Many aspects relating to the conduct of mediation are left to mediator choice, but mediators often lack adequate guidance on how their discretion ought to be exercised. In this book, Omer Shapira identifies the ethical norms that govern mediators' conduct. Adopting a professional ethics perspective on the basis of role-morality and applying it to a core definition of mediators' role, Shapira argues that all mediators are placed in ethical relationships with mediation parties, the mediation profession, the public, and (...) their employers or principals that produce ethical obligations. (shrink)

In this book, best-selling author and mathematician Haim Shapira presents an introduction to mathematical theories which deal with the most beautiful concept ever invented by humankind: infinity. Written in clear, simple language and aimed at a lay audience, this book also offers some strategies that will allow readers to try their ability at solving truly fascinating mathematical problems. Infinity is a deeply counter-intuitive concept that has inspired many great thinkers. In this book we will meet many sages, both familiar (...) and unfamiliar: Zeno and Pythagoras, Georg Cantor and Bertrand Russell, Sofia Kovalevskaya and Emmy Noether, al-Khwarizmi and Euclid, Sophie Germain and Srinivasa Ramanujan. The world of infinity is inhabited by many paradoxes, and so is this book: Zeno paradoxes, Hilbert's "Infinity Hotel", Achilles and the gods paradox, the paradox of heaven and hell, the Ross-Littlewood paradox involving tennis balls, the Galileo paradox and many more. Aimed at the curious but non-technical reader, this book refrains from using any fearsome mathematical symbols. It uses only the most basic operations of mathematics: adding, subtracting, multiplication, division, powers and roots - that is all. But that doesn't mean that a bit of deep thinking won't be necessary and rewarding. Writing with humour and lightness of touch, Haim Shapira banishes the chalky pallor of the schoolroom and offers instead a truly thrilling intellectual journey. Fasten your seatbelt - we are going to Infinity, and beyond! (shrink)

This book takes a unique organizational approach towards understanding the concept of ethics in educational systems. It provides a global perspective and connects theory and praxis through team-based simulations, case studies and scenarios, thus presenting an integrative approach towards tackling teachers' withdrawal behaviors.

The Covid-19 pandemic that entered our lives suddenly in 2020 compelled higher education systems throughout the world to transfer to online learning, including online evaluation. A severe problem of online evaluation is that it enables various technological possibilities that facilitate students' unethical behaviors. The research aimed to investigate these behaviors, as well as the reasons for their appearance, as practiced in exams held for the first time during the Covid-19 pandemic, and to elicit students' and lecturers' perceptions of students' academic (...) dishonesty during this period. The sample included 81 students and 50 lecturers from several Israeli colleges and universities. The findings expand extant knowledge on academic dishonesty, identifying significant differences between the perceptions of students and lecturers concerning attitudes towards online exams and the reasons for dishonest behaviors. The findings among the students also indicate that younger students and Arab students tended to cheat more in online exams. Moreover, the findings indicated a lack of mutual trust between students and lecturers with regard to academic dishonesty, a deep distrust that will probably continue even after the Covid-19 crisis. This last finding should be a cause of concern for higher education policy-makers, affecting future policies for improving lecturer-student relations, especially during crises. Recommendations are proposed for addressing academic dishonesty in exams in general and during the pandemic in particular. (shrink)

The War Inside is a groundbreaking history of the contribution of British psychoanalysis to the making of social democracy, childhood, and the family during World War II and the postwar reconstruction. Psychoanalysts informed understandings not only of individuals, but also of broader political questions. By asserting a link between a real 'war outside' and an emotional 'war inside', psychoanalysts contributed to an increased state responsibility for citizens' mental health. They made understanding children and the mother-child relationship key to the successful (...) creation of a democratic citizenry. Using rich archival sources, the book revises the common view of psychoanalysis as an elite discipline by taking it out of the clinic and into the war nursery, the juvenile court, the state welfare committee, and the children's hospital. It traces the work of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Freud in response to total war and explores its broad postwar effects on British society. (shrink)

The study examined the distinction between two traditional work absence measures: frequency, reflecting voluntary absence, and duration, reflecting non-voluntary absence. The two measures were compared in a test of the relationship between work absence and employees’ perceptions of organizational ethics. Questionnaires and archive data were collected from 1,016 teachers in Israel. Organizational ethics was represented by three variables: ethical climate, organizational justice, and teacher’s tendency to misbehave. Results showed that four ethical constructs were related to absence frequency, while only one (...) was related to absence duration. The findings add to previous research on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary absence measures, and the superior sensitivity of frequency over duration as a measure of voluntary absence. In practice, the results may encourage principals and managers to create ethical workplaces to minimize absence frequency. (shrink)

A "wrongful life" suit is based on the purported tortious liability of a genetic counsellor towards an infant with hereditary defects, with the latter asserting that he or she would not have been born at all if not for the counsellor's negligence. This negligence allegedly lies in the failure on the part of the defendant adequately to advice the parents or to conduct properly the relevant testing and thereby prevent the child's conception or birth. This paper will offer support for (...) the thesis that it would be both feasible and desirable to endorse "wrongful life" compensation actions. The genetic counsellor owed a duty of due professional care to the impaired newborn who now claims that but for the counsellor's negligence, he or she would not have been born at all. The plaintiff's defective life constitutes a compensable injury. A sufficient causal link may exist between the plaintiff's injury and the defendant's breach of duty of due professional care and an appropriate measure of damages can be allocated to the disabled newborn. Sanctioning a "wrongful life" cause of action does not necessarily entail abandoning valuable constraints with regard to abortion and euthanasia. Nor does it inevitably lead to an uncontrolled slide down a "slippery slope". (shrink)

This article takes a close look at a rhetoric strategy, often used in an attempt to preserve an appearance of neutrality in conflicts over rights. This strategy rests on the concept of symmetry, and in particular concerns symmetry between so-called 'positive rights' (described as the right to obtain or have an object, to engage in an activity, or to enjoy a desired state of affairs) and 'negative rights' (the right not to have this object, not to engage in this activity, (...) or to prevent this state of affairs). When a positive and a negative right protect contradictory options, this strategy conveys that they are of equal standing. The article cautions against the risks entailed by this inference. The deceptive nature of symmetry is first examined in the context of procreation rights and subsequently in other contexts, including conflicts concerning freedom of expression, active euthanasia, and abortion. Our conclusion is that the explicit or implicit recourse to the argument from symmetry is a recurrent feature of rights discourse, deserving attention and cautious handling. (shrink)

Loss of insight is a prominent clinical manifestation of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia , but its characteristics are poorly understood. Twelve bvFTD patients were compared with 12 Alzheimer’s disease patients on a structured insight interview of cognitive insight and emotional insight . Compared to the AD patients, the bvFTD patients were less aware and less concerned about their disorder, and they had less appreciation of its effects on themselves and on others. After corrective feedback , the bvFTD patients were just (...) as aware of their disorder as the AD patients but remained unconcerned and unappreciative of its effects. These findings suggest that lack of insight in bvFTD is not due to “anosognosia,” or impaired cognitive and executive awareness of disease, but to “frontal anosodiaphoria,” or lack of emotional concern over having bvFTD and its impact on themselves and others. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic, and an account of consequence offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. This text presents what the authors term as 'logical pluralism' arguing that the notion of logical consequence doesn't pin down one deductive consequence relation; it allows for many of them.

The legal system affects behavior not just directly, by imposing sanctions, but also indirectly, by producing information on how people behave. For example, internal company documents exposed during litigation will help third parties assess whether they trust a company and want to keep doing business with it. The law therefore affects behavior by shaping reputations. Drawing on economics, communications, and a nascent multidisciplinary literature on reputation, Roy Shapira highlights how reputation works, and how information from the courtroom affects the (...) court of public opinion, with a particular emphasis on the role of the media. By fleshing out interactions between law and reputation, Shapira corrects common misperceptions about the ability of market forces to discipline corporate behavior and adds to timely, ongoing debates such as the desirability of heightened pleading standards or mandatory arbitration clauses. Law and Reputation should interest any scholar who invokes notions of market discipline in their work. (shrink)

I discuss the attitude of Jewish law sources from the 2nd–:5th centuries to the imprecision of measurement. I review a problem that the Talmud refers to, somewhat obscurely, as impossible reduction. This problem arises when a legal rule specifies an object by referring to a maximized measurement function, e.g., when a rule applies to the largest part of a divided whole, or to the first incidence that occurs, etc. A problem that is often mentioned is whether there might be hypothetical (...) situations involving more than one maximal value of the relevant measurement and, given such situations, what is the pertinent legal rule. Presumption of simultaneous occurrences or equally measured values are also a source of embarrassment to modern legal systems, in situations exemplified in the paper, where law determines a preference based on measured values. I contend that the Talmudic sources discussing the problem of impossible reduction were guided by primitive insights compatible with fuzzy logic presentation of the inevitable uncertainty involved in measurement. I maintain that fuzzy models of data are compatible with a positivistic epistemology, which refuses to assume any precision in the extra-conscious world that may not be captured by observation and measurement. I therefore propose this view as the preferred interpretation of the Talmudic notion of impossible reduction. Attributing a fuzzy world view to the Talmudic authorities is meant not only to increase our understanding of the Talmud but, in so doing, also to demonstrate that fuzzy notions are entrenched in our practical reasoning. If Talmudic sages did indeed conceive the results of measurements in terms of fuzzy numbers, then equality between the results of measurements had to be more complicated than crisp equations. The problem of impossible reduction could lie in fuzzy sets with an empty core or whose membership functions were only partly congruent. Reduction is impossible may thus be reconstructed as there is no core to the intersection of two measures. I describe Dirichlet maps for fuzzy measurements of distance as a rough partition of the universe, where for any region A there may be a non-empty set of - _A, where the problem of impossible reduction applies. This model may easily be combined with probabilistic extention. The possibility of adopting practical decision standards based on -cuts is discussed in this context. I propose to characterize the uncertainty that was presumably capped by the old sages as U- uncertainty, defined, for a non-empty fuzzy set A on the set of real numbers, whose -cuts are intervals of real numbers, as U = 1/h 0 h log [1+]d, where h is the largest membership value obtained by any element of A and is the measure of the -cut of A defined by the Lebesge integral of its characteristic function. (shrink)

What happens when someone acts? A familiar answer goes like this. There is something that the agent wants, and there is an action that he believes conducive to its attainment. His desire for the end, and his belief in the action as a means, justify taking the action, and they jointly cause an intention to take it, which in turn causes the corresponding movements of the agent's body. I think that the standard story is flawed in several respects. The flaw (...) that will concern me in this paper is that the story fails to include an agent-or, more precisely, fails to cast the agent in his proper role. (shrink)

Do participants bring their own priors to an experiment? If so, do they share the same priors as the researchers who design the experiment? In this article, we examine the extent to which self-generated priors conform to experimenters’ expectations by explicitly asking participants to indicate their own priors in estimating the probability of a variety of events. We find in Study 1 that despite being instructed to follow a uniform distribution, participants appear to have used their own priors, which deviated (...) from the given instructions. Using subjects’ own priors allows us to account better for their responses rather than merely to test the accuracy of their estimates. Implications for the study of judgment and decision making are discussed. (shrink)

War and peace in the Bible -- Theoretical aspects of war in rabbinic thought -- War and peace in modern Jewish thought and practice -- Israel, war, ethics and the media.

War and peace in the Bible -- Theoretical aspects of war in rabbinic thought -- War and peace in modern Jewish thought and practice -- Israel, war, ethics and the media.

Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of..

Abstract I argue that meaning in life is importantly influenced by bioloical ties. More specifically, I maintain that knowing one's relatives and especially one's parents provides a kind of self-knowledge that is of irreplaceable value in the life-task of identity formation. These claims lead me to the conclusion that it is immoral to create children with the intention that they be alienated from their bioloical relatives?for example, by donor conception.

Retributive theories of punishment argue that punishing a criminal for a crime she committed is sufficient reason for a justified and morally permissible punishment. But what about when the state gets lucky in its decision to punish? I argue that retributive theories of punishment are subject to “Gettier” style cases from epistemology. Such cases demonstrate that the state needs more than to just get lucky, and as these retributive theories of punishment stand, there is no anti-luck condition. I’ll argue that (...) Gettier-style cases demonstrate an impermissible instance of punishment, even though they meet the conditions of retributive theories of punishment. Retributive theories are, therefore, too weak. The safety condition from epistemology provides the anti-luck condition needed for permissible punishment. I argue that two forms of retributivism, rights-forfeiture and what I call standard retributivism, are both subject to Gettier-style cases. Unlike the literature on standards of proof, this paper argues that safety is a condition on punishment itself, i.e., in all nearby possible worlds, the accuser must correctly accuse the convicted for the crime they actually committed. (shrink)

J.L. Schellenberg offers a path to a new kind of religious outlook. Reflection on our early stage in the evolutionary process leads to skepticism about religion, but also offers a new answer to the problem of faith and reason, and the possibility of a new, evolutionary form of religion.

Supervaluationism is often described as the most popular semantic treatment of indeterminacy. There’s little consensus, however, about how to fill out the bare-bones idea to include a characterization of logical consequence. The paper explores one methodology for choosing between the logics: pick a logic thatnorms beliefas classical consequence is standardly thought to do. The main focus of the paper considers a variant of standard supervaluational, on which we can characterizedegrees of determinacy. It applies the methodology above to focus ondegree logic. (...) This is developed first in a basic, single-premise case; and then extended to the multipremise case, and to allowdegreesof consequence. The metatheoretic properties of degree logic are set out. On the positive side, the logic is supraclassical—all classical valid sequents are degree logic valid. Strikingly, metarules such as cut and conjunction introduction fail. (shrink)

v. 1. Nicomachean ethics. Politics. The Athenian Constitution. Rhetoric. On Poetics.--v. 2. Logic.--v. 3. Physics. Metaphysics. On the soul. Short physical treaties.--v. 4. On the heavens. On generation and corruption. Meteorology. Biological treatises.