about people, what we do, or ought to, care about is their well-being. The suggestion is indifferent to who cares and who is cared for. People may care, perhaps ought to care, about themselves, and they may care, perhaps ought to care, about people with whom they have, or ought to have special bonds, and finally they may care, perhaps ought to care, about other people generally. In all cases what they care, or ought to care, about is the wellbeing of the relevant people, themselves or others. I will argue that the suggestion is misleading, and the role of well-being in both personal and ethical life is much more modest. (shrink)

The advent of quantum mechanics in the early 20 th Century had profound consequences for science and mathematics, for philosophy (Schrödinger), and for logic (von Neumann). In 1968, Putnam wrote that quantum mechanics required a revolution in our understanding of logic per se. However, applications of quantum logics have been little explored outside the quantum domain. Dummett saw some implications of quantum logic for truth, but few philosophers applied similar intuitions to epistemology or ontology. Logic remained a truth-functional ’science’ (...) of correct propositional reasoning. Starting in 1935, the Franco-Romanian thinker Stéphane Lupasco described a logical system based on the inherent dialectics of energy and accordingly expressed in and applicable to complex real processes at higher levels of reality. Unfortunately, Lupasco’s fifteen major publications in French went unrecognized by mainstream logic and philosophy, and unnoticed outside a Francophone intellectual community, albeit with some translations into other Romance languages. In English, summaries of Lupasco’s logic appeared ca. 2000, but the first major treatment and extension of his system was published in 2008 (see Brenner 2008). This paper is a further attempt to establish Lupasco’s concepts as significant contributions to the history and philosophy of logic, in line with the work of Gödel, general relativity, and the ontological turn in philosophy. (shrink)

MOST of us feel an aversion to lying and believe that it always stands in need of justification. One expression of this is to say that there is a prima facie duty not to lie. Another is Sissela Bok's "Principle of Veracity" which holds that lying has an "initial negative weight" so that there is always a presumption against telling a particular lie. Still a third variation can be found in Arnold Isenberg's "constancy principle" which holds that what is inherently (...) bad in any lie is the same for all, constant from one lie to the next. While these sorts of view are plausible, the literature on lying provides little in the way of a specific account for the negative weight inherent in all lies--their common disvalue. What follows is proposed as such an account, one which should also help clarify why some lies are worse than others, why some are excusable and others justifiable. Without presuming to be exhaustive, the view offered maintains that there are at least two inherent negative components of all lies; further, each of these inherent disvalues disposes the liar toward a particular, contingent harm. The inherent disvalues and the harms they threaten collectively constitute sufficient grounds for the presumption against lying. (shrink)

Contract cheating, or plagiarism via paid ghostwriting, is a significant academic ethical issue, especially as reliable methods for its prevention and detection in students’ assignments remain elusive. Contract cheating in academic assessment has been the subject of much recent debate and concern. Although some scandals have attracted substantial media attention, little is known about the likely prevalence of contract cheating by students for their university assignments. Although rates of contract cheating tend to be low, criminological theories suggest that people (...) who employ ghostwriters for their assignments are likely to re-offend, and little is known about re-offence rates in this form of academic misconduct. We combined previously-collected datasets and conducted additional, and previously-unreported, analyses on self-report measures of contract cheating prevalence. We found that few students, on aggregate, ever engaged in contract cheating but this varied substantially among samples. Of those who ever engaged in contract cheating, 62.5% did so more than once. The data also suggested that engagement in contract cheating is influenced by opportunity. These figures may help policy makers, and researchers who are creating contract cheating detection methods, to estimate base rates of contract cheating and the likelihood of re-offence. (shrink)

The crash of two 737 MAX passenger aircraft in late 2018 and early 2019, and subsequent grounding of the entire fleet of 737 MAX jets, turned a global spotlight on Boeing’s practices and culture. Explanations for the crashes include: design flaws within the MAX’s new flight control software system designed to prevent stalls; internal pressure to keep pace with Boeing’s chief competitor, Airbus; Boeing’s lack of transparency about the new software; and the lack of adequate monitoring of Boeing by the (...) FAA, especially during the certification of the MAX and following the first crash. While these and other factors have been the subject of numerous government reports and investigative journalism articles, little to date has been written on the ethical significance of the accidents, in particular the ethical responsibilities of the engineers at Boeing and the FAA involved in designing and certifying the MAX. Lessons learned from this case include the need to strengthen the voice of engineers within large organizations. There is also the need for greater involvement of professional engineering societies in ethics-related activities and for broader focus on moral courage in engineering ethics education. (shrink)

Medical ethics has become an important and recognized component of physician training. There is one area, however, in which medical students receive little guidance. There is practically no discussion of the financial aspects of medical practice. My objective in this paper is to initiate a discussion about the moral dimension of physician billing practices. I argue that physicians should expand their conception of professional responsibility in order to recognize that their moral obligations toward patients include a commitment to honest (...) and forthright billing practices. I argue that physicians should aspire to a standard of clinical accuracy—not legal adequacy—in describing their activities. More generally, physicians should strive to promote an integrity-based professional culture, first and foremost by stigmatizing rather than celebrating creative billing practices, as well as condemning the misguided sense of solidarity that currently makes it taboo for physicians to criticize each other on this score. (shrink)

The prevalence of white-collar crime casts a long shadow over discussions in business ethics. One of the effects that has been the development of a strong emphasis upon questions of moral motivation within the field. Often in business ethics, there is no real dispute about the content of our moral obligations, the question is rather how to motivate people to respect them. This is a question that has been studied quite extensively by criminologists as well, yet their research has had (...) little impact on the reflections of business ethicists. In this article, I attempt to show how a criminological perspective can help to illuminate some traditional questions in business ethics. I begin by explaining why criminologists reject three of the most popular folk theories of criminal motivation. I go on to discuss a more satisfactory theory, involving the so-called “techniques of neutralization,” and its implications for business ethics. (shrink)

This paper seeks to give an account of what it is for an individual to instantiate thisness (i.e. primitive individual essence). Thisnesses are peculiar entities, and even those who endorse their existence and instantiation by objects/entities, have said very little about how an individual and its thisness are related. My approach will be to seek out a model for the instantiation of thisness by canvassing broadly Aristotelian accounts of the substance/attribute relation, and then by making appropriate modifications to the (...) most likely candidates in order to accommodate an individual's instantiation of thisness. What will emerge is that the model with the most utility makes thisness redundant in the case of material substances. Nonetheless, I will suggest that a version of the model can be appropriately applied in the case of other individuals which might instantiate thisness: for example, events (where these are conceived as a fundamental category of ontology distinct from material substances). (shrink)

In 1908, three years after Einstein first published his special theory of relativity, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski introduced his four-dimensional “spacetime” interpretation of the theory. Einstein initially dismissed Minkowski’s theory, remarking that “since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself anymore.” Yet Minkowski’s theory soon found wide acceptance among physicists, including eventually Einstein himself, whose conversion to Minkowski’s way of thinking was engendered by the realization that he could profitably employ it for the (...) formulation of his new theory of gravity. The validity of Minkowski’s mathematical “merging” of space and time has rarely been questioned by either physicists or philosophers since Einstein incorporated it into his theory of gravity. Physicists often employ Minkowski spacetime with little regard to the whether it provides a true account of the physical world as opposed to a useful mathematical tool in the theory of relativity. Philosophers sometimes treat the philosophy of space and time as if it were a mere appendix to Minkowski’s theory. In this critical study, Joseph Cosgrove subjects the concept of spacetime to a comprehensive examination and concludes that Einstein’s initial assessment of Minkowksi was essentially correct. (shrink)

Self- Deception in General "A Liberal Decalogue" suggests (Russell, 1967, pp. 60-61) not to envy people who live in a fool's paradise: It is a place only for fools. This saying invites detailed commentary. A fool's paradise is not a place, but a state o f mind; it is a system of opinions, of assessments of situations, that calms one down, that reassures one into the opinion that all is well, even when all is far from well. Fools may be (...) ignorant of the severity of their situations, perhaps because being well informed tends to get them into a panic. This happens regularly, and there is little that can be done about it, except that the wise would still prefer to be well informed so as to try to cope with the panic more constructively. They would not easily fa ll for the reassuring hypothesis, preferring to examine any reasonable alternative hypothesis about any risk that might invite action - - so that if the hypothesis is corroborated they can try to mobilize some appropriate action. (shrink)

The main concern of these notes is objectivity. The demand of traditional rationalism for absolute objectivity is excessive; the license of hermeneuticists and post-modernists to replace objectivity by frank ethnocentrism by endorsing local prejudices is unfortunate. Most social observers still attempt to overcome ethnocentrism, by the use of statistics and of the field method of participant observation and of other means, knowing that no guarantee is possible. As the volume at hand concerns the sociology of one religion in one place, (...) it may serve as a case study. A little objectivity should prevent the camouflage of the deterioration of religious life caused by discrimination. (shrink)

The son of a shopkeeper, Joseph Lancaster received little formal education himself. In 1798 he set up a school in Southwark, waiving fees for poor children. Originally published in 1803, this work sets out in detail the philosophy and practice of Lancaster's system of education, which relied on peer tutoring. He was always concerned with the education of the underprivileged in industrial cities, lamenting that 'poor children be deprived of even an initiatory share of education, and of almost (...) any attention to their morals'. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the peak of the popularity of Lancaster's system as his ideas spread and inspired the establishment of schools around the world. His book is still significant in the history of educational methods. This reissue of the revised third edition of 1805 incorporates a brief 1840 biography of Lancaster. (shrink)

Simone Weil was a defining figure of the twentieth century; a philosopher, Christian, resistance fighter, Labour activist and teacher, described by Albert Camus as 'the only great spirit of our time'. In 1941 Weil was introduced to Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, a Dominican priest whose friendship became a key influence on her life. When Weil asked Perrin for work as a farm hand he sent her to Gustave Thibon, a farmer and Christian philosopher. Weil stayed with the Thibon family, working (...) in the fields and writing the notebooks which became _Gravity and Grace _and other posthumous works. Perrin and Thibon met Weil at a time when her spiritual life and creative genius were at their height. During the short but deep period of their acquaintance with her, they came to know her as she actually was. First published in English in 1953, and now introduced by J.P. Little, this unique portrait depicts Weil through the eyes of her friends, not as a strange and unaccountable genius but as an ardent and human person in search of truth and knowledge. (shrink)

This succinct but illuminating book defends the free market, while criticizing a narrowly economistic understanding of man and society. Baldacchino argues that a sound economy has ethical and cultural prerequisites that are integral to its survival. Includes an introduction by Russell Kirk. _From the Introduction: _ “Any society’s moral order develops from its religion, its philosophy, its humane literature. The discipline of political economy, little understood until the latter half of the eighteenth century, is no independent creation: what economic (...) views one holds must depend upon one’s apprehension of human nature. An economic system indifferent to morality will not long endure. For proof of these theses, read with attention Baldacchino’s succinct study, the work of a sound scholar endowed with a philosophical habit of mind.”–_Russell Kirk_. (shrink)

A great deal of research has demonstrated that learning is influenced by the learner’s prior background knowledge (e.g. Murphy, 2002; Keil, 1990), but little is known about the processes by which prior knowledge is deployed. We explore the role of explanation in deploying prior knowledge by examining the joint effects of eliciting explanations and providing prior knowledge in a task where each should aid learning. Three hypotheses are considered: that explanation and prior knowledge have independent and additive effects on (...) learning, that their joint effects on learning are subadditive, and that their effects are superadditive. A category learning experiment finds evidence for a superadditive effect: explaining drives the discovery of regularities, while prior knowledge constrains which regularities learners discover. This is consistent with an account of explanation’s effects on learning proposed in Williams & Lombrozo (in press). (shrink)

ExcerptA keynote speaker at the German Studies Association Conference in October 2013 was the renowned historian David Blackbourn, who—together with Geoff Eley—had originally made his reputation by challenging the well-entrenched Sonderweg interpretation of the course of modern German historical development. His keynote address, however, had the far less intellectually lofty, and certainly more humorous, title “Honey, I Shrunk German History.”1.

This little-known late writing of Hobbes reveals an unexplored dimension of his famous doctrine of sovereignty. The essay was first published posthumously in 1681, and from 1840 to 1971 only a generally unreliable edition has been in print. This edition provides the first dependable and easily accessible text of Hobbes's _Dialogue._ In the _Dialogue,_ Hobbes sets forth his mature reflections of the relation between reason and law, reflections more "liberal" than those found in _Leviathan_ and his other well-known writings. (...) Hobbes proposes a separation of the functions of government in the interest of common sense and humaneness without visibly violating his dictum that the sharing or division of sovereignty is an absurdity. This new edition of the _Dialogue_ is a significant contribution to our understanding of seventeenth-century political philosophy. "Hobbes students are indebted to Professor Cropsey for this scholarly and accessible edition of _Dialogue._"—J. Roland Pennock, _American Political Science Review_ "An invaluable aid to the study of Hobbes."—_Review of Metaphysics_. (shrink)

Recent research in moral psychology highlights the role of emotion and intuition in moral judgment. In the wake of these findings, the role and significance of moral reasoning remain uncertain. In this article, we distinguish among different kinds of moral reasoning and review evidence suggesting that at least some kinds of moral reasoning play significant roles in moral judgment, including roles in abandoning moral intuitions in the absence of justifying reasons, applying both deontological and utilitarian moral principles, and counteracting automatic (...) tendencies toward bias that would otherwise dominate behavior. We argue that little is known about the psychology of moral reasoning and that it may yet prove to be a potent social force. (shrink)

While there had been much radical thought before John Stuart Mill, Joseph Persky argues it was Mill, as he moved to the left, who provided the radical wing of liberalism with its first serious analytical foundation, a political economy of progress that still echoes today. A rereading of Mill's mature work suggests his theoretical understanding of accumulation led him to see laissez-faire capitalism as a transitional system. Deeply committed to the egalitarian precepts of the Enlightenment, Mill advocated gradualism and (...) rejected revolutionary expropriation on utilitarian grounds: gradualism, not expropriation, promised meaningful long-term gains for the working classes. He endorsed laissez-faire capitalism because his theory of accumulation saw that system approaching a stationary state characterized by a great reduction in inequality and an expansion of cooperative production. These tendencies, in combination with an aggressive reform agenda made possible by the extension of the franchise, promised to provide a material base for social progress and individual development.The Political Economy of Progress goes on to claim that Mill's radical political economy anticipated more than a little of Marx's analysis of capitalism and laid a foundation for the work of Fabians and other gradualist radicals in the 20th century. More recently, modern philosophic radicals, such as Rawls, have deep links to this Millean political economy. These links are still worthy of development. In particular, a politically meaningful acceptance of Rawls's radical liberalism waits on a movement capable of re-engineering the workplace in a manner consistent with Mill's endorsement of worker management. (shrink)

While affirmative action programs exist for a number of groups, little serious consideration has been given to the establishment of such programs for gay men and lesbians. This essay argues that many of the conditions that justify current affirmative action programs would also justify their extension to gay people, both in terms of compensation for injuries suffered and in terms of benefit to both individuals and society generally. It is argued that anti-discrimination policies are hard to enforce and, in (...) any case, would be inadequate to redress many of the wrongs suffered by gays and lesbians. It is concluded that programs favoring gay visibility are morally justified. (shrink)

The studies of theoretical bias in evidence are these days developed by many clever psychologists, social psychologists, and philosophers. It therefore comes as a surprise to realize that most of the material one can find in the up-to -date literature repeats discoveries which are due to the heroes of the present sketch, namely Galileo Galilei, Sir Francis Bacon, and Robert Boyle; William Whewell, Pierre Duhem, and Karl Popper. We may try to raise scholarly standards by familiarizing ourselves with their ideas (...) and studying them with a little appreciation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Arguing about PsychiatryNatural Selection, Austinian Conservatism, and Finding Our Way to the BestJoseph Gough (bio)Professors Murphy and Lieberman have offered two generous and interesting commentaries on my article, each very insightful and helpful in its own way, and each offering an interesting alternative characterization of the subject matter of psychiatry. I found each extremely thought-provoking, hence this rather bloated response. I strongly disagree with each. In brief, I disagree (...) with the 'preliminaries' of each commentary, struggle to see the tension between Hull's view of science and my view of psychiatry, reject Lieberman's appeal to the history of mind-like and mental-illness-like concepts, and finally, believe my position neither suffers from the instability of psychiatry, nor blocks the route to best practice, nor counsels despair.Metaphysical Precision and Conceptual Evolution: Response to MurphyMurphy begins by offering some helpful context for the debate, and for our disagreement within that debate. Partly it is helpful because it raises a cluster of questions, which I agree with him, are related to the topic at hand. Partly it is helpful because it lays out Murphy's background metaphysics, with which I broadly agree, but where I think it is important to be more pedantic than Murphy himself is. Murphy and I agree that there are animate objects, importantly different from inanimate objects; we also agree that there is no object in nature that is a mind. However, in that [End Page 45] opening paragraph, there are a few things that look to me a little like conflations—and while I am happy to grant this as pedantry, I am not happy to deny its importance.First, not everything animate is intelligent and unpredictable—a presumably accidental implication of Murphy's use of 'these' throughout the paragraph. Second, intelligence and unpredictability do not in my view cluster in the way that Murphy suggests in the passage—a highly intelligent system may be exceptionally predictable at least so long as its goals and knowledge are fixed, and a highly unpredictable system may, of course, be entirely unintelligent. Of course, when some systems behave other than we expect, we count this as a failing of the system; but this is a feature of artifacts as well as animate systems, and perhaps also of objects that are neither artifacts nor animate (think of a farmer whose crops fail to go—might they not think there is something wrong with the soil?). The class of 'predictions' Murphy identifies is what I would describe as a class of normative expectations, that, of course, must be somewhat in line with the way things actually are, but are not 'predictions' in the paradigmatic sense of guesses about what will happen.This pedantry matters because this implied (or perhaps less charitably, enforced) alignment between non-coextensive categories in this picture of Murphy's is leveraged, I think, to gesture towards an objection. First, Murphy claims that this class of systems has required a special vocabulary, 'mental' vocabulary. Second, it is, I think, suggested in Murphy's set-up (and perhaps in Murphy's work; Murphy & Stich, 1999) that at some level this vocabulary anchors what we are talking about when we are talking about 'mental illness.'But here, of course, I disagree—or at least, I might disagree if I were clear what is being claimed. Which class of systems is that gives rise to this 'special vocabulary? Several have been mentioned. It should also come as no surprise that I think it is deeply unclear what counts as 'mental' vocabulary. Is it the vocabulary of animacy? Of normative expectation and function-ascription? Perhaps of intentionality? Or of consciousness? Maybe it is defined 'ostensively' with respect to terms like belief and desire?After these preliminaries, Murphy offers an objection to my position, and a brief defense of his own. I would like to begin with his defense of his own position:the best way to think about the claim that mental illnesses are brain diseases … is to see them as committing us to a form of explanation that treats psychiatry as continuous with other sciences of mind, in... (shrink)

This article suggests that Rawls's break with early utilitarians is not so much over the greatest happiness principle as it is over the relation of the institution of private property to justice. In this respect Rawls is very close to John Stuart Mill, arguing for a cleansed or tamed version of the institution. That said, Rawls's defense of private property remains very thin and highly idealized, again following Mill. If Hume and Bentham fail to demonstrate their claims, Rawls and Mill (...) do little better. Rawls, like Mill, has constructed a challenging standard, admits to severe limitations on our empirical knowledge, and remains deeply ambivalent over the role of private property. (shrink)

Although sexual antagonism may have played a role in forming some sex chromosome systems, there appears to be little empirical or theoretical justification in assuming that it is the driving force in all cases of sex chromosome evolution. In many species, sex chromosomes have diverged in size and shape through the accumulation of mutations in regions of suppressed recombination. It is commonly assumed that recombination is suppressed in sex chromosomes due to selection to resolve sexually antagonistic pleiotropy. However, the (...) requirement for a sex chromosome‐specific mechanism for suppressing recombination is questionable, since more general models of recombination suppression on autosomes also appear to be applicable to sex chromosomes. Direct tests of the predictions of the sexual antagonism hypothesis offer only limited support in specific sex chromosome systems and circumstantial evidence remains open to interpretation. (shrink)

A large proportion of the total global burden of disease is caused by emergency medical conditions. Emergency care research is essential to improving emergency medicine but this research can raise some distinctive ethical challenges, especially with regard to (1) standard of care and risk–benefit assessment; (2) blurring of the roles of clinician and researcher; (3) enrolment of populations with intersecting vulnerabilities; (4) fair participant selection; (5) quality of consent; and (6) community engagement. Despite the importance of research to improve emergency (...) care in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the widely acknowledged ethical challenges, very little has been written on the ethics of emergency care research in LMICs. This paper examines the ethical and regulatory challenges to conducting emergency care research with human participants in LMICs. We outline key challenges, present potential solutions or frameworks for addressing these challenges, and identify gaps. Despite the ethical and regulatory challenges, conducting high-quality, ethical emergency care research in LMICs is possible and it is essential for global health. (shrink)

Kincaid argues that molecular biology provides little support for the reductionist program, that biochemistry does not reveal common mechanisms, indeed that biochemical theory obstructs discovery. These assertions clash with biologists' stated advocacy of reductionist programs and their claims about the consequent unity of experimental biology. This striking disagreement goes beyond differences in meaning granted to the terms. More significant is Kincaid's misunderstanding of what biochemists do, for a closer look at scientific practice-- and one of Kincaid's examples--reveals substantial progress (...) toward explaining biological function with biochemical models. With the molecular detail emerge unifying generalizations as well as further aspects of the functional processes. (shrink)

The concept of ‘the violence inherent in the system’ was famously satirized by Monty Python in their movie The Holy Grail. In order to avoid ridicule, left-wing theorists and activists for a long time stopped using the expression. The underlying social critique, which had given rise to the expression, was also widely dismissed from serious consideration, merely through invocation of the phrase. Because of this, there has been little explicit discussion of the actual political theory that was being satirized (...) in this scene. And yet the theory has continued to exercise considerable influence on the practice of many left-wing groups, particularly in the way that protest is conceptualized and carried out. The central objective in this paper will be to provide an explicit articulation of the theory, in order to show how it falls short of providing a meaningful critique of any aspect of our social practices. (shrink)

Recently, social epistemologists have sought to establish what the governing epistemic relationship should be between novices and experts. In this paper, I argue for, and expand upon, Helen De Cruz’s expert-as-teacher model. For although this model is vulnerable to significant challenges, I propose that a specifically extended version can sufficiently overcome these challenges (call this the “extended-expert-as-teacher” model, or the “EEAT” model). First, I show the respective weaknesses of three influential models in the literature. Then, I argue the expert-as-teacher model (...) can overcome its weaknesses by adding what I call the "Authority Clause", "Advisor Clause", and "Ex Post Facto Clause" of the EEAT model. After developing a robust account of these clauses, I entertain three major objections. First, I respond to the charge that the EEAT model is little better than the expert-as-authority model. Second, I respond to a double-counting objection. Lastly, I respond to a pragmatic objection from complexity. (shrink)

This paper seeks to ascertain the ways in which Adonis and his ritual lament were used by Classical men and women in their constructions of their own gender and the other. The evidence from Classical Athens turns out to originate mainly among men and thus outside the cult, from which men were excluded; the myths and descriptions of the rite that we possess say more about men's attitudes toward themselves and toward women than about the celebrants' motives. Nevertheless, women's attitudes (...) toward Adonis may be inferred from the social circumstances in which the Attic cult arose. Care must be taken to distinguish the different interests represented in the extant evidence . Marcel Detienne's influential structuralist interpretation of the cult has rightly dissociated Attic Adonis from similar Near Eastern figures and contextualized him in Classical Athenian society. Detienne's interpretation, however, has limitations, since it treats Adonis only as a representative of the unmanly and unproductive, and tends to ignore the different uses to which men and women could put Adonis and his rite. For example, the proverb "more fruitless than the gardens of Adonis" originated in male discourse, and does not necessarily reflect women's views. In comedy Adonis and the Adonia become a foil for masculine values; not only does this tell us nothing of what the celebrants thought, but awareness of the many strategies of self-definition available to Athenian men compels us to entertain other constructions of Adonis in other discursive milieus. Finally, although little testimony remains from the woman's perspective, we may speculate that in democratic Athens, restrictions on traditional female mourning rituals and the polarization of the sexes would have made such a private cult as the Adonia attractive to women. (shrink)

Moral distress has been the subject of extensive research and debate in the nursing ethics literature since the mid-1980s, but the concept has received comparatively little attention from those working outside of applied ethics. In this article, I defend a care ethical account of moral distress, according to which the phenomenon is the product of an agent’s inability to live up to one of her caring commitments. This account has a number of attractions. First, it places a greater emphasis (...) on the importance of the relationship between the caregiver and her cared-for than that found in previous accounts. Second, it does not make problematic assumptions about the correctness of a caregiver’s moral judgments, as has been claimed in relation to previous accounts of moral distress. Finally, my account allows for a clear conceptual distinction to be drawn between moral distress and other forms of negative moral emotion such as guilt and regret. Earlier accounts draw this distinction by appealing to the causal aetiology of moral distress, but as I show here, such appeals are ultimately unsuccessful unless they are made from an explicitly care ethical starting point. One of the implications of my account is that moral distress has the potential to occur in the context of any caregiving relationship. This claim is explored in the final section of the paper, in relation to student-teacher and parent-child caregiving. (shrink)

It is argued that current attempts to model human learning behavior commonly fail on one of two counts: either the model assumptions are artificially restricted so as to permit the application of mathematical techniques in deriving their consequences, or else the required complex assumptions are imbedded in computer programs whose technical details obscure the theoretical content of the model. The first failing is characteristic of so-called mathematical models of learning, while the second is characteristic of computer simulation models. An approach (...) to model building which avoids both these failings is presented under the title of a black-box theory of learning. This method permits the statement of assumptions of any desired complexity in a language which clearly exhibits their theoretical content.Section II of the paper is devoted to the problem of testing and comparing alternative learning theories. The policy advocated is to abandon attempts at hypothesis testing. It is argued that, in general, we not only lack sufficient data and sufficiently powerful techniques to test hypotheses, but that the truth of a model is not really the issue of basic interest. A given model may be true in the sense that on the basis of available evidence we cannot statistically reject it, but not interesting in the sense that it provides little information about the processes underlying behavior. Rather, we should accept or reject models on the basis of how much information they provide about the way in which subjects respond to environmental structure. This attitude toward model testing is made precise by introducing a formal measure of the information content of a model. Finally, it is argued that the statistical concept of degrees-of-freedom is misleading when used in the context of model testing and should be replaced by a measure of the information absorbed from the data in estimating parameters. (shrink)

There has been little discussion about how to act when uncertain about the existence of moral reasons in general. In this paper I will argue that despite being uncertain about the existence of moral reasons, someone can still have a practical reason to act in a particular way. This practical reason is morally relevant because it will have an impact on whether we’re making the correct moral decision. This practical reason will result from a principle of decision-making that can (...) be used when someone is agnostic about the existence of moral reasons. The aims of this paper include explicitly beginning the discussion about this topic and advocating for a principle of moral decision-making that can be used despite being metaethically agnostic. (shrink)

Mainstream science, technology, and society scholars have shown little interest in engineering ethics, one going so far as to label engineering ethics activists as “shit shovelers.” Detachment from engineering ethics on the part of most STS scholars is related to a broader and long-standing split between the scholar-oriented and activist-oriented wings of STS. This article discusses the various STS “subcultures” and argues that the much-maligned activist STS subculture is far more likely than the mainstream scholar subculture to have a (...) significant impact on engineering ethics education and practice. (shrink)

The concept of evidence-based medicine (EBM) has been invented by physicians mostly from English Canada, mostly from McMaster University, Ontario, Canada. The term EBM first appeared in the biomedical literature in 1991 in an article written by a prominent member of this group—Gordon Guyatt from McMaster University. The inventors of EBM have also created the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations (GRADE) working group, which is a prominent international organisation whose main purpose is to develop evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (...) (CPGs). CPGs that are based on the GRADE approach are becoming increasingly adopted worldwide, in particular by many professional or governmental organisations. This group of thinkers being thus identified, we have retrieved and read many of their publications in order to try and understand how they intend to incorporate bioethical values into their concept. The author of this little essay did also spend a few years on the internet as an active member of the GRADE group discussion list. The observations thus gathered suggest that although some of the inventors of EBM, at least Gordon Guyatt, wish to incorporate core principles of biomedical ethics into their concept (ie, non-malevolence, beneficence and maybe to a lesser extent respect for autonomy, and justice), some clarifications are still necessary in order to better understand how they intend to more explicitly incorporate bioethical values into their concept and, perhaps more importantly, into evidence-based CPGs. (shrink)

The first collection of its kind, The Continental Philosophy of Film Reader is the essential anthology of writings by continental philosophers on cinema, representing the last century of film-making and thinking about film, as well as all of the major schools of Continental thought: phenomenology and existentialism, Marxism and critical theory, semiotics and hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism. Included here are not only the classic texts in continental philosophy of film, from Benjamin's “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical (...) Reproduction” to extracts of Deleuze's Cinema and Barthes's Mythologies, but also the earliest works of Continental philosophy of film, from thinkers such as Georg Lukács, and little-read gems by philosophical giants such as Sartre and Beauvoir. The book demonstrates both the philosophical significance of these thinkers' ideas about film, as well their influence on filmmakers in Europe and across the globe. In addition, however, this wide-ranging collection also teaches us how important film is to the last century of European philosophical thought. Almost every major continental European thinker of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had something to say-sometimes, quite a lot to say-about cinema: as an art form, as a social or political phenomenon, as a linguistic device and conveyor of information, as a projection of our fears and desires, as a site for oppression and resistance, or as a model on the basis of which some of us, at least, learn how to live. Purpose built for classroom use, with pedagogical features introducing and contextualizing the extracts, this reader is an indispensable tool for students and researchers in philosophy of film, film studies and the history of cinema. (shrink)

Do doctors fix patients? Or do they heal them? For all of modern medicine’s many successes, discontent with the quality of patient care has combined with a host of new developments, from aging populations to the resurgence of infectious diseases, which challenge medicine’s overreliance on narrowly mechanistic and technical methods of explanation and intervention, or “fixing’ patients. The need for a better balance, for more humane “healing” rationales and practices that attend to the social and environmental aspects of health and (...) illness and the experiencing person, is more urgent than ever. Yet, in public health and bioethics, the fields best positioned to offer countervailing values and orientations, the dominant approaches largely extend and reinforce the reductionism and individualism of biomedicine. The collected essays in To Fix or To Heal do more than document the persistence of reductionist approaches and the attendant extension of medicalization to more and more aspects of our lives. The contributors also shed valuable light on why reductionism has persisted and why more holistic models, incorporating social and environmental factors, have gained so little traction. The contributors examine the moral appeal of reductionism, the larger rationalist dream of technological mastery, the growing valuation of health, and the enshrining of individual responsibility as the seemingly non-coercive means of intervention and control. This paradigm-challenging volume advances new lines of criticism of our dominant medical regime, even while proposing ways of bringing medical practice, bioethics, and public health more closely into line with their original goals. Precisely because of the centrality of the biomedical approach to our society, the contributors argue, challenging the reductionist model and its ever-widening effects is perhaps the best way to press for a much-needed renewal of our ethical and political discourse. (shrink)

Mendola spends little time distinguishing human thought from horse sense and any possible ruminations of other creatures. Nor does he acknowledge an distinction between conscious experience and thought content. He develops a theory of content for human thought that delineates the things human can think, constructs an account of the realization of such thought, explains how thoughts with such a range of context might be constituted and how there might be people with such thoughts, and argues that no coherent (...) and humanly conceivable account of the realization of our thought is plausible because we cannot plausibly explain our experience. He concludes that how we think we think what we think is not how we do in fact think we think. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joseph Margolis LITERATURE AND SPEECH ACTS The trivial truth that literature employs language has been fastened on regularly and repeatedly to spawn a remarkable variety of misconceptions. Most famously, in the context of aesthetics, it has led to the untenable thesis that all art is language,1 and to the more pointed claim that works of art somehow affirm propositions that may be linguistically rendered and straightforwardly judged true (...) or false. It has also embarrassed a good deal of theorizing about the nature of aesthetic experience and the aesthetic orientation, and has led to preposterous views about the aesthetic status of the literary arts and the exaggerated importance of words in literature. These developments are reasonably well known, partly because they form a venerable portion of the history of aesthetics, partly because the doctrines at stake take so many apparently persuasive guises—even in our own time. There are other views, however, also largely based on the example of literature, that are at once useful because they are corrective of other abuses and are in their turn prone to newer mistakes that bid fair to become fashionable. The ambivalent corrective I have in mind may be marked by the thesis that a work of art is an utterance of some sort. In effect, the thesis stresses the distortion that results from pretending to address art relevantly solely in terms of the palpable properties of some object or product—more or less on the model of examining a perceptually accessible physical object. Attention is required, on the theory, to the act or agency of the artist by which the work is "uttered," in a sense quite close to that in which a forger is said to "utter" a bad check: by this simple strategem, we are led to see that biographical, historical, intentional considerations are instructive about a work of art in an essential way and that the properties of an artwork cannot possibly be restricted to its merely sensory or sensuous features (if indeed, admitting conceptual art, a particular work has any such features at all). The proposal, therefore, is at least a heuristically useful one. Whether it ought also to be enshrined as definitional of 39 40Philosophy and Literature art is another question altogether, qualified partly by its being entirely possible to save the corrections without the thesis, partly by the debatable force of definitions themselves. A rather specialized but utterly misleading and unpromising version of the utterance theory maintains that literature as such, as well as such particularly important distinctions within literature as fiction, poetry, and metaphor, may be perspicuously defined or distinguished in terms of a speech-act model. We must be careful here. The general thesis that the phenomenon of language cannot be adequately analyzed apart from contextual considerations bearing on speakers' intentions, shared assumptions and background beliefs between speakers and hearers, and the actual histories of conversations and the like has now been abundantly confirmed by a variety of theorists—including, prominently, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, H. P. Grice, John Searle, Keith Donnellan, George Lakoff, and Zeno Vendler. Still, the general concession that familiar syntactic and semantic studies of the phenomenon of language omit an entire dimension of language, as Austin so ably demonstrated, has rather little to say about the distinctions normally debated in the context of literary theory and the appreciation and criticism of literature. (This may well seem paradoxical. The argument has yet to be supplied.) But since the application of the speech-act model to literary analysis shows some tendency to attract advocates, it may be useful to draw explicit attention here to the inherent limitations and difficulties of the enterprise. Obviously, if language must be analyzed at least in part in terms of the context of performing speech acts, it will be impossible to ignore altogether the speech-act dimension of literary utterances. The question remains: what can and what cannot be illuminated by means of the speech-act model? Precisely how restricted a general speech-act model is—that is, one not restricted just to literature—can be seen at a stroke simply by noting that the meanings of sentences (i) cannot be equated with what speakers... (shrink)

After reviewing theoretical reasons for doubting that machine learning methods can accurately infer gene regulatory networks from microarray data, we test 10 algorithms on simulated data from the sea urchin network, and on microarray data for yeast compared with recent experimental determinations of the regulatory network in the same yeast species. Our results agree with the theoretical arguments: most algorithms are at chance for determining the existence of a regulatory connection between gene pairs, and the algorithms that perform better than (...) chance are nonetheless so errorprone as to be of little practical use in these applications. (shrink)