The recent speculation which I have in view is that which finds its inspiration in the great development of scientific discovery and scientific thought in our day. It would be impossible to range over the whole field. Moreover, the efforts which have been made to frame a comprehensive scheme of thought on the foundation supplied by science are those which are truly characteristic of our time. In recent years, science has been passing beyond the experimental stage, and also beyond the (...) limits which, in former times, made it departmental. The great conception of Evolution, and the intimate linking up of astronomy with chemistry and physics, and of chemistry and physics with physiology and biology, have quite altered our outlook on the universe. The mind of to-day passes from space-time to the electron, and from the electron to the structure of the cell, and from the cell to the living organism, with hardly a jolt. Not that the problems which mark the passage from stage to stage in this series have been solved, far from it; but that the different tages have so much the appearance of closing up into one continuous process that we seem to be approaching a view which will regard the whole as one unbroken development. No wonder that philosophic minds, among students and dreamers speculating on the mystery of the Universe, begin to think that some account of it, based on assured results of science, is becoming possible. (shrink)

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Research from the fields of criminology and social psychology suggests that the deterrent effect of security countermeasures is not uniform across individuals. In this study, we examine whether certain individual characteristics (i. e., computer self-efficacy) or work arrangement (i. e., virtual status) moderate the influence of security policies, security education, training, and awareness (SETA) program, and computer monitoring on information systems misuse. The results suggest that computer savvy individuals are less deterred by SETA programs and computer monitoring, while these countermeasures (...) are also less influential (from a deterrence perspective) on employees that spend more working days outside the office. Implications for both the research and practice of information security are discussed. (shrink)

All things considered, there are many public assistance recipients for whom there are compelling moral reasons to engage in welfare fraud. For many people, failure to defraud the welfare system, should they find themselves in a position to do so with impunity, would constitute a serious moral offense. This conclusion seems to fly in the face of prevailing notions of common sense. But this is misleading, since it is at the same time implied by principles that are widely embraced, assuming (...) a set of circumstances that can be readily shown to obtain in many cases. Under that set of circumstances, and given our affirmation of certain basic moral convictions, we cannot consistently blame the practitioner of welfare fraud, or excuse, without special justifications, the legal conformist. (shrink)

The question of what makes someone the same person through time and change has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. In recent years, the question of what makes ordinary or lay people judge that someone is—or isn’t—the same person has caught the interest of experimental psychologists. These latter, empirically oriented researchers have sought to understand the cognitive processes and eliciting factors that shape ordinary people’s judgments about personal identity and the self. Still more recently, practitioners within an emerging discipline, experimental (...) philosophical bioethics or “bioxphi”—the focus of this chapter—have adopted a similar aim and employed similar methodologies, but with two distinctive features: (a) a special concern for enhanced ecological validity in the examples and populations studied; and (b) an interest in contributing to substantive normative debates within the wider field of bioethics. Our aim in this chapter is to sample illustrative work on personal identity in bioxphi, explore how it relates to studies in psychology covering similar terrain, and draw out the implications of this work for matters of bioethical concern. In pursuing these issues, we highlight recent work in bioxphi that includes the perceived validity of advance directives following neurodegeneration, the right of psychologically altered study participants to withdraw from research, how drug addiction may cause one to be regarded by others as “a completely different person,” the effect of deep-brain stimulation on perceptions of the self, and the potential influence of moral enhancement interventions on intuitive impressions of a person’s character. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is fairly modest. I obviously do not claim that there has never been or could never be an instance of irrational or fallacious appeals to quotations from canonical sources in the marxist tradition. Instead, I claim that the practice of using quotations from canonical sources is not, as such, irrational. If we understand the epistemological infrastructure of the practice -- the rational underpinnings of it -- we can grasp how these citations appeal to the presumptive (...) authoritativeness of formulations that condense or concisely convey the core of insights that emerged from learning processes that the intellectual tradition of marxism has already traversed. The rational underpinnings of the practice include, first, the neo-Hegelian idea that we can justify a view we now hold by rationally reconstructing the insight-motivated learning process from which it emerged, and second, the convention that these rational reconstructions do not have to be elaborated in each insistence, but can be invoked in a short-form way, such as by citing the name of a decision or a concise statement of it (like a short quotation), as is common in the epistemologically similar practice of precedential reasoning in common law juridical justification. No claim is true just because of who made it; but a claim might be presumptively authoritative in cases where it was made at the end of a learning process, which has not been overtaken by a change in the circumstances or further learning. (shrink)

Introductory, by B. H. Streeter.--Love and omnipotence, by C. F. D'Arcy.--The survival of the fittest, by Lily Dougall.--Power, by Lily Dougall.--The defeat of pain, by B. H. Streeter.

In its opening chapters, ‘Languages of the Unheard’ offers a broad account of militancy as an aid to democracy and a principled response to the intransigence of elites and the unresponsiveness of institutions to the public interest. It proposes an understanding of militancy as a civic virtue and a contribution to democratic politics, relying on a normative conception of ‘autonomous democracy.’ In the second part of the book, this understanding of admirable militancy is applied to a wide range of protest (...) styles, including the nonviolent civil disobedience promoted by Gandhi and King, the disruptive direct action of strikes and other forms organized disruption, the rioting and black blocs of militant street protest, and the armed insurgency promoted by both urban and rural guerrilla groups. (shrink)