Jeffrey Moriarty argues for a return to a robust notion of stakeholder theory involving direct procedural voting by stakeholders. He asserts that such voting offers the best possible chance of restraining firm behavior and taking into account all stakeholder interests. I argue, however, that Moriarty proceeds with an overly narrow conception of democracy, ignoring problems that arise from procedural voting. Specifically, paradoxes in voting procedures, the tyranny of the majority, and the inefficacy of representation advantage well-organized and moneyed interests. A (...) stakeholder democracy may in fact undermine the very interests that Moriarty seeks to promote. (shrink)

_The first unabridged English translation of the correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Georg Ernst Stahl detailing their opposing philosophies_ The correspondence between the eighteenth-century mathematician and philosopher G. W. Leibniz and G. E. Stahl, a chemist and physician at the court of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, known as the Leibniz-Stahl Controversy, is one of the most important intellectual contributions on theoretical issues concerning pre-biological thinking. Editors François Duchesneau and Justin E. H. Smith offer readers (...) the first fully annotated English translation of this fascinating exchange of philosophical views on divine action, the order of nature, causality and teleology, and the soul-body relationship. (shrink)

Purpose: Explore public attitudes towards the trade-offs between justice and medical outcome inherent in organ allocation decisions.Background: The US Task Force on Organ Transplantation recommended that considerations of justice, autonomy and medical outcome be part of all organ allocation decisions. Justice in this context may be modeled as a function of three types of need, related to age, clinical urgency, and quality of life.Methods: A web-based survey was conducted in which respondents were asked to choose between two hypothetical patients who (...) differed in clinical urgency , age, pretransplant and post-transplant quality of life, and life expectancy.Results: A pool of 1600 people were notified via email about the survey; 623 responded. Respondents preferred giving organs to younger people up to an age difference of <15.4 years and more clinically urgent people up to a difference in urgency of <2.54 months . Priority varied with the quality of life of the worst-off patient and the relative status of the patients. If both had worse than average quality of life, respondents preferred the better-off patient. When both had better than average quality of life, they preferred the worse-off patient. In analysis according to age versus clinical urgency, the older the patient, the more urgency needed to receive priority. In quality of life versus clinical urgency, the better the control’s quality of life, the more urgency the competing patient required. The worse the patient’s post-transplant outcome, the more urgency needed to receive priority.Conclusions: It appears that clinical urgency is only one of many factors influencing attitudes about allocation decisions and that respondents may invoke different principles of fairness depending the relative clinical status of patients. (shrink)

Der Artikel analysiert die Aussagen Fichtes zur ästhetischen Diskussion seiner Zeit und die von ihm entwickelte Kulturauffassung als Mittler zwischen empirischen und transzendentalen Ich bis hin zur Aufnahme seiner Theoreme in der Jenaer Frühromantik. The article analyzes Fichte's statements on the aesthetic discussion of his time and the conception of culture he developed as a mediator between the empirical and transcendental ego up to the inclusion of his theorems in the Jena early romantic period.

Purpose: Explore public attitudes towards the trade-offs between justice and medical outcome inherent in organ allocation decisions.Background: The US Task Force on Organ Transplantation recommended that considerations of justice, autonomy and medical outcome be part of all organ allocation decisions. Justice in this context may be modeled as a function of three types of need, related to age, clinical urgency, and quality of life.Methods: A web-based survey was conducted in which respondents were asked to choose between two hypothetical patients who (...) differed in clinical urgency , age, pretransplant and post-transplant quality of life, and life expectancy.Results: A pool of 1600 people were notified via email about the survey; 623 responded. Respondents preferred giving organs to younger people up to an age difference of <15.4 years and more clinically urgent people up to a difference in urgency of <2.54 months . Priority varied with the quality of life of the worst-off patient and the relative status of the patients. If both had worse than average quality of life, respondents preferred the better-off patient. When both had better than average quality of life, they preferred the worse-off patient. In analysis according to age versus clinical urgency, the older the patient, the more urgency needed to receive priority. In quality of life versus clinical urgency, the better the control’s quality of life, the more urgency the competing patient required. The worse the patient’s post-transplant outcome, the more urgency needed to receive priority.Conclusions: It appears that clinical urgency is only one of many factors influencing attitudes about allocation decisions and that respondents may invoke different principles of fairness depending the relative clinical status of patients. (shrink)

Philosophia (Israel), 16(3-4), 333 - 344. YEAR: 1986 Extensive corrigenda Vol. 17, no. 3. -/- SUBJECT(S): Quine's second thoughts on quantifying in, appearing in the second, revised edition of _From a Logical Point of View_ of 1961, are shown to be incorrect. His original thoughts were correct. ABSTRACT: Additional tumult is supplied to pp. 152-154 of _From A Logical Point of View_, showing that being dated is no guarantee of being right. Among other things, it is shown that Quine's argument (...) to the conclusion that limiting the universe of discourse to intensional entities does not "relieve the original difficulty over quantifying into modal contexts" is incorrect; that the contradictory of that conclusion is in fact true; and that an even stronger conclusion is true, with 'abstract' replacing 'intensional'. (shrink)

Contemporary literature investigating the significant impact of technology on our lives leads many to conclude that ethics must be a part of the discussion at an earlier stage in the design process i.e., before a commercial product is developed and introduced. The problem, however, is the question regarding how ethics can be incorporated into an earlier stage of technological development and it is this question that we argue has not yet been answered adequately. There is no consensus amongst scholars as (...) to the kind of ethics that should be practiced, nor the individual selected to perform this ethical analysis. One school of thought holds that ethics should have pragmatic value in research and design and that it should be implemented by the engineers and/or scientists themselves, while another school of thought holds that ethics need not be so pragmatic. For the latter, the ethical reflection can aim at a variety of goals, and be carried out by an ethicist. None of the approaches resulting from these lines of thinking have been adopted on a wide-scale basis. To that end, the approach presented here is intended to bridge the gap between these schools of thought. It is our contention that ethics ought to be pragmatic and to provide utility for the design process and we maintain that adequate ethical reflection, and all that it entails, ought to be conducted by an ethicist. Thus, we propose a novel role for the ethicist—the ethicist as designer—who subscribes to a pragmatic view of ethics in order to bring ethics into the research and design of artifacts—no matter the stage of development. In this paper we outline the series of steps that a pragmatic value analysis entails: uncovering relevant values, scrutinizing these values and, working towards the translation of values into technical content. In conclusion, we present a list of tasks for the ethicist in his/her role as designer on the interdisciplinary team. (shrink)

Der Konstruktionsbegriff erfuhr er unter dem Eindruck technischer Fortschritte wie soziokultureller Veränderungen vor allem im 19. Jahrhundert wesentliche Wandlungen. Mit dessen selbstverständlich erscheinender Nutzung ergibt sich die Frage nach seinem Bedeutungsfeld: Ist Konstruieren ein Prozess, der sich auf das Entwerfen, die Präsentation der äußerlichen Gestalt des zu erzeugenden Gegenstandes konzentriert oder sind in ihm wesentlich mehr Aspekte impliziert? Im 17./18. Jahrhundert war Konstruktion verbunden mit dem Maschinenbegriff und vom Anspruch getragen, das geschlossene Ganze der Maschine als Objekt zu erfassen. Im (...) Unterschied dazu wurde namentlich in der klassischen deutschen Philosophie der Konstruktionsgedanke in ganz anderer Weise ausgebildet. Insbesondere Fichte vollzog einen Paradigmawechsel, indem er die Konstruktion zur universellen Fähigkeit der Begriffsbildung erhob. Wissen galt ihm als ideale "Nachkonstruktion" des Seins unter der Form des Wissens. Es verbindet sich damit der Wechsel vom ordnenden zu einem entwerfenden Weltverhältnis. Das Wissen erscheint nun als ein Werdendes. Im Herausarbeiten der theoretischen-begrifflichen Fassung des Wesens eines Gegenstandes manifestiert sich der entwerfende, tätige Charakter des Subjektes. Der Artikel verfolgt zum einen Aspekte der philosophischen und zum anderen der technischen Entwicklung. The concept of construction underwent significant changes under the influence of technical advances and socio-cultural changes, especially in the 19th century. With its seemingly obvious use, the question of its field of meaning arises: Is construction a process that focuses on design, the presentation of the external shape of the object to be produced, or are significantly more aspects implied in it? In the 17th/18th In the 19th century, construction was associated with the concept of machine and supported by the claim to grasp the closed whole of the machine as an object. In contrast to this, the idea of ​​construction was developed in a completely different way, especially in classical German philosophy. Fichte in particular carried out a paradigm shift by elevating construction to the universal ability of concept formation. Knowledge was for him the ideal "reconstruction" of being under the form of knowledge. This is linked to the change from an ordering to a designing world relationship. Knowledge now appears as something in the making. The drafting, active character of the subject manifests itself in the working out of the theoretical-conceptual version of the essence of an object. The article follows aspects of philosophical and technical development on the one hand. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual framework for studying the influence of mood on managerial ethical decision making. We draw on mood-congruency theory and the affect infusion model to propose that mood influences managerial ethical decision making through deliberate and conscious assessments of the moral intensity of an ethical issue. By accounting for proscriptive and prescriptive morality—i.e., harmful and prosocial behavior, respectively—we demonstrate that positive and negative mood may have asymmetrical and paradoxical effects on ethical decision making. Specifically, our analysis suggests (...) that individuals in a positive mood will be more likely to engage in prosocial behavior but less likely to refrain from activities that have harmful consequences for others, whereas individuals in a negative mood will be more likely to avoid activities that put others at risk or harm but at the same time less prone to engaging in activities that have positive consequences for others. Importantly, we account for the context within which managers make their decisions by examining how situational strength may moderate the influence of mood on managerial ethical decision making. Finally, we discuss how organizations can leverage the double-edged sword effect of mood on ethical decision making and prevent, control and manage the risk of unethical decision making on the part of managers. (shrink)

This book discusses the concept of immanent critique, i. e. whether there is a form of critique which neither just applies empirically accepted standards nor independently justified norms but rather reconstructs norms which are immanent to social practices. -/- It surveys both political theories of criticism (Walzer, Taylor, MacIntyre) and contemporary critical theories (Habermas, Honneth) for how they describe such forms of critique and develops a new model of immanent critique. For this purpose, it takes up both contemporary social ontology (...) theories and the discussion about rule-following. The book argues that we can speak of immanent rules as far as persons can practically recognize each other as members of rule-governed practices if they attribute each other defeasible normative authority. -/- Finally, it describes the consequences of the adoption of such a model for our description of a practice of critique and analyzes both first-order immanent critique and the second-order critique of reification. (shrink)

When should we use care robots? In this paper we endorse the shift from a simple normative approach to care robots ethics to a complex one: we think that one main task of a care robot ethics is that of analysing the different ways in which different care robots may affect the different values at stake in different care practices. We start filling a gap in the literature by showing how the philosophical analysis of the nature of healthcare activities can (...) contribute to robot ethics. We rely on the nature-of-activities approach recently proposed in the debate on human enhancement, and we apply it to the ethics of care robots. The nature-of-activities approach will help us to understand why certain practice-oriented activities in healthcare should arguably be left to humans, but certain goal-directed activities in healthcare can be fulfilled with the assistance of a robot. In relation to the latter, we aim to show that even though all healthcare activities can be considered as practice-oriented, when we understand the activity in terms of different legitimate ‘fine-grained’ descriptions, the same activities or at least certain components of them can be seen as clearly goal-directed. Insofar as it allows us to ethically assess specific functionalities of specific robots to be deployed in well-defined circumstances, we hold the nature-of-activities approach to be particularly helpful also from a design perspective, i.e. to realize the Value Sensitive Design approach. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the characteristics of digital platforms challenge the fundamental assumptions of value sensitive design. Traditionally, VSD methods assume that we can identify relevant values during the design phase of new technologies. The underlying assumption is that there is only epistemic uncertainty about which values will be impacted by a technology. VSD methods suggest that one can predict which values will be affected by new technologies by increasing knowledge about how values are interpreted or understood in (...) context. In contrast, digital platforms exhibit a novel form of uncertainty, namely, ontological uncertainty: even with full information and overview, it cannot be foreseen what users or developers will do with digital platforms. Hence, predictions about which values are affected might not hold. In this paper, we suggest expanding VSD methods to account for value dynamism resulting from ontological uncertainty. Our expansions involve extending VSD to the entire lifecycle of a platform, broadening VSD through the addition of reflexivity, i.e. second-order learning about what values to aim at, and adding specific tools of moral sandboxing and moral prototyping to enhance such reflexivity. While we illustrate our approach with a short case study about ride-sharing platforms such as Uber, our approach is relevant for other technologies exhibiting ontological uncertainty as well, such as machine learning, robotics and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Le Obiezioni contro la Teoria medica di G.E. Stahl, tradotte per la prima volta in italiano, rappresentano un documento di particolare interesse storico-filosofico. Da una parte Georg Ernst Stahl (1659-1734), medico, chimico, fisico, sostenitore di una fisiologia corporea a impronta “vitalista” e dall’altra Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), genio universale della matematica e della filosofia dell’età barocca. Il fulcro della polemica riguarda la possibilità di capire se e in che misura l’organizzazione meccanica di un corpo organico sia di per (...) se sufficiente a spiegare il fenomeno della vita “biologica”, o se invece si debba postulare la presenza di princìpi vitali capaci di integrare le leggi fisiologiche che strutturano la corporeità. A dispetto della lontananza storica, o anzi forse proprio in virtù di tale lontananza, la polemica tra Leibniz e Stahl ci aiuta a decifrare le radici di uno dei refrain più abusati di tanta filosofia contemporanea, il tema cioè della ‘naturalizzazione’ della vita e dello spirito. L’idea di espungere tutti gli elementi “soprannaturali” (l’anima, gli spiriti, etc.) dal novero delle spiegazioni scientifiche non è certo un’idea novecentesca e si confronta in questo caso non solo con la sua tesi opposta, ma soprattutto con una vasta gamma di soluzioni intermedie e di varianti non riduzioniste, di cui proprio la filosofia di Leibniz è uno splendido esempio. Il volume è accompagnato da un saggio di postfazione intitolato Vita e organismo tra filosofia e medicina: le ragioni di una polemica. (shrink)

This volume explores the intersection between early modern philosophy and the life sciences by presenting the contributions of important but often neglected figures such as Cudworth, Grew, Glisson, Hieronymus Fabricius, Stahl, Gallego, Hartsoeker, and More, as well as familiar figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, and Kant.

What kind of relationship subsists between an “organism” and a “monas dominans »? In some texts, Leibniz claims that the soul « actuat » the organic body and in the late debate with Stahl he describes the « monas dominans » as a « monas actuatrix ». But how does the monas « actualize » the organic body ? and what implies the semantic of the word « agere » here used by Leibniz ? Is it also possibile to (...) describe this event in terms of « whole/part » relationship ? The aim of this paper is to sketch out the status quaestionis of the topic by discussing some of the most recent studies. More specifically to propose an interpretation of the « monas dominans » as the « nota distinguens » of the whole organism. (shrink)

The historical treatment of atomism and the mechanical philosophy largely neglects what I call "chymical atomism," namely a type of pre-Daltonian corpuscular matter theory that postulated particles of matter which were operationally indivisible. From the Middle Ages onwards, alchemists influenced by Aristotle's Meteorology, De caelo, and De generatione et corruptione argued for the existence of robust corpuscles of matter that resisted analysis by laboratory means. As I argue in the present paper, this alchemical tradition entered the works of Daniel Sennert (...) and Robert Boyle, and became the common property of seventeenth-century chymists. Through Boyle, G.E. Stahl, and other chymists, the operational atomism of the alchemists was even transmitted to Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, where it became the basis of his claim that elements are simply "the final limit that analysis reaches.". (shrink)

The landscape of seventeenth-century chemistry is complex, and it is impossible to find in it either a clear-cut distinction between alchemy and chemistry or a sort of simple identification of the two. The seventeenth-century cultural context contained a rich variety of "chemical" discourses with arguments ranging from specific experiments to the justification of the validity of chemistry and its novelty in terms of its extraordinary antiquity. On the basis of an analysis of the works by O. Borch, J.J. Glauber, and (...) J. J. Becher, this paper tries to demonstrate that a historical reconstruction of "chemistry" must consider these different levels of the chemical debate. Only then will it be possible to appreciate the outstanding role played by G.E. Stahl in founding modern chemistry. The paper argues in favor of a contextualization of the historical research on seventeenth-century chemistry. (shrink)

This essay challenges the relevance of the primary analogy in Ronit Stahl and Ezekiel Emanuel’s article “Physicians, Not Conscripts: Conscientious Objection in Health Care.” The author then proposes an alternative, classi­cally inspired model of conscience based on the work of E. Christian Brugger, Edmund Pellegrino, and Alasdair MacIntyre. This teleological model enables a more robust analysis of conscience claims than does Stahl and Emanuel’s social-constructivist framework.

Este artigo investiga as mudanças conceituais revolucionárias que ocorreram quando a teoria do flogisto de Stahl foi substituída pela teoria do oxigênio de Lavoisier. Utilizando técnicas extraídas da inteligência artificial, o artigo descreve os estágios cruciais no desenvolvimento conceitual de Lavoisier, de 1772 até 1789. Em seguida, é esboçada uma teoria computacional da mudança conceitual de modo a explicar a descoberta de Lavoisier da teoria do oxigênio e a substituiçáo da teoria do flogisto. Este artigo é uma traduçáo de (...) “The Conceptual Structure of The Chemical Revolution”, publicado originalmente em Philosophy of Science , número 57, p. 183-209, 1990. Todos os direitos do artigo pertencem à revista Philosophy of Science , editada pela University of Chicago Press. O copyright do artigo original é de 1990, da Philosophy of Science Association. Os tradutores agradecem a Paul Thagard e a Philosophy of Science a permissáo para esta traduçáo. [NT.]. (shrink)

Before there was the digital divide there was the analog divide– and universal service was the attempt to close that analogdivide. Universal service is becoming ever more complex in terms ofregulatory design as it becomes the digital divide. In order to evaluatethe promise of the next generation Internet with respect to the digitaldivide this work looks backwards as well as forwards in time. Byevaluating why previous universal service mechanisms failed andsucceeded this work identifies specific characteristics ofcommunications systems – in particular (...) in billing and managinguncertainty – and argues that these characteristics underliesuccess or failure in terms of technological ubiquity. Developing a setof characteristics of services rather than a set of services is afundamental break with the tradition of universal service. In fact, theimplications of our proposal is that basic characteristics in theoffering of the service rather than the absolute price are critical toclose the digital divide: certainty of total charge, ability to avoiddeposits or disconnection via best effort service, and payer-basedcontrol of all charges. While all of these principles sound obvious infact none of these hold in the telephony network. Universal service hasevolved from common carriage (serve all with no discrimination) to aright to basic services (100% penetration). Universal service isnow discussed as the digital divide, as the access to information asopposed to services becomes increasingly critical. However, we arediscussing in this paper access to the bits and the network rather thanaccess to the information (or intellectual property) once connected. Theprovision of universal service is seen as a technical problem only in thatthe technology costs money – universal service debates have longbeen the domain of economists. Yet the design of protocols has been thedomain of engineers, the building of systems the corporate domain, andthe discussion of equity the interest of ethicists. The design ofprotocols can define the parameters of the corporate decision-makers,the variables of the economist, and the questions for the ethicist. Thedesign decisions made at the fundamental levels can make communicationsequity more or less likely. In this work I focus on the design ofprotocols for the next generation Internet, protocols which willfundamentally change the best-effort nature of Internet services.Building on the economic and ethnographic work of others I argue thatthe effects of protocols adoption on universal service can be predictedto some degree. By examination of past and current technologies Iexamine a set of technical mechanisms to determine how such mechanismsmight harm or enhance universal service. I define each mechanism (e.g.denial of entry) and offer observations about each particularmechanism''s implicit pricing assumptions. I close with a discussion ofinterest to ethicists and regulators on evaluating communicationsprotocols with respect to universal access. Protocols for developingmultiple qualities of service for packet-switched networks have focusedon economic efficiency (e.g. Mackie-Mason, 1995; Choi, Stahl &Winston, 1997; Shapiro & Varian, 1998), billing to encouragewidespread adoption of network innovations (e.g. Xie & Sirbu, 1985)and billing in a manner consistent with the underlying network (e.g.Clark, 1996). Here we examine a set of protocols which include varyingquality of service mechanisms with respect to the compatibility of theprotocols with universal access. (shrink)

Characterizations of philosophy abound. It is ‘the queen of the sciences’, a grand and sweeping metaphysical endeavour; or, less regally, it is a sort of deep anthropology or ‘descriptive metaphysics’, uncovering the general presuppositions or conceptual schemes that lurk beneath our words and thoughts. A different set of images portray philosophy as a type of therapy, or as a spiritual exercise, a way of life to be followed, or even as a special branch of poetry or politics. Then there is (...) a group of characterizations that include philosophy as linguistic analysis, as phenomenological description, as conceptual geography, or as genealogy in the sense proposed by Nietzsche and later taken up by Foucault. (shrink)