40 found
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  1. Granting Automata Human Rights: Challenge to a Basis of Full-Rights Privilege.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2015 - Human Rights Review 16 (4):369-391.
    As engineers propose constructing humanlike automata, the question arises as to whether such machines merit human rights. The issue warrants serious and rigorous examination, although it has not yet cohered into a conversation. To put it into a sure direction, this paper proposes phrasing it in terms of whether humans are morally obligated to extend to maximally humanlike automata full human rights, or those set forth in common international rights documents. This paper’s approach is to consider the ontology of humans (...)
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  2. Responsible research for the construction of maximally humanlike automata: the paradox of unattainable informed consent.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2020 - Ethics and Information Technology 22 (4):297-305.
    Since the Nuremberg Code and the first Declaration of Helsinki, globally there has been increasing adoption and adherence to procedures for ensuring that human subjects in research are as well informed as possible of the study’s reasons and risks and voluntarily consent to serving as subject. To do otherwise is essentially viewed as violation of the human research subject’s legal and moral rights. However, with the recent philosophical concerns about responsible robotics, the limits and ambiguities of research-subjects ethical codes become (...)
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  3. How Ecology Can Edify Ethics: The Scope of Morality.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2018 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31 (4):443-454.
    Over the past several decades environmental ethics has grown markedly, normative ethics having provided essential grounding in assessing human treatment of the environment. Even a systematic approach, such as Paul Taylor’s, in a sense tells the environment how it is to be treated, whether that be Earth’s ecosystem or the universe itself. Can the environment, especially the ecosystem, as understood through the study of ecology, in turn offer normative and applied ethics any edification? The study of ecology has certainly increased (...)
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  4. Anticipating the ultimate innovation, volitional evolution: can it not be promoted or attempted responsibly?Lantz Fleming Miller - 2015 - Journal of Responsible Innovation 2 (3):280-300.
    The aspiration for volitional evolution, or human evolution directed by humans themselves,has increased in philosophical, scientific, technical, and commercial literature. The prospect of shaping the very being who is the consumer of all other innovations offers great commercial potential, one to which all other innovations would in effect be subservient. Actually an amalgam of projected technical/commercial developments, this prospective innovation has practical and ethical ramifications. However, because it is often discussed in a scientific way (specifically that of evolutionary theory), it (...)
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  5.  86
    Fine-tuning the ontology of patriarchy: A new approach to explaining and responding to a persisting social injustice.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2015 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 41 (9):885-906.
    After years of activism and scholarship concerning patriarchal social structures, many contemporary societies have made substantial progress in women’s rights. The shortfall, and the work ahead, is well known. Even in societies where the most progress has been achieved, males continue to dominate at key levels of power. Yet, essentialism appears to be widely, although not yet entirely, discounted. In helping to illuminate the social ontology of patriarchy and thereby helping to defuse its injustice, scholars have made proposals of patriarchy’s (...)
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  6.  94
    Is Species Integrity a Human Right? A Rights Issue Emerging from Individual Liberties with New Technologies.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2014 - Human Rights Review 15 (2):177-199.
    Currently, some philosophers and technicians propose to change the fundamental constitution of Homo sapiens, as by significantly altering the genome, implanting microchips in the brain, and pursuing related techniques. Among these proposals are aspirations to guide humanity’s evolution into new species. Some philosophers have countered that such species alteration is unethical and have proposed international policies to protect species integrity; yet, it remains unclear on what basis such right to species integrity would rest. An answer may come from an unexpected (...)
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  7.  77
    Rights of Self-delimiting Peoples: Protecting Those Who Want No Part of Us.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2013 - Human Rights Review 14 (1):31-51.
    While in recent years new charters and government actions have boosted the collective and individual rights enjoyed by “Fourth-World” indigenous peoples such as the Inuit, another set of indigenous peoples has not experienced such protection: “self-delimiting” peoples. Their rights go largely unprotected because of deliberate ambiguities in the word “indigenous”; because these peoples generally avoid all contact with the larger society, and so are unknown by it and have no voice in it; and because charters and institutions generally require validation (...)
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  8. Twenty-one Theories of Rationality Assessed for Which Is the Most Explanatory.Lantz Fleming Miller - manuscript
    This article serves as either an addendum or as an expansion of ideas and work developed in my 2024 book, The Rationality Project: Across the Millennia, issued by Palgrave Macmillan. The book explores 21 potential theories for explaining rationality in terms of why and how one among these can serve in the position of explanatory power. The book does not fully explain all of these candidate theories, assigning that complete role to this addendum or work-in-progress. The main reason for this (...)
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  9. Autonomy, Equality, and Freedom: Commentary and Expansion on Three Central Political Concepts.Lantz Fleming Miller - manuscript
  10. Relentless Assimilationist Indigenous Policy: From Invasion of Group Rights to Genocide in Mercy’s Clothing.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2016 - Indigenous Policy Journal (3).
    Despite the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, assimilationist policies continue, whether official or effective. Such policies affect more than the right to group choice. The concern is whether indeed genocide or “only” ethnocide (or culturecide)—the elimination of a traditional culture—is at work. Discussions of the distinction between the two terms have been inconsistent enough that at least one commentator has declared that they cannot be used in analytical contexts. While these terms, I contend, have distinct senses, (...)
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  11.  30
    “We Now Control Our Evolution”: Circumventing Ethical and Logical Cul-de-Sacs of an Anticipated Engineering Revolution.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2014 - Science and Engineering Ethics 20 (4):1011-1025.
    Philosophers, scientists, and other researchers have increasingly characterized humanity as having reached an epistemic and technical stage at which “we can control our own evolution.” Moral–philosophical analysis of this outlook reveals some problems, beginning with the vagueness of “we.” At least four glosses on “we” in the proposition “we, humanity, control our evolution” can be made: “we” is the bundle of all living humans, a leader guiding the combined species, each individual acting severally, or some mixture of these three involving (...)
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  12. Plato’s Aesthetic Adventure: The Symposium in the Broad Light of Comedy.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (Number 2):15-26.
    Two Socratic dialogues often considered “comic”—Ion and Hippias Major—have also been contested as to their Platonic authenticity. Plato’s dialogues; while certainly engaging, can also seem grim in their philosophical intensity: At least one author has contended that the dialogue more firmly established as genuinely by Plato, Symposium; has some comic elements: This article goes a step further in suggesting that this dialogue does not merely have comic elements but is in fact a comedy. It draws on several texts in the (...)
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  13. Kantian Approaches to Human Reproduction: Both Favorable and Unfavorable.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2021 - Kantian Journal 40 (1):51-96.
    Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the question of whether humans should reproduce. Some say human life is too punishing and cruel to impose upon an innocent. Others hold that such harms do not undermine the great and possibly unique value of human life. Tracing these outlooks historically in the debate has barely begun. What might philosophers have said, or what did they say, about human life itself and its value to merit reproduction? This article looks to (...)
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  14. What We Think We Are: Maximizing the Subjects in the Human Sciences.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2022 - Annals of Philosophy, Social and Human Disciplines 1.
    Human-sciences research often focuses on social problems to create tools for solving them. Yet, in using common prejudices in gathering and sorting data on their subjects, they risk propagating those same prejudices. This article proposes that a major subject matter of human sciences is human concepts themselves. Concepts about “what we are,” individually and as a species, are deeply embedded, if not essential. It concludes that for greater precision, practitioners in human sciences must take maximum advantage of this characteristic of (...)
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  15. Where Does Music End and Nonmusic Begin? Fine-tuning the “Naturalist Response” Problem for Nontonal Music’s Naturalistic Critics.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2022 - Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 45 (1):354-368.
    As to what distinguishes music from other sound, some investigators in both philosophy and cognitive scientists have answered “tonality.” It seems subservient even to rhythm. Tonality is considered to be the central factor around which the piece is oriented; it gives a sense of home, expectation, and completeness. Most important, much of this inquiry builds on naturalistic, evolutionary explanation to account for human nature and behavior. The conclusion of such line of thought is that sounds missing tonality or tonal focus (...)
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  16. Review of "God Science Ideology: Examining the Role of Ideology in the Religious-Scientific Dialogue," by Joseph Hinman.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2022 - Philosophy in Review 42 (2):22-24.
    If any area of current philosophy is so incendiary as to veer on violence, it is argument about a divide being’s existence. Hinman’s sober offering is possibly one of the most thorough apologetics in contemporary times, meriting serious consideration yet certain to draw fire. Since Darwin, the religious have taken up arms, both metaphorically and, in the case of World Trade Center and its imitators, literally. In turn, growing atheist movements reacted against such defensiveness. This upsurge in side-taking and regrouping (...)
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  17. Human Rights of Users of Humanlike Care Automata.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2020 - Human Rights Review 21 (2):181-205.
    Care is more than dispensing pills or cleaning beds. It is about responding to the entire patient. What is called “bedside manner” in medical personnel is a quality of treating the patient not as a mechanism but as a being—much like the caregiver—with desires, ideas, dreams, aspirations, and the gamut of mental and emotional character. As automata, answering an increasing functional need in care, are designed to enact care, the pressure is on their becoming more humanlike to carry out the (...)
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  18.  67
    No Longer as Free as the Wind: Human Reproduction and Parenting Enter the Scope of Morality; Review Essay.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (3):657-664.
    Camus considered the most crucial philosophical problem to be that of suicide—whether to discontinue your existence by endingit. Alternatively, a most crucial philosophical problem may be procreation—whether to continue human existence by making new humans. The topic has spurred an increasing amount of debate over the past decade, with marked diversion with Anscomb’s comment that it makes no moral sense to inquire whether one should reproduce. One might as well ask why digest food or why should the wind blow. This (...)
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  19. The composite redesign of humanity’s nature: a work in process.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2018 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 39 (2):157-164.
    One of the most salient contemporary concerns in academic debates and pop culture alike is the extent to which new technologies may re-cast Homo sapiens. Species members may find themselves encased in a type of existence they deem to be wanting in comparison with their present form, even if the promised form was assured to be better. Plausibly, the concern is not merely fear of change or of the unknown, but rather it arises out of individuals’ general identification with what (...)
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  20. What You Are and Its Affects on Moral Status: Godman's Epistemology and Morality of Human Kinds, Gunkel's Robot Rights, and Schneider on Artificial You.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2021 - Human Rights Review 22 (4):525-531.
    Thanks to mounting discussion about projected technologies’ possibly altering the species mentally and physically, philosophical investigation of what human beings are proceeds robustly. Many thinkers contend that whatever we are has little to do with how we should behave. Yet, tampering with what the human being is may tread upon human rights to be whatever one is. Rights given in widely recognized documents such as the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples assume what humans are and need depends (...)
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  21. Transplanting the Body: Preliminary Ethical Considerations.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2017 - The New Bioethics 23 (3):219-235.
    A dissociated area of medical research warrants bioethical consideration: a proposed transplantation of a donor’s entire body, except head, to a patient with a fatal degenerative disease. The seeming improbability of such an operation can only underscore the need for thorough bioethical assessment: Not assessing a case of such potential ethical import, by showing neglect instead of facing the issue, can only compound the ethical predicament, perhaps eroding public trust in ethical medicine. This article discusses the historical background of full-body (...)
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  22.  82
    Michael Hauskeller: Sex and the Posthuman Condition: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014, 98 pp.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2016 - Science and Engineering Ethics 22 (5):1569-1574.
    This new book from Michael Hauskeller explores the currently marketed or projected sex/love products that exhibit some trait of so-called “posthumanistic” theory or design. These products are so designated because of their intention to fuse high technologies, including robotics and computing, with the human user. The author offers several arguments for why the theory behind these products leads to inconsistencies. The book uses a unique approach to philosophical argument by enmeshing the argument’s major points in a concomitant discussion of pieces (...)
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  23.  74
    The Astounding Assumption of Infinite Life.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2019 - Metaphilosophy 50 (3):377-394.
    The multi-millennial philosophical discussion about life after death has received a recent boost in the prospect of immortality attained via technologies. In this newer version, humans generally are considered mortal but may develop means of making themselves immortal. If “immortal” means not mortal, thus existing for infinity, and if the proposed infinite-existing entity is material, it must inhabit an infinite material universe. If the proposed entity is not material, there must be means by which it can shed its material substance (...)
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  24.  79
    Individual Responsibility for Environmental Degradation.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2016 - Environmental Ethics 38 (4):403-420.
    In environmental ethics a debate has arisen over the extent to which the individual should make changes in personal lifestyle in a long-term program of ameliorating environmental degradation, as opposed to directing energies toward public-policy change. In opposition are the facts that an individual’s contribution to environmental degradation can only have a negligible effect. Public policy offers the only real hope for such massive coordinated effort, and environmental degradation is only one of many global problems to which ethi­cally oriented people (...)
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  25. Assessing the Kantian Perspective on Valuing.Lantz Fleming Miller - manuscript
    Is the Kantian basis of valuing in humanity sufficient or sound enough to account for all valuing? At least two other such bases have been proposed across the ages, that of the sentiments and the valuing of life itself. This article focuses on the Kantian view, the first of these three possible bases of valuing. The concern is: by which criteria can we assess whether a given theory of or approach to basing a value is in fact usable and optimal, (...)
     
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  26. Beholt, the Man.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2015 - Colorado Springs, USA: Grand Viaduct.
    This narrative commentary on Nietzschean ambitions, in part influenced by Zarathustra and Ecce Homo, centers on a long, ongoing, expansive, and highly imaginative technological projects by two men, Stuart Beholt and Alby Tolby. Having worked up adventurous software in university days, their experiences interwoven with their friendship bring out a panoply of current philosophical issues--and beyond. This narrative philosophy evokes and explores more issues than current philosophical debates concerning emerging technologies can include in a more conventional work. At the same (...)
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  27. City Limit: A Sociopolitical Philosophical Indictment.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2013 - Colorado Springs: Grand Viaduct.
    This philosophical narrative delves into deepening crises afflicting modern democracies, when extreme inequality and its resultant alienation grips not just adults but, even more anguishingly, children. These children and often their parents come in far under the social radar, so out-of-touch that even census takers overlook them. In this milieu, weapons and narcotics are as much an unquestioned part of life as breathing. The world beyond this invisible cage entirely escapes them, nor does the larger society miss them or know (...)
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  28.  23
    (1 other version)Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, "Violence and Political Theory.".Lantz Fleming Miller - 2021 - Philosophy in Review 41 (2):65-67.
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  29.  72
    Persisting pan-institutional racism.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2017 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 43 (7):748-774.
    Which types of group-typing amounts to racism? The answer seemingly has to do with deeper physical or cultural traits over which an agent has no deliberate control but which are formative of the agent. In this article, I look to the cultural or ethnic bases of division of humans into races, albeit of a specific type: a basis that sees humanity climbing in a certain, presumably improving, direction. Those ethnicities that appear not to opt for this climb are commonly presumed (...)
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  30.  48
    Three Pervasive Presuppositions about Human Life and Ethics Strongly Warrant Analysis.Lantz Fleming Miller - 2017 - Metaphilosophy 48 (4):484-503.
    Common philosophical discussions concerning the ethics of human interaction with the biosphere and universe have been significantly informed by certain presuppositions: nature is conquerable; human cultural and social progress is somewhat like a thing, beyond human control, and is inevitable and benevolent; and Homo sapiens is the superior life-form. Although arguments, such as whether humans should conquer nature, founded upon these presuppositions have sometimes been challenged, each of these three presuppositions wants direct analysis. The three have become so ingrained in (...)
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  31. The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television by Michael Hauskeller, Thomas Philbeck, and Curtis Carbonell (review). [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2019 - Film and History 49 (2):94-96.
    Science fiction has served the film industry like a dreamy stepchild. It gets only scant accolades from its master but must do heavy lifting: that is, make money. While science-fiction films often emphasize spectacle and action, they also inspire philosophical contemplation. Why? Science fiction, dating back to Shelley and Verne, came into existence speculating about humanity's social and physical worlds. Many books and articles over the past several years discuss the philosophical issues that films raise. One fairly new school of (...)
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  32. A Way Out of Techno-limbo. [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2019 - Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 23 (2):251-256.
    Nihilism is in the air. Yet, it is hard to say to what profit—beyond that for marketers and manufacturers of electronic devices. Advertisements paradoxically take on a bravura of appealing to targeted-consumers’ nihilism in the guise of bold autonomy dependent on one’s incorporating their brand names into one’s life. Social analysts themselves, reporting on such phenomena, seem to shy from too much criticism of the trend lest they appear out of touch. We seem to have ended up in a sociopolitical (...)
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  33. Review of Consciousness and Moral Responsibility. By Neil Levy. [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2014 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 21 (11-12):201-206.
    One purpose for the field of consciousness studies may be to increase general understanding about consciousness and its place in human life, thereby possibly aiding us in living in better harmony within our societies and with our fellow humans. Neil Levy’s new work is a candidate for this latter purpose for the field. Consciousness studies may help us better understand how we function as conscious agents—or what role consciousness plays in our agency—and aid in our more just construction of laws, (...)
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  34. Review of The Trace of God: A Rational Warrant for Belief. By Joseph Hinman. [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2014 - Studies in Religion 43 (3):529-531.
    The ongoing debates about what rationality consists in remain unsettled and leave plenty of interpretation for what is rational in belief formation and action. Hinman risks a large step in seeming to assume that it is rational not to contravene scientific theories and findings and irrational to disallow this openness. These -- possibilities lending a potential for deistic beliefs not to be inconsistent with rationality. The presumed scientific approach to allowing a rationality in such belief revolves around the development of (...)
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  35. Beyond Human Nature by Jesse J. Prinz. [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2015 - Philosophy Now 108:47-49.
    The nature-nurture debate rages so, one cannot help but wonder why the sides are so vehemently partitioned. What's at stake? It is simply not clear why a great amount of people embrace either one side or the other, but dare not even blow a kiss to the opposite opinion. Prinz does an excellent job of arguing for the nurture position, zeroing in on some of the most preciously held nature arguments including the basis of knowledge, thought, and feelings in experience (...)
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  36.  71
    The Meaning of Life and Death: Ten Classic Thinkers on the Ultimate Question, MichaelHauskeller, 2020. London, Bloomsbury Academic. xv + 236 pp. £ 45.50 (hb) £ 13.99 (pb). [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2020 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (4):681-683.
    This book is at once incisive and exploratory, interpretive and historic scholarship. It appeals to both general and specialized readers. It uniquely takes a common philosophical theme, the meaning of life, and traces it through many philosophers’ and novelists' works. Sometimes the theme is buried and implicit, and offers a plausible distillation of each author's view. The result is a title that may sound like a self-help book’s—except the contents expand in manifold directions rather than narrow to easy advice. The (...)
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  37.  57
    Allen Buchanan: Beyond Humanity?: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-10-958781-0. $27.95. [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (4):899-900.
  38.  30
    King Car and the Ethics of Automobile Proponents’ Strategies in China and India, by Martin Calkins. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2011. 164 pp. Index. ISBN: 978-1617612718. [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2013 - Business Ethics Quarterly 23 (4):617-619.
    The increasing proliferation of the automobile is one of the hardest practical and ethical problems contemporary societies face, in terms of technology production and use. Nuclear weaponry may be our number one threat, but it is in the hands of a very few, almost inaccessible people. Nanotechology may tum the planet into a "gray goo," in Bill Joy's famous terms; and "superintelligent" machines and "uploaded minds" may engender megalomaniacal power-seekers; but such technologies remain highly speculative. Yet, the automobile is both (...)
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  39.  41
    Martha Nussbaum: Review of Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 978-0-674-72465-6. 457 pp. Hardback. Index. $35. [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (5):1009-1010.
    After much of the 20th Century, when morals were widely considered little more than mere emotional responses, a range of writers, such as Haidt, Prinz, and Patricia Churchland, have been restoring the emotions’ respectable roles in human cognition and morality. Nussbaum in her Upheavals of Thought showed how important emotions are for human cognitive life, so there is no clear distinction between their “irrationality” and the cerebral cortex’s supposed “rationality.” In Political Emotions, Nussbaum asks readers to look into how pivotally (...)
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  40.  25
    Review of Jan Baars, Aging and the Art of Living. [REVIEW]Lantz Fleming Miller - 2014 - American Journal of Bioethics 14 (4):62-63.