Ethical and legal traditions recognize prenatal duties to avoid harm to offspring. However, applying the harm principle to pregnancy requires a careful balancing of a baby's welfare with a pregnant woman's interest in liberty and bodily integrity. In the case of maternal PKU the mother can prevent harm to her baby by returning to the admittedly unpleasant diet that prevented her from being retarded. Informing, counseling, and access to medical care should be the primary policy. Seizures and forced treatment cannot (...) be justified in this case, and only rarely in other situations. (shrink)

In his famous essentialist account of identity, Kripke holds that it is necessary to the identity of individual people that they have the parents they do in fact have. Some have disputed this requirement, treating it either as a reason to reject essentialism or as something that should be eliminated in order to make essentialism stronger. I examine the reasoning behind some of these claims and argue that it fails to acknowledge the complex and multi-faceted importance of biological process in (...) determining identity and distinguishing significant differences between biological and non-biological cases. In fact, this failure derives from an inherent tendency to treat the biological case in just the same way as the non-biological case at least at one important point in its history—the point of formation. This analysis offers a way of salvaging Kripke’s original claims. I focus in particular on the views of Graeme Forbes and Teresa Robertson, but also discuss the views of Nathan Salmon, M. S. Price and E. J. Lowe. (shrink)

In this paper I apply a suitably developed version of Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority to the debate over the legitimacy of state action aiming to fulfill cosmopolitan moral obligations. I aim to advance two interrelated theses. First, viewed from the perspective of Raz’s service conception of authority, citizens’ moral duties to non-compatriots are an appropriate ground for authoritative intervention by agents of the state. Second, international law based on these duties can also enjoy moral authority over government (...) decision makers. An important source of the moral force of international law is derived from the power of international law to improve officials’ ability to recognize and conform to the totality of their reasons, which contributes to their states’ legitimacy. (shrink)

Hertz, J. H. Saadya gaon.--Altmann, A. Saadya's theory of revelation.--Herzog, D. The polemic treatise against Saadya.--Krauss, S. Saadya's Tafsir of the seventy hapax legomena explained and continued.--Leveen, J. Saadya's lost commentary on Leviticus.--Markon, I. explained by Saadya and his successors.--Marmorstein, A. The doctrine of redemption in Saadya's theological system.--Mittwoch, E. An unknown fragment by Gaon Saadya.--Rabin, C. Saadya gaon's Hebrew prose style.--Rawidowicz, S. Saadya's purification of the idea of God.-- Robertson, E. The relationship of the Arabic translation of the (...) Samaritan Pentateuch to that of Saadya.--Rosenthal, E. I. J. Saadya's exegesis of the Book of Job.--Stein, S. Saadya's Piyyuṭ of the alphabet.--Weis, P. R. The anti-Ḳaraite tendency of R. Saadya gaon's Arabic version of the Pentateuch.--Wieder, N. Fourteen new Genizah-fragments of Saadya's Siddur together with a reproduction of a missing part. (shrink)

Scholars have hitherto found little to no place for natural philosophy in the intellectual makeup of the Enlightened historian William Robertson, overlooking his significant contacts with that province and its central relevance to the controversy surrounding David Hume and Lord Kames in the 1750s. Here I reexamine Robertson's Situation of the World at the Time of Christ's Appearance (1755) in light of these contexts. I argue that his foundational sermon drew upon the scientific theism of such thinkers as (...) Joseph Butler, Edmund Law, and Colin Maclaurin to counter the autonomous figurations of the universe associated with Hume and Kames, and to develop a historical account of progress based around Christian progressivism rather than the stadial theory of Adam Smith. Robertson conceived of history neither in secular terms nor in those of traditional religion, but sought instead to update the language of providentialism by naturalizing the sacred within a framework of general laws. (shrink)

The seventh edition of this pragmatic guide to determining right and wrong in the workplace is updated with new case studies and ancillary materials to combine stakeholder perspectives with a deep dive on workplace ethics issues. Using a unique stakeholder-based approach, this book takes business ethics out of the theory realm and provides practical ways to analyze any business decision. Including dozens of cases, Joseph Weiss looks beyond the impacts of ethical lapses on share price and profit to focus (...) on relationships between stakeholders, including individuals, groups, corporations, and governments. The new seventh edition includes seven new cases and ten new Point/Counterpoint exercises, which challenge students to argue both sides of a contemporary issue. It incorporates the latest research as well as updated cases dealing with recent scandals at organizations such as Boeing, Facebook, and Uber. Professors will have access to online support, including teaching notes, PowerPoint slides, and sample tests. The book is equipped with a step-by-step guide to implementing stakeholder analysis, tips to help students apply ethical principles in their personal and professional lives, and comprehensive coverage of employee workplace issues. Addressing relevant topics such as risk management, preferential hiring, and sexual harassment in conjunction with the digital divide, bribery, the environment, and more, Business Ethics, seventh edition explores ethical implications in today's increasingly interconnected global business environment. (shrink)

This book critically assesses arguments for the existence of the God of classical theism, develops an innovative account of objects’ persistence, and defends new arguments against classical theism. The authors engage the following classical theistic proofs: Aquinas’s First Way, Aquinas’s De Ente argument, and Feser’s Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Augustinian, Thomistic, and Rationalist proofs. The authors also provide the first systematic treatment of the ‘existential inertia thesis’. By connecting the thesis to relativity theory and recent developments in the philosophy of physics, and (...) by developing a variety of novel existential-inertia-friendly explanations of persistence, they mount a formidable new case against classical theistic proofs. Finally, they defend new arguments against classical theism based on abstract objects and changing divine knowledge. The text appeals to students, researchers, and others interested in classical theistic proofs, the existence and nature of God, and the ultimate explanations of persistence, change, and contingency. (shrink)

We defend hylomorphism against Maegan Fairchild’s purported proof of its inconsistency. We provide a deduction of a contradiction from SH+, which is the combination of “simple hylomorphism” and an innocuous premise. We show that the deduction, reminiscent of Russell’s Paradox, is proof-theoretically valid in classical higher-order logic and invokes an impredicatively defined property. We provide a proof that SH+ is nevertheless consistent in a free higher-order logic. It is shown that the unrestricted comprehension principle of property abstraction on which the (...) purported proof of inconsistency relies is analogous to naïve unrestricted set-theoretic comprehension. We conclude that logic imposes a restriction on property comprehension, a restriction that is satisfied by the ramified theory of types. By extension, our observations constitute defenses of theories that are structurally similar to SH+, such as the theory of singular propositions, against similar purported disproofs. (shrink)

: Embryonic stem cells, which have the potential to save many lives, must be recovered from aborted fetuses or live embryos. Although tissue from aborted fetuses can be used without moral complicity in the underlying abortion, obtaining stem cells from embryos necessarily kills them, thus raising difficult questions about the use of embryonic human material to save others. This article draws on previous controversies over embryo research and distinctions between intrinsic and symbolic moral status to analyze these issues. It argues (...) that stem cell research with spare embryos produced during infertility treatment, or even embryos created specifically for research or therapeutic purposes, is ethically acceptable and should receive federal funding. (shrink)

While engaging in rich discussion, Conspiracy Theories analyzes current arguments and evidence while providing real-world examples so students can contextualize and visualize the debates. Each chapter addresses important current questions, provides conceptual tools, defines important terms, and introduces the appropriate methods of analysis.

The term 'implicit bias' has very swiftly been incorporated into philosophical discourse. Our aim in this paper is to scrutinise the phenomena that fall under the rubric of implicit bias. The term is often used in a rather broad sense, to capture a range of implicit social cognitions, and this is useful for some purposes. However, we here articulate some of the important differences between phenomena identified as instances of implicit bias. We caution against ignoring these differences: it is likely (...) they have considerable significance, not least for the sorts of normative recommendations being made concerning how to mitigate the bad effects of implicit bias. (shrink)

This overview of 10 years of stem cell controversy reviews the moral conflict that has made ESCs so controversial and how this conflict plays itself out in the legal realm, focusing on the constitutional status of efforts to ban ESC research or ESC-derived therapies. It provides a history of the federal funding debate from the Carter to the Obama administrations, and the importance of the Raab memo in authorizing federal funding for research with privately derived ESCs despite the Dickey-Wicker ban (...) on federal funding of embryo research. It also reviews the role that scientists themselves have played in developing regulations for ESC research, the emergence of ESCROs as special review bodies for ESC research, and the thorough consent requirements for donation of IVF embryos to ESC research. With research now transitioning from the lab to the clinic, the article reviews the challenges of ensuring safety and consent in translational research. It concludes with a call for respecting those persons who have to using or working with ESC products and an account of how obtaining stem cells from a person's own cells will alleviate some but not all of the controversy surrounding ESC research. (shrink)

This text provides an extensive exploration of the relationship between the thought of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, providing a new argument for the complementarity of their mature philosophies as part of a collaborative metatheory of science. In arguing that both Neurath and Carnap must be interpreted as proponents of epistemological naturalism, and that their naturalisms rest on shared philosophical ground, it is also demonstrated that the boundaries and possibilities for epistemological naturalism are not as restrictive as Quinean orthodoxy has (...) previously suggested. Both building on and challenging the scholarship of the past four decades, this naturalist reading of Carnap also provides a new interpretation of Carnap’s conception of analyticity, allowing for a refutation of the Quinean argument for the incompatibility of naturalism and the analytic/synthetic distinction. In doing so, the relevance and potential importance of their scientific meta-theory for contemporary questions in the philosophy of science is demonstrated. This text appeals to students and researchers working on Logical Empiricism, Quine, the history of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy of science, as well as proponents of naturalized epistemology. (shrink)

New uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis to screen embryos prior to transfer raise ethical, legal, and policy issues that deserve close attention. Extensions for medical purposes, such as to identify susceptibility genes, late onset disease, and human leukocyte antigen matching, are usually ethically acceptable. Whether embryo screening for gender, perfect pitch, or other non-medical characteristics are also acceptable depends upon the parental needs served and the harm posed to embryos, children, and society. Speculations about potential future uses of PGD should (...) not prevent otherwise acceptable current uses of PGD. (shrink)

This paper starts by considering an argument for thinking that predictive processing (PP) is representational. This argument suggests that the Kullback–Leibler (KL)-divergence provides an accessible measure of misrepresentation, and therefore, a measure of representational content in hierarchical Bayesian inference. The paper then argues that while the KL-divergence is a measure of information, it does not establish a sufficient measure of representational content. We argue that this follows from the fact that the KL-divergence is a measure of relative entropy, which can (...) be shown to be the same as covariance (through a set of additional steps). It is well known that facts about covariance do not entail facts about representational content. So there is no reason to think that the KL-divergence is a measure of (mis-)representational content. This paper thus provides an enactive, non-representational account of Bayesian belief optimisation in hierarchical PP. (shrink)

The book combines philosophical exposition and legal analysis, and pays special attention to issues of tort law.

In our papers on the rationality of magic, we distinghuished, for purposes of analysis, three levels of rationality. First and lowest (rationalitYl) the goal directed action of an agent with given aims and circumstances, where among his circumstances we included his knowledge and opinions. On this level the magician's treatment of illness by incantation is as rational as any traditional doctor's blood-letting or any modern one's use of anti-biotics. At the second level (rationalitY2) we add the element of rational thinking (...) or thinking which obeys some set of explicit rules, a level which is not found in magic in general, though it is sometimes given to specific details of magical thinking within the magical thought-system. It was the late Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard who observed that when considering magic in detail the magician may be as consistent or critical as anyone else; but when considering magic in general, or any system of thought in general, the magician could not be critical or even comprehend the criticism. Evans-Pritchard went even further: he was sceptical as to whether it could be done in a truly consistent manner: one cannot be critical of one's own system, he thought. On this level (rationalitY2) of discussion we have explained (earlier) why we prefer to wed Evans Pritchard's view of the magician's capacity for piece-meal rationality to Sir James Frazer's view that magic in general is pseudo-rational because it lacks standards of rational thinking. (shrink)

Socrates’ official answer to Meno’s question about the value of knowledge, near the end of Plato’s Meno, is that knowledge is stable. I argue that both the answer and the question have been widely misunderstood. The question has been taken to be why knowing at a time is better than true belief at that time, and Socrates’ answer has been taken to point to the greater persistence of knowledge over time. I argue instead that, given the broader context of the (...) question and answer in the Meno, together with what Plato has to say about stability elsewhere, Meno’s question is better understood as a more difficult question – and Socrates’ answer as a good solution to it. This also involves arguing that Socrates’ analogy to the statues of Daedalus is not intended as the simple illustration of Socrates’ official answer for which commentators have taken it. (shrink)

Many philosophers of science are ontologically committed to a lush rainforest of special science entities ), but are often reticent about the criteria that determine which entities count as real. On the other hand, the metaphysics literature is much more forthcoming about such criteria, but often links ontological commitment to irreducibility. We argue that the irreducibility criteria are in tension with scientific realism: for example, they would exclude viruses, which are plausibly theoretically reducible and yet play a sufficiently important role (...) in scientific accounts of the world that they should be included in our ontology. In this paper, we show how the inhabitants of the rainforest can be inoculated against the eliminative threat of reduction: by demonstrating that they are emergent. According to our account, emergence involves a screening off condition as well as novelty. We go on to demonstrate that this account of emergence, which is compatible with theoretical reducibility, satisfies common intuitions concerning what should and shouldn't count as real: viruses are emergent, as are trouts and turkeys, but philosophically gerrymandered objects like trout-turkeys do not qualify. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to fill a certain gap in the assessment of relativism by drawing on Joseph Ratzinger’s (1927–2022) criticism of the normative transformation since Kant. During the Enlightenment, Natural Law was doubted as a cultural feature of Christianity that had no bearing on pluralist society. Consequently, this jurisprudential tradition underwent de-Hellenization and branched out in radical directions, the most decisive of which was Kant’s post-metaphysical system of natural values. Positivism and German Idealism attempted to restore (...) the unity of philosophy that Kant’s philosophy had disrupted. Yet even more influentially, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was Marxism that relativized the doxological aspect of normativity by emphasizing the importance of praxis. Since philosophy became neither an exact science as Kant had conceived it to be, nor a practical programme for social justice as Marxism had promised, the Existentialists, and particularly Sartre, advocated a more radical philosophy of freedom. Ratzinger argues that despite the nuances of post-Kantian philosophy, Positivism, Existentialism, and Marxism failed to comprehend the human condition and that the positivist method resulted in an overwhelming relativism that has reduced normativity to a matter of correct procedures rather than regarding it as the foundation of the inviolable dignity of the human being. (shrink)

Now in his 89th year, Viscount Samuel, who with advancing age has had progressively to restrict the activities of his many-sided life, has reluctantly decided not to stand this year for election to the Presidency of The Royal Institute of Philosophy. It is but fitting, before he vacates the Presidential Chair in June, that PHILOSOPHY, as the official organ of the Institute, should pay a small tribute to one who has served its interests so devotedly, and whose claims on its (...) gratitude cannot be exaggerated. (shrink)

According to agent-based approaches to virtue ethics, the rightness of an action is a function of the motives which prompted that action. If those motives were morally praiseworthy, then the action was right; if they were morally blameworthy, the action was wrong. Many critics find this approach problematically insensitive to an act’s consequences, and claim that agent-basing fails to preserve the intuitive distinction between agent- and act-evaluation. In this article I show how an agent-based account of right action can be (...) made sensitive to an act’s consequences. According to the approach which I defend, an action is right just in case it realizes an agent’s morally praiseworthy motive. Conversely, an action is wrong just in case it realizes a morally blameworthy motive. Specifying act-evaluation in terms of the realization, rather than the expression, of an agent’s motives allows an agent-based approach to distinguish between agent- and act-evaluation. This is because an agent may act from a morally praiseworthy motive, but fail to realize that motive. Her action will therefore not have been the right one, despite its being the expression of morally praiseworthy motives. (shrink)

This anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, "Themes from Kaplan," organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.

Abstract David Sobel (2001) objects to Bernard Williams's internalism, the view that an agent has a reason to perform an action only if she has some motive that will be served by performing that action. Sobel is an unusual challenger in that he endorses neo-Humean subjectivism, ?the view that it is the agent's subjective motivational set that makes it the case that an agent does or does not have a reason to φ? (219). Sobel's objection in fact arises from this (...) very commitment. Internalism, he says, is incompatible with the best subjectivist accounts of reasons for action?accounts that suggest that there are what he calls fragile reasons and perhaps also superfragile ones, both of which allegedly provide for counterexamples to internalism. I argue that such reasons do not in fact threaten internalism. I then briefly explore whether internalism is vulnerable to a related charge?that it commits the conditional fallacy. (shrink)

Pyrrhonian skeptics, according to Sextus Empiricus, suspend judgment in the face of equally strong oppositions, but they also continue to investigate. This joint characterization has puzzled scholars: Why keep investigating if the evidence demands epochē? On this point, Sextus has been accused of muddled thinking at best and incoherence at worst. In this paper, I explain how investigative activity harmonizes with the suspensive mindset. My interpretation helps to explain several puzzling features of Pyrrhonian philosophy in addition to the idea that (...) one can both suspend judgment and continue investigating. (shrink)

Individualized customer information is at the heart of on-line commerce. Using increasing amounts of customer-specific data enhances the success and value of one-to-one on-line marketing; but the extensive gathering and use of data specific to individuals also causes alarm over the loss of digital privacy, setting up a confrontation between e-commerce and society. Governments and nations, particularly in Europe, have reacted with a reliance on sweeping laws governing digital privacy protection while other nations such as the U.S. have generally preferred (...) to allow companies and industry associations to regulate themselves. This tenuous balance is under attack from both sides. In this paper, we set up a framework which incorporates the environmental context, ethical perspectives and firm-specific considerations to help firms develop a strategy for handling digital privacy concerns. (shrink)

From a corporate governance perspective, one of the most important jobs of a firm's top management team is to create and maintain a positive moral environment. Business ethics has long been considered a cornerstone in the field of strategic management and a number of scholars have called for more research in this area over the years. In this paper 658 articles that appeared in "Strategic Management Journal" over the 10-year period between 1996 and 2005 are reviewed for business ethics focus (...) and content. The results reveal that while business ethics research in "Strategic Management Journal" is on the rise, the overall focus on this research stream has been limited. The most prominent ethics theme during the review period was environmentalism, accounting for 30% of all ethics articles. Author affiliations, future research directions, and implications are also discussed. (shrink)