Professionals, it is said, have no use for simple lists of virtues and vices. The complexities and constraints of professional roles create peculiar moral demands on the people who occupy them, and traits that are vices in ordinary life are praised as virtues in the context of professional roles. Should this disturb us, or is it naive to presume that things should be otherwise? Taking medical and legal practice as key examples, Justin Oakley and Dean Cocking develop a rigorous (...) articulation and defence of virtue ethics, contrasting it with other types of character-based ethical theories and showing that it offers a promising new approach to the ethics of professional roles. They provide insights into the central notions of professional detachment, professional integrity, and moral character in professional life, and demonstrate how a virtue-based approach can help us better understand what ethical professional-client relationships would be like. (shrink)

We present a formal system, E, which provides a faithful model of the proofs in Euclid's Elements, including the use of diagrammatic reasoning.

Computationalism holds that our grasp of notions like ‘computable function’ can be used to account for our putative ability to refer to the standard model of arithmetic. Tennenbaum's Theorem has been repeatedly invoked in service of this claim. I will argue that not only do the relevant class of arguments fail, but that the result itself is most naturally understood as having the opposite of a reference-fixing effect — i.e., rather than securing the determinacy of number-theoretic reference, Tennenbaum's Theorem points (...) towards a sense in which portions of our computational vocabulary should be regarded as model-relative. (shrink)

The authors examine the nature of the relationship between social science and philosophy and address the sort of work social science should do, and the role and sorts of claims that an accompanying philosophy should engage in. In particular, the authors reintroduce the question of ontology, an area long overlooked by philosophers of social science, and present a cricital engagement with the work of Roy Bhaskar. The book argues against the excesses of philosophising and commits itself to a philosophical approach (...) more deeply grounded in the social sciences. (shrink)

One formulation of the Categorical Imperative tells us to treat humanity as an end in itself. It has become common to think that ‘humanity’ (die Menschheit) here refers to some minimal power of rationality that is necessarily possessed by any rational agent, but I argue that this common reading is misguided. Instead, ‘humanity’ refers to a good will, the will of a being who is committed to moral principles. This good will reading of ‘humanity’ is not only suggested by passages (...) in which Kant specifically discusses humanity, but also is more consistent with the main ideas of Kant's ethics. (shrink)

The formal semantics that we have proposed for definite and indefinite descriptions analyzes them both as variable-binding operators and as referring terms. It is the referential analysis which makes it possible to account for the facts outlined in Section 2, e.g. for the purely ‘instrumental’ role of the descriptive content; for the appearance of unusually wide scope readings relative to other quantifiers, higher predicates, and island boundaries; for the fact that the island-escaping readings are always equivalent to maximally wide scope (...) quantifiers; and for the appearance of violations of the identity conditions on variables in deleted constituents. We would emphasize that this is not a random collection of observations. They cohere naturally with each other, and with facts about other phrases that are unambigously referential.We conceded at the outset of this paper that the referential use of an indefinite noun phrase does not, by itself, motivate the postulation of a referential interpretation. Our argument has been that the behavior of indefinites in complex sentences cannot be economically described, and certainly cannot be explained, unless a referential interpretation is assumed. It could be accounted for in pragmatic terms only if the whole theory of scope relations and of conditions on deletion could be eliminated from the semantics and incorporated into a purely pragmatic theory. But this seems unlikely. (shrink)

Beginning with Rachel Carson’s small book, The Sense of Wonder, I explore the moral significance of a sense of wonder—the propensity to respond with delight, awe, or yearning to what is beautiful and mysterious in the natural world when it unexpectedly reveals itself. An antidote to the view that the elements of the natural world are commodities to be disdained or destroyed, a sense of wonder leads us to celebrate and honor the more-than-human world, to care for it, to protect (...) its thriving. If this is so, then a sense of wonder may be a virtue, perhaps a keystone virtue in our time of reckless destruction, a source of decency and hope and restraint. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Should We Treat as an End in Itself? Value and Ends The Argument for the Humanity Formulation How Particular Duties Follow Final Thoughts Bibliography.

It was proposed that ethical evaluation of insurance claim padding behavior would be affected by characteristics of the policyholder, insurance agent, and company. These three factors were manipulated in written scenarios and the premise was tested in a factorial experimental design. No significant support was found for an effect of any of the three factors on ethical perceptions of claim padding. However, females found claims padding to be significantly less ethical than males. Given a claim scenario where the actual loss (...) was $500 and the claimed amount was $3000, subjects awarded an average of $986.91 on the claim. Many respondents were willing to compensate victims for intangible losses as well as tangible losses. (shrink)

The claim that everyone ought to be treated with respect is a familiar and widely accepted prescription in recent moral philosophy, often expressed as a principle of ‘respect for persons.’ I argue that this principle need not be justified by a claim that every person possesses some feature – dignity, autonomy, value, or the like – that makes her worthy of respect. There is abundant conceptual space within many approaches to moral philosophy, including a Kantian approach, to affirm a duty (...) of respect for all persons, while denying that the duty is justified by the respect-worthiness of every person. (shrink)

We analyze the pointwise convergence of a sequence of computable elements of L1 in terms of algorithmic randomness. We consider two ways of expressing the dominated convergence theorem and show that, over the base theory RCA0, each is equivalent to the assertion that every Gδ subset of Cantor space with positive measure has an element. This last statement is, in turn, equivalent to weak weak Königʼs lemma relativized to the Turing jump of any set. It is also equivalent to the (...) conjunction of the statement asserting the existence of a 2-random relative to any given set and the principle of Σ2 collection. (shrink)

Many UK public companies invest considerable resources in charitable donations and community involvement. Using semi‐structured interviews with public company officers, the author sought to investigate the motivations behind this activity. Was it undertaken because of an expectation of commercial benefit, out of a sense of obligation, or for other reasons? It appeared that public companies were increasingly anxious to make connections between corporate activity in the community and business activities. Public companies linked with local communities clearly felt a sense of (...) connection with them. Corporate officers were constantly dealing with the management of reputation, which was seen as a valuable business asset, and community links made this task easier. (shrink)

The Paradox of the Knower was originally presented by Kaplan and Montague [26] as a puzzle about the everyday notion of knowledge in the face of self-reference. The paradox shows that any theory extending Robinson arithmetic with a predicate K satisfying the factivity axiom K → A as well as a few other epistemically plausible principles is inconsistent. After surveying the background of the paradox, we will focus on a recent debate about the role of epistemic closure principles in the (...) Knower. We will suggest this debate sheds new light on the concept of knowledge which is at issue in the paradox – i.e. is it a “thin” notion divorced from concepts such as evidence or justification, or is it a “thick” notion more closely resembling mathematical provability? We will argue that a number of features of the paradox suggest that the latter option is more plausible. Along the way, we will provide a reconstruction of the paradox using a quantified extension of Artemovʼs [2] Logic of Proofs, as well as a series of results linking the original formulation of the paradox to reflection principles for formal arithmetic. On this basis, we will argue that while the Knower can be understood to motivate a distinction between levels of knowledge, it does not provide a rationale for recognizing a uniform hierarchy of knowledge predicates in the manner suggested by Anderson. (shrink)

This piece looks at the implications of Zizek's work on cyberspace for understanding the ideology of communicative capitalism. Emphasizing the role of the decline of symbolic efficiency in theorizing virtuality, the author extends the analysis into the field of practices known as Web 2.0. She argues that Zizek's work on drive opens up the internet as Real and employs it in a critique of Kittler and Hansen.

This paper extends the discussion of business ethics by examining the issue of corruption, its definition, the solutions being proposed for dealing with it, and the ethical perspectives underpinning these proposals. The paper’s findings are based on a review of association, think-tank, and academic reports, books, and papers dealing with the topic of corruption, as well as the pronouncements, websites, and position papers of a number of important global organizations active in the fight. These organizations include the World Bank, the (...) International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Transparency International, USAID, the United Nations, the International Chamber of Commerce, the Organization of American States, and the Council of Europe. Our discussion departs from prior analyses by adopting a Foucaultian theoretical framing and by incorporating insights found in the virtue ethics literature. Implications are provided for international business organizations. (shrink)

Abstract: Many astrologers attribute a successful birth-chart reading to what they call intuition or psychic ability,where the birth chart acts like a crystal ball. As in shamanism,they relate consciousness to a transcendent reality that,if true, might require are-assessment of present biological theories of consciousness.In Western countries roughly 1 person in 10,000 is practising or seriously studying astrology, so their total number is substantial. Many tests of astrologers have been made since the 1950s but only recently has a coherent review been (...) possible. A large-scale test of persons born less than five minutes apart found no hint of the similarities predicted by astrology. Meta-analysis of more than forty controlled studies suggests that astrologers are unable to perform significantly better than chance even on the more basic tasks such as predicting extraversion. More specifically,astrologers who claim to use psychic ability perform no better than those who do not. The possibility that astrology might be relevant to consciousness and psi is not denied, but such influences, if they exist in astrology,would seem to be very weak or very rare. -/- . (shrink)

The work of Foucault on liberal government, and that of his followers, is subject to two dangers. The first is to regard the critical character of liberalism (as governing through freedom) as providing safeguards against the despotic potentials of biopower and sovereignty. The second is to regard these heterogenous powers of life and death as somehow simply relocated or reinscribed within the field of liberal governmentality. The latter point is a major methodological error; the former closes the gap between the (...) analytics of government and the normativity of liberalism itself. By working through these dangers, our understanding of the ethos of liberal government is transformed. That ethos today requires us to link governing through freedom to the powers of life and death, the exercise of choice to the sovereign decision, the contract to violence, economic citizenship to moral discipline and obligation, and rights and liberties to enforcement. (shrink)

Though the name of Robert Mallet was once inevitably associated with the scientific study of earthquakes, it is less well known today. As part of an overdue reappraisal, this essay examines Mallet's major seismological projects and publications, emphasizing his theoretical contributions. Mallet's own claim to be a founder of modern seismology is upheld. Beyond that, however, he is also seen to be an important precursor of plate tectonics.

This collection of essays provides a reassessment of the question of sexual difference, taking into account important shifts in feminist thought, post-humanist theories, and queer studies. The contributors offer new and refreshing insights into the complex question of sexual difference from a post-feminist perspective, and how it is reformulated in various related areas of study, such as ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, biology, technology, and mass-media.

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is the forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character: this series is a much-needed focus for it.

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

The tension between external forces for better ethics in organizations, represented by legislation such as the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), and the call for internal forces represented by increased educational coverage, has never been as apparent. This study examines business school faculty attitudes about recent corporate ethics lapses, including opinions about root causes, potential solutions, and ethics coverage in their courses. In assessing root causes, faculty point to a failure of systems such as legal/professional and management (external) and declining personal values (...) (internal). We also found that faculty recommend external forces as a remedy more often than increased ethics educational coverage; we contextualize this finding with recent ethics education literature. We conclude by proposing that neither legislation nor ethics education alone are complete when addressing widespread unethical corporate acts and offer a multi-faceted approach to ethics educational opportunities. (shrink)

The nature of persons is a perennial topic of debate in philosophy, currently enjoying something of a revival. In this volume for the first time metaphysical debates about the nature of human persons are brought together with related debates in philosophy of religion and theology. Fifteen specially written essays explore idealist, dualist, and materialist views of persons, discuss specifically Christian conceptions of the value of embodiment, and address four central topics in philosophical theology: incarnation, resurrection, original sin, and the trinity.

This article investigates how historians have sought to foster empathic identification with victims in various narratives on the genocide of European Jewry. It takes historians’ extreme reactions to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executionersas a point of departure, and argues that most historical narratives fail to address how graphic writing about atrocities generates identification with both perpetrators and victims. The essay then analyses how some historians have sought, successfully or not, to overcome this problem.

This article addresses Michel Foucault's challenge to historians by historicizing his work on the history of sexuality. First, it summarizes recent scholarly literature about sexuality by historians and literary critics in order to clarify the theoretical and historical groundwork that has thus far been laid. It also places interdisciplinary scholarship in a framework historians will find meaningful. Second, the author argues that Foucault's work is the product of crises in male subjectivity originating after the Great War. In so doing, she (...) seeks to explain the absence of gender as a category of analysis in his own work, as well as his inability to account for the historical processes through which sexuality is produced. (shrink)

Although the history of the word ‘ geology ’ has often been referred to by those interested in the development of the science, that history has never been fully traced. An endeavor is made to do so here, taking the story at least as far as 1813, by which time the basic word had unquestionably been established in its modern form and meaning. Various claims as to who first gave the science its present name are also briefly examined.