Control of our own beliefs is allegedly required for the truth of epistemic evaluations, such as S ought to believe that p , or S ought to suspend judgment (and so refrain from any belief) whether p . However, we cannot usually believe or refrain from believing at will. I agree with a number of recent authors in thinking that this apparent conflict is to be resolved by distinguishing reasons for believing that give evidence that p from reasons that make (...) it desirable to believe that p whether or not p is true. I argue however that there is a different problem, one that becomes clearer in light of this solution to the first problem. Someone’s approval of our beliefs is at least often a non-evidential reason to believe, and as such cannot change our beliefs. Ought judgments aim to change the world. But ‘ought to believe’ judgments can’t do that by changing the belief, if they don’t give evidence. So I argue that we should instead regard epistemic ought judgments as aimed mainly at influencing assertions that express the belief and other actions based on the belief, in accord with recent philosophical claims that we have epistemic norms for assertion and action. (shrink)

At Epistles 2.2.87–9 Horace introduces an argument against writing poetry based on the unpleasant mutual admiration required in poetic society with an anecdote about an orator and a jurisconsult: †frater erat Romae† consulti rhetor, ut alter alterius sermone meros audiret honores, Gracchus ut hic illi, foret huic ut Mucius ille.

At Epistles 2.2.87–9 Horace introduces an argument against writing poetry based on the unpleasant mutual admiration required in poetic society with an anecdote about an orator and a jurisconsult: †frater erat Romae† consulti rhetor, ut alter alterius sermone meros audiret honores, Gracchus ut hic illi, foret huic ut Mucius ille.

During spring of 2020, environmental ethics students at a medium sized metropolitan university in the Southeastern United States were asked to read and comment on classic essays from Robert Heilbroner and Garrett Hardin, essays regarding our responsibilities towards future generations. In general, students seemed to hold more with Heilbroner’s stance, which left room for compassion, while condemning Hardin’s harshness. Students were then asked to provide written responses stating whether they would personally sacrifice their eventual retirement in order to stop COVID-19 (...) and the reasons for their views. Responses were analyzed and categorized to detect inconsistencies between students’ described views and their willingness to personally sacrifice for the sake of others. Almost 72% of respondents asserted that they would be willing to intervene to stop the novel coronavirus by sacrificing their retirement. A fair number of respondents that stated they would sacrifice said that they would do so because they would benefit personally from the avoidance of guilt and/or from the opportunity to feel good about themselves, suggesting that even seemingly selfless behaviors are sometimes driven by egoistic motivations. Forty percent of all respondents held inconsistent views. Most notably, a number of students condemned Hardin for his lack of compassion, yet were not willing to act compassionately themselves. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the claim that parallel distributed processing (PDP) networks are autonomous learning systems. A PDP model of a simple distributed associative memory is considered. It is shown that the 'generic' PDP architecture cannot implement the computations required by this memory system without the aid of external control. In other words, the model is not autonomous. Two specific problems are highlighted: (i) simultaneous learning and recall are not permitted to occur as would be required of an autonomous system; (...) (ii) connections between processing units cannot simultaneously represent current and previous network activation as would be required if learning is to occur. Similar problems exist for more sophisticated networks constructed from the generic PDP architecture. We argue that this is because these models are not adequately constrained by the properties of the functional architecture assumed by PDP modelers. It is also argued that without such constraints, PDP researchers cannot claim to have developed an architecture radically different from that proposed by the Classical approach in cognitive science. (shrink)

Reply in Book Symposium on James Ladyman, Don Ross: 'Everything must go: metaphysics naturalized', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

When a debate is misplaced, new problems are cast in the distorting language of the settled problems of the past while, at the same time, the participants in the debate are assimilated into communities of thought with which they have little in common. The result is that their work, and our response to it, is distorted. This article contends that the polemical debate between James Gustafson (and his followers) and Stanley Hauerwas (and his followers) is just such a misplaced debate. (...) In fact, both can be shown to be Troeltschian historicists, and it is only when this commonality is recognized that their very real and deep differences can be rightly appreciated as emblematic of the true sources of disagreement at the growing edge of the discipline. (shrink)

In the target article “Universal and Uniform Protections of Human Subjects in Research,” Shamoo and Schwartz (2008) argue for state action to address the fact that significant numbers of human-rese...

The issue of genetic inheritance, and particularly the contradictory rights of donors, recipients and donor offspring as to the disclosure of donor identities, is ethically complicated. Donors, donor offspring and parents of donor offspring may appeal to individual rights for confidentiality or disclosure within legal systems based on liberal rights discourse. This paper explores the ethical issues of non-disclosure of genetic inheritance by contrasting two principle models used to articulate the problem—liberal and communitarian ethical models. It argues that whilst the (...) latter provides a more constructive avenue to providing an ethics for donation than the competing and contradictory positions represented in a liberal rights approach, it raises issues of ethical judgement and authority that remain problematic. This ethical discussion is supported by a field study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, exploring the perceptions and experiences of recipients of donor sperm and their partners towards donor anonymity. The field study provides the empirical basis of an argument for making ethical judgements on the grounds of the community good rather than individual rights, that nevertheless recognises that both are inherently problematic. (shrink)

Although Thomas Aquinas assumes that all knowledge begins in the senses, he maintains that substantial forms and the essences of material things are not apparent to the senses. Clearly, the noetic of abstraction per se cannot account for our knowledge of them. Thomas often says that they are “unknown in themselves” but “become known” through their accidents. The author argues that properties, or proper accidents — namely, accidents that are interconvertible with a subject — play a crucial role in this (...) obscure area of Thomas’s thought. Beginning with an examination of the property in logic , the author goes on to examine Thomas’s accounts of heat as a property of fire, and the powers of the soul as properties of its essence. Thomas maintains that such properties flow from the essence by a causal relation that he calls resultatio, but that their coexistence with the essence is absolutely necessary in a quasi-logical manner . Finally, the author suggests that in Thomas’s view, accidents really do make the hidden quiddities of their subjects known: knowing created things through their accidents is not at all like knowing God through creatures. (shrink)

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

To better illuminate aspects of stress that are relevant to the moral domain, we present a definition and theoretical model of “moral stress.” Our definition posits that moral stress is a psychological state born of an individual’s uncertainty about his or her ability to fulfill relevant moral obligations. This definition assumes a self-and-others relational basis for moral stress. Accordingly, our model draws from a theory of the self (identity theory) and a theory of others (stakeholder theory) to suggest that this (...) uncertainty arises as a manager faces competing claims for limited resources from multiple stakeholders and/or across multiple role identities. We further propose that the extent to which the manager is attentive to the moral aspects of the claims (i.e., moral attentiveness) moderates these effects. We identify several consequences of managerial moral stress and discuss theoretical, empirical, and practical implications of our approach. Most importantly, we argue that this work paves an important path for considering stress through the lens of morality. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, academic-industrial collaborations and technology transfer have played an increasingly prominent role in the biomedical sciences. These relationships can speed the delivery of innovative drugs and medical technologies to clinical practice, creating important public health benefits as well as income for universities and their faculty. At the same time, they raise ethical concerns, particularly when research involves human subjects in clinical trials. Lapses in oversight of industry sponsored clinical trials at universities, and especially patient deaths in (...) a number of trials, have brought these issues into the public spotlight and have led the federal government to intensify its oversight of clinical research. The leadership of Harvard Medical School convened a group of leaders in academic medicine to formulate guidelines on individual financial conflicts of interest. They and other groups are working to formulate a national consensus on this issue. (shrink)

This collection investigates the current state of play in studies informed by Marxism. It includes a magisterial essay on state theory by Bob Jessop, a discussion of fundamental socialist values using analytical Marxism by Alan Carling, an introduction to Fromm's humanist Marxism by Lawrence Wilde, and provocative pieces on Marxism and ecology, Marxism and feminism, the debate between Marxists and post-Marxists, the democratic Marxism of Hal Draper, the confrontation between Marxism and Liberalism, and Marxism's place in the history of political (...) thought. (shrink)

Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

In most decision-making situations, there is a plethora of information potentially available to people. Deciding what information to gather and what to ignore is no small feat. How do decision makers determine in what sequence to collect information and when to stop? In two experiments, we administered a version of the German cities task developed by Gigerenzer and Goldstein (1996), in which participants had to decide which of two cities had the larger population. Decision makers were not provided with the (...) names of the cities, but they were able to collect different kinds of cues for both response alternatives (e.g., “Does this city have a university?”) before making a decision. Our experiments differed in whether participants were free to determine the number of cues they examined. We demonstrate that a novel model, using hierarchical latent mixtures and Bayesian inference (Lee & Newell, 2011) provides a more complete description of the data from both experiments than simple conventional strategies, such as the take–the–best or the Weighted Additive heuristics. (shrink)

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States housed 2.3 million inmates in 7,147 incarceration structures that, because of age, overcrowding, and poor ventilation, exacerbated the spread of airborne infections. The flow of individuals into and out of correctional facilities compounded the challenges in keeping them COVID-free. This article focuses on the work of the health and administrative leadership, in partnership with judicial and police personnel, to prevent COVID-19 inside the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail and to mitigate its spread when the (...) jail population and/or its staff became infected. From the onset, implementing science-based policies and upholding the human right to health and healthcare for all were priorities. (shrink)

The idea that democracy is under threat, after being largely dormant for at least 40 years, is looming increasingly large in public discourse. Complex systems theory offers a range of powerful new tools to analyse the stability of social institutions in general, and democracy in particular. What makes a democracy stable? And which processes potentially lead to instability of a democratic system? This paper offers a complex systems perspective on this question, informed by areas of the mathematical, natural, and social (...) sciences. We explain the meaning of the term 'stability' in different disciplines and discuss how laws, rules, and regulations, but also norms, conventions, and expectations are decisive for the stability of a social institution such as democracy. (shrink)

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

We report on the small-scale (0.5 13 h - 1M, a large-scale bias of ~2.0 and a satellite fraction of 12 ± 2 per cent. Thus, these galaxies occupy haloes with average masses in between those of the higher redshift BOSS CMASS sample and the original SDSS I/II luminous red galaxy sample © 2012 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society © doi:10.1093/mnras/sts314.

Abstract: When things go badly, we notice that something is amiss, figure out what went wrong and why, and attempt to repair the problem. Artificial systems depend on their human designers to program in responses to every eventuality and therefore typically don’t even notice when things go wrong, following their programming over the proverbial, and in some cases literal, cliff. This article describes our work on the Meta-Cognitive Loop, a domain-general approach to giving artificial systems the ability to notice, assess, (...) and repair problems. The goal is to make artificial systems more robust. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Burma’s Healthcare Under Fire: My Experience as an Exiled Medical ProfessionalP. P. KyawI used to work as a medical doctor in a less developed state than many big cities in Burma1 that experienced prolonged civil wars and current similar atrocities decades before the urban areas of the country experienced them. Before everything started, I was responsible for the medical management of the most vulnerable communities and had been struggling (...) with pandemic-related medical activities. Those were the happiest years of my life. I was with one of the best international organizations, where every effort I made was directly delivered to the patients with no unnecessary paperwork. The system was efficient, my colleagues were supportive, and I had a good work-life balance. I supported my family and whoever needed temporary financial support, played music weekly, met good friends who I hung out with every weekend, and [End Page 164] found hobbies like gardening and crocheting. I was content and happy. I even postponed my plans to get registered as a doctor in the Western world.Before moving to this beautiful ethnic state in 2019, I previously worked as a government medical doctor in Yangon, the capital. As much as I loved working in those civilian hospitals, I could not support myself with a monthly pay of $100-$150 USD. It was a hard decision to leave the service because it meant I could not pursue the medical specialty that I had always longed for and had to leave like-minded supportive colleagues. In Myanmar, unless you are a civil servant, you cannot pursue further clinical specialties. However, after leaving the government’s service to work in humanitarian medical assistance in hard-to-reach areas of Burma, I learned that life is still beautiful outside my comfort zone, until February 2021 when the coup began. Democratically elected members of the country’s ruling party were overthrown by the military, which then bestowed power in a military junta.I expected the election prior to the coup in November 2020 to be an uphill battle for Burma, but nothing more. I was still in denial when I first heard the news from one of the town’s NGO staff. The person had to travel on a motorbike to inform everyone that the junta had staged the coup. No telephone or internet was working at that time. My colleagues and I cried in our office, saying, “We are so young, and the future is still ahead. I don’t think this is going to last long. Maybe it will be over in a few days or, at most, a few weeks.” Once the peaceful protests started nationwide, my friends and I provided medical cover for the protesters, initially for minor medical problems such as low sugar, low blood pressure, injuries from accidental minor slips and falls, etc. Never in my life had I imagined that I would be taking care of bullet wounds and people injured by live rounds. While learning about gunshot wounds in forensic medicine, I thought, “Oh, this is not going to be very useful because Burma is not America, and I am not going there.” Then suddenly, it became too real and more useful than I would’ve liked it to be.I always think back to one especially bloody day when many people in the town were shot with live rounds. We assisted many patients. Usually, we would go around with the protest groups until they were over in the late afternoon. The protesters were always peaceful. There were no riots, no harmful acts, or vandalism. Only when the protesters were cruelly dispersed with tear gas, high-pressure pumps, rubber bullets, and live rounds (to the head) did they decide to defend themselves while still making their voices heard. The only defenses people had to counteract the live rounds were things like metal covers, firecrackers, and slingshots.One afternoon in March 2021, my team and I took an early break for lunch—unaware that some people would lose their lives that afternoon. We followed the local protests through Facebook Live while having lunch and started to hear firecracker sounds. A few seconds later, we knew... (shrink)