This article argues, from a critical realist perspective, that it would be beneficial to extend thinking on how personal and social education could become more central to students’ learning. We explore how constructive-informed arrangements which emphasize cognitive skills and affective qualities could be realized through experiential approaches to learning. Our theorizing is informed by neo-Aristotelian thinking on the importance of identifying mutually acceptable value commitments which can cultivate practical wisdom as well as generally benefit society. Thereafter, we outline how the (...) recent writings of Tiberius could inform thinking on how, epistemologically and ethically, a first person perspective on learning and personal growth could connect with normative decision making on how to make good life choices. We conclude by briefly highlighting the methodological potential of using outdoor learning environments to help students make informed and wise judgements which show evidence of discernment, deliberation and effective decision making. (shrink)

Benton MacKaye's name is rarely evoked in the fields of environmental history and philosophy. The author of the Appalachian Trail in the early 1920s and a co-founder of the Wilderness Society with Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall in the 1930s, MacKaye's unique contribution to American environmental thought is seldom recognized. This neglect is particularly egregious in the current debate over the intellectual foundations of the American wilderness idea, a discussion to which I believe MacKaye has much to contribute. Specifically, (...) I believe that his pragmatic vision for wilderness conservation, a project supported through an appeal to the values of a reconstructed "indigenous" communal environment, owes much to the social philosophy of Josiah Royce, MacKaye's former teacher at Harvard. While the Appalachian Trail never delivered on MacKaye's goals of progressive reform and failed to unite the regional planning and conservation communities of the time, his vision remains highly relevant to our present-day deliberations about the relationship between wild nature and society at the dawn of the 21st century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.1 (2002) 147-153 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals Steven M. Wise. Foreward by Jane Goodall. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2000. pp. 384. US $17.50. ISBN 0-7382-0437-4 (Paperback) "Ancient philosophers claimed that all nonhuman animals had been designed and placed on this earth just for human beings. Ancient (...) jurists declared that law had been created just for human beings. Although philosophy and science have long since recanted, the law has not." Steven M. Wise, Rattling the Cage, p. 4. Readers of this journal are well-versed in the myriad ways in which nonhuman animals are harmfully exploited at the hands of human beings—from battery hens and veal calves to mass-produced pigs; from Pennsylvania pigeon shoots to canned hunts on Texas ranches; from rodeos to roadside zoos; from LD-50 toxicity tests on rats and Draize eye tests on rabbits to head trauma and infectious disease experimentation on primates. Despite other sticking points, it is by now uncontroversial among [End Page 147] nonanthropocentric theorists that, in utilitarian terms, the benefits to humans of the above practices fall far short of justifying the harms they cause to their nonhuman victims or, in deontological terms, that they violate the rights of creatures with inherent value. Indeed, these arguments are so well-rehearsed and so widely regarded as compelling that it no longer seems particularly bold to predict that if reason ever prevails over tradition and prejudice, the future will look back on this generation's treatment of our fellow creatures with the same kind of shame and condemnation with which European Americans regard our slaveholding past.More sobering but equally familiar is the observation that decisive arguments for the gross immorality of existing practices will bring about neither their elimination nor significant reform as long as the presumed legitimacy of human exploitation of nonhuman beings remains entrenched in both popular consciousness and economic, political, and legal institutions. In the interests of chipping away at popular apathy, academics should no doubt go on repeating the well-worn arguments against speciesism in classrooms, popular venues, and professional research. But in a world structured far more directly by the interests of a powerful few than by the values of the many, this consciousness-raising strategy properly plays at most a supporting role to the even more vital project of challenging and ultimately restructuring the institutions that sanction and carry out these injustices. In short, what nonhuman animals need from ethically sensitive intellectuals is not just rational argument, but effective legal and political action.One of the main institutional obstacles to progress in this area is undoubtedly the legal relegation of animals to property status—which is why Steve M. Wise's Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals is such an important book. Wise teaches animal rights law at Harvard, Vermont, and John Marshall Law Schools and has spent more than twenty years fighting for animals in the legal system; his book displays the bittersweet fruit of that experience. The tenor throughout is a mixture of conviction in the justice of his cause—which cannot but sustain a vision of its eventual success—together with the frustration and determined patience borne from decades of butting up against an utterly implacable wall. An eloquent foreword by Jane Goodall, together with Wise's own harrowing first chapter, describe the nightmarish existences imposed on our nearest nonhuman relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, for the sake of science, entertainment, and profit—nightmares enabled by a legal system that [End Page 148] treats all nonhumans as mere things. An engaging storyteller with a synthetic conception of the history of ideas, Wise unearths the origins of this conception of animals in the Great Chain of Being, demonstrates its defeat by Darwinian science, and builds piece by piece a case—drawing heavily on research into animal consciousness—for extending legal rights at least to chimpanzees and bonobos.The substantive theses of this case are, first, that the denial of... (shrink)

Benton MacKaye's name is rarely evoked in the fields of environmental history and philosophy. The author of the Appalachian Trail in the early 1920s and a co-founder of the Wilderness Society with Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall in the 1930s, MacKaye's unique contribution to American environmental thought is seldom recognized. This neglect is particularly egregious in the current debate over the intellectual foundations of the American wilderness idea, a discussion to which I believe MacKaye has much to contribute. Specifically, (...) I believe that his pragmatic vision for wilderness conservation, a project supported through an appeal to the values of a reconstructed "indigenous" communal environment, owes much to the social philosophy of Josiah Royce, MacKaye's former teacher at Harvard. While the Appalachian Trail never delivered on MacKaye's goals of progressive reform and failed to unite the regional planning and conservation communities of the time, his vision remains highly relevant to our present-day deliberations about the relationship between wild nature and society at the dawn of the 21st century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.1 (2002) 147-153 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals Steven M. Wise. Foreward by Jane Goodall. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2000. pp. 384. US $17.50. ISBN 0-7382-0437-4 (Paperback) "Ancient philosophers claimed that all nonhuman animals had been designed and placed on this earth just for human beings. Ancient (...) jurists declared that law had been created just for human beings. Although philosophy and science have long since recanted, the law has not." Steven M. Wise, Rattling the Cage, p. 4. Readers of this journal are well-versed in the myriad ways in which nonhuman animals are harmfully exploited at the hands of human beings—from battery hens and veal calves to mass-produced pigs; from Pennsylvania pigeon shoots to canned hunts on Texas ranches; from rodeos to roadside zoos; from LD-50 toxicity tests on rats and Draize eye tests on rabbits to head trauma and infectious disease experimentation on primates. Despite other sticking points, it is by now uncontroversial among [End Page 147] nonanthropocentric theorists that, in utilitarian terms, the benefits to humans of the above practices fall far short of justifying the harms they cause to their nonhuman victims or, in deontological terms, that they violate the rights of creatures with inherent value. Indeed, these arguments are so well-rehearsed and so widely regarded as compelling that it no longer seems particularly bold to predict that if reason ever prevails over tradition and prejudice, the future will look back on this generation's treatment of our fellow creatures with the same kind of shame and condemnation with which European Americans regard our slaveholding past.More sobering but equally familiar is the observation that decisive arguments for the gross immorality of existing practices will bring about neither their elimination nor significant reform as long as the presumed legitimacy of human exploitation of nonhuman beings remains entrenched in both popular consciousness and economic, political, and legal institutions. In the interests of chipping away at popular apathy, academics should no doubt go on repeating the well-worn arguments against speciesism in classrooms, popular venues, and professional research. But in a world structured far more directly by the interests of a powerful few than by the values of the many, this consciousness-raising strategy properly plays at most a supporting role to the even more vital project of challenging and ultimately restructuring the institutions that sanction and carry out these injustices. In short, what nonhuman animals need from ethically sensitive intellectuals is not just rational argument, but effective legal and political action.One of the main institutional obstacles to progress in this area is undoubtedly the legal relegation of animals to property status—which is why Steve M. Wise's Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals is such an important book. Wise teaches animal rights law at Harvard, Vermont, and John Marshall Law Schools and has spent more than twenty years fighting for animals in the legal system; his book displays the bittersweet fruit of that experience. The tenor throughout is a mixture of conviction in the justice of his cause—which cannot but sustain a vision of its eventual success—together with the frustration and determined patience borne from decades of butting up against an utterly implacable wall. An eloquent foreword by Jane Goodall, together with Wise's own harrowing first chapter, describe the nightmarish existences imposed on our nearest nonhuman relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, for the sake of science, entertainment, and profit—nightmares enabled by a legal system that [End Page 148] treats all nonhumans as mere things. An engaging storyteller with a synthetic conception of the history of ideas, Wise unearths the origins of this conception of animals in the Great Chain of Being, demonstrates its defeat by Darwinian science, and builds piece by piece a case—drawing heavily on research into animal consciousness—for extending legal rights at least to chimpanzees and bonobos.The substantive theses of this case are, first, that the denial of... (shrink)

This book is our century’s most comprehensive and wise treatment of nihilism in all of its guises, comparing favorably with Rosen, Cavell, and indeed with Spengler. Crosby argues that our culture is genuinely haunted by nihilism expressing itself in the fideism of fundamentalism as well as in the debilitating alienation from all orientation. This results from a one-sided development of Western culture. Unlike most writers on this topic, Crosby acknowledges many sources colluding to frame the culture of nihilism, including (...) “the death of God,” the objectification of nature, the meaninglessness of suffering in a mechanical universe, the ephemerality of time in a world where value does not accumulate, the arbitrariness of historicized reason, the reduction of value to will, and the alienation of the Cartesian ego. These sources are reviewed in the first two parts of the book with the result that the phenomenon of nihilism becomes understandable. In its third and fourth parts, Crosby provides a critical analysis of the religious and philosophical forces leading to nihilism by discussing authors from the early modern period through Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Russell, and Derrida. He shows that these forces are skewed and impoverished and should not be allowed to determine our situation. The comprehensive attention to detail and the multi-perspectival interpretation demonstrates as well as asserts the richness of the culture that puts nihilism in its place. Part Five, finally, rephrases the criticism of the sources of nihilism in positive ways. Part Four in particular is a tour de force of philosophical argument. Its richness of nuance, plurality of views examined, and adroitness of critical interpretation provide cumulatively a powerful, non-nihilistic reading of the philosophic tradition. The force of the argument derives from its comprehensive, cumulative character. Crosby distinguishes and relates five areas of nihilism: political, moral, epistemological, cosmic, and existential. Throughout the book, he illustrates and examines these as they are expressed in literature and art, in daily life and practical affairs, and in philosophy. The book is richly erudite in its marshalling of consciousness from so many domains. (shrink)

In The Quantum Self, Danah Zohar argues that the insights of modem physics can illuminate our understanding of everyday life -- our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world at large. Guiding us through the strange and fascinating workings of the subatomic realm to create a new model of human consciousness, the author addresses enduring philosophical questions. Does the new physics provide a basis by which our consciousness might continue beyond death? How does the material world (for instance, (...) ugly inner cities) impinge upon our sense of self? Is there a subatomic wellspring from which our creativity, our empathy with others, and our feelings of unity with the inanimate world originate?Most important, Zohar shows how the vitality of the new physics combats the alienation and fragmentation of twentieth-century life, and replaces it with a model of reality in which the universe itself may possess a type of consciousness, of which human consciousness is one expression. (shrink)

In his recent book, Professor J. S. Morrison has brought to a happy conclusion a quarter of a century and more of inspired research into the problem of how the oars of a classical trireme were arranged. The essence of his solution of this perennial problem is that the fifth-century Athenian trireme had her oars and benches alike disposed at three different levels, each rower having his own oar, and each oar its separate thole set at a distance of feet, (...) not inches, from its neighbours. The evidence is marshalled with such mastery that it may be thought unlikely that there will ever be any general recrudescence of the di scaloccio and a zenzile theories that were as fashionable once as they are seen now to have been unhistorical. In his inquiry, however, Professor Morrison has wisely confined himself to the ancient sources, and no more than touched upon the analogy of the Byzantine dromon, the direct descendant of the classical trireme and to some extent the parent of the a zenzile galley. Other protagonists, and notably Tarn, have been far from sharing his discretion, and there is still room perhaps for a brief note calling attention to the possibility that the dromon of the Middle Ages may shed indirect light upon the trireme of fifteen hundred years earlier. (shrink)

In his recent book, Professor J. S. Morrison has brought to a happy conclusion a quarter of a century and more of inspired research into the problem of how the oars of a classical trireme were arranged. The essence of his solution of this perennial problem is that the fifth-century Athenian trireme had her oars and benches alike disposed at three different levels, each rower having his own oar, and each oar its separate thole set at a distance of feet, (...) not inches, from its neighbours. The evidence is marshalled with such mastery that it may be thought unlikely that there will ever be any general recrudescence of the di scaloccio and a zenzile theories that were as fashionable once as they are seen now to have been unhistorical. In his inquiry, however, Professor Morrison has wisely confined himself to the ancient sources, and no more than touched upon the analogy of the Byzantine dromon, the direct descendant of the classical trireme and to some extent the parent of the a zenzile galley. Other protagonists, and notably Tarn, have been far from sharing his discretion, and there is still room perhaps for a brief note calling attention to the possibility that the dromon of the Middle Ages may shed indirect light upon the trireme of fifteen hundred years earlier. (shrink)

Plato extends a bold, confident, and surprising empirical challenge. It is implicitly a claim about the psychological — more specifically motivational — economies of human beings, asserting that within each such economy there is a desire to live well. Call this claim ‘psychological eudaimonism’ (‘PE’). Further, the context makes clear that Plato thinks that this desire dominates in those who have it. In other words, the desire to live well can reliably be counted on (when accompanied with correct beliefs about (...) the role of morality or virtue in living well) to move people be virtuous. As we will argue, this general claim appears in not only Plato but Aristotle and the Stoics as well. But it is one we might wonder about, in three ways. First, we might wonder about its warrant. After all, the claim is universal in scope; yet it is about a highly contingent fact about the motivational propensities of individual human organisms, and there is abundant variability in the individual forms human nature takes. What grounds could the ancients have for their confidence that there are no outliers (assuming, as we do, that they do not merely misspeak in framing general claims as universal ones)? Second, we might wonder about its truth. For were it true, it would entail something remarkable about the nature of rationality that we (post-)moderns would be wise to heed. And third, we might wonder about its relationship with normative eudaimonism. By ‘normative eudaimonism’ (‘NE’) we mean the claim that we have conclusive reason to act in ways that conduce to our own eudaimonia. As we will show, the key to these three questions is the first. If we consider what justification the ancients have for their claim, we can see why that claim must be true. Moreover, as we will also show, it must be true because of the nature of practical rationality as the ancients understood it — that is, in terms of normative eudaimonism. We will show this by marshalling unexpected resources: Donald Davidson’s work in understanding how we interpret others and in so doing make sense of them as rational beings. If we couple Davidson’s account of interpretation with the eudaimonist structure of practical rationality essential to these ancient ethical theories, psychological eudaimonism is a consequence. The paper proceeds as follows. In Section I, we lay out the textual basis for ascribing PE to Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In Section II, we introduce Davidson’s account of interpretation. This allows us to appropriate that account in Section III to the particular purposes of normative eudaimonism, to support the claim that we must ascribe the desire to live well to those whom we would see as rational. Finally, in Section IV we consider challenges to this strategy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Human Goodness: Pragmatic Variations on Platonic ThemesCatherine E. MorrisonHuman Goodness: Pragmatic Variations on Platonic Themes by Paul Schollmeier Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 302. $80.00, cloth.This is a book about spirits—human, godly, ghostly, and alcoholic. Paul Schollmeier's Human Goodness: Pragmatic Variations on Platonic Themes explores how humble humans act morally in an absurd world. Schollmeier contends that the Socratic spirit, or daimon, of self-knowledge and (...) hypothesis testing provides the foundation for a deeply human moral philosophy. It is, in Schollmeier's elegant phrasing, daimonic rather than eudaimonic, joining Aristotle and Plato with William James, as well as contributions from the ghosts of David Hume and Immanuel Kant and a few rounds of whiskey. Spirits abound! Mixing Socratic skepticism with Jamesian empiricism, Schollmeier argues that we act best when we apply general principles held as opinion (not as certain knowledge), and tested through experience, to our particular situation. When these opinions yield fruit, we find ourselves less at the whim of our capricious surroundings; when they do not, we are obliged to recognize the provisional nature of our opinions and change them. The ends of these day-to-day activities reflect a far grander cosmological order, one we ignore to our mortal (and moral) peril. It is by engaging in this intellectual activity that we are made happy, and it is in measured pursuit of this happiness that we are virtuous. Our actions are neither absolutely true nor perfect. They are instead the best that we can do. And for a reviewer attempting to encapsulate a finely nuanced book in a small space, this is comforting advice indeed. [End Page 190]The book begins with a puzzle: The curious twin claims in Plato's Apology that, true to the Delphic oracle's proclamation, Socrates is both wise and knows nothing. The key to this apparent paradox, Schollmeier contends, is the difference between divine knowledge, "ultimate, nonhypothetical knowledge of final causes" (6), and human knowledge, which is hypothetical only. Schollmeier marshals William James to argue that as humans, we encounter objects of knowledge perceptually; even our concepts are fashioned from this meager material. Without access to divine knowledge, humans must test hypotheses and assume that they are true only provisionally.James's (and Hume's) emphasis on the passions as the foundation for action, however, gives Schollmeier pause. In order to construct a moral philosophy that avoids absolutism but remains objective, Schollmeier argues for a harmony between the intellectual and the passional that is ultimately rational, our Socratic daimon. We are neither gods nor animals. Should we surrender rationality to desire, Schollmeier warns in concert with Socrates, our already fragile perceptual knowledge will be further distorted by fickle emotion. It is precisely because our grasp on the world is so tenuous that we must pay heed to cool intellect rather than hot passion.Such skepticism of our claim to know might make one hesitant to engage in the enigmatic world—but we have no choice! In order to find our hybrid daimon, both Socratic and pragmatic, Schollmeier suggests rhetoric as the methodology best suited to serving practical knowledge because it eschews certainty in favor of probability and acknowledges that the hypotheses on which we act are tentative and revisable. To this end, Schollmeier highlights the enthymeme and argument by example as the two techniques that best suit the nature of our hypothetical knowledge, and he urges a return to philodoxy, the love of opinion.Giving up our claim to certainty need not be a dismal proposition. Having established his methodology, Schollmeier begins building a moral philosophy that embraces an ontology of change and contends that our happiness provides us with stability in the form of a rational teleology. The objects of our human happiness are fleeting and changeable, so happiness cannot be static but is, rather, an activity that is its own end, "an activity that is an intellectual inquiry" (78). Our happiness is contingent on our ability to hypothetically determine, in our particular setting, our function and then fulfill this role to the best of our abilities. Depending on the setting, it may be dancing, parenting, or simply a lively... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’s Moral Theory by John MarshallMartin HarveyJohn Marshall. Descartes’s Moral Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 177. Cloth, $35.00.In this concise, well-wrought and provocative work, John Marshall sets two primary goals for himself: 1) to show that Descartes, contrary to the received view, does provide us with the foundational elements of a full fledged ethical theory, and 2) to prove, again contrary to (...) standard interpreters, that Descartes’s early theory of morals, as sketched in the Discourse, is at one with the later theory propounded in The Passions of the Soul and numerous correspondences with Princess Elizabeth.The book is divided into three parts. The first section includes a thorough discussion of Descartes’s self-described morale par provision which provides the philosophical inquirer with practical guidance while the theoretical foundations of his or her belief system are shorn by radical doubt. These four maxims—to follow the customs of one’s country, practice one’s faith and rely on the opinions of the wise, to act resolutely in the face of uncertainty, to master one’s passions and to live the life, at least in Descartes’s case, of a philosopher—should not, Marshall argues, be viewed as ‘provisional’ in a pejorative sense (16–19). Instead, Marshall claims that Descartes takes them to be derivable from his four rules of method (14; 32–33). Therefore, the morale par provision is not some sort of “convenient” compromise but actually forms the second order core of a viable ethical theory (16). The second part, Descartes’s “Final Morality” is devoted to exploring Descartes’s conception of virtue and his notion of the good life (57). Succinctly, the good life for Descartes is happiness which, according to Marshall, in a very weakly Neo-Stoic sense is taken to consist in virtue and wisdom. Formally defined, Cartesian virtue is “the disposition always to judge as well as we can what is the best plan of action and to adhere strictly to that plan” (63). In turn, in a letter to Elizabeth, we are informed that behaving virtuously requires one to display strength and firmness of will, to judge well, and to possess well ordered desires—evidence which Marshall takes to show a close correspondence with the maxims of the earlier morale par provision. (74–5). Contra commentators such as Geroult, an apparent conceptual continuum between the early and later theories thereby obtains. (See Martial Geroult, Descartes’s Philosophy Interpreted according to the Order of Reasons, translated by Roger Ariew [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985], Chapters 19–20.)Unfortunately, and as Marshall readily admits, Descartes provides us with little substantive guidance concerning his axiology and theory of right action. Thus, the third, and more “speculative” part of the work seeks to correct this deficit by delving into a proposed Cartesian metaethics (115). Marshall begins by fleshing out Descartes’s [End Page 677] concept of the Summum Bonum, i.e., virtue. Cartesian virtue is a second-order good which instructs us to strive after and promote various intrinsically valuable first-order goods such as joy, knowledge, friendship, free will, the love of God, etc. (118). As such, Descartes seems to provide us with a fairly straightforward teleological conception of ethics. Nonetheless, when we turn to moral theory proper, Marshall wants to claim that Descartes exhibits certain proto-Kantian leanings, entailed by his concept of generosite as discussed at length in The Passions. The genereux, i.e., those who display generosite, are individuals who, Marshall argues, always act with “respect” towards others and thus treat their fellows both benevolently and justly (152). The basis for this respect is to be found, and this is somewhat of a stretch, albeit an interesting one, in our mutual capacity for free and rational willing (156). From here, of course, it would be a rather short step to Kant. More work needs to be done, however, to square this seemingly non-consequentialist conception of right action with Descartes’s teleological axiology.Regardless, Marshall has accomplished his first task—the normative theory outlined in The Passions, although rudimentary, certainly deserves to be viewed as ethical, not simply prudential, in... (shrink)

No doubt men are capable even now of much more unselfish service than they generally render; and the supreme aim of the economist is to discover how this latent social asset can be developed more quickly and turned to account more wisely. (Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics , p. 8).

This book offers a ground-up defense of objective morality, drawing inspiration from a wide range of philosophers, including John Locke, Arthur Schopenhauer, Iris Murdoch, Nel Noddings, and David Lewis. The core claim is compassion is our capacity to perceive other creatures' pains, pleasures, and desires. Non-compassionate people are therefore perceptually lacking, regardless of how much factual knowledge they might have. Marshall argues that people who do have this form of compassion thereby fit a familiar paradigm of moral goodness. His (...) argument involves the identification of an epistemic good which Marshall dubs "being in touch". To be in touch with some property of a thing requires experiencing it in a way that reveals that property - that is, experiencing it as it is in itself. Only compassion, Marshall argues, lets us be in touch with others' motivational mental properties. -/- This conclusion about compassion has two important metaethical consequences. First, it generates an answer to the question ";Why be moral?", which has been a central philosophical concern since Plato. Second, it provides the keystone for a novel form of moral realism. This form of moral realism has a distinctive set of virtues: it is anti-relativist, naturalist, and able to identify a necessary connection between moral representation and motivation. The view also implies that there is an epistemic asymmetry between virtuous and vicious agents, according to which only morally good people can fully face reality. (shrink)

McCoy and colleagues (2023) offer a reflective framework for data ethics and governance with several historical bioethics principles as a foundation. Their framework is one among a plethora of othe...

Technologic advances mean automated, wearable cameras are now feasible for investigating health behaviors in a public health context. This paper attempts to identify and discuss the ethical implications of such research, in relation to existing guidelines for ethical research in traditional visual methodologies. Research using automated, wearable cameras can be very intrusive, generating unprecedented levels of image data, some of it potentially unflattering or unwanted. Participants and third parties they encounter may feel uncomfortable or that their privacy has been affected (...) negatively. This paper attempts to formalize the protection of all according to best ethical principles through the development of an ethical framework. Respect for autonomy, through appropriate approaches to informed consent and adequate privacy and confidentiality controls, allows for ethical research, which has the potential to confer substantial benefits on the field of health behavior research. (shrink)

Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed (...) as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies”— animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh. (shrink)

In recent years, the practices of work organizations have raised increasing concerns regarding individual privacy at work. It is clear that people expect and value privacy in their personal lives. However, the extent to which privacy perceptions influence individuals’ work attitudes is less clear. Research has explored the extent to which employee perceptions of privacy derive from characteristics of the programs themselves. However, there is a paucity of research that examines how the characteristics of the individual employee may influence perceptions (...) of these programs. In this study we seek to shed light on this issue, as we examine how the individual ethical orientation of employees influences perceptions of a variety of human resource programs that have the potential to be perceived as invasive. Results indicate that ethical orientation exerts direct effects on perceived invasiveness of programs and exerts both direct and indirect effects on perceived appropriateness of programs. Implications for research and for managers adopting privacy-related programs are discussed. (shrink)

The interplay between emotion and learning is a continuing source of debate and inquiry in organization studies, attracting an increasing number of important contributions. However, a detailed understanding of the interaction between emotion and learning remains elusive. In an effort to extend the existing debate, this article offers an alternative approach that draws on the tradition of pragmatist philosophy, where emotion and learning can both be defined as dynamic processes that emerge in the relational context of social transactions. The mutually (...) constructing interplay between these two processes is then illustrated with an example of a collaborative project in which anxiety, love, guilt, and hostility are all entangled in the learning process. (shrink)

This collection of essays provides an introduction to Nietzsche's thought and educational writings, and examines questions concerning the centrality of values for education in postmodernity.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:War, Peace, and Reconciliation: A Theological Inquiry by Theodore R. WeberDavid H. MessnerWar, Peace, and Reconciliation: A Theological Inquiry Theodore R. Weber EUGENE, OR: WIPF & STOCK, 2015. 182 pp. $23.00Weber's book makes a helpful contribution to enlivening more theologically grounded strategies for peacemaking through reconciliation. It is a careful, systematic work that takes as its foundation a distinctively Christian view of [End Page 214] God's nature and (...) relation to the world. As a scholar and a pastor for over fifty years, Weber brings a much-needed, wise, and re-centered view to the questions entangled in war, peace, and reconciliation. He advises us not to look first into the realities of war for God, but to look to understand God as the context for all human conflict. He forcefully calls the reader to be a reconciler despite the intractability of conflict. The book is structured in three main parts, beginning with the theological context, then the political context, and, last, to peace, justice, and the church.The "war" that Weber addresses is interstate conflict, representing the negation of the web of relationships constituting a healthy international system. War disrupts God's plan and ruptures the right relationship between humanity and God (43–44). Throughout, Weber embraces a kind of Christian Realism, one that takes seriously the loving nature of God, the sinfulness of humanity, and the limits and possibilities for peacemaking in a human world. Downplaying the pacifistic message of Jesus, Weber highlights the necessities within a fallen world. We cannot eliminate war as a category of existence under the conditions of sin (until the eschaton), but with right orientation and action we can eliminate some war.Noting inadequacies of the just war tradition (though not dispensing with it), Weber identifies the need to ground it more firmly in theology, including enhanced attention to "just intention" as a primary criterion in evaluating the prosecution of war, displacing cause as the first question with which we must interrogate ourselves. Discernment about war and peace must be an ongoing conversation that should include people of faith as well as policymakers. Weber's theological and pastoral sensibilities, alongside his political savvy throughout, make the book a pleasurable and provocative read.The definition of reconciliation deployed is broad and complex, and Weber marshals it for powerful work. Reconciliation "is God's work—the movement of Divine grace through history, engaging all aspects of brokenness and promise and reaching its climax of fulfillment and disclosure in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ" (3). Grace continually calls humanity to enter into the work of reconciliation. Here Weber introduces the idea of relational power; more nuanced than mere substantive power, it connects to the core idea of institution building and the critical emphasis on strengthening the social fabric in the interest of peace. It is the hallmark of the reconciling transformation from systems of dominance to relationships of consent.The book raises questions regarding how to put reconciliation as described into concrete practice, responding to real cases and controversies. Also, there could be added discussion, against this theological backdrop, of what opportunities exist amid current US and global regime change to enter this reconciling activity more fully.Ultimately, the Christian context is central to understanding the ethics that Weber advances. Weber recommends a biblical foundation, one in which [End Page 215] we take the benefit of reading scripture backward from the Christ event. Such an exegetical strategy reveals that God has a plan for all of humanity, a vision of inclusiveness and reconciliation. It is from this vantage point of God's culminating vision, Weber illuminates, that we can understand and embrace human action throughout history and the meaningful, if incomplete, work of reconciliation to which we must commit ourselves, both politically and spiritually. [End Page 216]David H. MessnerEmory UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This article analyzes the claim that “deliberate denial [of genocide] is a form of aggression that ought to be regarded as a contribution to genocidal violence in its own right.” Its objective is to demonstrate that the claim is substantially correct: there are instances of genocide negation that are genocidal acts. The article suggests that one such instance is contained in a letter sent to Professor Robert Jay Lifton by Turkey's ambassador to the United States. The article is divided into (...) three parts. In the first part, it delineates and discusses the unexpected contents of the letter to Lifton. In the second, it primarily deals with three topics: lying, genocide, and Austinian performatives. In the third part, it takes the points made in the second part and applies them to the contents of the letter to Lifton, and demonstrates that the letter is an instance of genocide negation that is genocidal. (shrink)

In 1975 I published an article on Gilbert Ryle's task/achievement analysis of teaching (), arguing that teaching was in Ryle's sense of the distinction a task verb. Philosophers of education were appealing to a distinction between tasks and achievements in their discussions of teaching, but they were often also appealing to Ryle's work on the analysis of task and achievement verbs. Many philosophers of education misunderstood Ryle's distinction as teaching was often claimed to be a term with both an achievement (...) sense and a task sense. In terms of Ryle's distinction a verb could not have both a task and an achievement sense. It will be argued that in recent (neo‐liberal) discussions of education, teaching is treated more as an achievement verb than as a task verb, contrary to my original claim that teaching was a task verb. ‘Teaching’ then would appear to have changed its meaning. If that is so, it is a function of altered approaches to teaching (and its teaching in Teacher Education), whereby unless something of value has been added then the teaching was not successful, or appropriate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Literary Method of Urban Design: Design Fictions Using FictionAlan Marshall (bio)For students of design the world over, there’s usually nowhere near enough time in the school year to build a prototype of each and every single innovative idea that pops into one’s head—let alone to test them all in the social world or the marketplace. To speedily explore as many innovations as possible, students are sometimes encouraged (...) to follow an alternative pathway, to create “design fiction.” Intended to exist only on paper or the screen, a “design fiction” is not really destined for the real world.1 As a learning technique, it allows for a significant degree of technical experimentation as well as the imagining of new social arrangements. Many design experts see this “free-for-all” method as rather annoying and untrustworthy—more art than science. Yet for the most creative students, it serves to liberate them from the various constraints of their discipline. My own peculiar process of “design fiction” is what I call the “Literary Method of Urban Design.” I will come to this method in a moment.Last year, I was invited by the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Germany, to contribute artworks for a special exhibition entitled “Ways to Utopia: Life Between Desire and Crisis” (running from April 1, 2023—January 29, 2024).2 [End Page 560] This exhibition is a celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Bauhaus’s first architectural product: a modern suburban family home in the city of Weimar called the Haus Am Horn. Built in 1923 the Haus Am Horn ushered in the Bauhaus style, a streamlined functional elegance presented in clean, bright, hopeful hues.3 Beyond just style, though, the house was proffered up in utopian terms. Its Bauhaus creators suggested that such a home could be mass-produced on an industrial scale cheaply and efficiently to provide elegant living to every single family in Europe, be they rich or poor. In its first iteration, the Staatliches Bauhaus was a high-spirited, playful, future-oriented, and socially aware fine arts and architecture school that ran from 1919 to 1933 in Weimar, then Dessau, then Berlin. However, its liberalism and experimentation away from traditional teaching and practice invited scorn from conservatives and from the Nazi Party. The former took the Bauhaus school’s funding away; the latter shuttered it for good. Despite the closure of the building, the Bauhaus style transformed design across the world as former teachers and ex-students applied Bauhaus principles and approaches in new settings. The old Bauhaus school has since been resurrected, with the opening of Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and the Bauhaus Museum, with locations in Weimar and Dessau.A few years back, Skyhorse Publishers published a book of my own “design fictions” depicting real-world cities set far in the future, each presented in utopian terms.4 Because of this, the Bauhaus approached me to help them celebrate their centennial anniversary by displaying my utopian urban designs in their museum. However, to convey the centenary theme of the exhibition, they requested exactly 100 different artworks of 100 different urban utopias portraying 100 different real-world cities set 100 years in the future. At the time, I had only produced eighty such works over the preceding decade. However, since the exhibition was to include masterworks by Bauhaus design greats like George Muche and Alma Buscher, I did not want to fall short. To make the “century” in quick time, I pushed ahead by deploying my own peculiar “Literary Method of Urban Design.”5 This method comprises three steps:1. Select a city.2. Select a literary work.3. Design the future of the selected city, based upon the themes of the selected literary work.[End Page 561] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Future London. By the author, inspired by More’s Utopia (1516).When I used this method for the first time with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as the literary base, a curator at the Museum of London was tickled enough to include it in an exhibition about the future of London.6Since then, the utopian spark has flowed through many of... (shrink)

BackgroundDrug user networks and community-based organizations advocate for greater, meaningful involvement of people with lived experience of drug use in research, programs and services, and policy initiatives. Community-based approaches to research provide an opportunity to engage people who use drugs in all stages of the research process. Conducting community-based participatory research with people who use drugs has its own ethical challenges that are not necessarily acknowledged or supported by institutional ethics review boards. We conducted a scoping review to identify ethical (...) issues in CBPR with people who use drugs that were documented in peer-reviewed and grey literature.MethodsThe search strategy focused on three areas; community-based research, ethical issues, and drug use. Searches of five academic databases were conducted in addition to a grey literature search, hand-searching, and consultation with organizational partners and key stakeholders. Peer reviewed literature and community reports published in English between 1985 and 2013 were included, with initial screening conducted by two reviewers.ResultsThe search strategy produced a total of 874 references. Twenty-five references met the inclusion criteria and were included in our thematic analysis. Five areas were identified as important to the ethics of CBPR with people who use drugs: 1) participant compensation, 2) drug user perspectives on CBPR, 3) peer recruitment and representation in CBPR, 4) capacity building, and 5) participation and inclusion in CBPR.ConclusionsWe critically discuss implications of the emerging research in this field and provide suggestions for future research and practice. (shrink)

Funding organizations around the world are adopting open science policies, resulting in a pressing need for open science programs. In response to the 2011 decadal survey, NASA sought to expand and accelerate omics research, releasing its GeneLab Strategic Plan in 2014. GeneLab is an open science data repository and analysis portal for spaceflight and space-relevant omics data. GeneLab’s output has been outstanding, but its full potential as a way to transform space biology has not yet been achieved. NASA should pursue (...) the development of GeneLab as an open science platorm in earnest. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies Edited by Bernadette J. BrootenEboni Marshall TurmanBeyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies EDITED BY BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 352 pp. $30.00In her introduction to this edited collection of essays, Bernadette Brooten asserts that religion has long been complicit in the construction and practice of the logic of human enslavement. She provocatively claims that (...) religion and the racial and sexual norms that emerge from religious inquiry have historically [End Page 236] designated women and other bodies that defy white male normativity as inherently “slaveable.” She further contends that the religious and sexual legacies of slavery are not relegated to a moment in time, now past and gone. Rather, contemporary society is the heir of a flesh-and-blood hierarchy that continues to shape its “social values, religious thought, and economic realities” (3). The remnants of enslavement persist among human communities not only as a lived reality that, as Mende Nazer suggests in the epilogue, continues to threaten the lives and life chances of poor women and children throughout the world, but also as a blood memory—a recollection that runs so deep into the social fabric of our theopolitical worlds that in spite of slavery’s superficial obscurity, it remains as the pulse of human everydayness, lurking beneath the surface of daily exchanges.The insidious legacies of slavery that emerge from bigoted God-talk promote dehumanizing racial-sexual stereotypes, dictate the quality of marriage and intimate relationships, corrupt and exploit sexual expression, and drive the development of public policy and law in ways that disproportionately marginalize and disempower women and girls. Consequently, this volume proposes resistance and calls readers to communal action that renounces slavery in all its forms.In parts 2, 3, and 4, the essays detail the racial, religious, and sexual character of slavery by focusing on the experience of black women’s oppression in America. This focus on the varieties of black women’s enslavement—from legal chattel slavery and social-political bondage to incarceration—provides the groundwork for the volume’s subsequent engagement of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic law, which demonstrates how slavery and its concomitant assignment and rationalization of embodied inferiority has been primarily cultivated by sacred texts. In her essay, for example, Sheila Briggs explicitly connects religious belief and dehumanizing practices; she ingeniously links religious textual interpretation with the sexual violence of early Christian gladiatorial practices in ancient amphitheaters.In parts 5 and 6, the volume reintroduces the substance of slavery’s legacies by way of a historical survey that connects enslavement across social contexts. In linking Debra Blumenthal’s discussion of slavery in late medieval Spain and Catherine Clinton’s analysis of the racial hypocrisies of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond to the problem of the Bible and the oppression it yields for sexual minorities as uncovered by Sylvester Johnson, Brooten exposes the vast and prevailing scope of slavery that affects all of us—women and girls, men and boys, sexual minorities, and even those who dare to fall in love across racial boundaries. In parts 7 and 8, Frances Smith Foster and Dwight Hopkins directly engage the “herstories” of black women who are marked by the legacies of slavery and yet who have consistently resisted in creative and effective ways (271). [End Page 237]Undoubtedly, this volume is a critical contribution to the field insofar as it uncovers an enduring social issue that continues to influence how we engage each other across differences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The breadth of its disciplinary scope proves to be overwhelming at times. Nonetheless, Brooten’s constructive method serves well to emphasize the titanic complexity of enslavement and the challenge of its demolition.Eboni Marshall TurmanDuke Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Despite decades of research on the reconstruction of proto-Korean-Japanese (pKJ), some scholars still reject a genetic relationship. This study addresses their doubts in a new way, interpreting comparative linguistic data within a context of material and cultural evidence, much of which has come to light only in recent years. The weaknesses of the reconstruction, according to J. Marshall Unger, are due to the early date at which pKJ split apart and to lexical material that the pre-Korean and pre-Japanese branches (...) later borrowed from different languages to their north and south, respectively. Unger shows that certain Old Japanese words must have been borrowed from Korean from the fourth century C.E., only a few centuries after the completion of the Yayoi migrations, which brought wet-field rice cultivation to Kyushu from southern Korea. That leaves too short an interval for the growth of two distinct languages by the time they resumed active contact. Hence, concludes Unger, the original separation occurred on the peninsula much earlier, prior to reliance on paddy rice and the rise of metallurgy. Non-Korean elements in ancient peninsular place names were vestiges of pre-Yayoi Japanese language, according to Unger, who questions the assumption that Korean developed exclusively from the language of Silla. He argues instead that the rulers of Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla all spoke varieties of Old Korean, which became the common language of the peninsula as their kingdoms overwhelmed its older culture and vied for dominance. Was the separation so early as to vitiate the hypothesis of a common source language? Unger responds that, while assuming non-relationship obviates difficulties of pKJ reconstruction, it fares worse than the genetic hypothesis in relation to non-linguistic findings, and fails to explain a significant number of grammatical as well as lexical similarities. Though improving the reconstruction of pKJ will be challenging, he argues, the theory of genetic relationship is still the better working hypothesis. The Role of Contact in the Origins of the Japanese and Korean Languages shows how an interdisciplinary approach can shed light on a difficult case in which the separation of two languages lies close to the time horizon of the comparative method. (shrink)

Many families worldwide have at least one member with a behavioral or mental disorder, and yet the majority of the public fails to correctly recognize symptoms of mental illness. Previous research has found that Mental Health Literacy (MHL)—the knowledge and positive beliefs about mental disorders—tends to be higher in European and North American cultures, compared to Asian and African cultures. Nonetheless quantitative research examining the variables that explain this cultural difference remains limited. The purpose of our study was fourfold: (a) (...) to validate measures of MHL cross-culturally, (b) to examine the MHL model quantitatively, (c) to investigate cultural differences in the MHL model, and (d) to examine collectivism as a predictor of MHL. We validated measures of MHL in European American and Indian samples. The results lend strong quantitative support to the MHL model. Recognition of symptoms of mental illness was a central variable: greater recognition predicted greater endorsement of social causes of mental illness and endorsement of professional help-seeking as well as lesser endorsement of lay help-seeking. The MHL model also showed an overwhelming cultural difference; namely, lay help-seeking beliefs played a central role in the Indian sample, and a negligible role in the European American sample. Further, collectivism was positively associated with causal beliefs of mental illness in the European American sample, and with lay help-seeking beliefs in the Indian sample. These findings demonstrate the importance of understanding cultural differences in beliefs about mental illness, particularly in relation to help-seeking beliefs. (shrink)

Bioethics is not a spectator sport. Health is an applied field that requires that insight be connected to the real world. Few have done more thoughtful writing on the need to advance a moral basis...

Assuming the consistency ofZF + “There is an inaccessible number of inaccessibles”, we prove that Kelley Morse theory plus types is not a conservative extension of Kelley-Morse theory.

African and African American Christian ethics comprises an assemblage of disciplines and traditions that address the embodied experiences of black people and provide moral guidance for life in community. Its progenitors helped to establish it as a field of ethical inquiry despite marginalization and hostility and in contrast to dominant ethical traditions that privilege concepts over encounters with embodied life. African and African American Christian ethics privileges embodied encounter as the location for determining a moral hermeneutic in order to recalibrate (...) our understanding of communal relationships toward healthier norms, for the sake of the entire community’s survival and wholeness. (shrink)

We prove that it is not possible to define an appropriate notion of rank in set theories without the axiom of foundation.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.