Corporate philanthropy describes the action when a corporation voluntarily donates a portion of its resources to a societal cause. Although the thought of philanthropy invokes feelings of altruism, there are many objectives for corporate giving beyond altruism. Meeting strategic corporate objectives can be an important if not primary goal of philanthropy. The purpose of this paper is to share insights from a strategic corporate philanthropic initiative aimed at increasing the pool of frontline customer contact employees who are performance-ready, while supporting (...) curriculum development and infrastructure improvement for selected university business programs, creating a win-win situation for the company and the universities. This paper will address three objectives. First, we will examine the evolution of strategic philanthropy from the traditional view to its current position as a strategic option. Second, we will address the recruitment of front line talent needs (customer facing jobs in sales, customer service, and marketing) based on the profit maximization model of strategic philanthropy. Finally, we will offer conclusions and issues for future research. (shrink)

Many believe that the ethical problems of donation after cardiocirculatory death (DCD) have been "worked out" and that it is unclear why DCD should be resisted. In this paper we will argue that DCD donors may not yet be dead, and therefore that organ donation during DCD may violate the dead donor rule. We first present a description of the process of DCD and the standard ethical rationale for the practice. We then present our concerns with DCD, including the following: (...) irreversibility of absent circulation has not occurred and the many attempts to claim it has have all failed; conflicts of interest at all steps in the DCD process, including the decision to withdraw life support before DCD, are simply unavoidable; potentially harmful premortem interventions to preserve organ utility are not justifiable, even with the help of the principle of double effect; claims that DCD conforms with the intent of the law and current accepted medical standards are misleading and inaccurate; and consensus statements by respected medical groups do not change these arguments due to their low quality including being plagued by conflict of interest. Moreover, some arguments in favor of DCD, while likely true, are "straw-man arguments," such as the great benefit of organ donation. The truth is that honesty and trustworthiness require that we face these problems instead of avoiding them. We believe that DCD is not ethically allowable because it abandons the dead donor rule, has unavoidable conflicts of interests, and implements premortem interventions which can hasten death. These important points have not been, but need to be fully disclosed to the public and incorporated into fully informed consent. These are tall orders, and require open public debate. Until this debate occurs, we call for a moratorium on the practice of DCD. (shrink)

This book presents an entirely new answer to the question: “What is fair?” In their radical approach to ethics, Frohlich and Oppenheimer argue that much of the empirical methodology of the natural sciences should be applied to the ethical questions of fairness and justice.

This book presents an entirely new answer to the question: “What is fair?” In their radical approach to ethics, Frohlich and Oppenheimer argue that much of the empirical methodology of the natural sciences should be applied to the ethical questions of fairness and justice.

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Judgments concerning animals have arisen across a variety of established practice areas. There is, however, no publicly available repository of judgments concerning the emerging practice area of animal protection law. This has hindered the identification of individual animal protection law judgments and comprehension of the scale of animal protection law made by courts. Thus, we detail the creation of an initial animal protection law repository using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. This involved domain expert classification of 500 judgments (...) according to whether or not they were concerned with animal protection law. 400 of these judgments were used to train various models, each of which was used to predict the classification of the remaining 100 judgments. The predictions of each model were superior to a baseline measure intended to mimic current searching practice, with the best performing model being a support vector machine (SVM) approach that classified judgments according to term frequency—inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) values. Investigation of this model consisted of considering its most influential features and conducting an error analysis of all incorrectly predicted judgments. This showed the features indicative of animal protection law judgments to include terms such as ‘welfare’, ‘hunt’ and ‘cull’, and that incorrectly predicted judgments were often deemed marginal decisions by the domain expert. The TF-IDF SVM was then used to classify non-labelled judgments, resulting in an initial animal protection law repository. Inspection of this repository suggested that there were 175 animal protection judgments between January 2000 and December 2020 from the Privy Council, House of Lords, Supreme Court and upper England and Wales courts. (shrink)

Intellectual and professional reforms in evolutionary studies between 1935 and 1950 included substantial expansion, diversification, and realignment of community infrastructure. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley and Alfred Emerson organized the Society for the Study of Speciation at the 1939 AAAS Columbus meeting as one response to concerns about ‘isolation’ and ‘lack of contact’ among speciation workers worried about ‘dispersed’ and ‘scattered’ resources in this newly robust ‘borderline’ domain. Simply constructed, the SSS sought neither the radical reorganization of specialities nor the creation (...) of some new discipline. Instead, it was designed to facilitate: to simplify exchange of information and to provide a minimally invasive avenue for connecting disparate researchers. Emerson served as SSS secretary and was its principal agent. After publishing one block of publications, however, the SSS became ‘quiescent’. Anxious to promote his own agenda, Ernst Mayr tried to manoeuvre around Emerson in an effort to revitalize the project. After meeting impediments, he moved his efforts elsewhere. The SSS was too short-lived to merit a claim for major impact within the community; however, it reveals important features of community activity during the synthesis period and stands in contrast to later efforts by George Simpson, Dobzhansky, and Mayr. (shrink)

The pace of change and, indeed, the sheer number of clinical ethics committees has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Committees were formed to support healthcare professionals and to operationalise, interpret and compensate for gaps in national and professional guidance. But as the role of clinical ethics support becomes more prominent and visible, it becomes ever more important to address gaps in the support structure and misconceptions as to role and remit. The recent case of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (...) NHS Foundation Trust v MX, FX and X, [21]–[23] and [58]) has highlighted the importance of patient/family representation at clinical ethics committee meetings. The court viewed these meetings as making decisions about such treatment. We argue that this misunderstands the role of ethics support, with treatment decisions remaining with the clinical team and those providing their consent. The considered review by clinical ethics committees of the moral issues surrounding complex treatment decisions is not a matter of determining a single ethical course of action. In this article, we consider current legal understandings of clinical ethics committees, explore current concepts of ethics support and suggest how they may evolve, considering the various mechanisms of the inclusion of patients and their representatives in ethics meetings which is not standard in the UK. (shrink)

This paper offers a brief historical survey of the development of analytic philosophy in Hong Kong from 1911 to the present day. At first, Western philosophy was a minor subject taught mainly by part-time staff. After the Second World War, research and teaching in analytic philosophy in Hong Kong began to grow and consolidate with the expansion of higher-education and the establishment of new universities. Analytic philosophy has been a significant influence on comparative and Chinese philosophy and played a crucial (...) role in the teaching and promotion of critical thinking. Analytic philosophers in Hong Kong are now active participants in the global philosophical community. We review the development of analytic philosophy across the major tertiary institutions in Hong Kong and discuss some of the future challenges faced by the discipline. (shrink)

Aristotle's Physics is one of the least studied "great books"--physics has come to mean something entirely different than Aristotle's inquiry into nature, and stereotyped Medieval interpretations have buried the original text. Sach's translation is really the only one that I know of that attempts to take the reader back to the text itself. -- Leon Cass, University of Chicago.

We live in a human-rights world. The language of human-rights claims and numerous human-rights institutions shape almost all aspects of our political lives, yet we struggle to know how to judge this development. Scholars give us good reason to be both supportive and sceptical of the universal claims that human rights enable, alternatively suggesting that they are pillars of cross-cultural understanding of justice or the ideological justification of a violent and exclusionary global order. All too often, however, our evaluations of (...) our human-rights world are not based on sustained consideration of their complex, ambiguous and often contradictory consequences. Reconstructing Human Rights argues that human rights are only as good as the ends they help us realise. We must attend to what ethical principles actually do in the world to know their value. So, for human rights we need to consider how the identity of humanity and the concept of rights shape our thinking, structure our political activity and contribute to social change. Reconstructing Human Rights defends human rights as a tool that should enable us to challenge political authority and established constellations of political membership by making new claims possible. Human rights mobilise the identity of humanity to make demands upon the terms of legitimate authority and challenges established political memberships. In this work, it is argued that this tool should be guided by a democratising ethos in pursuit of that enables claims for more democratic forms of politics and more inclusive political communities. While this work directly engages with debates about human rights in philosophy and political theory, in connecting our evaluations of the value of human rights to their worldly consequences, it will also be of interest to scholars considering human rights across disciplines, including Law, Sociology, and Anthropology. (shrink)

Does metacognition--the capacity to self-evaluate one's cognitive performance--derive from a mindreading capacity, or does it rely on informational processes? Joëlle Proust draws on psychology and neuroscience to defend the second claim. She argues that metacognition need not involve metarepresentations, and is essentially related to mental agency.

ABSTRACT Shagrir and Sprevak explore the apparent necessity of representation for the individuation of digits in computational systems.1 1 I will first offer a response to Sprevak’s argument that does not mention Shagrir’s original formulation, which was more complex. I then extend my initial response to cover Shagrir’s argument, thus demonstrating that it is possible to individuate digits in non-representational computing mechanisms. I also consider the implications that the non-representational individuation of digits would have for the broader theory of computing (...) mechanisms. 1 The Received View: No Computation without Representation 2 Computing Mechanisms and Functional Individuation 3 Against Computational Externalism 4 Implications for the Mechanistic Account. (shrink)

_Teachers as Researchers_ urges teachers - as both producers and consumers of knowledge - to engage in the debate about educational research by undertaking meaningful research themselves. Teachers are being encouraged to carry out research in order to improve their effectiveness in the classroom, but this book suggests that they also reflect on and challenge the reductionist and technicist methods that promote a 'top down' system of education. It argues that only by engaging in complex, critical research will teachers rediscover (...) their professional status, empower their practice in the classroom and improve the quality of education for their pupils. Now re-released to introduce this classic guide for teachers, the new edition of _Teachers as Researchers_ now also includes an introductory chapter by Shirley R. Steinberg that sets the book within the context of both the subject and the historical perspective. In addition, she also provides information on some key writing that extends the bibliography of this influential book thereby bringing the material fully up to date with current research. Postgraduate students of education and experienced teachers will find much to inspire and encourage them in this definitive book. (shrink)

The target article criticises reductionist programs in cognitive science for failing to take into account important explanatory features of the organism's physical embodiment and task environment. My aim in this commentary is to show how such features are increasingly being taken seriously by (some) researchers in cognitive neuroscience, who describe the functional activity of neural structures in terms that are context-sensitive rather than intrinsic. This approach can allow us to take seriously the concerns presented in Gallagher’s [2019] target article without (...) having to completely give up on neuroscientific explanations of human behaviour. (shrink)

This article poses the question of what it is that Nietzsche values, arguing that we need a generic answer that makes sense of Nietzsche's admiration for both exceptional individuals and types of culture: what Nietzsche values are certain kinds of syntheses of the will to power, holding at diverse levels. These are syntheses endowed with a distinctive, "aristocratic" structure with a pathos of distance maintaining a separation between ruling and subjugated elements. But Nietzsche's valuing is also oriented by extrinsic criteria (...) such as "agonistic" relations, subjugation of other syntheses, and the "exceptional" status of individuals; the determining of value must combine intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Conflict occurs within Nietzsche's values because the conditions that produce the most exceptional individuals are at odds with the conditions needed for flourishing cultures. I contend that the tenor of Nietzsche's late thinking suggests a way of resolving this tension through a willingness to give up on the exceptional status of individuals in favor of the advancement of flourishing cultures. (shrink)

The paper examines the logic of the knowability paradox and a structural analogue, a new paradox of happiness. We develop a general understanding of what it is to be a Fitch paradox, and follow a natural thread in the literature that attempts to block or resolve Fitch paradoxes. We conclude that, in the case of the attitude of happiness, the new paradox remains even if one finds the knowability analogue non-threatening.

Tsong kha pa's Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, completed in 1402, set the agenda in regard to the nature of and role for morality, meditation, and a correct understanding of ultimate reality for many Tibetan Buddhist thinkers and practitioners. The arguments move from reliance on scriptural authority to reliance on personal investigation, in the beginning by logic, but in the end by meditative insight. However, the model of the ascetic monastic remains basic, providing little justification for claims by some (...) modern apologists that Tibetan Buddhism relegates monasticism to the background. While it is undeniable that Tibetan civilization embraces a number of visions of Buddhism and thus a number of Buddhist lifestyles and moral points of view, Tsong kha pa attempts in the Stages of the Path to show that monastic and bodhisattva viewpoints need not be at odds. (shrink)

Few studies of gangs have explored both ethnic and gender variations in the experience of gang membership. Based on an analysis of interviews with 48 youth from a number of ethnic gangs in Hawaii, this article explores boys' and girls' reasons for joining gangs. The results suggest that although gang members face common problems, they deal with these in ways that are uniquely informed by gender and ethnicity. The interviews also confirm that extensive concern about violent criminal activities in boys' (...) gangs has distracted researchers from exploring the wide range of activities and experiences gangs provide their members. Girls and boys growing up in poor and violent neighborhoods turn to the gangs for many reasons, and the gangs themselves take on a variety of forms in response to the diverse challenges facing their members. Most important, the interviews reveal that girls and boys, even those in the same ethnic groups, inhabit worlds that are heavily influenced by gender. As a result, male and female gangs tend to provide different sets of experiences, skill, and opportunities to their members. (shrink)

What do words have to do with the world? Do our concepts make the world the way it is for us? If concepts do make the world what it is for us, is this making complete, without residue of a natural world, and how does this making occur? Is there a real world to which word and concepts refer that anchors their meaning? What is the role of the imagination in making words have meaning? Is understanding embodied, conceptual, or both? (...) A Modest Realism explores these questions through its examination of the foundations of articulatable experience. It joins language and experience in a non-essentialist realism, while avoiding the non sequiturs and practical impossibilities of most twentieth century postmodern philosophers. (shrink)

Human rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This suspicion, however, is not absolute and the desire to preserve and reform human rights persists for many of us. The most important contemporary critiques of human rights focus on the problematic consequences of the desire for universal rights. Some defenders of human rights accept elements of this critique in their reformulations, but opponents remain wary of the desire to think and act in human rights (...) terms because of their limitations as a political ethics. Yet, we hesitate to abandon human rights. In this article, I look at the political critique of human rights in greater detail. I argue that an agonistic account drawing on the work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig offers the best response to the most important contemporary critiques of human rights, and a clearer account of what it means to claim that human rights do valuable work. The key developments of this agonistic view of human rights are its focus on the ambiguity of ‘humanity’ as a political identity and the challenge to legitimate authority and membership that new rights claims make. In the end, human rights are defended as a universal political ethos focused on the pluralization and democratization of global politics. (shrink)

In order to employ and exhibit our Simon-inspired approach to computational economics, and specifically defend our version of the view that even logically untrained humans are rational, albeit no more than “boundedly” so, we provide two models, both rooted in computational logic, of how it is that logically untrained humans perform in a seemingly irrational fashion in a particular “deviant” auction (the bi-pay auction).

There are many cases in which, by making some great sacrifice, you could bring about either a good outcome or a very good outcome. In some of these cases, it seems wrong for you to bring about the good outcome, since you could bring about the very good outcome with no additional sacrifice. It also seems permissible for you not to make the sacrifice, and bring about neither outcome. But together, these claims seem to imply that you ought to bring (...) about neither outcome rather than the good outcome. And that seems very counterintuitive. In this paper, I develop this problem, propose a solution, and then draw out some implications both for how we should understand supererogation and for how we should approach charitable giving. (shrink)

"He completed the assignment in two phases: The photographs made during the first phase capture the natural ruggedness of the terrain and establish its relationship to the developed neighboring enclaves. Those made during the second phase not only record the actual construction process but also reveal Deal's personal perspective on the qualities of light and the creation of form. Represented in this book as a selection from the resulting portfolio, Topos, a Greek word meaning place, site, position, and occasion - (...) Deal's artistic legacy to the Gerry Center."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Is there any number of people you should save from paralysis rather than saving one person from death? Is there any number of people you should save from a headache rather than saving one person from death? Many people answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’, respectively. They therefore accept a partially aggregative moral view. Patrick Tomlin has recently argued that the most promising partially aggregative views in the literature have implausible implications in certain cases in which there are additions or subtractions to (...) the groups of people that we can save. Several philosophers have begun responding to this argument by developing partially aggregative views that avoid the relevant implications. In this paper, I extend Tomlin’s argument to create a dilemma that no partially aggregative view can avoid. I conclude that we should accept a fully aggregative moral view. (shrink)

A longstanding criticism of Lenin is that his epistemological contributions to the theory of scientific socialism prompted the decline of Marxism in dogmatism and despotism in the twentieth century. According to this narrative, Lenin claimed to possess the objective truth, and he therefore refused to tolerate alternative perspectives. This article subjects these claims to a textual analysis, and it argues that they are erroneous. Lenin defends a fallibilist account of science that affirms the uncertainty of knowledge in the natural, philosophical (...) and social sciences. This fallibilism pervades the text that supposedly showcases his intolerance, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Lenin’s scientific socialism opposes rigid conceptions of socialism, and it encourages an atmosphere of democratic debate. Whilst Lenin’s writings have their flaws, they are not the founding documents of Marxist dogmatism that they are often portrayed as being. Lenin is not the narrow-minded vulgariser of Marxism that he is routinely taken to be. (shrink)

Religion is an important element of end-of-life care on the paediatric intensive care unit with religious belief providing support for many families and for some staff. However, religious claims used by families to challenge cessation of aggressive therapies considered futile and burdensome by a wide range of medical and lay people can cause considerable problems and be very difficult to resolve. While it is vital to support families in such difficult times, we are increasingly concerned that deeply held belief in (...) religion can lead to children being potentially subjected to burdensome care in expectation of ‘miraculous’ intervention. We reviewed cases involving end-of-life decisions over a 3-year period. In 186 of 203 cases in which withdrawal or limitation of invasive therapy was recommended, agreement was achieved. However, in the 17 remaining cases extended discussions with medical teams and local support mechanisms did not lead to resolution. Of these cases, 11 (65%) involved explicit religious claims that intensive care should not be stopped due to expectation of divine intervention and complete cure together with conviction that overly pessimistic medical predictions were wrong. The distribution of the religions included Protestant, Muslim, Jewish and Roman Catholic groups. Five of the 11 cases were resolved after meeting religious community leaders; one child had intensive care withdrawn following a High Court order, and in the remaining five, all Christian, no resolution was possible due to expressed expectations that a ‘miracle’ would happen. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhy is Roger Federer a GOAT of tennis? I argue that the correct response goes beyond statistics and style of play; instead, it is due to the fact that Federer embodies the qualities that typify sporting genius. More than merely being a developed or refined form of expertise, sporting genius relies on the notion of performative fit; that is, the capacity to express viable ways of succeeding within a given sport in virtue of one’s cultivated history of biological and socio-cultural (...) existence. In other words, a genius such as Federer perfectly fits the requirements of his sport and, moreover, is able to safeguard and shape this fit through his unique disposition to perform in certain ways. Performative fit provides the foundations for received traits of genius such as creativity, self-belief and risk-taking. (shrink)

Few fates seem worse than living without cause for hope. Yet what is it to have a cause for hope? And how is it related to having hope? Although these questions have received relatively little philosophical attention, I argue that Kant advances a rationalist account of hope that addresses them. My central thesis has two parts. First, hope is a rational attitude for Kant; certain rational conditions are needed to differentiate hope from other desiderative attitudes (such as mere wishing or (...) fantasizing). Second, these rational conditions involve causal inferences made by the hoping agent. To hope, an agent must make certain inferences about the cause of her desire and the cause of her belief that the object of her desire is possible. In short, to hope requires an agent to take herself to have a cause for hope. (shrink)

Let me begin by saying that I am sympathetic to the simulation theory, especially where it is conceived of as a crucial and central addition alongside the theory-theory as the explanation of our capacity to attribute mental states, rather than as an exclusive and exhaustive account by itself.1 I part company with Professor Stueber, however, in that I view the recent simulation theory/theory- theory controversy as subject to resolution primarily through empirical findings. Still, it cannot be denied that Stueber has (...) helped to crystallize elements of the simulation theory/theory-theory debate that have been lurking all along, and has illuminated an important avenue of inquiry into the status of simulation. (shrink)

Being a friend makes our lives better, but it seems this consideration cannot guide our pursuit of friendship, lest this mean we are not true friends and that our lives are not made better. The aim of this paper is to show how, appearances notwithstanding, being a true friend is consistent with having one's own happiness as one's ultimate end. Aristotle's idea that friends are other selves, and recent accounts of practical reason, show how (i) one's acting as a friend (...) could be motivated and justified by one's being a friend (and not directly by one's own happiness), and yet (ii) one's being a friend (and not one's friendly actions) is in turn supervised and justified by one's own happiness. The paper ends by considering whether such a person's pursuit of another's good is still too circumscribed by that of their own for them to count as a true friend. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to begin developing a version of Gualtiero Piccinini’s mechanistic account of computation that does not need to appeal to any notion of proper functions. The motivation for doing so is a general concern about the role played by proper functions in Piccinini’s account, which will be evaluated in the first part of the paper. I will then propose a potential alternative approach, where computing mechanisms are understood in terms of Carl Craver’s perspectival account of (...) mechanistic functions. According to this approach, the mechanistic function of ‘performing a computation’ can only be attributed relative to an explanatory perspective, but such attributions are nonetheless constrained by the underlying physical structure of the system in question, thus avoiding unlimited pancomputationalism. If successful, this approach would carry with it fewer controversial assumptions than Piccinini’s original account, which requires a robust understanding of proper functions. Insofar as there are outstanding concerns about the status of proper functions, this approach would therefore be more generally acceptable. (shrink)

I find myself ambivalent with respect to the line of argument that Schonbein offers. I certainly want to acknowledge and emphasize at the outset that Schonbein’s discussion has brought to the fore a number of central, compelling and intriguing issues regarding the nature of the dynamical approach to cognition. Though there is much that seems right in this essay, perhaps my view is that the paper invites more questions than it answers. My remarks here then are in the spirit of (...) scouting some of the surrounding terrain in order to see just what Schonbein’s claim is and what arguments or options may be open to the dynamicist. (shrink)

In everyday life, we typically explain what people do by attributing mental states such as beliefs and desires. Such mental states belong to a class of mental states that are _intentional_, mental states that have content. Hoping that Johnny will win, and believing that Johnny will win are of course rather different mental states that can lead to very different behaviour. But they are similar in that they both have the same content : what is being hoped for and believed (...) is the very same thing. According to the thesis of externalism that has been defended most notably by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, not all of the contents of our mental states are determined by our intrinsic properties. Instead, the contents of our beliefs and desires are often determined in part by our relations to the environment. They are, so to speak, "wide" contents that are "not in our heads." Although externalism is accepted by most philosophers, many have argued that mental states with wide contents must also have a kind of content wholly determined by the intrinsic properties of the individuals who are in those states. This kind of content is called "narrow content". The aim of this paper is to distinguish between three rather different motivations for postulating narrow content. I argue that, given a certain conception of narrow content that I shall explain below, none of these three motivations succeed in establishing the existence of narrow content. (shrink)