The adamant and uniform pro-choice viewpoints expressed in each of the target articles demonstrates how mainstream bioethics has become a homogeneous and insular advocacy movement that seeks to ins...

Foreword by Robert H. Bork -- Culture wars -- A distorted understanding of rights -- The right to privacy -- Griswold and contraception -- Roe and abortion -- Assisted suicide and homosexuality -- Political connections and natural consequences.

This article responds to Professor Romano’s piece in this issue. It concerns our ongoing debate with regard to the desirability of permitting issuers to choose the securities regulation regime by which they are bound. Romano favors issuer choice, arguing that it would result in jurisdictional competition to offer issuers share value maximizing regulations. I, in contrast, believe that abandoning the current mandatory system of federal securities disclosure would likely lower, not increase, U.S. welfare. Each issuer, I argue, would select a (...) regime requiring a level of disclosure less than is socially optimal because its private costs of disclosure would be greater than the social costs of such disclosure. Professor Romano and I agree on most of the basic analytic building blocks for deciding whether issuer choice is a desirable reform: belief in analyzing the problem in terms of the broadly accepted principles of modern financial economics; recognition that disclosure has costs as well as benefits; and acknowledgment that incentives exist for issuers to provide at least some disclosure. We nevertheless reach the opposite conclusion on the desirability of issuer choice. To start, Romano believes that issuers’ private costs of disclosure will not generally be greater than the social costs of such disclosure, whereas I show they will be. Romano argues as well that this is a special case in which any divergence of private and social costs that does exist will not lead to a market failure, at least one possibly correctable by public regulation. I show her argument to be unpersuasive. Finally, Romano interprets the existing empirical evidence as proving mandatory disclosure’s lack of social value, while I show that the evidence in fact does not point in either direction. Where, as here, the theoretical case for the existence of a market failure is strong and the current program for dealing with it is widely admired, the advocate of change should have the burden of proof. Professor Romano has not met this burden. If she is serious about advancing her proposal for issuer choice, she needs to show that despite the market failure inherent in issuer choice, there is inevitably an even greater failure in the regulatory response. Absent such a showing, mandatory disclosure should be retained. (shrink)

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein “to be” or werden “to become”, and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a (...) dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently “sudden” acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. (shrink)

Many of Søren Kierkegaard's most controversial and influential ideas are more relevant than ever to contemporary debates on ethics, philosophy of religion and selfhood. Kierkegaard develops an original argument according to which wholeheartedness requires both moral and religious commitment. In this book, Roe Fremstedal provides a compelling reconstruction of how Kierkegaard develops wholeheartedness in the context of his views on moral psychology, meta-ethics and the ethics of religious belief. He shows that Kierkegaard's influential account of despair, selfhood, ethics and religion (...) belongs to a larger intellectual context in which German philosophers such as Kant and Fichte play crucial roles. Moreover, Fremstedal makes a solid case for the controversial claim that religion supports ethics, instead of contradicting it. His book offers a novel and comprehensive reading of Kierkegaard, drawing on important sources that are little known. (shrink)

In mainstream analytic epistemology, Reformed theology has made its presence prominently felt in Reformed epistemology, the view of religious belief according to which religious beliefs can be properly basic and warranted when formed by the proper functioning of the sensus divinitatis, an inborn capacity or faculty for belief in God that can be prompted to generate certain religious beliefs when presented with things (e.g., certain majestic aspects of creation). A major competitor to Reformed epistemology is Wittgensteinian quasi-fideism, a position drawn (...) from the epistemology of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, according to which some foundational religious commitments are not properly basic beliefs but some kind of apodictic, unshakeable certainties that form part of the structure of one’s rationality and worldview. I argue that the Reformed tradition has contained elements of quasi-fideism at least as far back as Calvin’s account of faith from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 3, chapter 2. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article examines Harold Ramis’s 2005 noir comedy The Ice Harvest as the critically dystopian counter-panel to his beloved 1993 film Groundhog Day, a film frequently discussed within the paradigm of utopia. While starkly different in genre, tone, and reception, the two films comprise a dialectical dyad that registers the historical transition from the utopian cultural effervescence of the early 1990s to the tragic foreclosure of imaginative horizons and the dystopian transformation of economic, political, and social landscapes in the new (...) millennium. In The Ice Harvest, the author argues, this is achieved through a strategic reactivation of film noir as a variant of the critical dystopia. (shrink)

Unethical pro-organizational behaviors are unethical, but prosocially-motivated, acts intended to benefit one’s organization. This study examines the extent to which employees are willing to perform UPB to benefit a liked leader. Based on social exchange theory, we hypothesized that LMX would mediate the association of interpersonal justice with UPB willingness. Moral identity and positive reciprocity beliefs were examined as moderators. Higher LMX was significantly and positively related to UPB willingness, and the indirect effect of interpersonal justice on UPB via LMX (...) was significant and positive. These findings suggest that LMX and interpersonal justice could have a previously-unexplored dark side. Moral identity had a negative direct relationship with UPB, but it did not moderate the relationship of LMX with UPB. Thus, LMX facilitates UPB willingness even when employees are high in moral identity. LMX is associated with many positive outcomes, but our results show that high LMX may also increase willingness to perform unethical behaviors to benefit one’s leader. These results contribute to the literature by identifying a potential negative outcome associated with high LMX. (shrink)

The problem of this paper may be stated simply. It is that, in dealing with the nature of reality, it is not only possible, but more fruitful and more accurate, to deal with the category of order or design, meaning by this, the structure or relationship of the parts of a whole, without associating this idea with that of purpose or teleology, than it is to conjoin these concepts. It is the purpose of the paper to show why this separation (...) is advisable, and to indicate the background of the problem which tends to make difficult the separation of these two concepts. (shrink)

This article tries to make sense of the concept of the highest good (eternal bliss) in Søren Kierkegaard by comparing it to the analysis of the highest good found in Immanuel Kant. The comparison with Kant’s more systematic analysis helps us clarify the meaning and importance of the concept in Kierkegaard as well as to shed new light on the conceptual relation between Kant and Kierkegaard. The article argues that the concept of the highest good is of systematic importance in (...) Kierkegaard, although previous research has tended to overlook this, no doubt due to Kierkegaard’s cryptic use of the concept. It is argued that Kierkegaard’s concept of the highest good is much closer to Kant’s than what previous research has indicated. In particular, Kant and Kierkegaard see the highest good not only as comprising of virtue and happiness (bliss), but also as being the Kingdom of God. (shrink)

Ethics guidance increasingly recognises that researchers and sponsors have obligations to consider provisions for post-trial access to interventions that are found to be beneficial in research. Yet, there is little information regarding whether and how such plans can actually be implemented. Understanding practical experiences of developing and implementing these plans is critical to both optimising their implementation and informing conceptual work related to PTA. This viewpoint is informed by experiences with developing and implementing PTA plans for six large-scale multicentre HIV (...) prevention trials supported by the HIV Prevention Trials Network. These experiences suggest that planning and implementing PTA often involve challenges of planning under uncertainty and confronting practical barriers to accessing healthcare systems. Even in relatively favourable circumstances where a tested intervention medication is approved and available in the local healthcare system, system-level barriers can threaten the viability of PTA plans. The aggregate experience across these HIV prevention trials suggests that simply referring participants to local healthcare systems for PTA will not necessarily result in continued access to beneficial interventions for trial participants. Serious commitments to PTA will require additional efforts to learn from future approaches, measuring the success of PTA plans with dedicated follow-up and further developing normative guidance to help research stakeholders navigate the complex practical challenges of realising PTA. (shrink)

By comparing the theories of evil found in Kant and Kierkegaard, this article aims to shed new light on Kierkegaard, as well as on the historical and conceptual relations between the two philosophers. The author shows that there is considerable overlap between Kant's doctrine of radical evil and Kierkegaard's views on guilt and sin and argues that Kierkegaard approved of the doctrine of radical evil. Although Kierkegaard's distinction between guilt and sin breaks radically with Kant, there are more Kantian elements (...) in Kierkegaard than was shown by earlier scholarship. Finally, Kierkegaard provides an alternative solution to the problem of the universality of guilt, a problem much discussed in the literature on Kant. (shrink)

Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good is a major study of Kierkegaard's relation to Kant that gives a comprehensive account of radical evil and the highest good, two controversial doctrines with important consequences for ethics and religion.

The aim of this paper is to clarify Kierkegaard’s concept of demonic despair (and demonic evil) and to show its relevance for discussions of the guise of the good thesis (i.e. that in f-ing intentionally, we take f-ing to be good). Contemporary discussions of diabolic evil often emphasise the phenomena of despair and acedia as apparent counter-examples to the guise of the good. I contend that Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair is relevant to these discussions, because it reconciles demonic (extreme) despair (...) and acedia with the guise of the good. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard provides an influential, systematic account of despair that relates evil, despair, and acedia to each other. Michelle Kosch argues that this account goes beyond Kierkegaard’s German predecessors by introducing a concept of diabolic evil and despair. By contrast, the present paper argues that Kierkegaard takes diabolic evil to be impossible, although he offers a rich analysis of the demonic that resembles diabolic agency. Still, Kierkegaard’s analysis rests on ontological assumptions about the nature of the good that belong to a Platonico-Christian tradition that is controversial today. (shrink)