In this article, I assess (1) whether some cyborgs and AI robots can theoretically be considered persons; and (2) how we will know if/when they have attained personhood. Since our discourses of personhood are inherently pluralistic and our concepts of both humanness and personhood are inherently nebulous, both some cyborgs, and some AI robots, I conclude, could theoretically be considered persons depending on what, exactly, one means by “person.” The practical problem of how we distinguish them from nonpersonal AI entities (...) is, however, both more important, and much more difficult to solve. In conversation with various secular and theological accounts of relational personhood, I argue that only by treating AI entities as persons by default might we avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences of mistakenly denying personhood to an entire group of eligible entities. (shrink)

Raymond Turner first provides a logical framework for specification and the design of specification languages, then uses this framework to introduce and study ...

Adherence to professional ethics in nursing is fundamental for high-quality ethical care. However, analysis of the use and impact of nurses’ codes of ethics as a part of professional ethics is limited. To fill this gap in knowledge, the aim of our review was to describe the use and impact of the Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements published by the American Nurses Association as an example of one of the earliest and most extensive codes of ethics for (...) nurses with their interpretative statements and constituting a strong basis for the International Council of Nurses’ Code of Ethics for Nurses. We based our review on previous literature using a scoping review method. We included both non-scientific and scientific publications to provide an analysis of codes of ethics which can be utilized in development and revision of other nurses’ codes of ethics. In the searches, we used CINAHL and PubMed databases limiting publications to texts with a connection to the Code of Ethics for Nurses published from January 2001 to November 2022 and written in English. Searches yielded 1739 references, from which 785 non-scientific and 71 scientific publications were included for analysis of the data. Although non-scientific and scientific publications addressed different number of categories, the results indicated that in the both groups the use and impact focused on professional ethics, nursing practice, and work environment and less on education, research, or social health issues. Nurses’ ethical standards were not addressed in non-scientific publications, and clinical issues and leadership were not in focus in scientific publications. To increase evidence-based knowledge of the impact of codes of ethics additional research is needed. Good scientific conduct was followed. (shrink)

Now that mankind has created the capability of destroying itself through nuclear technology, is it still possible to think in terms of a "just war"? Johnson argues that it is, and in the context of specific case studies he offers moral guidelines for addressing such major contemporary problems as terrorist activity in a foreign country, an individual’s conscientious objection to military service, and an American defense policy that requires development of weapons that may be morally employed in case of need. (...) "Remarkable.... A thoughtful and even profound book, which can be warmly recommended."—Adam Roberts, _New Society_ __ "[A] wise, prudential, and moral thesis.... A most important book, one that all Americans who can should read."—George Armstrong Kelly, _Political Science Quarterly_ __ "At its heart, _Can Modern War be Just? _Is a challenge to the common assumption that any modern war must be total—an unrestrained, spasmodic release of one’s entire destructive capacity against the whole of the enemy’s population."—Richard Allen, _Journal of Religious Ethics_ __ "Johnson... seriously attempt[s] to balance principles and respect facts. For this he is to be praised."—Gary Jason, _Chronicles of Culture_ __ "Johnson’s application of just war doctrine to the hardest problems of contemporary warfare is both morally sensitive and intellectually bold. Readers will sometimes disagree with his arguments, but they will be forced to think hard, and they will learn what it is to work within a moral tradition."—Michael Walzer. (shrink)

This is an indispensible book for students, teachers and professional researchers in sociology, cultural studies, politics, feminism and philosophy.

What is, or should be, the role of defense in thinking about the justification of use of armed force? Contemporary just war thinking prioritizes defense as the principal, and perhaps the only, just cause for resorting to armed force. By contrast, classic just war tradition, while recognizing defense as justification for use of force by private persons, did not reason from self-defense to the justification of the use of force on behalf of the political community, but instead rendered the idea (...) of just cause for resort to force in terms of the sovereign's responsibility to maintain justice, vindicating those who had suffered from injustice and punishing evildoers. This paper moves through three major stages in the historical development of just war thinking, first examining a critical phase in the formation of the classical idea of just cause as the responsibility to maintain justice, then discussing the shift, characteristic of the modern period, to an idea of sovereignty as connected to the state and the prioritization of defense of the state as just cause for use of force, and lastly showing how this conception of the priority of defense became part of the recovery of just war thinking in the latter part of the twentieth century. The paper concludes by noting recent changes in thought on international law that tend to emphasize justice at the expense of the right of self-defense, suggesting that the roots of just war thinking imply the need for a similar rethinking of contemporary just war discourse. (shrink)

This essay responds to the six essays on my thought above, doing so both directly on particularly important points and indirectly through my own reflections on how I understand my work and its development.

This essay explores the convergence of theoretical or foundational, historical, and comparative concerns in religious ethics through the examination of two religiously informed traditions on statecraft, that shaped by Augustine's idea of the civitas dei and that shaped by classical Islamic juristic thought on the dar alislam. Three issues are examined for each tradition: the concept of normative political order, the nature of justified use of force, and the implications of their rival claims to universality. The essay shows how the (...) normative logic and implications of each tradition can be properly understood only by attention to its historical development. It further argues that possibilities for conversation between these traditions, difficult or even nonexistent in terms of the original statements of the Augustinian and juristic ideals, may be identified by attention to the historical working out of these ideals in the practice of statecraft within the two cultures. (shrink)

Starting with Ben-Menahem’s definition of historical contingency as sensitivity to variations in initial conditions, we suggest that historical events and processes can be thought of as forming a complex landscape of contingency and necessity. We suggest three different ways of extending and elaborating Ben-Menahem’s concepts: By supplementing them with a notion of historical disturbance; by pointing out that contingency and necessity are subject to scaling effects; by showing how degrees of contingency/necessity can change over time. We also argue that further (...) development of Sterelny’s notion of conditional inevitability leads to our conclusion that the topography of historical contingency is something that can change over time. (shrink)

Three recent books focus, in different ways, on the idea of human rights and its relation to religion and religious ethics. All three books discussed here address criticisms of the human rights idea and seek to establish the relationship of religion and human rights with regard to the field of policy. The present discussion begins with an overview that places these three books in the larger context of the development of the human rights idea and its historical relationship with religion. (...) It then turns to Little's book, next to the collection of essays edited by Twiss, Simion, and Petersen, which is described internally as a Festschrift for Little, and then to Hogan's book, and in the final section it explores comparisons among the books. (shrink)

This article presents Franz Rosenzweig’s concept of redemption as a vehicle for raising some important questions for confronting the contemporary movement of Transhumanism. The upshot of our discussion is located in the existential questions asked, following a philosophical comparison of Rosenzweig’s religious and philosophical commitment to human life in its most robust form, with Transhumanism’s scientistic vision. To do so, the article first discusses some techno-scientistic assumptions of Transhumanism, showing that it presumes what was once a core principle of German (...) Idealism, the identity of reason and being, against which Rosenzweig rebelled. Then, the article turns to examine Rosenzweig’s humanistic redemptive vision and its emphasis on the corporeal, the temporal, and the worldly. The conclusion makes explicit the ways in which Rosenzweig’s redemptive vision provides a contrasting model to the one set forth by Transhumanism. (shrink)

In addition to noting significant differences of interpretation between me and Kristopher Norris on understanding classic just war thought and judging its importance, this Comment flags errors of fact and faulty logic in the Norris essay.

Fracking or the extraction of shale gas through hydraulic fracturing of rock has become a contested topic, especially in the United States, where it has been deployed on a large scale, and in Europe where it is still largely speculative. Research is beginning to investigate the environmental and economic costs and benefits as well as public perceptions of this new energy technology. However, so far the social and psychological impact of fracking on those involved in it, such as gas workers, (...) or those living in the vicinity of fracking sites, has escaped the attention of the social science research community. In this article we begin to fill this gap through a small-scale thematic analysis of representations of fracking in fifty YouTube videos, where the trailer of a controversial film, Gasland (Fox, 2010), has had a marked impact. Results show that the videos discuss not only environmental and economic costs and benefits of fracking but also social and psychological impacts on individuals and communities. These videos reveal a human face of fracking that remains all too often hidden from view. (shrink)

Beginning with the support given by religious groups to humanitarian intervention for the protection of basic human rights in the debates of the 1990s, this essay examines the use of the human rights idea in relation to international law on armed conflict, the “Responsibility To Protect” doctrine, and the development of the idea of sovereignty associated with the “Westphalian system” of international order, identifying a dilemma: that the idea of human rights undergirds both the principle of non-intervention in the internal (...) affairs of states and the idea of an international responsibility for humanitarian intervention in cases of oppression. The pre-Westphalian conception of sovereignty as moral responsibility for the common good is then examined as an alternative that avoids this dilemma, and the essay concludes by suggesting that religious ethics also has other resources that, if used, may shed useful light on resolving this problem. (shrink)

In this paper, the stability and stabilization issues for a class of delayed neural networks with time-varying hybrid impulses are investigated. The hybrid effect of two types of impulses including both stabilizing and destabilizing impulses is considered simultaneously in the analysis of systems. To characterize the occurrence features of impulses, the concepts of average impulse interval and average impulse strength are employed. Based on the analysis of stability, a pinning impulsive controller which can ensure the global exponential stability of the (...) studied neural networks is designed by pinning a small fraction of neurons. Finally, two numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes for delayed neural networks with hybrid impulses. (shrink)

Abstract [Remarks at the 10th-anniversary conference for the Journal of Military Ethics, Oslo, Norway, 9 September 2011, arranged by the journal in collaboration with the Norwegian Defence University College, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, and Bj?rknes College.].

Since World War II human rights language has come to occupy a central place in moral and legal discourse on the justification and limitation of armed conflict. At the core of contemporary international humanitarian law, concern for human rights has also developed as a vehicle for identifying and expressing moral concerns held in common across diverse cultural systems.

Can history serve to uphold democracy as an ethical standard of governance? The author suggests that the basic and cross-temporal cornerstones of morality, the family and religion, serve as "intermediate" social structures in attaining the central virtues of a moral democracy.

In its classic form the doctrine of the just war, whether enunciated by theological or secular theorists, had two main components: the jus ad bellum, which defined the morally acceptable limits within which a sovereign could and even should go to war, and the jus in bello, which set limits to the conduct of war. By contrast, today the problem of just limitation of war is addressed almost entirely by legal and theoretical attempts to refine the jus in bello, while (...) there exists only a morally truncated and politically ineffective jus ad bellum. What is the contemporary status of the jus ad bellum and what makes it politically and morally inadequate are the issues I wish to address directly in this paper. Indirectly, however, I wish to speak to more fundamental questions: what are the ingredients of a moral doctrine limiting resort to war, and what is required for this to be politically workable as well? The final goal, which is far beyond the scope of this paper, is to reconstruct for our own time a doctrine on the just limitation of war which would restore the dual thrust of just war doctrine in its classic form. (shrink)

“Stab, smite, slay!” These are not the words of Bashar al-Assad telling his forces how they should deal with the Syrian rebel movement, or indeed those of any other contemporary political leader, but rather the words of Martin Luther exhorting the German nobility to a harsh response to the peasants' rebellion of 1524–1525. His writings show that he sympathized with many of the peasants' grievances so long as these did not issue in rebellion, but when they turned to force of (...) arms, he responded sternly. This was not a peculiarity of Luther. Consider the following from an English courtier, Thomas Churchyard, writing admiringly of the treatment of Irish rebels in 1579 by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, commander of the English army sent to put down the rebellion: He further tooke this order infringeable, that when soever he made any ostyng [military campaign], or inrode, into the enemies Countrey, he killed manne, woman, and child, and spoiled, wasted, and burned, by the grounde all that he might, leavyng nothing of the enemies in saffetie, whiche he could possiblie waste, or consume. (shrink)

While Biggar in chapter 2 of his In Defence of War cites Augustine in support of an argument for forgiveness and reconciliation, this paper argues through a close look at Augustine’s Letters 95 and 139 and Book I of his On Christian Doctrine that Augustine’s view of how the Donatists should be treated focused on their punishment, not on reconciliation in the sense Biggar describes.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Beginning with a sketch of the major moral ideas contained in just war tradition, this essay applies them to three controverted issues in contemporary military debate: nuclear deterrence strategy, the strategic defense initiative, and the possibility of building and deploying fractional megatonnage nuclear weapons on delivery vehicles of extremely high accuracy. It is argued that, in terms of the criteria of just war tradition, deterrence in its present form poses grave moral problems. The two new weapons systems are then examined (...) in terms of whether, by just war criteria, they represent more moral means of defense than contemporary nuclear deterrence. (shrink)

Picking up before the award-winning documentary The Bad Kids began, Lessons from The Bad Kids will teach us not only to improve our educational system but also how to become better people.

This article examines a post-war generation of academics in the United States and in Britain, who, coming from lower-class families without any previous experience of university education, became internationally famous but nevertheless continued to feel out of place in the academic world. Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of habitus, field and doxa is useful in studying the world of such outsiders and exiles who shaped post-war sociology. Without an established canon of sociology, these students typically developed critical and creative perspectives on society. (...) In Britain the post-war welfare state was the foundation of this new breed of academics. John O’Neill is the classic example. In America ‘The Disobedient Generation’ were influenced by race, the Vietnam War, and the draft. William Connolly and Stephen Turner provide two case studies of highly successful academics who were often subjectively outsiders. ‘Event’ and ‘hazard’ imply that successful careers are in fact merely accidental. Neoliberalism may have closed off such accidental careers. (shrink)

Globalization and the digital revolution are transforming human civilization in unprecedented ways, in large measure via innovation as well as imposition of emergent technologies on growing numbers of consumers. While these transformations confer undeniable benefits to humanity, the benefits are bundled with a corresponding set of detriments. This paper does not contest the benefits, but confronts the detriments. It appeals to humanities therapy as a remedy for many of the cognate problems experienced by individuals and societies alike, problems that stem (...) from overexposure to technologies and underexposure to humanities. (shrink)