A serious yet unstudied consequence of the Christian-Muslim conflict in medieval Spain was the capture and enslavement of soldiers and civilians. Men, women, and children who were seized on raids, taken in battle, or pirated off ships were regarded by their captors as booty, to be used as slaves or to be sold for profit. Since warfare in twelfth-century Spain pitted Christians against Muslims, the usual prohibitions against enslavement of coreligionists clearly did not apply. For Muslims and Christians alike, capture (...) meant a life of slavery. Christian chronicles of this era are replete with stories of captives taken off to be sold in the slave markets of al-Andalus in southern Spain or, even worse, in those of North Africa. Some of these slaves, however, were able to regain their freedom through redemption — that is, to purchase their liberty by paying a ransom. Since the ransom price frequently exceeded what could be gained in the slave auctions, redemption became an attractive option to both captor and captive. (shrink)

Reviewing this collection nearly a year after the deposition of Donald Trump by Joe Biden, one is prompted to delve through memories of a presidency so flagrantly outrageous that it is hard to comprehend that some of the events that took place under it were real. By the final months of Trump's tenure, the coronavirus had brought the United States to its knees, with a death rate then unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Meanwhile, the wave of Black Lives Matter (...) protests, sparked by the brutal killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police, were met with violent military force. The US Army was deployed in cities seen as protest hotbeds, such as Portland, Oregon, and teargas was used to dispel peaceful protesters... (shrink)

This paper attempts to elucidate three characteristics of causal relationships that are important in biological contexts. Stability has to do with whether a causal relationship continues to hold under changes in background conditions. Proportionality has to do with whether changes in the state of the cause “line up” in the right way with changes in the state of the effect and with whether the cause and effect are characterized in a way that contains irrelevant detail. Specificity is connected both to (...) David Lewis’ notion of “influence” and also with the extent to which a causal relation approximates to the ideal of one cause–one effect. Interrelations among these notions and their possible biological significance are also discussed. (shrink)

This paper discusses some issues concerning the relationship between the mental and the physical, including the so-called causal exclusion argument, within the framework of a broadly interventionist approach to causation.

In their upcoming article, Henk Jasper van Gils-Schmidt and Sabine Salloch highlight the supposed responsibilities of healthcare professionals in addressing the global health challenges posed by climate change. They argue that healthcare professionals’ duties to future generations and their ‘climate-related obligations’ have been neglected, primarily due to potential conflicts with other responsibilities, such as providing optimal care to current patients and maintaining patient trust. The authors suggest that these competing obligations should be viewed as part of the multifaceted identities individuals (...) hold, encompassing roles as both physicians and environmentalists, each with normative and competing commitments. They propose that a transformative shift in physicians’ professional ethos, expanding from the predominant focus on individual patients to include obligations towards climate protection, could pave the way for identifying effective mechanisms to address these challenges. While acknowledging the authors’ emphasis on sustainable healthcare practices, we argue that a duty to climate protection as part of healthcare professionals’ identity lacks ethical support. We identify serious concerns that stem from the transformative shift in physicians’ professional ethos, particularly in the authors’ presentation of reasons for action. First, envisaging a stable disposition that compels healthcare professionals to ensure optimal care conditions for both immediate and potential future encounters is unrealistic. Such a scenario would necessitate a nuanced and multifaceted evaluation, weighing …. (shrink)

This paper presents a counterfactual account of what a mechanism is. Mechanisms consist of parts, the behavior of which conforms to generalizations that are invariant under interventions, and which are modular in the sense that it is possible in principle to change the behavior of one part independently of the others. Each of these features can be captured by the truth of certain counterfactuals.

Author Marc James Léger responds to Elias Khoury’s review of his book _Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism_, which was published in volume 17 of the _International Journal of __Žižek Studies_. While Léger accepts the one mistake in the book that Khoury correctly identifies, he takes issue with nearly everything else in Khoury’s review, which involves fallacies, misquotations, reductive arguments, misdirection and failure to mention anything that would contradict Khoury’s generally false claims. Léger describes the possibility of academic (...) foul play in the context of a public secret directed against him and that he has been struggling against since the late 1990s. (shrink)

Introduces Aristotle's writings on ethics, and discusses character, intelligence, pleasure, and friendship.

From a leading authority in artificial intelligence, this book delivers a synthesis of the major modern techniques and the most current research in natural language processing. The approach is unique in its coverage of semantic interpretation and discourse alongside the foundational material in syntactic processing.

The results of four experiments provide evidence for controlled processing in the absence of awareness. Participants identified the colour of a neutral distracter word. Each of four words was presented in one of the four colours 75% of the time or 50% of the time . Colour identification was faster when the words appeared in the colour they were most often presented in relative to when they appeared in another colour, even for participants who were subjectively unaware of any contingencies (...) between the words and the colours. An analysis of sequence effects showed that participants who were unaware of the relation between distracter words and colours nonetheless controlled the impact of the word on performance depending on the nature of the previous trial. A block analysis of contingency-unaware participants revealed that contingencies were learned rapidly in the first block of trials. Experiment 3 showed that the contingency effect does not depend on the level of awareness, thus ruling out explicit strategy accounts. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that the contingency effect results from behavioural control and not from semantic association or stimulus familiarity. These results thus provide evidence for implicit control. (shrink)

I argue that the Hole Argument is based on a misleading use of the mathematical formalism of general relativity. If one is attentive to mathematical practice, I will argue, the Hole Argument is blocked.

What is the relationship between, on the one hand, the sorts of causal claims found in the special sciences (and in common sense) and, on the other hand, the world as described by physics? A standard picture goes like this: the fundamental laws of physics are causal laws in the sense that they can be interpreted as telling us that realizations of one set of physical factors or properties “causes” realizations of other properties. Causal claims in the special sciences are (...) then true (to the extent that they are) in virtue of “instantiating” these underlying causal laws; as it is often put, the latter serve as “truth-makers” for the former. The picture is thus one according to which the notion of cause, as it occurs in the special sciences, is reflected or “grounded” in a fairly straightforward and transparent way in a similar notion that occurs in fundamental physics. This paper explores some alternatives to this picture. (shrink)

The moral obligation to support space exploration follows from our obligations to protect the environment and to survive as a species. It can be justified through three related arguments: one supporting space exploration as necessary for acquiring resources, and two illustrating the need for space technology in order to combat extraterrestrial threats such as meteorite impacts. Three sorts of objections have been raised against this obligation. The first are objections alleging that supporting space exploration is impractical. The second is the (...) widely held notion that space exploration and environmentalism are at odds with one another. Finally, there are two objections to using space resources that Robert Sparrow has raised on the topic of terraforming. The obligation to support space exploration can be defended in at least three ways: (1) the "argument from resources," that space exploration is useful for amplifying our available resources; (2) the "argument from asteroids," that space exploration is necessary for protecting the environment and its inhabitants from extraterrestrial threats such as meteorite impacts; and (3) the "argument from solar burnout," that we are obligated to pursue interstellar colonization in order to ensure long-term human survival. (shrink)

This paper provides a restatement and defense of the data/ phenomena distinction introduced by Jim Bogen and me several decades ago (e.g., Bogen and Woodward, The Philosophical Review, 303–352, 1988). Additional motivation for the distinction is introduced, ideas surrounding the distinction are clarified, and an attempt is made to respond to several criticisms.

Terraforming is a process of planetary engineering by which the extant environment of a planetary body is transformed into an environment capable of supporting human inhabitants. The question I would like to consider in this paper is whether there is any reason to believe that the terraforming of another planet—for instance, the terraforming of Mars—is morally problematic. Topics related to the human exploration of space are not often discussed in philosophical circles. Nevertheless, there exists a growing body of philosophical literature (...) dedicated to sorting out the moral implications of the use of resources from (and in) space. Most of this literature is produced as environmental philosophy. Questions of .. (shrink)

Limited Aggregation is the view that when there are competing moral claims that demand our attention, we should sometimes satisfy the largest aggregate of claims, depending on the strength of the claims in question. In recent years, philosophers such as Patrick Tomlin and Alastair Norcross have argued that Limited Aggregation violates a number of rational choice principles such as Transitivity, Separability, and Contraction Consistency. Current versions of Limited Aggregation are what may be called Comparative Approaches because they involve assessing the (...) relative strengths of various claims. In this paper, we offer a non-comparative version of Limited Aggregation, what we call the Threshold Approach. It states that there is a non-relative threshold that separates various claims. We demonstrate that the Threshold Approach does not violate rational choice principles such as Transitivity, Separability, and Contraction Consistency, and we show that potential concerns regarding such a view are surmountable. (shrink)

I articulate and discuss a geometrical interpretation of Yang–Mills theory. Analogies and disanalogies between Yang–Mills theory and general relativity are also considered.

Autonomy has recently become one of the central concepts in contemporary moral philosophy and has generated much debate over its nature and value. This 2005 volume brings together essays that address the theoretical foundations of the concept of autonomy, as well as essays that investigate the relationship between autonomy and moral responsibility, freedom, political philosophy, and medical ethics. Written by some of the most prominent philosophers working in these areas, this book represents research on the nature and value of autonomy (...) that will be essential reading for a broad swathe of philosophers as well as many psychologists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RELIGION AND SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE Paul Ricoeur Université de Nanterre Paris X These are issues that I take very much to heart, so I will risk my own thoughts on the relation between religion and violence, not excluding the violence in and ofreligion. This is to say that I am not evading the objection made by Jean-Pierre Changeux in a recent discussion, namely, that religion as such produces violence. I (...) do not wish to evade the objection nor to hide behind the collateral explanation that it is when religion is detoured by politics that it produces violence. It is the presupposition that religion produces violence that brings me into discussion with René Girard. I encountered his work several decades ago and I have met him intermittently, with moments of distancing and rediscovery. This is the case for me again today regarding one of his later books, The Scapegoat. I cannot forget the dazzling excitement of 1972 when Violence and the Sacred first appeared. And then for me came a moment of hesitation, of doubt: isn't this explanation too psychologizing? Aren't the Gospels too easily exonerated ofthe accusation ofviolence? But I thereafter experienced disappointment with alternative accounts, principally sociological ones, and in particular with the one given by Maurice Bloch in La Violence du religieux. I am going to take the risk of a personal interpretation ofthe intimate relation between religion and violence. My own conviction, at bottom, is that I have been able, by broadening and deepening the issue, to discern the point where this very movement of going deeper bifurcates and branches out toward external violence. I have clarified my position in La Critique et la conviction and in my more recent debate with J.R Changeux, Ce quifait que nouspensons on this complicity between religion and violence. And it was in pursuing the direction opened up in La Critique et la conviction that I rediscovered an 2 Paul Ricoeur interest in The Scapegoat. I found his interpretation not only to be complementary to my own, but its necessary complement. I will now proceed to show how René Girard's thesis is necessary to my own thinking. So now I will go directly to my interpretive proposal, then I will turn to the position of Bloch in La Violence du religieux, a sociological interpretation, in order to come back in the end to Girard. It is by way of reflection on tolerance considered as a progressive initiation that I arrived at the interpretation I am going to present. At its minimal state, we find only the tolerance ofthe intolerant person, who states, "I don't agree with what you believe, I disapprove of it, but I cannot prevent it. I tolerate it in the sense of not being able to prevent it; I would like to prevent it, but I do not have the power to do so." At a second level, tolerance is more positive, saying, "I maintain the conviction that I am the one who has the truth, but I recognize, by way of being accommodating, that you have the right to profess what I hold as false, and I do this in the name ofjustice. That is to say, you certainly have the right, and it is one equal to mine, to profess what you believe, although I take it as false." I would say that the force of the principle ofjustice as thus expressed is this: any other life is worth as much as mine. Let us say that what I recognize here is the right to error. But at this stage I am torn within by the truth that I believe to be unilaterally mine and the justice that entails recognition ofthe other, which I place on another level from that oftruth. I make a further step in pursuing the issue, at a level farther advanced, when I say, "My adversary has perhaps a part ofthe truth but I don't know what it is." I would say that this is the perspectival version oftolerance: the other person sees a side of things, which I cannot see. But our positions cannot be substituted for each other. At this stage there is a... (shrink)

In a challenge to Basic Emotion theories, Ortony suggested in a recent article that the existence of affect-free surprise means that surprise is not necessarily valenced and therefore arguably not an emotion. In an article in response, Neta and Kim argued that surprise is always valenced and therefore is an emotion, with apparent cases of affect-free surprise actually being cases of the cognitive state of unexpectedness rather than surprise. We view Neta and Kim's position as resting on an idiosyncratic stipulation (...) of word usage. We further suggest that rejecting affect-free surprise by appealing to examples of affect-laden surprise has no bearing on whether surprise is always valenced, and propose that when surprise appears to be affect-laden the locus of the experienced valence is a co-occurring emotion. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 82-84.

This paper explores some issues concerning the nature and structure of causal explanation in psychiatry and psychology from the point of view of the “interventionist” theory defended in my book, Making Things Happen. Among the issues is explored is the extent to which candidate causal explanations involving “upper level” or relatively coarse-grained or macroscopic variables such as mental/psychological states (e.g. highly self critical beliefs or low self esteem) or environmental factors (e.g. parental abuse) compete with explanations that instead appeal to (...) underlying, “lower level” or more fine gained neural, genetic, or biochemical mechanisms. (shrink)

This article develops an interpretation and defense of Husserl’s account of the omnitemporality of idealities. I first examine why Husserl rejects the atemporality and temporal individuation of idealities on phenomenological grounds, specifically that these attributions prove countersensical in how they relate idealities to consciousness. As an alternative to these conceptions, I develop a two-sided interpretation of omnitemporality expressed in modal terms of actuality and possibility, the actual referring to appearances in time and the possible, to reactivation at any time. In (...) defense of this interpretation of omnitemporality, I consider influential criticisms against Husserl’s account of idealities as they concern time, particularly whether the historical genesis of idealities compromises their omnitemporality by binding them to time. Ultimately, I argue that the transcendental historicity of idealities, despite being relevant to the question of validity and access, proves indifferent to their omnitemporality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Case against Rational Egoism in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground*James P. ScanlanWriting in his own voice, in letters, notebooks, and diaries, Fyodor Dostoevsky frequently attacked the philosophy of the Russian “nihilists,” as he typically called them—Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Dmitry Pisarev, and other representatives of the radical Russian intelligentsia in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. But because Dostoevsky also used fiction to argue against them, if we wish (...) to discern the full contours of his opposition, we must turn to his stories and novels; and there we face the problem of determining to what extent, if any, the statements of his narrators and characters express his own views.This problem is particularly challenging in regard to the radicals’ “Rational Egoism,” to use the label by which the Russian variant of the theory of enlightened egoism came to be known. 1 Dostoevsky’s most sustained and spirited attack on that aspect of “nihilist” philosophy is found in Part One of Notes from Underground (1864), but it is voiced by one of the darkest, least sympathetic of all his characters—the nameless narrator and protagonist known as the Underground Man. Was this repellent creature speaking for Dostoevsky? The Underground Man, moreover, can easily be viewed as a sheer irrationalist whose rejection of Rational Egoism is a tortured emotional outburst with no logical credentials. Robert L. Jackson, in his groundbreaking study of 1958, describes the Underground Man’s thinking at one point as follows: “It is impossible to argue [End Page 549] with the rationalists: reason is on their side. All that remains is irrationally to negate reason.” 2 If those words were to be taken not simply as a moment in Jackson’s rich analysis but as a comprehensive description of the Underground Man’s attitude, it would be senseless to expect philosophically nuanced arguments from him. And we would have no grounds for thinking that Dostoevsky’s own treatment of Rational Egoism went beyond emotional rejection.Critics from Vasily Rozanov to Joseph Frank have debated the Underground Man’s stance toward Rational Egoism and its relation to Dostoevsky’s, with no sign yet of a definitive resolution. Frank’s recent treatment, presented in the third volume of his monumental literary biography of Dostoevsky, offers a helpful history of the dispute as well as his own finely elaborated interpretation of the Underground Man as an irrational opponent of Rational Egoism. 3 Frank reads Notes from Underground as satire, and he contends that the Underground Man is caught in an agonizing self-contradiction: intellectually, he accepts the basic premises of the Rational Egoists’ outlook, such as the denial of free will; but he finds that, “despite the convictions of his reason,” he cannot live with the amoral and dehumanizing implications of those premises, which strip human beings of moral responsibility. 4 From a rational point of view, of course, rejection of the implications should force the Underground Man to reject the premises as well (by the hoary logical law of modus tollendo tolens), and indeed he does at times passionately condemn them. But according to Frank, these condemnations simply show the depth of his predicament: his “intellectual acceptance” of Chernyshevsky’s determinism is conjoined with “simultaneous rejection of it with the entire intuitive-emotional level of personality identified with moral conscience,” causing him to respond irrationally in a multitude of instances. 5 Frank’s Underground Man, then, is an intellectual disciple but an emotional critic of Rational Egoism; and he is triply an irrationalist: his thinking is mired in self-contradiction, he acts irrationally as a result, and his opposition to Rational Egoism has not a rational but an “intuitive-emotional” basis.But where does this leave Dostoevsky? Must we conclude that he, too, is somehow suspended between acceptance and rejection of Rational Egoism and for that reason has created in Notes from Underground a Bakhtinian equilibrium in which neither position is clearly privileged? For Frank, certainly not. It follows from Frank’s analysis that Dostoevsky himself, unlike the Underground [End Page 550] Man, is a fully consistent opponent of Rational Egoism, for that theory is the target of the inverted irony at the core of his satire; “the... (shrink)

Reviewing works by James Alison, Alistair McFadyen, Andrew Sung Park, Ted Peters, and Solomon Schimmel, the author suggests that the status and function of the discourse/doctrine of sin highlight tensions between theology and ethics in ways that suggest the character, limits, and promise of religious ethics. This literature commends attention to sin-talk because it helps religious ethicists to render more adequately the dynamics of human agency, sociality, and culture and because it raises questions about the nature and task of (...) theology, faith, and morality. Yet these volumes also indicate that religious ethics should pay more attention to particular sins. (shrink)

It is commonly asserted that “death is not a welfare issue” and this has been reflected in welfare legislation and policy in many countries. However, this creates a conflict for many who consider animal welfare to be an appropriate basis for decision-making in animal ethics but also consider that an animal’s death is ethically significant. To reconcile these viewpoints, this paper attempts to formulate an account of death as a welfare issue. Welfare issues are issues that refer to evaluations concerning (...) an animal’s interests. This includes evaluations that refer only to comparisons between the presence and absence of states, including positive states. This means that an animal’s death may be a welfare issue insofar as it leads to the exclusion of relevant positive states. This allows us to deny that death is necessarily not a welfare issue. (shrink)

The author, in this series of essays, depicts the law as an essentially literary, rhetorical, and ethical activity. The topics discussed include a talk to students entering law school, describing the intellectual activity of the law, an exploration of the structure of legal thought and expression, and a dialogue which explores the ethics of argument.

We use the phrase "moral intuition" to describe the appearance in consciousness of moral judgments or assessments without any awareness of having gone through a conscious reasoning process that produces this assessment. This paper investigates the neural substrates of moral intuition. We propose that moral intuitions are part of a larger set of social intuitions that guide us through complex, highly uncertain and rapidly changing social interactions. Such intuitions are shaped by learning. The neural substrates for moral intuition include fronto-insular, (...) cingulate, and orbito-frontal cortices and associated subcortical structure such as the septum, basil ganglia and amygdala. Understanding the role of these structures undercuts many philosophical doctrines concerning the status of moral intuitions, but vindicates the claim that they can sometimes play a legitimate role in moral decision-making. (shrink)

In this book, distinguished theologian and political scientist James V. Schall explores Maritain's political philosophy, demonstrating that Maritain understood society, state, and government in the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, of natural law and human rights and duties. Schall pays particular attention to the ways in which evil appears in political forms, and how this evil can be dealt with morally.

I begin by reviewing some recent work on the status of the geodesic principle in general relativity and the geometrized formulation of Newtonian gravitation. I then turn to the question of whether either of these theories might be said to ``explain'' inertial motion. I argue that there is a sense in which both theories may be understood to explain inertial motion, but that the sense of ``explain'' is rather different from what one might have expected. This sense of explanation is (...) connected with a view of theories---I call it the ``puzzleball view''---on which the foundations of a physical theory are best understood as a network of mutually interdependent principles and assumptions. (shrink)

Physical and biological measurements might display range values extending towards infinite. The occurrence of infinity in equations, such as the black hole singularities, is a troublesome issue that causes many theories to break down when assessing extreme events. Different methods, such as re-normalization, have been proposed to avoid detrimental infinity. Here a novel technique is proposed, based on geometrical considerations and the Alexander Horned sphere, that permits to undermine infinity in physical and biophysical equations. In this unconventional approach, a continuous (...) monodimensional line becomes an assembly of countless bidimensional lines that superimpose in quantifiable knots and bifurcations. In other words, we may state that Achilles leaves the straight line and overtakes the turtle. (shrink)

The purpose of this work is to critically assess Errol E. Harris’s process philosophy in the face of contemporary research in the special sciences. Harris devoted his life to grappling with the big questions concerning the relationships between nature, mind, and knowledge. His 70-plus year career was distinguished, his texts on the history of philosophy, philosophy of science, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and consciousness were widely published, and yet his metaphysics has until now remained excluded from mainstream discussions. This (...) book’s contention is that Harris’s work reveals as yet unnoticed connections between theories in numerous scientific disciplines ranging from psychology to cosmology and that an examination of certain theories within these disciplines may serve to strengthen his original arguments. This work maintains that the resulting metaphysics frames a transdisciplinary paradigm shift and provides a viable solution to the hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)

Biodiversity is a valuable resource that supports sustainability within agricultural systems, yet in contradiction to this agriculture is recognised as a contributor to biodiversity loss. Agricultural advisory services are institutions that support sustainable agricultural development, employing a variety of approaches including farmer discussion groups in doing so. This study evaluates the impact of a farmland biodiversity management (FBM) communication strategy piloted within Irish farmer discussion groups. A sensemaking lens was applied in this objective to gain an understanding of how this (...) strategy could create an actionable space for FBM promotion amongst farmers. The strategy was piloted with six Irish dairy farmer discussion groups, after which focus groups were conducted with members of these groups. Additionally, baseline and endline surveys were completed by the members to determine their knowledge, attitude and on-farm practices relating to FBM. Analysis of the focus group data identified that the communication strategy supported the affordance of sensemaking with respect to FBM. Analysis of the data from the baseline and endline surveys relating to knowledge, attitudes and practices found that engaging with the communication strategy promoted farmers to improve their attitude in relation to FBM. Results from this study provide important lessons for agricultural advisory services to support farmers in incorporating FBM into the overall management of their farms and, in turn, to promote the improvement of farmland biodiversity and contribute to a sustainable future. (shrink)

Philosophical enquiry stands to benefit from the inclusion of methods from the digital humanities to study language use. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities have the potential to contribute to both conceptual analysis and intuition-based enquiry, two important approaches in contemporary philosophy. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities can also provide valuable metaphilosophical insights into the nature of philosophical methods themselves. The use of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy should be expected to (...) follow a similar trajectory to another attempt to introduce empirical methods in philosophy. Experimental philosophers use empirical methods from the cognitive sciences to bear on philosophical questions. At first, we should expect the main contribution of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy to be at the metaphilosophical level. Then, given the right impetus and support, we are optimistic that methods from the digital humanities can make important and sustained contributions to first-order philosophical enquiry. This chapter gives two case studies of recent studies in which methods from the digital humanities are used to address metaphilosophical questions about the use of the word ‘intuition’ and the methods of philosophy and physics. It gives three examples of contemporary first-order philosophical debates to which methods fromthe digital humanities could make an important contribution in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. The chapter discusses some methodological challenges and limitations which are of particular importance when considering the application of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy, including concerns about the demographic representativeness of widely available corpora. (shrink)

At least since the publication of the monumental Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (1984), the “stakeholder theory” originated by R. E. Freeman has engrossed much of the business ethics literature. Subsequently, some advocates have moved a bit too quickly and without proper definition or argument. They have exceeded Freeman’s intentions which are more libertarian and free-market than is often thought. This essay focuses on the versions of stakeholder theory directly authored or coauthored by Freeman in an effort to recover (1) (...) Freeman’s intentions and (2) the argumentative justification of stakeholder theory. It then argues that Freeman’s appeal to legal, economic, and ethical constraints ultimately produce arguments that are invalid. One can thoroughly support legislation constraining corporations or seeking to prevent age discrimination, market monopolies, and externalities and regret the extent that capitalism is heir to such shortcomings without it following that (1) business beneficiaries should be changed from stockholders to stakeholders and (2) the latter should be given serious decision-making power. Further, stakeholder theory neither defines nor battles any obvious opposition. Hence, it is difficult to see what it changes about business management. In short, stakeholder theory either changes too much about business, or nothing important at all (depending on one’s interpretation). Efforts to supplant or improve the reigning theory of capitalism will have to do better. (shrink)

In addition to the infant cry being a signal for attention, it may also be a critical component of the early formation of attachments with caregivers. We consider the complex development of that attachment, which involves reciprocal interactive signaling and a host of evolutionarily conserved caregiver factors.

Three main claims are made in this paper. First, it is argued that Onora O’Neill has uncovered a serious problem in the way medical ethicists have thought about both respect for autonomy and informed consent. Medical ethicists have tended to think that autonomous choices are intrinsically worthy of respect, and that informed consent procedures are the best way to respect the autonomous choices of individuals. However, O’Neill convincingly argues that we should abandon both these thoughts. Second, it is argued that (...) O’Neill’s proposed solution to this problem is inadequate. O’Neill’s approach requires that a more modest view of the purpose of informed consent procedures be adopted. In her view, the purpose of informed consent procedures is simply to avoid deception and coercion, and the ethical justification for informed consent derives from a different ethical principle, which she calls principled autonomy. It is argued that contrary to what O’Neill claims, the wrongness of coercion cannot be derived from principled autonomy, and so its credentials as a justification for informed consent procedures is weak. Third, it is argued that we do better to rethink autonomy and informed consent in terms of respecting persons as ends in themselves, and a characteristically liberal commitment to allowing individuals to make certain categories of decisions for themselves. Respect for autonomy is in trouble. In recent work in this journal1 and elsewhere,2 O’Neill has forcefully argued that respect for autonomy, as it has come to be used in medical ethics, is philosophically indefensible. If her arguments are sound, then, contrary to the standard view, respect for autonomy cannot be the source of the ethical requirement to seek informed consent before treating a patient or enrolling a participant in a trial. So her critique goes to the heart of contemporary medical ethics: if O’Neill is right, medical ethicists have systematically misunderstood two of the most fundamental concepts they deal with—respect for autonomy and informed consent. This paper has four sections. Section 1 distinguishes between three different ways of talking about respect for autonomy, and looks in more detail at the one that has come to be central to bioethical writing on informed consent—namely, the idea that we should respect autonomous choices. Section 2 argues, following O’Neill, that it is implausible to think that the purpose of informed consent requirements is to respect autonomous choices. Section 3 argues that O’Neill’s proposed reworking of autonomy and informed consent is inadequate. O’Neill’s approach requires us to adopt a more modest view of the purpose of informed consent procedures. In her view, the purpose of informed consent procedures is simply to avoid deception and coercion, and the ethical justification for informed consent derives from a different ethical principle, which she calls principled autonomy. I argue that contrary to what O’Neill claims, we cannot derive the wrongness of coercion from principled autonomy, and so its credentials as a justification for informed consent procedures is weak. Section 4 argues that we do better to rethink autonomy and informed consent in terms of respecting persons as ends in themselves, and a characteristically liberal commitment to allowing individuals to make certain categories of decisions for themselves. (shrink)

Intellectual property typically involves claims of ownership of types, rather than particulars. In this article I argue that this difference in ontology makes an important moral difference. In particular I argue that there cannot be an intrinsic moral right to own intellectual property. I begin by establishing a necessary condition for the justification of intrinsic moral rights claims, which I call the Rights Justification Principle. Briefly, this holds that if we want to claim that there is an intrinsic moral right (...) to φ, we must be able to show that (a) violating this right would typically result in either a wrongful harm or other significant wrong to the holder of the right, and (b) the wrongful harm or other wrong in question is independent of the existence of the intrinsic right we are trying to justify. I then argue that merely creating a new instance of a type is not the kind of action which can wrongfully harm the creator of that type. Insofar as there do seem to be wrongs involved in copying a published poem or computer program, these wrongs presuppose the existence of an intrinsic right to own intellectual property, and so cannot be used to justify it. I conclude that there cannot be an intrinsic right to own intellectual property. (shrink)