Conflicts of interest pose special problems for the professions. Even the appearance of a conflict of interest can undermine essential trust between professional and public. This volume is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the ramifications and problems associated with important issue. It contains fifteen new essays by noted scholars and covers topics in law, medicine, journalism, engineering, financial services, and others.

ABSTRACT:Thomas Donaldson’s framework for dealing with value-conflicts between a manager’s home and host country distinguishes between a “conflict of relative [economic] development”—conflicting norms that arise because home and host are at two different stages of economic development—and a “conflict of culture,” which arises because the home and host’s different cultures generate conflicting norms on the issue the manager faces. My question here is a thought experiment. What different insights might emerge if we flipped Donaldson’s framework around? Specifically: What if we (...) viewed the kinds of conflicts that fall under Donaldson’s “conflicts of culture” as arising not because the home and host exhibit a “fundamental” conflict in cultural norms, but because they are at two different stages ofculturaldevelopment? And what if we viewed “conflicts of relative economic development” as conflicts that occur not because home and host are at two different stages of economic development but, simply, because their economies contemporaneously interact with each other in ways that generate normative conflict: call them “conflicts of economy”? (shrink)

A central strand in philosophical debate over the just distribution of resources attempts to juggle three competing imperatives: helping those who are worst off, helping those who will benefit the most, and then – beyond this – determining when to aggregate such ‘worst off’ and ‘benefit’ claims, and when instead to treat no such claim as greater than that which any individual by herself can exert. Yet as various philosophers have observed, ‘we have no satisfactory theoretical characterization’ as to how (...) to weigh each of the three imperatives against one another, we find it ‘difficult to state... precise or comprehensive conclusions’, and we do not yet have a ‘metric for integrating the three measures’. In what follows, I offer an approach to weighing the three criteria against one another that yields resolutions – in Hard Cases of the ‘saving one infant's life versus replacing ten elderly people's hips’ sort – that are cardinally definitive, intuitively satisfactory and theoretically justified. (shrink)

The doctrine of double effect and the many other principles that philosophers have advanced to remedy the doctrine’s defects were meant, in the words of Warren Quinn, "to capture certain kinds of fairly common intuitions about [a set of canonical] pairs of cases." Both cases in each pair “have the same consequential profile,” in that "agents bring about the same good result at the same cost in lives lost or harm suffered." But they exhibit differing deontological characteristics, leading the “common (...) intuitions” to which Quinn refers to deem one but not the other case in each pair permissible. Over time, though, the body of cases has ballooned to embrace ever more complex situations about which intuitions are far less shared, and the principles advanced to explain those intuitions do not necessarily generate the “common” permissible/impermissible distinctions in each canonical pair. My goal is to offer a principle that does so, and to suggest that it reflects a unique deontology. (shrink)

_A penetrating and provocative exploration of human mortality, from Epicurus to Joan Didion_ For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our inevitable (...) demise? In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological truth of these consolations and searches our collective literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions for answers to the question of how we, in the twenty-first century, might accept our mortal condition. Ranging from Epicurus and Heidegger to bucket lists, the flaming out of rock stars, and the retiring of sports jerseys, Stark’s poignant and learned exploration shows how these consolations, taken together, reveal death as a blessing no matter how much we may love life. (shrink)

_A penetrating and provocative exploration of human mortality, from Epicurus to Joan Didion_ For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our inevitable (...) demise? In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological truth of these consolations and searches our collective literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions for answers to the question of how we, in the twenty-first century, might accept our mortal condition. Ranging from Epicurus and Heidegger to bucket lists, the flaming out of rock stars, and the retiring of sports jerseys, Stark’s poignant and learned exploration shows how these consolations, taken together, reveal death as a blessing no matter how much we may love life. (shrink)

A quid pro quo is an exchange of value between a citizen or group—often a businessperson or organization—and an official; whatthe citizen or group offers can take either monetary or nonmonetary form and what the official supplies, in return, is some kind of public act. Despite the fact that instances of quid pro quo seem continually to compel public attention, very few rise to the level of bribery; i.e., the level in which they are resolved judicially. In part, quid pro (...) quo eludes judicial forums for factual reasons: It is difficult to prove. And in part, the reasons are normative: The distinction between objectionable quid pro quo and acceptable democratic norms—on which citizens and groups ought to be able to support officials who are in turn responsive to them—is difficult to draw. Hence, a great gray area of quid pro quo finds itself resolved (or at least debated) in political forums. In what follows I examine central strands of American public discourse over the factual and normative issues of quid pro quo. My purpose is to articulate those principles which most parsimoniously account for its structure, and to explore what presuppositions various discourse-participants either explicitly or implicitly bring to bear in determining whether a situation constitutes a troubling quid pro quo. (shrink)

A quid pro quo is an exchange of value between a citizen or group—often a businessperson or organization—and an official; whatthe citizen or group offers can take either monetary or nonmonetary form and what the official supplies, in return, is some kind of public act. Despite the fact that instances of quid pro quo seem continually to compel public attention, very few rise to the level of bribery; i.e., the level in which they are resolved judicially. In part, quid pro (...) quo eludes judicial forums for factual reasons: It is difficult to prove. And in part, the reasons are normative: The distinction between objectionable quid pro quo and acceptable democratic norms—on which citizens and groups ought to be able to support officials who are in turn responsive to them—is difficult to draw. Hence, a great gray area of quid pro quo finds itself resolved (or at least debated) in political forums. In what follows I examine central strands of American public discourse over the factual and normative issues of quid pro quo. My purpose is to articulate those principles which most parsimoniously account for its structure, and to explore what presuppositions various discourse-participants either explicitly or implicitly bring to bear in determining whether a situation constitutes a troubling quid pro quo. (shrink)

The debates over global and historical justice much preoccupy contemporary political theory. Yet they have not been analyzed in tandem. And this, despite the fact that a number of theoretical frameworks, principal among them contractarianism and utilitarianism, configure arguments in both debates. In this essay, I show that such arguments, as advanced by either side in each of the two debates, all rest on a set of patterned assumptions about the nature of the self. Specifically, I argue, the debates over (...) historical and global justice resemble each other as parallel contests over the physical, metasocial, metaphysical and social natures of the self. At their cores, the debates over historical and global justice thus display a common and symmetrical structure. I will also show that certain conceptions of the self underlying both the anti-historical justice and the anti-global justice positions are mutually inconsistent. Similar contradictions do not beset the pro-historical and pro-global justice positions. (shrink)

What are the final limits of medicine? What should we not try to cure medically, even if we had the necessary financial resources and technology? This book philosophically addresses these questions by examining two mirror-image debates in tandem. Members of certain groups, who are deemed by traditional standards to have a medical condition, such as deafness, obesity, or anorexia, argue that they have created their own cultures and ways of life. Curing their conditions would be a form of genocide. Members (...) of other groups are seeking to provide medical treatment to what would conventionally be deemed 'cultural conditions'. Mild neurotics who take anti-depressants to elevate their mood, runners who use steroids, or men and women seeking cosmetic surgery are asking for medical treatment for problems that might be solved culturally, by changing norms, pressures, or expectations in the broader culture. Each of these two debates endeavors to locate medicine's final frontier and to articulate what it is that we should not treat medically even if we could. This volume analyzes what these two contemporary debates have to say to each other and thus offers a new way of determining medicine's final limits. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Here is a question as intriguing as it is brief: what are we? The animalist’s answer is equal in brevity: we are animals. This stark formulation of the animalist slogan distances it from nearby claims—that we are essentially animals, for example, or that we have purely biological criteria of identity over time. Is the animalist slogan—unburdened by modal or criterial commitments—still interesting, though? Or has it lost its bite? In this article we address such questions by presenting a positive (...) case for the importance of animalism and applying that case to recent critiques. (shrink)

The value-free ideal for science prohibits noncognitive values from influencing the practice of science. After all, a scientist should not reject an empirical theory on religious grounds. But while motivated by reasonable concerns, VFI overlooks legitimate roles for noncognitive values in science. Contra VFI, Hugh Lacey explains that noncognitive values can promote scientific aims by grounding new methodologies that may lead to novel theories and extend to new domains. Yet, Lacey agrees with one aspect of VFI: noncognitive values should not (...) serve as grounds in the empirical evaluation of theories. This has led some critics to misidentify his view merely as an updated version of VFI. I argue that views of the kind Lacey endorses, which I call Dialectical Empiricism, deserve further investigation. They capture what VFI gets right; but they also show that noncognitive values are essential to good science. Throughout the dissertation I explore variants of DE, demonstrating its potential and flexibility. Furthermore, I defend DE against its critics, especially those who mistake it for a version of VFI. In stark opposition to VFI, DE reveals how the illusion of value-freedom sometimes blinds us to promising alternatives to mainstream scientific approaches. I demonstrate this by applying the framework of DE to contemporary research in agricultural and nutritional science. These case studies show that noncognitive values really do influence scientific practices. And, most importantly, they demonstrate how embracing a value-laden view of science can open our eyes to promising alternative approaches that may have the potential to increase our knowledge of the world and of possibilities for human flourishing. (shrink)

Rational choice theory enjoys unprecedented popularity and influence in the behavioral and social sciences, but it generates intractable problems when applied to socially interactive decisions. In individual decisions, instrumental rationality is defined in terms of expected utility maximization. This becomes problematic in interactive decisions, when individuals have only partial control over the outcomes, because expected utility maximization is undefined in the absence of assumptions about how the other participants will behave. Game theory therefore incorporates not only rationality but also common (...) knowledge assumptions, enabling players to anticipate their co-players' strategies. Under these assumptions, disparate anomalies emerge. Instrumental rationality, conventionally interpreted, fails to explain intuitively obvious features of human interaction, yields predictions starkly at variance with experimental findings, and breaks down completely in certain cases. In particular, focal point selection in pure coordination games is inexplicable, though it is easily achieved in practice; the intuitively compelling payoff-dominance principle lacks rational justification; rationality in social dilemmas is self-defeating; a key solution concept for cooperative coalition games is frequently inapplicable; and rational choice in certain sequential games generates contradictions. In experiments, human players behave more cooperatively and receive higher payoffs than strict rationality would permit. Orthodox conceptions of rationality are evidently internally deficient and inadequate for explaining human interaction. Psychological game theory, based on nonstandard assumptions, is required to solve these problems, and some suggestions along these lines have already been put forward. Key Words: backward induction; Centipede game; common knowledge; cooperation; epistemic reasoning; game theory; payoff dominance; pure coordination game; rational choice theory; social dilemma. (shrink)

The world of factories and industry is a crucial yet oft-forgotten fact that undergirds the bustling prosperity of contemporary American life. Photographer Andrew Borowiec has spent his career exploring the industrial fields of middle America, and he now turns his camera's eye southward in Industrial Perspective, exploring the panoramic landscapes along and near the Gulf of Mexico where oil and gas industry workers live and work. Borowiec gained permission from oil corporations to enter their high-security sites and was thus (...) able to photograph the delicate balance of land, life, and industry along the Gulf. The region's immense concentration of oil, chemical, and paper plants has created one of America's most unique and misunderstood contemporary landscapes, and Borowiec unravels its complexity in his evocative images. The visual sequence of Industrial Perspective reveals a continually evolving area that was transformed after World War II from a plantation system into an intricate and vast industrial complex built to accommodate the demands of a surging American economy. As Borowiec reveals through his striking images, this world of iron, oil, and heat enabled the American dream to come to fruition, yet its unyielding and stark character is virtually alien to those who do not live near the region. Industrial Perspective is a compelling and vibrant collection of images that offers a unique and powerful view of the industrial realities of American abundance. (shrink)

There are broad commonalities between the projects of Donald MacKinnon and Stanley Cavell sufficient to make the claim that they struck an analogous pose in their respective contexts. This is not to discount their manifest differences. In the milieu of 1960s and 1970s Cambridge, MacKinnon argued in support of a qualified language of metaphysics in the service of a renewed catholic humanism and Christian socialism. At Harvard, Cavell articulated commitments that made him more at home in the world of North (...) American secular political liberalism. Where Nietzsche, Hume, Freud, Heidegger, Emerson and Thoreau were Cavell’s inspirations, Butler, Kant, G. E. Moore, Collingwood and the New Testament were MacKinnon’s. For all the stark differences, commonalities abound and the reason for this can be traced to a shared appreciation of Austin’s contribution to the ‘lingusitic turn’ together with Wittgenstein’s later work. They both developed projects obsessed with the problem of scepticism together with a commitment to a creative re-animation of moral discourse in light of it, with MacKinnon defending a qualified ‘moral realism’, and Cavell, ‘moral perfectionism’. Seen together, a distinctive post-Kantian and post-Wittgensteinian therapeutic moral philosophy is in evidence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religious Enthusiasm, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Disenchantment of the WorldAndrew KeittIn 1688 Anglican divine William Wharton published a short tract entitled The Enthusiasm of the Church of Rome demonstrated in some observations upon the life of Ignatius Loyola. Typical of the confessional propaganda of the day, Wharton's work contrasted the "rationality" of Protestantism with what he considered to be the superstition and obscurantism of the Catholic faith:It has (...) been the peculiar happiness of the Church of England to create a right sense of Religion and Piety in all her Communicants, and secure to them the practice of a rational Devotion. She makes no pretensions to private Inspirations, and extraordinary Illuminations of the Holy Ghost; and all her Children are more apt to deride, than admire the follies of the Enthusiasts.... Not so the Church of Rome, which in all her Offices and publick Ceremonies promotes and foments it, hath on many occasions given publick applause and approbation to it, and oweth the greatest part of her peculiar Doctrines, and present prosperity to the Enthusiasm of her Followers.1The "enthusiasm" to which Wharton refers had become the object of intense controversy in late seventeenth-century England. The term enthusiasm in this context meant highly emotional, deeply embodied religious experience in [End Page 231] the form of inspired raptures, miraculous revelations, and prophetic power. It was an epithet used with increasing frequency during this period to condemn not only Catholics but also members of radical Protestant sects such as the Diggers, Levellers, and Fifth Monarchy Men.The efforts of mainstream Protestant denominations to distance themselves from the "ultrasupernaturalism" of religious enthusiasts would seem to fit within a Weberian paradigm in which the Protestant Reformation functions as a catalyst for the "disenchantment of the world," the process by which the boundaries of the supernatural were supposedly rolled back in the modern West.2 Indeed, many historians of early modern Europe have adopted, either implicitly or explicitly, such a model. Lawrence Stone, for example, reflects this school of thought with his assertion that by the end of the seventeenth century, Protestantism's "more rational and coherent view of nature and its relationship to God's providence" created a worldview in which magical or miraculous explanations of events became increasingly untenable.3Catholicism, on the other hand, has often been portrayed as maintaining a more porous boundary between nature and supernature. Summarizing what he calls the "Weberian consensus," sociologist Peter Berger offers the following analysis, which reads remarkably like a translation of Wharton's characterization of Catholicism into the language of the social sciences:The Catholic lives in a world in which the sacred is mediated to him through a variety of channels—the sacraments of the church, the intercession of the saints, the recurring eruption of the "supernatural" in miracles—a vast continuity of being between the seen and the unseen.4In recent years, however, as historians have emphasized the structural parallels between the various confessions in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such stark contrasts have become increasingly suspect.5 Consequently, scholars have underscored the need for comparative work on the topic. Michael Heyd, for example, has suggested such a strategy in his work on the reaction to religious enthusiasm in seventeenth-century Europe.6 [End Page 232] Although Heyd focuses primarily on the English case, he recommends an integrative, comparative approach. He describes how religious enthusiasm became "the subject of detailed analysis—theological, social, psychological and even medical" in the closing decades of the seventeenth century in England, and he details the efforts of both religious and secular authorities "to distinguish carefully between true inspiration and a false one, between the natural realm and the truly supernatural."7 Heyd links this reaction against religious enthusiasm to the disenchantment of the world and asks to what extent these trends were unique to the Anglican tradition in England.8Lorraine Daston has emphasized the need for comparative study as well. Religious enthusiasm plays an important role in Daston's "historical epistemology," which traces the development of modern notions of "fact" and "evidence," and their relationship to changing attitudes toward the miraculous in early modern Europe. The... (shrink)

The article by Jessica Pierce and Christina Kerby, raises some important but seldom asked questions about the use of natural resources in healthcare. They take for their example latex gloves, which are in wide everyday use, especially since the establishment of principles of universal precautions in infection control as a reaction to the spread of HIV. They trace the production of latex gloves back through rubber processing to their origins in Malaysian rubber plantations and elsewhere. They then ask, but do (...) not answer, some hard questions about the ethics of our relationship as patients to the impact of the materials we use on communities and the environment. To draw out their theme more starkly, consider the rumor widespread in South America that some babies purportedly adopted by Northerners are sold and cut up for their organs. Suppose this story were true; suppose your donated organ were obtained in this way. You would probably be so revolted by the immorality of its acquisition that you would refuse to accept it. But now take a morally more ambiguous case, as Pierce and Kerby intend. Suppose that the process of obtaining latex gloves is part of the gradual erosion of the Malaysian environment, and that workers in latex factories are poorly paid. Now, should or would you refuse to use latex gloves? Should or would you even be more selective in their use? The practice of universal precautions presumes a virtually unlimited supply of gloves; yet to react to resource scarcity with selective precautions hazards discrimination. Is there any way philosophically to balance the local justice issue of discrimination in comparison to injustice on a global scale and to future generations? (shrink)

Master Sun's _The Art of War_ is by no means the only ancient Chinese treatise on military affairs. One chapter in the _Huainanzi_, an important compendium of philosophy and political theory written in the second century B.C.E., synthesizes the entire corpus of military literature inherited from the Chinese classical era. Drawing on all major, existing military writings, as well as other lost sources, it assesses tactics and strategy, logistics, organization, and political economy, as well as cosmology and the fundamental morality (...) of warfare. This powerful work set out to become the last word on military matters, subsuming and replacing all preceding literature. Written under the sponsorship of Liu An, king of Huainan, the _Huainanzi_'s "military methods" emphasize the preservation of peace as the ultimate value to be served by the military, insisting that the army can be effectively and rightly used only when defending the sacred hereditary position of the emperor and his vassals. This position stands in stark contrast to that of _The Art of War_, which prioritizes the enrichment and empowerment of the state. Liu An's philosophy also argues that military success depends on the personal cultivation of the commander and that deception is not enough to secure victory. Only a commander with the exceptional qualities of insight and cognition, developed through a program of meditative practice and yogic refinement, can effectively control and interpret the strategic situation. Andrew Seth Meyer offers both a full translation of this text and an extensive analysis of its historical context. His thorough treatment relates Liu An's teachings to issues in Chinese philosophy, culture, religion, and history, helping to interpret their uncommon message. (shrink)

In what follows, “persons” are ideal-typical concepts of human beings, deployed expressly or supposed implicitly in particular theoretical contexts. Thus, the person of Kantian moral philosophy is a pure bearer of moral predicates, bereft of all properties that empirically distinguish human beings from one another: properties that, in Kant's view, are irrelevant to moral deliberation. No man or woman, actual or possible, could be so starkly featureless. But Kant's aim was not to describe human beings in actual or possible deliberations, (...) but moral agency as such. Similarly, homo oeconomicus, economic man, is not a composite man or woman, but also a person, a theoretical construct introduced for explanatory purposes in models of economic behavior. My aim is to investigate capitalist persons: ideal-typical concepts of human beings deployed in justifying theories of capitalist property relations. I shall identify two capitalist persons, and impugn one of them. To situate my position historically, I call the impugned person Lockean, and the other Kantian. It is tempting to designate the Lockean person “ the capitalist person.” However, this characterization would be misleading. Justifying theories of capitalism can employ either concept, and both can serve in accounts of socialist economies. Nevertheless, the Lockean person is tendentially procapitalist while the Kantian person is not. What follows is therefore relevant to the broader capitalism/socialism debate. To fault the Lockean person is not quite to fault capitalism itself. But a case against the Lockean person, if successful, would undermine an important strain of procapitalist argument. More importantly, the considerations I will adduce suggest a way of thinking about distributive justice and, ultimately, an ideal of equality that socialism, but not capitalism, can in principle accommodate. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Philosophical Gaze into the Writings of the Zodiac Killer Who is the Zodiac Killer? Peek‐A‐Boo: You Are Doomed! This is the Zodiac Speaking Conclusion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary FictionAndrew J. McKennaThe Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary Fiction, by Cesareo Bandera; 318 pp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, $16.50.When we consider the early relations of philosophy and literature, we most often think of Republic X and about degrees of separation between reality and (...) its image. That is a mistake, according to Cesareo Bandera, who shows in his deft reading of Laws that Plato expelled the poets chiefly because of their threat to the difference between sacred and profane: their mournful harmoniae polluted sacred rites. In this Plato is closer to the religious world examined by Durkheim, where the absolute difference between sacred and profane alone guarantees all other differences. Aristotle is shown to be starkly misleading here, since his Poetics discuss tragedy as if it had nothing to do with the ritual practices in which it originates. His vaunted realism can only save poetry—and ontological appearances—by ignoring, by virtually expelling the sacred from its purview.This expulsion of the sacred from the horizon of our rationality is the thematic core of Bandera’s argument about modern literary fiction as it [End Page 189] emerges in the Renaissance. He does not bring the religious back to our attention to enthrall us with it anew, but to explain via formidable literary and historical scholarship how we stand with respect to it, and how we misunderstand our enlightened disrespect for it. Our modern scientific spirit, our really amazing freedom of inquiry, has a different genealogy than we commonly suppose.It is not primarily philosophy which grounds our humanist irreverence, but our Western religious tradition, which Bandera reads, along with René Girard, Roberto Calasso, and Marcel Gauchet, as a uniquely desacralizing agency in culture. His book’s central endeavor is to expand the implications of Girard’s sacrificial theory of social formation across close readings of ancient and Renaissance literature and criticism in order to show the constraints on rationality within a culture where the sacred veiled human violence. According to this view, that veil is rent irreparably with the revelation of the innocent victim as the vantage point from which to interpret the murderous fury of the crowd, however ritualized as awe for the god(s), or as art. A stunning analysis of Virgil (with an assist from Michel Serres’s reading of Lucretius) reveals a writer holding back from his appalled understanding of violent foundations. With the Renaissance, art is cannily deritualized; not pious Aeneas, born of a goddess, but Don Quixote, born in prison, sets the course for modern fiction.Bandera’s astute readings of Renaissance literature and criticism shed decisively new light on the significance of this axial period, poised at the fulcrum of his argument. His vast and probing research reminds us how modern literary fiction nourished its self-consciousness and freedom amidst lavish and vehement debate over mixing the human and divine. Stripped of the taboos limiting classical thought, the sacred’s monopoly on violence had eroded to reveal individual culpability—but also vast, new possibilities for thought and action. A clear ethical impulse accompanies these readings, in which Calderon and Cervantes are shown to deprive us of a sacred alibi for human violence, which is now a matter for me to resolve with my neighbor. Organically cultural imperatives lose ground to a sense of individual responsibility, which Bandera traces back to the historically documented ascendancy of devotio moderna in late medieval Europe.Despite and because of debates over its cultural role, Renaissance literature’s very marginality freed it to explore every dimension of human error. And we learn how those who unwittingly conspire to resacralize it, from Tasso and Shelley through Arnold and Frye, only continue to play the sacred game that caused shudders in Plato and inspires just plain silliness among our own critical anarchs and demystifyers.Bandera’s net is cast wide and deep, including a bracing debate with Milbank and Blumenberg, whose sweep he emulates successfully, and whose powerful analyses he corrects. Witty and adroit scrutiny of our “sacred allergy” extends... (shrink)

In a spirit of critical appreciation, this essay challenges several core aspects of the critique of secular morality and the defense of Orthodox Christianity offered by H. Tristram Engelhardt in After God. First, I argue that his procedurally driven approach to a binding morality based solely on a principle of permission leaves morality without any substantive definition in general terms, in ways that are both conceptually problematic and also at odds with Engelhardt’s long-standing distinction between non-malevolence and beneficence. Second, I (...) question the accuracy or adequacy of Engelhardt’s critique of the Enlightenment project for his unwarranted privileging of a particular version of Enlightenment thinking at the expense of other Enlightenment perspectives less amenable to Engelhardt’s working generalizations. Third, I challenge the theoretical cogency of Engelhardt’s insistence on the ubiquity and intractability of moral controversies and his depiction of moral strangers and moral friends as, in effect, mutually exclusive terms. Finally, I question Engelhardt’s embrace of a divine command model of ethics as the appropriate resolution of Euthyphro’s dilemma and suggest that there may be intermediate approaches to the usual starkly drawn contrasts between divine command and naturalist accounts. (shrink)

The first edition was awarded the '2005 Textbook Award of the Association of University Professors of Management (Verband der Hochschullehrer fur ...

How should politicians act? When should they try to lead public opinion and when should they follow it? Should politicians see themselves as experts, whose opinions have greater authority than other people's, or as participants in a common dialogue with ordinary citizens? When do virtues like toleration and willingness to compromise deteriorate into moral weakness? In this innovative work, Andrew Sabl answers these questions by exploring what a democratic polity needs from its leaders. He concludes that there are systematic, (...) principled reasons for the holders of divergent political offices or roles to act differently. Sabl argues that the morally committed civil rights activist, the elected representative pursuing legislative results, and the grassroots organizer determined to empower ordinary citizens all have crucial democratic functions. But they are different functions, calling for different practices and different qualities of political character. To make this case, he draws on political theory, moral philosophy, leadership studies, and biographical examples ranging from Everett Dirksen to Ella Baker, Frances Willard to Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr. to Joe McCarthy. Ruling Passions asks democratic theorists to pay more attention to the "governing pluralism" that characterizes a diverse, complex democracy. It challenges moral philosophy to adapt its prescriptions to the real requirements of democratic life, to pay more attention to the virtues of political compromise and the varieties of human character. And it calls on all democratic citizens to appreciate "democratic constancy": the limited yet serious standard of ethical character to which imperfect democratic citizens may rightly hold their leaders--and themselves. (shrink)

We all face death, but how many of us are actually ready for it? Whether our own death or that of a loved one comes first, how prepared are we, spiritually or practically? In Preparing to Die, Andrew Holecek presents a wide array of resources to help the reader address this unfinished business. Part One shows how to prepare one's mind and how to help others, before, during, and after death. The author explains how spiritual preparation for death can (...) completely transform our relationship to the end of life, dissolving our fear and helping us to feel open and receptive to letting go in the dying process. Daily meditation practices, the stages of dying and how to work with them, and after-death experiences are all detailed in ways that will be particularly helpful for those with an interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in Tibetan approaches to conscious dying. Part Two addresses the practical issues that surround death. Experts in grief, hospice, the funeral business, and the medical and legal issues of death contribute chapters to prepare the reader for every practical concern, including advance directives, green funerals, the signs of death, warnings about the funeral industry, the stages of grief, and practical care for the dying. Part Three contains heart-advice from twenty of the best-known Tibetan Buddhist masters now teaching in the West. These brief interviews provide words of solace and wisdom to guide the dying and their caregivers during this challenging time. Preparing to Die is for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for death from a Buddhist perspective, both spiritually and practically. It is also for those who want to learn how to help someone else who is dying, both during the time of illness and death as well as after death. (shrink)

A satisfactory theory of linguistic communication must explain how it is that, through the interpersonal exchange of auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli, the communicative preconditions for the acquisition of testimonial knowledge regularly come to be satisfied. Without an account of knowledge-yielding communication this success condition for linguistic theorizing is left opaque, and we are left with an incomplete understanding of testimony, and communication more generally, as a source of knowledge. This paper argues that knowledge-yielding communication should be modelled on knowledge (...) itself. It is argued that knowledge-yielding communication occurs iff interlocutors coordinate on truth values in a non-lucky and non-deviant way. This account is able to do significant explanatory work: it sheds light on the nature of referential communication, and it allows us to capture, in an informative way, the sense in which interlocutors must entertain similar propositions in order to communicate successfully. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the enkratic principle in its classic formulation may not be a requirement of rationality. The investigation of whether it is leads to some important methodological insights into the study of rationality. I also consider the possibility that we should consider rational requirements as a subset of a broader category of agential requirements.

This paper argues that the dominance of linear models has led many sociologists to construe the social world in terms of a "general linear reality." This reality assumes (1) that the social world consists of fixed entities with variable attributes, (2) that cause cannot flow from "small" to "large" attributes/events, (3) that causal attributes have only one causal pattern at once, (4) that the sequence of events does not influence their outcome, (5) that the "careers" of entities are largely independent, (...) and (6) that causal attributes are generally independent of each other. The paper discusses examples of these assumptions in empirical work, consider standard and new methods addressing them, and briefly explores alternative models for reality that employ demographic, sequential, and network perspectives. (shrink)

A Physicalist Manifesto is a full treatment of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so formulated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. Two concluding chapters argue (...) in detail that contemporary science provides no significant empirical evidence against physicalism and some considerable evidence for it. Written in a brisk, candid and exceptionally clear style, this 2003 book should appeal to professionals and students in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Brecht’s Life of Galileo provides elements for elaborating what I call “a theory of the encounter of practices”. The concept of the encounter pushes back against teleological theories that predestine modern science to operate as an instrument of domination. I argue that Life of Galileo stages the missed encounters in modernity between science, politics, and art at the same time as it foregrounds the emancipatory power of science. I trace the encounter of practices from the play’s opening scenes – highlighting (...) what I call Galileo’s “double life”. Then, I turn to the most important scene of the play, Scene 10, in which political and artistic practices repurpose Galileo’s novel inventions for their emancipatory desires. In the virtual potentialities of this encounter, that is, despite the missed encounter between Galileo and “the people”, Brecht’s Life of Galileo continues to be fruitful for theorizing the emancipatory power of science. (shrink)

This introduction to mathematical logic starts with propositional calculus and first-order logic. Topics covered include syntax, semantics, soundness, completeness, independence, normal forms, vertical paths through negation normal formulas, compactness, Smullyan's Unifying Principle, natural deduction, cut-elimination, semantic tableaux, Skolemization, Herbrand's Theorem, unification, duality, interpolation, and definability. The last three chapters of the book provide an introduction to type theory (higher-order logic). It is shown how various mathematical concepts can be formalized in this very expressive formal language. This expressive notation facilitates proofs (...) of the classical incompleteness and undecidability theorems which are very elegant and easy to understand. The discussion of semantics makes clear the important distinction between standard and nonstandard models which is so important in understanding puzzling phenomena such as the incompleteness theorems and Skolem's Paradox about countable models of set theory. Some of the numerous exercises require giving formal proofs. A computer program called ETPS which is available from the web facilitates doing and checking such exercises. Audience: This volume will be of interest to mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers in universities, as well as to computer scientists in industry who wish to use higher-order logic for hardware and software specification and verification. (shrink)

Kant holds that in order to have knowledge of an object, a subject must be able to “prove” that the object is really possible—i.e., prove that there is neither logical inconsistency nor “real repugnance” between its properties. This is (usually) easy to do with respect to empirical objects, but (usually) impossible to do with respect to particular things-in-themselves. In the first section of the paper I argue that an important predecessor of Kant’s account of our ignorance of real possibility can (...) be found in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In the middle sections I discuss the way in which our inability to prove the real possibility of things-in-themselves motivates Kant’s famous prohibition on certain kinds of knowledge-claims about them. In the final section I examine Hegel’s attempts to dissolve this problem of real repugnance and thereby remove an inherited obstacle to speculative knowledge of the supersensible. -/- . (shrink)

Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to (...) which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that a majority of people believe that time robustly passes, and that many also report that it seems to them, in experience, as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists deny that time robustly passes, and many contemporary non-dynamists—deflationists—even deny that it seems to us as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists, then, face the dual challenge of explaining why people have such beliefs and make such reports about their experiences. Several philosophers have suggested the stable-self explanation, according to which (...) what partly explains one or both of the explananda is that people believe themselves to have a stable persisting self which is imagined either as moving through time, or as being stationary, with time moving around it. This paper empirically investigates this explanation. We found, however, no evidential support for the stable-self explanation, leaving the non-dynamist but also, we will argue, the dynamist, with an extant explanatory challenge. (shrink)

This is a discussion of the state of discussion on pragmatic reasons for belief.

Critics have argued that Rawls's account of self-respect is equivocal. I show, first, that Rawls in fact relies upon an unambiguous notion of self-respect, though he sometimes is unclear as to whether this notion has merely instrumental or also intrinsic value. I show second that Rawls’s main objective in arguing that justice as fairness supports citizens’ self-respect is not, as many have thought, to show that his principles support citizens’ self-respect generally, but to show that his principles counter the effects (...) of the market on lower class citizens’ sense of worth. This discussion establishes that Rawls, in the end, sees self-respect primarily as an intrinsic good. (shrink)

This is the first book-length treatment of the relationship between citizenship and the environment. Andrew Dobson argues that ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in terms of the two great traditions of citizenship - liberal and civic republican - with which we have been bequeathed. He develops an original theory of citizenship, which he calls 'post-cosmopolitan', and argues that ecological citizenship is an example and an inflection of it. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and these (...) duties are owed non-reciprocally, by those individuals and communities who occupy unsustainable amounts of ecological space, to those who occupy too little. (shrink)