What does modern warfare, as fought by liberal societies, have in common with our human evolution? This study posits an important relationship between the two we have evolved to fight, and traditional hunter-gatherer societies were often violent places. But we also evolved to cooperate, to feel empathy and to behave altruistically towards others.

Michael Ridge At one point in England it was a capital offense to “appear on a high road with a sooty face.”1 I do not know whether anyone was executed for this offense, but many people were sent to Australian penal colonies for such petty crimes as stealing a handkerchief. More recently, Kenneth Payne was sentenced to 16 years in prison for stealing a Snickers Bar in Texas. When the Assistant District Attorney in this case was asked how (...) she could justify putting a man in prison for 16 years for stealing a candy bar she replied, “It was a king size,” and indeed it was – value, $1.00.2 These punishments are vulnerable to many criticisms but the most obvious is that they do not fit the crime. Unfortunately, the idea that the punishment should fit the crime is as difficult to characterize precisely as it is plausible. The doctrine of lex talonis embodied in the slogan “an eye for an eye” provides the most obvious answer to this question but it has the unfortunate vice of being false. In some cases the problems with lex talonis are moral ones – we would debase ourselves if we were literally to rape rapists. In other cases the problems are conceptual – taken literally, the theory seems to have no intelligible application for a crime like treason, for example. These problems are familiar and defenders of lex talonis typically qualify the doctrine in ways that are supposed to avoid them. However these qualifications typically are either ad hoc or too metaphorical to be helpful. Intriguingly, Michael Davis argues that we can formulate a more precise and non-metaphorical account of proportionality by.. (shrink)

For Hume, one task of logic is “to explain the principles and operations of our reasoning faculties”; this chapter is a study of his logic of inductive reasoning, as presented in Book I of his Treatise and in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Like other early modern logics—especially those composed, as Hume’s was, under the influence of Locke—Hume’s logic is descriptive, explanatory, and normative. It also aspires to be revelatory. It is descriptive in documenting how our reasoning actually proceeds, explanatory (...) in telling us why it so proceeds, normative in telling us how it should proceed, and revelatory in using those findings to arrive at larger truths about human nature and human life. Hume formulates rules of inductive reasoning and ranks inductive arguments as better and worse. He also advocates the reform of intellectual disciplines. Yet his logic, it is argued, is at the same time deeply skeptical. (shrink)

This article proposes a role for aesthetic judgment in our practical thought. The role is related to those moments when practical reason seems to give out, when it fails to yield a judgment about what to do in the face of a choice we cannot avoid. I argue that these impasses require agents to create, but that not any creativity will do. For we cannot regard a response to one of these problems as arbitrary or capricious if we want to (...) act on it. We must instead regard that response as justified by the problem itself. I suggest that this combination of creativity and normativity is characteristic of aesthetic judgment and this makes it a promising candidate for making these very difficult choices. (shrink)

This book assesses and defends Kant's Critical epistemology, and the rich yet neglected resources it provides for understanding and resolving fundamental issues regarding human experience, perceptual judgment, empirical knowledge and cognitive sciences. Kenneth Westphal first examines Kant's methods and strategies for examining human sensory-perceptual experience, and then examines Kant's central, proper, and subtle attention to judgment, and so to the humanly possible valid use of concepts and principles to judge particulars we confront. This provides a comprehensive account of Kant's (...) anti-Cartesianism, the integrity of his three principles of causal judgment, and Kant's account of disciminatory perceptual-motor behaviour, including both sensory reafference and perceptual affordances. Westphal then defends the significance of Kant's subtle and illuminating account of causal judgment for three main philosophical domains: history and philosophy of science, theory of action and human freedom, and philosophy of mind. Kant's Critical Epistemology will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in Kant and the relations of his thought to contemporary philosophical debates and to the sciences of the mind. (shrink)

It seems intuitive that human development and environmental protection should go hand in hand. But some have worried there is no framework within environmental ethics that suitably conjoins them. I...

As critic, Kenneth Burke's preoccupations were at the beginning purely esthetic and literary; but afterCounter-Statement(1931), he began to discriminate a ...

Business students have long been noted for their differential proclivity to engage in academic misconduct. Unfortunately, the potential for misconduct has been exacerbated in recent years by rapid advances in technology, easy access to information, competitive pressures, and the proliferation of websites that provide students access to information that allows them to directly circumvent the learning process. Using a convenience sample of 631 students matriculating in various business majors at four U.S. universities and structural equations modeling procedures, this study assesses (...) the effects of psychological factors on business students’ propensities to utilize the services of homework assistance websites. Specifically, we examine how “Dark Triad” personality traits (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) interact with Fraud Diamond elements to influence student decisions to engage the services of these websites. We find that each Dark Triad trait exerts a significant influence on at least one of the Fraud Diamond elements, which in turn have a significant direct or indirect positive association with students’ reported intentions to utilize, and reported utilization of, these websites. (shrink)

A philosopher may develop ideas on his or her own or follow them in the works of others. Different kinds of documentary threads will develop. Historians of a subject may follow either kind. In the period of _Toward “Principia Mathematica”, 1905–08_, Russell engaged with developments in the writings of Poincaré, Haldane, Schiller and Berry, among others. What follows are remarks on supplementary documents (one being on-line) for a fuller study of logical and philosophical threads in the period.

If representation is resemblance, how we do we think of groups or classes of things? According to a tradition Berkeley opposed—a tradition represented by Locke—we do so by forming abstract or incomplete ideas. I show that Berkeley's opposition does not depend on his own personal failure to form abstract images, but on what he took to be the impersonal or objective impossibility of abstract objects. Berkeley himself accounts for general thinking not in terms of abstract or incomplete ideas, but in (...) terms of our selective attention to ideas both concrete and determinate. Contentful thought about the natural world is impossible without ideas as objects, Berkeley believes, but ideas do not, in his view, completely fix the content of our thought. (shrink)

After describing the corpuscularian background of Berkeley's work, I consider whether Berkeley can endorse the existence of immaterial atoms or corpuscles. I suggest that he hopes to avoid a definite commitment. He wants his position to ‘float’, its level to be determined by the kind of empirical evidence that would strike materialists and immaterialists with equal force. This chapter foregrounds the role played by the notion of intelligibility, both in the defence of modern corpuscularian science and in Berkeley's critical response (...) to it. (shrink)

This chapter reviews and assesses Berkeley's main arguments for immaterialism, his arguments against the existence of matter or material substance. I place particular emphasis on the themes of earlier chapters: intentionality, abstraction, necessity, and intelligibility. My aim is to show that Berkeley's thinking about these topics made a powerful contribution to his immaterialism, even if they seem, on the surface, to be distant from it. I provide an account of immediate perception as Berkeley understands it, and emphasize the phenomenalist elements (...) in Berkeley's development of immaterialism. (shrink)

I suggest that in his early, unpublished notebooks, Berkeley experimented with a radically formal conception of necessity, according to which necessity is nothing more than the inclusion of one idea within the definition of another. Berkeley's experiment was defeated by the same objective connections that rule out the existence of simple ideas. Although Berkeley was left without an understanding of the nature of necessity, he never wavered in his conviction that necessity is something objective—that ideas and the world have an (...) inherent, inescapable structure. (shrink)

I offer an interpretation and partial defence of Berkeley's belief that he is a mind or spirit—a spiritual substance—distinct from his ideas. I argue in particular that the arguments examined in earlier chapters, particularly the account of representation or intentionality developed in Ch. 1, and the immaterialist arguments reviewed in Ch. 6, do not force Berkeley to conclude that spiritual substance is no less impossible than matter.

Many empiricists, among them Locke and Hume, make a distinction between simple and complex ideas. Berkeley refuses to do so, because he finds connections—objective connections incompatible with simplicity—even among the ‘simplest’ of ideas. Simple ideas, in his view, are illegitimately abstract.

This is the first of three chapters examining the consequences of Berkeley's immaterialism and the problems to which it gives rise. In the present chapter, I defend a phenomenalist interpretation of Berkeley on unperceived objects. Appealing to his denial of blind agency, I show that a phenomenalist interpretation can be reconciled with texts that seem to go against it. I provide a modest interpretation of Berkeley's doctrine of archetypes, and argue briefly that even in Siris, Berkeley's doctrine of archetypes is (...) unambitious and not especially Platonic. (shrink)

This chapter explores the difference between two kinds of signs that Berkeley followed Locke in recognizing: words and ideas. I argue that Berkeley does not assume that ideas are images of things but concludes it, as part of a deliberate attempt to explain how at least some of our thoughts succeed in referring to the world. For Berkeley, representation—the intentionality or ‘aboutness’ of thought—is sometimes a matter of resemblance.

This paper discusses the role of religious speech in the public square and the common school. It argues for more openness to political theology than many liberals are willing to grant and for an educational strategy of engagement over one of avoidance. The paper argues that the exclusion of religious debate from the public square has dysfunctional consequences. It discusses Rawls’s more recent views on public reason and claims that, while they are not altogether adequate, they are consistent with engagement. (...) The outcome of these arguments is applied to three ‘hot button’ issues in US education: creationism, an issue of gay rights, and teaching the Bible in schools. (shrink)

In this book, Westphal offers an original interpretation of Hegel's moral philosophy. Building on his previous study of the role of natural law in Hume's and Kant's accounts of justice, Westphal argues that Hegel developed and justified a robust form of civic republicanism. Westphal identifies, for the first time, the proper genre to which Hegel's Philosophical Outlines of Justice belongs and to which it so prodigiously contributes, which he calls Natural Law Constructivism, an approach developed by Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and (...) Hegel. He brings to bear Hegel's adoption and augmentation of Kant's Critique of rational judgment and justification in all non-formal domains to his moral philosophy in his Outlines. Westphal argues that Hegel's justification for the standards of political legitimacy successfully integrates Rousseau's Independence Requirement into the role of public reason within a constitutional republic. In these regards, Hegel's moral and political principles are progressive not only in principle, but also in practice. Hegel's Civic Republicanism will be of interest to scholars of moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, Hegel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is the relationship between the Greek and Indian systems of physiognomics in antiquity. The study seeks to find similarities between the two geographically separated modes of thought and, as a result, to posit a plausible exchange of ideas about the human body as omen in antiquity, in which the flow of ideas went both ways between the Greek and Indian cultures in the ancient world.

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)

Opening with Ford Motor Company as a case in point, this essay develops a broad and systematic approach to the field of business ethics. After an analysis of the form and content of the concept of responsibility, the author introduces the principle of moral projection as a device for relating ethics to corporate policy. Pitfalls and objections to this strategy are examined and some practical implications are then explored.The essay not only defends a proposition but exhibits a research style and (...) a research program. Philosophical ethics and organizational management are joined in the process. (shrink)

This book marks Kenneth Burke's breakthrough in criticism from the literary and aesthetic into social theory and the philosophy of history. In this volume we find Burke's first entry into what he calls his theory of Dramatism and here also is an important section on the nature of ritual.

A notable feature of paradox is recognition that seemingly contradictory terms are inextricably intertwined and interrelated—holding out the hope that something new can be learned from the cognitive tension contained within. Aram has characterized the central concern of the business and society field as the paradox of interdependent relations. Our study argues that this and related paradoxes can be addressed by engaging with others and trying to gain shared insight via an interactive, developmental, exploratory sensemaking process that can inform the (...) governance of stakeholder networks. We advocate multistakeholder learning dialogues (MSLDs) as a means for both scholars and practitioners to construct meanings that can guide joint efforts to cope with messy problems that help shape complex, paradoxical relationships within stakeholder networks. (shrink)

According to classical theism, the universe depends on God in a way that goes beyond mere (efficient) causation. I have previously argued that this ‘deep dependence’ of the universe on God is best understood as a type of grounding. In a recent paper in this journal, Aaron Segal argues that this doctrine of deep dependence causes problems for creaturely free will: if our choices are grounded in facts about God, and we have no control over these facts, then we do (...) not control our choices and are therefore not free. This amounts to a grounding analogue of the Consequence Argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. If successful, it would have application beyond classical theism: similar concerns would apply to any view that takes our choices to be grounded in a deeper reality which is beyond our control. However, I show that the argument is not successful. Segal’s Grounding Consequence Argument is so closely analogous to the Causal Consequence Argument that any response to the one provides a response to the other. As a result, if you don’t think that prior causes (whether deterministic or indeterministic) undermine free will, you shouldn’t think that prior grounds undermine free will. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 59-75, Spring 2022.

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)

Ethical theory is an explanatory endeavor, but until recently relatively little attention has been paid to the question of what makes for an adequate ethical explanation. This chapter argues that like explanation generally, ethical explanation is relativized to a contrast space: it is not a two-place relation between an explanandum and an ethical theory, but a three-place relation involving a background framework that, among others things, specifies a contrast space. The chapter then draws two morals from this thesis. The first (...) is that ethical theorizing can be a morally problematic activity, even when it produces adequate explanations, if the contrast space it relies upon is itself morally questionable. The second is that some conflicts between ethical explanations are merely apparent and in fact reflect a difference in contrastive focus. -/- . (shrink)