Many physicians are involved in relationships that create tension between a physician's duty to work in her patients’ best interest at all times and her financial arrangement with a third party, most often a pharmaceutical manufacturer, whose primary goal is maximizing sales or profit. Despite the prevalence of this threat, in the United States and globally, the most common reaction to conflicts of interest in medicine is timid acceptance. There are few calls for conflicts of interest to be banned, and, (...) to our knowledge, no one calls for conflicted practitioners to be reprimanded. Contrast our attitudes in medicine with public attitudes toward financial conflicts among government employees. When enforcement of rules against conflict of interest slackens in the public sector, news organizations investigate and publish their criticism. Yet even when doctors are quoted in the media promoting specific drugs, their personal financial ties to the drug maker are rarely mentioned. Policies for governmental employees are strict, condemnation is strong, and criminal statutes exist (allowing for corruption charges). Yet the evidence that conflict is problematic is, if anything, stronger in medicine than in the public sector. Policies against conflicts of interest in medicine should be at least as strong as those already existing in the public sector. (shrink)

Many physicians are involved in relationships that create tension between a physician's duty to work in her patients’ best interest at all times and her financial arrangement with a third party, most often a pharmaceutical manufacturer, whose primary goal is maximizing sales or profit. Despite the prevalence of this threat, in the United States and globally, the most common reaction to conflicts of interest in medicine is timid acceptance. There are few calls for conflicts of interest to be banned, and, (...) to our knowledge, no one calls for conflicted practitioners to be reprimanded. Contrast our attitudes in medicine with public attitudes toward financial conflicts among government employees. When enforcement of rules against conflict of interest slackens in the public sector, news organizations investigate and publish their criticism. Yet even when doctors are quoted in the media promoting specific drugs, their personal financial ties to the drug maker are rarely mentioned. Policies for governmental employees are strict, condemnation is strong, and criminal statutes exist. Yet the evidence that conflict is problematic is, if anything, stronger in medicine than in the public sector. Policies against conflicts of interest in medicine should be at least as strong as those already existing in the public sector. (shrink)

Mental representation has long been central to standard accounts of action and cognition generally, and in the context of sport. We argue for an enactive and embodied account that rejects the idea that representation is necessary for cognition, and posit instead that cognition arises, or is enacted, in certain types of interactions between organisms and their environment. More specifically, we argue that enactive theories explain some kinds of high-level cognition, those that underlie some of the best performances in sport and (...) similar practices (dance, martial arts), better than representational accounts. Flow and mushin (mindfully fluid awareness) are explained enactively to this end. This results in a mutually beneficial analysis where enactivism offers theoretical and practical advantages as an explanation of high performance in sports, while the latter validates enactivism. (shrink)

University students will be our future business leaders, and will have to address social problems caused by business by implementing solutions such as social entrepreneurship ventures. In order to facilitate the learning process that will foster social entrepreneurship, however, a more holistic pedagogy is needed. Based on learning theory, we propose that students’ social entrepreneurship actions will depend on their learning about CSR and their absorptive capacity. We propose that instructors and higher education institutions can enhance this absorptive capacity by (...) exploiting Web 2.0 technologies. We tested our proposition with a sample of 425 university students using structural equation modeling and found support for the proposed relationships. (shrink)

En el contexto de la discusión epistemológica sobre el examen de las transferencias y los intercambios científicos de las teorías, el objetivo de este artículo es señalar la presencia de categorías e ideas weberianas en la teoría de la dependencia formulada por Fernando Cardoso y Enzo Faletto. Aquí ..

In the epistemological context of theory transferand scientific exchanges, the aim of this paper is to indicate the presence of Weberian categories and ideas on dependency theory formulated by Fernando Cardosoand Enzo Faletto. Here we see how the construction of this paradigm was based on some issues, concepts, approaches and orientations of the Weberian research program formulated by José Medina Echavarría to explain Latin American development. We will also consider the contexts of enunciation and reception theories, allowing us to talk (...) about the "sociological school" that was formed in the Social Planning Division of ILPES in mid-sixties, crucial for understanding the history of sociology in Latin America. En el contexto de la discusión epistemológica sobre el examen de las transferencias y los intercambios científicos de las teorías, el objetivo de este artículo es señalar la presencia de categorías e ideas weberianas en lateoría de la dependencia formulada por Fernando Cardoso y Enzo Faletto. Aquí veremos cómo la construcción de este paradigma se sustentó en algunos temas, conceptos, enfoques y orientaciones del programa de investigación weberiano formulado por José Medina Echavarría para explicar el desarrollo latinoamericano. También tendremos en cuenta los contextos de enunciación y de recepción de las teorías, lo que nos permitirá hablar de la "escuela sociológica" que se formó en la División de Planificación Social del ILPES a mitad de los años 60, decisiva para comprender la historia de la sociología en América Latina. (shrink)

We argue that explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), specifically reason-giving XAI, often constitutes the most suitable way of ensuring that someone can properly be held responsible for decisions that are based on the outputs of artificial intelligent (AI) systems. We first show that, to close moral responsibility gaps (Matthias 2004), often a human in the loop is needed who is directly responsible for particular AI-supported decisions. Second, we appeal to the epistemic condition on moral responsibility to argue that, in order to (...) be responsible for her decision, the human in the loop has to have an explanation available of the system’s recommendation. Reason explanations are especially well-suited to this end and we examine whether – and how – it might be possible to make such explanations fit with AI systems. We support our claims by focusing on a case of disagreement between human in the loop and AI system. (shrink)

There is a pervasive presumption that African thought is inherently anthropocentric and has little to contribute to environmental ethics. Against this view, a promising African environmentalism can be be found in a belief in a fundamental interrelatedness between natural objects. What establishes moral considerability on this African view is that entities are part of the interconnected web of life. This position accords moral standing to all living things, groups of living things, as well as inanimate natural entities. This view is (...) not only plausible, but also theoretically appealing. (shrink)

According to some recent arguments, if our moral beliefs are products of natural selection, then we do not have moral knowledge. In defense of this inference, its proponents argue that natural selection is a process that fails to track moral facts. In this paper, I argue that our having moral knowledge is consistent with, the hypothesis that our moral beliefs are products of natural selection, and the claim that natural selection fails to track moral facts. I also argue that natural (...) selection is a process that could track moral facts, albeit imperfectly. I do not argue that we do have moral knowledge. I argue instead that Darwinian considerations provide us with no reason to doubt that we do, and with some reasons to suppose that we might. (shrink)

Given the importance of being able to account for moral obligations towards future generations, especially in the light of the problem of global climate change, I argue that there are under-appreciated notions in African thought that are able to significantly contribute to the on-going discourse with respect to inter-generational moral obligations. I identify two related African notions, both springing from the prominent belief that ancestors who have died ? but continue to have a presence ? are entitled to respect, which (...) upon secular refinement are promising in terms of grounding a claim that we do have moral obligations to future generations. These conceptions are that the environment is a communal resource, shared across generations, and that the present generation should express gratitude to its predecessors for preserving the environment on its behalf, by emulating its predecessors and preserving the environment for future generations. I argue that these two conceptions present plausible grounds for thinking that we have moral obligations to posterity, partly because they go some way towards overcoming some of the theoretical concerns generally associated with the notion of moral obligations towards unidentifiable, contingent future persons. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 3, Page 371-388, June 2021.

Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people's moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers' moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philosophers and non-philosophers do indeed sometimes have (...) different moral intuitions, but challenging the notion that philosophers have better or more reliable intuitions. (shrink)

The era of the Cyborg is now upon us. This has enormous implications on ethical values for both humans and cyborgs. In this paper the state of play is discussed. Routes to cyborgisation are introduced and different types of Cyborg are considered. The author's own self-experimentation projects are described as central to the theme taken. The presentation involves ethical aspects of cyborgisation both as it stands now and those which need to be investigated in the near future as the effects (...) of increased technological power have a more dramatic influence. An important feature is the potential for cyborgs to act against, rather than for, the interests of humanity. (shrink)

I give an account how the principle of ‘respect for autonomy’ dominates the field of bioethics, and how it came to triumph over its competitors, ‘respect for persons’ and ‘respect for free power of choice’. I argue that ‘respect for autonomy’ is unsatisfactory as a basic principle of bioethics because it is grounded in too individualistic a worldview, citing concerns of African theorists and other communitarians who claim that the principle fails to acknowledge the fundamental importance of understanding persons within (...) the nexus of their communal relationships. I defend the claim that ‘respect for persons’ is a more appropriate principle, as it is able to acknowledge both individual decision making and the essential relationality of persons. I acknowledge that my preference for ‘respect for persons’ is problematic because of the important debate around the definition of ‘personhood’ in bioethics discourse. Relying on Thaddeus Metz's conception of moral status, I propose a relational definition of personhood that distinguishes between persons with agency and persons without agency, arguing that we have different moral obligations to these distinct categories of persons. I claim that this conception of personhood is better able to accommodate our moral intuitions than conventional approaches, and that it is able to do so without being speciesist or question-begging. (shrink)

Causal selection is the cognitive process through which one or more elements in a complex causal structure are singled out as actual causes of a certain effect. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we investigated the role of moral and temporal factors in causal selection. Our results are as follows. First, when presented with a temporal chain in which two human agents perform the same action one after the other, subjects tend to judge the later agent (...) to be the actual cause. Second, the impact of temporal location on causal selection is almost canceled out if the later agent did not violate a norm while the former did. We argue that this is due to the impact that judgments of norm violation have on causal selection—even if the violated norm has nothing to do with the obtaining effect. Third, moral judgments about the effect influence causal selection even in the case in which agents could not have foreseen the effect and did not intend to bring it about. We discuss our findings in connection to recent theories of the role of moral judgment in causal reasoning, on the one hand, and to probabilistic models of temporal location, on the other. (shrink)

An important and engaging book on a key argument in contemporary debates about free will and moral responsibility.

The goal of this article is to motivate the idea of a social reason and demonstrate its usefulness in social theorizing. For example, in a society that values getting married young, the fact that one is young is a reason to get married. In racist and sexist societies, we have social reasons to be racist and sexist. Social reasons give rise to social requirements and obligations, where these requirements often conflict with prudential and moral requirements. My application of reasons to (...) social philosophy parallels Charles Mills' and Carole Pateman's applications of social contract theory to political philosophy. While they use social contract theory to make sense of patriarchy and white supremacy, I use the theory of normative reasons to make sense of social injustice. The theory of normative reasons meets non-ideal theory. (shrink)

This paper challenges the commonly held view that Smith's moral theory is a subjectivist theory. Smith's test for goodness and rightness – for propriety – is not the approbation of an impartial spectator, but the warranted approbation of such a spectator. Something is right or good not because an impartial spectator would approve of it, but because such a spectator would be warranted in so approving....

Justifying religious exemptions is a complicated matter. Citizens ask to not be subject to laws that everyone else must follow, raising worries about equal treatment. They ask to be exempted on a religious basis, a basis that secular citizens do not share, raising worries about the equal treatment of secular and religious citizens. And they ask governmental structures to create exceptions in the government’s own laws, raising worries about procedural fairness and stability. We nonetheless think some religious exemptions are appropriate, (...) and in some cases, that exemptions are morally required. So how are we to determine when religious exemptions are justified? This article employs a public reason framework to provide an answer. I show how to publicly justify religious exemptions. My thesis is that a citizen merits a religious exemption under four conditions: if she has sufficient intelligible reason to oppose the law, if the law imposes unique and substantial burdens on the integrity of those exempted that are not off-set by comparable benefits, if the large majority of citizens have sufficient reason to endorse the law, and if the exempted group does not impose significant costs on other parties that require redress. If these conditions are met, then legislative and/or judicial bodies should carve out an exemption for those requesting them. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow (among others) claims that if an autonomous weapon were to commit a war crime, it would cause harm for which no one could reasonably be blamed. Since no one would bear responsibility for the soldier’s share of killing in such cases, he argues that they would necessarily violate the requirements of jus in bello, and should be prohibited by international law. I argue this view is mistaken and that our moral understanding of war is sufficient to determine blame (...) for any wrongful killing done by autonomous weapons. Analyzing moral responsibility for autonomous weapons starts by recognizing that although they are capable of causing moral consequences, they are neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy in the moral sense. As such, their military role is that of a tool, albeit a rather sophisticated one, and responsibility for their use is roughly analogous to that of existing “smart” weapons. There will likely be some difficulty in managing these systems as they become more intelligent and more prone to unpredicted behavior, but the moral notion of shared responsibility and the legal notion of command responsibility are sufficient to locate responsibility for their use. (shrink)

Although many bioethicists have given attention to the special health issues of Africa and to the ethics of research on the continent, only a handful have considered these issues through the lens of African moral thought. The question has been for the most part neglected as to what a distinctively African moral perspective would be for the analysis and teaching of bioethics issues. To address the oversight, the authors of this paper describe embarking on a project aimed at incorporating African (...) moral perspective, values and philosophy into a teaching curriculum. The authors clarify the rationale for the project and discuss the strategies employed in Africanizing the bioethics curriculum. (shrink)

This book is a tribute to Kevin Kelly, who has been one of the most influential British theologians for a number of decades. On its own merits, however, it is groundbreaking collection of essays on key themes, issues and concepts in contemporary moral theology and Christian ethics. The focus is on perspectives to inform moral debate and discernment in the future. The main themes covered are shown in the list of contents below. Several of the of the contributors are (...) from the United States, three others live and work in Continental Europe and the rest are from various parts of the British Isles. Many of the authors are among the best known in their fields on both sides of the Atlantic. (shrink)

Morality – the subjective sense that humans discern between right and wrong – plays a ubiquitous role in everyday life. Deontological reasoning conceptualizes moral decision-making as rigid, such that many moral choices are forbidden or required. Not surprisingly, the language used in measures of deontological reasoning tends to be rigid, including phrases such as “always” and “never.” Two studies drawn from two different populations used commonly used measures of moral reasoning and measures of morality to examine the link between individual (...) differences in deontological reasoning and language on the endorsement of moral foundations. Participants low on deontological reasoning generally showed less endorsement for moral principles when extreme language was used in the measures. (shrink)

Wittgenstein was centrally concerned with the puzzling nature of the mind, mathematics, morality and modality. He also developed innovative views about the status and methodology of philosophy and was explicitly opposed to crudely "scientistic" worldviews. His later thought has thus often been understood as elaborating a nuanced form of naturalism appealing to such notions as "form of life", "primitive reactions", "natural history", "general facts of nature" and "common behaviour of mankind". And yet, Wittgenstein is strangely absent from much of the (...) contemporary literature on naturalism and naturalising projects. This is the first collection of essays to focus explicitly on the relationship between Wittgenstein and naturalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each of which addresses a different aspect of naturalism and its relation to Wittgenstein's thought. The first section considers how naturalism could or should be understood. The second section deals with some of the main problematic domains—consciousness, meaning, mathematics—that philosophers have typically sought to naturalise. The third section explores ways in which the conceptual nature of human life might be continuous in important respects with animals. The final section is concerned with the naturalistic status and methodology of philosophy itself. This book thus casts a fresh light on many classical philosophical issues and brings Wittgensteinian ideas to bear on a number of current debates-for example experimental philosophy, neo-pragmatism and animal cognition/ethics-in which naturalism is playing a central role. (shrink)

In three studies, we examined the relationship between implicit negotiation beliefs, moral disengagement, and a negotiator’s ethical attitudes and behavior. Study 1 found correlations between an entity theory that negotiation skills are fixed rather than malleable, moral disengagement, and appropriateness of marginally ethical negotiation tactics. Mediation analysis supported a model in which moral disengagement facilitated the relationship between entity theory and support for unethical tactics. Study 2 provided additional support for the mediation model in a sample of MBA students, whereby (...) predispositions to morally disengage mediated the effect of dispositional entity beliefs on unethical behavior in a negotiation exercise. In study 3, we manipulated implicit beliefs prior to a negotiation simulation and found that entity beliefs predict deception through two sequential mediators, extreme opening bids and state moral disengagement. (shrink)

African ethical theories tend to hold that moral agents ought to be partial, in the sense that they should favour members of their family or close community. This is considered an advantage over the impartiality of many Western moral theories, which are regarded as having counterintuitive implications, such as the idea that it is unethical to save a family member before a stranger. The partiality of African ethics is thought to be particularly valuable in the context of bioethics. Thaddeus Metz, (...) in particular, argues that his African-derived theory best accounts for a number of plausible intuitions, such as the intuition that health care practitioners ought to be biased towards the patients for whom they are directly responsible. In this article, I claim that the plausible intuitions drawn on in favour of partiality can be satisfactorily explained on the basis of impartial moral theories. Moreover, I argue that blanket acceptance of partiality has problematic consequences for distributive justice in resource allocation in biomedical contexts. By contrast, impartial theories can justify plausible instances of partiality whilst avoiding the pitfalls of fully partial moral theories. Although this provides grounds for abandoning partiality in principle, I claim that this finding should not be seen as damaging to African medical ethics. Instead, it prompts investigation of underexplored possibilities of impartial African moral theories. To demonstrate the value of this direction, I sketch some novel and attractive conceptions that combine impartiality with elements of African ethics. (shrink)

The notion of role morality suggests individuals may adopt a different morality depending on the roles they undertake. Investigating role morality is important, since the mentality of role morality may allow agents to believe they can abdicate moral responsibility when acting in a role. This is particularly significant in the literature dealing with professional morality where professionals, because of their special status, may find themselves at odds with their best moral judgments. Here I tell four stories and draw out some (...) distinctions. I conclude that role morality is a genuine and useful distinction. However, I suggest that the purported distinction between role morality and professional morality is over‐determined. Therefore, alleged conflicts between the demands of role and profession (such as the different pressures on Pinto designers as employees and as engineers) are not conflicts between different kinds of demands, but rather conflicts arising from divergent roles that most workers will encounter regularly. Another analytical perspective is to look at moral choices at work in terms of power and the ability to bring about change. Finally, I draw the implication that we should stress moral awareness at a fairly abstract level for all employees and reinforce the moral primacy of individual choice. (shrink)

Is voting a duty of democratic citizenship? This article advances a new argument for the existence of a duty to vote. It argues that every normative account of electoral representation requires universal turnout to function in line with its own internal normative logic. This generates a special obligation for citizens to vote in electoral representative contexts as a function of the role morality of democratic citizenship. Because voting uniquely authorizes office holding in representative democracies, and because universal turnout contributes powerfully (...) to representation being fair, to be a good citizen of such democracies requires one to vote. Whereas previous arguments for a duty to vote have invoked basic moral principles like fairness or a Samaritan duty of rescue, this account is based on citizens occupying a vital functional role within electoral representative institutions. This institutional duty solves the “specificity problem” of justifying a duty to vote better than competing accounts and also immunizes the duty to objections that there is no duty to vote when there are only bad choices and that there is a no duty to vote but rather duty to vote well. By emphasizing the tight connection between institutions and individual conduct, the role morality approach used here supplies a less abstract and more realistic framework than much previous research on the ethics of democratic citizenship and brings the debate closer to constitutive features of democratic politics. (shrink)

Human beings working in fields involving life, death, and morality are going to have fundamental and occasionally irreconcilable differences of opinion regarding goals, values, and actions. This has been true from the beginning of civilization. Along the way, civilized peoples have created laws that accommodate these differences so that a diverse population can coexist peaceably in one pluralistic society. As such, the Law is the practical, inchoate expression of that society's combined morals.For more than a decade, scholarly articles about conscientious (...) objection in medical care have tended to involve one group of people telling other groups what they must value and how they must behave in order to be good... (shrink)

Many academic philosophers and ethicists are appointed to teach ethics to medical students. We explore exactly what this task entails. In South Africa the Health Professions Council's curriculum for training medical practitioners requires not only that students be taught to apply ethical theory to issues and be made aware of the legal and regulatory requirements of their profession, it also expects moral formation and the inculcation of professional virtue in students. We explore whether such expectations are reasonable. We defend the (...) claim that physicians ought to be persons of virtuous character, on the grounds of the social contract between society and the profession. We further argue that since the expectations of virtue of health care professionals are reasonable, it is also sound reasoning to expect ethics teachers to try to inculcate such virtues in their students, so far as this is possible. Furthermore, this requires of such teachers that they be suitable role models of ethical practice and virtue, themselves. We claim that this applies to ethics teachers who are themselves not members of the medical profession, too, even though they are not bound by the same social contract as doctors. We conclude that those who accept employment as teachers of ethics to medical students, where as part of their contractual obligation they are expected to inculcate moral values in their students, ought to be prepared to accept their responsibility to be professionally ethical, themselves. (shrink)

Gerald Gaus was one of the leading liberal theorists of the early twenty-first century. He defended liberal order based on its unique capacity to handle deep disagreement and pressed liberals toward a principled openness to pluralism and diversity. Yet, almost everything written about Gaus's work is evaluative: determining whether his arguments succeed or fail. This essay breaks from the pack by outlining underlying themes in his work. I argue that Gaus explored how to sustain moral relations between persons in light (...) of the institutional threats of social control, evaluative pluralism, and institutional complexity, and the psychological threat of acting solely from what I shall call themere first-personal point of view. The idea of public justification is the key to sustaining moral relations in the face of such challenges. When a society's moral and political rules are justified to each person, moral relations survive the threats they face. (shrink)

Two prominent theoretical frameworks in moral psychology, Moral Foundations and Dual Process Theory, share a broad foundational assumption that individual differences in human morality are dispositional and in part due to genetic variation. The only published direct test of heritability, however, found little evidence of genetic influences on moral judgments using instrumentation approaches associated with Moral Foundations Theory. This raised questions about one of the core assumptions underpinning intuitionist theories of moral psychology. Here we examine the heritability of moral psychology (...) using the moral dilemmas approach commonly used in Dual Process Theory research. Using such measures, we find consistent and significant evidence of heritability. These findings have important implications not only for understanding which measures do, or do not, tap into the genetically influenced aspects of moral decision-making, but in better establishing the utility and validity of different intuitionist theoretical frameworks and the source of why people differ in those frameworks. (shrink)

In response to the intellectual movement of New Atheism, this volume articulates a "New Theist" response that has at its core a desire to engage in productive and depolarizing dialogue. To ensure this book is of interest to atheists and theists alike, a team of experts in the field of philosophy of religion offer an assessment of the strongest New Atheist arguments. The chapters address the most pertinent questions about God, including politics and morality, and each essay shows how a (...) reflective theist might deal with points raised by the New Atheists. This volume is a serious academic engagement with the questions asked by New Atheism. As such, it will be of significant interest to scholars working in the philosophy of religion and theology, as well as those engaged in religious studies generally. (shrink)

The idea that ethics can be derived from a common morality, while controversial, has become very influential in biomedical ethics. Although the concept is employed by several theories, it has most prominently been given a central role in principlism, an ethical theory endorsed by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in Principles of Biomedical Ethics (2009).1 This text has become a cornerstone of medical ethics education, an achievement that has been commended by critics and supporters alike. It articulates a system of (...) ethical decision making that is firmly rooted in claims about the common morality. Beauchamp and Childress’s theory of common morality has been both defended and criticized in the bioethics .. (shrink)

This book introduces readers to the major debates and positions related to moral realism, and defends a pluralistic version of moral realism.

In “The Trouble with Tracing,” Manuel Vargas argues that tracing-based approaches to moral responsibility are considerably more problematic than previously acknowledged. Vargas argues that many initially plausible tracing-based cases of moral responsibility turn out to be ones in which the epistemic condition for moral responsibility is not satisfied, thus suggesting that contrary to initial appearances the agent isn’t morally responsible for the action in question. In the present paper, I outline two different strategies for responding to Vargas’s trouble with tracing. (...) I then show how further consideration of the epistemic condition for moral responsibility renders tracing significantly less problematic than Vargas claims. (shrink)

This book is concerned with how we should think and act in our work, leisure activities, and time utilization in order to achieve flourishing lives. The scope papers range from general theoretical considerations of the value, e.g. 'What is a balanced life?', to specific types of considerations, e.g. 'How should we cope with the effects of work on moral decision-making?'.

This essay argues that Confucian ritual propriety (li 禮) and Aristotelian habit (hexis, ἔξις) play analogous roles within their respective ethical systems and that we can come to appreciate important dimensions of each category by juxtaposing it with the other. Despite numerous and deep dissimilarities, both li and hexis work to organize and publicize emotions and dispositions, ground true moral quality in phenomenally-present activity, and (leveraging insights from Marcel Mauss) contribute to shaping and actualizing an agent’s body and behavior. The (...) essay unpacks several semantic subtleties of li and hexis, and attempts to respond to alleged disanalogies. Finally, the success of a such a li-hexis analogy reveals the ways in which Aristotle’s virtues are more socially contingent and Confucian morality is less particularistic than is often allowed; which in turn, I argue, lessens some of the distance between virtue-based and role-based ethical frameworks. (shrink)

Mass surveillance is a more real threat now than at any time in history. Digital communications and automated systems allow for the collection and processing of private information at a scale never seen before. Many argue that mass surveillance entails a significant loss of privacy. Others dispute that there is a loss of privacy if the information is only encountered by automated systems.This paper argues that automated mass surveillance does not involve a significant loss of privacy. Through providing a definition (...) of informational privacy as a matter of actual access of private information by one who can understand the meaning of that information, it follows that automated systems which lack understanding cannot of themselves diminish privacy. This is not to say that mass surveillance is unproblematic, though - it is deeply problematic. It is just that privacy is not the most significant of these problems. (shrink)