Some critics question new natural law theorists’ conception of the common good of the political community, namely, their interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas and the conclusion that the political common good is primarily instrumental rather than intrinsic and transcendent. Contrary to these objections, the common good of the political community is primarily instrumental. It aims chiefly at securing the conditions for human flourishing. Its unique ability to use the law to bring about justice and peace and promote virtue in individuals (...) may make the common good of the political community critically important. Nevertheless, it is still not an intrinsic aspect of human flourishing. Unlike the family or a religious group, membership in a political community is not an end in itself. (shrink)

If libertarianism is true, then there is a sense in which agents have it within their power to bring it about that some world is actual. Against recent arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, I offer an account of power over the past which takes this implication of libertarianism into consideration. I argue that the resulting account is available to Ockhamists and that it is immune to recent criticisms of the notion of counterfactual power over the (...) past. But I contend that it is not an option for Molinists and that this fact leaves that position vulnerable to incompatibilist arguments. (shrink)

An Argument From Evolutionary Naturalism An Argument from Personal Dignity References.

Mary Poppins is a magical film and a story of redemption that might be placed alongside the Parable of the Prodigal Son or A Christmas Carol. Mary may be the star of the film, but George Banks is its subject. If the world ever seemed wonderful and filled with surprises for George Banks as a child, it has since been supplanted by a world that is mechanical, predictable, and subject to the demands of business and of propriety. From Jack the (...) Giant Killer people learn that when pride has grown to gigantic proportions it ought to be killed; Cinderella teaches that the humble are exalted; Beauty and the Beast demonstrates the principle that loving the unlovable may result in the transformation from the beastly to the beautiful; and Mary Poppins reminds them that “There is no greater joy than that seen through the eyes of a child,” as Walt Disney observes in Saving Mr. Banks. (shrink)

The traditional doctrine of human dignity has fallen on hard times. It is said that that doctrine is “speciesist to the core” and “the moral effluvium of a discredited metaphysics.” Those of us who would defend the view that humans enjoy greater moral standing than nonhuman living things must answer the question, “What’s so special about humans?” In this paper, I argue that moral agency is a great-making property that confers special worth on its bearer.

This paper presents five studies on the development and validation of a scale of intellectual humility. This scale captures cognitive, affective, behavioral, and motivational components of the construct that have been identified by various philosophers in their conceptual analyses of intellectual humility. We find that intellectual humility has four core dimensions: Open-mindedness (versus Arrogance), Intellectual Modesty (versus Vanity), Corrigibility (versus Fragility), and Engagement (versus Boredom). These dimensions display adequate self-informant agreement, and adequate convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity. In particular, Open-mindedness (...) adds predictive power beyond the Big Six for an objective behavioral measure of intellectual humility, and Intellectual Modesty is uniquely related to Narcissism. We find that a similar factor structure emerges in Germanophone participants, giving initial evidence for the model’s cross-cultural generalizability. (shrink)

The scientific, ethical, and policy issues raised by research involving the engraftment of human neural stem cells into the brains of nonhuman primates are explored by an interdisciplinary working group in this Policy Forum. The authors consider the possibility that this research might alter the cognitive capacities of recipient great apes and monkeys, with potential significance for their moral status.

Debates over health care have focused for so long on economics that the proper goals for medicine seem to be taken for granted; yet problems in health care stem as much from a lack of agreement about the goals and priorities of medicine as from the way systems function. This book asks basic questions about the purposes and ends of medicine and shows that the answers have practical implications for future health care delivery, medical research, and the education of medical (...) students. The Hastings Center coordinated teams of physicians, nurses, public health experts, philosophers, theologians, politicians, health care administrators, social workers, and lawyers in fourteen countries to explore these issues. In this volume, they articulate four basic goals of medicine — prevention of disease, relief of suffering, care of the ill, and avoidance of premature death — and examine them in light of the cultural, political, and economic pressures under which medicine functions. In reporting these findings, the contributors touch on a wide range of diverse issues such as genetic technology, Chinese medicine, care of the elderly, and prevention and public health. The Goals of Medicine clearly demonstrates the importance of clarifying the purposes of medicine before attempting to change the economic and organizational systems. It warns that without such examination, any reform efforts may be fruitless. (shrink)

By using social media, corporations can communicate about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) to the public without having to pass through the gatekeeping function of the news media. However, to what extent can corporations influence the public’s evaluation of their CSR activities with social media activities and if the legacy news media still act as the primary agenda setters when it comes to corporate reputation have not yet been thoroughly analyzed in a digitized media environment. This study addressed this research (...) gap by looking at the effect of CSR communication through Facebook and news media coverage of CSR on corporate reputation in Switzerland. The results of this longitudinal study show that the salience and tone of news media coverage of CSR were positively related to corporate reputation, even though the news media coverage about CSR was predominantly negative. Thus, reputation was still strengthened even in the face of negative publicity. No effect of CSR communication through Facebook on corporate reputation was found. The results suggest that legacy news media still were influential in determining how the public evaluates corporations in the digital age. (shrink)

In _The Priority of Prudence_, Daniel Mark Nelson proposes a reappropriation of a moral perspective that focuses on the cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. The study aims to recover and rehabilitate the virtue of prudence as a way of resuming a moral conversation that has been stalemated for too long. Nelson's main source for reviving the virtue of prudence is St. Thomas Aquinas's account of the cardinal virtues in the _Summa Theologica_. A primary problem with (...) using Aquinas as a source for reviving an ethics of virtue centered on prudence is that he is commonly perceived as the most prominent figure in the conflicting natural-law tradition. According to Nelson's reinterpretation, however, Aquinas teaches that moral understanding depends first and foremost on prudence working in accord with other cardinal virtues and that natural law functions to explain moral reasoning rather than to guide it. This study serves to advance the debate about the contemporary relevance of an ethics of virtue by way of its significantly more detailed explication of prudence. Nelson makes important connections between influential reinterpretations of the ethical theory of Aquinas that have been published during the last thirty years and widespread interest in an ethics of virtue that has been expressed by Alasdair Maclntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, William Sullivan, Robert Bellah, and others. _The Priority of Prudence _represents a significant contribution to the scholarly literature both in the study of Aquinas and in the debate on the ethics of virtue. (shrink)

Daniel Haybron’s recent book, The Pursuit of Unhappiness, includes a defense of a normative notion of well-being. Haybron’s main contribution is to argue that a central component of well-being is the fulfillment of one’s “emotional nature,” that is, fulfillment as a unique individual who is such as to find happiness in some things rather than others. We argue that the contrast he draws between his view and “Aristotelian” views of well-being is problematic in two ways. First, Haybron says that (...) unlike the self-fulfillment theory, Aristotelian theories of well-being are “perfectionist” theories; we argue that Haybron’s concerns about “perfectionism” should be distinguished from Aristotelian eudaimonist theory. Second, Haybron’s self-fulfillment theory makes an individual’s well-being wholly dependent on that individual’s make-up, and we argue that that is a bad fit with our considered convictions about well-being. (shrink)

From the early days of European settlement in North America, Christianity has had a profound impact on American law and culture. This volume profiles nineteen of America's most influential Christian jurists from the early colonial era to the present day. Anyone interested in American legal history and jurisprudence, the role Christianity has played throughout the nation's history, and the relationship between faith and law will enjoy this worthy and unique study. The jurists covered in this collection were pious men and (...) women, but that does not mean they agreed on how faith should inform law. From Roger Williams and John Cotton to Antonin Scalia and Mary Ann Glendon, America's great Christian jurists have brought their faith to bear on the practice of law in different ways and to different effects. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)

Many forms of Buddhism, divergent in philosophy and style, emerged as Buddhism filtered out of India into other parts of Asia. Nonetheless, all of them embodied an ethical core that is remarkably consistent. Articulated by the historical Buddha in his first sermon, this moral core is founded on the concept of karma--that intentions and actions have future consequences for an individual--and is summarized as Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood, three of the elements of the Eightfold Path. Although they (...) were later elaborated and interpreted in a multitude of ways, none of these core principles were ever abandoned. The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics provides a comprehensive overview of the field of Buddhist ethics in the twenty-first century. The Handbook discusses the foundations of Buddhist ethics focusing on karma and the precepts looking at abstinence from harming others, stealing, and intoxication. It considers ethics in the different Buddhist traditions and the similarities they share, and compares Buddhist ethics to Western ethics and the psychology of moral judgments. The volume also investigates Buddhism and society analysing economics, environmental ethics, and Just War ethics. The final section focuses on contemporary issues surrounding Buddhist ethics, including gender, sexuality, animal rights, and euthanasia. This groundbreaking collection offers an indispensable reference work for students and scholars of Buddhist ethics and comparative moral philosophy. (shrink)

The use of robots in therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder raises issues concerning the ethical and social acceptability of this technology and, more generally, about human–robot interaction. However, usually philosophical papers on the ethics of human–robot-interaction do not take into account stakeholders’ views; yet it is important to involve stakeholders in order to render the research responsive to concerns within the autism and autism therapy community. To support responsible research and innovation in this field, this paper identifies a (...) range of ethical, social and therapeutic concerns, and presents and discusses the results of an exploratory survey that investigated these issues and explored stakeholders’ expectations about this kind of therapy. We conclude that although in general stakeholders approve of using robots in therapy for children with ASD, it is wise to avoid replacing therapists by robots and to develop and use robots that have what we call supervised autonomy. This is likely to create more trust among stakeholders and improve the quality of the therapy. Moreover, our research suggests that issues concerning the appearance of the robot need to be adequately dealt with by the researchers and therapists. For instance, our survey suggests that zoomorphic robots may be less problematic than robots that look too much like humans. (shrink)

Substance dualism is the view that there are two fundamentally different kinds of substances: physical and mental. By contrast, according to property dualism there is only one kind of substance (physical) but two fundamentally different kinds of properties: physical and mental. Property nominalism is the view that there are neither repeatable nor non-repeatable fundamentally predicable entities (i.e. neither universals nor tropes) and that things being a certain way or being related in a certain way must ultimately be accounted for in (...) terms of concrete particulars. In this paper, we consider a number of different kinds of property nominalism and argue that none of them sits well with property dualism. We pay special attention to the question of what it could mean for a property to count as mental given different nominalistic accounts of properties. Our conclusion is that property nominalism and property dualism are not a stable match. This is surprising, since property dualism has usually been understood as a thesis that is neutral about the nature of fundamental ontological categories and the relation between them. (shrink)

It is a clinician’s cliché that a physician only challenges a patient’s capacity to make a treatment decision if that decision is not what the physician wants. Agreement is proof of decisional capacity; disagreement is proof or at least evidence of capacity’s absence. It is assumed that this asymmetry cannot be justified, that the asymmetry must be a form of physicians’ paternalism. Instead what is at issue when patient and physician disagree are usually two laudable impulses. The first is physicians’ (...) commitment to patients’ well-being: physicians have a professional obligation as well as, ideally, a personal commitment to take care of patients—to do their best to bring about a positive medical outcome. The second impulse is common to much of human life, namely, the urge to find and to understand the source of our disagreements with one another. In this article we argue that, jointly, these impulses justify the asymmetry with regard to examining patients’ capacity. (shrink)

Recently Díaz, Hössjer and Marks (DHM) presented a Bayesian framework to measure cosmological tuning (either fine or coarse) that uses maximum entropy (maxent) distributions on unbounded sample spaces as priors for the parameters of the physical models (https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2021/07/020). The DHM framework stands in contrast to previous attempts to measure tuning that rely on a uniform prior assumption. However, since the parameters of the models often take values in spaces of infinite size, the uniformity assumption is unwarranted. This is known as (...) the normalization problem. In this paper we explain why and how the DHM framework not only evades the normalization problem but also circumvents other objections to the tuning measurement like the so called weak anthropic principle, the selection of a single maxent distribution and, importantly, the lack of invariance of maxent distributions with respect to data transformations. We also propose to treat fine-tuning as an emergence problem to avoid infinite loops in the prior distribution of hyperparameters (common to all Bayesian analysis), and explain that previous attempts to measure tuning using uniform priors are particular cases of the DHM framework. Finally, we prove a theorem, explaining when tuning is fine or coarse for different families of distributions. The theorem is summarized in a table for ease of reference, and the tuning of three physical parameters is analyzed using the conclusions of the theorem. (shrink)

Pro-poor value chains intend to integrate smallholding farmers into high value markets to contribute to poverty alleviation and food security. Although income benefits of pro-poor value chains have been found, scant evidence exists regarding the potential for these markets to enhance food security. This study focuses on components of food access—dietary diversity, physical and financial access, and social acceptability—among households that participate in pro-poor value chains and non-participating households in the central highlands of Peru where development interventions have created high (...) value market niches for the native potato varieties that smallholding farmers have conserved for thousands of years. Using a mixed methods approach, this study assessed dietary diversity among households that participate and do not participate in pro-poor value chains, as well as their perceptions of their food access. Findings indicated that households that participate in value chains have higher dietary diversity than non-participating households but that these differences are likely due to pre-existing differences in socioeconomic status rather than any causal effect provided by value chains. The study also concluded that while participation in pro-poor value chains sometimes enhance the purchasing power of participating households, they may also weaken financial access, important for both purchasing food and travel to make those purchases. Community perspectives also indicated concerns with the acceptability of diets, which cannot likely be comprehensively addressed by pro-poor value chains. Collectively, the findings from this study cast doubt on the assumption that a linear flow exists between pro-poor value chains and enhanced food access. (shrink)

A survey of the 37 psychology departments offering courses accredited by the Australian Psychological Society yielded a 92% response rate. Sixty-eight percent of departments employed students as research subjects, with larger departments being more likely to do so. Most of these departments drew their student subject pools from introductory courses. Student research participation was strictly voluntary in 57% of these departments, whereas 43% of the departments have failed to comply with normally accepted ethical standards. It is of great concern that (...) institutional ethics committees apparently continue to condone, or fail to act against, unethical research practices. Although these committees have a duty of care to all subjects, the final responsibility for conducting research in an ethical manner lies with the individual researcher. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 38, Issue 1, pp 176 - 210 Two pirated editions form a vital but neglected part of the printing and reception history of the first edition of Grotius’s _Mare liberum_.

Philosophical analyses of scientific concepts are legion. However, this literature is replete with methodological errors that have largely gone unnoticed. Five distinct projects are conflated which has led to faulty inferences, ambiguities, and mischaracterizations. There has also been some recent enthusiasm for approaches that attempt to rectify problematic scientific concepts but the motivations for these approaches are questionable. I am hopeful that by bringing these various issues to light that it will lead practitioners to be more explicit about their aims (...) and subsequently result in better analyses. (shrink)

As part of a multifactorial approach to address weak incentives for innovative antimicrobial drug development, market entry rewards are an emerging solution. Recently, the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy released the Priority Antimicrobial Value and Entry Award proposal, which combines a MER with payment reforms, transitioning from volume-based to “value-based” payments for antimicrobials. Here, the PAVE Award and similar MERs are reviewed, focusing on further refinement and avenues for implementation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a host of ethical challenges, but key among these has been the possibility that health care systems might need to ration scarce critical care resources. Rationing p...