The world's first permanent international criminal tribunal for the prosecution and punishment of the world's most serious crimes was created in 2002. In Bringing Power to Justice? legal scholars, political scientists, and political philosophers respond to fundamental questions about the future of this court and international criminal justice. For instance, will the ICC be undermined by political constraints, given the opposition of major powers, including the United States? What are the implications of holding heads of state responsible for international crimes? (...) Are trials the best response to state crime or would other devices (such as truth commissions) be more suitable? Is retributive justice an appropriate response? The contributors offer indispensable and thoughtful assessment of the future of international criminal justice. (shrink)

The return of devolution to Northern Ireland in May 2007 marks an important turning point in the Northern Ireland peace process, but there remains the issue of the “on-the-runs”—a term used to describe persons suspected of committing a range of terrorist acts during the Troubles, who were never arrested, charged, prosecuted, or tried. It is thought that the On-the-Runs want to return to Northern Ireland, but determining the conditions for their return is a difficult and controversial issue, raising legal and (...) moral concerns and causing strong and painful reactions among the victims of terrorist violence on all sides of the Northern Ireland conflict. It is also an issue that is complicated by the fact that while the Belfast Agreement of 1998 did not address expressly the situation of the On-the-Runs, it did provide for the accelerated release of a significant number of paramilitaries, both republican and loyalist, from prisons in both Ireland and Northern Ireland. This paper reviews the possible options in law for addressing the situation of the On-the-Runs, including extradition and prosecution, as well as trial and amnesty, and pardons. While the paper makes clear that the political offence exception to extradition is no longer the obstacle it once was, it also concludes that politics, rather than law, or simply the passage of time is more likely to offer the solution to the problem posed by the On-the-Runs. (shrink)

This fully revised second edition suggests ways in which you can introduce philosophical enquiry to your Personal, Social and Health Education and Citizenship teaching and across the curriculum.

Written specifically for education studies students, this accessible text offers a clear introduction to philosophy of education. It skilfully guides readers through this challenging and sometimes complex area bringing key philosophical ideas and questions to life in the context and practice of education. Considering the implications of educational trends and movements through a variety of philosophical lenses such as Marxism, feminism, ethics and democracy, the book explores enduring themes in philosophy of education. Features include: individual tasks and group activities to (...) promote discussion case studies notes boxes to highlight further reading; chapter overviews and summaries Drawing on readers' own experiences of education, the book reveals the connections between philosophical ideas and educational policy and practice. Part of the Foundations in Education Studies series, this timely textbook is essential reading for students coming to the study of philosophy of education for the first time. (shrink)

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Contemporary picturebooks open up spaces for philosophical dialogues between people of all ages. As works of art, picturebooks offer unique opportunities to explore ideas and to create meaning collaboratively. This book considers censorship of certain well-known picturebooks, challenging the assumptions on which this censorship is based. Through a lively exploration of children's responses to these same picturebooks the authors paint a way of working philosophically based on respectful listening and creative and authentic interactions, rather (...) than scripted lessons. This dialogical process challenges much current practice in education. The authors propose that a courageous and critical practice of listening is central to the facilitation of mutually educative dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of education studies, philosophy of education, literacy teaching and learning, children's literature, childhood and pedagogy. (shrink)

The author is in essential agreement with Tallis, that when we only deploy one mode of interpretation, ie the scientific mode, we lose the fundamental realities of human experience, including the experience of free will, on which, ironically, scientific practice depends. Tallis’s philosophical stance is compared to that of Owen Barfield and his work on free will is placed within the context of his other books. A sense of wonder is common to all of them.

This book addresses how people and organisations sometimes respond to uncertainty in making decisions. Those decisions are rooted in beliefs and behaviours that are not always rational, especially in response to perceived randomness, chaos and unexpected circumstances. The author uses a transdisciplinary approach to the study of superstition in the context of business and management, taking care to acknowledge that what is regarded as superstition to one person may well be constructed as a spiritual belief by another. Respect and sensitivity (...) in explicating individual and social constructions of spirituality is a core value in structuring the narrative of the text. The work also explores the interwoven relationships amongst superstition, religion, spirituality and empiricism and how cultural, political, economic and environmental factors are likely to influence organisations and those who are employed by them. Further, it examines the influence of beliefs related to topics such as feng shui, astrology, phrenology and the I Ching in recruitment. This comprehensive treatment of the role of superstition in business will advance the scholarly conversation on uncertainty in decision making. It points to the power of belief that defies empirical validation and how it can be used in a variety of contexts, such as the marketing of products and images to manipulate unwary consumers or inhibit the implementation of health advice in times of COVID-19. (shrink)

Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such fictions resulted in abuse or incoherence. We (...) conclude that difficulties in holding “electronic persons” accountable when they violate the rights of others outweigh the highly precarious moral interests that AI legal personhood might protect. (shrink)

Exercise-based rehabilitation forms a key part of the UK National Health Service patient-care pathway for cardiac rehabilitation (CR). Only around half of all eligible patients attend core CR, however, with social inequalities affecting participation. Few qualitative studies have explored in-depth the key factors influencing engagement with CR, specifically from a sociological theoretical, and ethnographic perspective. Utilising an ethnographic approach allowed us to get a sense of the embodied experiences of 10 participants attending or declining core CR, together with a further (...) seven family members/significant others. This provided in-depth appreciation of participants’ lifeworld contexts as key influences on CR participation. The article draws on these qualitative data and focuses on 1) participants’ initial thoughts about CR; and 2) navigating the field of CR, analysed via thematic analysis. We utilise a Bourdieusian theoretical perspective to theorise the findings, including salient socio-cultural factors influencing attendance/non-attendance and (non)adherence. The article findings highlight how perceptions of CR and the ability to navigate the field are strongly influenced by habitus and capital, and how personal biographies and socio-material conditions affect adherence to CR programmes. The study provides original insights into embodied experiences of exercise-based CR, and novel understandings of the reasons for drop-out/poor adherence, theorised from a Bourdieusian perspective. (shrink)

The question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly reconstruct our artefacts, including our ethical systems. Consequently, the place of AI systems in society is a matter of normative, not descriptive ethics. Here I start from a functionalist assumption, that ethics is the set of behaviour that maintains a society. This assumption allows me to exploit the (...) theoretical biology of sociality and autonomy to explain our moral intuitions. From this grounding I extend to consider possible ethics for maintaining either human- or of artefact-centred societies. I conclude that while constructing AI systems as either moral agents or patients is possible, neither is desirable. In particular, I argue that we are unlikely to construct a coherent ethics in which it it is ethical to afford AI moral subjectivity. We are therefore obliged not to build AI we are obliged to. (shrink)

By re-examining the writings of Gadamer and Habermas and their views of earlier interpretive theorists, this book offers a radical challenge to their idea of the 'dialogue' between researchers and their subjects.

How leaders and managers respond to not knowing is highly relevant given the complex, ambiguous, and chaotic business environment of the twenty-first century. Drawing on the literature from a variety of disciplines, the paper explores the dominant, unfavorable conceptualization of not knowing. The authors present some potential ethical implications of a negative view of not knowing and suggest how organizations would benefit from identifying any unhelpful aspects of the culture that may encourage unethical, undesirable, and/or hasty actions in situations of (...) not knowing. The paper specifically illustrates how patience, courage, honesty, integrity, and humility are integral to negative capability in the contexts of not knowing. Finally, the paper calls for deeper inquiry into the role of virtue ethics in preparing managers and leaders for not knowing and urges organizations to embrace negative capability in not knowing rather than engaging in damaging delusion. (shrink)

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has (...) changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

There is an abundance of enthusiasm and optimism about how governments at all levels can make use of big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence. There is also growing concern about the risks that come with these new systems. This article makes the case for greater government transparency and accountability about uses of big data through a Government of Canada qualitative research case study. Adapting a method from critical cartographers, I employ counter-mapping to map government big data practices and internal discussions (...) of risk and challenge. I do so by drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests. The analysis reveals that there are more concerns and risks than often publicly discussed and that there are significant areas of silence that need greater attention. The article underlines the need for our democratic systems to respond to our new datafied contexts by ensuring that our institutions make changes to better protect citizen rights, uphold democratic principles and ensure means for citizen intervention. (shrink)

This collection focuses on the 19th and early 20th centuries and the impact of the industrial revolution. Complete works, extracts and articles from journals illustrate the beginnings of management as we know it today.

Stimulated by late-1990s debate in the UK on quality, effectiveness and usefulness of educational research (reports by OFSTED, DFEE and NFER), this book shows ...

A person who is liable to defensive harm has forfeited his rights against the imposition of the harm, and so is not wronged if that harm is imposed. A number of philosophers, most notably Jeff McMahan, argue for an instrumental account of liability, whereby a person is liable to defensive harm when he is either morally or culpably responsible for an unjust threat of harm to others, and when the imposition of defensive harm is necessary to avert the threatened unjust (...) harm. Others may favour a purely noninstrumental account of liability: one that looks only to the past behaviour of the potentially liable person. We argue that both views are vulnerable to serious objections. Instead we develop and defend a new view of liability to defensive harm: the pluralist account. The pluralist account states that liability to defensive harm has at least two bases. First, if an attacker is morally or culpably responsible for an unjust attack then he has forfeited what we call his agency right, and in doing so he has made himself partially liable to defensive harm. Whether the attacker is fully liable to defensive harm depends, however, on whether the imposition of defensive harm would infringe a different right held by the attacker: his humanitarian right. Humanitarian rights are rights to be provided with urgently needed resources or to be protected from serious harms when others can do so at reasonably low cost. We argue the pluralist account avoids the objections to which the instrumental and noninstrumental views are vulnerable, coheres with our intuitive reactions in a wide range of cases, and sheds new light on the way different rights combine to determine a person's liability to suffer harm. (shrink)

In the recent philosophical literature, several counterexamples to the interpretative principle that symmetry-related models are physically equivalent have been suggested The Oxford handbook of philosophy of physics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, Noûs 52:946–981, 2018; Fletcher in Found Phys 50:228–249, 2020). Arguments based on these counterexamples can be understood as arguments from scientific practice of roughly the following form: because in scientific practice such-and-such symmetry-related models are treated as representing distinct physical situations, these models indeed represent distinct physical situations. In (...) this paper, a strategy for analysing arguments of this type is presented and applied to the examples that can be found in the literature. I argue that if we are exclusively interested in models understood as representing entire possible worlds, arguments from scientific practice should involve some additional assumptions to guarantee they are relevant for models understood in this way. However, none of the examples presented in the literature satisfy all these additional assumptions, which leads to the conclusion that arguments from scientific practice based on these examples do not undermine the interpretative principle that different symmetry-related models represent the same possible world. (shrink)

The collapse of the Weimar Republic remains central to the history of the 20th century and to contemporary debates on 'classical modernity' and its Europe-wide crisis in the wake of the First World War. The present issue of Thesis Eleven focuses on three dimensions of the Weimar crisis: the experience of fundamental societal crisis and closure and its diagnostic power in relation to the rise of fascist movements; the cognitive and normative resources that sought to work against this crisis-ridden sense (...) of closure; and third, the degree to which these counter tendencies anticipate postmodern interrogations of the premises of classical modernity. (shrink)

Criticism of ‘the West’ and of ‘Western civilization’ in Germany in the early 20th century is generally most familiar today as a conservative force of the age. It is well-known that at the outbreak of war in August 1914 a longstanding German complex of resentment of the Western European powers exploded in a call to arms. Yet it needs to be stressed that not all prominent German bourgeois writers endorsed a wholly militant reading of the motif of German national-cultural ‘protest (...) at the West’. By 1918 an array of voices could come to discern another kind of salient work of contention that refused apology for any kind of violent Kulturkrieg. The thesis defended in this article is that in sophisticated humanistic writing of the era, a German mood of antagonism with the West represents not a regressive ideology but the productive and intelligent outcome of a longstanding preeminence of philosophical questioning in German academic life since the later 19th century about European world pictures and their claims to universal validity on the stage of world history. A range of statements are shown here to anticipate debates of the present day about ‘late’, ‘reflexive’ or ‘post-Eurocentric’ conditions of Western modernity. (shrink)

By re-examining the writings of Gadamer and Habermas and their views of earlier interpretive theorists, this book offers a radical challenge to their idea of the 'dialogue' between researchers and their subjects.

In this paper, we discuss the processes of racialisation on the example of biomedical research. We argue that applying the concept of racialisation in biomedical research can be much more precise, informative and suitable than currently used categories, such as race and ethnicity. For this purpose, we construct a model of the different processes affecting and co-shaping the racialisation of an individual, and consider these in relation to biomedical research, particularly to studies on hypertension. We finish with a discussion on (...) the potential application of our proposition to institutional guidelines on the use of racial categories in biomedical research. (shrink)

Seeing-as and Novelty brings together new essays that consider Wittgenstein’s treatment of the phenomenon of aspect perception in relation to the broader idea of conceptual novelty; that is, the acquisition or creation of new concepts, and the application of an acquired understanding in unfamiliar or novel situations. Over the last twenty years, aspect perception has received increasing philosophical attention, largely related to applying Wittgenstein’s remarks on the phenomena of seeing-as, found in Part II of Philosophical Investigations , to issues within (...) philosophical aesthetics. Seeing-as, however, has come to occupy a broader conceptual category, particularly in philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology. The essays in this volume examine the exegetical issues arising within Wittgenstein studies, while also considering the broader utility and implications of the phenomenon of seeing-as in the fields of aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of mathematics, with a thematic focus on questions of novelty and creativity. The collection constitutes a fruitful interpretative engagement with the later Wittgenstein, as well as a unique contribution to considerations of philosophical methodology. (shrink)

Inaccurate body size judgements are associated with body image disturbances, a clinical feature of many eating disorders. Accordingly, body related stimuli have become increasingly important in the study of estimation inaccuracies and body image disturbances. Technological advancements in the last decade have led to an increased use of computer generated (CG) body stimuli in body image research. However, recent face perception research has suggested that CG face stimuli are not recognised as readily and may not fully tap facial processing mechanisms. (...) The current study assessed the effectiveness of using CG stimuli in an established body size estimation task (the ‘bodyline’ task). Specifically, we examined whether employing CG body stimuli alters body size judgments and associated estimation biases. One hundred and six 17- to 25-year-old females completed the CG bodyline task, which involved estimating the size of full-length CG body stimuli along a visual analogue scale. Our results show that perception of body size for CG stimuli was non-linear. Participants struggled to discriminate between extreme bodies sizes and overestimated the size change between near to average bodies. Furthermore, one of our measured size estimation biases was larger for CG stimuli. Our collective findings suggest using caution when employing CG stimuli in experimental research on body perception. (shrink)

Przedwczesna śmierć samoświadomej istoty, nawet całkowicie bezbolesna, nie jest obojętna moralnie. I nie ma znaczenia, czy istota ta jest człowiekiem. Stanowisko to, nierzadkie dziś na gruncie animal studies, jako jeden z pierwszych przyjął i uzasadnił Tom Regan. W niniejszym artykule przedstawiono jego argumentację – opisano dwie najważniejsze zasady Stanowiska praw: Zasadę szacunku i Zasadę krzywdy oraz relacje między kategoriami podmiotów moralnych, obiektów moralnej troski i podmiotów życia. Zrekonstruowano i przeanalizowano problem etycznego wymiaru śmierci zwierzęcia, jako jednostki, naszkicowano też konsekwencje hipotetycznego (...) przyjęcia Stanowiska Praw dla dopuszczonych dziś prawnie i powszechnie stosowanych praktyk wobec zwierząt pozaludzkich. (shrink)

Although task-unrelated thinking has been increasingly investigated in recent years, the content and correlates of everyday off-task thought in clinical d...

The analysis of Political Action Committee activities is dominated by the perspective that PAC contributions are a rational investment in political candidates; they yield valuable short-term payoffs. PACs buy access to officeholders and their votes on important legislation. Despite broad acceptance of this morally suspect theory, the evidence upon which it is based is weak. An alternative perspective — what we call the principled approach — both fits the evidence and rejects the morally repugnant interpretation of the relationship between business (...) and politics that permeates the rational investment perspective. (shrink)

After nearly three decades of discussion about sustainable development are we any nearer to achieving it? And do we even know what a sustainable world will look like for future generations? Early definitions of sustainable development were so broad as to allow a range of interpretations based largely on individual interests and anthropocentric needs. We are measuring the performance of countless indicators of sustainable development, but is this more an exercise in applying data than meaningful progress? This article explores the (...) ultimate goals of sustainable development and the most important means of achieving this by analyzing and comparing two frameworks designed to direct attention to the fundamental means and the ends of sustainable development. (shrink)