A case study is presented of the American Psychological Association (APA), as a health care organization that promotes human welfare. APA includes policies on human welfare in its Ethical Principles of Psychologists and even lists the advancement of psychology "as a means of promoting human welfare" on its letterhead. Nevertheless, APA has other policies and activities based on military and weapons work that appear to conflict with its promotion of human welfare. Although military work in and of itself may not (...) necessarily be problematic, work that contributes to people purposely being harmed or killed should be squared with the association's ethical guidelines. The results presented here show that this may not be the case: There currently appears to be little justification in the Ethical Principles for work intended to harm people. APA's active lobbying, research, and development for the military are documented here, in relation to an analysis of the Ethical Principles. APA's uncritical support for Operation Desert Storm is examined specifically, with regard to weapons technology and therapeutic treatment of U.S. soldiers on the battlefield. This one-sided support for victims of the war is not in keeping with a Hippocratic health care ethic to treat patients needing care, and to do so with neutrality and impartiality. Similarities to a historical example of nationalistic mental health ethics are discussed, with a review of the development of the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy and of the German Society for Psychology in the Nazi wartime effort and the Holocaust. The results here show similar deficiencies in APA's ethical standards, not the least of which is that the code applies to individual members but not to APA policies, committees, or activities. This article concludes with suggested criteria for the Ethical Principles that would at least (a) recognize the ambiguities in systematically developing and using weapons to hurt people and (b) provide an initial rationale of potential justifications. (shrink)

The willingness to trade off large but ill-defined future consequences for immediate work characterizes social problems such as environmental sustainability. This commentary argues that important applications of behavioral models of self-control are being overlooked in the experimental literature. Tying the experimental literature to longterm health, environmental, and other risks makes the experimental work more germane, and raises new research questions for experimental modeling.

As we navigate through life, we model time as flowing, the present as special, and the past as “dead.” This model of time—manifest time—develops in childhood and later thoroughly infiltrates our language, thought, and behavior. It is part of what makes a human life recognizably human. Yet if physics is correct, this model of the world is deeply mistaken. This book is about this conflict between manifest and physical time. The first half dives into the physics and philosophy to establish (...) the conflict’s existence; but it also argues that the claim that physics “spatializes” time is overstated. Rather, even relativity theory makes time special in deep and significant ways. The second half turns to psychology, biology, and more, seeking to understand why creatures like us develop manifest time. The novel picture that results is that manifest time is a natural reaction to the many cognitive and evolutionary challenges that we face. For subjects embedded in our circumstances, it makes sense to develop—even if fundamentally wrong. (shrink)

Over 50% of the world population will develop a psychiatric disorder in their lifetime. 1 In the realm of psychiatric treatment, two primary modalities have been established: pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Yet, pharmacological interventions often take precedence as the initial treatment choice despite their comparable outcomes, severe side effects and disputed evidence of their efficacy. This preference for medication foregrounds a vital re-examination of what it means to be invasive in medical treatments, namely in psychiatric care. De Marco _et al_ challenge (...) the standard account of invasiveness, presenting considerations that transcend the traditional criteria of physical intrusion. 2 Through case studies centred on treatments for schizophrenia and depression, we aim to (1) reinforce De Marco _et al_’s challenge to the standard account of invasiveness and (2) extend the dialogue to the moral imperative of redefining mental invasiveness. Our aims are to broaden the definition of mental invasiveness, aligning... (shrink)

Why does time seem to flow in one direction? Can we influence the past? Is only the present real? Does relativity conflict with our common understanding of time? How does time relate to free will? Could science do away with time? These questions and others about time are among the most puzzling problems in philosophy and science. In this exciting collection of original articles, eminent philosophers propose novel answers to these and other questions. Based on the latest research in philosophy (...) and physics, these essays will be enjoyable to anyone with a speculative turn of mind. (shrink)

In 2018, William Lane Craig and Erik J. Wielenberg participated in a debate at North Carolina State University, addressing the question: "God and Morality: What is the best account of objective moral values and duties?" Craig argued that theism provides a sound foundation for objective morality whereas atheism does not. Wielenberg countered that morality can be objective even if there is no God. This book includes the full debate, as well as endnotes with extended discussions that were not (...) included in the debate. It also includes five chapters by other philosophers who have written substantive responses to the debate - J. P. Moreland, David Baggett, Mark Linville, Wes Morriston, and Michael Huemer. The book provides crucial resources for better understanding moral realism and its dependence on, or independence from, theistic foundations. Key Features A valuable debate about whether or not God is the best explanation for objective morality, bringing together theists and atheists working on the same subject who normally are not in conversation with each other. Includes clear coverage of ontological and epistemological issues in metaethical theories, focusing on Divine Command Theory and Non-natural Robust Moral Realism. Engaging and accessible throughout, making the book well suited for undergraduate and seminary classrooms. (shrink)

Thomas Szasz famously argued that mental illness is a myth. Less famously, Szasz argued that since mental illness is a myth, so too is psychotherapy. Szasz’ claim that mental illness is a myth has been much discussed, but much less attention has been paid to his claim that psychotherapy is a myth. In the first part of this essay, I critically examine Szasz’ discussion of psychotherapy in order to uncover the strongest version of his case for thinking that it is (...) a myth. As we’ll see, this involves an understanding of psychotherapeutic interventions as treatments of psychopathological problems. In the rest of this essay, I turn to this directly and argue that psychotherapy has an important non-pathocentric dimension. I argue that we fail to appreciate the nature and variety of psychotherapy if we concentrate only on its pathocentric dimensions. Though I use Szasz as a stalking horse, the substantive topic is the nature of psychotherapy. This enquiry falls into the philosophy of psychotherapy as distinct from the philosophy of psychiatry and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This book argues that the moral quality of an act comes from the agent's inner states. By arguing for the indispensable relevance of intention in the moral evaluation of acts, the book moves against a mainstream, 'objective' approach in normative ethics. It is commonly held that the intentions, knowledge, and volition of agents are irrelevant to the moral permissibility of their acts. This book stresses that the capacities of agency, rather than simply the label 'agent', must be engaged during an (...) act if its moral evaluation is to be coherent. The author begins with an ontological argument that an act is a motion or a causing of change in something else. He argues that the source of an act's moral meaning is in the agent: specifically, what the agent, if aware of relevant facts around her, aims to accomplish. He then moves to a series of critical chapters that consider arguments for mainstream approaches to act evaluation, including Thomson's dismissal of the agent knowledge and volition requirements, Scanlon's arguments for a derivative relevance of intentions to permissibility, Frowe's "causal roles" of agents in the moral evaluation of acts, and Bennett's explicit defense of the objective approach. The book concludes by offering the author's preferred replacement for the objective approach, an Aristotelian-Thomist view of acts. Acts, Intentions, and Moral Evaluation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in ethics, just war theory, the ethics of self-defense, and philosophy of action. (shrink)

By developing an absurd counterfactual history, I show that many objections launched against Bohmian mechanics could also have been made against Newtonian mechanics. This paper introduces readers to Koopman–von Neumann dynamics, an operator-based Hilbert space representation of classical statistical mechanics. Lessons for quantum foundations are drawn by replaying the battles between advocates of standard quantum theory and Bohmian mechanics in a fictional classical history.

This chapter offers an interpretation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s idealism. Despite Leibniz’s frequent claim that the universe ultimately boils down to monads, he also sometimes appears to say that the world’s fundamental furniture includes extended, corporeal substances. Here, I examine Leibniz’s views about the relationship between monads and the material world, especially in connection with material bodies and corporeal substances.

To the surprise of many readers, Jürgen Habermas has recently made religion a major theme of his work. Emphasizing both religion's prominence in the contemporary public sphere and its potential contributions to critical thought, Habermas's engagement with religion has been controversial and exciting, putting much of his own work in fresh perspective and engaging key themes in philosophy, politics and social theory. Habermas argues that the once widely accepted hypothesis of progressive secularization fails to account for the multiple trajectories of (...) modernization in the contemporary world. He calls attention to the contemporary significance of "postmetaphysical" thought and "postsecular" consciousness - even in Western societies that have embraced a rationalistic understanding of public reason. Edited by Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, _Habermas and Religion_ presents a series of original and sustained engagements with Habermas's writing on religion in the public sphere, featuring new work and critical reflections from leading philosophers, social and political theorists, and anthropologists. Contributors to the volume respond both to Habermas's ambitious and well-developed philosophical project and to his most recent work on religion. The book closes with an extended response from Habermas - itself a major statement from one of today's most important thinkers. (shrink)

Is philosophy of film without theory an oxymoron or a family of non-, anti-, and a-theoretical approaches with which to engage in film-involving philosophical scholarship and understanding? The goal of this collection is to argue for the latter and to do so by example. By demonstrating a mere handful of the many ways in which philosophy of film without theory might be pursued, in tandem with the insights born of these methods, the volume’s contributors both implicitly and explicitly challenge the (...) academic assumption that engaging philosophically with film must be a theoretical activity. Indeed, they indicate the potential for championing without theory scholarship across the humanities for anyone whose projects and practices seek and celebrate humanistic understanding. -/- Contributors include Lucy Bolton, Carla Carmona, James Conant, Katheryn Doran. Maximilian De Gaynesford, Rob van Gerwen, John Gibson, Eran Guter & Inbal Guter, Colin Heber-Percy, Iris Vidmar Jovanović, Andrew Klevan, David Macarthur, Rupert Read, William Rothman, Constantine Sandis, and Sebastian Sunday. Films and television programmed discussed include Gravity, Le notti di Cabiria, Dunkirk, The Handmaid's Tale, Three Colours: Red and many more. -/- In addition there is an interview with Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey. (shrink)

Despite the promise of international collaboration and sharing by bringing together bioethicists from throughout the world at the 2024 IAB conference in Qatar, I will not be attending. The authors...

The Past Hypothesis is the claim that the Boltzmann entropy of the universe was extremely low when the universe began. Can we make sense of this claim when *classical* gravitation is included in the system? I first show that the standard rationale for not worrying about gravity is too quick. If the paper does nothing else, my hope is that it gets the problems induced by gravity the attention they deserve in the foundations of physics. I then try to make (...) plausible a very weak claim: that there is a well-defined Boltzmann entropy that *can* increase in *some* interesting self-gravitating systems. More work is needed before we can say whether this claim answers the threat to the standard explanation of entropy increase. (shrink)

It is an open question when procreation is justified. Antinatalists argue that bringing a new individual into the world is morally wrong, whereas pronatalists say that creating new life is morally good. In between these positions lie attempts to provide conditions for when taking an anti or pronatal stance is appropriate. This paper is concerned with developing one of these attempts, which can be called qualified pronatalism. Qualified pronatalism typically claims that while procreation can be morally permissible, there are constraints (...) on when it is justified. These constraints often concern whether an individual is motivated to procreate for the right reasons. For instance, if someone is not sufficiently concerned with the child’s future welfare, the qualified pronatalist will say that procreation is not justified. Moreover, David Wasserman says that this concern forms a role-based duty. That is, prospective parents have special duties to be concerned for the child’s future welfare by virtue of the role they occupy. In this paper, I argue that a proper examination of a prospective parent’s role-based duties entails that more is needed to justify procreation. Bringing a new person into the world leaves fewer resources for people who already need them, and the current size of the human population is unsustainable from a planetary point of view. Therefore, even if there is nothing wrong with procreation per se, the external condition of overpopulation, and its ensuing public health issues, plausibly gives rise to a role-based duty that prospective parents must account for when deciding whether to procreate. (shrink)

Social Theory and the Political Imaginary: Practice, Critique and History is an innovative work of synthesis, critique, and analysis. It presages a social theory perspective that recognises the constitutive significance of the political imaginary in modernity. Social theory's current dilemmas are explored through a series of interlinked asssessments of some of its recent substantial strands, specifically, Luc Boltanski's pragmatism and the wider 'practical turn', the perspectives of multiple modernities and global modernity, the outlook of social and political imaginaries, and critical (...) social theory. The political imaginary's reconfigurations are evident in the tensions of global modernity and original social theory interpretations are advanced of landmark instances of twenty-first century social contestation: the Hong Kong protests conditioned by threats to civil freedoms and a lack of self-determination, the radical democratic practices of anti-austerity movements contesting capitalist globalisation's injustices, and the inverted cosmopolitanism of the 2005 French Riots challenging the oppression and inequalities experienced by immigrant communities and marginalised youth. These incisive applications of social theory and complementary conceptual innovations illuminate the vicissitudes of social struggles, political forms, and theoretical perspectives. Similarly, reflection on the political imaginary is found to enable a necessary rethinking of the interrelationship of practice, critique and history. (shrink)

Multicultural Counseling: Responding With Cultural Humility, Empathy, and Advocacy is divided up into three sections. The first section is comprised of four chapters and explores the counselors' worldview. The second section is made up of 19 chapters that encapsulate the clients' worldview. The third section includes four chapters that demonstrate the application of multicultural counseling by broaching race and culture; providing culturally responsive assessment, diagnosing, and treatment planning; finding a supervisor who prepares advocates; and designing a culturally sensitive workplace. Each (...) chapter opens with questions designed to have counselors consider their beliefs, attitudes, and judgments and how they might show up in their work with diverse clients. Chapters include clinical case scenarios where students can conceptualize cases using empathy, humility, and advocacy. A distinguishing feature of this book is that it includes cultures that may have been overlooked elsewhere. The authors also sought to include various faiths in this text-such as agnosticism, atheism, and indigenous spiritual practices-with hopes that counselors' first experience with such would be in this book rather than on their couches with clients. Another chapter is dedicated specifically to transgender people. The goal of this book is to give learners the framework to begin to understand who the people are that they will be serving. (shrink)

Morality after Calvin' examines the development of ethical thought in the Reformed tradition immediately following the death of Calvin. The book explores a previously unstudied work of Theodore Beza, the Cato Censorius Christianus (1591). When read in conjunction with the works and correspondence of Beza and his colleagues (Simon Goulart, Lambert Daneau, Peter Martyr Vermigli, among others), the poems of the Cato reveal the theoretical underpinnings of the disciplinary activity during the period. Kirk M. Summers shows how the moral (...) fervor of the latter half of the sixteenth century had its genesis in a well-formulated theology that viewed a Christian's sanctification as a process of restoration to an original order created by God. 00. (shrink)

Der Verfasser legt einen Kommentar vor, der allen Lesern von Humes erkenntnistheoretischen Schriften hilfreich sein wird; auch werden zentrale Aspekte seiner Moral- und Religionsphilosophie vorgefuhrt und diskutiert. Dabei wird ein Gesamtbild der Philosophie Humes entwickelt und in den Zusammenhang des zeitgenossischen europaischen Denkens gestellt. Hier bekampft der Verfasser die gelaufige Interpretation, derzufolge Hume als der konsequente Zerstorer des Empirismus gilt; Humes Ziel sei eher die Widerlegung einer Weltauffassung, die fast allen Philosophen seiner Epoche, Empiristen und Rationalisten, gemeinsam war. In einem (...) Anhang wird sein Verhaltnis zur kritischen Philosophie Kants eingehender behandelt. Auf diese Weise soll nicht nur Studenten eine Einfuhrung in die Philosophie Humes, sondern auch Spezialisten grundsatzlich neues Material geboten werden. (shrink)

The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Philosophy series serves undergraduate college students who have had little or no exposure to philosophy, as well as the curious lay reader. Following this first primer volume, which introduces both the discipline and the topics of the remaining nine volumes, each handbook will usher the reader into a subfield of philosophy (see list of titles below), and explore fifteen to thirty topics in that subfield. Every chapter in each volume will use vehicles such as film to (...) facilitate understanding of philosophical issues; for example, the film Dead Man Walking may be used as an introduction to issues related to the death penalty. (shrink)

Researchers have raised concerns about teachers’ ability to embed nature of science in their science instruction, a complicated situation that is certainly impacted by the availability of adequate resources to assist K-12 science teachers. In light of the implementation of the ideas from the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards in the USA, this study sought to identify and evaluate resources aimed at guiding NOS instruction. A search of the National Science Teachers Association database for (...) Next Generation Science Standards -aligned instructional resources resulted in an analytical sample of eight lessons. All materials accompanying these lessons were analyzed for their representations of 10 NOS aspects. The evaluation of these materials revealed a prevalence of implicit, naïve representations in the sample lessons. Examination of the connections to NOS in these lessons leads to a set of recommendations to improve the quantity and quality of NOS representations in future NGSS-aligned instructional resources. The analytical approach used and the issues raised about the presentation and treatment of NOS in precollege lessons are of interest to the broader science education community. (shrink)

Memory and the Political Art in Plato's Statesman provides a novel reading of Plato's Statesman, while arguing that the philosophic and practical dimensions of memory create a framework for political life.

The farms in the LEGO Farm theme are immaculate. They feature sparkling clean tractors, pristine fences, and the complete absence of dirt. Whether it is on purpose, or a limitation based on the number of pieces that can be placed inside a box, LEGO Farm presents an agricultural utopia. The farms are smaller, less dependent on toxic inputs, and friendlier to animals than real‐life commercial farms. LEGO Farm often features animals that are clean and well fed. Some animals even appear (...) to be smiling, and that's appropriate considering that they are viewed as living creatures rather than commodities. With LEGO, kids and adults can imagine farms as they would ideally make them. The beauty of LEGO is that anyone can be a Master Builder, building their own MOCs. As a Master Farmer the possibilities for representing environmentally friendly agriculture are endless. (shrink)

The idea that human beings have a distinct moral worth—a moral significance over and above any moral worth, such as that may be, possessed by other animals—has a long history and has traditionally been taken for granted by philosophers and theologians. However, in a variety of quarters in recent philosophy, this idea has come into disrepute, seeming to indicate a mere prejudice in favour of our own species. For example, Peter Singer has argued that such a position is mere speciesism, (...) a prejudice of a kind with racism and sexism in that it involves making moral distinctions between our own and other species that cannot be morally justified. What on such views is needed to justify any such distinction is a difference in terms of the morally relevant properties possessed by our own species as compared with other species. I will call this view the moral property view. Insofar as other species share with us morally relevant properties, for example the capacity to suffer cognitive ability and so on, it is mere prejudice not to accept moral requirements with respect to them as we do with respect to our own species. While on the surface such a view may seem morally enlightened, it indicates what will seem to many problematic moral judgments with respect to severely disabled human beings. In this paper, I will respond to these concerns by suggesting a different basis for the idea of human moral distinctiveness, one that draws on recent work by Wittgensteinian moral philosophers and which denies what I called above the property view. According to this view, while our shared life with other animals involves the recognition of their moral significance, our shared life with other human beings involves recognising that human beings as human beings have a distinctive moral value. (shrink)

How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.

This chapter contains sections titled: Relationism, Substantivalism and Space‐time Conventionalism about Space‐time Black Holes and Singularities Horizons and Uniformity Conclusion.

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz (1983) More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic. ...

How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of (...) Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. (shrink)

The New World reveals a warning of the great change coming to our world and a prophetic vision of a future world for which we must prepare. It is a warning from God about humanity's rapid depletion and degradation of the Earth and the urgent action we must take, individually and collectively, to both restore our planet and prepare for the future.

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological nature (...) of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

The counterfactual mental state of negligent criminal activity invites skepticism from those who see mental states as essential to responsibility. Here, I offer a revision of the mental state of criminal negligence, one where the mental state at issue is actual and not merely counterfactual. This revision dissolves the worry raised by the skeptic and helps to explain negligence’s comparatively reduced culpability.

Some platonists truly agonize over the ontological commitments which their platonism demands of them. Peter van Inwagen, for example, confesses candidly,I am happy to admit that I am uneasy about believing in the existence of ‘causally irrelevant’ objects. The fact that abstract objects, if they exist, can be neither causes or [sic] effects is one of the many features of abstract objects that make nominalism so attractive. I should very much like to be a nominalist, but I don't see how (...) to be one …. (shrink)

This paper will examine the relation between philosophical thought and the various milieus in which such thought takes place using the late work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It will argue that their assessment of this relation involves a rearticulation of philosophy as an historiophilosophy. To claim that Deleuze and Guattari promote such a form of philosophy is contentious, as their work is often noted for implementing an ontological distinction between becoming and history, whereby the former is associated with (...) the act of creation and the latter with retrospective representations of this creative process. Furthermore, when elaborating on the creative nature of philosophical thought, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to philosophy as a 'geophilosophy' that is in contrast to history. Nevertheless, this paper will demonstrate that far from abandoning the category of history, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the relations between philosophical thought and relative milieus suggests to us an historical ontology and methodology that is a critical part of philosophy’s nature. (shrink)

Drunk drivers and other culpably incapacitated wrongdoers are often taken to pose a problem for reasons-responsiveness accounts of moral responsibility. These accounts predicate moral responsibility upon an agent having the capacities to perceive and act upon moral reasons, and the culpably incapacitated wrongdoers lack exactly those capacities at the time of their wrongdoing. Many reasons-responsiveness advocates thus expand their account of responsibility to include a tracing condition: The culpably incapacitated wrongdoer is blameworthy despite his incapacitation precisely because he is responsible (...) for becoming incapacitated. As some skeptics have suggested, it is not clear that we need tracing. Here, however, I make a stronger case against tracing: I show that tracing gets things wrong. I consider a new sort of case, the case of the Odysseus agent, whose incapacitation is non-culpable (sometimes merely permissible and sometimes praiseworthy). Tracing would have us hold responsible and therefore blame unlucky Odysseus agents, Odysseus agents who commit a wrongdoing in the throes of their non-culpably induced incapacitation. But we should not hold these unlucky Odysseus agents responsible for their incapacitated wrongdoing. Because tracing gets these cases wrong, we should reject tracing. (shrink)

Informed consent documents are central to the informed consent process and are required for participation in clinical trials in the U.S. The primary purpose of the document is “to assist a prospect...

In order to determine whether a particular course of conduct is ethically permissible it is important to have a concept of what it means to be harmed. The dominant theory of harm is the counterfactual account, most famously proposed by Joel Feinberg. This determines whether harm is caused by comparing what actually happened in a given situation with the ‘counterfacts’ i.e. what would have occurred had the putatively harmful conduct not taken place. If a person's interests are worse off than (...) they otherwise would have been, then a person will be harmed. This definition has recently faced challenges from bioethicists such as John Harris, Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu who, believing it to be severely flawed, have proposed their own alternative theories of the concept. In this article I will demonstrate that the shortcomings Harris, Kahane and Savulescu believe are present in Feinberg's theory are illusory and that it is their own accounts of harm that are fraught with logical errors. I maintain that the arguments presented to refute Feinberg's theory not only fail to achieve this goal and can be accommodated within the counterfactual account but that they actually undermine the theories presented by their respective authors. The final conclusion will be that these challenges are misconceived and fail to displace the counterfactual theory. (shrink)