This paper examines the moral arguments for and against employees' blowing the whistle on illegal or immoral actions of their employers. It asks whether such professional dissidents are justified in disclosing wrongdoing by others while concealing their own identity. Part I examines the concept of anonymity, distinguishing it from two similar concepts — secrecy and privacy. Part II analyzes the concept of whistleblowing using recent definitions by Bok, Bowie and De George. Various arguments against anonymous whistleblowing are identified and evaluated. (...) The author concludes with a defense of the practice in terms of social benefits — primarily the redressing of wrongdoing. (shrink)

' ...this volume extracts the moral and ethical conflicts presented by everyday police activity and makes explicit the assumption that shape the police response... '.

A woman walks into a room and sits down beside a man. They talk and as they talk he puts his arm around her. After a few moments they kiss. He becomes excited and starts to fondle her. She does not resist. A few moments later, she gets up and leaves.A man and a woman drive into a parking lot. It is dark, the lot is empty. He stops the car, turns out the lights and puts his arm around her. (...) They kiss, then make love. After 30 minutes they drive off. (shrink)

This paper compares and evaluates two forms of dissent: civil disobedience — protests by citizens against the laws or actions of their government; and whistleblowing — disclosure by employees of illegal, immoral or questionable practices by their employees. Each is identified, the conceptual issues are distinguished from strategic and normative ones and parallel moral questions posed. Should one first dissent within prescribed channels before going outside them? Should one act publicly or is withholding one's identity permissible or desirable? What is (...) the basis and limits for one's loyalty to one's country or employer, and how can transgressing these limits be morally justified? (shrink)

"[T]his is much more than a conventional reference guide. . . . An essential item in any collection that deals with the subject of ethics and public policy." Choice.

This paper offers a series of reflections on the movement of philosophy beyond its traditional locus in colleges and universities into business settings.This movement is characterized as a variation on a persistent theme in the western tradition beginning with Socrates and running throughout modern (Spinoza, Hume, Locke and Berkeley) and recent philosophers (Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre and Russell) who held no full time academic appointment. Increasingly philosophers are addressing the concerns of scientists, lawyers, and engineers on the job rather than (...) in the classroom. (shrink)

Aims towards a more complete understanding of the individual as a sexual being by exploring monogamy, adultery, perversion, feminism, and abortion within a philosophical framework.

Written by one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Heidegger, this book is an important statement about the basis of human sociability that is a major contribution to the continuing debates about Heidegger in particular, and ethics in general. Existential philosophy is often thought to promote moral nihilism in which everything is permitted. This book demonstrates that, in the case of Martin Heidegger, any such accusation is unjust. On the contrary, Heidegger thought seriously about the implications of human co-existence, and this (...) book shows that conceptions of trust and responsibility that lie at the very heart of morality are to be found in the sketch of Mitsein - our being together with one another in the world - offered in Being and Time. That Heidegger never developed these conceptions may explain why they have been overlooked, but renders them no less important for that. (shrink)

One Introduction The student who tries to define Edmund Burke's political theory attempts something that Burke refused to do himself. ...

In this paper I investigate the notion of an unconscious intention as it is discussed and defended in Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. I am concerned with two issues: first, whether the evidence that Freud adduces supports his conclusion that there are unconscious intentions, and, second, whether the notion of an unconscious intention is coherent. I call into question some of Freud's arguments to support the notion, and I present a case for the incoherence of the notion. Finally, I (...) suggest how one might begin to reconcile my argument for its incoherence with an argument for the existence of unconscious intentions. (shrink)

_Naturalism and the Human Condition_ is a compelling account of why naturalism, or the 'scientific world-view' cannot provide a full account of who and what we are as human beings. Drawing on sources including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Sartre, Olafson exposes the limits of naturalism and stresses the importance of serious philosophical investigation of human nature.

This broad, ambitious study is about human nature, but human nature treated in a way quite different from the scientific account that influences so much of contemporary philosophy. Drawing on certain basic ideas of Heidegger the author presents an alternative to the debate waged between dualists and materialists in the philosophy of mind that involves reconceiving the way we usually think about 'mental' life. Olafson argues that familiar contrasts between the 'physical' and the 'psychological' break down under closer scrutiny. They (...) need to be replaced by a conception of human being in which we are not entities compounded out of body and mind, but unitary entities that are distinguished by 'having a world', which is very different from simply being a part of the world. (shrink)

I argue that Norman's thesis works in sofaras one is prepared to be lax about the alleged congruency between “ecological” and “dorsal,” and unconcerned by the results of recent studies showing that grasping movements are subject to the same geometric distortion illusions as perceptual judgements.