The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in ‘social’ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being (...) materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of ‘just us’ – a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovators’ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics. (shrink)

Efforts to promote responsible conduct of research (RCR) should take into consideration how scientists already conceptualize the relationship between ethics and science. In this study, we investigated how scientists relate ethics and science by analyzing the values expressed in interviews with fifteen science faculty members at a large midwestern university. We identified the values the scientists appealed to when discussing research ethics, how explicitly they related their values to ethics, and the relationships between the values they appealed to. We found (...) that the scientists in our study appealed to epistemic and ethical values with about the same frequency, and much more often than any other type of value. We also found that they explicitly associated epistemic values with ethical values. Participants were more likely to describe epistemic and ethical values as supporting each other, rather than trading off with each other. This suggests that many scientists already have a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between ethics and science, which may be an important resource for RCR training interventions. (shrink)

When scientists act unethically, their actions can cause harm to participants, undermine knowledge creation, and discredit the scientific community. Responsible Conduct of Research training i...

Surgical devices are often marketed before there is good evidence of their safety and effectiveness. Our paper discusses the ethical issues associated with the early marketing and use of new surgical devices from the perspectives of the six groups most concerned. Health Canada, which is responsible for licensing new surgical devices, should amend their requirements to include rigorous clinical trials that provide data on effectiveness and safety for each new product before it is marketed. Industry should comply with all Health (...) Canada requirements to obtain licenses for new products. Until Health Canada requires effectiveness and safety data, industry should cooperate with physicians in appropriate studies before releasing new products and should make balanced presentations of all the available evidence. Surgeons should, before using a new surgical device, assess the evidence on its effectiveness and safety and ensure they are properly trained and competent in using the device. Surgeons should provide their patients with an evaluation of the available evidence and inform them about possible complications and the surgeon's level of experience with the new device. Patients, who should be given an honest evaluation of the available evidence, possible complications, and the surgeon's experience, should be encouraged to evaluate the evidence and information to their own satisfaction to ensure that fully informed consent is given. Health institutions, responsible for regulating practice within their walls, should review new devices for safety, effectiveness, and economic impacts, before allowing their use. They should also limit the use of new surgical devices to surgeons trained and competent in the new technology. Professional societies should provide guidance on the early adoption of new surgical devices and technologies. We urge all those involved in the development, licensing, and use of new surgical devices to aim for higher ethical standards to protect the health and safety of patients requiring surgery. The lowest acceptable ethical standard would require device manufacturers to provide surgeons with accurate and timely information on the efficacy and safety of their products, allowing surgeons and patients to evaluate the evidence (and the significance of information not yet available) before surgery. (shrink)

Legal theorists tend to focus on disagreement over the law, and yet a theory of law should also explain why lawyers and judges agree on the law as often as they do. To that end, this article first pins down a precise sense in which there can be pervasive agreement on the law. It then argues that such agreement obtains in the United States and likely in many other jurisdictions as well. Finally, it contends that Hartian Positivism offers a straightforward (...) explanation of this phenomenon and, indeed, a better explanation than rival theories, like Ronald Dworkin’s Law as Integrity or Scott Shapiro’s Planning Theory. Given the ubiquity of legal agreement, Hartian Positivism’s explanatory superiority in this regard is a strong, albeit still not dispositive, consideration in its favour. The broader lesson is that theories of law should give greater priority to explaining legal agreement than many theories now do. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to reflect upon the insistence on the use of gender neutral language and its implications for freedom of speech in Canada. There has been much controversy in Canada over recent legislation that adds gender expression and gender identity as protected grounds under the Canada Human Rights Act- i.e. Bill C-16, Jordan B. Peterson, Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has expressed his dissatisfaction with Bill C-16 and its implications for free speech. (...) Peterson argues that free speech is the mechanism by which democracies have survived over the centuries! He has further argued that the imposition of language on people can have devastating effects. For example, there is a clear distinction between legislation concerning What one ought not to say, such as screaming "fire!" in a crowded cinema and mandating speech about what one must say, such as compelling the use of gender-neutral pronouns. In order to understand the background behind Bill C-16, and in order to gather insights as to what is motivating certain cultural trends and what is at stake, I will examine two distinct philosophical approaches. First, will examine the thought of Jordan Peterson, who I would dub the "defender of objectivity." Second, I will present some of the views of the postmodern epistemologist, Jacques Derrida, Derrida can be dubbed the "wishful mortician of the absolute" for his methodology of deconstructionism. Through examining these distinct approaches, I wish to put a clearer finger on the complex issues surrounding Bill C-16, political correctness, and free speech. (shrink)

How should pragmatists respond to and contribute to the resolution of one of America's greatest and most enduring problems? Given that the most important thinkers of the pragmatist movement—Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead—said little about the problem of race, how does their distinctly American way of thinking confront the hardship and brutality that characterizes the experience of many African Americans in this country? In 12 thoughtful and provocative essays, contemporary American pragmatists connect ideas with (...) action and theory with practice to come to terms with this seemingly intractable problem. Exploring themes such as racism and social change, the value of the concept of race, the role of education in ameliorating racism, and the place of democracy in dealing with the tragedy of race, the voices gathered in this volume consider how pragmatism can focus new attention on the problem of race. Contributors are Michael Eldridge, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Judith M. Green, D. Micah Hester, Donald F. Koch, Bill E. Lawson, David E. McClean, Gregory F. Pappas, Scott L. Pratt, Alfred E. Prettyman, John R. Shook, Paul C. Taylor, and Cornel West. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Clinicians’ “Folk” Taxonomies and the DSM: Pick Your PoisonG. Scott Waterman (bio)Keywordsnosology, classification, diagnosis, psychopathologyWith attention turning to the process of formulating the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V; e.g., Kendler et al. 2008), the study by Flanagan and Blashfield (2007) of the similarities and differences between clinicians’ “folk” taxonomies and psychiatry’s official one is timely, and its lessons are in need (...) of analysis. In this commentary I first address questions raised by the existence of multiple de facto taxonomies, and by the characteristics of those taxonomies themselves, before focusing attention on the DSM diagnostic system and its attributes that make acceptance by its constituencies far less than complete. Although the aim of Flanagan’s and Blashfield’s study is explicitly descriptive rather than normative, it provides an important opportunity to examine the extent to which our taxonomies serve the purposes for which they were constructed—whether by experts or by clinicians.There are certainly reasons to expect significant deviations between clinicians’ everyday taxonomies and the official one. Perhaps the most glaring reason is the fact that—even if it were desirable—no one can be familiar with the enormous number of categories codified by the DSM. On the other hand, the remarkable hegemony of the DSM—in the education and training of physicians and clinical psychologists, in clinical communication, and in the ubiquitous administrative functions of billing and coding—makes such deviations at least somewhat surprising and in need of scrutiny and explanation. The first question, however, is whether one should be concerned by the existence (surprising or otherwise) of multiple taxonomies. Flanagan and Blashfield make the compelling case that, given the high rate at which Americans seek clinical attention for psychiatric problems, the stakes are commensurately high for our efforts at categorizing those problems in valid and useful ways. And the extent to which a gulf exists between the way psychiatry and clinical psychology are written about and taught on the one hand, and conceptualized and practiced by clinicians on the other, invites a multitude of problems—among which cynicism about our disciplines may be one of the most pernicious.At least as important as their finding of only moderate correlations between clinicians’ taxonomies [End Page 271] and that of the DSM are the characteristics of clinicians’ diagnostic systems themselves. One potentially major artifact of their methodology, however, must be borne in mind: the instruction to the clinicians in their study to “[p]ut together the diagnoses that have similar treatments…” (emphasis mine). Although they cite previous work (Flanagan and Blashfield 2006) in defense of the proposition that such instruction did not unduly influence their findings, it was certainly an avoidable potential problem, which itself likely reflects the history of our clinical disciplines in which the treatment cart frequently pulled the diagnosis horse. It is, therefore, not unlikely that clinicians’ taxonomies might emphasize treatment considerations even if they had not been directed to do so. The fallacious reasoning behind such intuitively appealing practice, however, must be exposed. The implicit assumption that treatment response is a proxy for other important characteristics of illnesses is predicated on the false proposition that our treatments exert their effects via similar mechanisms across the various indications for their uses, thus allowing us to infer from such responses that what was awry in the first place among the conditions for which a given treatment is effective must be closely related. Categorizing mania and trigeminal neuralgia together by virtue of their shared responses to anticonvulsant therapy, or considering autoimmune platelet deficiencies to be closely related to abdominal trauma due to the fact that each sometimes requires splenectomy, are examples of the potential results of acting on that false premise.Another parameter on which the clinicians in the current study based their nosologies—most explicitly by the “dimensional experts”—is the “environmental” versus “biological” one. Given that a coherent dichotomy would either distinguish environmental from genetic etiological factors, or would contrast psychological (i.e., subjective or first-person) from biological (i.e., objective or third-person) manifestations of illness, a taxonomy one of whose axes purports to represent an environmental/biological continuum cannot... (shrink)

In Beyond Rigidity I argue that, like ‘red’, ‘water’ can be used both as a singular term, and as a predicate – as illustrated by and. 1a. Red is a color. b. Bill’s shirt is red. 2a. Unlike gold, which is an element, water is a compound. b. The liquid in the glass is water. Just as ‘red’ designates a kind instances of which constitute the extension of the predicate ‘is red’, so ‘water’ designates a kind instances of which (...) constitute the extension of the predicate ‘is water’. This observation is used in analyzing examples of the necessary aposteriori like those in, which have the force of quantified conditionals in which both the grammatical subjects and ‘is H2O’ function as mass predicates, true of all instances of the associated kinds. 3a. Water is H2O. b. Ice is H2O. c. Water vapor is H2O. (shrink)

Both in church and culture, discussion of sexual orientation has far outpaced discussion of gender identity, leaving the churches with limited resources to respond to “bathroom bills” or to walk faithfully with transgender persons in their midst. This paper draws on the work of Rowan Williams and Sarah Coakley to argue for understanding gender transition as an eschatological formation ordered to the body’s grace. In critical conversation with Oliver O’Donovan, John Milbank, and David Cloutier, the paper offers a constructive, non-voluntarist (...) theological proposal for transgender affirmation in the service of participation in the triune life that exceeds gender. (shrink)

With the arrival of another wave of “boat people” to Australian waters in late 2009, issues of human rights of asylum seekers and refugees once again became a major feature of the political landscape. Claims of “queue jumping” were made, particularly by some sections of the media, and they may seem populist, but they are also ironic, given the protracted efforts on the part of the federal government to stymie any orderly appeals process, largely through resort to “privative clauses”. Such (...) clauses demonstrate the many ways in which human rights of those seeking asylum in far-off lands and are potential future immigrants, who often lack much-touted needed papers, yet who are for the most part genuine refugees, are subject to the slings and arrows of political fortune (and misfortune). Approaching the courts if treated unfairly or seeking a further decision as to your fate would seem one of the fundamental premises of human rights. Yet privative clauses—or attempts to ouster the jurisdiction of the courts and to insulate decisions from appeal—have become an increasingly frequent feature of the Australian migration legislation. With a seemingly watertight federal constitutional power set in stone since 1901, to deal with migration and aliens, and without the tempered contemporary update of a federal Bill of Rights, the Australian federal government has been able to narrow the grounds of judicial review in those contexts. We argue that the concerted efforts to deny such fundamental rights of appeal to those most in need of the full armoury of the protection of the law in a modern, affluent democracy, constitutes both a breach of their human rights and a breach of core constitutional principles such as separation of powers. Those principles may not be formally articulated in the text of the Australian Constitution, but in our view they are implicit in the constitutional arrangements, and hence we can conclude with the arguments of former Justice of the High Court of Australia, Michael Kirby, who asked—to whom does sovereignty truly belong? (shrink)

As privacy concerns among consumers rise, service providers increasingly want to provide services that support privacy enhancing technologies. At the same time, online service providers must be able to protect themselves against misbehaving users. For instance, users that do not pay their bill must be held accountable for their behavior. This tension between privacy and accountability is fundamental, however a tradeoff is not always required. In this article we propose the concept of a time capsule, that is, a verifiable (...) encryption with timed and revocable decryptability. The time capsule together with its related protocols offer support of privacy while retaining strong accountability. In our scheme an honest user may enjoy full anonymity, but dishonest users who do not pay their bill have their identity revealed. In contrast to existing revocable anonymity systems, our proposed scheme requires less trust in an external authority, while simultaneously making accountability easier (and less costly) to achieve. (shrink)

Bill Brewer presents an original view of the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of empirical knowledge. He argues that perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs if there are to be any determinate beliefs at all about particular objects in the world. This fresh approach to epistemology turns away from the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge and works instead from a theory of understanding in a particular area.

Part one attempts to diffuse five different forms of truth skepticism, broadly conceived: the view that truth is indefinable, that it is unknowable, that it is inextricably metaphysical, that there is no such thing as truth, and the view that truth is inherently paradoxical, and so must either be abandoned, or revised. An intriguing formulation of the last of these views is due to Alfred Tarski, who argued that the Liar paradox shows natural languages to be inconsistent because they contain (...) defective, and ultimately incoherent, truth predicates. I argue in response that on a plausible interpretation of his puzzling notion of an inconsistent language, Tarski’s argument turns out to be logically valid, but almost certainly unsound, since one of its premises can be seen to be indefensible. Similar results are achieved for other forms of truth skepticism. (shrink)

Evidence for a dichotomy between the planning of an action and its on-line control in humans is reviewed. This evidence suggests that planning and control each serve a specialized purpose utilizing distinct visual representations. Evidence from behavioral studies suggests that planning is influenced by a large array of visual and cognitive information, whereas control is influenced solely by the spatial characteristics of the target, including such things as its size, shape, orientation, and so forth. Evidence from brain imaging and neuropsychology (...) suggests that planning and control are subserved by separate visual centers in the posterior parietal lobes, each constituting part of a larger network for planning and control. Planning appears to rely on phylogenetically newer regions in the inferior parietal lobe, along with the frontal lobes and basal ganglia, whereas control appears to rely on older regions in the superior parietal lobe, along with the cerebellum. Key Words: action; apraxia; control; illusions; optic ataxia; PET; planning; reaching;. (shrink)

This article presents the results of a study that investigated the roles that one's money ethic, religiosity and attitude toward business play in determining consumer attitudes/beliefs in various situations regarding questionable consumer practices. Two dimensions of religiosity - intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness - were studied. A global scale of money ethic was examined, as was a global measure of attitude toward business. Results indicate that both types of religiosity as well as one's money ethic and attitude toward business were significant (...) determinants of at least some types of consumer ethical beliefs. (shrink)

Maureen Donnelly has recently argued that directionalism, the view that relations have a direction, applying to their relata in an order, is unable to properly treat certain symmetric relations. She alleges that it must count the application of such a relation to an appropriate number of objects in a given order as distinct from its application to those objects in any other ordering of them. I reply by showing how the directionalist can link the application conditions of any fixed arity (...) relation, no matter its arity or symmetry, and its converse(s) in such a way that directionalism will yield the correct ways in which it can apply. I thus establish that directionalism possesses the same advantage Donnelly's own account of relations, relative positionalism, has over traditional positionalist accounts of relations, which do not properly treat symmetric relations. I then note some advantages that directionalism has over its closest competitors. This includes Donnelly's relative positionalism, since directionalism is not, like relative positionalism, committed to the involvement of relative properties in every irreducibly relational claim. I close by conceding that, as Donnelly notes, directionalism is committed to the primitive relation of order-sensitive relational application. But I don't find this notion as mysterious as Donnelly does. I conclude that, even if one construes this feature of directionalism as a drawback, the two views are at worst at a draw, other things being equal, since this drawback is mitigated by the advantage directionalism has over relative positionalism. (shrink)

The present study uses cross‐cultural samples of marketing practitioners from two European Union (EU) nations (the United Kingdom and Spain) and China to examine the relationships between moral intensity, personal moral philosophies and ethical decision making. Additionally, cross‐cultural comparisons were made regarding intentions, personal moral philosophies and moral intensity. Results indicate that both samples tend to use the perceived harm construct (e.g. magnitude of consequences, probability of effect, temporal immediacy and concentration of effect) to determine intentions in situations involving ethical (...) issues. However, social consensus tends to be situation‐specific for both groups and proximity seems not to be used at all when making decisions in situations involving ethics. As for personal moral philosophies, idealism is only used by the EU sample; however, for both samples, the use of relativism depends upon the specific situation. (shrink)

In Rogues, Jacques Derrida once again examines some central concepts in political theory and ethics, in the context of the post-9/11world and the present American drive to reforge global hegemony. The book is important not only for what it says about the concepts of sovereignty, unconditionality, law, and justice, but also for engaging in an extended way with the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and especially Kant. Bill Martin argues that Derrida’s thought is vitally significant for radical politics. He compares (...) Rogues, as (arguably) Derrida’s last major work (to appear before his passing in October 2004) with Sartre’s last book, Hope Now. Lastly, Martin memorializes Derrida, whom he knew as teacher and friend, as “a kind and generous man who stood for many good things,” and hereflects on the philosophical trajectory that extends from Sartre to Derrida. (shrink)

History of science and philosophy of science have experienced a somewhat turbulent relationship over the last century. At times it has been said that philosophy needs history, or that history needs philosophy. Very occasionally, something entirely new is said to need them both. Often, however, their relationship is seen as little more than a marriage of convenience. This article explores that marriage by analyzing the citations of over 7,000 historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science. The data reveal that a small (...) but tightly-knit bridge does exist between the disciplines, and raises suggestions about how to understand that bridge in a more nuanced fashion. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Forster and Sober's [1994] solution to the curve-fitting problem. If their solution is correct, it will provide us with a solution to the New Riddle of Induction as well as provide a basis for choosing realism over conventionalism. Examining this solution is also important as Forster and Sober incorporate it in much of their other philosophical work (see Forster [1995a, b, 1994] and Sober [1996, 1995, 1993]). I argue that Forster and Sober's solution is (...) subject precisely to the problem they seek to solve. They provide a method of choosing among hypotheses but only at the cost of requiring that we have a method of choosing between different ways of conceptualizing the world. Thus the solution raises a new problem--the world-fitting problem. (shrink)

There is a wealth of evidence which indicates that arguments are not very efficient tools for changing minds. Against this skepticism, Novaes (2023) presents evidence that, given the right social context, arguments sometimes play a significant role in belief revision. However, drawing on Levy (2021), I argue that the evidence Novaes cites is compatible with the view that it is not arguments that change individual minds but instead belief outsourcing that occurs alongside the consideration of arguments.

Studies of the Early Modern debate concerning absolute and relative space and motion often ignore the significance of the concept of true motion in this debate. Even philosophers who denied the existence of absolute space maintained that true motions could be distinguished from merely apparent ones. In this paper, I examine Berkeley's endorsement of this distinction and the problems it raises. First, Berkeley's endorsement raises a problem of consistency with his other philosophical commitments, namely his idealism. Second, Berkeley's endorsement raises (...) a problem of adequacy, namely whether Berkeley can provide an adequate account of what grounds the distinction between true and merely apparent motion. In this paper, I argue that sensitivity to Berkeley's distinction between what is true in the metaphysical, scientific, and vulgar domains can address both the consistency and the adequacy problems. I argue that Berkeley only accepts true motion in the scientific and vulgar domains, and not the metaphysical. There is thus no inconsistency between his endorsement of true motion in science and ordinary language, and his metaphysical idealism. Further, I suggest that sensitivity to these three domains shows that Berkeley possesses resources to give an adequate account of how true motions are discovered in natural science. (shrink)

In 2011, Hibbard suggested an intelligence measure for agents who compete in an adversarial sequence prediction game. We argue that Hibbard’s idea should actually be considered as two separate ideas: first, that the intelligence of such agents can be measured based on the growth rates of the runtimes of the competitors that they defeat; and second, one specific (somewhat arbitrary) method for measuring said growth rates. Whereas Hibbard’s intelligence measure is based on the latter growth-rate-measuring method, we survey other methods (...) for measuring function growth rates, and exhibit the resulting Hibbard-like intelligence measures and taxonomies. Of particular interest, we obtain intelligence taxonomies based on Big-O and Big-Theta notation systems, which taxonomies are novel in that they challenge conventional notions of what an intelligence measure should look like. We discuss how intelligence measurement of sequence predictors can indirectly serve as intelligence measurement for agents with Artificial General Intelligence (AGIs). (shrink)

His first point is that true exhibits pathologies that smidget doesn’t. If smidget is undefined for Charlie, then the sentence Charlie is a smidget is undefined, and there is no basis for accepting either it or its negation. There is no pathology here; it is simply a case in which a sentence and its negation must both be rejected. With smidget there is no paradoxicality analogous to Liar sentences and no circularity corresponding to Truth Tellers. Gupta concludes that true and (...) smidget must be very different. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of a national study of the beliefs and perceptions of small business professionals concerning ethics within their company and business in general. The study examined their views on the relationship between success and ethical conduct as well as the extent and nature of ethical conflicts experienced by the respondents. Some comparisons are made with similar studies that have been conducted in the past. Respondents have the most ethical conflicts with customers and employees, and with regard (...) to honesty in contracts/agreements. Most also believe that ethical standards are lower than they were 10 and 20 years ago, primarily because society's moral standards are lower. Additionally, they believe that the behavior of top management has the most influence on decisions in ethical situations. Finally, consistent with prior studies, they believe that they have the most responsibility to customers, ahead of employees and stockholders. (shrink)

W.V.O. Quine's doctrines of the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference are among the most famous and influential theses in philosophy in the past fifty years. Although by no means universally accepted, the arguments for them have been widely regarded as powerful challenges to our most fundamental beliefs about meaning and reference — including the belief that many of our words have meaning and reference in the sense in which we ordinarily understand those notions, as well as beliefs (...) about the particular things meant and referred to in specific cases, such as my belief that in the past my son Brian often referred with affection to his pet rabbit Bigwig. If Quine's doctrines, and the arguments for them, are correct, then beliefs such as these cannot be accepted as true.One might expect that with consequences like these Quine's theses would widely be regarded as obviously incorrect. (shrink)

This volume explores the philosophical issues involved in the idea of petitionary prayer, where this is conceived as an activity designed to influence the action of the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good God of traditional theism. Theists have always recognized various logical and moral limits to divine action in the world, but do these limits leave any space among God's reasons for petitionary prayer to make a difference? Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation develops a new account of the conditions required for (...) a petitionary prayer to be answered by employing the notion of contrastive explanation. With careful attention to recent developments in metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory, Scott A. Davison surveys the contemporary literature on this question. He considers questions about human freedom and responsibility in relation to different views of divine providence, along with the puzzles inherent in Christian teachings concerning petitionary prayer. Davison develops new challenges to the coherence of the idea of answered petitionary prayer based upon the nature of divine freedom, the limits of human knowledge, and the nature of those good things that require a recipient's permission before they can be given. He proposes new defences, building upon careful analysis of the shortcomings of previous proposals and clarifying the issues for future debate. (shrink)

Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments that in order to create an effective and productive capitalist system, individuals must pursue interests of both the self and society. Despite this assertion, modern economic theory has become tightly focused on the pursuit of economic self-interests at the expense of other, higher order motives. This paper will argue that the tendency to employ such an egocentric strategy often generates externalities and inequalities that serve to detract (...) from the greater welfare of society. However, by tempering these economic self-interests with non-economically motivated considerations, this paper will suggest that individuals may create tremendous benefits to society, precisely as Smith outlined more than two centuries ago. In defense of this assertion, this paper will review an array of theoretical arguments and empirical findings that suggest that today''s entrepreneurs are not only seeking to satisfy both selfish and ethical motivations, but in so doing they are also contributing substantially to the overall welfare of society through job creation, wealth redistribution, and a lack of discrimination. As such, it appears that spirit and impact of the capitalist system that Smith envisioned is being realized through entrepreneurship. (shrink)

In this essay, I identify an important problem that has plagued virtue ethics since its inception and offer something of a solution. The problem to which I refer is the inability of many virtue ethicists to understand properly the relationship between law and virtue. This essay will unfold in four sections. First, we will discuss the causes of this inability among virtue ethicists to see clearly the connection between law and virtue. We will focus on the work of Rosalind Hursthouse (...) and argue that she does not adequately understand the political dimension of human nature. Second, we will draw upon both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, two crucial sources for virtue ethics, to understand how law functions as a necessary foundation for virtue; we will argue that law is a training in and support for virtuous action, while virtue in turn perfects the law by bringing out its full dynamism and intelligibility. Third, we will continue to discuss Aristotle’s understanding of law and virtue by appealing to his distinction between natural and legal justice, and we will offer an Aristotelian account of how one comes to know the natural law. Finally, fourth, we will develop points from the ancient craft analogy to virtue. Just as skillful activity is founded upon rules but transcends mechanical rule-following behavior, so too virtuous actions are founded upon law but transcend mere law-abiding behavior. This section shows that our account does not violate the so-called “non-codifiability” thesis, nor does it fall into law or rule “fetishism.”. (shrink)

What if a tree told a joke in the woods and there was no one there to hear it? Occasionally I watch The Ellen DeGeneres Show. I have appreciated Ellen as a comedian since she first came on the public scene, and one part of her talk show that I enjoy is the dancing in the opening segment, where Ellen dances to music played by a DJ, and she goes up into the audience and the overwhelmingly female audience dances with (...) her. I like to dance and I enjoy watching other people dance, but the Ellen dance segment also holds a special fascination for me, as there is a style of dancing I have observed over the last twenty-five years or so, a style that might as well be called “lesbian,” and which, if you don’t .. (shrink)

Research is now an increasingly heterogeneous activity involving an expanded range of new actors and stake-holders and employing an eclectic range of epistemologies and methodologies. The emergence of these new research paradigms — and, in particular, of so-called ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production that is highly contextualised and socially distributed — raises new and challenging ethical issues and also important questions about the autonomy of science and the social responsibilities of scientists.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for psychological egoism, i.e., the view that the ultimate motivation for all human action is the agent’s self-interest. Two principal opponents to psychological egoism are considered. These two views are shown to make human action inexplicable. Since the reason for putting forward these views is to explain human action, these views fail. If psychological egoism is the best explanation of human action, then humans will not differ as regards their motivations for their (...) actions. However, humans will differ as regards their knowledge of what is in fact in their self-interest. (shrink)

Marilyn Adams rightly pointed out that there are many kinds of evil, some of which are horrendous. I claim that one species of horrendous evil is what I call horrendous-difference disabilities. I distinguish two subspecies of horrendous-difference disabilities based in part on the temporal relation between one’s rational moral wishing for a certain human function F and its being thwarted by intrinsic and extrinsic conditions. Next, I offer a theodicy for each subspecies of horrendous-difference disability. Although I appeal to some (...) claims made by Marilyn Adams for this theodicy, I reject one particular claim. I deny that one must be aware that one participates in a horrendous evil when the horrific event occurs. To develop this point and its relevance for a theodicy for horrendous-difference disabilities, I engage with Andrew Chignell’s work on infant suffering. In doing so, I show that what partly motivates the claim is a time-bias, i.e., near-bias. By rejecting this time-bias, I show how it is possible, given post-mortem life, for persons with profound cognitive disabilities to participate in horrendous evils and how these might be defeated by God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.1 (2000) 94-96 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. Janet M. Atwill. London: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi + 235. $35.00 hard cover. Much like Weimar, Germany, American civil society has been buffeted for a half-century by both the lunatic right, hiding behind the mask of religious freedom, and (...) the lunatic left, sporting "pomo" (postmodern) tribal colors in the garb of academic freedom. In an earlier age, both might be burned at the stake; today, they are granted tax-exempt status. Readers seeking contributions to the life of the mind find their harangues both unpleasant and unrewarding. This book is unfortunately no exception.Atwill's title is deceptive. Her work is only marginally about either Aristotle or his rhetoric. She is more concerned to "reclaim" the liberal arts held hostage by the received tradition of Athenian democratic ideals. Vide: At issue are the character of the social identities of gender, race, and class and the nature of the social ties by which we are bound.... (3) Challenges to the... humanist paradigm... became the subject of... debates over cultural diversity, political correctness, and revisionist literary canons and historical accounts. Just what is at stake... is the type of subjectivity produced by the paideia of a multicultural curriculum (that subjects values, views of reality, and relationships to cultural and political authority. (12-13) So we are in for another salvo of pomo evangelism, with the usual suspects trotted out (Stanley Fish, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Edward Said) all with a view to rectifying the hegemonic white male biases of E. M. Cope, and rhetoric's four B's (Baldwin, Burnet, Burkhardt, and Hans Baron).Were Atwill offering a New Age update of Cope's commentary, her project might hold promise. Embers of such potential glow throughout the [End Page 94] book. Thus, her passing remarks on the relation of techne and theoria to Greek medicine (74-79) and to the cultural demands of what amounts to a plantation society (107-8) bear consideration. And her deconstruction of Cope's work as a managerial art grounded in associationist psychology (192-200) is especially insightful.Where the book disappoints is its clumsiness: it is simultaneously pedantic and superficial. On the first count, the author shows wide acquaintance with the standard commentaries on classical culture, but she seems often to be adrift in an ocean of secondary sources. For example, she is more likely to discuss Kennedy's treatment of Aristotle than Aristotle himself (58). And so it goes: Wright on Empedocles (90), Crane on Cicero (31), Woods on Cope (200). Indeed, it is difficult to tell from the book if the author's command of classical Greek extends much beyond Liddell and Scott.In addition to her overdependency on secondary sources, Atwill disregards historical contexts in pushing her quirky pomo readings to the fore. To cite only a few of these: For Plato, expertise is equivalent to function, and function determines one's place in the hierarchical order of the state. (30)... Physis (nature) or faculty equals function equals place in the social order. (141) [For Aristotle,] private property is the means of both self-expression and self-knowledge; knowledge of the self would be impossible without the procurement of private property. The subject and object distinction, usually made in the context of epistemology, is relocated at the center of the notion of private property. (184-85) If Protagoras, Isocrates, and Cicero were appointed deans... today, I doubt that they would institute a curriculum based on principles of radical democracy. (209) Perhaps Atwill would prefer to pick her dean from among Che, Mao, Pol Pot, or Lenin. While such eccentric inferences may fit the bill for cultural studies, they flunk the test of impartiality. This is a commodification of pedantry--recycling fragments of academic publications to advocate a partisan position. But advocacy resting on innuendo, resentment, and polite sneering can never meet the standards of serious scholarship... (shrink)