In this concise and accessible introductory text, Gómez-Lobo and Keown introduce a "human goods" approach to bioethics as an alternative to the dominant principle-based method in the field (best illustrated by Beauchamp and Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, OUP). Following Aristotle and the natural law tradition, the authors demonstrate how an emphasis on human goods--such as health, life, family, friendship, work and play, the experience of beauty, knowledge, and integrity--provides a necessary context for medical decisions and can help us (...) understand critical issues at the beginning and end of life. The manuscript includes two parts: Foundations and Issues. In the Foundations section the authors explain how one can think about bioethics, offering definitions of ethics and ontology (the study of being) and prudential reasoning. In the Issues section they address genetics, abortion, infanticide, suicide and physician-assisted suicide, nutrition and hydration, and transplantation ethics. The book includes appendices featuring personal statements by Gómez-Lobo on the status of the human embryo and criteria for the determination of death. (shrink)

: This response to Nikolaus Knoepffler's paper in the same issue of the Journal agrees that if the arguments supporting the first two of the eight human embryonic stem cell research policy options discussed are unsound, as Knoepffler argues, then it seems natural to move to the increasingly permissive options. If the arguments are sound, however, then the more permissive options should be rejected. It is argued that three of the rejected arguments, taken together, constitute very good reasons to hold (...) that a human embryo is endowed with dignity from fertilization onward. Thus, countries that want their public policies to match the moral imperative of respect for human beings should refrain from allowing destructive human embryo research and should devote considerable energy and public funds to research and clinical trials using non-embryonic ("adult") stem cells. (shrink)

El artículo relaciona el nuevo orden narrativo con la técnica del “storytelling” y cómo se manifiestan en el periodismo actual. Se estudian los casos de tres periodistas: David Simon, Stieg Larsson y Ryzard Kapuscinski y cómo su obra muestra la difusa línea de los hechos, la recreación, la invención, la fábula, la historia, la apariencia y la verdad. Se contrastan estos casos con las aportaciones del paradigma narrativo de Fisher. Nos preguntamos también cómo se crean narraciones en Internet a partir (...) de los periodistas estudiados. El ámbito de la verdad periodística se entremezcla con una apariencia de verdad mientras la ficción que aparenta realidad se convierte en acercamiento a ésta. La aproxi-mación a este fenómeno, que se inicia a finales del siglo XX y se consolida en la primera década del siglo XXI, se lleva a cabo desde las aportaciones de la Teoría de la Comunicación. (shrink)

Frente a los riesgos del monopolio de significados sobre la vida en común, la sociedad civil puede actuar como fuente de reconocimiento y desarrollo de identidades, pero afirmarlo requiere que previamente se establezcan nuevos puntos de partida para el análisis sobre su significado. Apoyados en esta premisa, proponemos un cuestionamiento a la apropiación teórica y práctica que desde la dimensión política se ha hecho y establecemos la redefinición de lo cívico como el sustento para un tipo de pluralismo basado en (...) la capacidad para expresar y conocer por medio de la razón. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is focused on presenting the method of historical analysis built by Michel Foucault in his book Histoire de la Folie à l’Âge Classique as a “History of the Other”. Such term appears for the first time at Les Mots et les Choses’s Preface, in which Foucault analyses his method in the quoted book on madness (but also in La Naissance de la Clinique). In this sense, firstly we have to verify the hypothesis of this relation (...) between Foucault’s archeological method as a Thought of the Otherness, precisely concerning to that “Other History” proposed by the philosopher. Secondly, we need to analyse specifically Histoire de la Folie as a privileged work, as far as the approach on the relation with the other is concerned. KEY WORDS – Archeology of knowledge. History. Alterity. Madness. (shrink)

This volume explores the inherent pluralism of Hinduism through ethnographic and philosophical evidence as presented in the Journal of Anthropological Society of Bombay. The essays dated 1886-1936, represent a period that marked the emergence of a European-educated native intelligentsia with a rationalist outlook. The essays cover a wide range of topics from Tree Worship in Mohenjo Daro, the origin of the Hindu Trimurti, interpretation of Avestic and Vedic Texts; to a second set of more localized papers that cover the Muhammadan (...) Castes of Bengal, the Tenets and Practices of a Certain Class of Faqirs in Bengal, the Theoretical History of the Goddess Yellamma, and much more. Written during a particular historical as well as intellectual period that reflected certain key patterns - a period just following the Bengal Renaissance of the nineteenth century that ushered in the ideologies of a reformative Hinduism - this volume highlights how religions of all denominations have influenced each other and appear to have mingled beliefs and practices from multiple sources. It shows how tolerance and inclusiveness along with syncretism have been part of India's religious and social history. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of religions, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and sociology of religion. It will also be useful to those interested in inter-religious dialogues and civil society. (shrink)

Using an international sample of banks, we study how differences in religiosity across countries affect earnings management. Given that religiosity is a major source of morality and ethical behavior, it may reduce excessive risk taking and act as deterrence for earnings manipulations. Therefore, we predict lower earnings management in societies that have higher religiosity. Consistent with expectations, our cross-country analysis indicates that religiosity is negatively related to income-increasing earnings management for loss-avoidance and just-meeting-or-beating prior year’s earnings. We also find that (...) religiosity reduces income-increasing earnings management through abnormal loan loss provisions. In additional tests, we document that religiosity increases the information value of bank earnings, with both earnings persistence and cash flow predictability being enhanced by higher religiosity. For the crisis period analysis, our evidence shows that banks in countries with higher religiosity exhibit lower probability of reporting asset deterioration and lower probability of having poor performance. (shrink)

We explore the intimate connection between spacetime geometry and electrodynamics. This link is already implicit in the constitutive relations between the field strengths and excitations, which are an essential part of the axiomatic structure of electromagnetism, clearly formulated via integration theory and differential forms. We review the foundations of classical electromagnetism based on charge and magnetic flux conservation, the Lorentz force and the constitutive relations. These relations introduce the conformal part of the metric and allow the study of electrodynamics for (...) specific spacetime geometries. At the foundational level, we discuss the possibility of generalizing the vacuum constitutive relations, by relaxing the fixed conditions of homogeneity and isotropy, and by assuming that the symmetry properties of the electro-vacuum follow the spacetime isometries. The implications of this extension are briefly discussed in the context of the intimate connection between electromagnetism and the geometry of spacetime. (shrink)

This article revises Foucault's account of biopolitics in the light of the impact of the molecular and digital revolutions on `the politics of life itself'. The confluence of the molecular and digital revolutions informationalizes life, providing an account of what it is to be a living thing in terms of complex adaptive and continuously emergent, informationally constituted, systems. Also revisiting Foucault's The Order of Things and its interrogation of the modern analytics of finitude, the article argues that our contemporary politics (...) of life is therefore distinguished by the quasi-transcendentals that now distinguish informationalized life: circulation, connectivity and complexity. Here, too, the article argues, the figure of Man, which once united the quasi-transcendentals of life, labour and language, is replaced by the contingency that now unites circulation, connectivity and complexity. Observing that a life of continuous emergence is also one in which production is continuously allied with destruction, such a life is lived as the continuous emergency of its own emergence. This account of contemporary biopolitics, together with its emergency of emergence, contrasts, in particular, with that offered by Agamben in his appropriation of Schmitt. (shrink)

Nuestro trabajo se propone presentar el pensamiento paulino trabajado por Alain Badiou en San Pablo: La fundación del universalismo. Intentaremos clarificar las posiciones que toma Badiou en torno a la figura del apóstol. Consideramos que, explicitando las lecturas del autor en cuestión, es posible tejer puentes para la discusión en el campo de la teología política. Entendemos la lectura de Badiou como una lectura filosófica política, que busca dialogar con una comunidad política. Pablo, en Badiou, es presentado como «un teórico (...) antifilosófico de la universalidad» y el fundador del universalismo cristiano. A partir de esta interpretación la tarea de Badiou es buscar lo universal en lo particular. (shrink)

We examine whether anti-corruption intensity strengthens tax enforcement effectiveness in China. Using hand-collected anti-corruption data and aggregate tax enforcement data, which include the probability of tax audits and tax deficiencies, for a sample of 11,687 firm-year observations from 2012 to 2017, we find that anti-corruption intensity increases the deterrence role and the enforcement role of tax audits. We also identify the fear effect as a possible channel through which anti-corruption intensity affects tax enforcement effectiveness. Overall, the results indicate that anti-corruption (...) intensity can improve a revenue agency’s effectiveness. (shrink)

Respect for human embryos is often defended on the basis of the potentiality argument: embryos deserve respect because they already possess potentially the features that in adults are fully actualized. Opponents of this argument challenge it by claiming that if embryos should be respected because they are potentially adults, then gametes should be respected because they are potentially embryos. This article rejects this reductio ad absurdum argument by showing that there are two different types of potentiality involved so that the (...) transitivity of potentiality does not hold up in this case. Respect for embryos does not logically entail respect for gametes. (shrink)

In this provocative new work, Alfonso Gomez-Lobo proposes that the earliest Platonic writings, in particular Apology, Crito, and sections of Gorgias, contain an underlying moral philosophy that can be attributed to Socrates with some degree of assurance. His aim is to show that Socratic moral philosophy is a reasonably systematic construction generated by a small number of principles or axioms.

In order to understand the nature of human embryos I first distinguish between active and passive potentiality, and then argue that the former is found in human gametes and embryos (even in embryos in vitro that may fail to be implanted) because they all have an indwelling power or capacity to initiate certain changes. Implantation provides necessary conditions for the actualization of that prior, active potentiality. This does not imply that embryos are potential persons that do not deserve the same (...) respect as actual persons. To claim that embryos become persons is to understand the predicate person as a phase sortal, roughly equivalent to adult person. This entails that we would not be essentially persons. In order to explain the traditional understanding of person as a proper sortal rather than a phase sortal, the author distinguishes between proximate and remote potentiality, and shows that, unlike feline embryos, human embryos, by their genetic constitution, possess the remote potentiality to later exercise the typically human activities. It follows that they are already persons essentially. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and (...) celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this fifth group of contributions, three philosophers explore the specters of colonialidade, the specifically Brazilian legacies of Portuguese and European coloniality. Carla Rodrigues opens the dialogue by exploring the haunting and melancholy provoked by colonial forms of violence and shows how confronting Brazilian necropolitics sustains the Derridean legacy; Rafael Haddock-Lobo offers a meditation on the difficulties of being before the law and standing before specters as a means of being justly haunted by the others of European philosophy in Brazil; finally, Marcelo Moraes continues the theme of Europe as a specter-producing machine and invokes specifically the presences of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian political resistances with the aim of deconstructing coloniality. (shrink)

Educação estética em “Rua de mão única” e em “A idade da terra” 1 Resumo: O presente ensaio analisou o tema da educação estética a partir do texto literário “Rua de mão única” de Walter Benjamin e do filme “A idade da terra” de Glauber Rocha e buscou identificar semelhanças entre a forma alegórica presente nas duas obras, bem como descrever as potencialidades pedagógicas presentes nas imagens-pensamentos produzidas por elas junto ao receptor. Definimos como problematização a compreensão do potencial de (...) crítica e ensino da forma alegórica mediada pela literatura e pelo cinema. Nosso principal objetivo foi identificar as características alegóricas na construção das obras, entendendo as relações com os contextos históricos, econômicos e culturais em que foram produzidas. Como principais resultados de nossa investigação apontamos que o cinema e a literatura são espaços privilegiados de construção de imagens-pensamentos, que associados aos conceitos filosóficos potencializam a interpretação e a crítica da realidade histórica, econômica e cultural, derivando na dimensão pedagógica da imagem que acreditamos possa ser melhor explorada pelos educadores. Palavras-chave: Educação estética. Cinema. Literatura. Alegoria. Ensino. 1 Apoio FAPEMIG ao projeto de pesquisa APQ 02218-18: O Cinema Novo como experiência inovadora da formação cultural docente. Aesthetics education in "One-Way Street" by Walter Benjamim and in "The Age of the Earth" by Glauber Rocha: The present essay analyzed the topic aesthetics education from the literary text "One-Way Street", by Walter Benjamin, and the film "The Age of the Earth" by Glauber Rocha. It aimed to identify similarities between the allegorical constructions present in the two works, as well as, to describe the pedagogical potentialities present in the images-thoughts produced by them together with the receiver. We defined as questioning the understanding of criticism and teaching potential of the allegorical form mediated by literature and cinema. Our main objective was to identify the allegorical characteristics in creating the works, conceiving relationships with historical, economic and cultural contexts in which they were created. Our main results point out that cinema and literature are privileged spaces of images-thoughts construction, and that associated with the philosophical concepts they can potentiate the interpretation and the criticism of the historical, economic and cultural reality, deriving the educational dimension of the image that we believe educators may best explore. Keywords: Aesthetics education. Cinema. Literature. Allegory. Teaching. Educación estética en "Calle de sentido único” y en “La edad de la tierra ” Resumen: En este trabajo se analizó el tema de la educación estética del texto literario "Calle de sentido único" de Walter Benjamin y de la película “La edad de la tierra” de Glauber Rocha. Se buscó identificar semejanzas entre la forma alegórica presente en las dos obras, así como describir las potencialidades pedagógicas presentes en las imágenes-pensamientos producidas por ellas junto al receptor. Definimos como problematización la comprensión del potencial de crítica y enseñanza de la forma alegórica mediada por la literatura y el cine. Nuestro objetivo principal fue identificar las características alegóricas en la construcción de las obras, entendiendo las relaciones con los contextos históricos, económicos y culturales en que se produjeron. Los principales resultados de nuestras investigaciones señalan que el cine y la literatura son espacios privilegiados de construcción de imágenes-pensamientos, los cuales, asociados a los conceptos filosóficos, promueven la interpretación y la crítica de la realidad histórica, económica y cultural, derivando en la dimensión pedagógica de la imagen, y creemos que los educadores puedan sacar mejor provecho de ello. Palabras clave: Educación estética. Cine. Literatura. Alegoría. Enseñanza. Data de registro:09/06/2019 Data de aceite: 09/12/2019. (shrink)

Prior research has examined several ethical questions related to executive compensation. The issues that have received most attention are whether executives' pay is fair and justified by performance. Since more recent studies show that stock options grants constitute the single largest component in executive compensation, we examine the relations of these grants to economic determinants and corporate governance for firms in the stagnant stage of their lifecycle. We find that, on average, stock options grants comprise a significant portion of annual (...) CEO compensation (26.4%) for stagnant firms. We also find that economic (corporate governance) factors explain less (or more) of the cross-sectional variation in stock options grants for stagnant firms than for growth firms. Furthermore, we document lower pay-performance sensitivity (i.e., weaker incentive alignment) and no improvement in future firm performance from past stock options grants to CEOs of stagnant firms. In particular, our study provides empirical evidence on some inefficiencies associated with stock options grants to CEOs of low potential (stagnant) firms, a long-standing concern of business ethics researchers (Moriarty, 2005; Nichols and Subramaniam, 2001; Perel, 2003). Our results also provide support for the corporate governance reforms discussed in Matsumura and Shin (2005), especially those proposed provisions that curtail the power of CEOs in the governance of firms. (shrink)

When does a human being begin to exist? Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard have argued that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. In their view, a human individual begins to exist at gastrulation, i. e. at about sixteen days after fertilization. In this paper we argue that even granting Smith and Brogaard's ontological commitments and biological assumptions, the existence of a human being can be shown to (...) begin much earlier, viz., with fertilization. Their interpretative claim that a zygote divides immediately into two substances and therefore ceases to exist is highly implausible by their own standards, and their factual claim that there is no communication between the blastomeres has to be abandoned in light of recent embryological research. (shrink)

: This paper starts from three assumptions: that we are essentially human organisms, that we start to exist at conception, and that we retain our identity throughout our lives. The identity claim provides the background to argue that it is irrational for a person to claim that it would be impermissible to kill her now but permissible to have killed her at an earlier age. The notion of "full moral status" as an ascertainable property is questioned and shown to be (...) dependent on previously accepted moral norms. It is concluded that the exclusion of the very young from the scope of the norm o f common morality that prohibits the killing of the innocent amounts to discrimination on the basis of age. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to clarify what is properly common to the common good and to support its irreducibility as a guarantee of overcoming an atomistic conception of civil society. We begin by addressing the notion of individual freedom and the questioning of the selfish condition of the human being. Then, we delve into the normative possibilities offered by an ethical interpretation of the common good. The difference of the common good from other notions used in late-modern discourses (...) is key in determining the intrinsic commonality of social relations. In concluding, we argue for a conception of the common good that accommodates individual freedom, understanding it no longer in isolation, but as part of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Self-interest theories hold that rationality requires one always to choose what is best for oneself. Where these theories differ is in their accounts of what is best for one. Hedonism is a typical self-interest theory, distinguished from other versions by the claim that what is best for one is what gives one the greatest net balance of pleasure over pain. Gómez-Lobo thinks that Socrates is a self-interest theorist: Socrates believes that “a choice is rational if and only if it (...) is a choice of what is best for the agent”. Gómez-Lobo also thinks that Socrates holds that “something is good for an agent if and only if it is morally right” ; this distinguishes his theory from hedonism and other self-interest theories. Finally, Gómez-Lobo thinks that Plato defends Socrates’ in arguing at Gorgias 506c5-507a3 that “a being is good if and only if it has the order proper to it”: follows from and other Socratic principles. These three claims constitute the “foundations” of Socratic ethics mentioned in Gómez-Lobo’s title. (shrink)

I would like to challenge this view on various grounds, but before I do so, I wish to provide a broader setting for the problems discussed in this paper.

The author argues that individuality does not require indivisibility and that twinning can be explained as the reprogramming of blastomeres that already have begun to differentiate in accordance with the needs of the unified organism that originates at conception.

In a recent article published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, David DeGrazia criticized the two pivotal assumptions that underlie President Bush’s policy on funding stem cell research. Those assumptions are that we originate as single-cell zygotes at the time of conception and that we have full moral status as soon as we originate.In this paper, I would like to concentrate on the first of those assumptions and show in light of recent findings in embryological development that DeGrazia’s (...) criticisms have to be rejected. I shall save my discussion of DeGrazia’s critique of the second assumption for a later article that can take into account DeGrazia’s further elaboration of his position. (shrink)

Decisions of regulatory government bodies and courts affect many aspects of citizens’ lives. These organizations and courts are expected to provide timely and coherent decisions, although they struggle to keep up with the increasing demand. The ability of machine learning (ML) models to predict such decisions based on past cases under similar circumstances was assessed in some recent works. The dominant conclusion is that the prediction goal is achievable with high accuracy. Nevertheless, most of those works do not consider important (...) aspects for ML models that can impact performance and affect real-world usefulness, such as consistency, out-of-sample applicability, generality, and explainability preservation. To our knowledge, none considered all those aspects, and no previous study addressed the joint use of metadata and text-extracted variables to predict administrative decisions. We propose a predictive model that addresses the abovementioned concerns based on a two-stage cascade classifier. The model employs a first-stage prediction based on textual features extracted from the original documents and a second-stage classifier that includes proceedings’ metadata. The study was conducted using time-based cross-validation, built on data available before the predicted judgment. It provides predictions as soon as the decision date is scheduled and only considers the first document in each proceeding, along with the metadata recorded when the infringement is first registered. Finally, the proposed model provides local explainability by preserving visibility on the textual features and employing the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Our findings suggest that this cascade approach surpasses the standalone stages and achieves relatively high Precision and Recall when both text and metadata are available while preserving real-world usefulness. With a weighted F1 score of 0.900, the results outperform the text-only baseline by 1.24% and the metadata-only baseline by 5.63%, with better discriminative properties evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic and precision-recall curves. (shrink)

This article is a response to Frank Hindriks’ “Restructuring Searle’s Making the Social World.”.

The Schwarzschild solution has played a fundamental conceptual role in general relativity, and beyond, for instance, regarding event horizons, spacetime singularities and aspects of quantum field theory in curved spacetimes. However, one still encounters the existence of misconceptions and a certain ambiguity inherent in the Schwarzschild solution in the literature. By taking into account the point of view of an observer in the interior of the event horizon, one verifies that new conceptual difficulties arise. In this work, besides providing a (...) very brief pedagogical review, we further analyze the interior Schwarzschild black hole solution. Firstly, by deducing the interior metric by considering time-dependent metric coefficients, the interior region is analyzed without the prejudices inherited from the exterior geometry. We also pay close attention to several respective cosmological interpretations, and briefly address some of the difficulties associated to spacetime singularities. Secondly, we deduce the conserved quantities of null and timelike geodesics, and discuss several particular cases in some detail. Thirdly, we examine the Eddington–Finkelstein and Kruskal coordinates directly from the interior solution. In concluding, it is important to emphasize that the interior structure of realistic black holes has not been satisfactorily determined, and is still open to considerable debate. (shrink)

Quaestio, Volume 20, Issue, Page 534-538, January 2020.

In this study we expose and develop the core and principal themes of the philosophy of the last God in Martin Heidegger’s treatises written between 1930 and 1940. With this historical reconstruction it’s possible to observe and determine how his ontological research involves the subject of Godhood and how they evolve together in the period of time in which being is discovered and interpreted as Ereignis and as Anfang, but most importantly, when this idea becomes the object of an insistent (...) philosophical work that advances towards a more precise formulation and completion of the horizon of its problems, in a group of initially secret writings that aimed to provide an answer to the “question of being”. (shrink)

Ce texte est un complément qui aspire à dialoguer avec d’autres écrits proposés dans ce dossier. Les sources pour sa fabrication ont été, à l’image du campurreo, mélangées et métissées. Les auteurs Fernando Pairican, historien, et Elicura Chihuailaf, ont été une source particulièrement précieuse pour ces écrits.

Entre el Estallido chilien d’Octobre 2019 et les résultats du référendum pour ou contre le texte d’une nouvelle constitution paritaire, écologique et inclusive, le Chili aura été un centre d’attention pour des observateur·ices du monde entier. Ayant ouvert une voie institutionnelle aux aspirations collectives, ce processus avait réveillé des espoirs un peu partout. Après l’étonnante défaite de cette proposition, le pays semble avoir sombré dans un point aveugle des analyses internationales. Cette défaite temporaire du progressisme peut toutefois nous renseigner sur (...) des phénomènes sociaux, affectifs et politiques qu’on expérimente d’un bout à l’autre de la planète. (shrink)