Poultry production makes a substantial contribution to global food security, providing energy, protein, and essential micro-nutrients to humans. Modern intensive poultry farming systems are challenged by the evolution of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza strains. The presence of avian influenza in poultry flocks poses a significant risk of an avian origin influenza that is easily transmittable between human beings evolving. By reducing contact between humans and fowl, the use of automation in poultry production has the potential to improve biosecurity and thus (...) reduce the risk of pandemic influenza. Many poultry facilities are already highly automated. The rapid rate of progress in robotics and AI suggests that “lights out”—fully automated—poultry production systems may soon be possible. In this paper we consider the ethical and policy issues that would be raised by lights-out poultry production. There is a strong animal and human welfare case for reducing the risk of pandemic influenza via increased use of automation. However, lights-out farming looks to be the ultimate endpoint of dynamics already present in industrial agriculture, which led to the dangers of zoonotic infection from animal agriculture in the first place. Whether nations should respond to that risk by doubling down on industrial models of animal production and embracing fully automated farms or by reconsidering the current model of animal agriculture altogether is, we suggest, both the most important, and the most difficult, question posed by the prospect of lights out farms. (shrink)

In deliberative argument, in political discourse, in teaching, and in casual conversation, as rhetors we often hope that our attempts at interaction will have some effect on the participants in these discursive environments. The phenomena of stubbornness, however, would seem to suggest that, despite our efforts, there are times when rhetoric just doesn't work. This dissertation complicates this premise, and in so doing complicates common understandings of both stubbornness and rhetorical effect. As I argue, rhetorical effects exist within a complex (...) rhetoric system, within which they circulate and are interconnected with a diversity of other rhetorical and non-rhetorical elements. Using N. Katherine Hayles's concept of "making the cut," I argue that within such complex systems, stability and change are tangled up in an interdependent relationship; in short, in order for complexity to exist it must be constrained by contingent stabilities. These necessary stabilities mask the way that systems are always moving, and so we often do not see changes in the rhetoric systems we inhabit. In this sense, these changes are compensatory, and they work to maintain a stability that can manifest precisely as stubbornness. In delineating what I call a "rhetoric-systems" approach, this dissertation maps the stabilities and movements of several different rhetoric systems, and provides new insight into the complex and relational movement of rhetorical effect. Our use of this approach asks us to recognize the existence and value of certainty and stability, and then to pull back and recognize the existence of complexity and change. The approach integrates insights from systems theory into existing rhetorical theory, and in so doing models an interdisciplinary approach to public rhetorics and writing studies that is firmly grounded in rhetorical theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that ignorance, rather than being a result or representation of false beliefs or misinformation, is a compensatory epistemic adaptation of complex rhetoric systems. A rhetoric system is here defined as a set of interconnected rhetorical elements that cohere into a self-organized system that is thoroughly “about” its contexts—meaning that its own boundaries and relations are both constrained and enabled by the contexts in which it exists. Ignorance, as described here, is epistemic management that preserves the boundaries and (...) relations of a rhetoric system, and is a way of dealing with information that runs counter to one’s beliefs. Ignorance is also productive, in that it produces new knowledge that works to make rhetoric systems more resistant to potential destabilization. To elaborate these points, the paper examines discourse about the phenomenon of global climate change, which illustrates how individuals productively counter information as a way of preserving beliefs. As the paper argues, ignorance is neither a cognitive nor epistemological failure, but rather is a result of the dynamic and continuous process of enforcing epistemic and rhetorical boundaries. (shrink)

A transdisciplinary exploration of the work of Kenneth Burke and posthumanist rhetorics. In considering questions of power and persuasion as well as of ethics, responsibility, the contributors to this volume imagine the contradictions among Burke's writings and posthumanism as opportunities for knowledge making"--Provided by publisher.

A shared goal amongst most educators, we argue, is to supplant students’ raw or “naive” intuitions with more refined intuitions about a particular domain. Educators want students, and people more generally, to recognize when ideas, frameworks, and processes don’t “look right”. When we know that something does not look right, sound right, or feel right, we investigate further. We seek to fill in the gaps between our knowledge and we attempt to learn new approaches for solving problems. Lifelong learning, in (...) other words, builds from a recognition of incoherence. We hope students will be more likely to recognize flawed reasoning or rhetorical appeals, even if they have long forgotten the details of logic, statistics, and argumentation. They have acquired a refined (one might even say “aesthetic”) sense of what is likely correct or incorrect; what is likely promising or empty. This sense is “aisthesis”. -/- Aisthesis is a marker of education. Although it doesn’t refer to particular sets of knowledge or particular skills in analyzing and evaluating problems, it provides a overarching framework that binds educators in both literature and science. Consequently, aisthesis provides a novel lens for pedagogy. Insofar as we are correct that education is about the cultivation of an aesthetic discrimination between good and bad work, aisthesis could be more explicitly targeted. Educators hope to instill in students an aisthetic sense of how to recognize when statements, issues, or artifacts are problematic and require further engagmeent. (shrink)

Drawing from my previous experiences as an Approved Social Worker and my current experiences as a social work educator, this paper will explore the issues that mental health professionals, and specifically social workers, will face when confronted with the requirement to make decisions that are contrary to the emancipatory values that may have been inculcated in them during their period of training. The controlling nature of statutory social work in particular will be investigated and an assessment of its impact will (...) be offered. The legislative system in the United Kingdom dictates that one piece of legislation can override another in certain instances. In applying this phenomenon, the argument will be made that social workers are increasingly required to override certain values to accomplish the desired outcomes of their position. Ethical issues and the concept of care versus control will be assessed in an attempt to rationalize the problems faced by many of today's mental health social workers. (shrink)

This article is the lead piece in a special report that presents the results of a bioethical investigation into chimeric research, which involves the insertion of human cells into nonhuman animals and nonhuman animal embryos, including into their brains. Rapid scientific developments in this field may advance knowledge and could lead to new therapies for humans. They also reveal the conceptual, ethical, and procedural limitations of existing ethics guidance for human‐nonhuman chimeric research. Led by bioethics researchers working closely with an (...) interdisciplinary work group, the investigation focused on generating conceptual clarity and identifying improvements to governance approaches, with the goal of helping scholars, funders, scientists, institutional leaders, and oversight bodies (embryonic stem cell research oversight [ESCRO] committees and institutional animal care and use committees [IACUCs]) deliver principled and trustworthy oversight of this area of science. The article, which focuses on human‐nonhuman animal chimeric research that is stem cell based, identifies key ethical issues in and offers ten recommendations regarding the ethics and oversight of this research. Turning from bioethics’ previous focus on human‐centered questions about the ethics of “humanization” and this research's potential impact on concepts like human dignity, this article emphasizes the importance of nonhuman animal welfare concerns in chimeric research and argues for less‐siloed governance and oversight and more‐comprehensive public communication. (shrink)

This article draws out the link between the 1968 events, regional development and the Marcusian theories developed in his book One-Dimensional Man . Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is often perceived as encapsulating the underlying frustrations that drove the events of 1968 around the world with the German philosopher described by some as the "guru" of the New Left. In France the theories of Marcuse and in particular his 1964 text became popular in the aftermath of the upheaval as people sought to (...) make sense of what had just happened. Focussing on the provincial revolts of Strasbourg and Brest, this article will provide one example of why this text was perceived as relevant to the situation in France and thus so popular. (shrink)

It may seem that epistemic and practical rationality weigh reasons differently, because ties in practical rationality tend to generate permissions and ties in epistemic rationality tend to generate a requirement to withhold judgment. I argue that epistemic and practical rationality weigh reasons in the same way, but they have different "default biases". Practical rationality is biased toward every option being permissible whereas epistemic rationality is biased toward withholding judgment's being required.

There exists broad agreement that participatory, intersubjective engagements in infancy and early childhood, particularly triadic engagements, pave the way for the folk psychological capacities that emerge in middle childhood. There is little agreement, however, about the extent to which early participatory engagements are cognitively prerequisite to the later capacities; and there remain serious questions about exactly how narrative and other language practices can be shown to bridge the gap between early engagements and later abilities, without presupposing the very abilities that (...) they are supposed to account for. A key issue here is the normativity inherent in requesting, proferring and inferring reasons. I point out that normativity is not a property only of linguistic interactions. Normativity and conventionality are also materially instantiated in the artefactual objects that are most frequently implicated in early triadic engagements. The conventional, canonical functions of artefacts may, however, be overlaid in symbolic play by significations rooted in children's experience of blended actual and virtual worlds. Artefactual objects are amplifiers, as well as objects of consciousness. Interwoven with the symbolic forms of language, they co-constitute a specifically human biocultural niche, within and in virtue of which developing human beings become competent folk psychologists. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine critically the notion of “Triple Bottom Line” accounting. We begin by asking just what it is that supporters of the Triple Bottom Line idea advocate, and attempt to distil specific, assessable claims from the vague, diverse, and sometimescontradictory uses of the Triple Bottom Line rhetoric. We then use these claims as a basis upon which to argue (a) that what issound about the idea of a Triple Bottom Line is not novel, and (b) that what (...) is novel about the idea is not sound. We argue on bothconceptual and practical grounds that the Triple Bottom Line is an unhelpful addition to current discussions of corporate social responsibility. Finally, we argue that the Triple Bottom Line paradigm cannot be rescued simply by attenuating its claims: the rhetoric isbadly misleading, and may in fact provide a smokescreen behind which firms can avoid truly effective social and environmental reporting and performance. (shrink)

This article critically examines current responses to multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and argues that bioethics needs to be willing to engage in a more radical critique of the problem than is currently offered. In particular, we need to focus not simply on market-driven models of innovation and anti-microbial solutions to emergent and re-emergent infections such as TB. The global community also needs to address poverty and the structural factors that entrench inequalities—thus moving beyond the orthodox medical/public health frame of reference.

One recent development in epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge, is the notion of ‘epistemic innocence’ introduced by Bortolotti and colleagues. This concept expresses the idea that certain suboptimal cognitive processes may nonetheless have epistemic (knowledge-related) benefits. The idea that delusion or confabulation may have psychological benefits is familiar enough. What is novel and interesting is the idea that such conditions may also yield significant and otherwise unavailable epistemic benefits. I apply the notion of epistemic innocence to research on the (...) transformative potential of psychedelic drugs. The popular epithet ‘hallucinogen’ exemplifies a view of these substances as fundamentally epistemically detrimental. I argue that the picture is more complicated and that some psychedelic states can be epistemically innocent. This conclusion is highly relevant to policy debates about psychedelic therapy. Moreover, analysing the case of psychedelics can shed further light on the concept of epistemic innocence itself. (shrink)

Can there be phenomenal consciousness without self-consciousness? Strong intuitions and prominent theories of consciousness say “no”: experience requires minimal self-awareness, or “subjectivity”. This “subjectivity principle” faces apparent counterexamples in the form of anomalous mental states claimed to lack self-consciousness entirely, such as “inserted thoughts” in schizophrenia and certain mental states in depersonalization disorder. However, Billon & Kriegel have defended SP by arguing that while some of these mental states may be totally selfless, those states are not phenomenally conscious and thus (...) do not constitute genuine counterexamples to SP. I argue that this defence cannot work in relation to certain experiences of ego dissolution induced by potent fast-acting serotonergic psychedelics. These mental states jointly instantiate the two features whose co-instantiation by a single mental state SP prohibits: phenomenal consciousness and total lack of self-consciousness. One possible objection is that these mental states may lack “me-ness” and “mineness” but cannot lack “for-me-ness”, a special inner awareness of mental states by the self. In response I propose a dilemma. For-me-ness can be defined either as containing a genuinely experiential component or as not. On the first horn, for-me-ness is clearly absent from my counterexamples. On the second horn, for-me-ness has been defined in a way that conflicts with the claims and methods of its proponents, and the claim that phenomenally conscious mental states can totally lack self-consciousness has been conceded. I conclude with some reflections on the intuitive plausibility of SP in light of evidence from altered states. (shrink)

Psychedelic ingestion and meditative practice are both ancient methods for altering consciousness that became widely known in Western society in the second half of the 20th century. Do the similarities begin and end there, or do these methods – as many have claimed over the years – share some deeper common elements? In this chapter I take a neurophilosophical approach to this question and argue that there are, indeed, deeper commonalities. Recent empirical studies show that psychedelics and meditation modulate overlapping (...) brain networks involved in the sense of self, salience, and attention; moreover, psychedelics can occasion lasting increases in “mindfulness-related capacities” for taking a non-reactive stance on one’s inner experience (e.g. Sampedro et al. 2017). The self-binding theory of psychedelic ego dissolution (Letheby and Gerrans 2017) offers a plausible explanation of these findings: by disrupting self-related beliefs implemented in high-level cortical networks, both psychedelics and meditation can “unbind” mental contents from one’s self-model, moving these contents along the continuum from phenomenal transparency to opacity (cf. Metzinger 2003). In other words, both psychedelics and meditation can expose and weaken our foundational beliefs about our own identity, allowing us to disidentify with these beliefs and see them as “just thoughts”. There are connections between these ideas and recent arguments suggesting that psychedelic use may have epistemic benefits consistent with philosophical naturalism (Letheby 2015, 2016, 2019). I conclude with a proposal: these connections may help in thinking about the putative epistemic benefits of meditation practice from a naturalistic perspective. (shrink)

In replying to certain objections to the existence of God, Robert Adams, Bruce Langtry, and Peter van Inwagen assume that God can appropriately choose a suboptimal world, a world less good than some other world God could have chosen. A number of philosophers, such as Michael Slote and Klaas Kraay, claim that these theistic replies are therefore committed to the claim that satisficing can be appropriate. Kraay argues that this commitment is a significant liability. I argue, however, that the relevant (...) defenses of theism are committed to the appropriateness of, not satisficing, but motivated submaximization. When one submaximizes with motivation, one aims at the optimum but accepts the good enough because of a countervailing consideration. When one satisfices, one aims at the good enough and chooses the good enough because it realizes her aim at the good enough. While commitment to the appropriateness of satisficing may be a significant liability, commitment to the appropriateness of motivated submaximization is not. (shrink)

The “Slicing Problem” is a thought experiment that raises questions for substrate-neutral computational theories of consciousness, including those that specify a certain causal structure for the computation like Integrated Information Theory. The thought experiment uses water-based logic gates to construct a computer in a way that permits cleanly slicing each gate and connection in half, creating two identical computers each instantiating the same computation. The slicing can be reversed and repeated via an on/off switch, without changing the amount of matter (...) in the system. The question is what do different computational theories of consciousness believe is happening to the number and nature of individual conscious units as this switch is toggled. Under a token interpretation, there are now two discrete conscious entities; under a type interpretation, there may remain only one. Both interpretations lead to different implications depending on the adopted theoretical stance. Any route taken either allows mechanisms for “consciousness-multiplying exploits” or requires ambiguous boundaries between conscious entities, raising philosophical and ethical questions for theorists to consider. We discuss resolutions under different theories of consciousness for those unwilling to accept consciousness-multiplying exploits. In particular, we specify three features that may help promising physicalist theories to navigate such thought experiments. (shrink)

Choice architecture is heralded as a policy approach that does not coercively reduce freedom of choice. Still we might worry that this approach fails to respect individual choice because it subversively manipulates individuals, thus contravening their personal autonomy. In this article I address two arguments to this effect. First, I deny that choice architecture is necessarily heteronomous. I explain the reasons we have for avoiding heteronomous policy-making and offer a set of four conditions for non-heteronomy. I then provide examples of (...) nudges that meet these conditions. I argue that these policies are capable of respecting and promoting personal autonomy, and show this claim to be true across contrasting conceptions of autonomy. Second, I deny that choice architecture is disrespectful because it is epistemically paternalistic. This critique appears to loom large even against non-heteronomous nudges. However, I argue that while some of these policies may exhibit epistemically paternalistic tendencies, these tendencies do not necessarily undermine personal autonomy. Thus, if we are to find such policies objectionable, we cannot do so on the grounds of respect for autonomy. (shrink)

Recent scientific research into the therapeutic potential and mechanisms of psychedelic drugs raises intriguing and hitherto largely unexplored philosophical questions. A brief overview of the relevant science is given before addressing these questions. It is argued that psychedelic transformation is a distinctive psycho- pharmacological intervention because its mechanism of action ineliminably involves conscious mental representations, and thus is more transparent to the subject than the mechanisms of other drug therapies. This argument connects with issues in the philosophy of (cognitive) scientific (...) explanation. It is also argued that transformative psychedelic experiences may well confer three distinct kinds of epistemic benefits: knowledge by acquaintance of the subject's psychological potential, knowledge by acquaintance of the meta-physical nature of the (sense of) self, and revitalized capacities for the acquisition of modal knowledge. Non-naturalistic metaphysical and epistemological claims abound in psychedelic circles; thus, it is important to realize that psychedelics may yield naturalistically acceptable epistemic benefits. (shrink)

This paper aims to explain why the laws of nature are held fixed in counterfactual reasoning. I begin by highlighting three salient features of counterfactual reasoning: it is conservative, nomically guided, and it uses hindsight. I then present a rationale for our engagement in counterfactual reasoning that aims to make sense of these features. In particular, I argue that counterfactual reasoning helps us evaluate the evidential relations between unanticipated pieces of evidence and various hypotheses of interest about the history of (...) the actual world. Given this goal, it makes a great deal of sense that counterfactual reasoning would have the aforementioned features. Additionally, it turns out that this account of counterfactual reasoning is nicely congruent with Humean views of laws. Specifically, it can explain, in a Humean-friendly way, both why the laws are counterfactually resilient, and why we may be inclined to have anti-Humean intuitions in the first place, even if some form of Humeanism is correct. (shrink)

In recent years, increasing attention has been given to virtue ethics in business. Aristotle's thought is often seen as the basis of the virtue ethics tradition. For Aristotle, the idea of phronësis, or 'practical wisdom', lies at the foundation of ethics. Confucian ethics has notable similarities to Aristotelian virtue ethics, and may embody some similar ideas of practical wisdom. This article considers how ideas of moral judgment in these traditions are consistent with modern ideas about intuition in management decision making. (...) A hypothetical case is considered where the complexity of ethical decision making in a group context illustrates the importance of intuitive, phronësis-like judgment. It is then noted that both Aristotelian and Confucian virtue ethics include suggestions about support for moral decision making that are also consistent with modern theory. (shrink)

In 2006 we awoke, in Europe at least, to the odd situation in which twitchers – obsessive birdwatchers who spend much of their leisure time on the far-flung edges of countries – are being reinvented as the eyes and ears of the state, helping warn of new border incursions. These incursions are posited as taking an avian form that may bring with it very unwelcome pathogens. Everyday avian observations and knowledges of migratory routes are being reinvented as a kind of (...) border patrol, a first line of veterinary surveillance. (shrink)

Children’s ability to pretend, and the apparent lack of pretence in children with autism, have become important issues in current research on ‘theory of mind’, on the assumption that pretend play may be an early indicator of metarepresentational abilities.

In this paper, I explore briefly the "secular priesthood" metaphor often applied to bioethicists. I next ask: if, despite our discomfort with the metaphor, we were to embrace the best aspects of the priesthood(s) ? which I identify as the missionaries' willingness to work among sinners and lepers, at their own peril ? would we be able to live up to that standard of bravery? I then draw a parallel with the fears of contagion currently be voiced (by Carl Elliott (...) and others), with regard to bioethicists working in or near corporate settings. I argue that such fears may themselves have a number of deleterious effects, and I suggest several possible positive steps in response to that fear. (shrink)

"Guanxi" involves interpersonal obligations, which may conflict with other obligations people have that are based on general or abstract moral considerations. In the West, the latter have been widely accepted as the general source of obligations, which is perhaps tied to social changes associated with the rise of capitalism. Recently, Western ethicists have started to reconsider the extent to which personal relationships may form a distinct basis for obligation. In administration and management, salient bases for decision-Making include deontological, consequentialist and (...) personalist ethics. The first may be reflected in a bureaucratic approach, the second in a price system, and the third in arrangements like "guanxi". Each has positive and negative aspects, but problems arise when they lead to conflicting obligations, as may occur for an office holder who has some obligations based in deontological considerations and others based in personal relationships. This is a type of conflict of interest. Such conflicts have been considered in the West, and remedies proposed. Problems arise especially in cases where it is not clear how to prioritise different obligations, and this has been noted as a difficulty in the Chinese legal system. Questions that need to be answered include not only questions about how to deal with conflicting obligations, but also questions about what institutions to accept as giving rise to obligations. Institutions themselves may be problematic not only because of their consequences for economic productivity, but because they are internally incoherent, and this may be manifested in frequent conflicts faced by office holders. (shrink)

“[A]ny truly neutral state,” writes George Sher in this important and timely new book, “must needlessly cut its citizens off from important goods”. For that reason, he argues, liberal neutrality, the view that government must remain neutral between competing conceptions of the good life, is indefensible. There is, moreover, a uniquely best, rationally defensible conception of the good life—not a subjective view that insists that all value depends on satisfying actual or hypothetical desires, but an objective view that recognizes that (...) some value depends on the realization of certain broad capacities that humans share. However, this objective or perfectionist view, as Sher calls it, is not communitarian, since it rejects the idea that society’s history or conventions must ratify its values or that civic participation or engagement in common projects must be among its recommendations. It is a liberal perfectionism, since it requires procedural and substantive liberal rights and recognizes that there are many different ways of realizing the human capacities whose exercise generates value. Hence, although government may legitimately promote the good, “the ability to promote the good is not all-or-nothing”. (shrink)

This paper aims to explain why the laws of nature are held fixed in counterfactual reasoning. I begin by highlighting three salient features of counterfactual reasoning: it is conservative, nomically guided, and it uses hindsight. I then present a rationale for our engagement in counterfactual reasoning that aims to make sense of these features. In particular, I argue that counterfactual reasoning helps us evaluate the evidential relations between unanticipated pieces of evidence and various hypotheses of interest about the history of (...) the actual world. Given this goal, it makes a great deal of sense that counterfactual reasoning would have the aforementioned features. Additionally, it turns out that this account of counterfactual reasoning is nicely congruent with Humean views of laws. Specifically, it can explain, in a Humean-friendly way, both why the laws are counterfactually resilient, and why we may be inclined to have anti-Humean intuitions in the first place, even if some form of Humeanism is correct. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an account of social alienation, a genre of alienation engendered by contemporary work that has gone largely overlooked in the ethics of labor. Social alienation consists in a corruption of workers’ relations to their social life and the people that make it up. When one is socially alienated, one’s sociality and close relations exist as a mere afterthought or break from work, while labor is the central activity of one’s life. While one might think that (...) existing solutions to alienated labor would resolve this social alienation, I suggest that such solutions at best leave the problem intact and may in fact contribute to it by giving labor the place of priority in workers’ lives. Resolving social alienation, I suggest, requires rethinking the amount of time we commit to work, the rigidity of the work schedule, and most crucially, the value that we attribute to work as the primary source of purpose in our lives. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

There has been widespread emphasis on the importance of trust amongst parties to the employment relationship, associated with a call for increased "integrative bargaining". Trust is bound up with ethical action, but there has been some debate about the ethics of deception in bargaining. Because it is possible for cooperative bargainers to be exploited, some writers contend that deceptive behavior is ethical and established practice. There are several problems about that view. It is questionable how clear and uniform such a (...) practice has been. An appearance of deceptive bluffing can often be explained as exchange of genuine concessions. Recent trends have seen increased devolution of bargaining from professionals to non-professionals, which dilutes any shared understandings there have been in the past, while practices that do exist may not be freely or voluntarily accepted and the existence of such practices is not enough to compensate for inequalities of power and skill. It is questionable to what extent bluffing and deception are necessary for self-defense. There other techniques available by which parties can guard themselves against exploitation. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Daniel Stephens argues against Chad Hansen’s and Chris Fraser’s interpretations of the later Mohists as realists about the ontology of kinds, contending that the Mohist stance is better explained as conventionalist. This essay defends a realist interpretation of later Mohism that I call “similarity realism,” the view that human-independent reality fixes the similarities that constitute kinds and thus determines what kinds exist and what their members are. I support this interpretation with a (...) new, detailed account of the Mohist conception of a kind on which kind relations lie in inherent similarities between the intrinsic features of objects. This account distinguishes kind relations from “uniting together” and part-whole relations, both of which, unlike kind relations, may be determined by convention. I argue that Stephens’s critique of realist interpretations fails because it confuses the ontological issue of what determines the existence of kinds with the semantic issue of what fixes the names for kinds. (shrink)

Dale Dorsey’s wide-ranging A Theory of Prudence contains ideas and arguments worthy of our attention on quite a variety of self-interest-related normative topics. In this essay I focus on Dorsey’s theory of prudential rationality, which is designed to deliver a negative answer to this essay’s titular question. Dorsey’s negative answer may be more intuitive, but I believe the positive answer is more defensible. From the perspective of prudence, it is just as reasonable to change your desires to fit the world (...) as it is to change the world to fit your desires. (shrink)

Historically Wales has been regarded as a country with relatively low levels of school exclusion, particularly in comparison with England. This has been used as an indicator of Wales’ commitment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which foregrounds a rights-based agenda that would argue school exclusion is a consequence of broader socio-economic structures than individual actions. However, simple analyses may mask a different picture of school exclusions in Wales. In this article, we study more detailed information (...) on formal school exclusions by looking at ‘instances’ of school exclusion, which considers the frequency and length of formal school exclusions in Wales, and alongside recorded school absence. The article also demonstrates that the pupils ‘at risk’ of formal school exclusion varies by when they experience school exclusion during their educational lifecourse. The article concludes by highlighting that patterns of school exclusion are complex, and that interpretation of these patterns depends on what kind of measure of school exclusion is used. By publishing these results, the article hopes to persuade policymakers and practitioners to re-examine their processes of exclusion to ensure they are commensurate with the law and to prevent unnecessary school exclusions. (shrink)

The article assesses Chad Hansen's arguments that both early and later Moist texts apply only pragmatic, not semantic, terms of evaluation and treat “appropriate word or language usage,” not semantic truth. I argue that the early Moist “three standards” are indeed criteria of a general notion of correct dao 道 , not specifically of truth. However, as I explain, their application may include questions of truth. I show in detail how later Moist texts employ terms with the same expressive role (...) as “ is true.” Thus, contra Hansen, the Moists can justifiably be said to have a concept of semantic truth. (shrink)

In our increasingly instrumentalist culture, debates over the privatization of schooling may be beside the point. Whether we hatch some new plan for chartering or funding schools, or retain the traditional model of government-run schools, the ongoing instrumentalization of education threatens the very possibility of public education. Indeed, in the culture of performativity, not only the public school but public life itself is hollowed out and debased. Qualities are recast as quantities, judgments replaced by rubrics, teaching and learning turned into (...) exchange values. Schools should be central to public life: key locations for the regeneration of values, the cultivation of judgment, and the creation of the conditions for positive freedom. In this article Chris Higgins, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, goes beyond typical treatments of the schools as equalizer of individual opportunity to explore three aspects of educational publicity: the school as an object of communal concern, schooling as preparation for public life, and the classroom as public space. (shrink)

Many people wonder as they look at their newborn child about how this perfect child can be marked by original sin. This invites us to look more deeply at our understanding of human nature and our capacity to make choices that can give life to ourselves and others, or take life and diminish it. While we have tended to identify the sin of the first couple as some sort of sexual sin, this is not supported by the text of Genesis. (...) The original sin is one of seeking knowledge, of overstepping the boundaries established by God, and grasping what is not ours. We are created in God's image, but that does not mean being equal to God-clearly not. God intimately and lovingly breathed life into the creature of the earth, but being so richly blessed is sadly not enough. The story is a complex one that leaves the reader wondering why God places the tree of the knowledge of good and evil right in the midst of the garden, where the first couple cannot avoid seeing it and continually have to confront the boundary that God has set. The role of the serpent prompts questions that will remain unanswered about how God allows the serpent to exist in the first place, let alone endanger the peace and tranquillity of the garden. (shrink)

Over the past twenty-five years, or so, considerable advances have been made in understanding how learning occurs in the brain, though much of this research is still to make its way into education. One contribution it should be making is to furnish the philosophical critique of past and current theory with supporting empirical evidence. For example, motivation theory and its cognate expectancy-value theory continue to be taught in teacher education, even though their rational cognitivist foundations are philosophically shaky, and their (...) shared representational notion of the mind is incompatible with what is now known about the learning brain. Furthermore, the central claim of motivation theory that children need to be motivated in order to learn is educationally problematic, not least because it incorporates a deficit model of the child as learner. This paper provides a philosophical and educational critique of motivation and expectancy-value theories and begins to sketch out an alternative dynamic systems approach, which argues that value is deeply embedded in the learning process, not only in the value students may or may not attach to their learning, but also neurobiologically. In opposition to motivation and its notion of the learner this paper argues that every student is equipped with a brain that is value-orientated towards learning and will learn, when nested in suitably affordant learning environments. In place of expectancy-value, we argue for value-embedded learning, which provides a non-reductive and biologically plausible account of how value and emotional salience are dynamically interwoven in the learning process. (shrink)

Among the many striking features of the philosophy of the Zhuāngzǐ is that it advocates a life unperturbed by emotions, including even pleasurable, positive emotions such as joy or delight. Many of us see emotions as an ineluctable part of life, and some would argue they are a crucial component of a well-developed moral sensitivity and a good life. The Zhuangist approach to emotion challenges such commonsense views so radically that it amounts to a test case for the fundamental plausibility (...) of the Daoist ethical orientation: If the Zhuangist stance on emotion is untenable, then other aspects of Daoist ethics may founder as well. In this essay, I explore what I call a Zhuangist ‘Virtuoso View’ of emotion and its connections with human agency, attempting to show that at least one version of a Zhuangist approach to emotion passes the ‘basic plausibility’ test. I begin by describing the Virtuoso View and sketching its theoretical foundation, which involves claims about human agency, the self, psychophysical hygiene, the good life, epistemology, and metaphysics. Next, I defend the Virtuoso View against three objections, namely that it abandons intentionality, that it interferes with a good life, and that it yields a schizophrenic conception of agency. I argue for three major theses. First, the Virtuoso View is easily intelligible and largely defensible. Second, it reflects a crucial insight into a fundamental dichotomy at the core of human agency: the unavoidable conflict within a self-aware human agent between an internal, engaged perspective and an external, detached one. Third, I suggest that certain problems or conflicts arising from the Virtuoso View actually reflect inherent features of the human predicament and thus are not mere conceptual defects. Hence even if we do not find the Virtuoso View wholly convincing, we can nevertheless gain much insight from it. (shrink)

"Guanxi" involves interpersonal obligations, which may conflict with other obligations people have that are based on general or abstract moral considerations. In the West, the latter have been widely accepted as the general source of obligations, which is perhaps tied to social changes associated with the rise of capitalism. Recently, Western ethicists have started to reconsider the extent to which personal relationships may form a distinct basis for obligation. In administration and management, salient bases for decision-Making include deontological, consequentialist and (...) personalist ethics. The first may be reflected in a bureaucratic approach, the second in a price system, and the third in arrangements like "guanxi". Each has positive and negative aspects, but problems arise when they lead to conflicting obligations, as may occur for an office holder who has some obligations based in deontological considerations and others based in personal relationships. This is a type of conflict of interest. Such conflicts have been considered in the West, and remedies proposed. Problems arise especially in cases where it is not clear how to prioritise different obligations, and this has been noted as a difficulty in the Chinese legal system. Questions that need to be answered include not only questions about how to deal with conflicting obligations, but also questions about what institutions to accept as giving rise to obligations. Institutions themselves may be problematic not only because of their consequences for economic productivity, but because they are internally incoherent, and this may be manifested in frequent conflicts faced by office holders. (shrink)

Educational institutions rely on academic citizenship behaviors to construct knowledge in a responsible manner. However, they often struggle to contain the unlawful reuse of knowledge by some learning communities. This study draws upon secondary data from two televised episodes describing contract cheating practices prevalent among international student communities. Against this background, we have investigated emergent teaching and learning structures that have been extended to formal and informal spaces with the use of mediating technologies. Learners’ interactions in formal spaces are influenced (...) by ongoing informal social experiences within a shared cultural context to influence learners’ agency. Building upon existing theories, we have developed an analytical lens to understand the rationale behind cheating behaviors. Citizenship behaviors are based on individual and collective perceptions of what constitutes as acceptable or unacceptable behavior. That is, learners who are low in motivation and are less engaged with learning may collude; more so, if cheating is not condemned by members belonging to their informal social spaces. Our analytical lens describes institutional, cultural, technological, social and behavioral contexts that influence learner agency. (shrink)

Photographs by one of French cinema's most influential and enigmatic artists. Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with La Jetée —a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. His still camerawork is not as well known, but Marker has been taking photographs as long as he has been making films. Staring Back presents 200 black-and-white (...) photographs from Marker's personal archives, taken from 1952 to 2006. Some of the photographs are related to his classic films, others are portraits of famous faces, but most are pictures of people Marker has encountered as he has traveled the world. The central section of the book contains a series of photographs documenting political protests Marker has witnessed, including the march on the Pentagon in 1967, the events of May 1968 in Paris, and the tumultuous 2006 demonstrations protesting the French government's proposed employment policies. The photographs are accompanied by several unpublished texts by Marker, including the English language text of The Case of the Grinning Cat and Marker's annotations for some of the photos. The book—which appears in conjunction with an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University—also includes essays by Wexner Center curator Bill Horrigan and art historian Molly Nesbit. (shrink)

This paper tests a novel implication of the original version of prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979): that choices may systematically violate transitivity. Some have interpreted this implication as a weakness, viewing it as an anomaly generated by the ‘editing phase’ of prospect theory which can be rendered redundant by an appropriate re-specification of the preference function. Although there is some existing evidence that transitivity fails descriptively, the particular form of non-transitivity implied by prospect theory is quite distinctive and hence (...) presents an ideal opportunity to expose that theory to test. An experiment is reported which reveals strong evidence of the predicted intransitivity. It is argued that the existence of this new form of non-transitive behaviour presents a fresh theoretical challenge to those seeking descriptively adequate theories of choice behaviour, and a particular challenge to those who seek explanations within the conventional economic paradigm of utility maximisation. (shrink)

After examining the ethical and political writings of Immanuel Kant, one finds an apparent paradox in his philosophy as his perfectionist moral teachings appear to be linked to his anti-perfectionist political theory. Specifically, he writes that the perfection of moral character can only take place for an individual who is inside of civil society, a condition where no laws may legitimately be implemented expressly for the purpose of trying to make individuals moral. Kant believes that living in civil society is (...) a necessary condition for an individual to refine his talents and reason completely, a process required by morality. I believe, however, that the connection between his moral and political theory runs much deeper than simply facilitating the refinement of talents. Kant's moral theory focuses on an individual's cultivation of virtue, but this cultivation cannot be most satisfactorily completed unless that individual is a member of civil society. Put differently, civil society plays a necessary role in cultivating an individual's character so that he is able to act from maxims consistent with the moral law, out of the respect for the law itself. However, because he believes that civic laws primarily intended to encourage moral cultivation cannot be implemented legitimately, it seems curious that this condition should play such a significant role in Kant's moral philosophy. Through this examination of Kant's moral and political theory, it will be shown that Kant's political society establishes a condition necessary for an individual's complete cultivation of virtue, not by implementing laws that make men moral but by weakening the forces of heteronomy, thereby removing barriers to moral action. (shrink)

Analogy with the monisms of fundamental physics suggests that a concept of symmetry breaking is likely to help towards developing an understanding of mind/matter monism. I explore some possible consequences of this concept, arguing that a broken symmetry, involving energy and 'what-it-is-like-to-be-ness'along with time, may occur and may manifest in the course of energy measurements. The resultant proto-panpsychist picture has the advantage of indicating how our complex, human consciousness could emerge from proto-conscious elements. It's an account that has empirical, refutable (...) implications which are briefly discussed. (shrink)

There are differences among forms of impression management that are relevant to its ethical evaluation. Sometimes, moral appraisal is to do with impression management as a tactic of influence, but not about deception. In other cases, an audience is given a true or a false impression, and ethical questions of deception arise, but they are made more complex by the need to consider the responsibility of an audience in reaching its conclusions. Cases where that is an issue blend into a (...) third category in which impression management is joint social performance. Such cases raise additional possibilities of the problematic influence of one agent by another, but also begin to move ethical concerns from the behaviour of an individual agent to the social practices that sustain their expectations. Such social practices invite ethical appraisal because they may impose constraints. But they may also provide opportunities for achievement and pursuit of excellence. (shrink)