Online research in philosophy

This article summarizes the multitude of empirical studies that test ethical decision making in business and suggests additional research necessary to further theory in this area. The studies are categorized and related to current theoretical ethical decision making models. The studies are related to awareness, individual and organizational factors, intent, and the role of moral intensity in ethical decision making. Summary tables provide a quick reference for the sample, findings, and publication outlet. This review provides insights for understanding organizational ethical (...) decision constructs, where ethical decision making theory currently stands, and provides insights for future empirical work on organizational ethical decision making. (shrink)

Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders is the only full-length interpretive study on Machiavelli's controversial and ambiguous work, Discourses on Livy. These discourses, considered by some to be Machiavelli's most important work, are thoroughly explained in a chapter-by-chapter commentary by Harvey C. Mansfield, one of the world's foremost interpreters of this remarkable philosopher. Mansfield's aim is to discern Machiavelli's intention in writing the book: he argues that Machiavelli wanted to introduce new modes and orders in political philosophy in order (...) to make himself the founder of modern politics. Mansfield maintains that Machiavelli deliberately concealed part of his intentions so that only the most perceptive reader could see beneath the surface of the text and understand the whole of his book. Previously out of print, Mansfield's penetrating study brings to light the hidden thoughts lurking in the details of the Discourses on Livy to inform and challenge its readers at every step along the way. (shrink)

Uniting thirty years of authoritative scholarship by a master of textual detail, Machiavelli's Virtue is a comprehensive statement on the founder of modern politics. Harvey Mansfield reveals the role of sects in Machiavelli's politics, his advice on how to rule indirectly, and the ultimately partisan character of his project, and shows him to be the founder of such modern and diverse institutions as the impersonal state and the energetic executive. Accessible and elegant, this groundbreaking interpretation explains the puzzles and (...) reveals the ambition of Machiavelli's thought. "The book brings together essays that have mapped [Mansfield's] paths of reflection over the past thirty years. . . . The ground, one would think, is ancient and familiar, but Mansfield manages to draw out some understandings, or recognitions, jarringly new."--Hadley Arkes, New Criterion "Mansfield's book more than rewards the close reading it demands."--Colin Walters, Washington Times "[A] masterly new book on the Renaissance courtier, statesman and political philosopher. . . . Mansfield seeks to rescue Machiavelli from liberalism's anodyne rehabilitation."--Roger Kimball, The Wall Street Journal. (shrink)

In this paper, our goal is to (a) survey some of the legal contexts within which violence risk assessment already plays a prominent role, (b) explore whether developments in neuroscience could potentially be used to improve our ability to predict violence, and (c) discuss whether neuropredictive models of violence create any unique legal or moral problems above and beyond the well worn problems already associated with prediction more generally. In Violence Risk Assessment and the Law , we briefly examine the (...) role currently played by predictions of violence in three high stakes legal contexts: capital sentencing ( Violence Risk Assessment and Capital Sentencing ), civil commitment hearings ( Violence Risk Assessment and Civil Commitment ), and sexual predator statutes ( Violence Risk Assessment and Sexual Predator Statutes ). In Clinical vs. Actuarial Violence Risk Assessment , we briefly examine the distinction between traditional clinical methods of predicting violence and more recently developed actuarial methods, exemplified by the Classification of Violence Risk (COVR) software created by John Monahan and colleagues as part of the MacArthur Study of Mental Disorder and Violence [1]. In The Neural Correlates of Psychopathy , we explore what neuroscience currently tells us about the neural correlates of violence, using the recent neuroscientific research on psychopathy as our focus. We also discuss some recent advances in both data collection ( Cutting-Edge Data Collection: Genetically Informed Neuroimaging ) and data analysis ( Cutting-Edge Data Analysis: Pattern Classification ) that we believe will play an important role when it comes to future neuroscientific research on violence. In The Potential Promise of Neuroprediction , we discuss whether neuroscience could potentially be used to improve our ability to predict future violence. Finally, in The Potential Perils of Neuroprediction , we explore some potential evidentiary ( Evidentiary Issues ), constitutional ( Constitutional Issues ), and moral ( Moral Issues ) issues that may arise in the context of the neuroprediction of violence. (shrink)

Drug promotion should be evaluated according to its impact on health, access to information, informed consent, and wealth. Drug promotion currently does more harm than good to each of these objectives because it is usually misleading. This is a systemic problem. Whilst improved regulation and education will address it to some degree, major reforms to payment systems for drug companies and doctors are also required. Until all these systemic reforms can be put in place, the best policy option is to (...) ban the promotion of drugs to doctors and the public. Consequently, pending major reforms, it is appropriate for governments to restrict drug promotion as much as is politically achievable. (shrink)

Rights theorists tend to take tempi pacifici for granted, but it is precisely in emergencies that rights are most difficult to protect and most in need of protection. Two remedies are: first, to be successful in emergencies and second, to establish a free government capable of handling emergencies. These remedies play no role in the thinking of the ACLU, which has increasingly come to define the public's understanding of rights. For the ACLU, a right is not a right unless it (...) can be carried to an extreme and used irresponsibly. A better liberal theory, with instruction from Machiavelli, will seek to combine our interest in security with our assertion of rights. (shrink)

War is always defined in relation to something else: peace, society, civilization, friendship or love. What is the relationship between war and its "other"? Are they opposites or versions of one another? This book surveys four hundred years of thinking about the definition of war, from Hobbes and Clausewitz to Badiou and Žižek.

A careful reading of Harvey C. Mansfield's Manlines s (2006) and the recent translation (2007) of Daniel Tanguay's Leo Strauss; une biographie intellectuelle (2003) reveals that neither text supports the view that Leo Strauss was a harmless if qualified friend of liberal democracy. Key Words: Leo Strauss • Straussians • Nietzsche • Carl Schmitt • Heidegger • National Socialism • Liberalism • Redlichkeit • Hobbes • Hegel • Viktor Trivas.

This article is concerned with the shape of the story of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy as told by J. B. Schneewind in The Invention of Autonomy. After discussion of alternative possible shapes for such a story, the focus falls on the question to what extent, in Schneewind's account, strands of empiricist voluntarism and rationalist intellectualism are interwoven in Kant. This in turn leads to consideration of different types of voluntarism and their roles in early modern ethical theory. Correspondence:c1 robert.adams@ (...) class='Hi'>mansfield.oxford.ac.uk. (shrink)

Ever since the publication of Mansfield Park readers and critics have debated how to understand the novel and particularly its heroine Fanny Price. Some have disliked Fanny, have thought of her as prudish and priggish, and perhaps have preferred Mary Crawford and wished for a different ending to the story. Others have defended Fanny’s virtue, her judgment, and her mind, regarding them as quite superior to the virtue, judgment, and minds of all of the other women in the novel, (...) and all the men too, excepting (perhaps) Edmund. The debate, quite clearly, is about what Jane Austen was up to in a novel with a heroine so different from those in her other novels. The question is unclear in part because the narrator’s voice in Mansfield Park is so much like Mary Crawford’s voice. In her article “Searching for Jane Austen in Mary Crawford,” Emily Auerbach offers us quotations from Mary Crawford and from Jane Austen’s own letters and challenges us to figure out which are which—and it is very difficult. Mary Crawford, like Jane Austen, is frequently sparkling and edgy while Fanny is not, yet Fanny is the star. (shrink)

“I love information upon all subjects that come in my way, and especially upon those that are most important.” Thus boldly declares Euphranor, one of the defenders of Christian faith in Berkley's Alciphron (Dialogue 1, Section 5, Paragraph 6/10, see Berkeley [1732]). Evidently, information has been an object of philosophical desire for some time, well before the computer revolution, Internet or the dot.com pandemonium (see for example Dunn [2001] and Adams [2003]). Yet what does Euphranor love, exactly? What is information (...) ? The question has received many answers in different fields. Unsurprisingly, several surveys do not even converge on a single, unified definition of information (see for example Braman [1989], Losee [1997], Machlup and Mansfield [1983], Debons and Cameron [1975], Larson and Debons [1983]). (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time thirteen recent interviews with the brightest names in contemporary philosophy, including W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam and John Rawls. The pieces are culled from the Harvard Review of Philosophy, which has operated at the core of Harvard's Philosophy Department since 1991. Covering wide range of topics from the philosophy of law to logic to metaphysics to literature, the interviews provide a fascinating introduction to some of the most influential thinkers (...) of the day. The book also includes a foreword by Thomas Scanlon. Interviews with Henry Alison, Stanley Cavell, Alan Dershowitz, Cora Diamond, Umberto Eco, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Alexander Nehemas, Hilary Putnam, W.V. Quine, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Michael Sandel, Cornel West. (shrink)

Let Γ be a collection of relations on the reals and let M be a set of reals. We call M a perfect set basis for Γ if every set in Γ with parameters from M which is not totally included in M contains a perfect subset with code in M. A simple elementary proof is given of the following result (assuming mild regularity conditions on Γ and M): If M is a perfect set basis for Γ, the field of (...) every wellordering in Γ is contained in M. An immediate corollary is Mansfield's Theorem that the existence of a Σ 1 2 wellordering of the reals implies that every real is constructible. Other applications and extensions of the main result are also given. (shrink)

Isolation in the back-country: George Chamier, G.B. Lancaster, Katherine Mansfield, John Mulgan, and Graham Billing -- Outsiders and misfits in fragmented social milieux: William Satchell, Vincent Pyke, John A. Lee, Robin Hyde, Frank Sargeson, and others -- The lonely and the alone in the fiction of Janet Frame -- Maurice Gee and postmodern isolation -- Women, isolation, and history: Fiona Kidman, Noel Hilliard, and Patricia Grace -- Cultural deracination and isolation: Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, and Alan Duff.

Uberrima Fides is a legal doctrine that governs insurance contracts and expects all parties to the insurance agreement to act in good faith by declaring all material facts relative to a policy. The doctrine originated in England in 1766 with the case Carter v Boehm ruled by Lord Mansfield. Ever since, it has become, with some differences in interpretation, a cornerstone of insurance relationships around the world. The role that trust plays within it, however, is not simple and should (...) not be taken for granted. While it is expected that an idea of trust represents an order of truth, trust in itself is the outcome of a complex negotiation of moral orders. Semiotically, trust operates here not as a Kantian category for the understanding but as a signifier of an order of truth that upholds the possibility for insurance relationships. Trust, as sign, operates as a condition of possibility for the performance of insurance. In this article, a Foucaultian approach is employed to problematise the idea of trust and its role in insurance relationships. The case of mis-selling of insurance policies in the United Kingdom since the 1980s, which has given rise to numerous legal rulings, is used as the empirical site for the problematisation. (shrink)

1. Introduction: Machiavelli's method and his interpreters, by A. Parel.--2. Machiavelli's humanism of action, by N. Wood.--3. Machiavelli's thoughts on the psyche and society, by D. Germino.--4. Success and knowledge in Machiavelli, by A. Kontos.--5. Necessity in the beginnings of cities, by H. Mansfield.--6. The concept of fortuna in Machiavelli, by T. Flanagan.--7. In search of Machiavellian virtu, by J. Plamenatz.--8. Machiavelli minore, by A. Parel.--9. The relevance of Machiavelli to contemporary world politics, by A. D'Amato.