Two prevailing paradigms explain the diversity of sex-determining modes in reptiles. Many researchers, particularly those who study reptiles, consider genetic and environmental sex-determining mechanisms to be fundamentally different, and that one can be demonstrated experimentally to the exclusion of the other. Other researchers, principally those who take a broader taxonomic perspective, argue that no clear boundaries exist between them. Indeed, we argue that genetic and environmental sex determination in reptiles should be seen as a continuum of states represented by species (...) whose sex is determined primarily by genotype, species where genetic and environmental mechanisms coexist and interact in lesser or greater measure to bring about sex phenotypes, and species where sex is determined primarily by environment. To do otherwise limits the scope of investigations into the transition between the two and reduces opportunities to use studies of reptiles to advance understanding of vertebrate sex determination generally. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

I begin the paper by outlining one classic argument for the guise of the good: that we must think that desires represent their objects favourably in order to explain why they can make actions rational (Quinn 1995; Stampe 1987). But what exactly is the conclusion of this argument? Many have recently formulated the guise of the good as the view that desires are akin to perceptual appearances of the good (Oddie 2005; Stampe 1987; Tenenbaum 2007). But I argue that (...) this view fails to capitalize on the above argument, and that the argument is better understood as favouring a view on which desires are belief-like states. I finish by addressing some countervailing claims made by Avery Archer (2016). (shrink)

You know what someone else is thinking and feeling by observing them. But how do you know what you are thinking and feeling? This is the problem of self-knowledge: Alex Byrne tries to solve it. The idea is that you know this not by taking a special kind of look at your own mind, but by an inference from a premise about your environment.

_The Revenge of History_ is a frontal assault on the widely accepted idea that the East European revolutions of 1989 mark the death of socialism. Alex Callinicos seeks to vindicate the classical Marxist tradition by arguing that socialism in this tradition can only come from below, through the self-activity of the working class. Stalinism from this standpoint was a counterrevolution, erecting at the end of the 1920s a state capitalist regime on the ruins of the radically democratic socialism briefly (...) achieved in October 1917. Callinicos argues that the collapse of Stalinism at the end of the 1980s is one aspect of a worldwide transition from nationally organized to globally integrated capitalism. The result is likely to be greater economic and political instability. Against this background socialism—in Marx's sense—is all the more necessary. Callinicos contends that Marx's vision of a classless communist society would be both practically feasible and profoundly democratic. He concludes that the collapse of Stalinism should be less the moment to abandon socialism than to resume unfinished business. (shrink)

Statements of the core ethical and professional responsibilities of medical professionals are incomplete in ways that threaten fundamental goals of medicine. First, in the absence of explicit guida...

A pragmatic approach to business ethics is argued for in this volume, which demonstrates the usefulness of the approach by applying it to a variety of issues. These issues are broad and far-reaching and include the relations between rational and moral//ethical decision-making, the limits of loyalty to employers, the impact of trust on business and the role of commercial public opinion polling during elections. The author also covers advertising, tobacco promotion, manufacture and marketing of armaments, concentration and taxation of wealth, (...) and the North American Free Trade Agreement. (shrink)

A persistent argument against the transitivity assumption of rational choice theory postulates a repeatable action that generates a significant benefit at the expense of a negligible cost. No matter how many times the action has been taken, it therefore seems reasonable for a decision-maker to take the action one more time. However, matters are so fixed that the costs of taking the action some large number of times outweigh the benefits. In taking the action some large number of times on (...) the grounds that the benefits outweigh the costs every time, the decision-maker therefore reveals intransitive preferences, since once she has taken it this large number of times, she would prefer to return to the situation in which she had never taken the action at all. We defend transitivity against two versions of this argument: one in which it is assumed that taking the action one more time never has any perceptible cost, and one in which it is assumed that the cost of taking the action, though (sometimes) perceptible, is so small as to be outweighed at every step by the significant benefit. We argue that the description of the choice situation in the first version involves a contradiction. We also argue that the reasoning used in the second version is a form of similarity-based decision-making. We argue that when the consequences of using similarity-based decision-making are brought to light, rational decision-makers revise their preferences. We also discuss one method that might be used in performing this revision. (shrink)

The “fair benefits” approach to international research is designed to produce results that all can agree are fair without taking a stand on divisive questions of justice. But its appealing veneer of collaboration masks ambiguities at both a conceptual and an operational level. An attempt to put it into practice would look a lot like an auction, leaving little reason to think the outcomes will satisfy even minimal conditions of fairness.

To judge from the rash of recent law review articles, it is a miracle that research with human subjects in the U.S. continues to draw breath under the asphyxiating heel of the rent-seeking, creativity-stifling, jack-booted bureaucrethics that is the current system of research ethics oversight and review. Institutional Review Boards, sometimes called Research Ethics Committees, have been accused of perpetrating “probably the most widespread violation of the First Amendment in our nation's history,” resulting in a “disaster, not only for academics, (...) but for the whole nation.” One member of the President's Council on Bioethics went so far as to assert, “There has been no greater damage to academic freedom in the United States in my lifetime. And my lifetime encompasses McCarthy and it encompasses political correctness, both.” Locked in the bureaucratic “iron cage” of IRB oversight, critics charge that researchers have been transformed into a vulnerable, exposed population, subject to domination, that has been likened in one case to a kind of “Tuskegee in reverse.”. (shrink)

Regulators rely on clinical trials for drug approval and labeling decisions. Health systems and clinicians rely on the evidence from trials to determine treatment, and patients rely on it to decide which courses of care to undertake. Many of these stakeholders presume that the careful review of individual studies is enough to address the ethical and scientific questions that arise in clinical trials. In what follows, however, we demonstrate that explicit consideration of trial portfolios—series of trials that are interrelated by (...) a common set of objectives—is crucial. the ethical acceptability and evidentiary probity of individual trials can change depending on the characteristics of the portfolios in which they are embedded. Second, how trial portfolios are composed, how well they are coordinated, and how efficiently they use information determines the balance of risks and benefits they present as well as their different prospects for generating socially valuable information; these three factors also raise distinct questions of justice. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of equipoise in evaluating international research. It distinguishes two possible formulations of the equipoise requirement that license very different evaluations of international research proposals. The interpretation that adopts a narrow criterion of similarity between clinical contexts has played an important role in one recent controversy, but it suffers from a number of problems. An alternative interpretation that adopts a broader criterion of similarity does a better job of avoiding both exploitation of the brute fact of (...) social deprivation and the exploitation of needy populations for the benefit of more well-off populations. It also holds out the promise of reconciling the need to find interventions that can be employed in developing world contexts with the cluster of moral values that must constrain the way such research is carried out. (shrink)

Any view of equipoise faces perhaps the most radical and far-reaching objections from moral foundations. These objections hold that the equipoise requirement conflates the ethics of medical research and the ethics of clinical medicine. Once this conflation is recognized, this position holds, research can be given a new foundation on the imperative to avoid exploiting research participants. This article argues that what is novel in this critique is not as successful as its proponents claim and that the ultimate success of (...) this approach actually hinges on a version of the objection from utility. Nevertheless, this criticism highlights the limited scope of applicability of the equipoise requirement. The article concludes, therefore, by describing the outlines of what the article calls an ‘integrative approach’ to clinical trials. This approach represents one way in which the normative requirements of equipoise and the non-exploitation approach might be unified under a single, broad framework. (shrink)

This article argues that lingering uncertainty about the normative foundations of research ethics is perpetuated by two unfounded dogmas of research ethics. The first dogma is that clinical research, as a social activity, is an inherently utilitarian endeavor. The second dogma is that an acceptable framework for research ethics must impose constraints on this endeavor whose moral force is grounded in role-related obligations of either physicians or researchers. This article argues that these dogmas are common to traditional articulations of the (...) equipoise requirement and to recently articulated alternatives, such as the non-exploitation approach. Moreover, important shortcomings of these approaches can be traced to their acceptance of these dogmas. After highlighting these shortcomings, this article illustrates the benefits of rejecting these dogmas by sketching the broad outlines of an alternative called the "integrative approach" to clinical research. (shrink)

Following a boom in investment and overinflated expectations in the 1980s, artificial intelligence entered a period of retrenchment known as the “AI winter.” With advances in the field of machine learning and the availability of large datasets for training various types of artificial neural networks, AI is in another cycle of halcyon days. Although medicine is particularly recalcitrant to change, applications of AI in health care have professionals in fields like radiology worried about the future of their careers and have (...) the public tittering about the prospect of soulless machines making life‐and‐death decisions. Medicine thus appears to be at an inflection point—a kind of Groundhog Day on which either AI will bring a springtime of improved diagnostic and predictive practices or the shadow of public and professional fear will lead to six more metaphorical weeks of winter in medical AI. (shrink)

Before participants can be enrolled in a clinical trial, an institutional review board must determine that the risks that the research poses to participants are ‘reasonable.’ This paper examines the two dominant frameworks for assessing research risks and argues that each approach suffers from significant shortcomings. It then considers what issues must be addressed in order to construct a framework for risk assessment that is grounded in a compelling normative foundation and might provide more operationally precise guidance to the deliberations (...) of various stakeholders. The paper concludes by sketching the outlines of what is referred to as the ‘Integrative Approach’ to risk assessment and by highlighting some of the ways in which this approach may be more promising than current alternatives. (shrink)

A. G. Long presents a new account of the importance of conversation in Plato's philosophy.

The threat of biological and chemical terrorism highlights a growing tension in research ethics between respecting the interests of individuals and safeguarding and protecting the common good. But what it actually means to protect the common good is rarely scrutinized. There are two conceptions of the common good that provide very different accounts of the limits of permissible medical research. Decisions about the limits of acceptable medical research in defense of the common good should be carried out only within the (...) latter framework. (shrink)

One of the fundamental challenges in any field of practical ethics is to articulate a framework for deliberation and decision making that is capable of providing warranted guidance about contentious ethical questions.1 Such a framework has to function effectively in the face of empirical uncertainty and what Rawls refers to as the fact of reasonable pluralism—the fact that individuals often differ in their ideals, ambitions, preferences and conceptions of the good life. One of the perennial questions in normative and metaethics (...) concerns the source of the warrant for such judgments, and a major preoccupation of practical ethics has been to find a way to generate such warrant without having to first settle all contentious philosophical questions about the nature and source of normativity. To the extent that scholars use the term ‘common morality’ to refer to a set of moral norms or concerns that are sufficiently common and widespread that they can be used as starting points for moral deliberation and inquiry, I am sympathetic to the term.2 To the extent that appeals to common morality are supposed to do more significant epistemic or justificatory work, they have always struck me as dangerously ad hoc and insufficiently responsive to the legitimate need to explain the ground for common normative claims. Although I am relatively sceptical of appeals to common morality, I am concerned that the version of this view that is critiqued in ‘Why not common morality’ is simply a straw person. Throughout the paper, Rhodes treats common morality as synonymous with everyday ethics and the ethics of everyday life. She says, ‘If common morality and medical ethics were the same, then the ethically justified behaviour for medical professionals and everyone else would be the same’ (Rhodes, p7).3 In effect, the view that Rhodes attacks is …. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Coherence of a Mind: John Locke and the Law of Nature*Alex Tucknessit is almost thirty years since John Dunn’s book, The Political Thought of John Locke, argued that a more coherent understanding of Locke was possible if his religious beliefs were taken to play a crucial role in his political theory.1 Since that time many scholars have expanded our historical knowledge of the role of religion in (...) Locke’s political thought.2 This article will not use a historical methodology, but will rather take the claim that religion is crucial to Locke’s thought as a starting point. When one combines this assumption with a careful reading of the Two Treatises of Government (Two Treatises), The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in Scripture (The Reasonableness), and the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Essay), significant progress in resolving many of the long-standing difficulties in Locke’s theory of natural law is possible.The difficulties are indeed serious. Prior to Locke there was a long standing theological debate about whether the laws of nature were binding because they were the command of God (voluntarism) or binding because of their intrinsic compatibility with reason (“rationalism” or “intellectualism”). There has been much dispute about whether Locke was consistently a voluntarist or not.3 Second, Locke argues in the Essay that the principles of morality are [End Page 73] capable of proof just like principles of geometry, yet Locke never produced a proof of the law of nature. In the Second Treatise the laws of nature are more asserted than defended, as if they were self-evident, yet in The Reasonableness Locke says that it is exceedingly difficult to discover the moral law through reason alone and says that no one has ever discovered the complete law of nature through unaided reason. It appears that Locke “… went on believing the arguments of the Second Treatise were plainly true even after he knew he could not properly ground them in natural law….”4Third, Straussians have been quick to point out that Locke adopted a hedonistic theory of human motivation and of good and evil, a position which seems to sit poorly with a Christian theory of natural law. Locke claimed that men5 were motivated to obey the law of nature by their perception of future pleasure or pain and that divine sanctions in the next life were necessary for the law of nature to be a proper law, yet later in life Locke admitted his inability to prove the existence of an afterlife.6 Fourth, the account of moral knowledge in the Essay seems to sit poorly with Locke’s account of natural law in the Two Treatises; his commitment in the latter to empiricism is questionable and the law of nature is presented with little argument as if it were obvious. Laslett has argued that the difficulties are so severe that Locke the philosopher of knowledge and Locke the political thinker should be kept very separate.7 This article will respond to each of these difficulties in order to show that Locke’s theory of natural law is more coherent than his critics have allowed.1. the ground of natural law: rationalism and voluntarismThe early Essays on the Law of Nature of Locke link morality to conformity with the rule of a superior; it is the will of God which provides the essential binding force of the law of nature. (ELN 183–185)8 In the Essay Concerning Human [End Page 74] Understanding, this theme continues. “I grant the existence of God, is so many ways manifest, and the Obedience we owe him, so congruous to the Light of Reason, that a great part of Mankind give Testimony to the Law of Nature”: But nonetheless many affirm these principles not “admitting the true ground of Morality; which can only be the Will and Law of a God, who sees Men in the dark, has in his Hand Rewards and Punishments, and Power enough to call to account the Proudest Offender” (Essay 1.3.6).There are, however, passages which seem to point to a more rationalist account of morality. When Locke writes in the Two Treatises that... (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The judgments of conscientious and informed experts play a central role in two elements of clinical equipoise. The first, and most widely discussed, element involves ensuring that no participant in a randomized trial is allocated to a level of treatment that everyone agrees is substandard. The second, and less often discussed, element involves ensuring that trials are likely to generate social value by producing the information necessary to resolve a clinically meaningful uncertainty or disagreement about the relative merits of a (...) set of interventions. The distribution of judgments in expert communities can take many forms, each with important implications for whether a trial satisfies one or both elements of clinical equipoise. In this article we use a graphical approach to represent three ways in which expert community uncertainty can vary: by spread, modality, and skew. Understanding these different distributions of expert judgment has three important implications: it helps to make operational the requirement of social value, it shows that some conditions for initiating studies to promote social value diverge from common assumptions about clinical equipoise, and it has important implications for how trials should be designed and monitored, and what patients should be told during informed consent. (shrink)

An interview by Alex Thomson of UKColumn on Landgrebe and Smith's book: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World. The subtitle of the book is Artificial Intelligence Without Fear, and the interview begins with the question of the supposedly imminent takeover of one profession or the other by artificial intelligence. Is there truly reason to be afraid that you will lose your job? The interview itself is titled 'Where this is no will there is no way', drawing on one (...) thesis of the book to the effect that there will never be anything like the human will on the part of a machine. This is for mathematical reasons. AI is always and in every case a matter of algorithms; thus of applied mathematics. And algorithms are not the sorts of things that can want or desire or intend to do something. It is the human will of those who work at OpenAI or google or microsoft which have given rise to the new shiny objects of AI (ChatGPT and other Large Language Models). And it is the human will of the users of these shiny objects which gives them the resources and power to work their apparent miracles. (shrink)

In “Epistemology in Philosophy of Religion,” Philip Quinn focuses on the central problem of religious epistemology for monotheistic religions: the epistemic status of belief in the existence of God. He explores what epistemic conditions arguments for God's existence would have to satisfy to be successful and whether any arguments satisfy those conditions. Turning to the claims of reformed epistemology about belief in God, Quinn assesses Alvin Plantinga's claim that belief in God is for many theists properly basic, that (...) is, has positive epistemic status even when it is not based on arguments or any other kind of propositional evidence. Quinn distinguishes two versions of this claim. According to the first, emphasized in Plantinga's earlier work, theistic belief is properly basic with respect to justification or rationality, while according to the second version, prominent in Plantinga's more recent work, theistic belief is properly basic with respect to warrant. (shrink)

In “The Real Problem With Equipoise,” Chiong (2006) raises two distinct, but interrelated issues concerning the concept of equipoise. The first deals with the role of equipoise in evaluating intern...

Death and immortality played a central role in Greek and Roman thought, from Homer and early Greek philosophy to Marcus Aurelius. In this book A. G. Long explains the significance of death and immortality in ancient ethics, particularly Plato's dialogues, Stoicism and Epicureanism; he also shows how philosophical cosmology and theology caused immortality to be re-imagined. Ancient arguments and theories are related both to the original literary and theological contexts and to contemporary debates on the philosophy of death. The book (...) will be of major interest to scholars and students working on Greek and Roman philosophy, and to those wishing to explore ancient precursors of contemporary debates about death and its outcomes. (shrink)

The DNA in a eukaryotic nucleus is packaged into a nucleosome array, punctuated by variations in the regular pattern. The local chromatin structure of inducible genes appears to fall into two categories: preset and remodeling. Preset genes are those in which the binding sites for trans‐acting factors are accessible (;i.e. in a non‐nucleosomal, DNase I hypersensitive configuration) prior to activation. In response to the activation signal, positive factors bind to cis‐acting regulatory elements and trigger transcription with no major alterations in (...) the chromatin structure of the promoter region. In contrast, remodeling genes are those in which some of the required cis‐acting regulatory elements are packaged into nucleosomes. The nucleosomes must be perturbed in response to an activation signal in order for the trans‐acting factors to gain access to cis‐acting elements; a chromatin remodeling process which forms DNase I hypersensitive sites must occur. In both cases, precise positioning of nucleosomes along the promoter region of a gene appears to be critical for appropriate regulation of expression. (shrink)

Of all contemporary social theorists, Luhmann has best understood the centrality of the concept of meaning to social theory and has most extensively worked out the notion's implications. However, despite the power of his theory, the theory suffers from difficulties impeding its reception. This article attempts to remedy this situation with some critical arguments and proposals for revision. First, the theory Luhmann adopted from biology as the basis of his own theory was a poor choice since that theory has no (...) explanatory power, being purely descriptive; furthermore, that theory is fundamentally flawed since it implies that viruses are impossible. Second, Luhmann's theory of meaning cannot coherently make the social domain autonomous as he desires since Luhmann does not take into account the distinction between syntax and semantics. By introducing this distinction, making clear that social systems consist of rules, not just communications, and raising the rule concept to the same prominence in social theory as those of actor and system, autonomy can be maintained while avoiding the counterintuitive aspects of Luhmann's theory. (shrink)

Maintaining plural values is important when there is no conclusive principle by which the relative priority of normative positions can be determined. Value-articulating institutions predicated upon such principles have a low pluralistic potential. In response to the failures of stated-preference approaches to economic valuation, new perspectives have been developed to capture plural values. Three broad approaches are identified. The first, functional diversifi-cation, seeks to encompass the multiple qualities of the object of valuation, whereas positional modification enforces a particular mode of (...) thinking on the subject. Both entail a prior judgement of values and benefit from a reduction in the range of values. Eventually, therefore, both approaches collapse pluralism to a problem that can be tackled. The third approach, structural reconstruction, has greater pluralistic potential, recognising that the more diverse and uncertain the object of valuation, the more compelling it is. (shrink)

: An Aristotelian conception of practical ethics can be derived from the account of practical reasoning that Aristotle articulates in his Rhetoric and this has important implications for the way we understand the nature and limits of practical ethics. An important feature of this conception of practical ethics is its responsiveness to the complex ways in which agents form and maintain moral commitments, and this has important implications for the debate concerning methods of ethics in applied ethics. In particular, this (...) feature enables us to understand casuistry, narrative, and principlism as mutually supportive modes of moral inquiry, rather than divergent and mutually exclusive methods of ethics. As a result, an Aristotelian conception of practical ethics clears the conceptual common ground upon which practical ethicists can forge a stable and realistic self-understanding. (shrink)

Darwin in Argentina -- Conflicting Systems -- Francisco Javier Muniz (1795-1871) -- Hermann Burmeister (1807-1891) -- Francisco P. Moreno (1852-1919) -- Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811-1888) -- Eduardo Holmberg (1852-1937) -- Florentino Ameghino (1854-1911) -- Jose Ingenieros (1877-1925) -- Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875-1918).

Werner Bonefeld is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK, and Adjunct Professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia). He has published on topics as varied as the development of the British state during the 1980s and 1990s, Europe’s monetary union, ordoliberalism, and Marx’s critique of political economy. A ground-breaking critical theorist, Bonefeld’s contribution to an ‘open’ Marxism developed a rigorous critique of capitalist social relations without omitting the significant themes of lived (...) experience and class antagonism. The following interview marks the publication of a recent monograph titled A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation. Bonefeld discusses his reading of Frankfurt School critical theory and its relation to heterodox and open Marxist social theory with Alex Alvarez Taylor, whose research focuses on early critical theory. (shrink)

In this chapter, Michael Quinn argues that although Bentham’s only works on international trade were discussions on “the balance of trade” and “colonial trade,” these works reveal several new aspects of Bentham’s broader political economy. Like Smith, Bentham considered international trade to be mutually beneficial and strongly criticized mercantilist fallacies concerning balance of trade and the fetishization of precious metals. However, Bentham’s views differ from Smith’s on the issues of paper money and inflation. The chapter explains Bentham’s struggles to (...) combine elements of both commodity and credit theories of money in a coherent package. (shrink)

This article aims to introduce E.V. Ilyenkov’s ‘Dialectics of the Ideal’, first published in unabridged form in 2009, to an English-speaking readership. It does this in three ways: First, it contextualises his intervention in the history of Soviet and post-Soviet philosophy, offering a window into the subterranean tradition of creative theory that existed on the margins and in opposition to official Diamat. It explains what distinguishes Ilyenkov’s philosophy from the crude materialism of Diamat, and examines his relationship to four central (...) figures from the pre-Diamat period: Deborin, Lukács, Vygotsky, and Lenin. Second, it situates his concept of the ideal in relation to the history of Western philosophy, noting Ilyenkov’s original reading of Marx through both Hegel and Spinoza, his criticism of Western theorists who identify the ideal with language, and his effort to articulate an anti-dualist conception of subjectivity. Third, it examines Ilyenkov’s reception in the West, previous efforts to publish his work in the West, including the so-called ‘Italian Affair’, as well as existing scholarship on Ilyenkov in English. (shrink)

Aquinas has been traditionally seen as the Christian thinker who was opposed to Platonism and predominantly influenced by the philosophy of Aristotle. In this study, Patrick Quinn argues that the most important aspects of Aquinas' theory of knowledge can only be properly understood when his Platonism is taken into account. Although he agreed with Aristotle that human knowledge is obtained from sensory-based experience, Thomas also insisted that the human mind functions at its best when it acts independently of the (...) senses. This occurs at the most sublime level when the mind is divinely enlightened when God's essence is made visible. (shrink)

Stuart Rachels and Larry Temkin have offered a purported counterexample to the acyclicity of the relationship “all things considered better than”. This example invokes our intuitive preferences over pairs of alternatives involving a single person’s painful experiences of varying intensity and duration. These preferences, Rachels and Temkin claim, are confidently held, entirely reasonable, and cyclical. They conclude that we should drop acyclicity as a requirement of rationality. I argue that, together with the findings of recent research on the way people (...) evaluate episodes of pain, the use of a heuristic known as similarity-based decision-making explains why our intuitive preferences may violate acyclicity in this example. I argue that this explanation should lead us to regard these preferences with suspicion, because it indicates that they may be the result of one or more biases. I conclude that Rachels’ and Temkin’s example does not provide sufficient grounds for rejecting acyclicity. (shrink)