Two recent papers1,2 report extensive nuclear DNA sequence from a 38,000‐year‐old Neandertal fossil, comparing it to modern humans and estimating when it diverged from, and whether it contributed to, our gene pool. Based on 65,250 and over a million base‐pairs of sequence across the genome, respectively, the groups arrived at slightly different interpretations. The data are an exciting and interesting new contribution, but are not surprising, and a sense of history and question helps put them in perspective. BioEssays 29: 105–110, (...) 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

An examination of the unconscious as it relates to popular music and the first truly interdisciplinary book on philosophy and popular music with equal weight given to each discipline.

This book is the result of a three-year study undertaken by a multidisciplinary working party of the Institute of Medical Ethic (UK). The group was chaired by a moral theologian, and its members included biological and ethological scientists, toxicologists, physicians, veterinary surgeons, an expert in alternatives to animal use, officers of animal welfare organizations, a Home Office Inspector, philosophers, and a lawyer. Coming from these different backgrounds, and holding a diversity of moral views, the members produced the agreed report as (...) a result of detailed and rigorous discussions. The book sets out facts about animal experiments and about animal abilities to experience pain, distress and anxiety. There is a detailed examination of the moral claims related to the benefits likely to accrue from animal research, and of strategies for weighing these benefits against the harm caused to animals, in order to decide whether particular research projects ought or ought not to proceed. This leads to consideration of the statutory and non-statutory controls which safeguard standards in such research. The final section explores a variety of philosophical arguments about the use of animals in research, and offers a philosophical justification for the Working Party's more practical conclusions. Written in clear, nontechnical language, this book is accessible to lay people as well as to scientists. It is the first such document to emerge from a meeting of people with such widely differing views on this highly controversial subject, and represents a major contribution towards informing and raising the quality of contemporary debate. The book is unique in drawing together material and ideas never before found in one volume. It will interest a broad spectrum of readers, from ethicists and animal rights advocates to scientific researchers and laboratory administrators, along with general readers concerned about this compelling issue. (shrink)

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

Reprint of paper first published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1984.

What is the nature of law and what is the best way to discover it? This book argues that law is best understood in terms of the social functions it performs wherever it is found in human society. In order to support this claim, law is explained as a kind of institution and as a kind of artefact. To say that it is an institution is to say that it is designed for creating and conferring special statuses to people so (...) as to alter their rights and responsibilities toward each other. To say that it is an artefact is to say that it is a tool of human creation that is designed to signal its usability to people who interact with it. This picture of law's nature is marshalled to critique theories of law that see it mainly as a product of reason or morality, understanding those theories via their conceptions of law's function. It is also used to argue against those legal positivists who see law's functions as relatively minor aspects of its nature. -/- This method of conceptualizing law's nature helps us to explain how the law, understood as social facts, can make normative demands upon us. It also recommends a methodology for understanding law that combines elements of conceptual analysis with empirical research for uncovering the purposes to which diverse peoples put their legal activities. (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to show that several missteps made by others in in their thinking about law as an artefact are due to misconceptions about the role of intentions in understanding law as an artefact. I first briefly recap my own contention that law is a genre of institutionalized abstract artefacts (put forth in The Functions of Law (OUP 2016) and subsequent papers), mostly following Searle’s understanding of institutions and Thomasson’s understanding of public artefacts. I highlight (...) the central place that this theory affords law’s functions, without requiring the theorist to say that possession or performance of the function is either necessary or sufficient for inclusion in the class of law. Some of the most common misunderstandings are exemplified in Brian Leiter’s paper ‘Legal Positivism about the Artifact Law’. He thinks that holding an intentionalist view of artefacts commits the theorist to privileging drafters’ intentions when interpreting law. (It doesn’t.) He also has confusions about the differences between artefact tokens and artefact types leading him to a problematically broad understanding of artefacts. Another problem can be seen in thinking that functional understandings of artefacts are vulnerable to the same problems that arise in functional explanations for biological systems. I go on to consider the work of Luka Burazin and Corrado Roversi, addressing worries that making intentionality central to artefacts implies too much conscious thought is required to make one, noting that several theories of intentionality do not require conscious thought in the execution of intentional action. While those who think a central place for intentionality threatens to leave us unable to explain customary law, this can be dealt with by noting the important distinction between customary rules and customary laws (where the latter requires a decision to enlist public aid in redressing violations). I claim that authors’ intentions are communicated requests for the artefacts’ audiences to see the artefacts as members of their putative kinds. Finally, I address the question of whether or not legal systems are themselves artefacts and institutions, given that they may or may not have been intentionally created. An early lawgiver might have created a legal system by accident in the process of handing down the first laws. I raise the possibility that we might want to impute intentionality to necessary by-products of artefact creation, seeing those by-products as artefacts as well. (shrink)

The chapters in this book have evolved from talks originally presented at The First International Workshop on Human and Machine Cognition.

This book, published in 1976, presents an entirely original approach to the subject of the mind-body problem, examining it in terms of the conceptual links between the physical sciences and the sciences of human behaviour. It is based on the cybernetic concepts of information and feedback and on the related concepts of thermodynamic and communication-theoretic entropy. The foundation of the approach is the theme of continuity between evolution, learning and human consciousness. The author defines life as a process of energy (...) exchange between organism and environment, and evolution as a feedback process maintaining equilibrium between environment and reproductive group. He demonstrates that closely related feedback processes on the levels of the behaving organism and of the organism’s nervous system constitute the phenomena of learning and consciousness respectively. He analyses language as an expedient for extending human information-processing and control capacities beyond those provided by one’s own nervous system, and shows reason to be a mode of processing information in the form of concepts removed from immediate stimulus control. The last chapter touches on colour vision, pleasure and pain, intentionality, self-awareness and other subjective phenomena. Of special interest to the communication theorist and philosopher, this study is also of interest to psychologists and anyone interested in the connection between the physical and life sciences. (shrink)

This article responds to two unresolved and crucial problems of cognitive science: (1) What is actually accomplished by functions of the nervous system that we ordinarily describe in the intentional idiom? and (2) What makes the information processing involved in these functions semantic? It is argued that, contrary to the assumptions of many cognitive theorists, the computational approach does not provide coherent answers to these problems, and that a more promising start would be to fall back on mathematical communication theory (...) and, with the help of evolutionary biology and neurophysiology, to attempt a characterization of the adaptive processes involved in visual perception. Visual representations are explained as patterns of cortical activity that are enabled to focus on objects in the changing visual environment by constantly adjusting to maintain levels of mutual information between pattern and object that are adequate for continuing perceptual control. In these terms, the answer proposed to (1) is that the intentional functions of vision are those involved in the establishment and maintenance of such representations, and to (2) that semantic features are added to the information processes of vision with the focus on objects that these representations accomplish. The article concludes with proposals for extending this account of intentionality to the higher domains of conceptualization and reason, and with speculation about how semantic information-processing might be achieved in mechanical systems. (shrink)

This book, published in 1976, presents an entirely original approach to the subject of the mind-body problem, examining it in terms of the conceptual links between the physical sciences and the sciences of human behaviour. It is based on the cybernetic concepts of information and feedback and on the related concepts of thermodynamic and communication-theoretic entropy. The foundation of the approach is the theme of continuity between evolution, learning and human consciousness. The author defines life as a process of energy (...) exchange between organism and environment, and evolution as a feedback process maintaining equilibrium between environment and reproductive group. He demonstrates that closely related feedback processes on the levels of the behaving organism and of the organism’s nervous system constitute the phenomena of learning and consciousness respectively. He analyses language as an expedient for extending human information-processing and control capacities beyond those provided by one’s own nervous system, and shows reason to be a mode of processing information in the form of concepts removed from immediate stimulus control. The last chapter touches on colour vision, pleasure and pain, intentionality, self-awareness and other subjective phenomena. Of special interest to the communication theorist and philosopher, this study is also of interest to psychologists and anyone interested in the connection between the physical and life sciences. (shrink)

Applying the analytical methods of modern logic to problems of interpretation in Plato, the author traces the development of Plato's analytic method from the crude form expressed in the Phaedo to the considerably more sophisticated and powerful techniques practiced in the later methodological dialogues.

I argue that law is not best considered an essentially contested concept. After first explaining the notion of essential contestability and disaggregating the concept of law into several related concepts, I show that the most basic and general concept of law does not fit within the criteria generally offered for essential contestation. I then buttress this claim with the additional explanation that essential contestation is itself a framework for understanding complex concepts and therefore should only be applied when it is (...) useful to gain a greater understanding of uses of the concept to which it is applied (adducing criteria for making such judgments of usefulness). With that in mind, I then show that applying the appellation of essential contestation to the concept of law does not helpfully illuminate the most general concept of law (usually of most interest to legal philosophers) and therefore it should not be used, while allowing that it might be more useful for the related concept of the rule of law. (shrink)

This chapter provides an explanation of precedent as a kind of artefact, in keeping with broader accounts of law that do so, specifically the author’s account of law as a genre of institutionalized abstract artefact. The chapter develops its explanation by responding to an argument by Dan Priel against seeing the common law as an artefact when understood to be a form of custom. The chapter shows that customs can themselves be artefacts but also that the precedential elements of common (...) law are not necessarily quite as customary as sometimes considered, showing that the common law built from precedents fits within a distributed design model of artefacts and that stare decisis has a wider systemic function of upholding certain rule of law principles. It ends with some considerations about the institutional nature of precedents, specifically that judicial decisions are most often both applications and developments of legal norms, but also determinations of legal validity. (shrink)

I have argued that law is a genre of institutionalized abstract artifact, meaning that laws are purposive products of human creation designed to signal norms of behavior with respect to them. Its institutional nature is seen in the fact that it is a system of artificial statuses that convey deontic powers to status holders understood in their institutional roles. Following Searle in explaining institutions, however, is also to see the institution as the 'continuing possibility of a practice.' Hence there is (...) no tension in seeing law as both a practice and a genre of artifact. (shrink)

At the beginning of his Metaphysics, Aristotle attributed several strange-sounding theses to Plato. Generations of Plato scholars have assumed that these could not be found in the dialogues. In heated arguments, they have debated the significance of these claims, some arguing that they constituted an 'unwritten teaching' and others maintaining that Aristotle was mistaken in attributing them to Plato. In a prior book-length study on Plato's late ontology, Kenneth M. Sayre demonstrated that, despite differences in terminology, these claims correspond (...) to themes developed by Plato in the Parmenides and the Philebus. In this book, he shows how this correspondence can be extended to key, but previously obscure, passages in the Statesman. He also examines the interpretative consequences for other sections of that dialogue, particularly those concerned with the practice of dialectical inquiry. (shrink)

A new edition of a classic work compares Plato's dialogues to Aristotle's depiction of them. Reprint.

The Struggle for the Soul of Teacher Education is a much-needed exploration of the unprecedented current controversies and debates over teacher education and professionalism. Set within the context of neo-liberal education reforms across the globe, the book explores how the current struggles over teaching and teacher education in the US came about, as well as reflections on where we should head in the future. Zeichner provides specific examples of work that moves teacher education toward greater congruency between ideals and practices, (...) while outlining the basis for a new form of community-based teacher education, where universities and other program providers, local communities, school districts, and teacher unions share responsibility for the preparation of teachers. Ultimately, Zeichner problematizes an uncritical shift to more practice and clinical experience, and discusses the enduring problems of clinical teacher education needed for this shift to be educative. (shrink)

Readable and accessible collection of papers re thinking machines.

I examine the impact of the presence of anarchists among key legal officials upon the legal positivist theories of H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz. For purposes of this paper, an anarchist is one who believes that the law cannot successfully obligate or create reasons for action beyond prudential reasons, such as avoiding sanction. I show that both versions of positivism require key legal officials to endorse the law in some way, and that if a legal system can continue to exist (...) and function when its key officials reject the reason-giving character of law, then we have a reason to re-examine and amend legal positivism. (shrink)

If medical complicity is understood as compliance with a directive to act against the professional's best medical judgment, the question arises whether it can ever be justified. This paper will trace the contours of what would legitimate a directive to act against a professional's best medical judgment (and in possible contravention of her oath) using Joseph Raz's service conception of authority. The service conception is useful for basing the legitimacy of authoritative directives on the ability of the putative authority to (...) enable subjects to comply better with reasons that already apply to them. Hence, the service conception bases the legitimacy of practical authority on a certain kind of greater knowledge or expertise. This helps to focus the conundrum regarding complicity on the clash of expertise between the medical expert and the governing body tasked with coordinating behaviour and otherwise devising rules for the social good. The ethical dilemma presented by a hypothetically legitimate directive to act against a professional's best medical judgment also serves to highlight the moral dimension of one's duty to obey a legitimate authority. (shrink)

Notions of procedural justice alone are sufficient to support evidentiary exclusions in a wide variety of legal and law-like institutions that focus on conflict resolution, including courts. Special attention is paid to the relevance and need for exclusion of parties’ own assessments of the value of their claims.

In his 1827 work Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Jeremy Bentham famously argued against exclusionary rules such as hearsay, preferring a policy of “universal admissibility” unless the declarant is easily available. Bentham’s claim that all relevant evidence should be considered with appropriate instructions to fact finders has been particularly influential among judges, culminating in the “principled approach” to hearsay in Canada articulated in R. v. Khelawon. Furthermore, many scholars attack Bentham’s argument only for ignoring the realities of juror bias, admitting universal (...) admissibility would be the best policy for an ideal jury. This article uses the theory of epistemic contextualism to justify the exclusion of otherwise relevant evidence, and even reliable hearsay, on the basis of preventing shifts in the epistemic context. Epistemic contextualism holds that the justification standards of knowledge attributions change according to the contexts in which the attributions are made. Hearsay and other kinds of information the assessment of which rely upon fact finders’ more common epistemic capabilities push the epistemic context of the trial toward one of more relaxed epistemic standards. The exclusion of hearsay helps to maintain a relatively high standards context hitched to the standard of proof for the case and to prevent shifts that threaten to try defendants with inconsistent standards. (shrink)

I argue that law is best understood as an institutionalized abstract artifact. Using the ideas of John Searle on institutions and Amie Thomasson on artifacts, I show how the law is capable of generating new reasons for action, arguing against recent work by David Enoch who holds that legal reason-giving is ultimately a form of triggering conditional reasons.

Joseph Raz argues that legal authority includes a claim by the law to replace subjects’ contrary reasons. I reply that this cannot be squared with the existence of choice-of-evils defenses to criminal prosecutions, nor with the view that the law has gaps (which Raz shares). If the function of authority is to get individuals to comply better with reason than they would do if left to their own devices, it would not make sense for law to claim both to pre-empt (...) our contrary reasons and to leave open spaces or catch-all exceptions which we must use our own devices to fill. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly becoming a popular business concept in developed economies. As typical of other business concepts, it is on its way to globalization through practices and structures of the globalized capitalist world order, typified in Multinational Corporations (MNCs). However, CSR often sits uncomfortably in this capitalist world order, as MNCs are often challenged by the global reach of their supply chains and the possible irresponsible practices inherent along these chains. The possibility of irresponsible practices puts global (...) firms under pressure to protect their brands even if it means assuming responsibilities for the practices of their suppliers. Pressure groups understand this burden on firms and try to take advantage of the situation. This article seeks to challenge the often taken-for-granted-assumption that firms should be accountable for the practices of their suppliers by espousing the moral (and sometimes legal) underpinnings of the concept of responsibility. Except where corporate control and or corporate grouping exist, it identifies the use of power as a critical factor to be considered in allocating responsibility in firm-supplier relationship; and suggests that the more powerful in this relationship has a responsibility to exert some moral influence on the weaker party. The article highlights the use of code of conducts, corporate culture, anti-pressure group campaigns, personnel training and value reorientation as possible sources of wielding positive moral influence along supply chains. (shrink)

Parmenides is generally recognized as Plato's most difficult dialogue. This work argues that the key to unlocking the puzzles of Parmenides II lies in the proper interpretive pairing of the eight hypotheses under which its arguments are grouped.

Business school faculty have begun to increase ethics instruction, but very little has been done to assess the effectiveness of this instruction. Curricula-wide studies present conflicting results of the effect of ethics integration into the business curricula. Several studies suggest that courses like business ethics and business and society might have an effect on the ethical awareness or ethical reasoning of business students. A belief of many individuals interested in business ethics is that students must be exposed to ethical awareness (...) and ethical reasoning in business ethics and business and society-type courses and this should be supplemented by discussions of these topics in various business courses such as Accounting, Finance, Marketing, and others.This study reports the results of integrating a unit of business ethics into eleven accounting classes at two universities. An approach for measuring the effect of ethics integration into accounting and other business courses is suggested, and an assessment is made of the impact of ethics integration on students in accounting classes. Results indicate that the principles on which students rely when making moral decisions were affected by ethics integration. After ethics integration, students relied more heavily on the disclosure rule, the golden rule, and the professional ethic. (shrink)

Economic success in competitive systems requires resource redistribution to those who fail. Once we recognize that success in competitive endeavors depends meaningfully on the failure of others, policy implications that involve strong redistributive mechanisms should be drawn. Particular attention is paid to the role of education in fostering a sense of self-esteem necessary to counter the effects of internalized competition.

The COVID-19 pandemic that struck New York City in the spring of 2020 was a natural experiment for the clinical ethics services of NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP). Two distinct teams at NYP’s flagship academic medical centers—at NYP/ Columbia University Medical Center (Columbia) and NYP/ Weill Cornell Medical Center (Weill Cornell)—were faced with the same pandemic and operated under the same institutional rules. Each campus used time as an heuristic to analyze our collective response. The Columbia team compares consults during the pandemic with (...) the same period during the year prior. The Weill Cornell service describes the phases of the pandemic to depict its temporal evolution and subsequent ethical challenges. Both sites report that the predominant ethical challenges centered around end-of-life decision making, setting goals of care, and medical futility, all complicated by resource allocation questions and the ambiguity of state law under crisis standards of care. The Columbia campus saw a statistically significant increase in ethics consultations provided to Hispanic patients, perhaps reflective of the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 suffered by this demographic. While Weill Cornell and Columbia saw a surge in clinical ethics consultations, the two services assumed a more expansive role than one normally played in institutional life. Serving as intermediaries between frontline clinicians and senior hospital administrators, consultants provided critical intelligence to hospital leadership about the evolution of the pandemic, disseminated information to clinicians, and attended to the moral distress of colleagues who were asked to provide care under truly extraordinary circumstances. The COVID-19 surge in New York City revealed latent capabilities in ethics consultation that may prove useful to the broader clinical ethics community as it responds to the current pandemic and reconceptualizes its potential for future service. (shrink)

Highlighting the distinct approaches to behavior guidance employed by law and aspirational religious institutions like Buddhism, focusing on the work of Lon Fuller. There is importance to both baseline or duty-centered rules such as found primarily in criminal law and deontic morality, as well as aspirational guidance principles that are found in religious law, virtue ethics, and sometimes seen in civil law. However, the specific assumptions and aims of these two modes of guidance must be harmonized to be effective.

Under John Searle’s theory of institutional facts, the law can be understood both as an institution governed by foundational documents and practices, and as a method for creating new institutions through the codification of the assignment of functions, usually of the form ‘X counts as Y in circumstances C’. The architect Christopher Alexander’s notion of pattern languages, schematic templates for problem-solving widely adopted by computer programmers, can be developed within a legal system as a coherence constraint on the assignment of (...) functions such that codified legal solutions do not conflict with other legal solutions to related or distinct problems. (shrink)

The charged debate on the ‘C‐S‐R‐ization’ of organizational practices seems to have produced two opposing and seemingly incompatible explanations for why organizations should engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR): one, the normative rationale based on an appeal to ethics; and the other, the instrumental rationale, based on an appeal to business pragmatism. This paper argues that a missing link in this debate is the failure to recognize that the normative and instrumental approaches to corporate social responsibility are underpinned by substantively, (...) differentiating, relative logics of emotional rationalism on the one hand, and instrumental rationalism on the other. The paper makes a case that for CSR as a management practice to be practicable and actionable within a sustainable business agenda, it will need to be stripped of its current normative undertone and reconstructed in the instrumentally, pragmatic (utlish) language of business. Otherwise, the whole concept of CSR may continue to dwell in the realm of abstract theorizing without yielding many beneficial and practicable outcomes. The paper concludes that such an approach that situates CSR within a pragmatic business lingua, rather than a non‐business lingua, will help in legitimizing CSR as a ‘neutral’ management practice. (shrink)