This chapter contains sections titled: What's in Santa's Mind? How We Know Anything We Know Santa as a Moral Exemplar Santa the Moral Accountant Santa as Moral Authority Example of Santa in Action: A Christmas Story Santa as Karma Embodied Conclusion.

Psychopathy refers to a range of complex behaviors and personality traits, including callousness and antisocial behavior, typically studied in criminal populations. Recent studies have used self-reports to examine psychopathic traits among noncriminal samples. The goal of the current study was to examine the underlying factor structure of the Self-Report of Psychopathy Scale–Short Form (SRP-SF) across complementary samples and examine the impact of gender on factor structure. We examined the structure of the SRP-SF among 2,554 young adults from three undergraduate samples (...) and a high-risk young adult sample. Using confirmatory factor analysis, a four-correlated factor model and a four-bifactor model showed good fit to the data. Evidence of weak invariance was found for both models across gender. These findings highlight that the SRP-SF is a useful measure of low-level psychopathic traits in noncriminal samples, although the underlying factor structure may not fully translate across men and women. (shrink)

_Serial Killers - Philosophy for Everyone_ investigates our profound intrigue with mass-murderers. Exploring existential, ethical and political questions through an examination of real and fictional serial killers, philosophy comes alive via an exploration of grisly death. Presents new philosophical theories about serial killing, and relates new research in cognitive science to the minds of serial killers Includes a philosophical look at real serial killers such as Ian Brady, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Zodiac killer, as well (...) as fictional serial killers such as Dexter and Hannibal Lecter Offers a new phenomenological examination of the writings of the Zodiac Killer Contains an account of the disappearance of one of Ted Bundy's victims submitted by the organization Families and Friends of Missing Persons and Violent Crime Victims Integrates the insights of philosophers, academics, crime writers and police officers. (shrink)

The city of Cork experienced a political odyssey between Easter 1916 and the end of 1918. Wartime policies conceived in London manifested themselves unexpectedly in Cork--The Defence of the Realm Act was used to repress political speech; deficit spending generated massive inflation; mandatory arbitration encouraged workers to join trade unions; food rationing panicked a country scarred by the Potato Famine; and military conscription generated virtual rebellion. As a result, the Cork public increasingly turned against the war. The book examines the (...) political situation in Cork prior to the Easter Rising; local reactions to the rebellion; the rapid creation of the Republican mass movement; the dramatic decline of the Irish Party; the explosion of anti-authority street rioting; the mobilization of women in the independence struggle; disturbances against venereal disease treatments and visiting American sailors; the emergence of radical trade unionism; agitation over the retention of local food supplies; the nationalist mobilization during the Conscription Crisis; and Sinn Féin's triumph in the 1918 General Election. (shrink)

Political advertising has long been a target for criticism regarding unethical behaviour. This study looks at the attitudes of Australian advertising agency executives and politicians towards ethical issues relating to political advertising. A sample of 101 advertising agency executives and 46 federal politicians were compared and some attitudinal differences were found, which could be areas of tension in the agency-client relationship.

The forces of freedom are challenged everywhere by a newly energized spirit of tyranny, whether it is Jihadist terrorism, Putin's imperialism, or the ambitions of China's dictatorship, writes Waller R. Newell in this engaging exposé of a thousand dangers. We will see why tyranny is a permanent threat by following its strange career from Homeric Bronze Age warriors, through the empires of Alexander the Great and Rome, to the medieval struggle between the City of God and the City of (...) Man, leading to the state-building despots of the Modern Age including the Tudors and 'enlightened despots' such as Peter the Great. The book explores the psychology of tyranny from Nero to Gaddafi, and how it changes with the Jacobin Terror into millenarian revolution. Stimulating and enlightening, Tyrants: Power, Injustice, and Terror will appeal to anyone interested in the danger posed by tyranny and terror in today's world. (shrink)

In Australia, as in many countries, the early advertising industry had a poor reputation for honesty. However, in 1920 ?truth in advertising? and raising ethical behavior became the focus of the Second Convention of Advertising Men of Australasia, held in Sydney. This was a major event in Australia's advertising history and was seen as a way to legitimize the industry in the eyes of those who doubted advertising's honesty. This paper will look at the Sydney Advertising Convention, with particular reference (...) to quotes from presenters and the establishment of self-regulatory bodies, to help gain an insight into the beginning of a system to observe ethical behavior in advertising. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: How Common Are Serial Killings? What is a Serial Killer? I Think Therefore I Kill: The Philosophical Musings of Serial Killers Can You Blame Them? Ethics, Evil, and Serial Killing Dangerous Infatuations: The Public Fascination with Serial Killers A Eulogy for Emotion: The Lack of Empathy and the Urge to Kill Creepy Cognition: Talking and Thinking about Serial Killers Psycho‐ology: Killer Mindsets and Meditations on Murder A Solemn Afterword: A Message from the Victim's Network A (...) Timeline of Serial Killers Notes. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Police Philosophize about the Armed and Dangerous The Interview.

In response to recent corporate ethical and financial disasters there has been increased pressure on business schools to improve their teaching of corporate ethics. Accreditation bodies, such as the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), now require member institutions to develop the ethical awareness of business students, either through a dedicated subject or an integrated coverage of ethics across the curriculum. This paper describes an institutional approach to the incorporation of a comprehensive multi-disciplinary ethics framework into the business (...) curriculum. We discuss important implications for the assessment of ethics within institutional assurance practices, and address critical issues related to the support of academics whenrequired to incorporate new ethics material within their subject which may be outside their field of expertise. As an example, the successful application of the framework within the marketing discipline is presented and discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.2 (2004) 125-128 [Access article in PDF] Comparing Psychoanalytic and Cognitive-Behavioral Perspectives on Control Bruce N. Waller Keywords freedom, locus of control, psychoanalysis, self-efficacy, volition Cognitive behavioral research on locus of control and self-efficacy has produced an extensive body of empirical results that might prove useful to psychoanalytic researchers endeavoring to strengthen the empirical foundation of psychoanalytic therapy. Cognitive-behaviorists and psychoanalysts share a common (...) interest in the importance of perspectives and belief systems and their impact on individual freedom, and comparative research on therapeutic effectiveness could yield benefits for both therapeutic approaches.Locus of control and self-efficacy are central elements in cognitive-behavioral psychology, and they play an important role in cognitive-behavioral therapy. Although the psychoanalytic approach does not explicitly employ those concepts, psychoanalytic therapists are obviously concerned with problems of effective action and internal obstacles to action. Attention to these two perspectives and their overlapping interests offers potential benefits for both the cognitive-behavioral and the psychodynamic approaches to psychological research and therapy.One potential benefit is the development of useful tools for advancing empirically based research on psychoanalysis. As Lehrer (1999) states, it is advantageous to ground psychoanalysis in "firm empirical evidence whenever possible." Although there have obviously been significant positive steps in that direction (Singer 2003; Weiss 1995, 1988; Weiss and Sampson 1986), psychoanalytic researchers have recognized that one source of difficulty is in finding clearly measurable research objectives and hypotheses (Burgin 2002). Cognitive-behavioral research on locus of control and self-efficacy has produced an extensive body of research using clear measurement standards that could prove useful in the empiricist approach to psychodynamic theories. In particular, those cognitive-behavioral research findings might offer a means of extending empirical investigation of psychodynamic theory in a direction usually regarded as difficult to test empirically: the study of psychoanalytic effectiveness to "change your way of seeing" (Lieberman 1999). Shifting locus of control or efficacy expectations in specific domains (Bandura 1997) [End Page 125] would empirically confirm the effectiveness of psychoanalytic techniques. It might well be that some efficacy expectations are enhanced more effectively by psychodynamic processes than by cognitive-behavioral therapy, or that psychoanalysis is effective in enhancing some specific efficacy expectations but not others. This could potentially extend the empirical examination of psychoanalytic theory as well as provide a base of comparison with cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques.Although self-efficacy enhancement might be a fruitful empirical test for psychodynamic therapy, therapeutic intervention to modify locus of control potentially could be even more productive. Current research indicates that one's orientation toward locus of control is a relatively stable characteristic, although it can be modified (Holyrod et al. 1984; Rotter 1979; Sadow and Hopkins 1993). One reason for locus of control stability may be that the locus of control imposes a perspective on the conceptualization of all one's experiences: from a strong internal locus of control perspective I view failures and successes as largely my own doing, whereas from an external locus perspective even my most effective efforts are seen as events that were outside my control: "I guess it was just my time to do well on a math exam," rather than "My hard work for that exam really paid off." (Lieberman makes this phenomenon quite clear in his excellent discussion of transparency.) Although locus of control is not easily modified, it is important to find effective means of helping subjects to achieve such changes, because research shows that a strong internal locus of control is positively correlated with success in work, sports, studies, marriage, and psychological adjustment (Lefcourt 1981, 1992), as well as with better health care behavior and better health (Bandura 1977; Schorr and Rodin 1982; Schulz 1976; Schulz and Hanusa 1978; Wallston 1993). Those deeply enmeshed in an external locus of control enjoy less real freedom and suffer severe disadvantages.How does one effect a shift in such a basic orientation? Not easily. From a psychoanalytic approach, the key will lie in recognizing and reconceptualizing the beliefs that impede effective action. Cognitive-behaviorists are more likely to... (shrink)

The patient's right to informed consent is grudgingly acknowledged by medical professionals, firmly established in law, and brandished as a shibboleth by most bioethicists. But questions remain concerning genuine patient autonomy, and the doctrine of informed consent offers inadequate answers. In addition to the continuing controversy over what counts as “informed,” the passive acquiescence implied by “consent” seems a pale shadow of genuine autonomy.

China is a country that has undertaken a great transformation since the late 1970' s, and among these changes, has seen a massive growth in the advertising industry with the influx of foreign advertisers, and the development of regional and global media, such as satellite television and the Internet. This has resulted in the Chinese people of all ages having a greater opportunity of exposure to different types of advertising, including the advertising of potentially controversial products, which could clash with (...) traditional Chinese values. Using a stakeholder theory approach, this study analyzes the responses of 630 Chinese respondents to discover who is offended by controversial advertisements and determine ways potentially offensive advertising messages can be reduced, thereby assisting marketers in being more socially responsible in their advertising messages. (shrink)

The advertising of controversial products/services and the use of controversial images to "cut through the clutter" in the marketplace appears to be increasing around the world. However, apart from the general ethical issue regarding the deliberate use of controversial/offensive images for public viewing that may offend some people, it is important to determine what makes a controversial advertisement offensive? A questionnaire was distributed to 1014 students across four different countries in the Asia Pacific region to determine what type of products (...) are seen as offensive and the reasons they are offensive. The results present some important implications for international marketers. (shrink)

In this article the author makes the case for a hybrid sourcehood–leeway compatibilist account of free will. To do so, she draws upon Lehrer’s writing on free will, including his preference-based compatibilist account and Frankfurt-style cases from the perspective of the cognizant agent. The author explores what distinguishes kinds of intentional influence in manipulation cases and applies this distinction to a new perspectival variant of Frankfurt cases, those from the perspective of the counterfactual intervenor. She argues that it matters what (...) kind of intentional influence is at issue in the counterfactual intervention and, further, that our judgments about desert of praise are affected by occupying the POV of the counterfactual intervenor. The author concludes that such attention to perspectival variants of Frankfurt cases supports the view that compatibilist sourcehood accounts of moral responsibility require an additional compatibilist could-have-done-otherwise condition to capture a more robust sense of moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper I begin by arguing that there are significant intellectual and normative continuities between pre-Victorian hereditarianism and later Victorian eugenical ideologies. Notions of mental heredity and of the dangers of transmitting hereditary ‘taints’ were already serious concerns among medical practitioners and laymen in the early nineteenth century. I then show how the Victorian period witnessed an increasing tendency for these traditional concerns about hereditary transmission and the integrity of bloodlines to be projected onto the level of national health. (...) Tracing the gradual emergence of eugenical thought, I also highlight some of the more fundamental social, political and intellectual factors that promoted this predilection for extrapolating from the individual lineage to the nation and race. In doing so I argue that fully fledged eugenical thought was always unlikely to emerge prior to the early Victorian period. However, I am also able to show that Francis Galton's 1865 eugenical proposals were far from innovative and that identifying him as the ‘father’ of the eugenics movement is highly misleading. (shrink)

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

Recognising and responding appropriately to emotions is critical to adaptive psychological functioning. Psychopathic traits (e.g. callous, manipulative, impulsive, antisocial) are related to differences in recognition and response when emotion is conveyed through facial expressions and language. Use of emotional music stimuli represents a promising approach to improve our understanding of the specific emotion processing difficulties underlying psychopathic traits because it decouples recognition of emotion from cues directly conveyed by other people (e.g. facial signals). In Experiment 1, participants listened to clips (...) of emotional music and identified the emotional content (Sample 1, N = 196) or reported on their feelings elicited by the music (Sample 2, N = 197). Participants accurately recognised (t(195) = 32.78, p <.001, d = 4.69) and reported feelings consistent with (t(196) = 7.84, p <.001, d = 1.12) the emotion conveyed in the music. However, psychopathic traits were associated with reduced emotion recognition accuracy (F(1, 191) = 19.39, p <.001) and reduced likelihood of feeling the emotion (F(1, 193) = 35.45, p <.001), particularly for fearful music. In Experiment 2, we replicated findings for broad difficulties with emotion recognition (Sample 3, N = 179) and emotional resonance (Sample 4, N = 199) associated with psychopathic traits. Results offer new insight into emotion recognition and response difficulties that are associated with psychopathic traits. (shrink)

Ruling Passion is the only book-length study of tyranny, statesmanship, and civic virtue in three major Platonic dialogues, the Georgias, the Symposium, and the Republic. It is also the first extended interpretation of eros as the key to Plato's understanding of both the depths of human vice and the heights of human aspirations for virtue and happiness. Through his detailed commentary and eloquent insights on the three dialogues, Waller Newell demonstrates how, for Plato, tyranny is a misguided longing for (...) erotic satisfaction that can be corrected by the education of eros toward the proper objects of its pleasure: civic virtue and philosophy. (shrink)

There is an increasing interest in how managers describe and respond to what they regard as moral versus nonmoral problems in organizations. In this study, forty managers described a moral problem and a nonmoral problem that they had encountered in their organization, each of which had been resolved. Analyses indicated that: (1) the two types of problems could be significantly differentiated using four of Jones' (1991) components of moral intensity; (2) the labels managers used to describe problems varied systematically between (...) the two types of problems and according to the problem's moral intensity; and (3) problem management processes varied according to the problem's type and moral intensity. (shrink)

Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. These essays examine both Socrates' and modern political philosophers' attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor.

The Philosophy of Freedom from Rousseau to Heidegger launched a great protest against modern liberal individualism, inspired by the virtuous political community of the ancient Greeks. Hegel argued that the progress of history was gradually bringing about greater freedom and restoring our lost sense of community. But his successors Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger rejected Hegel's version of the end of history with its legitimization of the bourgeois nation-state. They sought to replace it with ever more utopian, apocalyptic and illiberal visions (...) of the future: Marx's Socialism, Nietzsche's Overman, and Heidegger's commitment to Nazism. This book combines an exceptionally clear and rich study of these thinkers with a deep dive into the extent to which their views fed the political catastrophes of revolution, tyranny and genocide, including the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Nazis, Khmer Rouge, ISIS and populist nationalism, but argues that the Philosophy of Freedom remains indispensable for understanding today's world. (shrink)

This essay explores some concerns about the quality of informed consent in patients whose autonomy is diminished by fatal illness. It argues that patients with diminished autonomy cannot give free and voluntary consent, and that recruitment of such patients as subjects in human experimentation exploits their vulnerability in a morally objectionable way. Two options are given to overcome this objection: (i) recruit only those patients who desire to contribute to medical knowledge, rather than gain access to experimental treatment, or (ii) (...) provide prospective subjects the choice to participate in standard doubleblind study or receive the experimental treatment. Either option would guarantee that patients in desperate conditions are given a more meaningful choice and a richer freedom, and thus a higher quality of informed consent, than under standard randomized trials. Keywords: autonomy, double-blind trials, prerandomized and randomized trials, informed consent CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular, possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States, though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian Proletkult of the 1930s. Post-Heideggerian (...) "deconstructivism" though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness: psychoanalysis—not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and, perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event .For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and "revolutionaries"—in all cases, jealous guardians of their academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way:1. There are political implications inherent in the act of interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning. This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning.2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to become our modern religion: the final explanation.3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an example of political delirium in avant-garde writing.Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art and About Chinese Women.Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du langage poétique. (shrink)

In this book the author examines the stubborn philosophical belief in moral responsibility, surveying the philosophical arguments for it, but focusing on the system that supports these arguments: powerful social and psychological factors that hold the belief in moral responsibility firmly in place.--Publisher's description.

When should listening through observation stand alone? --.

If the physical constants, initial conditions, or laws of nature in our universe had been even slightly different, then the evolution of life would have been impossible. This observation has led many philosophers and scientists to ask the natural next question: why is our universe so "fine-tuned" for life? The debates around this question are wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary, complicated, technical, and heated. This study is a comprehensive investigation of these debates and the many metaphysical and epistemological questions raised by cosmological fine-tuning. (...) Waller's study reaches two significant and controversial conclusions. First, he concludes that the criticisms directed at the "multiverse hypothesis" by theists and at the "theistic hypothesis" by naturalists are largely unsuccessful. Neither of these options can plausibly be excluded. Choosing between them seems to turn on primitive metaphysical intuitions. Second, in order to break the philosophical deadlock, Waller moves the debate from the level of universes to the level of possible worlds. Arguing that possible worlds are also "fine-tuned" in an important and interesting sense, Waller concludes that the only plausible explanation for the fine-tuning of the actual world is to posit the existence of some kind of "God-like-thing.". (shrink)

Baruch Spinoza is one of the most influential and controversial political philosophers of the early modern period. Though best-known for his contributions to metaphysics, Spinoza’s _Theological-Political Treatise_ and his unfinished _Political Treatise_ were widely debated and helped to shape the political writings of philosophers as diverse as Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and even Locke. In addition to its enormous historical importance, Spinoza’s political philosophy is also strikingly contemporary in its advocacy of toleration of unpopular religious and political views and his (...) concern with stabilizing religiously diverse democratic societies. The first Guidebook to Spinoza’s political writings, _The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza on Politics_ covers the following key points: Spinoza’s life and the background to his philosophy the key themes and arguments of the _Theological-Political-Treatis_e and _Political Treatise _ the continuing importance of Spinoza’s work to philosophy. This book is an ideal starting point for anyone new to Spinoza and essential reading for students of political philosophy and seventeenth-century philosophy. (shrink)

In Free Will and Luck, Mele presents a case of an agent Ernie, whose zygote was intentionally designed so that Ernie A-s in 30 years, bringing about a certain event E. Mele uses this case of original design to outline the zygote argument against compatibilism. In this paper I criticize the zygote argument. Unlike other compatibilists who have responded to the zygote argument, I contend that it is open to the compatibilist to accept premise one, that Ernie does not act (...) freely and is not morally responsible for anything he does. I argue that compatibilists should deny premise two. Diana’s effective intention to create Ernie’s zygote such that Ernie A-s in 30 years and her intervention to bring about his A-ing mark a significant difference between Ernie and normal agents in a deterministic universe with regard to how their zygotes were created that affects whether those agents act freely and are morally responsible for so acting. (shrink)

Some of the methods for data collection in experimental psychology, as well as many of the inferences from observed behavior or image scanning, are based on the implicit premise that language use can be linked, via the meaning of words, to specific subjective states. Wittgenstein’s well known private language argument (PLA), however, calls into question the legitimacy of such inferences. According to a strong interpretation of PLA, all of the elements of a language must be publicly available. Thus the meaning (...) of words is not fixed by reference to our private experiences, and so data from subjective state claims indicates nothing about our subjective experiences. Application of PLA to psychological studies based on descriptions of the experience of orgasm offers support for the strong version of the conclusion of PLA. We show that PLA has deep implications for data collection methods and inferences in experimental psychology. In particular we critique two contemporary research projects in neuroscience: one studying the ability to remember emotionally loaded words and the other studying experience of attraction. Both of these projects attempt to link subjective experiences and thought processes to particular observable brain states. The research methods appeal to (implicit) inferences from linguistic usage to subjective states. Application of PLA will show that such inferences cannot be made because the meaning of a word is not determined by any subjective state of the speaker. (shrink)

The great biologist Louis Pasteur suppressed 'awkward' data because it didn't support the case he was making. John Snow, the 'first epidemiologist' was doing nothing others had not done before. Gregor Mendel, the supposed 'founder of genetics' never grasped the fundamental principles of 'Mendelian' genetics. Joseph Lister's famously clean hospital wards were actually notorious dirty. And Einstein's general relativity was only 'confirmed' in 1919 because an eminent British scientist cooked his figures. These are just some of the revelations explored in (...) this book. Drawing on current history of science scholarship, Fabulous Science shows that many of our greatest heroes of science were less than honest about their experimental data and not above using friends in high places to help get their ideas accepted. It also reveals that the alleged revolutionaries of the history of science were often nothing of the sort. Prodigiously able they may have been, but the epithet of the 'man before his time' usually obscures vital contributions made their unsung contemporaries and the intrinsic merits of ideas they overturned. These distortions of the historical record mostly arise from our tendency to read the present back into the past. But in many cases, scientists owe their immortality to a combination of astonishing effrontery and their skills as self-promoters. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the "mysterious" distinction which separates Spinoza's attributes might be a Scholastic "intermediate" distinction similar to Henry of Ghent's intentional distinction. My argument for this conclusion takes place in three sections. In section one, I contrast the nature of Henry's intentional distinction with Scotus's formal distinction. In section two, I deduce the nature of Spinoza's "mysterious" distinction from Descartes's real and conceptual distinctions and recast the problem concerning the nature of the attributes. In section three, (...) I argue that the attributes are likely intentionally distinct. (shrink)

Peter Woolcock, in Ruse's Darwinian Meta-Ethics: A Critique, argues that the subjectivist (nonobjectivist) Darwinian metaethics proposed by Michael Ruse (in Taking Darwin Seriously) cannot work, because the illusion of objectivity that Ruse claims is essential to morality breaks down when it is recognized as illusion, and there then remain no good reasons for acknowledging or following moral obligations. Woolcock, however, is mistaken in supposing that moral behaviour requires rational motivation. Ruse's Darwinian metaethical analysis shows why such objective support for morality (...) is neither plausible nor necessary; and when that is recognized, it can also be seen that Ruse's proposed illusion of moral objectivity is superfluous. (shrink)

In 1865 Francis Galton published ‘Hereditary Talent and Character’, an elaborate attempt to prove the heritability of intelligence on the basis of pedigree data. It was the start of Galton's lifelong commitment to investigating the statistical patterns and physiological mechanisms of hereditary transmission. Most existing attempts to explain Galton's fascination for heredity have argued that he was driven by a commitment to conservative political ideologies to seek means of naturalizing human inequality. However, this paper shows that another factor of at (...) least equal importance has been overlooked by Galton scholars: his determination during the 1860s to be accepted among the ranks of the Darwinian inner circle. By hitching his career to the fortunes of what looked likely to emerge as a new scientific elite, Galton felt that he could bypass the typically slow and uncertain route to achieving scientific distinction. For this essentially strategic reason, between 1860 and 1865 he drifted away from a set of existing scientific concerns that were failing to deliver the approbation that he desired. Earnestly seeking to ingratiate himself with the Darwinian lobby, he then toyed with a variety of potential research projects relevant to Darwinian evolution. Yet Galton consistently failed to stimulate the enthusiasm of the Darwinians. Finally, however, after several months of ruminating, in 1864 he settled on a study of eminent pedigrees as a subject that was both germane and highly useful to the Darwinian enterprise. Galton's willingness to shift the direction of his scientific career during the 1860s underscores the importance of examining the micro‐politics of scientific careers in addition to their broader social and political context. This account also emphasizes the limitations of class‐based explanations even when considering scientists whose work seems so manifestly indicative of ideological motivation. (shrink)

Many philosophical theories of causation are egalitarian, rejecting a distinction between causes and mere causal conditions. We sought to determine the extent to which people's causal judgments discriminate, selecting as causes counternormal events—those that violate norms of some kind—while rejecting non-violators. We found significant selectivity of this sort. Moreover, priming that encouraged more egalitarian judgments had little effect on subjects. We also found that omissions are as likely as actions to be judged as causes, and that counternormative selectivity appears to (...) apply equally to actions and omissions. (shrink)

Language’s intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production (...) of communicative acts requires mental-state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans. (shrink)

Informed consent has passed through three stages. The first paternalistic stage lasted for many centuries: The doctor's diagnosis and healing arts were kept secret, and informing patients was regarded as professionally and ethically wrong. Second came the legal stage, when the right of patients to make informed decisions concerning their own treatment was imposed by the courts and reluctantly tolerated by medical professionals. The third informed consent stage emerged more recently: the general therapy stage. The therapeutic benefits of informed consent (...) have been well established, and informed consent is widely recognized as an important element in sound medical practice. When patients are effectively informed and can exert knowledgeable control over their own treatment decisions and therapy processes, that enhances recovery, strengthens the immune system, promotes better pain tolerance, prevents depression, and encourages patient cooperation and fortitude in treatment, rehabilitation, and preventative procedures. As the medical community has absorbed greater knowledge of this research, informed consent has been recognized as both ethically essential and therapeutically sound: the hallmark of the current general therapy stage of informed consent. (shrink)