Attention to virtue ethics in Eastern Christianity complicates the dominant narrative within the field by revealing new ways of conceptualizing classical problems in virtue theory, new insights into the dynamics of virtues’ development, as well as new contexts for applied virtue ethics. Human flourishing is understood as the progressive realization of theosis—a godly mode of being cultivated through liturgy and askesis, marked by the embodiment of the full range of virtues, and crowned by a radical love.

An ongoing challenge within all approaches to ethical decision making is reducing the degree of doubt about what action is right, good, or at least better in a given situation. The process of moral discernment within Christian thought is no exception; however, different Christian communities tend to understand moral doubt and moral certainty differently, to pursue different ways of allaying doubt, and to expect—and accept—different degrees of moral certainty. Drawing especially from Aristotelian virtue theory, selected teachings from the Eastern Orthodox (...) tradition on humility, and recent discussions of the ‘grace of self-doubt,’ I sketch an account of virtuous moral doubt as a mean between the extremes of excessive and deficient moral doubt. My hope is doing so will help to make space and provide the framework for an ecumenical understanding of doubt’s proper role in moral discernment. (shrink)

Biomedical technologies capable of sharply reducing or ending human aging, “radical life extension”, call for a Christian response. The authors featured in this article offer some preliminary thoughts. Common themes include: What kind of life counts as a “good life;” the limits, if any, of human freedom; the consequences of extended life on the human species and on the Earth; the meaning and value of finite and vulnerable embodied life; the experience of time; anthropological self-understanding; and human dignity. Notably, all (...) four authors share serious concerns about RLE’s potential effects. (shrink)

Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to. First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic (...) than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity and systematicity. We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that ethical leadership is beneficial for the organization, the leader, and followers. Yet, little has been said about potential limitations of ethical leadership, particularly boundary conditions involving the same person perceived to display ethical leadership. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we argue that supervisor-induced hindrance stress and job hindrance stress are factors linked to the supervisor and work environment that may limit the positive impact of ethical leadership on employee deviance and turnover intentions. Specifically, we (...) expect that high levels of hindrance stress drain resources, specifically perceptions of social support, by inhibiting the completion of work, particularly in combination with the high expectations of ethical leaders. We test our model across two time-lagged field studies. Our results demonstrate that supervisor-induced hindrance stress mitigates some of the beneficial impact of ethical leadership and that job hindrance stress further strains these relationships. Overall, our results suggest that both forms of hindrance stress jointly impact the effectiveness of ethical leadership on important outcomes, and do so partly because of their influence on perceived social support. We discuss theoretical contributions to the ethical leadership and stress bodies of literature, as well as practical implications for managers and organizations wishing to develop ethical leaders. (shrink)

Increasingly, commissioners and providers of services for people with intellectual disabilities are turning to assistive technology and telecare as a potential solution to the problem of the increased demand for services, brought about by an expanding population of people with intellectual disabilities in the context of relatively static or diminishing resources. While there are numerous potential benefits of assistive technology and telecare, both for service providers and service users, there are also a number of ethical issues. The aim of this (...) paper is to raise these issues and to set them within the ethical framework proposed by Beauchamp and Childress. There is a need for a wider debate as a first step in the development of strategies to address the issues raised in the paper. (shrink)

Journalists’ and publics’ relationship with truth-telling is so messy because the term “truth” holds multitudes of competing senses that are rarely acknowledged in journalism discourse. People approach contested subjects from many, sometimes incommensurate, senses of truth. When journalists fail to identify the competing senses embedded in varying truth claims, they reproduce confusion as to the validity and verifiability of such claims and contribute to a rolling epistemic crisis in the public sphere. This essay explores six senses of truth – logical, (...) empirical, affective, ideological, authoritarian, and narrative – and discusses their interaction and problematic conflation. (shrink)

This article critically questions the commercialization of hospice care and the ethical concerns associated with the industry's movement toward “market-driven medicine” at the end of life. For example, the article examines issues raised by an influx of for-profit hospice providers whose business model appears at its core to have an ethical conflict of interest between shareholders doing well and terminal patients dying well. Yet, empirical data analyzing the experience of patients across the hospice industry are limited, and general claims that (...) end-of-life patient care is inferior among for-profit providers or even that their business practices are somehow unseemly when compared to nonprofit providers cannot be substantiated. In fact, non-profit providers are not immune to potentially conflicting concerns regarding financial viability (i.e., “no margin, no mission”). Given the limitations of existing empirical data and contrasting ideological commitments of for-profit versus non-profit providers, the questions raised by this article highlight important areas for reflection and further study. Policymakers and regulators are cautioned to keep ethical concerns in the fore as an increasingly commercialized hospice industry continues to emerge as a dominant component of the U.S. health care system. Both practitioners and researchers are encouraged to expand their efforts to better understand how business practices and commercial interests may compromise the death process of the patient and patient's family — a process premised upon a philosophy and ethical tradition that earlier generations of hospice providers and proponents established as a trusted, end-of-life alternative. (shrink)

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or arbitrary, word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate the iconicity of caregivers’ speech to young children during a naturalistic free‐play session with novel stimuli and ask whether the iconicity of caregivers’ speech (...) facilitates children's learning of the noniconic novel names of those stimuli. Thirty‐four 1.5‐2‐year‐olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners and half bilingual English‐Spanish learners) participated in a naturalistic free‐play task with their caregivers followed by a test of word‐referent retention. We found that caregivers’ use of iconicity, particularly in utterances in which they named the novel stimuli, was associated with the likelihood that children learned that novel name. This result held even when controlling for other factors associated with word learning, such as the concreteness and frequency of words in caregiver speech. Together, the results demonstrate that iconicity not only can serve to help children identify the referent of novel words (as in previous research) but can also support their ability to retain even noniconic word‐referent mappings. (shrink)

Dignity underlies much philosophical debate, but the concept and its place in a broader theory of justice have received renewed analytic attention of late. In this article, I examine several recent books on dignity: Human Dignity and Political Criticism, by Colin Bird; Human Dignity and Human Rights, and Human Dignity and Social Justice, both by Pablo Gilabert; Contours of Dignity by Suzanne Killmister; and Humanity Without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, and Human Rights, by Andrea Sangiovanni. As I outline, each book (...) develops and defends a position in an established disagreement between so-called ‘Naturalistic’ views, which hold that dignity inheres in natural properties, and ‘Conventionalist’ perspectives, which hold that dignity is socially defined. With these contemporary accounts in mind, I expose the contours of this disagreement and suggest that further work should focus on developing a hybrid conception of dignity consistent with Naturalism and Conventionalism. (shrink)

An introduction to ethical reasoning -- Comparative religious perspectives on war -- Just and unjust war in Shakespeare's Henry V -- Anticipating and preventing atrocities in war -- The CIA's original "social contract" -- The KGB: CIA's traditional adversary -- Espionage -- Covert action -- Interrogation -- Concluding reflections.

This paper examines the argument that moral approval of homosexuality is analogous to the early church's inclusion of gentiles. The analogy has a long but often overlooked history, dating back to the start of the modern gay-rights movement. It has recently gained greater prominence because of its importance to the Episcopal Church's debate with the wider Anglican Communion. Beginning with the Episcopal Church argument, we see that there are five specific areas most in need of further clarification. In this essay (...) I examine significant uses of the analogy from the prior 25 years to see how effectively they address these five areas. I conclude that the conversation surrounding the Gentile Analogy is the current, best hope for mutual understanding among Christians about homosexuality. However, if the analogy is to advance the Christian conversation, much greater care and precision is needed in its application from traditionalists and revisionists alike. (shrink)

The expressions “now,” “today,” “tomorrow,” “yesterday,” “last month,” “a year ago,” “past,” “future,” “present,” and others like them are temporal indexicals. Temporal indexicals and dates are both quite different from names. Temporal indexicals often play an important part in philosophical arguments about time. An example is this claim of McTaggart's in his famous essay about the unreality of time. Role‐linking is the key to understanding why temporal indexicals are useful. The system of temporal indexicals and system of dates correspond to (...) two different but interconnecting ways people think about things – role‐based and descriptive. Both contrast with a third way, via detached notions. McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time has two sides. According to McTaggart, these two essential properties of time cannot be combined; people's concept of time is incoherent; there is not and could not be anything that fits the conception; time is unreal. (shrink)

This monograph examines the past, present, and potential relationship between American pragmatism and communication research. The contributors provide a bridge between communication studies and philosophy, subjects often developed somewhat in isolation from each other. Addressing topics, such as qualitative and quantitative research, ethics, media research, and feminist studies, the chapters in this volume: *discuss how a pragmatic, Darwinian approach to inquiry has guided and might further guide communication research; *advocate a functional view of communication, based on Dewey's mature notion of (...) transaction; *articulate a pragmatist's aesthetics and connect it to Deweyan democracy; *discuss the similarities and differences between Dewey's notion of inquiry and the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer; *apply accommodation theory, linked to symbolic interactionism and more generally to the social behaviorism of George H. Mead and his followers, to media research; *interpret media-effects evidence in light of pragmatist ideas about inquiry; and *argue that pragmatism theorizes about despair and life's sense of the tragic. This book is written to be readily accessible to students and professional academics within and outside the field of communication studies without extensive training in specialized areas of communication study. (shrink)

Autism is a chronic neurodevelopmental disorder that presents unique challenges to bioethicists. In particular, bioethicists ought to reconsider pediatric consent in light of disparity between beliefs that are held about the disorder by parents and adults with autism. The neurodiverse community ought to be given some consideration in this debate, and, as such, there may be a role for autistic narratives in clarifying this problem.

The sources and methods of espionage, the goals and tactics of covert action, and the professional conduct of intelligence officers are matters typically hidden from public scrutiny, yet clearly worthy of public debate and philosophical attention. Recent academic studies of intelligence that have had any intentional bearing on ethics or political philosophy have largely focused on procedural questions surrounding the proper degree of oversight of intelligence agencies. But what is often missed in such examinations is substantive ethical analysis of intelligence (...) operations themselves. (shrink)

In a celebrated article, published nearly a century ago, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld endeavored to elucidate the various types of jural relations. Hohfeld’s scheme has been justly regarded as a seminal contribution to analytical jurisprudence, and has stimulated lively debate since. This Essay aims to refute one of Hohfeld’s fundamental and most influential theses: the axiom of right–duty correlativity. To do so, it employs the simplest refutation strategy in first-order logic, namely providing a valid counterexample. Part I discusses earlier attempts to (...) do likewise, and explains why they failed. For the most part, previous illustrations of ostensibly standalone rights or standalone duties neglected relevant parties who could owe the correlative duties or hold the correlative rights, respectively. Part II puts forward a simple argument: There are abstract duties in private law that ban certain types of conduct without reference to specific victims. Those duties are not necessarily correlative with rights, although their breach may generate secondary duties with corresponding rights. In particular, tort law allows plaintiffs to recover for harm caused by breach of duty that occurred before they acquired legal personality. This is tantamount to recognizing duties that are not correlative with rights, and therefore invalidates the correlativity axiom. (shrink)

"Thinking like a lawyer" is a phrase familiar to every law student, and the development of these analytical skills are, of course, essential. In this essay, however, I reflect on the value of a more expansive approach to professional formation. I argue that legal education best serves students, the bar, and the society when it takes seriously the importance of moral imagination, interpersonal relationships, and personal wellness.