The seven books of the Diuinae institutiones, the most important work by Lactantius, the Christian author and contemporary of Constantine the Great, are an apologetic treatise that includes a defense of Christianity and a criticism of pagan religion, philosophy and morals.

SENECA S LIFE Lucius ANNABUS SENECA was born at Cordoba, then the leading town in Roman Spain, at about the same time as Christ.1 His father, Marcus Annaeus ...

Research into cognitive biases that impair human judgment has mostly been applied to the area of economic decision-making. Ethical decision-making has been comparatively neglected. Since ethical decisions often involve very high individual as well as collective stakes, analyzing how cognitive biases affect them can be expected to yield important results. In this theoretical article, we consider the ethical debate about cognitive enhancement and suggest a number of cognitive biases that are likely to affect moral intuitions and judgments about CE: status (...) quo bias, loss aversion, risk aversion, omission bias, scope insensitivity, nature bias, and optimistic bias. We find that there are more well-documented biases that are likely to cause irrational aversion to CE than biases in the opposite direction. This suggests that common attitudes about CE are predominantly negatively biased. Within this new perspective, we hope that subsequent research will be able to elaborate this hypothesis and develop effective de-biasing techniques that can help increase the rationality of the public CE debate and thus improve our ethical decision-making. (shrink)

Across eight experiments (N = 2310), we studied whether people would prioritize rescuing individuals who may be thought to contribute more to society. We found that participants were generally dismissive of general rules that prioritize more socially beneficial individuals, such as doctors instead of unemployed people. By contrast, participants were more supportive of one-off decisions to save the life of a more socially beneficial individual, even when such cases were the same as those covered by the rule. This generality effect (...) occurred robustly even when controlling for various factors. It occurred when the decision-maker was the same in both cases, when the pairs of people differing in the extent of their indirect social utility was varied, when the scenarios were varied, when the participant samples came from different countries, and when the general rule only covered cases that are exactly the same as the situation described in the one-off condition. The effect occurred even when the general rule was introduced via a concrete precedent case. Participants' tendency to be more supportive of the one-off proposal than the general rule was significantly reduced when they evaluated the two proposals jointly as opposed to separately. Finally, the effect also occurred in sacrificial moral dilemmas, a general phenomenon occurring in multiple moral contexts. We discuss possible explanations of the effect, including concerns about negative consequences of the rule and a deontological aversion against making difficult trade-off decisions unless they are absolutely necessary. (shrink)

Excerpt from An Introduction to the Study of Government Since this book was conceived and written, events have come to pass which will ultimately be reflected in momentous political changes among the chief states of the modem world. Such changes, however, will certainly develop along the lines of liberal experiment in government as such experiment has been made in various democratic countries. A study of modern government in general will, therefore, have a value to the student in his consideration of (...) coming possibilities in European political organization. This book has been written to place before students a concise statement of the nature, organization, and operation of government as government exists in the foremost states of the modern world. On the one hand, it covers a narrower field than the current textbooks on Political Science; on the other, it covers a wider field than the current textbooks on the government of the United States. I have endeavored, after a study of various modern governments, to set forth general principles of government and to show how these general principles are modified in practice by particular states. Two years ago I wrote to several of the leading publishers in this country asking for the titles of their publications covering the field of government, and specified the nature of the material I desired. In reply, the publishers submitted works on Political Science, books on the government of the United States, and theoretical treatises on principles of government in general. So far as I could discover, no book of the precise character I wanted was in print. After considerable hesitation, I planned the work myself. The greatest part of my available time since then has been spent in writing the book. The general divisions of my plan are those that are commonly adopted by political science writers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Giving Primacy to Sociocultural Settings Giving Primacy to the Historical and Cultural Conclusion.

The 2016 outbreak of the Zika arbovirus was associated with large numbers of cases of the newly-recognised Congenital Zika Syndrome. This novel teratogenic epidemic raises significant ethical and practical issues. Many of these arise from strategies used to avoid cases of CZS, with contraception in particular being one proposed strategy that is atypical in epidemic control. Using contraception to reduce the burden of CZS has an ethical complication: interventions that impact the timing of conception alter which people will exist in (...) the future. This so-called ‘non-identity problem’ potentially has significant social justice implications for evaluating contraception, that may affect our prioritisation of interventions to tackle Zika. This paper combines ethical analysis of the non-identity problem with empirical data from a novel survey about the general public's moral intuitions. The ethical analysis examines different perspectives on the non-identity problem, and their implications for using contraception in response to Zika. The empirical section reports the results of an online survey of 93 members of the US general public exploring their intuitions about the non-identity problem in the context of the Zika epidemic. Respondents indicated a general preference for a person-affecting intervention over an impersonal intervention. However, their responses did not appear to be strongly influenced by the non-identity problem. Despite its potential philosophical significance, we conclude from both theoretical considerations and analysis of the attitudes of the community that the non-identity problem should not affect how we prioritise contraception relative to other interventions to avoid CZS. (shrink)

____On Race and Philosophy__ is a collection of essays written and published across the last twenty years, which focus on matters of race, philosophy, and social and political life in the West, in particular in the US. These important writings trace the author's continuing efforts not only to confront racism, especially within philosophy, but, more importantly, to work out viable conceptions of raciality and ethnicity that are empirically sound while avoiding chauvinism and invidious ethnocentrism. The hope is that such conceptions (...) will assist efforts to fashion a nation-state in which racial and ethnic cultures and identities are recognized and nurtured contributions to a more just and stable democracy. (shrink)

Race and ethnicity are two of the most pervasive aspects of life in America. That there are different races and ethnies, that each person is a member of one or more races and ethnies, is probably taken for granted by most people. And difficulties of various kinds involving race and ethnicity in a variety of ways are abundant. Yet, both raciality and ethnicity—what determines and characterizes a race and an ethnie, respectively; whether or not it is ever appropriate to take (...) race or ethnicity into account when making moral judgments about persons—are hardly settled matters, including whether it is correct to say that races, in particular, even exist. This too is an important aspect of prevailing difficulties. Race, especially, continues to be the focus of intense political struggle, and thus is presently a topic of equally intense and wide-ranging discussion. (shrink)

Dibujar el pensamiento de Seneca es dibujar su figura viva, trazar el esquema de su persona. Seneca es un mediador que para alzarse sobre nosotros necesita de nuestra necesidad, pues solo apoyado en nuestra indigencia tiene sentido. Maria Zambrano lleva a cabo un lucido estudio de la figura y significacion del pensador cordobes y presenta una seleccion de sus escritos.

The author argues that the new digital possibilities in scientific communication do not imply, by any means, that many old requirements are becoming dispensable. The essential elements of the system, such as quality assurance, authenticity, orientation and navigation will still demand considerable expense. The overall system costs will rather be higher in a hybrid system. In the second part of his lecture, the author discusses the two fundamentally different open access models, the Golden Road, which is supposed to be able (...) to operate, eventually, without any publishers, and the Green Road, whose functioning is based on primary publication through publishing houses. Finally, the basic issue of the indispensable qualitative stratigraphy of scientific documents is addressed. For this, the published journals, which also provide topical focus and, thus, orientation as well as active marketing in terms of optimal diffusion, still are a very capable tool. It is questionable to what extent these tasks could be fulfilled by university-based repositories. The publishing houses, on the other hand, have a proven track record of providing a wide range of useful value-adding services in digital publishing. (shrink)

____On Race and Philosophy__ is a collection of essays written and published across the last twenty years, which focus on matters of race, philosophy, and social and political life in the West, in particular in the US. These important writings trace the author's continuing efforts not only to confront racism, especially within philosophy, but, more importantly, to work out viable conceptions of raciality and ethnicity that are empirically sound while avoiding chauvinism and invidious ethnocentrism. The hope is that such conceptions (...) will assist efforts to fashion a nation-state in which racial and ethnic cultures and identities are recognized and nurtured contributions to a more just and stable democracy. (shrink)

We introduce an extension of the propositional calculus to include abstracts of predicates and quantifiers, employing a single rule along with a novel comprehension schema and a principle of extensionality, which are substituted for the Bernays postulates for quantifiers and the comprehension schemata of ZF and other set theories. We prove that it is consistent in any finite Boolean subset lattice. We investigate the antinomies of Russell, Cantor, Burali-Forti, and others, and discuss the relationship of the system to other set-theoretic (...) systems ZF, NBG, and NF. We discuss two methods of axiomatizing higher order quantification and abstraction, and then very briefly discuss the application of one of these methods to areas of mathematics outside of logic. (shrink)

Is the tendency to morally prioritize humans over animals weaker in children than adults? In two pre-registered studies (N = 622), 5- to 9-year-old children and adults were presented with moral dilemmas pitting varying numbers of humans against varying numbers of either dogs or pigs and were asked who should be saved. In both studies, children had a weaker tendency to prioritize humans over animals than adults. They often chose to save multiple dogs over one human, and many valued the (...) life of a dog as much as the life of a human. While they valued pigs less, the majority still prioritized ten pigs over one human. By contrast, almost all adults chose to save one human over even one hundred dogs or pigs. Our findings suggest that the common view that humans are far more morally important than animals appears late in development and is likely socially acquired. (shrink)

This volume offers clear and forceful contemporary translations of the most important of Seneca's 'Moral Essays': On Anger, On Mercy, On the Private Life and the first four books of On Favours. They give an attractive, full picture of the social and moral outlook of an ancient Stoic thinker intimately involved in the governance of the Roman empire in the mid first century of the Christian era. A general introduction describes Seneca's life and career and explains the fundamental ideas underlying (...) the Stoic moral, social and political philosophy that informs the essays. Individual introductions, footnotes and biographical notes place the essays in their historical and philosophical contexts, and further assistance to students is provided by section headings in the translations which organize the principal transitions in the argument and the more unfamiliar aspects of Seneca's writing. (shrink)